The Durrant case, then, is a textbook Victorian sex crime, and it makes us aware of the inhibitions and frustrations that caused the element of explosive violence in so many cases of the period. Most young men – and women – are biologically prepared for sexual intercourse from the age of thirteen or so, and experience sexual curiosity many years earlier than that. In an age when even a glimpse of a woman’s ankle was regarded as sexually provocative, the frustration of young men must have been enormous. In My Life and Loves, Frank Harris describes how, as a child, he used to allow the pencil to roll under the table so that he could crawl on all fours and look at the girls’ legs. But when he mentions seeing ‘the legs up to the knees’, we realise that they wore long skirts; it was their ankles and calves that caused Harris so much excitement.
It is clear, therefore, why sex crime suddenly made its appearance in the second half of the nineteenth century: it was due to a combination of imagination – fed by the new habit of novel-reading – and of frustration due to Victorian prudery. Suddenly, sex was no longer the down-to-earth occupation it had been for Cleland and Boswell; it had become something to brood about and gloat about. Baudelaire remarked that unless sex was sinful, then it was boring and meaningless; what he meant was that, in the crucible of the imagination, sex could be turned into something that was at once wicked and delicious. In the works of the new ‘sexologists’ such as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, we read of various kinds of fetishism – of men who were sexually excited by women’s shoes, stays, knickers, aprons, even crutches. The sheer pressure of desire had imbued these objects with sexual ‘magic’. Havelock Ellis himself had once seen his mother urinating in Regent’s Park, and for the rest of his life, wrote poetically about ‘golden streams’ and persuaded his mistresses to urinate in front of him.
All this explains why, although Victorian prudery was fast disappearing by the year 1901 (when Queen Victoria died), the problem of sex crime showed no sign of going away. It is true that the old, morbid sense of ‘forbiddenness’ gradually leaked away as sex became a subject that could be discussed openly, and that one result was that violent sex crimes – like those of the Ripper and Vacher – became increasingly rare. But there could be no return to the realistic sexual attitudes of Defoe and Cleland. For better or worse, sex had been taken over by the human imagination.
This meant, of course, that sex had become slightly unreal. Shakespeare idealised Juliet; but he knew precisely what she was like as a human being. The heroines of Dickens and Thackeray and Wilkie Collins lack a whole dimension of reality. ‘Professor’ Joad once remarked that he became interested in women when he discovered they were not solid below the waist. The Victorian novelists give the impression that their heroines are solid from the waist down (no wonder ‘Walter’ found it impossible to imagine them having female organs like his cousins). So the new sexual frankness – and the alarming theories of Professor Freud – made no real impact on the romanticism of the Edwardians. They continued to be avidly interested in seduction and adultery, even when they were convinced they were being shocked.
Newspaper proprietors – like William Randolph Hearst – soon made the discovery that sex sells newspapers; so the public had to be told the details of every divorce scandal. Murder cases involving adultery received headline treatment for as long as the case lasted. In America in 1904, the sensation of the year was the trial of Floradora girl Nan Patterson for shooting her lover in a hansom cab when he announced he was leaving her (she claimed it was suicide). In 1906, journalists labelled the murder of architect Stanford White ‘the crime of the century’; White was shot by a rich playboy named Harry Thaw, who had discovered that his wife – another Floradora girl – had been White’s mistress. Both were utterly commonplace crimes of passion; but they had the necessary element of adultery and glamour.
Even glamour was not essential; it was the sex that mattered. The sensation of 1908 was the case of the sinister Belle Gunness of Indiana, who advertised for husbands and then murdered them. 1910 was a good year. In London, Dr Crippen was tried for the murder of his wife (yet another ex-showgirl); he dismembered her and eloped with his mistress, who was disguised as a boy. In Venice, there was the trial of Countess Marie Tarnowska, who had persuaded one lover to murder another in order to collect his insurance money and run away with a third. We would now describe her as a scheming nymphomaniac; but a contemporary book about her calls her ‘the strange Russian woman whose hand slew no man, but whose beauty drove those who loved her to commit murder for her sake.’ (Even Belle Gunness, who weighed twenty stone and whose features were distinctly porcine is depicted in contemporary sketches as slim and beautiful.)
But a case of 1913 revealed that a genuine sex crime could eclipse all other scandals. On a Saturday morning in April, fourteen-year-old Mary Phagan went to collect her wages from a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia; on her way out, she called at the ladies’ toilet in the basement, where a negro named Jim Conley was sleeping off a hangover. The next day, her body was found in the basement, her dress around her waist, and a cord knotted round her throat so tightly that it disappeared into the flesh. She also had teeth marks on her bare shoulder. Two notes lay by the body, stating that she had been attacked by ‘a tall, sleam negro’ – an obvious attempt to throw suspicion on the night-watchman who found the body. (Conley was short and squat.)
The manager of the pencil factory, a Jew named Leo Frank, was arrested. Conley at first escaped suspicion by asserting that he could not read or write; later, when it was proved that he could do both, he insisted that Leo Frank had made him write the notes on the day before the murder. Oddly enough, the citizens of Atlanta preferred to believe that a Jew was guilty; public indignation would not be satisfied with the mere hanging of a negro. Negros were lynched every day on the slightest pretext – in the week after Mary Phagan’s murder, one was lynched for firing off a gun when drunk, one for speaking disrespectfully to a white man, and one for ogling Sunday-school mistresses at a picnic. In 1906, an unfounded rumour that blacks had killed two white women led to some of the worst race riots in American history, and many black men, women and children were killed by a rampaging white mob. If one white life was worth a dozen blacks, then obviously there was no mathematical logic in arresting a black for Mary Phagan’s murder; a Jew made an altogether more satisfactory culprit.
It was the newspapers who were mainly responsible for Frank’s eventual conviction. They discovered that the public appetite for stories about the Phagan murder was insatiable; any new fact about the case would sell ‘extras’. If facts were lacking, they could be invented – like the story that the walls of Frank’s office were covered with photographs of nude girls. If they pointed in the wrong direction – for example the discovery that the bite marks on Mary Phagan were not made by Frank’s teeth – they were ignored. For over two years, the Phagan story went on selling newspapers, until the day in August 1915 when Frank was dragged from jail by a lynch mob and hanged on a tree near Mary Phagan’s home. Even then, public interest remained as strong as ever; there were several books about the case, and three movies. The death of Mary Phagan touched some chord of public morbidity, like the murder of Maria Marten a century earlier. But in Maria’s case, it was the brutality that shocked; in Mary Phagan’s, it was the thought of rape. It is something of an anticlimax to learn that the medical evidence showed the assault was never completed, and she remained a virgin.
It seems somehow symbolic that the Frank case occurred on the eve of the First World War. It was the war that swept away the last vestiges of the Victorian outlook, and introduced our modern age of violence.
In fact, the violence had been gathering for more than three decades.
REVOLT
On 1 March 1881, the tsar of Russia, Alexander II, was returning to the palace after an inspection of his troops. In his pocket he was carrying a document that he had worked out with his advisers: a tentative plan for some kind of Russian parliament – the first step towards the English style of representative government. Although Alexander had freed the serfs, socialist agitation was increasing, and in the previous year, an anarchist bomb had destroyed the dining room of the Winter Palace a few minutes before the tsar and his family came in for dinner. Now, at last, he was prepared to relinquish a little of his absolute power.