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4. Personal Responsibility
- Louisiana State University Press
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4 Personal Responsibility T he titillating angle of the “boyfriend motive” helped Americans make sense of Susan Smith as the kind of mother who could commit a heinous crime. This plot twist kept her in the headlines, but as more details leaked to the press during the weeks following Smith’s confession, it became clear to the American public that sex, or even romance, was not her only motive. Susan Smith, it seemed, was a specific kind of slut: she was a social climber. The emphasis on socioeconomic status in public representations of Susan Smith was not random, nor was it simple sensationalism. As with sex, there was an underlying political agenda. The link between class and sex was not conjured from thin air. There was, in fact, evidence: Smith herself paired the two in her written confession. “Because of my romantic and financial situation ,” the Boston Globe quoted a few days after her arrest, “I’ve never been so low.”1 There were also cultural precedents for the association between class and sex. Once Susan Smith’s estranged husband, erstwhile boyfriend, and rumored sexual behaviors achieved headline status, it was inevitable that representations of her socioeconomic status would free fall. We have seen the pop-cultural connection between female violence and sexuality in American culture. There is a corresponding connection between class status and morality; in the American imagination, lower socioeconomic status generally entails low morals, and vice-versa. For American women especially , a set of specific class associations accompanies sexual activity. In her genealogy of the term “slut,” feminist Leora Tanenbaum explains: “Regardless of her family’s actual economic status, the ‘slut’ is thought to be ‘low-class’ and ‘trampy,’ the kind of girl who wears gobs of makeup and whose voluptuous curves threaten to explode the fabric of her tight clothes. She lacks the polish of the ‘good girl,’ who keeps her sexuality reigned in and discreet (beneath a blazer, a belt, some nude pantyhose), and who will no doubt marry a nice middle-class man and raise a nice middle-class family.”2 Personal Responsibility 93 Author Dorothy Allison grew up in a working-class family about an hour away from Union, and she recognized this class/sex divide among the girls and young women in her small South Carolina town, as well. The “good” girls wore fashionable clothes and “virgin pins” and “went on to marry” the star football players after high school. The blue-collar girls, Allison wrote in a memoir published the year of the Smith trial, “were never virgins, even when we were.” Their socioeconomic status dictated rumors of their sexual activity : “Like the stories told about Janis Joplin in Port Arthur, Texas, there were stories about us in Greenville, SC.”3 Likewise, girls’ sexual activity reflected their class status: “Sex was dangerous , a trap, trashy as drinking whiskey in a paper cup or telling dirty stories in a loud whisper. Sex was a sure sign of having nothing better to hope for.”4 As in Allison’s best-selling memoirs and fiction, the rumors of sexual impropriety that formed the crux of the “boyfriend motive” determined a sea change in Susan Smith’s perceived class status. So, as journalists and observers revised their understanding of Susan Smith in the days following her arrest, class effortlessly joined sex as a key component of their analyses. Susan Smith, the “most hated woman in America,” quickly found herself pictured on front pages as a working-class single mother. Through the rumors, speculation, and the seemingly less important actual details of Smith’s motive to murder, we can track the essential building blocks of this most famous and lasting version of Susan Smith. The image had both historical and literary precedents. In their coverage of the Smith case, journalists perhaps unwittingly referenced a modern literary archetype that combined sexuality, class climbing, and murder. As Susan Smith arrived for her bond hearing the day after her confession, one reporter described the screaming mob that awaited her outside the Union County Courthouse as a “scene worthy of a Theodore Dreiser novel.” The description was apt; in fact, Theodore Dreiser would have easily recognized Susan Smith. With the exception of the criminal’s gender, the “boyfriend motive” perfectly fit the script of what the great American novelist described as the classic American homicide. These kinds of crimes, explained Dreiser in a 1935 interview , were the result of the national obsession with upward social mobility: “It seemed to spring...