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Chapter Six
A Pharmakon, a Pharmakos and a Pure Woman

Much of the Medical testimony during the trials would have stood in stark contrast to this tale of romantic friendship. Not only did the juries hear how the comatose Thelma was supported to the lavatory and then later removed from her urine and menstrual-blood-soaked bedclothes to be taken to hospital, but they had to sit through what must have been for lay people some rather disturbing scientific testimony. The government analyst, Griffin, began by testifying that

On 16th April 1935 I received from Det. Serg. Meiklejohn 3 jars containing certain parts of a human body, parts of the brain, liver, spleen, 2 kidneys, stomach and contents. The liver spleen and kidneys were in one jar, and the others in separate jars. I also received 3 test tubes containing urine taken from body and a bottle of urine (Ex. 20) labelled 'Mrs T. Mareo. Urine 15/ 4/35'. Another bottle Ex. 19 labelled 'Stomach lavage. Mrs Thelma Mareo'.¹

If the juries had only known, they would have recognised that such testimony resembled some of the 'found poems' or objets trouvees then being 'written' by the European avant-garde. But this was neither Paris nor London and, as Griffin explained, he

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was given 2 lbs of brain. I first put it through the mincer machine — the whole 2 lbs — It is probably a superior type of household mincer. It is thoroughly minced up and goes through a mesh of a 1/16th of an inch. It is then mixed, which is done with a spoon in a jar, thoroughly. This is the method always used in treating samples, according to standard textbooks. Having got my mixture, I took 1 1b out of the 2 lbs. I adopted the same performance with the case of the other organs where I did not have the whole amount. Except in case of the stomach lining, where I took the whole of it.²

At any time the mincing of parts of a woman's body according to some bizarre medical recipe by 'a superior type of household mincer' would be, despite its necessity, repellent for most people. This was probably especially the case during the 1930s when female identity was so strongly linked to notions of sexual and physical purity. Although the cults of domesticity and motherhood that derived from, or helped produce, such notions were prevalent in other Western societies, there is reason to suspect that they were particularly strong in New Zealand. After all, in comparison to most other Western countries, Pakeha New Zealand had a stronger middle class and a higher proportion of people from the evangelical denominations, both of which have been particularly susceptible to the kinds of discourses of female purity that emerged from about the eighteenth century onwards.³ The success of the 1890s feminist movement in gaining the vote for women before anywhere else in the world is one sign of the historical strength of such discourses. As Phillida Bunkle has shown, its main organisation, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, promulgated a world view that opposed female purity to dangerous 'male sexual energy'.⁴ Thus, from the 1880s onwards, according to Erik Olssen,

[A] small group of Protestant activists spelt out a new vision of an alcohol-free society from which the sexual double standard had been eradicated. As part of the new emphasis on purity, the home was elevated into an article of religious faith and Mother was reinvented as its guardian angel. The conjugal family became the family.⁵

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Such a vision was probably largely unaffected by either the challenge to traditional gender roles that occurred in Britain following the influx of women into the workforce during the Great War or by any kind of postwar sexual revolution.⁶ Significantly, it was in these decades that Truby King's Plunket Society partly succeeded in medicalising the 'vocation' of motherhood, thereby severely narrowing whatever radical potential the cult of female purity once had.⁷ Thus, in the year of the Mareo trials the Women's Weekly was able to proclaim that the New Zealand wife and mother was the 'Prime Minister' of her 'home'.⁸

In such a context the poisoning of a youngish wife by her much older cosmopolitan husband would probably have appeared especially disturbing. Many already regarded poisoners as somehow worse than other types of murderers. Meredith (the Crown Prosecutor), for example, told the second jury that '[a] poisoning case was the most insidious form of murder'.⁹ Somewhat later, an Attorney-General of New Zealand would explain that '[a]gainst open assault a man may defend himself. Against the poisoner he has no defence. The victim generally receives the poison from the hands of one they trust and love, and the only protection is the certainty of conviction and punishment'. Meredith would write in a book of legal reminiscences that 'those… words still stand true for most cases of poisoning'.¹⁰ Thus, a murderer who literally poisoned a 'pure' woman such as Thelma would have been regarded as an especially sinister figure.

