SEX, MURDER, AND INJUSTICE IN OLD NEW YORK

Author: By Shaun O'Connell

Date: SUNDAY, July 26, 1998

Page: F2

Section: Books

In 1836, the case of the slain fiancee was dramatized in ``Norman Leslie,'' at the Bowery Theater. Prostitutes packed the third tier, meeting men on the make while mayhem was nightly acted out on stage. Helen Jewett, a 23-year-old prostitute, and one of her lovers, 18-year-old Richard P. Robinson, a clerk, saw the play before they became characters in one of the city's most notorious crime dramas.

On an early April morning, Jewett was murdered in a brothel, her head split open with a hatchet, her bed set afire. Robinson was arrested, tried, and acquitted. The case ``entered the limbo where unsolved mysteries linger, tantalizing public memory,'' writes Patricia Cline Cohen, author of this meticulous and arresting account of the Jewett case.

Packed into lower Manhattan, from the Battery to Greenwich Village, the city's population of 270,000 in 1835 (up 35 percent in five years) fed on the sensational. This tale of sex and violence was exploited by the penny press and covered under the guise of news by respectable papers, feeding the appetites of a city second only to New Orleans in vice. The editor of the New York Herald described Jewett's body as sexy and arty, ``a beautiful female corpse that surpassed the finest statue of antiquity.'' He concluded that Jewett ``was a remarkable character, and has come to a remarkable end.'' Cohen's study supports his view.

The Jewett case, like later notorious murders, became an ambiguous text which yielded contrary moral readings about life and death in Gotham. With some 10,000 prostitutes and a vast new urban work force, ``girls on the town'' inevitably encountered young men from the provinces, ``a masculine youth culture . . . with little guidance from adults,'' in Cohen's words. Indeed, when Robinson left home for the city, his father worried about his ``moral character,'' doubting his son's ability to resist temptation. Was Jewett, then, a predatory prostitute or the victim of a clever psychopath who took advantage of the city's opportunities for vice and was protected by its class-driven moral assumptions? The case became an early urban parable in which Americans judged themselves.

Cohen presents convincing evidence that Robinson was guilty of the hatchet murder of his hired lover, but the press spun the story in his favor. The Boston Post, for example, reported that Jewett was ``shrewd and very artful . . . having contributed as largely to the ruin of young men as any female of her character in the same space of time.'' The jury could not believe that this young man from a solid Connecticut family could commit a crime so horrific, despite the testimony of the brothel's madam, who placed him at the scene.

The New York power elite of the day, bourgeois and male, set Robinson free, but Cohen convincingly retries him, finds him guilty, and indicts those who refused to see value in Jewett's life. Cohen's Jewett is a far more complex and interesting character than New Yorkers of her day could imagine: ``a young woman who could appear romantic, wistful, and tragic but who also was quite able to be clever, deceitful, and manipulative.''

Jewett's letters show her as bright, literate, and accomplished in handling men. To titillate male sexual fantasies, Cohen suggests, Jewett played up her tale of seduction by a respectable bank clerk while she was a servant girl in Maine. At the same time, Jewett's clients had to court her with florid love letters and gifts, a means of acknowledging her power over men. She ``preferred her prostitution all rigged up with romance.'' Jewett was quite successful at her trade, but she clearly played a dangerous game with men who thought they could do what they pleased with such women.

As Nathaniel Hawthorne redeemed a fallen woman in ``The Scarlet Letter,'' published 15 years after the Jewett case, and faulted the hard-hearted righteousness of those who judged her, so too does Cline portray Jewett as a feminist heroine. ``In all the various stories of Jewett's challenge to men, the constant theme was her brazenness and her strong sense of herself as a woman who could challenge men and demand justice.'' (Hawthorne lurks around the edges of this tale, for his friend Horatio Bridge knew Jewett when she was Dorcas Doyen, a servant girl in Augusta, and Bridge and Hawthorne exchanged letters on the case. Hawthorne even went to see the wax statues of Jewett and Robinson that toured the country. Perhaps a trace of Jewett's independence appears in Hester Prynne.)

Cohen's study draws on a range of documents, from newspapers to letters, in order to reconstruct this engrossing case. At the end, we know all that can be known about it, perhaps even more than we need to know, down to the present condition of the wallpaper and paintings in Jewett's bedroom. But ample details serve to make this distant world plausible and present.

Cohen's interest was roused when she came across a batch of Jewett's letters while doing research at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester for a study of women and sexual danger in public. Cohen's treatment is consistent with her original research project, for Jewett is portrayed as a woman of considerable resources who used sex to gain independence, but put herself in danger from an obsessed, conscienceless man: ``So confident with other men, Jewett seemed insecure and vulnerable in the face of Robinson's moody and domineering personality.'' Robinson, who got away with murder, lived out a quiet, respectable life in Texas. Until now, Helen Jewett has not had a fair hearing. Through an examination of the Jewett case, we penetrate the pieties and hypocrisies of early America, and we glimpse the bitter truths beneath the bright promises of New York, the city Emerson described as ``a sucked orange.''