THE BODICE RIPPER

Sensitive themes: Prostitution and murder in the Victorian era.

CHARACTER: 1 female, 30s, attractive

CIRCA AND SETTING: 1888, London

All action transpires on a stage which is bare except for a table and high-backed chair. The table has a neatly folded white towel on its surface.

AT RISE: A soft bluish light suggests evening. After a moment, the FEMALE enters. She wears a floor-length, hooded black cape, black opera gloves and carries a leather medical bag. She looks around as if to check no one has followed her. With a deep sigh of relief, she plops the medical bag on the table and flips back the hood of her cape to reveal a face worthy of a Victorian portrait. As she slowly removes her gloves, she resolutely reflects on what has transpired that evening.

FEMALE

Enough already. Enough. Nothing I’ve done these past months will change the squalid fabric of society’s lesser mortals nor inspire redemption by the wealthy—my husband included—whose deviant predilections so casually believe such plight is justified. As for the police, their efforts are completely scattered and worthless. (softly chuckles) Even their ascription of motive could not be farther from the truth. The truth—were it ever to be known to them—would be the stuff of nightmares. I may as well stop before I ruin a perfect record of anonymity.

She takes her time unbuttoning the front of her cloak.

This evening, it was the woman who approached me and not the other way around. “Are you lost, miss?” she asked. Clearly my clothing immediately betrayed that she and I were not of the same class. Further, that the environment itself was not a seemly one for a lady walking alone. I lied and told her that my husband was to have sent a carriage but must have forgotten or been detained by his work. Her face registered admiration when I told her he was a surgeon. I asked her if she thought a woman might do well in similar profession. (her expression darkens) Her response was to laugh and deem it impossible beyond the delivery of babies or the making of simple tinctures. “What’s your name, dear?” I sweetly inquired. Without hesitation, she told me it was Mary Kelly. (a sinister smile emerges) Poor Mary Kelly. You really shouldn’t have laughed at my question.

She doffs the cape and puts it over the back of the chair. We now see that the front and sleeves of her white shirtwaist and long skirt are stained with bright red blood. As she continues talking, she removes medical tools and a large knife from the leather bag. She’ll proceed to thoughtfully wipe each one off with the towel, revealing the amount of blood clinging to them.

I feigned a shiver and asked if she knew where I might buy myself a cup of tea. To my surprise, she told me she lived in the next street and could fix me a cup of tea herself. How did this filthy little piece of humanity know to make it so very easy for me? Had I passed her by and chosen someone else, my punishment would have been meted out in an alley, always at risk of accidental discovery. I had been lucky the times before but how much longer would it last? No one thinks twice at the sight of two females holding tight in an alley, presumably consoling one another, yet in reality the life’s blood of one of them draining away.

I looked around at the miserable flat Mary Kelly called home. A home that was in every single aspect extraordinarily different from the mansion I share with my husband. A mansion which has every luxury he can afford and a bevy of servants attending to our every need. Mary Kelly and the others just like her will never know a life such as that. The ultimate irony, of course, is that they are able to freely ply their trade while I am bound by restrictions imposed by men, men who believe that a woman’s best use is to be decorative and not entertain any complicated thoughts such as a career in medicine would engender.

“Are you frightened to live here?” I asked her. She shrugged and replied, “It is what it is.” I found myself as repulsed as I was fascinated that anyone could exist in these wretched conditions. Her door may as well have been made of paper, her broken windows stuffed with greasy rags to keep out the wind. How many men had she lain with in the rickety iron bed with stained bedclothes? Had my esteemed surgeon husband been one of them? I shudder to think of him debasing himself in that way, and yet I know he and his friends have never been without submissive companions. Even at his club tonight, I’m sure he and his peers are regaling one another with stories of past conquests and future dalliances.

She suddenly turns the conversation to the killer who has been terrifying Whitechapel. “Do you think the coppers will catch him?” she asks me. I can’t resist asking why she thinks the killer is a male. She laughs at this. Again, the laughing. Please stop, Mary Kelly. You’re only sealing your own fate. She tells me she knew the other girls who met their deaths but that they weren’t close friends. I find myself wondering whether my husband knew them, too, though it would not have been likely he’d know them by name. “Street commodities,” he calls them. Whether he pays attention to what’s going on in Whitechapel, it’s never a topic of conversation at the breakfast table. How amusing it would be if he ever found out that the heinous killer of prostitutes was sitting across from him and innocently buttering her toast.

“You can’t be stupid and take chances,” Mary Kelly continues, suggesting in this that she believed herself to be much smarter than they were. “Especially now,” she adds. It’s as if this pathetic, wayward creature craves company and can’t stop talking, comforted by the presence of another female in such close proximity. Had she ever known the acquaintance of someone like me? Someone wealthy, intelligent and well bred? I seriously doubt it. Then again, how many times would I have crossed paths—much less had tea—with someone like her?

I want to violently shake women like this, women who find nothing wrong with selling their bodies and—in doing so—selling their souls. You can be more than this, a part of me wants to tell them. Another part recognizes that they can’t. For them, this is the best it will ever be until death finally releases them. And so they flaunt their independence while those like me who can flaunt our wealth are prisoners in our ivory towers, denied the freedoms enjoyed by men. My husband claims that the physical and aesthetic traits of the gentle sex make them entirely unsuitable for the pursuit of medical studies. End of subject. Though perhaps he really shouldn’t have left his medical books and journals so easily accessible to me…

By the time my shabby hostess offered me more tea, I’d had quite enough of her empty chatter. “Do you really have to be going?” she said.

She picks up the knife and smiles as she looks at it.

I told her there was one thing more I needed to do before I left. As I opened my bag, she laughed again and remarked that it was funny I knew her name and yet she hadn’t inquired as to mine.

“No one you know,” I replied. “No one that anyone knows.”

SFX: A clock is chiming the lateness of the hour in the distance.

She smiles as she returns the now clean instruments to the bag.

Ah, just enough time to change to a pretty frock and greet my husband with a crystal glass of sherry. And, of course, he’ll inquire, “Did you have a nice evening, my love? Not too lonely, were you?”

To which I’ll reply with a complacent smile and say, “As evenings go, it was most satisfactory.”

She picks up the bloody towel and her cape as the lights go down.

FADE TO BLACK

THE END