UBC: The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers
Jun. 1st, 2010 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennySrebnick, Amy Gilman. The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
I am disappointed in this book, and disappointed on several levels.
To start with, I am disappointed with Oxford University Press, which should damn well be able to copy-edit better than this. There are mistakes scattered throughout the text that a good copy-editor should catch: missing or incorrect apostrophes; using "criteria" as the singular; a sentence that says, "At the end of Lilla . . . the evil merchant undone, she [Lilla] dies" (155), when it is in fact important to Srebnick's argument that she survives (and the sentence after next begins "The survival of Lilla notwithstanding"); misuse of the word "quixotic": "Determining crime rates, especially for the early part of the nineteenth century, is a task fraught with difficulty, both because of the lack of consistent and reliable data and because of the quixotic meaning of those numbers that are available" (94). I'm not sure what word she does mean ("ambiguous," maybe?), but "quixotic" ain't it.
Secondly, I am disappointed in Srebnick as a historian. She treats her own speculations about Mary Rogers' genealogy as if they were analyzable facts on which to build an argument, and throughout the book, she does a poor job of distinguishing what in the historical record can be relied on as factual, what must be treated carefully as hypothesis, and what must be regarded as fiction.
And thirdly, I am disappointed in Srebnick as a writer. She has what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala calls line of direction problems (it's very obvious that she was unfamiliar with mystery fiction before she started researching on this topic, because she has no sense of how to organize her facts), she is not good at analyzing literary texts (most historians aren't, so this isn't surprising, but it's still disappointing), and she's over-theorized--which I say not merely because I have very little patience with theory, particularly in the Foucauldian-Derridean vein, but because her theory and her buzzwords have greater prominence in her argument than her ostensible subject, and frequently seem to me to be doing nothing but obscuring the fact that she doesn't have very much of an argument at all.
And all of this is a great pity, because the subject of this book is potentially fascinating. Mary Rogers is the real person behind Poe's roman à clef, "The Mystery of Marie Roget." She was a "cigar girl" (a young woman employed behind a cigar counter--which, in the 1840s was borderline scandalous and attracted both custom and a certain amount of notoriety to the shop) who disappeared one Sunday in July 1841 and was found three days later floating in the Hudson River, raped, battered, and strangled. The crime was, and remains, unsolved, although there are a number of theories and plausible scenarios. Some months after Mary's death, an innkeeper in New Jersey, near where the body was found, made a confession that Mary died as the result of an abortion performed in the inn, and what most deeply irritates me about The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers is that throughout the book, Srebnick treats this confession as if it were truthful despite the fact that she herself admits it may have been self-serving and despite the fact that it contradicts the published report of the coroner on Mary Rogers' body. And Srebnick never explains the contradictions. It is true that the aftereffects of a botched abortion might look like rape, but that does not explain why Mary Rogers was strangled. If Srebnick's theory is that she wasn't strangled, but died of the abortion, she needs to explain the very specific and vivid evidence presented in the newspaper reports of strangulation (especially since she spends a lot of time talking about the vivid newspaper descriptions of Mary's corpse as proof of the exploitation and degradation of female victims of violence); if the theory is that she was strangled, either she didn't die in the abortion but was murdered for some other reason, in which case Srebnick needs to stop treating the abortion theory as if it were the truth, or the abortionist also strangled her, in which case Srebnick seriously needs to explain (a.) how it was that she wasn't already dead or dying and (b.) why the abortionist felt it necessary to strangle her. To keep her from going to the police? Given the information about the police in New York in 1841, that doesn't seem likely to me, so if it's the case, I really need to have that laid out clearly. And if what's important to Srebnick is not what really happened to the real woman, Mary Cecilia Rogers, but only the stories that were constructed in the popular press, then she needs to make that clear, too, and to quit paying lip service to the idea that her book is about the real woman's real death.
But Srebnick wants Mary to have died of an abortion because that fits in with the buzzword theories about women's sexuality and "urban culture" (a phrase she uses constantly without ever clearly defining or acknowledging that "urban culture" in New York was not the same as "urban culture" in other cities, even other American cities) she's used to construct the book about, just as she wants Mary to have descended from the Rogers and Mather families (yes, those Mathers) because it makes Mary an example of the economic degradation and vulnerability of women in the mid-nineteenth century that is kind of the thing Srebnick really wants to write a book about.
