Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (21 page)

Like much about her life, the story of Alice’s death may have been a projection of the people around her, driven by fear and shaped by what they wanted to be true. We do not know exactly how Alice Mitchell died. We might never know. But we do know that it reunited her—almost—with her beloved: Alice and Freda were both buried at Elmwood Cemetery, about a quarter of a mile from each other. Because the Mitchells were of comfortable means, Alice was buried in a family plot, and her ornate headstone still stands; Freda’s was unmarked until recently, when a tree was planted on the site.

O
N HER WAY TO THE INSANE ASYLUM IN
1892,
Alice made one last request.

During the inquisition, the Mitchell family had insisted that Alice, in her insanity, believed Freda was still alive, but if her own testimony on the stand had not convinced the public otherwise, her final stop should have:
Before being committed, Alice wanted to visit Freda’s grave at Elmwood Cemetery.

Freda had no headstone, nor marker of any kind. Whether it had been a gesture of sympathy or much needed aid, Freda had been buried in a plot owned by the very same church she and Alice had hoped to be wed in. When Alice arrived at Elmwood on that August day, a year after they were forbidden to speak, she was trailed by reporters.

But even without a marker, Alice found Freda’s plot, a mound of dirt that had settled while she was in jail. The spring had brought grass, and the summer wildflowers. At night, fireflies flew low, illuminating the ground.

What did Alice say to Freda? What was she thinking about? Was it the first time she saw Freda at Miss Higbee’s? Did she imagine what their life would have been like, had they made it to St. Louis? Maybe she felt a jolt, like when a letter arrived from Freda, or when she picked the perfect rose for her beloved. Or maybe she thought about that photograph of her beautiful Freda, the one Alice had said she would not part with, even after they were forbidden to ever speak again.

But in the end, that photograph had been taken from her, along with the engagement ring she had engraved “From A. to F.,” and all of the other treasures she kept hidden in her family’s kitchen. It was all gone now.

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, for once, what they wrote seems believable: Alice dropped to her knees and, for the woman she loved without shame, wept openly.

T
HE
M
ITCHELL
-W
ARD CASE
sparked a controversy in the medical community that would last for decades to come, as evidenced by a proliferation of articles in U.S. and European medical publications.

Dr. Frank Sim, an expert witness in Alice’s lunacy inquisition, published the first lengthy account of the case on the
Memphis Medical Monthly
. His article was informed by sensational news stories and courtroom proceedings as much as medical research, and it circulated widely. It reached leading psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing in Austria, who then cited it in the English translation of
Psychopathia Sexualis
, a forensic reference book for the law and medical communities.

By the time the 1894 edition was published, Krafft-Ebing had come to believe that “‘forbidden friendships’ flourish especially in penal institutions for females,” but was on the rise more widely “partly owing to novels on the subject, and partly as a result of excessive work on sewing-machines, the sleeping of female servants in the same bed, seduction in schools by depraved pupils, or seduction of daughters by perverse servants.”
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Alice, who met Freda at the Higbee School, fit into the third circumstance, “seduction in schools.” Newspapers had initially speculated that Alice had been influenced by the first factor listed by Krafft-Ebing, specifically pointing to French novels about taboo relationships—but there is no evidence that Alice read these supposedly nefarious books, much less that the novels somehow led her to murder Freda.

The case provoked questions about treatment, sometimes leading to drastic conclusions. In light of Alice’s murder trial, Dr. F.E. Daniel wondered if the medical community should “asexualize [i.e. castrate] all criminals of whatever class.”
¹³⁷
By 1893, Daniel had already deemed castration the solution to most cases of sexual deviancy, from bestiality to masturbation. He was a Southern eugenicist, a doctor who believed that the human population would be improved by discouraging reproduction among people with genetic defects, along with those who had inherited other undesirable traits. Daniel’s call for castration of all classes was uncommon, but the school he subscribed to was not. Alice’s same-sex love and insanity, supposedly inherited from her mother, could easily fall into these eugenicist categories. It was indeed the fact of her class—that she had been raised by a respectable family—that made Daniel consider
expanding
his categories to include such cases, rather than rethinking the categories themselves.

