Gender, Familial Ideologies, and Aspects of Genre in the Early-Republic Murder Trial Report

Autori

  • Simona Porro Università degli Studi di Torino

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13130/2035-7680/7172

Abstract

The present essay focuses on a case of matricide which happened in New Jersey in 1812. Mary and Cornelius Cole, a married couple, were charged with the murder of Mary’s mother, Agnes Thuers. While Cornelius denied any involvement in the actual killing, and only admitted to assisting his wife in concealing the crime and disposing of the body, Mary confessed but claimed that she had killed Thuers in self-defence. She was convicted and hanged for this crime whereas her husband was sentenced to two years in prison as an accessory. The case was swiftly turned into two criminal narratives: A Genuine Sketch of the Trial of Mary Cole for the Wilful Murder of her Mother, Agnes Thuers (1812) and The Confession of Mary Cole (1813). The essay demonstrates how the strategies and techniques employed to construct, fictionalize, and present the tormented mother-daughter relationship to the reading public, offer a privileged insight into the dominant familial and gender ideologies of the time.

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Biografia autore

Simona Porro, Università degli Studi di Torino

Simona Porro holds a Ph.D. in Comparative literature from the University of Turin,
Italy. She taught American Literature and English Language at the University of Turin.
She authored several articles and book chapters, and the following volumes: L’ombra
della Shoah. Trauma, storia e memoria nei graphic memoir di Art Spiegelman (Edizioni
dell’Orso 2012), ‘La terra promessa’: l’American Dream al femminile nelle forme brevi di
Anzia Yezierska (Edizioni dell’Orso 2013), and Dalla teologia alla letteratura: il caso di
Arthur A. Cohen (forthcoming 2016).

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Pubblicato

2016-05-31

Come citare

Porro, Simona. 2016. «Gender, Familial Ideologies, and Aspects of Genre in the Early-Republic Murder Trial Report». Altre Modernità, n. 15 (maggio):24-37. https://doi.org/10.13130/2035-7680/7172.