Moreover, this particular murderer had not used a simple poison but a drug, and that at a time when there was a growing concern about such substances. Whereas for the ancient Greeks the word pharmakos had meant both medicine and poison, the nearest equivalent in English, 'drug', did not acquire such ambiguity until a handful of years before the Mareo trials. As one historian has pointed out in another context, 'drug' was defined in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary published in 1897 as only '[a]n original, simple medicinal substance, organic or inorganic, whether used by itself in its natural condition or prepared by art, or as an ingredient in a page 96medicine or medicament', and only by the time of the publication of the 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is there a record of the noun being 'often used synonymously for narcotics or poisonous substances', as well as for medicine.¹¹

Accordingly, during the first two decades of the century there were various international conventions on the issue of controlling the international drug trade. In response to one of these at The Hague in 1925, the New Zealand Government passed the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1927, regulating the exportation and importation of drugs such as opium, morphine, cocaine and cannabis and restricting their manufacture and sale. However, other dangerous drugs were still able to circulate too freely, at least according to Robin Hyde writing for the New Zealand Observer in July of 1932. A drug user herself (her supplier was a Queen Street pharmacist whom she referred to as Father Time and the Little Grey Man), Hyde reports that 'the depression has caused increased nervous strain, and has weakened the resistance of men and women who a few years ago would have shunned' drugs such as cocaine and morphine. However,

[v]eronal, the sleep-producing drug that is much in the public eye just now, is not yet down on New Zealand's black list of dangerous drugs, but it has been the cause of so many recent tragedies that the New Zealand Pharmacy Board is moving in the direction of having it so listed.

Every chemist in New Zealand has reason to know and fear the effect of veronal when it is rashly used, or administered by people who do not realise its deadly power. The Auckland district, in particular, has in the last few months acquired a veronal deathroll of which it cannot be proud. A young married woman died recently of an overdose: more recently still, in the north, a promising young medical man died from the same tragic cause.¹²

But veronal was not just unintentionally misused. For some years it had been a popular method of suicide, particularly amongst the literati. Both Eugene O'Neill (in 1912) and Virginia Woolf (in 1913), for example, had made serious attempts at dispatching themselves in this way; the latter, incidentally, only surviving page 97after having a dose pumped from her stomach of exactly the amount which allegedly killed Thelma. To guard against such misuse, the Poisons Act of 1934 came into force about two weeks before Thelma's death, ensuring that New Zealanders could no longer freely acquire certain drugs, including veronal, without a medical prescription, and as a consequence Mareo felt compelled to stock up.¹³

As the social significance of many drugs changed, so did the image of the person using them. During the same period, according to the historian referred to above, 'the image of the addict changed, from that of a middle-class victim accidentally addicted through medicinal use to that of a criminal or otherwise deviant individual who had turned to drugs for purely recreational reasons'.¹⁴ As Mareo's supporter, Melville Harcourt, explained,

when, during the course of the trial, it was revealed that Eric Mareo was a drug addict, the prejudice against him tightened considerably. You see, to those honest citizens from whom juries are selected there is something heinous about the very word 'drug' once it has been detached from its medical associations; they instinctively connect it with crime (it's useless, in contradiction, to cite some of the most luminous figures in literature that were addicts but assuredly not criminals), and there's no question that the fact that Eric Mareo was a self-confessed addict enormously depreciated his chances of an acquittal.¹⁵

But not only had Mareo supposedly murdered his talented wife with an apparently medicinal drug disguised in a cup of milk redolent with childhood associations, in the apparent safety of a suburban, middle-class home, he had also been posing as a dutiful and concerned husband. It was not just that his murder weapon of choice was a kind of pharmakos but that he was a kind of pharmakon, a word related to pharmakos that refers to a Greek citizen who is chosen to be a scapegoat. Like the pharmakon, Mareo was both a valued member of his community and yet also by virtue of his unusual profession outside ordinary society. He spoke with an English accent and hailed from Britain page 98at a time when Aucklanders would have thought of themselves as British, and yet he had changed his Germanic name to something that would have sounded vaguely Italian. Some sociologists have argued that it is not so much the strangeness or difference of certain social groups that produces prejudice as their ambiguous or ambivalent characteristics.¹⁶ We have suggested that Mareo's profession and manner would have provoked resentment, but there is also reason to suspect that it was his uncertain nationality and past that provoked suspicion. Like the Germans who in pre-WWI spy fiction posed as normal Englishmen, the Jews who looked just like gentiles in postwar antisemitic discourse, or, for that matter, Bela Lugosi's famous depiction in the 1931 film of Count Dracula as a displaced European aristocrat attired in black tie searching for fresh game and resembling the Auckland musician, Mareo was someone pretending to be something he wasn't. After the trials, the Observer published an article called, significantly, 'Mareo the Enigma', and even Harcourt conceded that

[M]oody and gay, passionate and fickle, charming and self- centred, [Mareo] could be all these; there was a protean quality about his personality that often puzzled even his friends and admirers.¹⁷

Like the drug with which he had poisoned Thelma, Mareo appeared to be a dangerous character precisely because of his ambiguous qualities.

