Dementia Americana: Harry K. Thaw, the unwritten law and narratives of responsibility.

Abstract

This project examines early twentieth-century conceptions of criminal responsibility circulating in and around Harry Thaw's 1907 trial for the murder of Stanford White over White's seduction of Thaw's wife Evelyn Nesbit. At trial Thaw raised the defense of the unwritten law, a courtroom strategy formulated in the mid-nineteenth century to persuade jurors to acquit husbands who killed sexual rivals. Using the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and other narrative theorists, I draw upon memoirs, legal treatises and trial transcripts, novels, yellow journalism, and popular images in order to situate Thaw's case in New York City's turn-of-the-century culture of sensationalism even as I situate his act in a larger set of violent responses to personal affront and community disruption---dueling, vigilantism, and the like---that had broad legal license throughout the nineteenth century. I describe this violence as constituting a domain of eccentric legality, standing in an oblique and dialogical, rather than purely oppositional, relation to the official law of homicide; indeed such violence was justified by an ideology of American manliness that itself embodied a kind of transcendent law. Because the unwritten law was not recognized as a legitimate legal defense, though, attorneys officially entered a plea of insanity on behalf of their clients, then relied upon the legal language of passion and the conventions of melodrama to argue that the defendants were simultaneously righteous defenders of moral order and victims of outrageous libertines, and that they killed both as manly agents and (temporarily) irrational and irresponsible madmen. By 1907, however, changes in the rules of marital privilege allowed Thaw's wife Evelyn Nesbit to take the stand; and though her story of seduction at Stanford White's hands fit the conventions of melodrama, the scandalous details of her testimony, devoured by the sensational press, subverted Thaw's assertions of heroism. At the same time, medical experts' increasingly legitimated narratives of hereditary insanity undercut the credibility of Thaw's claims of honor. Melodramatic narratives that historically had mediated the clash between honor and insanity, official and eccentric legality, failed to persuade fully either the jurors or the public of Thaw's innocence, and the trial ended with a hung jury.