If thirteen-year-old factory worker, Mary Phagan, had been murdered in a different time and place, it is likely that she would have joined that long list of unknown girls and women whose violent deaths have met with scant regard. However, the upheavals of the American South in the early 20th century created conflicts and insecurities that came to rest on Mary's lifeless body.

Young girls like Mary encountered shocking circumstances during those years as family hardship forced them from the home into the workforce. Some succumbed to youthful motherhood, prostitution and other jobs that worked them too hard and paid them too little. Rather than creating a response that would give such girls an education or decent wages and conditions, some Georgians thought creating an image of an idealised past would make it return again.

It was the "Little Mary Phagan" of popular imagination that peered out at newspaper readers before 'real' Mary ever got the chance. With a desire to reassert a masculinity eroded by the employment of young women in the burgeoning manufacturing sector, the creation of doll-like "Little Mary Phagan" by the press, politicians and the 'people' might have confirmed to some that the traditional Southern patriarchy still existed. The lynching on 16 August 1915 of Mary Phagan's unjustly convicted boss, Leo Frank, manager of the National Pencil Factory, perhaps allowed them to believe it was also triumphant once again.

The same year a vengeful posse from Mary's hometown known as "The Knights of Mary Phagan" murdered Frank, D W Griffith's cinematic tribute to the first Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation or The Clansman was released. Griffith's fictional heroine, Flora Cameron, like the ‘fictionalised’ Mary, chooses to die a "honourable" Southern woman's death rather than defilement by a lust-filled 'other'.

This viciously racist film has young Flora jumping off a cliff to escape Gus, the "renegade Negro", who is ludicrously played, and played ludicrously, by an actor in 'black face'. The "Mary" mythologised by anti-Semitic populism also gave up her life when faced with Frank, who was pruriently conceived as a "lascivious Northern Jew".

As symbols of an "Old South" threatened by the changing economic, political and social milieu, "Flora" and "Mary" were respectively 'present' at the creation of the first (formed 1865) and second (formed 1915) Ku Klux Klan. A gathering of the first Klan in Griffith's movie is informed, "Brethren, this flag bears the red star of the life of a southern woman, a priceless sacrifice on the altar of an outraged civilisation". While feminist historian, Nancy MacLean, who has written a book about the Klan, argues that Mary's murder "directly stimulated the establishment" of its second incarnation.

The 1987 miniseries, The Murder of Mary Phagan, kept iconic "Mary" alive, even while attempting to right other historical wrongs. Seventy-four years after her brutal death, Hollywood could only manage to resurrect hagiographic "Mary" with her impeccable manners, neat hair and offended reaction to Frank's inappropriate compliment, "Miss, you look very pretty today". Even as the 20th century drew to a close, it was evident that virginal Southern belles remained worthier victims than urban working class girls who may be sexually active could ever be.

When "miniseries Mary" puts on her hat for the Confederate Memorial Day Parade, an event honouring Georgia's Civil War dead, the soundtrack goes pretty and the gender order preferred by Georgia's reactionaries remains intact and uncritiqued. It is easy to imagine this "Mary" fanning herself on the porch in the "quaint" prewar South romanticised in Griffith's film.

It is interesting to note that symbolic "Mary" still inspires syrupy, if sincere, lamentations on a website dedicated to the (relatively) famous dead. Unfortunately, many women and girls who met a similar fate to Mary's, but were not 'symbol' material, remain unknown to us today.
 

Darlene is an Australian writer who is interested in feminism and politics.  You can reach her at:
 darls_2at@yahoo.com.au

References:
Griffith, D W. 1915. The Birth of A Nation or The Clansman. Hollywood Classics.

Maclean, Nancy. 1991. "The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism". The Journal of American History. December. 917 - 948.

The Murder of Mary Phagan. 1987. Orion Pictures International.
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