Pretty Woman

Helen Jewett was beautiful, smart, assertive, romantic, an avid reader, a spiffy dresser and a lovely letter-writer. She was also duplicitous, coy, histrionic and manipulative. She worked as a high-priced prostitute in New York City during the third decade of the 19th century, and she was apparently very good at her job. In April 1836, when Jewett was 23, a young client with whom she was having a turbulent, emotionally charged affair smashed her head with a hatchet and set her corpse on fire. Her death and his trial became a national obsession, a scandale, a template upon which the sexual, class and generational conflicts of Jacksonian America were projected.

This is juicy stuff, and perhaps nobody could write a bad, or at least boring, account of Jewett’s life and death. But few historians, I suspect, could do what Patricia Cline Cohen accomplishes in “The Murder of Helen Jewett.” Cohen combines the talents of a tireless, creative detective with those of a graceful storyteller, unearthing myriad details about Jewett’s life to weave a compelling narrative that is simultaneously expansive and focused. Even more impressive are Cohen’s analytic skills--her ability to discern both the complex social meanings that Jewett’s life and death assumed for her contemporaries and the social divisions that they exposed. This is a superbly researched and superbly argued book.

Cohen constructs a painstakingly detailed and fascinating history of class and familial relations in Kennebec County, Maine, where, in 1813, Jewett was born (birth name: Dorcas Doyen) to a poor shoemaker; where, at the age of 13, she joined a judge’s household as a servant; and where, four years later, she lost her virginity and was expelled from the community. The author seems to have read every periodical that circulated in New York City during the 1830s, from the Journal of Public Morals to the Flash, a brothel guide. She discusses the racy French wallpaper depicting bare-breasted Tahitian beauties that adorned the mansion of the judge’s neighbor (and that Cohen views as a clue to the sexual fantasies of the Augustan establishment); she scoured fire insurance maps to determine the thickness of the walls in Helen’s brothel room (could anybody have heard her scream?); she knows just which titles were for sale in the local bookstore that the adolescent Dorcas frequented. And even before her narrative ends, Cohen leaves little doubt that 18-year-old Richard P. Robinson--an arrogant, mercurial, well-bred clerk--did in fact kill Jewett.

At the time of Jewett’s death, reported homicides were rare in New York City, but prostitution was not. In fact, it was on the rise; it was integrated into the city’s “prosperous and dignified” neighborhoods; and it was legal. This does not mean, of course, that it was not also despised, denied and fetishized.

Jewett practiced a particular form of prostitution. She did not work the streets but lived in the comfort and safety of an established brothel, where middle-class men came sometimes simply to socialize and where they often spent the entire night (these were not quick tricks). She was well-paid, charging $3 to $5 per visit (a highly skilled journeyman earned $12 per week). She saw one to two clients per day and, most significant, she picked--or rejected--them as she saw fit.

“Helen Jewett preferred her prostitution all rigged up with romance,” writes Cohen, who depicts Jewett’s trade as an elaborate mime of bourgeois romance. Helen’s customers wooed her with beseeching love letters and sentimental gifts; Helen alternated among charming, seducing and rejecting them. “Instead of emotion-free sex, Jewett saturated her sexual relationships with rituals of masculinity and femininity, and of love, romance, and intimacy. . . . Both parties to the bargain, Jewett and each client, could be playactors, and the money payment at the heart of it--unspoken but of paramount importance--gave each a measure of power and control.”

Yet such power was, of course, only relative. Jewett chose to become a prostitute, but she chose from severely limited options, and the severity of those limits--more than her murder--is in some ways the most shocking part of her story. Cohen makes clear that the social fluidity, the porous sense of promise, the democratic open-endedness of Jacksonian America most decidedly did not extend to unmarried girls who had lost their virginity. In fact, such girls were regarded as terminally “contaminated, like an infected person. . . . [T]he dynamics of social ostracism . . . separate[d] the female moral leper from innocent womanhood.” And yet, tracing birth and marriage records, Cohen concludes that “premarital sex was surprisingly commonplace in the years up to about 1800.” But a generation later, this “tolerant climate” toward female sexuality had been effectively “reversed.”

What accounts for this “sea change in attitudes”? Cohen attributes it to, ironically, the vastly increased physical mobility brought about by the transportation advances--in steamboats, roads, railroads--of the 1820s. Such geographic mobility threatened social stability, community cohesion and family formation, resulting in a far greater emphasis on female virginity as a way to ensure marriage; thus did freedom beget repression.

