Title: The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired Chicago
Author: Douglas Perry
Date Read: January 6th 2017
Published: August 5 2010 @ Viking
Genre: Historical Non-Fiction
Rating: ⭐
"If it were sensational enough, whether a scientific breakthrough, a rousing new style of music, or an underworld murder, it would be celebrated."
This is an uninspired retelling that parrots the newspapers without context framing, except to spend paragraphs upon paragraphs describing in fine detail just how beautiful or ugly every single woman mentioned was.
Perry was obviously trying to forward a thesis that what the events boiled down to was that a beautiful woman can get away with anything, including murder. While this is honestly just a reiteration of the thesis in Chicago: the Musical, it seems interesting enough at first glance. What is our obsession with beauty? How does that affect our interactions with the media? What does that say about our conceptions of morality? Except none of those questions were answered, and instead, it was deemed necessary to waste my damn time describing in fine detail how attractive or unattractive not only the murderesses were, but the newspaper women, and the wives, and literally every other female presence you could think of. Which was not only boring, but came off as incredibly pigheaded. None of the women described were fleshed out beyond their physical appearances, and were largely framed as either the angel or the whore without any further investigation.
This ties into a bigger issue, in my opinion, that this account doesn't think critically or bring into question any of the claims made by the media, or even made by Maurine Watkins, who wrote the original play after the media frenzy. Watkins, whether or not she was hyperbolizing for effect, wrote a piece of satire. Perry, on the other hand, pitched this as "the real events that inspired Chicago," which means that he had a greater degree of responsibility to interrogate the source material. How did patriarchal archetypes of the time affect how the women were viewed?
All in all, I don’t think this added anything to my previous knowledge that a cursory google search wouldn’t have, and above all else, I was bored and annoyed with the style of writing. So do with that what you will, obviously, and maybe if you’re a huge fan of the musical you’ll enjoy it more than I did, but I really can’t think of anything redeemable about this book that, for literally being focused around “the girls of murder city,” so wildly misunderstood what it is to be a woman.
No comments:
Post a Comment