The nineteenth century was, we have been told, the 鈥渃entury of the poisoner,鈥 when Britain and the United States trembled under an onslaught of unruly women who poisoned husbands with gleeful abandon. That story, however, is only half true. While British authorities did indeed round up and execute a number of impoverished women with minimal evidence and fomented media hysteria, American juries refused to convict suspected women and newspapers laughed at men who feared them.
This difference in outcome doesn鈥檛 mean that poisonous women didn鈥檛 preoccupy Americans. In the decades following Andrew Jackson鈥檚 first presidential bid, Americans buzzed over women who used poison to kill men. They produced and devoured reams of ephemeral newsprint, cheap trial transcripts, and sensational 鈥渢rue鈥 pamphlets, as well as novels, plays, and poems. Female poisoners served as crucial elements in the literary manifestos of writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to George Lippard and the cheap pamphleteer E. E. Barclay, but these characters were given a strangely positive spin, appearing as innocent victims, avenging heroes, or engaging humbugs.
The reason for this poison predilection lies in the political logic of metaphor. Nineteenth-century Britain strove to rein in democratic and populist movements by labeling popular print 鈥減oison鈥 and its providers 鈥減oisoners,鈥 drawing on centuries of established metaphor that negatively associated poison, women, and popular speech or writing. Jacksonian America, by contrast, was ideologically committed to the popular鈥攁lthough what and who counted as such was up for serious debate. The literary gadfly John Neal called on his fellow Jacksonian writers to defy British critical standards, saying, 鈥淟et us have poison.鈥 Poisonous Muse investigates how they answered, how they deployed the figure of the female poisoner to theorize popular authorship, to validate or undermine it, and to fight over its limits, particularly its political, gendered, and racial boundaries.
Poisonous Muse tracks the progress of this debate from approximately 1820 to 1845. Uncovering forgotten writers and restoring forgotten context to well-remembered authors, it seeks to understand Jacksonian print culture from the inside out, through its own poisonous language.
鈥淐rosby鈥檚 work is an adventurous, sophisticated exploration in nineteenth-century American print culture of a little-remarked but widely utilized trope, women鈥檚 involvement in notorious poisonings. Her prose is felicitous and engaging throughout. We never feel as though we are being lectured to, even as the author displays enviable erudition and the lasting value of deep work in the archive鈥攆rom ephemeral newspapers and pamphlets to now-canonical literature.鈥濃擯hilip F. Gura, William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
鈥淎ccording to Sara Crosby, the new popular 鈥榩ower of horror鈥欌攊n writings by Poe and many others鈥攇ave American authors a new way of moving beyond beauty through the 鈥榩oisonous muse.鈥 This new power corresponds to the vitalizing changes in Jacksonian America鈥 and brings with it a major change in 鈥║S literary history. Her study of these changes in the US cultural scene is an incredibly engaging, vibrant narrative.鈥濃擠ale M. Bauer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
