Murder in a Mill Town by Bruce Dorsey;

Author:Bruce Dorsey;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Crazy Kate” was among the many literary and artistic representations of female insanity in the early nineteenth century. Johann Heinrich Füssli, Die wahnsinnige Kate (1806/07). Courtesy of Freies Deutsches Hochstift/Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

The two doctors who treated Maria Cornell for venereal disease, therefore, proved valuable for the defense. Dr. Graves suggested that he thought Cornell was insane because her language strayed from what he expected from a woman, but the only example he offered was Cornell bragging that she could out-pray and out-preach any of the Methodists.

Dr. Noah Martin, who treated Maria successfully after she resettled at the Great Falls factory, seemed less shady than Dr. Graves, but he was no less inclined to consider questions of sanity as an invitation to talk about womanhood. Quick to note that he didn’t think she was “laboring under mental alienation,” Dr. Martin still pointed to Maria’s manner of speaking. She was loquacious, he said, and her mode of conversation was irregular, even if coherent. “Her gesticulations were different from what we ordinarily find in females,” he added. She would begin talking about her ailment, dissolve into a flood of tears, and then five minutes later burst into laughter.24

These crude assessments of Maria Cornell’s sanity echoed fears about women workers and new cities, about the unleashing of women’s sexual desires, and about the chaotic and emotional spirituality of Methodists and their camp meetings. They worked because of powerful associations with the human passions—a term that could at once connote emotions and vices, spiritual and sexual desires, irrational melancholy, anger and revenge. A catch-all descriptor, “passion” allowed the defense to tie together popular conceits about sexual lust, religious frenzy, and unruly women.25

Ironically, doctors who treated venereal disease, whose own practice signaled suspicions about morality, anchored the defense’s portrait of Maria Cornell as a mixture of two qualities considered dangerous in females: religious excess and sexual excess. Dr. Graves’s reference to either passion or insanity conjured up images of wild camp meetings, love feasts, unbounded sexual desire, and the bold defiance of mobile, independent women. Dr. Martin proved just as adroit at coupling Cornell’s “mental anxiety” with “passion.”

Jeremiah Mason had turned Avery’s defense into the trial of Maria Cornell. In the latter stages of the trial he hammered home how unstable was Cornell’s nature. Her life, he insisted, was at once full of piety and shameless immorality, displaying “hypocrisy and religious enthusiasm mingled with a predisposition to insanity.” Rising to a crescendo, Mason unleashed a sketch of Cornell’s reckless character: “habitual sensual indulgences, with strong fanaticism—a wild enthusiasm, with morbid sensibility, and strange abstractions of mind.” Calling her “a creature of passion to which she gave unbridled license” evoked all the associations of passion with sexual licentiousness, women’s excessive emotionalism, and religious fanaticism. Cornell’s religious enthusiasm made it easy to presume her suicide, or at least to explain away uncomfortable evidence of a violent homicide.26

Stories of Maria Cornell’s sexual immorality and her wild spirituality were equally crucial when it came to proving her mental instability.

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