Technical Difficulties

Srebnick, Amy Gilman. The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

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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.