“A Flower in a Hard Rain”: Melodramatic Storytelling by, and About, Aileen Wuornos

Abstract

In one of her prison letters to childhood friend, Dawn Botkins, Aileen Wuornos feigns resignation about both her impending execution and her legacy. “Like a flower in a hard rain,” she claims, “I’ll let things go.” In fact, “letting go” of her story—at least those parts of it for which others clearly hungered—was something Wuornos ultimately would not or could not do. Instead of illumination, Wuornos’s letters feature an emotionally charged pattern that has been identified as “externalization,” wherein attentive members of her audience are fervently embraced only to be violently castigated. Ultimately unable to control the direction her story would take, Wuornos elected never to share it at all. Yet the heated “externalization” experts have attributed to her personality has been strangely mirrored in the ways commentators about Wuornos have approached one another.