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Book Review
| Kathleen A. Cairns, The Enigma Woman: The Death Sentence of Nellie May Madison, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Pp. 312. $25.00 (ISBN 978-0-8032-1141-4).
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| In 1934, Montanan-turned-Californian Nellie Madison nearly became the first woman to be put to death by the state of California. The extraordinary tale of how Madison came to be arrested, tried, convicted, condemned, reprieved and set free is the subject of this painstakingly researched work. Who Madison was and what her life and her crime meant is another story, and one that this book struggles to bring into being. |
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"Enigma Woman" was the moniker bestowed on Madison by one of the Los Angeles dailies that covered her June 1934 trial for the shooting death of her husband. Historian and former journalist Kathleen Cairns draws from the newspaper accounts of the grisly murder and the courtroom drama that ensued and from the trial transcripts, and the dramatic course of events following Eric Madison's death explains the sensationalistic treatment it received in the media: Nellie Madison, arrested the day after her husband's body was discovered in the cramped Burbank apartment they shared, refused to talk to the press (thus earning her nickname and a reputation as an ice queen). At her trial, confronting such prosecutorial theatrics as the introduction in evidence of the bullet-ridden, blood-stained bed on which her husband had been shot, Nellie testified in her own bizarre defense. Taking the stand, she said not only that she had not killed her husband, but that the body was not her husband's, and that she believed her husband was still alive. Other defense witnesses similarly offered testimony supporting the mistaken-identity theory. The jury, unsurprisingly unpersuaded by this evidence, voted to convict and recommended a death sentence. |
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Cairns argues that the district attorney sought the death penalty against Madison in order to make an example of her in "the establishment's campaign to discourage behavior that might be deemed threatening to the status quo" (85). Having murdered her husband—possibly in cold blood—and having violated public mores, Cairns argues, made Madison the perfect scapegoat. Madison had lived with one foot planted in conventional society and the other inching toward a sexual liberation movement that had not yet taken hold. As portrayed by Cairns, Madison's life story unfolded like the plot of a dreary pre-Code melodrama: married five times by the age of thirty-eight, Madison, childless, lived an itinerant existence, worked for a living, dressed fashionably, and knew her way around guns and horses. But Madison was a life-long practicing Catholic and evidently embraced, in her own way, conventional values of industry, modesty, and community—was she truly an ideal scapegoat? |
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Beginning from the premise of Madison as quasi-gender outlaw, Cairns presents as the crux of her story Madison's decision, following her failed appeal, to throw herself on the governor's mercy and confess. Her description of events leading up to her arrest are among the few that are rendered in Madison's own words, and they're transfixing—and, at once, dismal, detailing as they do the banal atrocities of domestic abuse—violence, shaming, blackmail (emotional and otherwise)—with which our culture has become all too familiar, particularly in the context of trials of women who kill their abusive spouses. |
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The confession, for Cairns, saved Madison's life; but it also marked the moment at which Madison, who had been figured as a "femme fatale" in the press, relinquished the last vestiges of self-determination that had characterized her early life and allowed herself to be redefined as a "pathetic victim" (247). The belated act that (accompanied by an astonishingly vigorous letter-writing campaign) saved her from execution also destroyed her as surely as had the abuse she endured. |
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Cairns concludes that Madison, a true "enigma woman" whose inner truth is impervious to discovery, was crushed by the forces that sought to fit her into paradigms of womanhood then conceivable or, failing that, to eliminate her. But Cairns, too, cannot resist the temptation to fill in the gaps in Madison's narrative. Stretching to account for the parts of Madison's life that are not documented in the newspapers, court records, prison reports, letters, and confession—and perhaps to enliven her tale—Cairns constructs dialogues and events out of whole cloth. These fabrications add a distracting air of "true crime" artifice, and undercut the argument that Nellie Madison was ineluctably unknowable. |
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Meanwhile, questions remain: for instance, Cairns criticizes the "mistakenidentity" defense, but accepts that a jury would not be receptive to a spousal-abuse defense. Yet evidence of such a defense succeeding—even in the form of jury nullification—had long existed (Marianne Constable, "Chicago Husband-Killing and the 'New Unwritten Law,'" TriQuarterly Journal 85 [2005]: 124). Ultimately, Cairns's effort to construct an image of Madison as both a reflection and a casualty of her time places more weight on Madison's biography than its slender frame can bear, and leaves the reader with mysteries destined to remain unsolved. |
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| Sara Manaugh
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| New York, N.Y. |
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