Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis

by Alexis Coe

  But Bernhardt’s failed attempt to see Alice was no social call. The theatrical nature of the same-sex love murder appealed to her, and she had reportedly compiled clippings related to the case in a scrapbook. She wished to collaborate with French dramatist Victorien Sardou to turn the tragedy of Alice and Freda into an opera. The Appeal Avalanche made much ado of the rumored opera, imagining it “will not be wanting in thrilling situations and sensational development.” The newspaper offered its own artistic interpretations of the theatrical show and, most importantly, speculated over which role the great Belle Époque actress should play. Editorialists thought Freda’s part too brief, and Alice’s too violent, but Lillie Johnson, the case’s swooning, innocent darling, seemed like just the right role.

  Nothing ever came of Bernhard’s visit, but if Alice had actually been asked if she would like to receive the actress, she may have done so to honor Freda’s memory. In happier times, the doomed couple had gone to the Grand Opera House and various theaters together—that is, the respectable ones with audiences free of mixed classes and races. They probably went unescorted, which had become increasingly acceptable at the time, offering Alice and Freda a tiny taste of freedom and independence. It gave each girl, in her own way, a means to imagine a world other than the one she knew. “Bernhard in the Jail….The Great Actress Wanted to See Alice Mitchell,” Memphis Appeal Avalanche, Feb. 17, 1892.

  80 Blaine T. Browne and Robert C. Cottrell, Lives and Times: Individuals and Issues in American History: Since 1865 (Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009).

  81 Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

  82 I found Stewart Emory Tolnay’s A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995) to be an excellent resource, as well as Lynching and Spectacle: Witness Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). For more on Wells, see Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

  83 Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells.

  84 For a thorough examination of the concurrent, but racially segregated lives of Alice Mitchell and Ida B. Wells, see Lisa Duggan’s Sapphic Slashers.

  85 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: The New York Age, 1892).

  86 Attorney General Peters, the Wards, and the Volkmars wanted Alice tried for murder, but the hanging of a white woman was a very different story.

  87 In Sapphic Slashers, an academic book, Duggan presents the Mitchell-Ward case alongside the simultaneous lynching narrative.

  88 In Sapphic Slashers, historian Lisa Duggan thoroughly explores these points. In the 1890s, the United States was cementing its national identity, and it was predicated upon maintaining the white home on a national level. Same-sex love and African American men and women were cogent threats to the rigid hierarchy of race and gender, and the reactions on a local level from the judge, jail, sheriff, and newspapers speak to the national construction of American modernity. For more information on American modernity, see Peter Taylor, Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

  CHAPTER 14: THE HYPOTHETICAL CASE

  89 F. L. Sim, “Alice Mitchell Adjudged Insane,” Memphis Medical Monthly (August 1892).

  90 The Hypothetical Case was inspired by the long reports that medical journals had been running for decades. Medical experts would receive these reports and study them in advance of a court case. They would then testify to the diagnoses offered. If the prosecution had found any medical experts, they would have likely provided their own hypothetical case.

  91 Charles Rosenberg, The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968).

  92 “Not a Murder,” Memphis Commercial, July 31, 1892, 4.

  93 According to The Hypothetical Case, Dr. Comstock, and others who weighed in. As I suggest throughout the text, I do not presume this evidence can be taken as fact. Postpartum depression, which accounts for many of Isabella’s symptoms, is by no means an uncontested diagnosis today. Some experts find it to be somatic, while others maintain it is a psychological disorder.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Wallpaper,” was published in January, 1892—the same month that Alice murdered Freda. The story speaks, however, to Alice’s mother, Isabella. It is a first-person collection of journal entries written by Jane, who has been confined to the upstairs bedroom of a house rented by her husband John, a physician. Jane has just given birth, and John believes she needs the “rest cure” and locks her in the nursery. There is a gate at the top of the stairs, and John, who leaves for work every day, controls Jane’s access to the rest of the house. The nursery’s windows are barred; her confinement is much like being institutionalized. Jane has been diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency,” and her mental health devolves as her confinement goes on and she is deprived of stimulation—just like Isabella’s supposed stages accelerated, from puerperal insanity to recovery, in the hospital.

