The Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman

by: Anne Bettina Pedersen , March 25, 2026

Is it supposed to be

An honor

To become

A beautiful corpse?

 

To have dudes jerk off

To my body

Tortured

Naked

Ropes

Pale blue Whiteness

Bruises on my breasts

Is this beauty?

 

Am I perfection now that

I can’t

Breathe

Move

Protest?

 

The girl next door

A woman in trouble

The most poetical topic

I have many labels

None of them

I have chosen[1]

 

At first glance, it looks like a black-and-white photo from a vintage fashion magazine: a young, well-dressed white woman nestles atop a crumpled car. Her eyes and mouth are closed, and she has a peaceful expression. Her ankles are crossed. The scenario appears to be choreographed, and the outfit and makeup are carefully styled. However, this photo, known as ‘The most beautiful suicide,’[2] depicts the corpse of twenty-three-year-old Evelyn McHale, who jumped to her death from the top of the Empire State Building in May 1947. In Women in the Picture: Women, Art and the Power of Looking (2021), Catherine McCormack describes how this image of ‘an exquisite corpse’ (2021: 146) or ‘a beautiful cadaver’ (2021: 146) exemplifies an idealised version of (white) femininity—‘one that is passive and silent and doll-like’ (2021: 146)—which is grounded in misogyny and verges on necrophilia. The photo illustrates a tendency addressed by Brandy Schillace in Death’s Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Can Tell Us About Life and Living (2015: 102): ‘even in death, it seems, women have historically been viewed as objects’. Elisabeth Bronfen argues in her 1992 seminal study, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, which focuses on Western European and U.S. cultural artefacts from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, that images of beautiful female corpses saturate cultural production to the extent that the aestheticisation of dead women’s bodies has become normalised. As Bronfen stresses, ‘representations of feminine death work on the principle of being so excessively obvious that they escape observation. Because they are so familiar, so evident, we are culturally blind to the ubiquity of representations of feminine death’ (1992: 3). In Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession (2018), Alice Bolin states: ‘It’s clear that we love the Dead Girl, enough to rehash and reproduce her story, to kill her again and again, but not enough to see a pattern. She is always singular, an anomaly, the juicy new mystery’ (2018: 56). Images of beautiful dead girls and women are so common in popular culture that they, in a sense, become invisible. Or, rather, the problematic nature of the constant display of the aestheticised/eroticised bodies of dead girls and women, some of whom are victims of femicide, is made invisible. Kristin Martin, in ‘Why We Love—and Need to Leave Behind—Dead Girl Stories’ (2018), explains that narratives about dead girls and women tend to be problematic because ‘the way we tell them permits us to look away from obvious patterns. It’s not doing us any good to keep rehashing these stories if we refuse to pay attention to the ways our culture is complicit in killing women’ (Martin 2018). Focusing on the murder of a girl or woman—for instance, a victim of femicide—as if it were an isolated event, something spectacular and unusual, prevents artists, texts, and audiences from engaging with larger systemic and cultural problems, such as misogyny, misogynoir, transmisogyny, and transmisogynoir, for example.[3]

The photo of McHale’s corpse also embodies a trope I refer to as the Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman, which dominates U.S. and Western European culture.[4] The term applies to real-life as well as fictional victims, and the trope appears across different genres and media, such as horror, true crime, poetry, fairy tales, and more. The Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman can be beautiful before her death and/or after/in death. Some victims, such as the real-life murder victims Hazel Drew, whose bloated body was found in Teal’s Pond in Sand Lake, New York, in 1908, and Elizabeth Short (“the Black Dahlia”), whose ‘nude and mutilated body’ (Ellroy 2011: 87) was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles in 1947, are celebrated for the beauty they embodied before they died. In contrast, the corpses of other white female victims, such as the iconic image of the beautiful, dead Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks and Anna Bergdahl in the first episode of season one of the Finnish crime series Karrpi (2018-2021), who is found wrapped in clear plastic (conjuring up the image of Laura Palmer) and posed like a bride, holding a bouquet of white Calla lilies, are framed as aesthetic objects.

Here, I account for how others have termed and defined the trope and how the aspect of Whiteness has often been overlooked. I unpack the different elements of the trope and trace the trope (as a recurring figure in popular culture) back to Edgar Allan Poe, whose conflation of (white female) beauty and death reverberates through U.S. and Western European cultural production. I use Twin Peaks/Laura Palmer as a guiding reference throughout the paper. It is crucial to grasp how the concept of Whiteness shapes the trope and how it has been utilised to privilege white victims—who are often framed as ‘perfect victims’—at the expense of other victims. This privileging has often been invisible to white researchers, white producers of cultural artefacts, and white audiences.

An examination of the trope necessitates taking a closer look at Whiteness and how it interweaves with concepts such as (in)visibility, beauty, femininity, innocence/purity, virginity, and (un)grievability. Typically, the so-called ‘perfect victim’ is white, beautiful, middle- or upper-class, cisgender, heterosexual, thin, able-bodied, and is either a virgin (according to normative definitions of cishet sex as penis-in-vagina penetration) or has had sex with so few men that she can still be considered ‘respectable.’ The focus on murdered cisgender heterosexual white girls and women makes it seem as if this group is more at risk than others and creates a hierarchy of victims, based on factors such as (but not limited to) gender, sexuality, and race.[5] Consequently, victims who do not fit into these categories become doubly invisible; they are invisible because they do not inhabit the characteristics of the ‘perfect victim,’ and their vulnerability is also made invisible. As Sara Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life (2017): ‘It is a white female body that is assumed to be vulnerable and in need of protection from others…. [A] brown body is not perceived as a fragile female body’ (2017: 34).

