Should we ban books and stories that dwell on dead women? Earlier this year, the author Bridget Lawless suggested just that, launching a new prize for fiction, for the best thriller “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”. So, how can I reconcile my consumption of crime narratives with my horror at the suffering these young Irish women endured so close to home? With my horror at any brutalisation of women? I wish I had an easy answer. Just last month in Ireland, two young women, or rather a young woman and a girl, Jastine Valdez (24) and Anastasia Kriegel (14), were assaulted and murdered.Ĭultural narratives of dead girls often implicate women in their own brutalisation: don’t wear revealing clothes, don’t walk alone at night, don’t get a “reputation”, don’t leave your drink unattended in the club. The media coverage was disturbing, with some headlines seeming to imply that she was somehow to blame. One of the students killed in the recent American school shooting in Santa Fe had reportedly rejected the repeated unwanted romantic advances of the male shooter. In true-crime news last month, both in the US and closer to home, it has been difficult not to feel overwhelmed by the emerging details of the brutal murders of a number of young girls. John Ramsey, the father of JonBenet Ramsey, discusses his new book about the case. This in turn perhaps accounts for why the 20th anniversary of her unsolved murder produced a flurry of media and pop-cultural re-tellings of her dreadful story: CBS, Lifetime, and A&E documentaries, even a Netflix movie, Casting JonBenét. Ramsey is perhaps the perfect iteration of the dead girl trope: blonde, beautiful, rich, innocent. Some of the most compelling true crime cases of all time have at their heart dead girls: Jack the Ripper's victims, The Black Dahlia: Elizabeth Short, the unsolved murder of American child beauty pageant queen, JonBenét Ramsey. Not all manifestations of the beautiful dead girl trope occur in fiction. This ethical question becomes particularly pointed, of course, in the case of true crime. A question that troubles me and should trouble all of us who consume such media: how can we account for or defend our widespread obsession with women who are abused or killed, and whose beautiful dead bodies are often employed only as narrative tools leading to (often male) stories of investigation? At home, I crash out on my sofa and watch True Detective or Thirteen Reasons Why on Netflix. On my commute, I'll listen to a podcast, perhaps Audible's West Cork – deemed "the next Serial"– which investigates the unsolved murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, brutally beaten to death by an assailant in December 1996. My days might begin writing an article on the victims of Jack the Ripper's 1888 murders, followed by a few hours of teaching Poe's detective stories, Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia. Westworld’s beautiful android Dolores, a character that exists only to be raped, killed, and resurrected and subjected to this fate time and time againĪs a creator, consumer and critic of crime narratives, I spend an unhealthy amount of time with beautiful murdered women. From the washed-up body of Laura Palmer in David Lynch's recently relaunched Twin Peaks, to Megan Hipwell, the gamine murder victim at the centre of Paula Hawkins's blockbuster, The Girl on the Train, to the murder of Hae-Min Lee covered by Serial – the show that launched a thousand true-crime podcasts – to Westworld's beautiful android Dolores, a character that exists only to be raped, killed, and resurrected and subjected to this fate time and time again, much of our most popular pop culture is dominated by the spectacle of the beautiful dead girl. (Worth noting that author Emily St John Mandel studied the groaning corpus of crime books with "girl" in the title and found that in those books the girl almost always ends up dead). Not quite 200 years later, popular literature and culture are still fascinated with beautiful dead girls or grown women termed girls for the purposes of commercial appeal. Men gaze at dead girls, the reader sharing that gaze and the resultant objectification of the victim. Not only described in unflinching detail to the reader, but gazed upon, lavished over, dissected by the "lynx eye" of Poe's detective, Chevalier Auguste Dupin. Not only dead, but murdered, mutilated, broken. This is borne out in his work at the centre of the first two detective stories in the history of the genre – The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget – are the bodies of beautiful dead women. "The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world," wrote Edgar Allan Poe, the acknowledged father of the modern detective genre, in 1846.
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