If you are a woman, and you have fantasised about murdering a lover, I would wager you thought about using poison. We are seven times more likely to use poison than a man — unless we are Vladimir Putin. Men kill more, of course, and are more likely to be killed. But in every other marker of physical violence, we lag behind them. Here, we catch up, and that should be a song in Chicago.
It’s arresting if you aren’t involved — death by poison stories are like bad childbirth tales — so the case of “Fungi fatale” Erin Patterson, the mushroom drudge of Leongatha, Australia, has travelled the world. Patterson is a witch who works with poison — all witches do — but a bad one: she got caught. She was found guilty of three murders and one attempted murder this week. Authorities decided not to charge her with the attempted murder of her ex-husband Simon, who was likely her real target. He was wary enough to decline her invitation to lunch.
The cognitive dissonance is riveting: superficially mild housewife and mother of two serves poisoned beef wellington, a formal, very respectable dish, with poisoned mushrooms to her former parents-in-law, and her ex-husband’s uncle and aunt, at a lunch to discuss Patterson’s fantasy ovarian cancer diagnosis. Why fantasy ovarian cancer? Does she feel her femininity was thwarted, and this is how she told them?
It was. The poisoner in the kitchen is the mad woman in the attic, escaped with a wooden spoon to stir her psychosis: femininity spoiled and home subverted. That is what the interest in Patterson amounts to: terror. She is a monster from a fairytale come to end you: the kitchen is a charnel house. What is up with Mama? Sexual frustration? Menopause? Rage? The apple in Snow White was, to our gormless heroine, a gift of love, not murderous envy. Perhaps Patterson’s victims thought the same, but her husband knew her better.
Lunch guests don’t expect death: food is love. But there is more to food than love. Anthony Bourdain’s writing and the TV show The Bear remind us that food is magic. It can be anything. Bourdain described his fury and longing for control before he killed himself. The cook says eat what I give you, and every tasting menu is homage to that. I am a restaurant critic, and I have gagged on the rage of cooks. I have eaten rage made from turnip and feather. Or there is thwarted love. Chef Carmy of The Bear wants to reanimate his family at every service. Carmy’s brother is dead: Carmy thinks the dead can return if you just cook well enough; if you love them enough. If “restaurant” is a corruption of “restore”, the poisoner’s table is the opposite: the removal of everything.
Patterson shows what a woman can do if she is furious enough, and how she can do it — surprisingly easily. I can see foxgloves from my desk: enough to kill my family. The kitchen cupboards are filled with poisons. Katherine Watson’s Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and Their Victims, a study of cases from 1752 to 1914, describes the mothers, stepmothers, and wives who poisoned their husbands and children. It was a minor epidemic. Rebecca Smith killed eight of her babies because, she said, she couldn’t care for them, and was the last woman hanged in Britain for murdering her child. Beware of limiting women’s access to birth control. That’s Smith’s message.
Or the poisoner is a wife gone awry: the climax of a mad romance. Nannie Doss, America’s most famous serial poisoner was called the “Lonely Hearts Killer”. Doss met some of her victims through the personal columns and the Diamond Circle dating club: then she fed them rat poison and arsenic. In all, she murdered four of her five husbands. Is lonely the right word? The British poisoner Mary Ann Cotton was hanged in 1873: it is believed she killed four of her five husbands. She was famous enough for a nursery rhyme: “Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string. Where? Where? She’s up in the air.” Where, of course, the witches are.
The duality of the poisoner — powerless, suddenly empowered — explains our fascination. She is everywhere in our culture: drudge and queen. She is Erin Patterson and Rebecca Smith, and Medea, and Empress Livia of I, Claudius. Claudius thought Livia was herself a poison: “They say a snake bit her once and died.” She is Cary Grant’s murderous aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace, case studies in unthreatening femininity — until they killed the lodgers. In J.K. Rowling’s Troubled Blood her poisoner is a nurse, and, Rowling writes, “to see the truth of her is almost impossible.” Rowling is canny: she could have been speaking of Erin Patterson.
If the poisoner has a terrifying duality, so too does her poison. Those foxgloves in my garden? They could kill me: or they could heal my heart. If taken in excess, most medicines, and almost all those enjoyable recreational drugs will end you, and there’s a metaphor. We see this in the battles over the End of Life bill as parliamentarians ask themselves, as Erin Patterson did — where does love end, and death begin? Both are closer than we think.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Tanya Gold
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://unherd.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