The victims who do receive attention—from the police, the media, artists, and the public—are often initially set up as innocent victims seemingly for the purpose of eventually being slut-shamed and victim-blamed in narratives that function as cautionary tales meant to socially condition girls and women. Contained in the trope of the Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman are aspects of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy that work on multiple levels and punish all girls and women while at the same time privileging white girls and women.

The (In)Visibility of Whiteness

‘Universal = White’  (Ahmed 2017).

Examining the concept of Whiteness means entering a world of racist/racial mathematics, which reveals that Whiteness as a construction functions as a binary opposition to Blackness and/or Otherness. Whiteness is often framed as personifying positive traits—whiteness = purity, for example. Conversely, Blackness has been linked with negative traits, often embodied by racist stereotypes. As Mikki Kendall writes in Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women White Feminists Forgot (2020), ‘I know that being a Black girl from the South Side of Chicago makes people assume certain things about me. The same is true of anyone who exists outside an artificial “norm” of middle class, white, straight, slim, able-bodied, etc.’ (2020: xvi). In White, originally published in 1997, Richard Dyer suggests that ‘[t]he equation of being white with being human secures a position of power’ (2004: 9), thus pointing to how Whiteness connotes universality and to how this equation, strengthened through cultural representations of Whiteness, helps maintain white supremacist power structures. Dyer also explains that race, as a concept, is something that appears to ‘afflict’ only persons who belong to categories other than ‘white.’ In contrast, Whiteness seems to slide off bodies belonging to that category. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), originally given as a series of lectures in 1990, Toni Morrison portrays Whiteness as slippery: ‘[I]n matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse’ (1993: 9). Whiteness, as a category, is mostly unmarked, while that which is set up in opposition to the norm is marked, for instance through the use of the adjective ‘Black.’ This (un)marking hides white privilege in plain sight (mainly from those who possess it).

Morrison poses that the ‘coded language’ (1993: 6) used by white writers, whose works she examines in-depth in Playing in the Dark, is ‘racial (not racist) language’ (1993: xii), thereby pointing out that works of literature may become vehicles for white supremacy, although the writer may not have intended this. Morrison asserts that whereas African Americans[6] may not be depicted in or only appear as minor characters in ‘canonical American literature’ (1993: 5), their presence is felt in their apparent absence. Morrison’s idea that Blackness is a ‘shadow [that] hovers in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation’ (1993: 47) may be used to illustrate how, for example, the lack of Black characters in a TV show or a movie, such as Pleasantville (1998) (a movie about racism and discrimination that erases Americans who belong to categories other than ‘white’), and/or the use of Black token characters speak to the sinister quality inherent in white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy: when something is present through its absence, visible to those outside the norm but invisible to (or ignored by) those in power, it becomes harder to prove its existence.

While white people are overrepresented in U.S. and Western European cultural production, their Whiteness is most often not pointed out. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, in ‘The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Contemporary America’ (2012), refers to this phenomenon as a ‘racial grammar [which] is as important as all the visible practices and mechanisms of white supremacy’ (2012: 173). Bonilla-Silva mentions as an example of racial grammar the normalised (and therefore largely invisible) conception that ‘one can refer to black movies and black TV shows but not label movies and TV shows white when in fact most are’ (2012: 173). Similarly, in Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes (1992), Helen Benedict points to the key role the media plays in maintaining the idea of Whiteness as the norm: when the press covered the murders committed by the Hillside Strangler in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, ‘the race of minority girls was mentioned while that of white women was not’ (1992: 40). This practice creates and reinforces the illusion that ‘stories about whites [are] stories about all of us’ (Bonilla-Silva 2012: 177). In her analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, in Playing in the Dark, Morrison summarises how the absent adjective ‘white’ functions in narratives: ‘Eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so’ (1993: 72). The absence of the adjective denoting Whiteness hides the white supremacist logic contained in that absence. Clara Juncker, in Circling Marilyn: Text Body Performance (2010), refers to Whiteness as having ‘no mark, no history, no community—a generic existence with nothingness always around’ (2010: 90). This idea of Whiteness as nothingness—as unmarked, absent, and invisible—is evident in texts where a person’s Whiteness is not addressed directly (whereas the skin color and/or racialised identity of other characters is commented on). The missing adjective ‘white’ at the same time hides and centres whiteness and signals that this text is about the (white) norm or ‘the average (white) American.’

The Most Poetical Topic

In a U.S. and Western European context, Whiteness resides as an invisible element in the adjective ‘beautiful,’ and cultural production is dominated by and builds on the conception of Whiteness as beauty, or beauty as Whiteness. Historically speaking, Whiteness has been equated with normative ideas about femininity, which Marilyn Frye addresses in ‘On Being White: Thinking Toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy’ (1983), when she states that ‘in the culture I was born and reared in, the word “woman” means white woman’ (1983: 117). Whiteness exists both in the space/gap between ‘beautiful’ and ‘woman’ as well as within the adjective ‘beautiful’ and the noun ‘woman’ in Edgar Allan Poe’s oft-quoted phrase from his 1846 essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition’: ‘the death, then, of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world’ (1993: 109).