I really wanted to like and be fascinated by this book, and I'm sad that neither happened.
I am disappointed in this book, and disappointed on several levels.
To start with, I am disappointed with Oxford University Press, which should damn well be able to copy-edit better than this. There are mistakes scattered throughout the text that a good copy-editor should catch: missing or incorrect apostrophes; using "criteria" as the singular; a sentence that says, "At the end of Lilla . . . the evil merchant undone, she [Lilla] dies" (155), when it is in fact important to Srebnick's argument that she survives (and the sentence after next begins "The survival of Lilla notwithstanding"); misuse of the word "quixotic": "Determining crime rates, especially for the early part of the nineteenth century, is a task fraught with difficulty, both because of the lack of consistent and reliable data and because of the quixotic meaning of those numbers that are available" (94). I'm not sure what word she does mean ("ambiguous," maybe?), but "quixotic" ain't it.
Secondly, I am disappointed in Srebnick as a historian. She treats her own speculations about Mary Rogers' genealogy as if they were analyzable facts on which to build an argument, and throughout the book, she does a poor job of distinguishing what in the historical record can be relied on as factual, what must be treated carefully as hypothesis, and what must be regarded as fiction.
And thirdly, I am disappointed in Srebnick as a writer. She has what
matociquala calls line of direction problems (it's very obvious that she was unfamiliar with mystery fiction before she started researching on this topic, because she has no sense of how to organize her facts), she is not good at analyzing literary texts (most historians aren't, so this isn't surprising, but it's still disappointing), and she's over-theorized--which I say not merely because I have very little patience with theory, particularly in the Foucauldian-Derridean vein, but because her theory and her buzzwords have greater prominence in her argument than her ostensible subject, and frequently seem to me to be doing nothing but obscuring the fact that she doesn't have very much of an argument at all.And all of this is a great pity, because the subject of this book is potentially fascinating. Mary Rogers is the real person behind Poe's roman à clef, "The Mystery of Marie Roget." She was a "cigar girl" (a young woman employed behind a cigar counter--which, in the 1840s was borderline scandalous and attracted both custom and a certain amount of notoriety to the shop) who disappeared one Sunday in July 1841 and was found three days later floating in the Hudson River, raped, battered, and strangled. The crime was, and remains, unsolved, although there are a number of theories and plausible scenarios. Some months after Mary's death, an innkeeper in New Jersey, near where the body was found, made a confession that Mary died as the result of an abortion performed in the inn, and what most deeply irritates me about The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers is that throughout the book, Srebnick treats this confession as if it were truthful despite the fact that she herself admits it may have been self-serving and despite the fact that it contradicts the published report of the coroner on Mary Rogers' body. And Srebnick never explains the contradictions. It is true that the aftereffects of a botched abortion might look like rape, but that does not explain why Mary Rogers was strangled. If Srebnick's theory is that she wasn't strangled, but died of the abortion, she needs to explain the very specific and vivid evidence presented in the newspaper reports of strangulation (especially since she spends a lot of time talking about the vivid newspaper descriptions of Mary's corpse as proof of the exploitation and degradation of female victims of violence); if the theory is that she was strangled, either she didn't die in the abortion but was murdered for some other reason, in which case Srebnick needs to stop treating the abortion theory as if it were the truth, or the abortionist also strangled her, in which case Srebnick seriously needs to explain (a.) how it was that she wasn't already dead or dying and (b.) why the abortionist felt it necessary to strangle her. To keep her from going to the police? Given the information about the police in New York in 1841, that doesn't seem likely to me, so if it's the case, I really need to have that laid out clearly. And if what's important to Srebnick is not what really happened to the real woman, Mary Cecilia Rogers, but only the stories that were constructed in the popular press, then she needs to make that clear, too, and to quit paying lip service to the idea that her book is about the real woman's real death.
But Srebnick wants Mary to have died of an abortion because that fits in with the buzzword theories about women's sexuality and "urban culture" (a phrase she uses constantly without ever clearly defining or acknowledging that "urban culture" in New York was not the same as "urban culture" in other cities, even other American cities) she's used to construct the book about, just as she wants Mary to have descended from the Rogers and Mather families (yes, those Mathers) because it makes Mary an example of the economic degradation and vulnerability of women in the mid-nineteenth century that is kind of the thing Srebnick really wants to write a book about.
