Amy Bishop and the Intersection of Women, Violence and Art

I have read Sam Tanenhaus's piece on the Amy Bishop case several times now and still don't quite know what to make of it. Even though it is clear his frame of reference with regards to women and violence is stuck in the same time warp he discusses, and thus omits a fair number of more recent exemplars of the intersection between fiction and fact, I can't dismiss the piece because he has a point that American culture is dumbfounded, more or less, by what Bishop did, recently and many years earlier.

The case is weird - and has already led to two quickie book deals that I know of - because the foundation it rests upon keeps shifting. First it was a school shooting; then a scorned woman whose fury required a 9-millimeter handgun to avenge her lack of tenure. Along came the secret past, first in the guise of an accidental shooting of her brother before the truth made things much murker, more premeditated, and a whole lot more complicated.

I'm intrigued by what both Patricia Cornwell and Chelsea Cain had to say:

“Everything is about power,” Cornwell, whose best-selling Scarpetta series is thick with forensic detail, maintained in an e-mail message, when asked what she made of the Bishop case. “The more women appropriate power, the more their behavior will mimic that of other powerful people.” Also: “Firearms are the great equalizer. You don’t have to be 6 foot 2 and weigh 200 pounds to kill a room full of people.”

Chelsea Cain, the author of a crime series that reverses the formula of “The Silence of the Lambs,” pitting a male detective against a female serial killer, suggested that Dr. Bishop is the latest version of an ancient figure, “the mother lioness that kills to protect herself and her family against perceived threats.”

And while I can see why Tanenhaus would reach back to THE BAD SEED or WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE, the comparisons don't quite ring true for me. Maybe because if there's a parallel to be made, it's with another woman, quite a ways younger, who was similarly pissed off at both the world and her peers and brought a .22 caliber rifle to school one day. Maybe, like Brenda Spencer, Amy Bishop just didn't like Mondays (or, more literally, Fridays.) And every time the pressure built up and the going in her head got too much, in kicked the killing mechanism - for no logic-based reason.

I'm actually surprised at how low-profile a figure Spencer has cut post-Bishop. She was denied parole last summer and won't get another hearing for a decade (which, in all likelihood, will be denied a fifth time) but being so close in age (Spencer is now 47; Bishop is 45) it makes me wonder what might have been had Spencer taken her anger out in a more accidental, happenstance manner, and then was allowed to live her life outside prison walls. It's a needless what-if, but if we're going to reach for answers, picking the brain of the longtime inmate of the California Institute for Women in Corona, California is as much of a crapshoot as looking to art, books and films for cultural resonance.

Comments

[Patti Abbott]

This sort of thing--the murders of the tenure committee--happens more than you'd think. We've had several similar incidents at this college over time. And several with graduate students who didn't pass their qualifying exams--especially with students here on student visas and desperate not to be deported. Clearly this case is more complex.

[John McFetridge]

Yes, the denied tenure aspect made me think of my old school, Concordia University and the Valery Fabrikant murders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordia_University_massacre).

It does seem like Cornwell is onto something, though.

[Steven Torres]

Hate to disagree, but I'm not so impressed with Cornwell and Cain. Lioness? Really? Power? How about "insane"? Not to say her case isn't complicated - what made her insane could be very complex, but... She's still not a well person.

If this were about how women mimic men as they appropriate formerly male power, then we need to look at the fact that this woman was DENIED power (in the form of tenure). Or is the acquired power the handgun? Does Cornwell mean "As more women buy guns, the more they will act like gunowners...and go on murderous rampages"? I doubt that's her meaning since I hear she's a bit of a gunlover herself.

As for Cain's comment - Bishop kills to "protect her family"? Is that irony? I haven't read the article, but I have to assume this was a joke.

[I.J.Parker]

Steven is absolutely right and took the words out of my mouth. I should add that we're both familiar with the academic world and the tenure system, for better or worse.

[Eric Christopherson]

Bishop's not a sociopath IMO. Her life's too stable for that. I'll bet it comes out she's been on anti-psychotics for years.

[Alafair Burke]

I'm obsessed with this case. If she were a man who had shot his sister, picked fights with neighborhood children, was a suspect in an attempted pipe bombing, punched someone in the head at IHOP in a fight over a booster seat, and then finally culminated with a workplace shooting, would we look for external explanations? I'm with Sarah.

[ruth]

My Dad was actually holding tenure discussions the same week the shooting happened. Having lived vicariously in the walls of academia for all of my years this lady doesn't surprise me at all. The fact that her intelligence let her get away with such a substantiated and negative behavior pattern for so long does. Let the lawyering commence.

[Lorraine Adams]

I agree with Sarah that Sam Tanenhaus's piece lacks the requisite cultural fluency. He's got a big theory but he focuses on small pieces of the culture. He leaves out the memoirs written by women warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan such as Kayla Williams's Love My Rifle More Than You. He doesn't seem aware of an important documentary on women combat veterans from Iraq, "Lioness," that I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival. I'd also argue that Snoop in The Wire is one of the great violent female characters of all time. And I think Catherine Opie raises complicated issues about femaleness and violence that make his comments about Finley and Abramovic seem simplistic. And my new novel The Room and the Chair--looks at the Afghanistan war from the perspective of a female fighter pilot.

[Levi]

Speaking of parallels, classic literature also gives us many examples (Medea, Lady Macbeth).

It's also worth mentioning that one of the most famous sociopath murderers in American history was a woman: "Lizzie Borden took an ax ..."