Poe’s quote has left an indelible mark on U.S. and Western European cultural production, and quoting it in a text that examines how (white) female beauty and death/murder are often linked in various kinds of texts seems almost cliché. However, the quote proves central to contemporary discourse surrounding the phenomenon. Including the quote creates a dialogue not only with Poe but also with other scholars and artists who cite it in their work. For instance, Bronfen devotes an entire chapter of her book to Poe’s ‘famous proposition’ (1992: 59).[7] The quote also appears as an epigraph in Ron Hughes’s 2017 self-published true crime book Who Killed Hazel Drew: Unraveling Clues to the Tragic Murder of a Pretty Servant Girl and Abigayle Anne Claggett’s 2020 article ‘“The Death of a Beautiful Woman”: Women’s Suicide by Drowning in 19th Century American Literature,’ and it is referenced in Amy Gilman Srebnick’s The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (1995), Daniel Stashower’s The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder (2007), and McCormack’s Women in the Picture (2021). Further, Maggie Nelson includes and comments on the quote in her poetry collection Jane: A Murder (2005), in which she explores the 1969 murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer, in Michigan. While not specified, all these victims are white, of course, thus affirming the idea that Whiteness, beauty, and death appear to be inextricably linked in U.S. and Western European popular culture.

The recurring references, direct or indirect, to Poe’s famous quote, as well as myths that have been constructed around him as, for instance, the inventor of the modern detective story, testify to his cultural significance, especially when it comes to narratives that center on dying/dead girls and women who live up to Eurocentric, cisheteronormative, and ableist beauty ideals. While the figure of the beautiful (white) female corpse did not originate with Poe but can be traced further back, to fairytales and murder ballads, for instance, Poe seems to have exploded the trope.

Drawing on Poe’s quote, Bronfen muses on the paradox inherent in the idea of the female corpse as an aesthetically pleasing object, as symbolic of tragedy, and as an embodiment of the realities of death—an example of ‘the utmost of abjection’ (Kristeva 1982: 4), as Julia Kristeva writes in The Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection (1982). Bronfen points to the lack of cohesion between equating aesthetics with death, which usually signifies the putrification of the physical body: ‘Equally a contradiction in terms is the combination of “beautiful”, “poetical” and “death”, since death is a decomposition of forms, the breaking of aesthetic unity’ (1992: 60). Poe’s quote contains a strange dynamic between the process of poetic composition and the concept of decomposition, which death naturally entails. However, in a cultural artefact, the disintegration of the corpse can be suspended forever, and beauty and youth can be preserved, creating the illusion that death does not equal the breaking down of the body. As Bronfen suggests, art offers a safe space for human beings to reflect on their fear of death: ‘We invest in images of wholeness, purity and the immaculate owing to our fear of dissolution and decay’ (1922: 62). Beauty, as personified by a dead woman, distracts humans from the idea that death is perhaps more closely aligned with putrescence than with beauty, if beauty signifies the body as whole/unfragmented. Poe’s ideal woman exists only in the abstract, in the world he created in his poems and stories, since no real-life woman can embody the paradoxical state of being eternally beautiful (unchanging) yet dead (disintegrating) at once.

Beautiful, dead (white) girls and women, kept in stasis in iconic images, become the ultimate erotic (and inanimate) objects, because they never age or change. At the same time, dead girls and women, like dolls, have no agency and can be made to fulfil every fantasy, including those involving a lack of consent, as exemplified by the movies Deadgirl (2008) and The Corpse of Anna Fritz (2015). In the two films, the white female cadaver is framed as the ultimate, passive sexualised object, as seen through the eyes of the cisgender heterosexual male rapists. Necrophilia is hinted at but ultimately avoided, because the rape victims are not truly dead—the dead girl in Deadgirl is a zombie-like creature, dead-but-not-quite-dead, while Anna Fritz is presumed dead but wakes up while she is raped in the morgue.

The Laura Syndrome

The cultural phenomenon of the Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman is complex and multi-layered, revealing how aspects such as race, gender, class, and sexuality pull in opposite directions, leaving the trope suspended between contrasting/contradictory constructions and readings. The trope haunts texts across geographical boundaries and seems to have been developed and maintained through a constant interweaving of real-life events and fiction and through exchanges back and forth across the Atlantic. For instance, both the 1908 murder of Hazel Drew in New York and the life and death of Marilyn Monroe inspired David Lynch and Mark Frost’s TV series Twin Peaks, which premiered in 1990. One of the most iconic images in U.S. popular culture is that of the dead Laura Palmer, wrapped in clear plastic, her bluish face exposed shortly after the discovery of her corpse at the beginning of the pilot episode. Laura has a peaceful look on her face, and, apart from some blood on the plastic that covers her body, her appearance does not hint at the brutality of her murder. Instead, her corpse is presented as an aesthetically pleasing and attractive object that provokes tears as well as a (necrophiliac) desire, felt by numerous men in the series, to be close to her body. The cultural significance of Twin Peaks is undeniable. The series is referenced in music (‘Fuck Twin Peaks!’ (1992) by Bikini Kill) and in video games (Life Is Strange (2015)), and in 2017—just in time for the premiere of season three of Twin Peaks—Funko released a series of Twin Peaks Pop! vinyl figures, including a bizarre piece of merchandise: Laura Palmer, as a cutesy corpse, naked and wrapped in plastic.