I really wanted to like and be fascinated by this book, and I'm sad that neither happened.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-06-01 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-01 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-01 10:41 pm (UTC)And I'm intrigued by the idea of cigar saleswomen falling into the category of "sex worker" by the standards of the first half of the 19th century. The equivalent of Playboy bunnies and strippers.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-01 11:37 pm (UTC)There are some historians all of whose copies of the works of Foucault should be removed and who should be forced to undergo a rigorous training in empirical research and how it should be done.
Theory should occupy the position of spice rather than the substance of the dish.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 12:22 pm (UTC)I'm not sure 'parasexual' is really Bailey's own coining but his work on barmaids is where I found it, and it really is a very useful concept.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 03:53 am (UTC)Although! One of the other things that irritated me deeply was that Srebnick kept talking about Mary's sexuality as if there were proof that she had had many lovers (as opposed to beaux) without ever CITING that proof--unless you buy the abortion theory and that Mary's previous disappearance in 1838 was also for an abortion, and even then, that's not proof that she had the kind of sexual freedom that Srebnick seems to want to claim.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 10:50 pm (UTC)*sighs*
I don't recall any evidence at all, anywhere, that clearly shows Mary Rogers was sexually active. The evidence we do have suggests that she may have become pregnant, which only requires that she have had sex once, with one man*. Since throughout history a fair number of young women whose families thought they were keeping a close eye on them have managed to do the same thing, this doesn't mean that Mary Rogers either had many lovers (as you note, "beau" is not automatically the same as "sexual partner", and neither is "admirer") or was in a situation where it was expected that she have sex with one man, let alone several. It sounds very much as if Srebnick doesn't have a clear handle on what these terms meant to the people amongst whom Mary Rogers lived.
*Does Srebnick get into Daniel Payne's suicide?
no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 11:02 pm (UTC)2. She does mention Payne's suicide, although she makes no effort to incorporate it into her narrative of Rogers' life and death. As best I can tell, she seems to think Payne was Rogers' dupe and therefore irrelevant.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-04 04:19 am (UTC)I mean, you'd think--
Never mind.
I think I'll just leave it at that.
Bless her heart. Having a Theory is so demanding, whatever is a poor soul to do.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 12:36 am (UTC)"Parasexual" is a useful term--there's a distinct niche that it fills.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 01:42 am (UTC)(I don't know the history very well, but just read an article that discussed it briefly, so if I'm wrong on that someone please correct me.)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 12:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 11:20 pm (UTC)Availability to the public gaze and to indiscriminate public contact was felt to signal sexual availability to some extent. A respectable female should not be subjected to "insult", but confusion as to her respectability could result from inappropriate public exposure--partly being seen in situations which might lead people (mostly male) to misundestand her availability, but also as the result of failing to show the proper degree of reserve in neutral situations--etiquette books of the era emphasize this is discussing how women should behave when in company. Stashower notes that John Anderson, Mary Rogers's employer, had to carefully promise her mother that not only would the girl never be left alone in the store (which appears to have sold newspapers, magazines, and books as well as tobacco products--it was a big hangout for literary New York), but that she would be escorted to and from work--he was expected to behave as a surrogate male family member to a certain extent.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 12:23 am (UTC)I read the Stashower a few years ago, and while he works the Poe connection pretty heavily, it sounds like it's a better (although probably not perfect) take on the incident that this book was. I recall reading a book about this case in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate, but I can't drag the name of that book to the forefront of my consciousness.
All these issues--the economic insecurity of women at that time, the disruption in society as more women began to work outside the home (this was close to the time of the Lowell mill girls, after all), the sexual vulnerability of women, both in urban and other environments in that era--all these are worth investigating. So is what happened to Mary Rogers, which was informed by all these issues, but not limited to them.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 10:31 pm (UTC)Good luck with that IMCST thing. I'd like some myself, in the form of an extra day in the week where I don't have to show up at the Rent Job.
ah theory
Date: 2010-06-02 03:44 am (UTC)I have found books that are heavy on academic theory and buzzwords have the added disadvantage of inaccuracy in what info they do include. This can be amusing, when they quote an original source and don't bother to notice that it's evidence against what they are arguing.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 05:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 11:00 pm (UTC)0:)