Disreputable Scraps
Lisa Appignanesi, Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness
Virago, 448pp, £13.99, ISBN 9780349004815
reviewed by Polly Bull
In 1871, Christiana Edmunds laced chocolate creams with strychnine and distributed them throughout her hometown of Brighton, hoping to poison her lover’s wife without attracting suspicion. When a young boy died from eating the chocolates, they were traced back to Edmunds and she was charged with his murder.
Edmunds pleaded not guilty, with a defence of insanity. Acquittal on this basis largely rested on proof of her inability, at the time of the crime, to distinguish right from wrong. In order to determine this, lawyers interrogated Edmunds’s actions leading up to the poisoning spree, her personal history, her lifestyle and her attitude in the dock. Her systematic approach to the distribution of the poisoned sweets indicated guilt. But her family had a history of mental illness which was used to cast doubts on her rationality, and thus partially exonerate her. Her father, once a successful architect, had spent the last years of his life in an asylum. Christiana herself had previously suffered from an episode of what mind doctors such as Jean-Martin Charcot or a young Freud would have classified as hysteria: paralysis down one side of her body and an inability to walk. She also wrote letters excessively. The irresistible urge to write was seen as one symptom of mental illness in the 19th century, and is still considered an aspect of mania today.
Edmunds also threatened Victorian ideas about appropriate female behaviour. She travelled independently on trains, enjoying a freedom of movement usually reserved for men. She was a middle-aged, middle-class spinster, one who – judging by her lack of distress at the death of an innocent child – lacked the maternal instinct. Was she not insane after all, but evil?
In Trials of Passion, an electrifying study of love crimes and madness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lisa Appignanesi considers Edmunds’s case alongside two others. Each took place in a different country – Britain, France and the USA – but all had their outcomes shaped by changing beliefs about gender and insanity. Appignanesi has written previously on related subjects in her award-winning Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (2008) and All About Love: An Unruly Emotion (2011). In this latest instalment, she brings together letters, newspaper accounts and court and asylum records to reveal the minutiae of the crimes and the defendants’ personal histories, as well as the tug-of-war drama of the trials. In each case, lawyers, judges and jurors were tasked with making sense of that unruliest antithesis of a rational courtroom: passionate love.
The trial of Marie Bière in belle époque Paris revolved around courtship and betrayal. Bière was an actress who embarked upon an affair with Robert Gentien, a socially ambitious man-about-town who had no intention of marrying someone of her profession. She nevertheless interpreted his correspondence as prelude to a proposal. When she became pregnant, Gentien suggested she have an abortion. Bière refused and gave birth to a daughter, Juliette, who died from bronchial complications. By this time, Gentien had found a new mistress. Bereaved, enraged and heartbroken, Bière planned his murder.
Her mistreatment by a cad and ‘natural’ maternal feelings created sympathy for her defence. The psychiatric profession played a much larger role in the French courts than in the British. The mind doctors claimed Marie was a woman of ‘near-morbid intensity (exaltation) whose emotions and passions dominated and obliterated her judgment.’ The judge had to decide whether this obliteration was temporary or permanent: was the accused a danger to society in the future, or was her crime a once-only?
Appignanesi’s third case concerns the murder of celebrity architect Stanford White, whose New York firm was responsible for projects such as Madison Square Garden and the Washington Square Memorial Arch. His lavish social life included a penchant for young girls, one of whom was the plucky but impecunious model and actress Evelyn Nesbit. White spotted Nesbit in 1901 when, aged 16, she was a chorus girl in the Broadway musical hit Florodora. They became lovers, but were separated when she went away to boarding school.
In 1905, Nesbit married the mentally unstable millionaire Harry Thaw. Thaw had long considered White his enemy, and the following year he murdered him, claiming he needed to restore his wife’s virtue. The case scandalised and enthralled the public, who were gripped by reports of an innocent media sweetheart standing in the witness box, recounting a tale of stolen feminine virtue and rapacious male sexuality. Notably, Thaw’s physical and mental abuse of his wife was not addressed in the trial.
Thaw’s trial differed from its European counterparts because of the money involved, as well as the questionable authority of a slew of expert witnesses who were paid thousands of dollars to attest to the defendant’s insanity. Early 20th-century conceptions of mental illness were far more complicated than those that influenced Edmunds’s trial in 19th-century England. Thaw’s 13 experts sought to exonerate him with a range of newly-identified disorders, including ‘neurotic temperament’, logorrhea (an abnormally rapid flow of words), ‘exaggerated ego’ and delusions of persecution. In contemporary terms, Appignanesi tells us, this might have added up to paranoid personality disorder.