Bolin explains in Dead Girls that Twin Peaks ‘spawned a genre’ (Bolin 14), which she refers to as ‘the Dead Girl Show’ (1). Twin Peaks reverberates through the Danish Nordic noir series Forbrydelsen (2007), especially in the pilot episode, which shares a structure very similar to the Twin Peaks pilot. In 2011, Forbrydelsen was remade as the U.S. series The Killing, which brought the story of the beautiful dead white girl back to the state of Washington, where Twin Peaks also takes place. The Twin Peaks reference was made obvious in a question posed on the poster for The Killing—‘Who killed Rosie Larsen?’—which mimics the question everyone asked in 1990: ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ In ‘She’s Dead, Wrapped in Plastic: On TV, the Only Good Girl Is a Dead Girl’ (2017), Jennifer Chesak points to the cultural legacy of Twin Peaks, as she wonders: ‘Since 1990, dozens of women … have died in our living rooms. What is it about dead girls that draws so many people in?’ (Chesak 2017). Chesak explains how series such as Veronica Mars (2004-2019), Pretty Little Liars (2010-2017), The Fall (2013-2016), and 13 Reasons Why (2017-2020) seem to follow the same structure, which can be traced back to Twin Peaks. Bolin echoes Chesak when asserting that many subsequent shows adhere to the same formula: ‘All Dead Girl Shows begin with the discovery of the murdered body of the young woman’ (2018: 14). When watching The Killing, audiences perhaps sense this “coming full circle” of the Dead Girl Show but may be unable to articulate the feeling that the same narrative appears to be told over and over again, by the media, in the pages of books, and on-screen—the story of the tragic, sometimes brutal, death of a beautiful white girl or woman.

The influence of Poe’s quote lives on in indirect references, intentional or not, in various crime narratives, including through Laura Palmer’s aesthetically pleasing corpse in Twin Peaks. The pilot episode almost functions as a treatise on Poe’s famous quote, with Laura Palmer personifying Poe’s ‘most poetical topic’ (Poe 1993: 109). In Chris Rodley’s Lynch on Lynch (2005), Lynch discusses how an adaptation of Goddess, Anthony Summers’s 1985 biography on Marilyn Monroe, morphed into the fictional tale of Twin Peaks. Lynch reveals that he ‘loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn’t know if I liked it being a real story’ (Rodley 2005: 156). The ‘woman in trouble’ may be viewed as Lynch’s version of Poe’s beautiful dead/dying woman. Although not all of Lynch’s ‘women in trouble’ are dead, many of them, such as Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet (1986) and various characters in Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), can be seen as being in close proximity to death because their lives are somehow threatened. Lynch has translated this idealised character, which personifies the linking of white femininity and beauty with death and/or the threat of death/violence, into pages of scripts and onto the screen.

In Room to Dream (2018), the memoir/biography co-written by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna, the ‘woman in trouble’ steps into Lynch’s life as a real-life person in one of his childhood memories: ‘[O]ut of the darkness—it was so incredible—came this nude woman with white skin…. [I]t seemed to me that her skin was the colour of milk, and she had a bloodied mouth…. I wanted to help her, but I was young and didn’t know what to do…. She was scared and beaten up, but even though she was traumatised, she was beautiful’ (2018: 26). Lynch’s use of light versus dark perhaps hints at the duality of the memory, which is traumatic and exciting and erotic. Lynch also draws on the dichotomy of light/dark to set the mood for the description of his encounter with the (white) ‘woman in trouble’: ‘in the fifties in small towns like Boise, there were streetlights, but they were dimmer, and it was much darker. It makes night kind of magical because things just go into black’ (Lynch and McKenna 2018: 26). The word ‘magical’ adds to the unreal quality of the recollection and suggests that Lynch’s occupation lends a bit of “movie magic” to the narrative.

In White, Dyer explains that the ‘aesthetic technology’ (2004: 83) of photography and film has always favoured white people; it is a ‘media of light’ (2004: 83). Dyer lists examples of how lighting is often adjusted to make white people stand out, while Black people almost blend in with the (dark) background. He describes how the film media has often gifted white women with a ‘characteristic glow’ (Dyer 2004: 87), and that they are also likely to appear more white/bright than white men. Thus, the film media often creates a contrast between light and dark and constructs femininity and beauty as associated with light and Whiteness. Dyer details scenes from various films in which light emanates from a white woman (often lit from behind); she appears to bring light into the darkness, accentuating her brightness/whiteness. Her glowing body speaks to the privileged status of white girls and women in the beauty hierarchy. Perhaps drawing on the ‘movie lighting hierarchies’ (Dyer 2004: 102) inherent to moviemaking, Lynch sets the scene for the beautiful white woman to emerge from the shadows as a beacon of light, thus echoing Dyer’s description of the glowing white female body.

