Identities are made out of stories, and stories are made out of identities. That’s certainly the case in Alexis Coe’s new book, Alice and Freda Forever, about 1892 century Memphis murder of Freda Ward by her lover and fiancé, Alice Mitchell. Alice and Freda were both well-to-do young women; they’d met at the Higbee School for Girls. Freda had agreed to marry Alice, but their families had discovered the plan and put a stop to it. Alice feared Freda would forget her and perhaps marry a man. So she stole her father’s razor and slit her ex’s throat; she was stopped before she could kill herself as well.
The murder was a massive story at the time — the O.J. Simpson trial of its day — precisely because of the identities of the killer and her victim. “Journalists knew that the story would be far less consequential to readers if the murderer and victim had been male, not white, or of lesser economic means,” Coe says. Identity for the public at the time was the story — as it is, in a different way for us. Would Coe, or her readers, be interested in this particular trial if it weren’t for the fact that Alice and Freda were lesbians?
Alice and Freda planned a same-sex wedding before the term, or even the concept, existed. As a result, it’s easy to identify with them; they seem like they’re part of a familiar story. But that familiarity can be deceptive. A firm lesbian identity didn’t really exist for Americans in the 1800s. As Sharon Marcus says in her book Between Women (focusing on England, but the general argument seems to apply to the U.S. as well), passionate same-sex relationships between women in the Victorian Era were accepted and even encouraged as part of a normal, mainstream heterosexual identity. Those relationships could include kissing, hugging, passionate declarations of love, and even, on occasion (as with Freda and Alice) sex. But people at the time didn’t organize any of those actions into an identity. Same-sex relationships between women were not policed, or codified. As a result, for most practical purposes, they were invisible.
If Alice had murdered someone in the 1950s, when homophobia was widespread and virulent, her violence probably would have been blamed immediately on her dangerous deviant lesbianism. But in the 1890s, Coe reports, people seemed to have difficulty even understanding the relationship between Freda and Alice. Their plan to marry was seen as impossible. One psychological expert, foreshadowing future anti-marriage-equality argument asked her incredulously how she could think of marrying Freda when the two of them couldn’t have children.
Those psychological experts were there in the courtroom less to evaluate Alice than to make sense of her; they weren’t figuring out if she was sick so much as they were figuring out what to do with her. Just as the Oscar Wilde trial a couple of years later solidified homosexual identity in England, the Mitchell trial — haltingly, hesitantly — took steps towards creating and defining a lesbian identity. That definition, at this point, was medical and marginal. The defense argument, which prevailed, was that Alice’s love for Freda was a sign of insanity. To buttress that argument, the lawyers made her love for Freda into her identity, playing up her childhood interest in sports and her later lack of attachment to men. She was masculine, disordered, and wrong. The argument was that her identity was not (jealous) murderer, but (lesbian) madwoman. The jury bought it — and so gave her a story that ended, not on the gallows, but in an insane asylum (and a few years later, in death, though whether by tuberculosis or drowning suicide remains unknown to this day.)
Coe is very sensitive to the ways in which Alice’s identity and her story wrap around one another. As an upper-middle class white woman, Alice’s range of movement and actions were extremely limited. Her plot to dress and pass as a man to marry Freda seems, from what Coe could determine, to have had little to do with a trans identity, and much more to do with economics. White women of Mitchell’s class weren’t supposed to, or allowed to, work, and Alice and Freda needed an income if they were going to live together as a couple. On the other hand, Alice’s race and resources ensured high powered lawyers and a sympathetic jury — luxuries which certainly wouldn’t have been afforded to anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, who, as Coe discusses, was forced to flee Memphis at around the same time as Alice’s trial. White Memphis found it easier to empathize with a white killer than with a black opponent of murder.
Even as she points to the ways in which Alice’s race and class shaped her story for her contemporaries, though, Coe can’t help but write her own narrative around our current reading of Alice’s identity. Very near the end of the book, Coe describes how Alice, before being sent off to the asylum, asked to be allowed to visit Freda’s grave.
We will never know what Alice was thinking at Elmwood that day, and neither did the journalists who watched from afar. But they did report what they saw, and what they wrote seemed believable: Alice dropped to her knees and, for the woman she loved without shame, wept openly.
It’s a moving scene — not least because, in that reference to “without shame”, Coe connects Alice to the current gay rights struggle, and its narrative of pride and identity. There’s no question that Alice was a startlingly brave young women, willing to own her own love and work towards a life that her family, and society, could barely conceive of or imagine. She was heroic. And yet, at the same time — she murdered her lover out of jealousy. If she were a man, she would be seen as participating, not in the narrative of gay rights, but in the long, ugly, misogynist narrative of domestic violence, in which the infidelity of a wife (and Freda was to be a traditional wife, Alice’s letters make clear) gives the husband the right to kill. That’s not to criticize Coe, who certainly doesn’t downplay or excuse Alice’s crime. It’s just a reminder that people often don’t fit neatly into the identities we use to tell their stories, nor into the stories we use to create their identities.