By Maddie Schutte
Gabby Petito, Madeline McCain, Jon Benet Ramsey—these are the names of just a few of the missing or murdered women whose sensationalized cases have flooded the media in recent decades. But the media’s obsession with missing or murdered women isn’t new to our age. Over a century ago, the Jack the Ripper case sparked a media craze and corresponding public obsession with the female victims of male violence.[1] The investigation of crimes against women consequently became a form of popular entertainment. In 1893, Catherine Louisa Pirkis tapped into this trend with her story “MISSING!”, the last installment of her detective crime series The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective. “Five hundred pounds reward,” the opening segment reads, for a woman “missing, since Monday, September 20, Irene, only daughter of Richard Golding.”[2] Published in the aftermath of the Jack the Ripper murders, this sensational opening was designed to spark readers’ interest. The story of the missing Irene speaks to a larger cultural obsession with missing and murdered women—then and now. A study of “MISSING!” enables us to consider why such narratives were so interesting then and why they persist in our own time.
The first of the Ripper murders occurred around the same time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle released the first of his Sherlock Holmes stories, drawing a clear correlation between fiction and real-life crime stories. The fact that Jack the Ripper’s victims were women “captured popular imaginations during the Victorian Era.”[3] For the first time, crime reporting became a popular obsession. Stories of brutally murdered woman published in newspapers sat on the dinner table and were a topic of family conversation, establishing a level of comfort with this violence against women. Victorian families simultaneously began reading “cheap and sensational Victorian-era storybooks of violent adventures or felonies.”[4] Of course, the romanticization of missing or murdered women began much earlier in literary history, for example in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. In his 1857 essay, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe noted that “the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”[5] Nineteenth-century writers weren’t just interested in crime but were inspired by it creatively. The idea that women were more interesting when they were dead is echoed in “MISSING!” where a woman’s disappearance is meant to seem sensational.
The fixation with violence against women, both in literature and in the media, is directly related to their appearance and class status. In “MISSING!”, Irene is described as a “loveable” and “most attractive young woman” who “turned the heads of all the men in the neighborhood.”[6] As Poe noted, it was the “beautiful” victim of crime who was most poetical—and the same can be said of the missing woman in Pirkis’s story. Coming from a somewhat wealthy family with a positive reputation, her murder was of interest to the police and community, although their response to finding her was slow. In contrast, the victims of Jack the Ripper[7] were treated as nonentities in the popular press.[8] Violence against working-class women was “tolerated and even an accepted part of society.”[9] Pirkis’s character Irene, a young wealthy woman admired for her good looks was of course interesting to the police and community—both as a beautiful object and a sensationalized victim of crime. The perfect victim, then, would be Irene – a fictional woman who could be romanticized but not criticized.
Violence against women in Victorian crime fiction echoed the realities of everyday life. While women began to gain some independence during this era, some journalists believed that the more success women achieved in society, the more at risk they were for violent crimes. An article in Answers, for example, linked the increase in women’s individual wealth to their vulnerability of being robbed, arguing that “women have, the police complain, grown too venturesome, too confident of being able to take care of themselves.”[10] The writer suggests that the majority of crimes against women go unnoticed because women don’t have the knowledge necessary to report crimes or to prevent themselves from being victimized. The idea of women being at fault for the crimes committed against them performed the function of discouraging women’s careers and presence in public spaces. By dismissing crimes as preventable, female victims are left responsible, and police involvement can be deemed unnecessary. Pirkis echoes this idea in “MISSING!” by depicting Irene as a young woman who is tied up in family and marital affairs that ultimately led to her disappearance. This narrative places the fault on Irene and her familial relationships, rather than on the perpetrator of her disappearance.
While crimes against women sex workers were often ignored along with their very existence, women of higher social status were not necessarily the focus of police investigations. Loveday Brooke, the woman detective investigating the case in “MISSING!” is shocked by the lack of police intervention. She says, “Do you mean to say that reward has not stimulated the energies of the local police and long ago put them on the traces of the missing girl?”[11] Her question is not only valid but timely. Oftentimes, if a woman went missing, it was not “really a matter for the police, although they [might] help if asked.”[12] Police at the time were not reliable sources for finding missing women unless something particularly dramatic or violent had obviously occurred.[13] Even the wealthiest women’s disappearances weren’t an urgent concern for the community or police department. Pirkis’s choice to write a female detective character speaks to a distrust of the predominantly male police force of the Victorian era. Without Loveday Brooke’s female perspective, Irene may have remained a missing person.
The popularization of crime against women continues our culture today, with unsolved cases of murdered or missing women being the frequent topic of podcasts, YouTube videos, docuseries, and thousands of crime novels. This is why most of us can name ten missing women but not one story of a missing man. What makes us fascinated by murdered or missing women? Who are they and how do aspects of their identity—for example, their class status or appearance—affect the popularity of their stories? By answering these questions, we will perhaps realize that we, as consumers, are just as much in control of these narratives as those who write them.
Notes
[1] Jan Bondeson, “Unsolved Murders of Women in Victorian London”, The History Press, Accessed February 1, 2024, https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk.
[2] Catherine Louisa Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke Lady Detective (New York: Dover, 2020), 181.
[3] Philip R. Stone and Cartiona Morton, “Portrayals of the Female Dead in Dark Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 97 (2022): n.p.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe: Poems and Tales (New York: Redfield, 1857), 265.
[6] Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 87.
[7] Stone and Morton, “Portrayals of the Female Dead,” n.p.
[8] Sula Sarkar and Lara Cleveland, “The Case of the Missing Prostitutes in Late 19th Century London,” Use It For Good (blog), May 26, 2016, https://blog.popdata.org/.
[9] Stone and Morton, “Portrayals of the Female Dead,” n.p.
[10] Justin Atholl, “Mystery of the Missing Women,” Answers 123 (March 21, 1953): 3.
[11] Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 181–82.
[12] Atholl, “Mystery,” 3.
[13] Ibid.