Possibly, in Lynch’s eyes, the woman is beautiful because she is traumatised; she embodies the coupling of Whiteness, beauty, and trauma that characterises his cinematic career. The image also conjures the figure of Ronette Pulaski, in Twin Peaks, walking on the bridge, wearing a stained and torn white slip, clearly beaten up and traumatised. The dream-like quality of Lynch’s work testifies to the trope’s unreal quality: she is a (white cishet male) fantasy. As Bolin suggests in Dead Girls, ‘American boys in their grieving and longing invented their dream girl, the Dead Girl’ (2018: 10). Lynch’s longing for the ‘woman in trouble’ of his childhood, along with similar figures he encountered in films, in turn led to the creation of Laura Palmer, perhaps the most iconic Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman.

Lynch’s fixation on the ‘woman in trouble’ is reflected in Agent Cooper’s obsession with the dead Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, which also mirrors Detective Mark McPherson’s obsession with the (presumably) murdered Laura Hunt in Vera Caspary’s noir novel Laura from 1942 that was adapted into a movie by Otto Preminger in 1944. Twin Peaks directly references Laura using names that appear in the novel/movie—Lydecker and Waldo, for instance— and thus intends for audiences to draw parallels between the series and the noir classic. In My Dark Places: An L.A. Crime Memoir, originally published in 1996, James Ellroy addresses the cultural significance of Caspary’s/Preminger’s Laura when he refers to the real-life and fictional obsession police detectives have with dead white women as ‘the Laura Syndrome’ (2004: 191). Ellroy explains that ‘[h]omicide detectives [in Los Angeles] loved the movie, Laura. A cop gets obsessed with the murder victim and finds out she’s alive. She’s beautiful and mysterious. She falls in love with the cop’ (2004: 191). In numerous crime narratives, there is an erotic binding between the white cishet male investigator and the dead white girl/woman. White cishet male killers, detectives, coroners/forensic pathologists and (real-life and fictional) artists often mirror each other, through their attempt to solve the Mystery of Woman’ by taking her apart through murder and/or dissecting her life, death, and body. Thus, white cishet men can take on many roles that circle around the Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman, who is always at the centre of these stories but also out of focus and silenced.

The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is a tour de force of naked, heartbreaking grief, often bordering on or crossing into melodrama. The episode gives viewers front-row access to the pain experienced by Laura’s parents, Sarah and Leland Palmer, or, rather, white upper-middle-class parental grief. At the high school, Principal Wolchezk announces over the speaker that Laura has died and says that ‘[t]his is a terrible moment for all of us,’ thus framing Laura’s death as a collective loss. Laura’s best friend, Donna Hayward, is comforted by a group of girls from her class, and this scene exemplifies that Laura’s life was interwoven with networks of care/caring that we tend to associate with lives that are ‘worth living.’ In contrast, the life of the killer’s first victim, the transient seventeen-year-old sex worker and waitress Teresa Banks, has become unravelled from the social fabric, and her death, as Agent Cooper asserts at the town hall meeting in the pilot episode, ‘wasn’t even news, until [the day Laura Palmer died].’ Lynch’s 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me builds on this idea of Banks as having no network and a sort of “un-life”: Sheriff Cable says that ‘Banks was a drifter, and nobody knew her,’ while Special Agent Desmond observes that ‘[n]o one came to claim the body. No next of kin.’

In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed describes persons who occupy precarious positions in society as ‘[l]iving on the edge: a life lived as a fragile thread that keeps unraveling; when life becomes an effort to hold on to what keeps unraveling’ (2017: 238). Ahmed argues that we are taught to distinguish ‘between [people] who matter and those who do not’ (2017: 32). For instance, when it comes to homeless people, we learn to ‘screen out not only their suffering but their very existence’ (2017: 32). Ahmed’s ‘unraveling lives’ echo Judith Butler’s examinations of ‘[u]ngrievable lives’ (Butler 2016: xix) in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? from 2009. In Frames of War, Butler argues that Israel frames Palestinian children as not living lives ‘worth living, worth sheltering, and worth grieving’ (2016: xxvii) and that ‘[w]e are asked to believe that those children are not really children, are not really alive’ (2016: xxvii). This idea may be extended to include persons perceived as existing outside of or at the borders of society, such as homeless persons, sex workers, victims of trafficking, and persons with substance misuse disorder. In true crime and crime fiction, these groups are often cast as murder victims and portrayed as almost already dead or living a life that is considered ‘a shadow life’ (Butler 2016: xxix), because their lives are somehow non-normative. Historically speaking, Black, brown, and Indigenous bodies, for example, have been depicted as less grievable than white bodies, because they have been defined by their non-whiteness. In ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness,’ Ahmed addresses how framing Whiteness as the norm ddehumanisesthose who fall out of that category: ‘If to be human is to be white, then to be not white is to inhabit the negative: it is to be “not.” The pressure of this “not” is another way of describing the social and existential realities of racism’ (2007: 161). However, when persons read as white somehow transgress against the (white) norm, they are expelled from Whiteness (and thus from ‘humanity’) so as not to taint ‘true whiteness.’

Whereas Laura’s corpse is not presented as abject, Teresa’s cadaver is clearly marked by the reality of death—her eyes and mouth are open, in terror, her skin is dirty, and her hair is messy and grimy. Banks seems to embody the concept of the ‘Dead Hooker in a Dumpster,’ a trope seen in, for instance, true crime books such as Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery (2013) and Christine Pelisek’s The Grim Sleeper: The Lost Women of South Central (2012), crime novels such as Walter Moseley’s White Butterfly from 1992 and Jess Walter’s Over Tumbled Graves (2001), and in ‘Man Up,’ a 2011 episode of the crime series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. In these narratives, the bodies of sex workers have been “thrown away like trash”—sometimes they are even found in a trash can or dumpster. When a narrative uses this trope, the victim is instantly framed as less grievable, and this informs how investigators discuss the victim and the case.

