Dreiser noted that when no story “of immediate import was supplied by the daily news,” his editor “created new ones him-
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self, studying out interesting phases of past romances or crimes in the city which he thought it would be worthwhile for me to work up. …”11
The murder of Billy Brown had all the qualities Dreiser’s editor in St. Louis sought so avidly: it was long on graphic gore and it was long on heartrending emotions. And if there was one paper in the country that was equipped to sensationalize a naturally sensational story like this one, it was Pulitzer’s World. Two of the most prominent headlines on January 1, 1894, for example, the year Dreiser took a short-lived job on the World, were “Shot His Bride Dead” and “Done by a Fiend.” The kind of journalism the World had come to represent was satirized in an 1897 cartoon in the comic magazine Life titled “In the Old Pit Shaft”: as two gentlemen descend through an old mine shaft into the snake-infested belly of the earth, one excursionist asks the other, ‘‘Doesn’t it terrify you — the depths to which we are descending?” “Oh, no!” replies his friend, “I’m a reporter for the New York World.”12
The World’s artists had a heyday with illustrations for the stories of the Gillette trial, often filling a full quarter of the paper’s front page, and occasional full pages inside, with drawings of “Chester Gillette as He Appears on Trial for His Life, and the Girl with Whose Murder He is Charged,” “Chester Gillette as He Appeared in Court and His Senior Counsel,” “Chester Gillette as He Appeared on the Witness Stand Telling His Version of Grace Brown’s Death,” and so on. In these artists’ pictures, Billy Brown is portrayed as a woman who stepped out of a Victorian cameo: beautiful, chaste, with her hair in the current Gibson-girl fashion (a style that the real Billy Brown could never persuade her hair to follow — as photographs of her reveal).13
The World covered the gory coroner’s report in loving detail and also quoted extensively from the letters Billy Brown had sent to Gillette. The letters of Billy Brown that drove the jurors to tears were sold on the courtroom steps in a specially published pamphlet and were hungrily bought by the scores of spectators at the trial. The helpless, pleading tone of those documents, the sense of innocence wronged, of good faith betrayed, of young womanhood tarnished and destroyed, rang oddly familiar: it was a not-so-distant cousin of the sentimental fiction against which realist and naturalist novelists at the end of the nineteenth century rebelled. Parts of them resemble best-sellers from the end of the eighteenth century, such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple or Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, both cautionary tales in which the seduced and
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abandoned woman, like Billy Brown, dies before the story’s end.14
But the entrepreneur who published Billy Brown’s letters and the reporters, as well, expressed no interest in another batch of letters that surfaced at the trial: those from Chester Gillette. The letters he wrote to Billy Brown, during a period when she went home suddenly to comfort a bereaved sister, are pleading in their own special key. “You don’t know how lonesome it is now with less work for me and nothing to do evenings. … Hurry back as you don’t know how lonesome it is here,” Gillette wrote in one of them. “Dear how I miss you,” he wrote in another.15 (It is ironic that these letters — which were never quoted in the papers and which Dreiser probably never saw — bear a distinct resemblance to innumerable letters Dreiser himself would send over the course of his life to innumerable young women, all of whom — for the moment, at least — he had great trouble doing without. To Marguerite Tjader Harris, for example, he wrote, ‘‘I’m so truly lonely”; and on another occasion, “I miss you so painfully you may not guess how much.”16) Billy Brown’s letters, unlike Gillette’s, fit the paradigm: they fleshed out the image of her as victim. Gillette’s letters did not. In the melodrama at hand, he was to be portrayed as a monster. The letters made him sound vulnerably human. Therefore they were excised from the journalists’ records.
Several other points did not make it from the courtroom into the press for the same reason: they were extraneous to the gendered morality play that was being presented in the media. (The prosecutor, of course, was enacting a drama not vastly different from that featured in the press. The difference is that the lawyers did not control everything that witnesses said in the courtroom, but the journalists did control all that they wrote in the newspapers. In other words, material that did not “fit” the arguments being made managed to slip into various testimonies during the trial, but were largely edited out by the lawyers in their summaries and by journalists in their reports.) In each of these areas, the elements of Billy Brown’s character challenge the weak, passive, feminine “victim” role in which she was cast during the trial.
First is the issue of professional competence. According to the representations of her in the World, Billy Brown worked in the factory alongside the other “girls” in unexceptional ways. In fact, as Craig Brandon has noted, “she proved to be such a good worker that she seems to have filled in at a number of jobs for other workers who went on vacation.”17 In addition, she was soon
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advanced to a position of some responsibility as an inspector.18 Billy Brown’s versatile skills as a worker and inspector (possibly a source of some personal satisfaction and pride as well) gave her a measure of mobility in the factory, which in turn made it easier for her to meet Gillette.
Second is the issue of intellectual curiosity. The Billy Brown of the newspaper reports never opens a book, but evidence indicates that reading was a key part of Billy Brown’s life — and that it may have been precisely her thirst for intellectual stimulation that attracted her initially to Gillette. As fellow workers testified at the trial, Chester Gillette and Billy Brown shared an affection for popular magazines and newspapers of the day and both spent a great deal of their free time reading.19 Craig Brandon notes that Billy “also showed an interest in more literary subjects, a love for which was probably instilled by her friend and teacher Maude Kenyon,” who had ignited her love of books during high school.20
As a coworker recalled, Billy “was trying to educate herself to be (Gillette’s) equal.” She noted that Grace was always proud that Chester had been to “college.”21 In fact, Chester had not been to college: he had attended Oberlin, but it was the Oberlin preparatory school. He did nothing, however, to disabuse friends of the image of him as a “college man.” Instead, he encouraged it, telling tales about his adventures ‘‘in college” and in the West.22 Despite all his dissembling about “college,” Chester was, in fact, better educated than anyone else Billy knew in Cortland, and was the only person with whom she could discuss the books, newspapers, and magazines she read.
Third is the subject of Billy’s sexual drive. The prosecuting attorney at the trial was determined to characterize Billy Brown’s first sexual encounter with Chester Gillette as an experience as close to rape as he could make it. Reporters covering the trial made clear how shocked the jurors, the public, and they themselves were by Chester Gillette’s initial intimation, on the witness stand, that he may not have forced himself on Billy. The following exchange transpired in the courtroom:
Q. Gillette; whose house were you in when [improper relations] first occurred?
A. I was at her sister’s house.
Q. Where were you?
A. In Cortland.
Q. Where were you in the house?
A. In the parlor I guess it is called.
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Q. Did you struggle with the girl?
A. No sir.23
His questioner then rephrases the question in several ways until Chester gives him the “yes” answer that he seeks. “Did she say ‘No; no’ many times?” he asks; and “Before you accomplished the purpose of having sexual intercourse with this girl did she struggle and resist you?” Chester eventually assents.
The World reported this exchange as follows:
Before you succeeded in overcoming “Billy” Brown did she resist you?
No.
And as Gillette gave that answer he realized what he had done. There was menace in the face of every man in the courtroom. He tried his best to overcome the resentment he had aroused. … (November 29, 1906)
If Billy Brown had not resisted Chester Gillette in their initial sexual encounter, ‘‘every man in the courtroom” — and presumably in the reading public — did not want to know about it.
I suggest that Billy Brown’s competence at her work, her desire to have someone to talk to about what she read, and her potential sense of her own sexual autonomy ran counter to the dominant ideology of gender of her day. The masculinist prism through which the reporters viewed her life prevented them from seeing her as a complex and whole woman, and led them to cast her, instead, as a weak, passive, dependent — i.e., stereotypically “feminine” — victim. Dreiser, as we will see, did the same.24