  94 Melancholia could have meant many things in 1892. Isabella might have seemed sad or depressed, but as a new mother, she may have just been tired. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  95 “Sane or Insane?” Memphis Commercial, July 19, 1892, 1.

  96 The Hypothetical Case states Isabella Mitchell gave birth seven times, but only four adult children were on record, and that same number are buried in the family plot at Elmwood. Only one deceased child (the first one) is mentioned.

  97 Judith Walzer Leavitt, Women and Health in America: Historical Readings (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).

  CHAPTER 15: VICARIOUS MENSTRUATION

  98 Thomas Maeder, Crime and Madness: The Origins and Evolution of the Insanity Defense (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 114.

  99 “Still in Doubt,” Memphis Commercial, July 20, 1892, 1. “None but Freda,” July 22, “Myra Is a Myth,” July 23, Memphis Commercial, 1892.

  100 Vicarious menstruation is bleeding from a surface other than the mucous membrane of the uterine cavity. It occurs around the time when “normal” menstruation should take place, hence the emphasis on the onset “around the time [Alice’s] womanhood was established.”

  101 “Silly Letters,” July 21, 1 and “Not Love at All,” July 24, Memphis Commercial, 1892.

  102 “None but Freda,” Memphis Commercial, July 22, 1892, 1.

  103 “An Analysis of Love,” Memphis Appeal Avalanche, July 24, 1892.

  104 Ruth Harris, “Melodrama, Hysteria and Feminine Crimes of Passion in the Fin-de-Siècle.” History Workshop 25 (Spring 1988).

  105 “Alice Mitchell Laughs,” New York World, July 20, 1892, 1.

  106 “None but Freda,” Memphis Commercial, July 22, 1892. “Is This Murdered Girl Insane,” New York World, July 1892.

  CHAPTER 16: AN IMPOSSIBLE IDEA

  107 “Not Love at All,” July 24, “More Evidence,” July 26, and “They All Agree,” July 27, Memphis Commercial, 1892. “An Analysis of Love,” July 24, “Diagnosis of Insanity,” July 26, “The Deed of a Maniac,” July 27, Memphis Appeal Avalanche, 1892. F.L. Sim, “Alice Mitchell Adjudged Insane,” Memphis Medical Monthly (August 1892), 377-429.

  108 Dr. Callender was best known for testifying in the case of Charles Guiteau, who was on trial for the assassination of President Garfield in 1881.

  109 “The Deed of a Manic,” Memphis Appeal Avalanche, July 27, 1892. “More Evidence,” Memphis Commercial, July 26, 1892.

  110 F. L. Sim, “Alice Mitchell Adjudged Insane,” Memphis Medical Monthly (August 1892).

  111 Ibid.

  112 See Janet Ann Tighe, “A Question of Responsibility
: The Development of American Forensic Psychiatry, 1838-1930.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1983).

  113 “The Deed of a Maniac,” Memphis Appeal Avalanche, July 27, 1892.

  114 Ibid.

  115 “More Evidence,” Memphis Commercial, July 26, 1892.

  116 F. L. Sim, “Alice Mitchell Adjudged Insane.”

  117 Ibid.

  118 “The Deed of a Maniac,” Memphis Appeal Avalanche, July 27, 1892.

  119 “Her Own Best Witness,” Memphis Appeal Avalanche, July 28, 1892.

  CHAPTER 17: HER OWN BEST WITNESS

  120 Their attention to her features was just another thing to speculate about, but they may have been influenced by pseudoscience, such as physiognomy or phrenology. Physiognomy was the practice of assessing a person’s personality traits from his or her outward appearance. Phrenology was focused on the human skull; the brain was considered the organ of the mind, thus certain areas have localized and specific functions. In order to determine an individual’s psychological attributes, the skull must be felt and observed.

  121 “Her Own Story,” Memphis Commercial, July 28, 1892.

  122 “Now a Murder,” Memphis Commercial, July 31, 1892.

  123 “The Mitchell Case,” Memphis Appeal Avalanche, July 31, 1892.

  124 “Her Own Best Winess,” Memphis Appeal Avalanche, July 28, 1892.