The contrast in the depiction of Laura’s corpse and Teresa’s corpse hints at the hierarchy embedded in the trope of the Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman. Laura is collectively mourned, in part because of her social status: she is a white, upper-middle-class high school girl, whereas Teresa lives in a trailer park and is clearly marked as ‘white trash.’ The concept of ‘white trash’ serves to distance white people, in general, from white persons who somehow deviate from the (white) norm. Casting poor white persons as Others—as ‘less than white’ (Hurley 2002: 252), as Andrew Hurley writes in Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture (2002)—ensures that ‘true whiteness’ can still be associated with morality, respectability, and other traits that are used to uphold white supremacy. Laura also did sex work, but her social status exempts her from being framed as ungrievable. Her secret life shocks audiences as well as the residents of Twin Peaks because her social status is not framed as synonymous with criminal behaviour. Laura is a ‘good girl gone bad,’ whereas Teresa is merely depicted as a ‘bad girl.’

The grief displayed in the pilot episode of Twin Peaks appears excessive compared to the overall dispassionate response to Teresa Banks’s murder. Consequently, ‘the Laura syndrome’ generated by Twin Peaks—the obsession, in the series as well as in U.S. popular culture, with Laura’s life, death, and body—accentuates the lack of care that ccharacterisesBanks’s life and death. Whereas Laura is constantly conjured up in the series, Teresa disappears from the narrative and is only mentioned in connection with Laura’s murder; i.e., Teresa’s life and death only gain value through her association with Laura Palmer, the quintessential Beautiful Dead White Girl.

(Re)Naming the Trope

The obsession with beautiful dead white girls and women in U.S. and Western European popular culture has been given different monikers, most of which leave out the aspect of Whiteness. A close examination of Bronfen’s groundbreaking study reveals how the role played by Whiteness in the construction of female beauty ideals and the framing of the female corpse as having aesthetic properties has also been made invisible and has not been explored in-depth. In White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993), Ruth Frankenberg explains that ‘[a]mong the effects on white people both of race privilege and of the dominance of whiteness are their seeming normativity, their structured invisibility’ (1993: 6). Dyer, in White, expands on this idea: ‘Whites are everywhere in representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites’ (2004: 3). Kendall, in Hood Feminism, elaborates: ‘In general, white women are taught to think of whiteness as default, of race as something to ignore’ (2020: 5). While Bronfen homes in on the intense focus on female corpses in U.S. and Western European cultural production, she overlooks the ubiquity or overrepresentation of dead white girls and women and how Whiteness informs what/who is perceived as beautiful and/or as having an aesthetically pleasing quality, according to Eurocentric ideas about beauty and femininity. Instead, Bronfen refers to the phenomenon she explores as ‘the feminine-death-figure’ (1992: xiv) and ‘the superlatively beautiful, desirable feminine corpse’ (1992: 64), terms that render Whiteness invisible. Frankenberg stresses the effect that marking Whiteness has: ‘Naming “whiteness” displaces it from the unmarked, unnamed status that is itself an effect of its dominance’ (1993: 6). Thus, when Morrison ‘names whiteness’ and makes Eddy’s Whiteness visible, she unmasks how Whiteness is allowed to dominate through discourse, through its unmarkedness, and how Whiteness is at the same time hypervisible, because it has been constructed as the norm, and invisible, because that which stands in opposition to the norm is made visible and marked through its contrast to the norm.

Bolin’s Dead Girls addresses the overrepresentation of white victims and how the female corpse is used as a vehicle for white supremacy: ‘Dead Girls help us work out our complicated feelings about the privileged status of white women in our culture’ (2018: 22). Whereas Bolin does point out that in Dead Girl Shows, ‘[t]he white girl becomes the highest sacrifice, the virgin martyr’ (2018: 23), the term ‘the Dead Girl’ makes Whiteness invisible. Similarly, Chesak discusses how integral Whiteness is to the trope— ‘Like much of TV, the dead girl is also incredibly whitewashed. Rarely, if ever, does a show revolve around solving the death of a woman of colour, which perpetuates the awful idea that they’re disposable’ (Chesak 2017)—but she also does not add the adjective “white” to the term ‘[t]he dead girl trope’ (Chesak 2017).

To highlight the overrepresentation and privileging of white victims, and in the hope of ‘dismantling the system,’ I refer to the trope as the Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman. I place ‘White’ and ‘Girl/Woman’ next to each other to stress the link between race and gender and how essential this link is to the privileging of some victims at the expense of others. By adding the adjective/racial marker ‘White’— and thus creating the term the Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman—I make Whiteness visible. However, in doing so, I risk recentering Whiteness, as Ahmed points out in ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’ (2007). Perhaps this attests to the power, treachery, and slippery nature of Whiteness: in pointing out how Whiteness is reproduced, I may end up reproducing the very mechanisms I aim to critique.

