NONFICTION - Jan. 28, 1996

THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF MARY ROGERS: Sex and Culture in 19th-Century New York by Amy Gilman Srebnick (Oxford University Press: $25; 218 pp.). No, it didn’t begin with the Black Dahlia or Nicole Brown Simpson. In 1841, the body of Mary Cecilia Rogers, known as the “Beautiful Cigar Girl” because she worked in a Manhattan tobacco shop frequented by journalists and Tammany Hall politicians, was found floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken, N.J. Public interest, fanned by the new popular press, was intense. Had Rogers committed suicide, been a victim of gang violence or a lover’s jealousy or, most likely, died of a botched abortion? The case was never solved. But its implications affect American society even today as Amy Gilman Srebnick, professor of history at Montclair State University, shows in this volume in the Oxford University Press series of “Studies in the History of Sexuality.”

Rogers’ death coincided with New York’s development into a modern city, with all the anonymity, danger and freedom that implies. It inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and lurid and sentimental novels by Ned Buntline and others. In the newspapers, particularly James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, descriptions of Rogers’ corpse and her possible love life broke new ground in frankness and voyeurism. Bennett exploited Rogers’ double image--as a victim of the city’s evils and as a sexually unfettered embodiment of those evils--to push for tougher policing and an 1845 state law criminalizing abortion. “Just as our national culture was solidifying,” Srebnick says, “becoming simultaneously more expansive in its economic enterprise and more repressive in its sexual and social attitudes, the subject of violent female death became an aspect of mass commercial culture.”