The cases in Trials of Passion are thrilling enough to transfix the reader, and the book’s style adds to its enjoyment. Appignanesi’s tone is sometimes that of a sensation-seeking journalist, cleverly mimicking contemporary reports of the crimes. ‘The public erupt in cheers at Lachaud’s moral fury,’ she writes of Marie Bière’s case (Charles Lachaud was Bière’s defence lawyer). ‘As if they were in a boulevard theatre, they applaud his peroration. Marie has given her word that she will never again target the man she now contemns. She has never lied.’ This blow-by-blow narration is tempered in other sections by detailed consideration of historical trends of mental illness, gender and the law, emphasising Appignanesi’s expertise in her subject. In addition to the trials of Edmunds, Bière and Thaw, she conducts briefer investigations into three other, equally riveting cases: a double suicide pact, a ‘belle époque Bonnie and Clyde’ and a newspaper room honour killing.
Appignanesi has a flair for rounding out her characters as if they are fictional creations, which reflects both her storytelling talents and her interest in psychoanalysis. At times she takes this too far, as in her analysis of Thaw’s childhood and relationship with his mother. ‘Perhaps because there had been a male child before Harry who had died in infancy (purportedly smothered by the ample Mary’s breast), Mary Thaw spoiled her surviving eldest and was ever ready to pull him out of disreputable scraps,’ she speculates. Still, bringing historical figures to life without taking some imaginative liberties is almost impossible, and Appignanesi’s conclusions are mostly convincing. Even her occasional partiality may be forgiven on the grounds that it serves her larger themes. While she has obvious disdain for ‘Mother Thaw’, her admiration for Evelyn Nesbit – a ‘true independent spirit and survivor’ – appropriately spotlights a courageous woman who was pulled apart by two rich, powerful and abusive men, yet lived to embrace some of the 20th century’s more promising opportunities for women.
‘Every love story is a potential grief story,’ Appignanesi writes at the beginning of Trials of Passion, quoting Julian Barnes. When that grief becomes murderous violence, the courts have to step in. The idea of putting love on trial gives the book its central question: how well can legal systems based on reason arbitrate feelings and thoughts that are far from rational? The answer is not very, and the verdicts are usually messy and inconclusive.
Edmunds pleaded not guilty, with a defence of insanity. Acquittal on this basis largely rested on proof of her inability, at the time of the crime, to distinguish right from wrong. In order to determine this, lawyers interrogated Edmunds’s actions leading up to the poisoning spree, her personal history, her lifestyle and her attitude in the dock. Her systematic approach to the distribution of the poisoned sweets indicated guilt. But her family had a history of mental illness which was used to cast doubts on her rationality, and thus partially exonerate her. Her father, once a successful architect, had spent the last years of his life in an asylum. Christiana herself had previously suffered from an episode of what mind doctors such as Jean-Martin Charcot or a young Freud would have classified as hysteria: paralysis down one side of her body and an inability to walk. She also wrote letters excessively. The irresistible urge to write was seen as one symptom of mental illness in the 19th century, and is still considered an aspect of mania today.
Edmunds also threatened Victorian ideas about appropriate female behaviour. She travelled independently on trains, enjoying a freedom of movement usually reserved for men. She was a middle-aged, middle-class spinster, one who – judging by her lack of distress at the death of an innocent child – lacked the maternal instinct. Was she not insane after all, but evil?
In Trials of Passion, an electrifying study of love crimes and madness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lisa Appignanesi considers Edmunds’s case alongside two others. Each took place in a different country – Britain, France and the USA – but all had their outcomes shaped by changing beliefs about gender and insanity. Appignanesi has written previously on related subjects in her award-winning Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (2008) and All About Love: An Unruly Emotion (2011). In this latest instalment, she brings together letters, newspaper accounts and court and asylum records to reveal the minutiae of the crimes and the defendants’ personal histories, as well as the tug-of-war drama of the trials. In each case, lawyers, judges and jurors were tasked with making sense of that unruliest antithesis of a rational courtroom: passionate love.