The media assesses female victims according to how ‘attractive’ they are, based on Eurocentric, fatphobic, ageist, and ableist beauty standards, and this assessment influences the narrative. The intersection within the Eurocentric beauty ideal excludes various bodies, marking them as outside the norm. As Mona Eltahawy asserts in The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls (2019), ‘Patriarchy uses attention as a reward for those it anoints as worthy: The White. The Thin. The cisgender. The feminine. The able-bodied’ (2019: 46). Eltahawy further comments on how Whiteness and femininity are linked with the cisgender female body (the ‘norm’): ‘The less a trans woman “passes,” the more violence she is subjected to. The further one is away from Whiteness and thinness, the further from “beautiful,” according to the patriarchy and its cisgender standards, the less deserving of attention’ (2019: 47). In Virgin or Vamp, Benedict writes that young, female victims who are ‘white, good-looking and wealthy’ (1992: 8) receive a lot of attention because (supposedly) ‘they fit the formula that sells papers’ (1992: 8). Maggie Nelson, in The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, originally published in 2007, refers to the media’s privileging of white female victims as ‘the dead-white-girl-of-the-week club’ (2017: 174), a term that directly addresses the issue of Whiteness. This club, Nelson remarks, includes ‘JonBenét Ramsay, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy, [and] Natalee Holloway’ (2017: 174),[8] whom Nelson defines as ‘[g]irls whose lives and deaths, judging by airtime, apparently matter more than all murdered, missing, and suffering brown people combined’ (2017: 174). Nelson’s critique seems poignant still, considering the time and attention awarded (by the police, the media and the public) to, for instance, the March 2021 kidnapping and murder of Sarah Everard in London, England, and the August 2021 murder of Gabrielle ‘Gabby’ Venora Petito in Wyoming, when compared to, for example, how little attention the 2012 disappearance of Sage Smith, a Black transgender woman from Charlottesville, Virginia, got, as addressed by Emma Copley Eisenberg in ‘“I Am a Girl Now,” Sage Smith Wrote. Then She Went Missing’ (2020), or the lack of attention awarded to missing and/or murdered First Nation girls and women in Canada and the Black victims of the Grim Sleeper in Los Angeles. This phenomenon, as Sarah Stillman points out in ‘“The Missing White Girl Syndrome”: Disappeared Women and Media Activism’ (2007), is referred to as ‘The missing white girl syndrome’ (2007: 492), a term coined by journalist Gwen Ifill at the ‘Unity: Journalists of Color’ conference in 2004,[9] or ‘The missing pretty girl syndrome’ (2007: 494). These two terms evince how the adjectives ‘white’ and ‘pretty’ often prove interchangeable, according to a logic based on white supremacist beauty ideals.

After having examined transcripts from the crime show Nancy Grace (2005-2016), Bonilla-Silva, in ‘The Invisible Weight of Whiteness,’ concludes that in discourse surrounding female murder victims, the adjective ‘beautiful’ is often employed to create a racist/racial hierarchy of female victims of various forms of violence: ‘[I]n cases dealing with the disappearance of young white women, the adjective is often there, but when the victim is a black or Latino woman, they are seldom discussed (and they too are victims of violence) and, when discussed, the adjective is not there’ (2012: 177). The linking of Whiteness with adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘pretty’ helps maintain the (in)visibility of Whiteness and the binary construction of white = beautiful versus Black/Other = ugly/less beautiful. As bell hooks writes in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (2015), ‘In a white supremacist sexist society all women’s bodies are devalued, but white women’s bodies are more valued than those of women of color’ (2015: 62). Because (white) audiences are used to linking beauty with Whiteness and Whiteness with the norm, they might automatically envision a dead white girl or woman when reading the term ‘the beautiful dead girl.’

In Mindhunter: Inside the FBI Elite Serial Crime Unit, originally published in 1995, former FBI profiler John Douglass and co-writer Mark Olshaker continually attach adjectives to white female murder victims to signal how attractive they are. They refer to white female victims as ‘beautiful innocent victims’ (2006: 74), ‘beautiful California coeds’ (2006: 107), ‘a beautiful and vivacious high school senior’ (2006: 296), and ‘[a] pretty fourteen-year-old girl’ (2006: 35). The adjectives ‘beautiful’ and ‘pretty’ and the absence of adjectives alluding to the victims’ skin color and/or rracialisedidentity suggest that these victims are all white. In Tami Hoag’s serial killer novel Deeper than the Dead, originally published in 2010, the victim’s skin colour is implied, but Whiteness is not directly addressed: ‘At first, all Tommy could see was that the woman was pretty. She looked peaceful, like in The Lady in the Lake. Her skin was pale and kind of blue. Her eyes were closed’ (2016: 9). Whiteness, here, is again signalled by the adjective ‘pretty.’ The words ‘pale’ and ‘blue’ hint at Whiteness but do not directly describe the dead woman as white. These adjectives also echo the image of the dead Laura Palmer and thus create an intertextual link between Hoag’s novel and Twin Peaks. Whiteness, in these examples, is circled, or danced around, rather than specifically marked.