  125 “The Last of Alice Mitchell,” Memphis Appeal Avalanche, July 31, 1892. “Not a Murder,” Memphis Commercial, July 31, 1892, and “Alice Mitchell Is Crazy,” New York World, July 31, 1892. “The Mitchell Case,” Memphis Appeal Avalanche, July 31, 1892.

  126 Alice had been somewhat inconsistent with the defense, but had ultimately helped Gantt and Wright achieve their aim. Her testimony made her lack of interest in young men abundantly clear. It also made clear her overwhelming love for another woman, so great she had intended to live out the rest of her life in costume, just so they could be together. Dr. Sim, one of the medical experts, would later write that she returned to the defense table with “an expression of satisfaction,” but given that her last moments on the stand were spent describing her longstanding desire to die and a blood-soaked thumbstall, that seems like a dubious observation. Alice’s testimony had satisfied the jury. It was the jury who made it known that they were prepared to deliberate immediately. Dr. Sim wrote they returned within moments, but most newspapers time it at twenty minutes.

  CHAPTER 18: THAT STORY WAS NEVER PRINTED

  127 Report of the Board of Trustees of the Western Hospital for the Insane, 1890/92, 1892/1894, 1896/98.

  128 “Alice Mitchell is Insane,” Bolivar Bulletin, Aug. 5, 1892. Patients who had entered an asylum by way of homicide charge were rarely discharged. For more information, see Thomas Mader, Crime and Madness: The Origins and Evolution of the Insanity Defense (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).

  129 If Alice had wanted to set the record straight without her father’s intervention, she had but a few years to do so. George Mitchell died in 1896, and was buried in the family plot at Elmwood Cemetery. Two years later Alice joined him, followed by Isabella in 1917. If Gantt and Wright’s legal fees took a toll on the Mitchell family, their headstones did not indicate it as they were carved in the ornate fashion of the day, but by the time Addie and Mattie joined in the late 1940s, the Great Depression may have taken its toll. Their graves are plain, lacking the roses that adorn Alice’s headstone. It is worth noting the elder Mitchell sisters appeared unmarried, perhaps a realization of the fear that their family’s supposed matrilineal insanity would taint their own prospects.

  130 Edward H. Tayor, “Alice Mitchell,” as excerpted in the Bolivar Bulletin, March 10, 1893. Also, see the hypothetical case in the appendix.

  131 Sherre Dryden, “That Strange Girl: The Alice Mitchell Murder Case,” DARE I (July 29-July 5, 1988): 4.

  132 The patient rolls were numbered, with the first being the healthiest. She appeared on the last roster in July of 1897, though she was back up to the middle roster in January of the following year. Tennessee State Library and Archives: Department of Mental Health Record Group no. 94, Series no. 7: Lists/Rolls of Employees, Inmates, Patients, Pupils and Veterans, box no. 3, folders 1-10.

  133 “Alice Mitchell Dead,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, Apr. 1, 1898.

  134 1896/1898 Biennial Report of the Western State Insane Asylum.

  135 Paul Coppock, “Memphis’ Strangest Love Murder Had All-Girl Cast,” Memphis Commercial, Sept. 7, 1930.

  EPILOGUE: SEXUAL MONSTERS

  136 These two quotes come from Psychopathia Sexualis p. 428, 430. The first edition, published in 1886, listed four “cerebral neuroses,” including parethesia, which Krafft-Ebbing defined as “misdirected sexual desire.” Under that heading, he placed fetishism, masochism, sadism, transsexualism, and homosexuality.

  137 R. E. Daniel, “Castration of Sexual Perverts,” Texas Medical Journal 9, no. 6 (Dec. 1893): 255-71, quoted from page 263.

  138 R. French Stone. Biography of Eminent American Physicians and Surgeons (Indianapolis: Carlson and Hollenbeck, 1894), 234-237.

  139 Hughes also made quite a few mistakes in his editorial. He misunderstood Alice’s plea as “not guilty” by reasons of insanity, when Gantt and Wright sought that she be declared unfit to stand trial. He also confused Krafft-Ebbing’s definitions of sexual perversion with other sexologists’ definitions, and continued to do so in subsequent articles on the case, introducing biblical and evolutional frameworks.

