Sympathizing with Monsters: Variances of Emotional Manipulation in Balladry and True Crime Podcasting

Abstract

In recent American culture especially, true crime narratives are popular in a variety of modes, from oral to textual. This study focuses on the oral storytelling mediums of murder balladry and true crime podcasting to examine the connections between the narrative, the narrator, and the listening audience; specifically, this study examines the narratives of violent women as told by other women. Women’s narratives in true crime settings are analyzed here through narrative techniques that women employ to speak of each other, sympathetically or otherwise. This analysis examines two traditions and four case studies of murderous women. The first traditional murderer is the scorned woman who, usually jilted for the favor of another woman, kills her lover after their relationship ends. She is analyzed here through “Love Henry,” a ballad dating back to seventeenth-century Scotland and the American ballad “Frankie and Johnnie,” which was first recorded in late nineteenth-century. The second traditional murderer is the mother who kills her children, heard through the infanticide ballad “The Cruel Mother,” which has been collected for nearly four centuries.

Both ballad traditions directly influence the attitudes heard in contemporary true crime narratives of violent women. The connection can be observed in four recent popular case studies—cruel mothers Diane Downs (convicted 1984) and Susan Smith (1994) and scorned women Betty Broderick (1991) and Jodi Arias (2012)—as told by a selection of women podcasters. This connection allows this study to trace the ways the attitudes towards violent women have or have not changed as these songs traversed the Atlantic Ocean and took root in an American culture already riveted by crime and punishment.