Death and Feminism in a Nutshell
Frances Lee Glessner, Kitchen (room from afar). From The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Photo by Corinne May Botz. (Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery and Monacelli Press.)
Homicide. Suicide by hanging. A great deal of drinking, mainly of whiskey, mainly by men. Blood pooled on the floor. Chairs overturned. Many weapons: guns and knives and ropes. Burned Cabin, where a burned skeleton is barely visible, Dark Bathroom, which contains a dead woman in a bathtub beside an empty liquor bottle, and Unpapered Bedroom, in a boarding house where an unknown woman has been found dead.
In Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas, the world is harsh and dark and dangerous to women. “The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” her series of nineteen models from the fifties, are all crime scenes. Glessner Lee built the dioramas, she said, “to convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”
Glessner Lee with her nutshell diorama . Image courtesy Glessner House Museum, Chicago,