And, not surprisingly, along with virginity’s newfound value came a newfound belief in women’s presumed “passionlessness.” Yet this ideological shift was occurring at precisely the moment when unprecedented numbers of unsupervised young men (and some young women, too) were streaming into the cities in search of work, adventure, independence and experience. Clearly, a highly contradictory mixture of social reality and social doctrine was in the making.

Jewett--who kept a picture of Lord Byron in her room--was far from passionless. Indeed, she seems to have simultaneously epitomized and, far more dangerously, contravened contemporaneous ideals of femininity. On the one hand, she was vain, charming, flirtatious, flattering and sexually pleasing, and her livelihood, in the last analysis, depended on her looks. But she was lacking, alas, in the traditional female virtues of “acquiescence, submission, piety, self-sacrifice,” not to mention in the requisite shame for a woman of her station. (Two years before her murder, she filed charges against a young man who kicked her in the behind during an evening out at the theater.) She could also be shrewd, demanding, authoritative and angry, and she did not quite excel at what Cohen terms that “splendidly feminine . . . renunciation of self.”

Jewett met her temperamental equal in Robinson (brothel name: Frank Rivers), with whom she had an increasingly volatile affair in the 10 months preceding her murder. “They both lived on--indeed, thrived on living on--an emotional edge,” writes Cohen, who quotes extensively from their letters, which move from idealized tenderness to jealousy, dependence, desperation and fury. In one, Frank warns, “Touch lightly, or a reaction may blow you to heaven high,” while Helen later writes, “You have known how I have loved, do not, oh do not provoke the experiment of seeing how I can hate.” What Cohen terms “the emotional calculus of this couple” was horribly unbalanced, and in the early morning of April 10, 1836, Cohen reports that Frank killed Helen “quickly, deliberately, efficiently.” Perhaps he thought she’d go straight to heaven high.

Jewett’s murder and Robinson’s arrest electrified, and polarized, the city. Young male clerks considered Robinson both a victim and a hero; a spate of pamphlets adoringly (and often fictitiously) recounted Jewett’s life, emphasizing her beauty, charm and spunk; moral reformers were energized in their fight against sin, as were the penny presses in their quest for readers. (The latter, at least, were successful, thus forcing the establishment papers--which, at the time, disdained sordid crime news--to cover the story.) During the trial, thousands of young men jammed the courthouse, trying to gain entry to the city’s greatest spectacle--and to cheer on a defendant who was, after all, one of their own.

From a modern standpoint, though, the trial itself was a fiasco. The relationship between Helen and Frank was, astonishingly, ignored by both prosecution and defense, and attention seemed to focus more on Robinson’s “venerable” family background than on the physical evidence against him. None of the clients in the brothel at the time of the murder was called to testify: Why risk damaging the good reputations of good men? Worst of all, the judge instructed the all-male jurors to disregard what Robinson’s lawyer termed the “polluted”--albeit eyewitness--testimony of the prostitutes who lived in Jewett’s house, and had seen Frank in Helen’s room on the night she was killed. The jury took between eight and 15 minutes to decide “not guilty.”

Robinson’s rather vile character--cruel, narcissistic, mendacious--was revealed when excerpts from his diary and various jailhouse letters to a friend were printed in several New York City papers. His acquittal surprised some New Yorkers and angered others, spurring the press to investigate the case independently and inspiring a lively debate on prostitution, morality and justice. “[T]he verdict opened a fissure running deeper than media sensationalism,” Cohen writes. “The perplexity over the acquittal exposed to view the raw dynamics of class and sex privilege in American society. . . . Robinson’s acquittal was discomfiting precisely because for a short moment the veil over male privilege was lifted up and its workings exposed to view. . . . Judge [Ogden] Edwards’ instructions to the jury laid bare the terms of power between men and women--or, more precisely, women of questionable character.”

At the time, Helen Jewett’s death was read as a morality tale: a warning of the perils that befall headstrong young girls with too much passion, too much ambition, too much independence (or even, in some versions, too great an appetite for romantic novels). Cohen’s marvelous book allows us to understand why Jewett’s contemporaries interpreted her story in all these ways, while inviting us to investigate the richer, deeper meanings it offers us today.