An Evening With JonBenet Ramsey

by Walter A. Davis

Book Overview

An Evening With JonBen t Ramsey begins with a full-length play, Cowboy's Sweetheart, which imagines the life of a sexually abused and murdered child as it might have evolved had she lived. The play is followed by two essays which consider the JonBen t Ramsey case from a number of perspectives. The result is an incisive critique of the media and a compelling study of the psychological consequences of what is a national epidemic: the sexual...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595309682
• ISBN13: 9780595309689
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Many powerful truths...

Please ignore the hostile reviews for this book. They appear to have been written by Ramsey supporters, and are therefore hopelessly biased. The book is excellent, and one of the most pertinent truths relates to the way the Ramseys dehumanized their 'lady mannequin', and in hypersexualizing their tiny six-year-old princess, they not only put her on show for every pedophile to lust over, they also gave her a distorted sense of body image - one of Davis's critical points. With regard to the propaganda about 'the real killer', the reviewers appear to be talking about John Mark Karr, who was cleared of involvement in the JonBenet killing. The guy was a nut job. The other gross inaccuracy is the claim that 'the evidence' supports the Intruder theory, thus clearing the Ramseys. No, there has never ever been ANY clear evidence of an intruder. The only 'clues' that might have been factors were debunked years ago. It was effectively impossible for a killer who had such close and prolonged contact with the child, to not leave ANY certain DNA traces. There was no intruder.

asking the right questions

I just finished teaching this play to a group of college sophomores in a unit dealing with beauty and the body, and almost to a person, they found Davis' play (and collateral essays) to raise some decisive and thought-provoking questions. The play gets us to consider the possible consequences of having four and five year girls participate in beauty pageants that clearly sexualize them. What do these pageants do to the way such girls perceive their bodies? What might be the long term effects of having children perform in this way at such a young age? For whom are they really performing? How will they conceive or approach romantic intimacy? Davis' play examines these issues by way of the famous, unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsey, but the fish he is out to hook is actually much bigger. The play and essays go right to the heart of the way parents foist their own desires violently onto their children, the way our society stresses beauty, sexual allure and competition from the earliest of ages, and the way we have not yet really begun to contemplate or grieve over this phenomenon. Read this book next to Toni Morrison's _The Bluest Eye_ or Lucy Grealy's _Autobiography of a Face_ and you'll begin to see how corrosive our ideas about beauty really are--and how literature can give us the means to examine critically some truly disturbing trends.

The American Family

An Evening with JonBenét Ramsey examines mental, physical, and sexual abuse. This is not a whodunit but rather a why did it happen. As the accompanying essay "There Is Another Court" asserts, legally, we cannot know what happened to this child, but, psychologically, we can. The play presents a theory of the traumatic family, not of the Ramseys, but of the American family at the end of the century in which our culture has wed sexuality and deathwork. The Bradys portrayed here are not the whitewashed bunch we nostalgically dream of being, but rather the perverse, if not psychotic, nightmare reality that undergirds such dreams as ours. This is what George and Martha of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? could have turned into had they actually had children.The play operates on two levels, in two times. On one level, in the past, the play presents a psychoanalytical theory of why parents abuse their children: the parent who does not know how to mourn the death of one child irrepressibly demands solace from the other child and the parent who lives in a state of shattered dreams (and broken sexuality) vents an uncontrollable rage at the child for simply being full of innocent potential. In their inability to confront the death of their (hopeless) dream of being, the parents foreclose upon compassion and install a perverse cruelty as the way they relate to their children. On the second level, in the future, the play portrays the psyche of one who has survived this cruelty. The child victim grows up to become a tragic, existentialist heroine, forever doomed to tap into the cruel deathwork implicit in her subsequent sexual relationships as well as exposing her parents for the aggressive and violent narcissists that they truly are.

Necessary Reading

I have a difficult time watching movies or reading stories that contain painful or troubling images because those images tend to stay with me for a long, long time. So for me to read a serious literary work on an emotionally provocative topic, it has to be extremely good, extremely worth the pain, or I won't do it. Toni Morrison and William Faulkner, I have found, are always worth the pain. In fact, they have taught me that letting myself feel pain in order to know something of the pain my fellow human beings have come through, is an honorable endeavor. That's how I feel about AN EVENING WITH JONBENET RAMSEY. Davis's play, and the commentaries that follow it, have taught me so much about the human heart--both about its most frightening capacities and about its most courageous possibilities--that I feel a better person for having read it.

wholesight

John Fowles wrote this startling sentence: "Wholesight: or all the rest is desolation." In our time, certainly a time of desolation, do not all of us search for "wholesight"? But what would wholesight be like if we found it? We know it would combine the imagination's ability to project and explore existential and emotional possibilities with reason's ability to deal with the recalcitrant world of facts. What is so surprising and original with Walter A. Davis's book, An Evening with JonBenet Ramsey, is that he shows us "wholesight" in two forms: as art and as essay.For those familiar with the comforts of partial perspectives, Davis's play is sure to be misinterpreted. His dramatic projection of JonBenet's life into a future gives us insights impossible in any other way; insights every bit as real as any of the facts he has so meticulously researched. In this short space, all I can say is that for those willing to undergo the demands, or what Davis calls the "agon" of real art, the play is an experience of exceptional power.I found the essays, as orginal, and in some ways, as powerful as the play. For once again, they show this elusive qualilty of "wholesight": not just showing multiple perspectives, but a fusion of perspectives. Read the essays and you will see what I mean.If you are, like me, in search of a new way of thinking about the issues of our time, even in search of a new ethic--one based on wholesight, then you cannot find a better, more exemplary work.