  140 Charles H. Hughes, “Alice Mitchell, the ‘Sexual Pervert’ and Her Crime,” Alienist and Neurologist 13, no. 3 (July 1892): 554-57.

  141 Editorial by “H.” from the Medical Fortnightly, excerpted in the Alienist and Neurologist 13, no. 2 (Apr. 1892). The article certainly left an impression on Hughes, who not only repurposed it, but was still wondering, a year later, how much “mutual masturbation” had occurred between Alice and Freda, and how much it influenced their relationship’s violent end. See Charles H. Hughes, “Erotopathia—Morbid Eroticism,” Alienist and Neurologist 14, no. 4 (October 1893), pg. 535.

  142 James G. Kiernan, “Sexology: Increase of American Inversion,” Urologic and Coetaneous Review (1916).

  143 In the 1970s, Alice Mitchell’s story was finally recast. After the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, civil rights, women’s liberation, and second wave feminism, the past was mined for lesbians, and Alice, who had so clearly informed modern conceptions of female same-sex love, became an important person within this history. She remained a murderer, but one who had been fundamentally misunderstood during her lifetime, and for almost a hundred years after. Jonathan Ned Katz included the case in his groundbreaking Gay American History in 1976, which finally cast a critical eye on the original newspaper articles and publications, including Dr. Frank Sim’s own Memphis Medical Monthly. In Tennessee, Fred Harris’s 1975 essay, “Lesbian Slaying Shocked ‘Gay Nineties’ Memphians” appeared in the collection Gaiety…Reflecting Gay Life in the South, and Sherre Dryden’s “That Strange Girl: The Alice Mitchell Murder Case” was published in DARE in 1988, Nashville’s lesbian and gay newspaper. That same year, “Alice and Fred,” a play by Dan Ellentuck, ran in New York City’s oldest theater, the Cherry Lane, though the playwright moved the tragedy from Memphis to Albany, and seemed to amplify her interest in baseball.

  144 Richard von Krafft-Ebbing described female inversion as “the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom.”

  145 Ellis was influenced by his wife, Edith Lees. When they married, he was a 32-year-old virgin, and she openly preferred women. Ellis recounted her case in Sexual Inversion, as well as five first-person narratives she found on his behalf. None of those accounts contained the same-sex love as violence plot favored by American newspapers, or even cases in asylums. Lees had not found these women on the pages of newspapers or in articles written by doctors in asylums, but out in the world, and they were women the Ellis’ were likely to socialize with; all of the women, like Alice Mitchell, enjoyed at lea
st a middle class existence. Ellis’s analysis, however, was a mix of naturalizing and negative, an attempt at carving out a space without threatening the traditional home or domestic roles within it. He reinforced the idea that there was some masculinity to be found in the female invert, which made her easier to identify than her feminine counterpart, but this was easier to maintain in theory than practice.

  On the whole, they are women who are not very robust and well developed, physically or nervously, and who are not well adapted for child-bearing, but who still possess many excellent qualities, and they are always womanly. One may, perhaps, say that they are the pick of the women whom the average man would pass by. No doubt, this is often the reason why they are open to homosexual advances, but I do not think it is the sole reason. So far as they may be said to constitute a class, they seem to possess a genuine, though not precisely sexual, preference for women over men, and it is this coldness, rather than lack of charm, which often renders men rather indifferent to them.

  146 The 1915 edition of Sexual Inversion is included as volume I, part 4, of Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York: Random House, 1942). Quoted from pp 201-2.

  147 Alfred C. Kinsey et al, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Co. (1948).

  148 Of course, I am not suggesting this is exclusively an American problem. The degradation and exclusion I refer to in the epilogue exists all over the world, including many countries that still deny the very existence of same-sex love. For example, in 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a broad anti-gay bill just months after police were given the right to arrest foreign nationals they suspected of being gay. It classifies “homosexual propaganda” as pornography, and warned that any parent who tells their child that same-sex love is acceptable is subject to arrest, and can be fined by the state.