Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

by Sady Doyle

  He was calling from the candlelight vigil for Laci.

  Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

  “We do Laci Peterson every fifteen minutes and see the numbers go up,” Bill O’Reilly told Vanity Fair in 2003. “It’s a story that resonates with women particularly.”3

  Frey’s revelations poured gasoline on what was already a very sizable fire. By the spring of 2004, images of Scott and Laci blared out from every supermarket checkout aisle and newsstand in the nation. The sheer audacity of Scott’s public existence—a man who had killed his wife walking around in the open, doing an exceptionally bad impression of a grieving husband—made him hard to look away from. One local radio station put Scott’s face on a billboard, next to a phone number, so that listeners could call in and describe the depth and vehemence of their hatred.

  Scott tried to win the people back by leaning into his newfound fame, giving high-profile interviews to national outlets and pulling in his family to do the same. This turned out to be one of the worst decisions Scott ever made, and this was a man whose decision-making skills had already led him to infidelity, faked Eiffel Tower parties, and murder. At one point, Scott’s father told Barbara Walters that his son was “no different than 95 percent of men in this country,” because it was “a reality of life [that] men have affairs.”

  “When their wives are eight-and-a-half-months pregnant?” Walters asked.

  “Probably more so!” Mr. Peterson said, cheerily.4 His own wife was sitting directly next to him at the time.

  Scott did no better when left to his own devices. At one point, he booked an exclusive Diane Sawyer interview on Good Morning America, where he inexplicably chose to insist that not only had he told Laci about his affair with Amber, Laci had given him her blessing.

  “Do you really expect people to believe,” Sawyer said, speaking very slowly, and placing lethal emphasis on every other word, “that an eight-and-a-half-months pregnant woman learns her husband is having an affair, and is saintly and casual about it? Accommodating? Makes a peace with it?”

  “Well, ah, yeah, ah…you don’t know,” he stuttered.5 He looked visibly angry to be questioned.

  I don’t want to be unduly facetious here. Not only was Laci dead, and horribly so, Scott was soon to be found guilty and sentenced to death himself. If you believe that capital punishment is murder—and it’s hard to think of what else to call it—then Scott, too, will one day be a murder victim. That said, if you were to look through history for the precise moment that Scott sentenced himself to death, that “well, ah, yeah” to Sawyer is probably it.

  Scott failed to recognize something that O’Reilly—of all people—could spot from a mile away: his fate rested on winning the sympathies of women. The audience that followed the Petersons’ case, tuned into the exclusive interviews and made all those magazines fly off the shelves was (like all true-crime audiences) mostly female. Scott’s blatant lie to Sawyer, or his father’s blithe assurance that most men cheated on their wives and it was nothing to worry about, betrayed not just callousness or dishonesty, but a failure to recognize that women’s opinions could even matter. That ignorance sealed his fate.

  Yet Scott was not the only one who failed to take those women seriously. To this day, if the media furor around Laci and Scott Peterson is remembered at all, it’s as an apolitical “distraction”; the case played out over the height of the Iraq War, which, along with the anti-abortion angle (the case resulted in legislation, Laci and Conner’s law, which classified fetuses as “unborn children” for the purposes of prosecuting murder) made it a go-to for Fox News and right-wing demagogues like O’Reilly. This is the space that Laci, and victims like her, occupy in the culture: silly stories for silly women, a prurient, frivolous break from the real news.

  But to many of the women watching the case unfold, Laci was the real news. Their fascination with the case had serious, even political implications. Scott really was like most of the men in this country, or at least, like many of the men those women had known. They paid attention to him not because his violence was abnormal or sensational, but because—in all his bland, hair-gelled brutality—he revealed how violent “normal” was.

  The Bloody Chamber

  Western culture typically posits marriage as a blissful event—the reward at the end of Shakespearean comedies and Disney movies and every deserving woman’s life. But there has always been a darker story we tell about marriage: Bluebeard warning his virginal bride away from his bloody chamber, where the corpses of wives past lie in wait.

  Scott Peterson was one of the many Bluebeards of basic cable—all those made-for-TV movies with names like Bed of Lies and Lies of the Heart and Cries Unheard: The Donna Yaklich Story, in which Jaclyn Smith or Susan Dey is seduced, then menaced by a sinister husband played by Chris Cooper or Brad Johnson or (I always assume) Judd Nelson. The Laci Peterson iteration was unsubtly titled The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story, and Scott was played by TV superman Dean Cain.

  It’s easy to dismiss this genre as mere melodrama: cheap titillation for midwestern wine moms, vicarious suffering for women with no real problems and no real pain. Yet, if Laci can teach us anything, it’s that even well-behaved, well-off suburban women can have much bigger and more painful problems than you might expect.

  For much of history, violence was not something unfortunate that happened within marriage—violence was marriage. It was a brutal institution, the primary mechanism by which men subdued individual women and put their unruly, monstrous sexuality under control. You couldn’t ask men not to beat their wives. It would be like building a jail with no bars or locks. How else were you going to keep women from getting loose?

