Mary Rogers
2014
Mary Rodgers
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/classics/mary_rogers/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goretti
FRIAR BARNARDINE. Thou hast committed--
BARABAS. Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.
I live a short walk from Sybil’s Cave which is/was a spring in the Palisades a stone throw from the Hudson estuary directly across from the Chelsea arrondissement in Manhattan. This week it has been beautifully shrouded in frozen sculpted snow and I remembered the famous crime associated with it which was transformed into the even more famous ‘Marie Roget’ story by Poe. The story was a sequel to the “Murders of the Rue Morgue” which makes claim to being an early (perhaps earliest) of the modern detective genre.
The historical account of the events is anything but ‘modern detective’. I have read a few accounts but I am in no way a historian andI like Poe but am in no way a literary expert. What is interesting to me about this story is the way in which Mary Rodgers becomes more or less complicent in her own death depending upon how virtuous she is.
A badly beaten body was found in the Hudson near Sybil’s Cave in the 1840s. I can see the rough area from my window as I type this. Today (early February) there is visible ice on the surface which gives an extra shiver thinking of a body floating in the river. She was found in July. From the accounts at the time Hoboken was a wooded and secluded area. There were little taverns and inns along the water where you could expect less scruitiny than in lower Manhattan. Presumably people would go here to conduct business unseen or be with lovers, etc.
I remember when I lived in Korea, hotels around Seoul that had long strips of rubber hanging over the entrance of the parking lot. Like the strips at the entrnace of a carwash but thinner. The purpose was so that you could drive your car into the parking area and get out unnoticed. These were called ‘love-motels’ - places to have some discretion in the densely crowded Korean capital.
Manhattan had the west bank of the Hudson for this purpose in the 1840s. From my window I can see cars and traffic lights on the Westside Highway and a few billboards - though not specifically what they say. People are smaller than ants. I can see when someone is climbing the Empire State Building spire against the sky and maybe partygoers on the piers jutting out into the Hudson but Hoboken is just far enough from Manhattan to not see actual human activity. The city has a calmness and a quiet from this distance. On a personal note I deeply value this distance. After a hectic day in a city that can beat you up both physically and mentally it is nice to look out the window, whisky in hand, at the slumbering beast and feel you’ve escaped to do battle another day.
So in the 1840s this was the place to come for cheaper brandy and solitude (though today Hoboken at 50,000 inhabitants per square mile is more densely populated than most Manhattan neighborhoods). Mary’s distraught suitor would later commit suicide on the same spot. To be near where she perished but also to be somewhere he would be left alone to overdose on alcohol and laudinum.
One account is that she went to Hoboken to call off an engagement with this man and he beat her to death. Another account was that she was accosted by a gang. The body was badly beaten and her dress torn. The doctor who acted as coroner indicated that she was likely attacked by more than one person. The doctor’s report indicated that she “had evidently been a person of chastity and correct habits”. I am guessing that this meant that she was not pregnant. A third account comes from the innkeeper at the place where Mary stayed on before her murder. On her deathbed she related that Mary had come to her establishment in part to have an abortion which went wrong. She died and her corse was mutilated to disguise the reason for death.
In short the murder was never quite solved. It played out in the NYC press, which at the time was quite competitive. There was a large number of ‘penny press’ newspapers which I suppose are the precursors to tabloids. Numerous accounts of the murder and events vied for readership. Mary was a minor celebrity at the time. She was a ‘cigar girl’ at a downtown business where figures from business, governement and the arts all went to buy their cigars. The store where she worked a focal point for the literati and journalists of the time. Including Poe. She had previously gone missing for a few days and this event made it to the newspapers. Her murder was a major story at the time.
When I first read this I thought it was something like the cigarette girl that you see in movies about early-mid 20th century gangsters. Attractive young women who walked around burlesque joints, speakeasies and casinos selling cigarettes from a tray hung from their necks. But this is different. She was “the cigar girl”.
In Korea greeters at department stores are generally attractive young women in a vaguely Jacqui Onassis looking outfit with white gloves. They smile and wave at customers as they enter. Also gas stations. Weather permitting thay stand outside waving at passing cars. They were generally beautiful and always young. There are other jobs for young attractive women. Golf attendant, tabang girl (coffee shop delivery girl) and room salon hostess. They are different in the sense that there is if not the expectation of sexual activity, there is the possibility… Department Store greeters are inviolate. Tabang girls are euphemisms.
I think Mary was on that side of the boundary. There is a way in which we construct subtle dividing lines between what is sex work and what is not. If Mary had been a beautiful prositiute then there would not have been a story. Even in my mind as I was reading the story there was a register shift. It becomes a different story as she is a ‘person of chastity’. It is like the transformation from the Hudson to the Seine, from Mary Rodgers to Marie Roget. From getting what she deserves in the court of public opinion to being a virtuous victim.
Here she reminds me of a 3rd Mary, Maria Goretti. Maria is the patron saint of “chastity, rape victims, girls, youth, teenage girls, poverty, purity and forgiveness”. As a preteen she was attacked by a laborer on her family farm. The Catholic Church’s version of events is that she chose death instead of submitting to the rape and she forgave here attacker on her deathbed. Deeply troubling story about what it implies about the ability to fight off a much bigger stronger person; as well as the evil trope that a woman can somehow physically make rape impossible; as well as the need to forgive before restitiution and pusnishment of the attacker… etc. But I digress. I just mean to say that Maria Goretti is the archtype which the Mary Rodgers story plays into.
Mary Rodgers is portrayed as beautiful, captivating and chaste. She is a muse. Poems to her starry eyes and heavenly face were published in the Herald. A lesser Helen of Troy unjustly felled in Hoboken. Unjust because it was Hoboken and not somethign more Elysian…