Voices of medical dissent, absent during the inquisitio itself, began to emerge afterward. Charles H. Hughes, M.D., president of the Barnes Medical College in St. Louis and editor of the
Alienist and Neurologist
, appeared to be the clearest voice of skepticism. He found Alice’s plea of present insanity to be highly dubious, and in July of 1892, he began examining her case on the pages of his medical publication.
¹³⁸
In an editorial, he criticized the sensational news coverage of the case, as well as the “novices in psychiatry” who would give credence to the insanity argument.
¹³⁹
Nothing Hughes had read convinced him that Alice was insane at the time of the inquisition, or before it. Based on those articles, he understood the slaying of Freda Ward
to be an act of revenge, and if Alice was indeed insane, “it will be because of other facts than that of contrary sexual feelings.”
¹⁴⁰

Hughes soon moved on to the information newspapers purposefully avoided in their coverage. The same month that Alice committed to an insane asylum in Bolivar, he reprinted an editorial written by “H.” in the
Medical Fortnightly
. It speculated that Alice likely discovered masturbation on her own, which she then introduced to Freda, and “mutual masturbation followed, then the well-developed perverted sexual love with all its disgusting details, was the almost inevitable result.” The subsequent forced separation of Alice and Freda had made “sexual monsters of the two maidens—then the climax—murder.”
¹⁴¹
Medical literature was still parsing the differences between hereditary and environmental influence—that is, whether the “insanity” was passed down from a parent, or whether the sexual relationship turned violent because of new circumstances.

Alice’s case continued to complicate conceptions of class and female sexual deviancy. Prostitutes and promiscuous women—who were often poor—were considered sexual deviants, but their motivations were typically ascribed to economics, and the supposed lust and immorality prevalent among the vulgar masses. As Hughes and others who published on the case acknowledged, Alice made no economic gains from her relationship with Freda and, on the contrary, assumed a significant financial burden in her intention to pass as a man and support Alvin J. Ward’s wife. Her desire to maintain middle class respectability seemed at odds with a sexually deviant woman, which is exactly why Alice’s defense team had gone to such lengths to exaggerate her masculinity and attribute the murder to this supposed pathological crossing of gender norms. As Hughes was careful to point out, Alice, in her relationship with Freda, was in fact motivated by love, and wanted to enact conventional romantic feelings within the structure of a traditional marriage.

Nevertheless, others continued to champion the argument that Alice was insane, and that her insanity stemmed from her sexual preferences. James G. Kiernan, a leading sexologist in America, was a proponent of this theory. He had worked in asylums, taught in medical schools on the East Coast, contributed to leading journals, and was regularly called upon to offer expert testimony in the courtroom. In a lengthy article, Kiernan predicted “that sexual pervert crimes of all types are likely to increase, because of newspaper agitation on the subject, among hysterical females, from a desire to secure the notoriety dear to the hysteric heart.”
¹⁴²
Whether or not that came to pass, Kiernan was still asserting this view in 1916, when he identified Alice Mitchell as the reason American mothers had been keeping a watchful eye on female friendships, lest their daughters meet a similar fate as Freda.
¹⁴³

Kiernan argued that such maternal vigilance had proven successful, and there were fewer incidences of “sexual inversion” in America. Sexologists believed that sexual inverts experience an inborn reversal of gender traits, hence the emphasis on Alice’s supposedly masculine inclinations.
¹⁴⁴
Even so, interpretations of his research varied. Influential English sexologist Havelock Ellis studied Kiernan’s conclusion and reached an opposing one, declaring that sexual inversion, or deviant “homosexuality,” was actually on the rise in America. He referred to the Mitchell-Ward case to substantiate his claim in 1915.
¹⁴⁵

The first conspicuous example of this tendency in recent times is the Memphis case (1892) in the United States....There is no reason to suppose that she was insane at the time of the murder. She was a typical invert of a very pronounced kind. Her mother had been insane and had homicidal impulses. She herself was considered unbalanced, and was masculine in her habits from her earliest years. Her face was obviously unsymmetrical
and she had an appearance of youthfulness below her age. She was not vicious, and had little knowledge of sexual matters, but when she kissed Freda she was ashamed of being seen, while Freda could see no reason for being ashamed . . . She was adjudicated insane.
¹⁴⁶

In the early twentieth century, middle to upper classes remained the focus of American research, but their proclivities were viewed in a variety of ways, rather than just the binary of “normal” and “deviant.” In 1925, social reformer Katherine Bement Davis published
Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women
, a groundbreaking study in the sexual activities of women, including auto-erotic practices and same-sex love. By the 1950s, Alfred Kinsey was conducting trailblazing research on homosexuality. The Kinsey scale indicated degrees of sexual orientation, from 0 (representing exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (for exclusively homosexual) because it “comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist.”
¹⁴⁷

But the rhetoric of deviance was far from extinct. In homes, the workplace, and academic and religious institutions throughout the United States, and most certainly in Memphis, the emphasis on marginalizing same-sex relationships persisted, echoed by politicians on issues of morality on a local and national level, and it became a powerful machine of degradation and political exclusion—much of which still exists today.
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