  This sounds dark, but history bears it out. Spousal rape was not outlawed in all fifty states until the 1990s. Even after domestic violence technically became illegal, courts often declined to try cases. “There has been for many years a gradual evolution of the law going on, for the amelioration of the married woman’s condition, until it is now, undoubtedly, the law of England and of all the American states, that the husband has no right to strike his wife,” the supreme court of Maine acknowledged in 1877.6 Yet the court ruled it was “better to draw the curtain [and] shut out the public gaze” from such matters.7 Yet another court ruled that domestic violence should not be prosecuted because families “would be disturbed by dragging into court for judicial investigation…matters of no serious moment, which if permitted to slumber in the home closet would be silently forgiven or forgotten.”8 Beating your wife was not just too trivial to be worth prosecuting; it was too common. Start hearing domestic violence cases, and the justice system would be flooded with beaten women.

  It probably would be, if women thought they had any chance of getting justice in the courts. To this day, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) says that one in four women is the victim of “severe” violence from a partner.9 The NCADV defines “severe” violence as different than slapping or shoving; by their metrics, 25 percent of the female population has experienced “beating, burning, strangling,” or in other words, what you and I might call attempted murder.10 Fifty-five percent of all female homicide victims are killed by a current or former partner.11 Even mass shootings, the most “random” and seemingly impersonal form of American violence, start here; as per the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, the vast majority of mass shootings begin as domestic violence incidents, with male shooters whose wives and children are their first casualties.12

  Women who obsess over stories about killer husbands aren’t indulging in tabloid sensationalism or thinking in complicated psychosexual metaphors. They are, literally, worried that their husbands are going to kill them—and those fears are not irrational.

  “Our trust in men is as unearned as it is unreciprocated—yet it’s expected,” writes feminist Chelsea G. Summers. “And this is where true crime’s real value lies: Unlike love songs, unlike r
om-coms, and unlike romance novels, true crime has no interest in telling us to trust men. Unlike politicians or bosses, it doesn’t seek to gaslight women.”13

  Bluebeard stories provide one of the few venues women have to talk about the pervasive nature of marital violence. Like the slashers, they convert private trauma into public spectacle, giving women a language for their pain.

  Look again to all those women obsessing over Laci Peterson while we waged war on Iraq, the trivial housewives with their trivial concerns: Between 2001 and 2012, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan killed 6,488 US soldiers. In that same span of time, over 10,470 American women were murdered by their partners.14 Women who followed Laci’s case weren’t ignoring the war abroad, they were paying attention to the war at home. That war is long and bloody, and there is no chance of a ceasefire any time soon. If we had no way to talk about it, we might die of the silence alone.

  Her Demon Lover

  When the truths of women’s lives are excluded from the cultural mainstream, the mediums women adopt to express those truths are also marginalized. Today, it’s true crime and Lifetime movies. Yesterday, it was the Gothic novel.

  Contemporary horror is founded on a sturdy Gothic bedrock. The “classic” monsters all originated in Gothic novels—Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—and so did the basic furniture of the genre, the dimly lit castles, crashing thunder, and pale ghosts moaning in the night. Granted, those tropes stopped scaring people when they showed up in Sesame Street segments, Disney’s Haunted Mansion, and/or Count Chocula commercials. But they were formative; everything we have now is derived from them.

  Which means that everything comes from women’s fiction. Many of the most celebrated eighteenth-and nineteenth-century books by women are Gothic: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an obvious example, but Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights also fit inside the Gothic box to some extent. Not only was the genre heavily feminized, female authors could attain shocking power within it: Ann Radcliffe, the mother of the Gothic, was “the most popular and best paid English novelist of the eighteenth century.”15 She was also publicly known as “Mrs. Radcliffe,” decades before the Brontës took on male pseudonyms to legitimize their own writing.

  It wasn’t just the authors. Girls and young women wolfed down Gothic novels, which—like Scream and Lifetime movies—provided a rare public forum through which women could discuss the day-to-day dangers they faced. No other genre was so focused on the evil men do to the women in their lives. The Gothic turned everyday family life inside out to produce anxiety nightmares of unnatural and illegitimate reproduction, child abuse, sexual perversion, and—most importantly, for our purposes—untrustworthy, violent husbands.

  The Byronic male love interest is one of the hottest and most problematic Gothic tropes, and has resurfaced, in degraded latter-day form, in entertainments ranging from Veronica Mars to Twilight. As outlined in the original nineteenth-century novels, he is a man who is not only dangerous and cruel to the women around him, but somehow more attractive because of his terrible personality. In Jane Eyre, Edward Rochester locks his wife in an attic so he can sexually harass his nanny; Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, literally strangles puppies for sport. Yet other, less overtly sociopathic men are framed as bores and dullards by comparison. Mina Harker is supposedly happy with her dim-witted husband Jonathan. Yet there’s a lifetime of oral fixation compressed into the brief, indelible description of her seduction by Dracula:

  With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom…. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.16

  Admittedly, you can go too far with this sort of thing; there are ardent female fan clubs not just for fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter (who at least has the benefit of being played by charismatic actors like Anthony Hopkins and Mads Mikkelsen) but for the real, significantly less charming cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. One Dahmer fan, interviewed by the Netflix show Dark Tourist, says only that “women love bad boys.”17

  “He didn’t enjoy the act of killing at all. He just wanted someone there for him and didn’t want to have to take care of them,” another woman volunteers.18 This, supposedly, explains why Dahmer poured acid into living men’s brains in the hopes of making them compliant sex zombies.