In August 1990, Esquire named Laura Palmer ‘Woman of the Year’ (Vega 1990: 118). The cover features an image of Sheryl Lee, who was twenty-three years old when the series premiered, portraying the seventeen-year-old murdered teenager.[10] The cover line says: ‘SHE’S COLD! LAURA PALMER A little stiff at parties, but then, so are we!’ The feature is not on Sheryl Lee, the actor, but on a fictional dead white girl, who is awarded the title ‘Woman of the Year,’ even though, in some U.S. states, she would be below the age of consent. The images of Lee as Palmer show ‘Laura’ as alive, somehow resurrected. Her look signals ‘glamour shot’ rather than ‘morgue’ —her skin is no longer bluish, and her hair and makeup are styled. However, the clear plastic (which reveals her right nipple) wrapped around her body references the iconic image of Laura as a corpse from the pilot episode. There is a discrepancy between the photo, which depicts Lee, a grown-up woman, and the text, which refers to and ssexualisesthe dead fictional teenager. The photos in Esquire appear to depict a liminal being, caught in between fiction and reality, life and death, and girlhood and womanhood. The article exemplifies the sexualisation of girls in popular culture, which Jessica Valenti addresses in The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women (2010): ‘The most desirable women aren’t women at all—they’re girls’ (2010: 62). Esquire sets up Laura as both a schoolgirl—‘a sweet blond prom queen’ (Vega 1990: 118)—and a grown woman with a voracious sexual appetite: ‘You were not only too much woman for one man, you were too much woman for one town’ (Vega 1990: 118). Using the term ‘woman’ llegitimisesthe ssexualisationof the teenager’s body, which dissociates this desire from pedophilia.

In her Editor’s Note to the 2020 essay collection Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession, Sarah Weinman refers to the phenomenon examined in this paper as ‘the trope of beautiful white dead girls’ (2020: xvii), a term that includes the aspect of Whiteness but then points to a tendency that is often also invisible, namely the problematic conflation of the nouns ‘girl’ and ‘woman.’ I decided to add the category of ‘Woman’ to the trope and to place a forward slash between ‘Girl’ and ‘Woman,’ because these two terms are often used interchangeably, and this tendency, as exemplified by the article in Esquire, holds special significance in the discourse surrounding violence done to girls and women; a seventeen-year-old (such as the fictional Laura Palmer) may be referred to as a woman to make the ssexualisationof her body and the desire, on behalf of adult men, to possess her body more palatable.

In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed declares: ‘You have to do more not to reproduce whiteness than not to intend to reproduce whiteness’ (2017: 150). In focusing so intensely on Whiteness and the privilege of white victims in this paper, I may unintentionally become complicit. To dismantle white cisheteropatriarchy, we need to be aware of the mechanisms and structures that maintain it. To build on Morrison’s conclusion in Playing in the Dark—‘Eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so’ (1993: 72)—we know that Poe’s most poetical topic is a dead white woman, and we know that the Dead Girl/the Beautiful/Pretty Dead Girl is white because their Whiteness is unmarked. The trope of the Beautiful Dead White Girl/Woman helps uphold a hierarchy of victims that privileges white victims above all others (while at the same time often slut-shaming and victim-blaming these same victims). Examining the trope and stressing how racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ageist, and ableist notions converge in this trope allows for new readings of various forms of texts—theoretical texts, such as Bronfen’s, true crime books, and crime fiction (novels, movies, and TV shows), for example—and, hopefully, encourages new forms of writings, too.

Notes

[1] This is a poem I wrote in June 2023 for this paper. Arts-Based Research is a method I often employ.

[2] The photo was taken by Robert C. Wiles and was originally published in Life on May 12, 1947, as ‘Picture of the week’ (pp. 42-43).

[3] The concepts of misogynoir, a term coined by Moya Bailey in 2008, transmisogyny, a term coined by Julia Serano in Whipping Girl (2007), and transmisogynoir, a term developed by writer and social critic Trudy, highlight the transphobic and racist mechanics behind the privileging of white cisgender heterosexual victims.

[4] I explore this trope in my dissertation, which I am currently working on, as well as in various articles, both in Danish and English. For more information, see the bibliography.

[5] This idea does not reflect reality. For example, as pointed out by Bernadine Y. Waller, Victoria A. Joseph, and Katherine M. Keyes in ‘Racial inequities in homicide rates and homicide methods among Black and White women aged 25-44 years in the USA, 1999-2020: a cross-sectional time series study’ (2024), ‘Although Black women represent only 10% of the overall female population, they account for 59% of murders in the USA’ (935).

[6] Morrison here refers to Black Americans or their ancestors from the African continent enslaved in the U.S.

[7] In Lolita, published in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov references Poe directly, through his resurrection of Virginia Clemm, Poe’s child bride and muse, in the figure of Humbert Humbert’s first love, Annabel Leigh, whose name echoes Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ (1849), a poem many critics, including Bronfen, believe is a tribute to Poe’s wife, who embodied the trope of the beautiful and young dead/dying white girl/woman. Virginia Clemm/Annabel Lee/Annabel Leigh is then mirrored in Dolores (Lolita) Haze, the primary object of Humbert’s nymphet obsession. Through Humbert, Nabokov also draws a direct link between Poe’s wife and Lolita, when Humbert writes: ‘Oh, Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s’ (107).

[8] Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped in 2002, at age fourteen, and held captive for nine months. She is still alive.

[9] Professor Sheri Parks at the University of Maryland has also used and popularised the term, for instance, in an interview with CNN in 2006, as pointed out by Kat Ferreira in ‘Reckoning with news media’s missing white woman syndrome’ (2021).

[10] In U.S. cultural production, adult actors often play teenage characters.