The trial of Marie Bière in belle époque Paris revolved around courtship and betrayal. Bière was an actress who embarked upon an affair with Robert Gentien, a socially ambitious man-about-town who had no intention of marrying someone of her profession. She nevertheless interpreted his correspondence as prelude to a proposal. When she became pregnant, Gentien suggested she have an abortion. Bière refused and gave birth to a daughter, Juliette, who died from bronchial complications. By this time, Gentien had found a new mistress. Bereaved, enraged and heartbroken, Bière planned his murder.
Her mistreatment by a cad and ‘natural’ maternal feelings created sympathy for her defence. The psychiatric profession played a much larger role in the French courts than in the British. The mind doctors claimed Marie was a woman of ‘near-morbid intensity (exaltation) whose emotions and passions dominated and obliterated her judgment.’ The judge had to decide whether this obliteration was temporary or permanent: was the accused a danger to society in the future, or was her crime a once-only?
Appignanesi’s third case concerns the murder of celebrity architect Stanford White, whose New York firm was responsible for projects such as Madison Square Garden and the Washington Square Memorial Arch. His lavish social life included a penchant for young girls, one of whom was the plucky but impecunious model and actress Evelyn Nesbit. White spotted Nesbit in 1901 when, aged 16, she was a chorus girl in the Broadway musical hit Florodora. They became lovers, but were separated when she went away to boarding school.
In 1905, Nesbit married the mentally unstable millionaire Harry Thaw. Thaw had long considered White his enemy, and the following year he murdered him, claiming he needed to restore his wife’s virtue. The case scandalised and enthralled the public, who were gripped by reports of an innocent media sweetheart standing in the witness box, recounting a tale of stolen feminine virtue and rapacious male sexuality. Notably, Thaw’s physical and mental abuse of his wife was not addressed in the trial.
Thaw’s trial differed from its European counterparts because of the money involved, as well as the questionable authority of a slew of expert witnesses who were paid thousands of dollars to attest to the defendant’s insanity. Early 20th-century conceptions of mental illness were far more complicated than those that influenced Edmunds’s trial in 19th-century England. Thaw’s 13 experts sought to exonerate him with a range of newly-identified disorders, including ‘neurotic temperament’, logorrhea (an abnormally rapid flow of words), ‘exaggerated ego’ and delusions of persecution. In contemporary terms, Appignanesi tells us, this might have added up to paranoid personality disorder.
The cases in Trials of Passion are thrilling enough to transfix the reader, and the book’s style adds to its enjoyment. Appignanesi’s tone is sometimes that of a sensation-seeking journalist, cleverly mimicking contemporary reports of the crimes. ‘The public erupt in cheers at Lachaud’s moral fury,’ she writes of Marie Bière’s case (Charles Lachaud was Bière’s defence lawyer). ‘As if they were in a boulevard theatre, they applaud his peroration. Marie has given her word that she will never again target the man she now contemns. She has never lied.’ This blow-by-blow narration is tempered in other sections by detailed consideration of historical trends of mental illness, gender and the law, emphasising Appignanesi’s expertise in her subject. In addition to the trials of Edmunds, Bière and Thaw, she conducts briefer investigations into three other, equally riveting cases: a double suicide pact, a ‘belle époque Bonnie and Clyde’ and a newspaper room honour killing.
Appignanesi has a flair for rounding out her characters as if they are fictional creations, which reflects both her storytelling talents and her interest in psychoanalysis. At times she takes this too far, as in her analysis of Thaw’s childhood and relationship with his mother. ‘Perhaps because there had been a male child before Harry who had died in infancy (purportedly smothered by the ample Mary’s breast), Mary Thaw spoiled her surviving eldest and was ever ready to pull him out of disreputable scraps,’ she speculates. Still, bringing historical figures to life without taking some imaginative liberties is almost impossible, and Appignanesi’s conclusions are mostly convincing. Even her occasional partiality may be forgiven on the grounds that it serves her larger themes. While she has obvious disdain for ‘Mother Thaw’, her admiration for Evelyn Nesbit – a ‘true independent spirit and survivor’ – appropriately spotlights a courageous woman who was pulled apart by two rich, powerful and abusive men, yet lived to embrace some of the 20th century’s more promising opportunities for women.
‘Every love story is a potential grief story,’ Appignanesi writes at the beginning of Trials of Passion, quoting Julian Barnes. When that grief becomes murderous violence, the courts have to step in. The idea of putting love on trial gives the book its central question: how well can legal systems based on reason arbitrate feelings and thoughts that are far from rational? The answer is not very, and the verdicts are usually messy and inconclusive.