  Women are indoctrinated from birth to overlook or forgive men’s bad behavior, especially when it comes to relationships. We can hardly be surprised that this process has had some strikingly weird results. But the point of the Byronic romance, I think, is not to excuse male violence, but to make a fetish out of female ambivalence, portraying masculinity as simultaneously attractive and scary and attractive because it is scary. Like BDSM, the convention of the Byronic hero takes the edge off sexual violence by reducing it to a set of roles and tropes, allowing participants to get a handle on their fear by turning it into a game. It’s not for nothing that Fifty Shades of Grey began as vampire fan fiction.

  Yet, by eroticizing male domination, the Gothic keeps the power dynamics of straight marriage perpetually at the top of readers’ minds. Its heroines exist in perpetual relation to male brutality, attempting to form meaningful relationships within it or around it or in spite of it. The question of how far to eroticize submission before it becomes mere degradation is at the center of Daphne du Maurier’s great twentieth-century Gothic novel Rebecca.

  Manderley Is Burning

  At first glance, Rebecca sits firmly within the confines of the Gothic romance. But this is a modern book, published in 1938. It has a bitter, modern cynicism; the marriage at its center gets less romantic the more you examine it.

  When she wrote Rebecca, du Maurier was unhappily married to Frederick Browning, an Olympic athlete and British Army officer who, despite these accomplishments, was nevertheless thoroughly unprepared for a wife who was (a) bisexual, (b) professionally successful, and (c) tougher than he was. One illustrative glimpse of just how much tougher comes to us from Nina Auerbach, who tells us that for his entire adult life, Browning “refused to travel without the toy bears he had had since childhood, whom he fondly called ‘the Boys.’ ”19 Conservatives may weep and wail at our modern age of premarital cohabitation, but at least a contemporary woman has less chance of learning something like this after the wedding.

  Du Maurier wanted to get rid of her sexual appetite and ambition—she called them “the boy in the box,” meaning a terrible, un-female presence lurking inside of her; she seems to have gotten the idea from her father, who told her she should have been born a boy—but realistically, in a society without easy divorces or pride parades, there was not much for unhappily married couples to do but sleep with other people. This admittedly imperfect solution was one du Maurier and her husband both pursued. We can only give them our understanding and our sympathy, and hope that “the Boys” did not come along to any hotel rooms on Browning’s dates.

  But du Maurier’s resentment and frustration nevertheless rippled through her fiction, where even the happiest marriage is a nightmare of cruelty and thwarted female needs. Rebecca‘s hero, Maxim de Winter, plays like a mean parody of a Byronic love interest; he is perpetually shouting at and insulting the heroine, when he isn’t longingly gazing over the edges of cliffs. (“You are almost as ignorant as Mrs. Van Hopper, and just as unintelligent. What do you know of Manderley?”20 This is his marriage proposal.) The heroine is unbearably mousy and timid, mumbling and trembling and fainting her way through every crucial plot point; as readers, we’re on her side, mostly because the first-person narration reveals she has a (well-hidden) sense of humor, but it’s a miracle when any of the other characters can drag more than a few words out of her. She’s so self-effacing that, until she calls herself “Mrs. de Winter,” she has no name.

  That title be
longed to someone else before her: Rebecca, a woman whose personality looms so large that even a story set after her death still bears her name on the cover. Rebecca was not mousy; she was not self-effacing; she was unfaithful, bisexual, glamorous, seductive. “She had all the courage and spirit of a boy…. She ought to have been a boy,” the adoring housekeeper Mrs. Danvers says at one point.21 Rebecca was nothing like the second Mrs. de Winter. But she was very much like du Maurier.

  Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Rebecca became famous for skirting the edges of the Hays Code, which prohibited overt on-screen depictions of queerness. Most obviously, there’s Mrs. Danvers, who still sneaks into Rebecca’s old room to fondle her underwear. But the sexual ambiguity in the novel doesn’t just center on Rebecca or her creepy maid. The entire mystery revolves around whether Maxim de Winter is attracted to his own wife.

  The novel inserts a few disclaimers as to Maxim’s virility—“I knew him as a lover,” the narrator says of their apparently successful honeymoon—but for most of the book, people keep asking the narrator if there’s any chance that she could be pregnant, and she keeps answering “no.”22 It’s not because they’re using contraception, either: “I do hope you produce a son and heir…. I hope you are doing nothing to prevent it,” de Winter’s sister says, to which the narrator answers, “of course not.”23 Maxim seemingly doesn’t respond to, or even notice, his wife’s looks; when told that he’s picky about clothes, she says that “he’s never seemed particular to me. I don’t think he notices what I wear at all.”24 When he says “I love you” for the first time, they’ve been married for three months.