Even the kinds of traits that we now admire would have confused many of the conventional social roles of the time. It seems, for example, that while he did most of the housework, this made him a dubious figure, at least according to a woman called Helen Frances Blagrove, the Mareos' landlady before they moved to Tenterden Avenue. She felt compelled to inform the Minister of Justice, in an unsolicited letter, that Mareo was 'a most funny and peculiar man', in part because he 'cleaned the windows for his wife [and] did most of the housework'.¹⁸ It also appears that Mareo was an affectionate father whose page 99devotion to his children was warmly returned. While New Zealand fathers were expected to be just as devoted to their children, most would not have spent anywhere near as much time looking after them. Nor of course would most New Zealand fathers have needed to have changed their home and country of residence so many times.

But why did Thelma's lack of interest in housework and her inability to get on with Betty not raise suspicions about her character? As O'Leary pointed out in his final address to the jury at the first trial, not only was Thelma a 'stepmother who knew little of how to care for boys', but she was an 'extremely nervous type' 'not suited to housework'.¹⁹ However, a younger woman married to a man who has children from some previous and rather dubious relationship is presumably not expected to display the usual maternal qualities. And, as for the fact that Thelma was clearly lacking a strong housework ethic, it seems that her 'bosom friend' was more than able to compensate. In an interview with Stark after the first trial, Truth did claim that Thelma had done 'her household duties', coached Graham for his matriculation exams and taught him the violin; but as though aware that it might be stretching credulity the paper dwelled largely on the domestic accomplishments of Stark. Her home, it discovers,

[I]s neat and comfortably-furnished, redolent of good housekeeping. The secret of that is simple. Freda's mother impresses as jolly and capable, and the girl - for Freda is essentially girlish in many of her ways - is similarly possessed of domestic ability. She performs her share of the household duties. Indeed, there were occasions during her friendship with Mrs Mareo that she could not find time to call on her actress friend, because there were tasks to be done at home.²⁰

Of course Stark was also a 'theatrical' and therefore someone potentially as beyond the pale as Mareo. However, it was probably more socially acceptable for a woman to be a 'theatrical' than a man, even though the entertainment world was undoubtedly male-dominated. As we have seen, the Herald's page 100music critic certainly believed that most people thought there was something 'unmanly' about being a musician, and, while a musical career was hardly a conventional choice for most women, it presumably represented less of a threat to their sexual identity. True, the realm of entertainment and high culture was within neither the public nor private spheres, in whose environs dwelt, respectively, such middle-class figures as the Breadwinner and the Angel of the House. The art gallery, concert or music hall, cinema and literary salon were situated within neither the home nor the workplace. However, books were read, music heard and photographs viewed in the home but virtually never in the workplace. As we have seen, in a society in which 'art' was both highly valued and viewed with hostility, it would be far easier for a woman to embody its positive aspects and a man its negative than vice versa.

Thus, while at the first trial O'Leary had asked Dr Walton whether Thelma was 'of an artistic temperament', to which the doctor answered '[y]ou might put it that way',²¹ he did not raise this issue at the second trial, and, apart from this brief exchange, Thelma's occupation of 'theatrical' was never directly associated with any kind of 'nervous' condition, despite the many obvious difficulties of her professional life. On the contrary, she was virtually never described in any of the newspapers without adjectives such as 'talented' and 'accomplished'. Although this was no doubt largely to bring out the tragedy of her death, it also creates the impression that such a woman could have had no reason either to kill herself or to place her life in jeopardy.

In contrast, the newspapers were unable to refer to Mareo's (usually 'diabolical') crime without also mentioning his 'brilliance'. Again, the main purpose of this contrast is to highlight the extraordinarily dramatic nature of his fall, but the implication is that there might be some kind of connection between artistic 'brilliance' and criminality. Harcourt claimed in his book about the trials that '[t]here are "types" whom it's almost impossible to associate with certain crimes', such as 'the genuine artist, the true dilettante, [who] will recoil from the callous, protracted business of poisoning'.²² But the fact that he page 101begins the section of his book specifically devoted to a defence of Mareo by making this point suggests that he might have been countering a popular belief - which has undoubtedly existed in European societies since the Romantics - that the 'artist' might be more prone than others to 'crime'. Certainly, the Controller- General of Prisons denied Harcourt's claim, pointing out that '[m]any of the most callous and diabolical murderers were supposedly gentle and refined', and then giving a list of some of the more famous refined and cultivated poisoners.²³ And, in response to the Observer article about the 'complex and contra- dictory aspects' of 'Mareo the Enigma', a correspondent arguing against the death penalty nevertheless claimed that there is a 'strong affinity' between the 'super-normal' or 'abnormal', of whom presumably the artistic Mareo is an example, and the insane and criminals.²⁴ Thus, while 'theatricals' and their families were different from 'ordinary' New Zealanders by virtue of their artistic qualities, they might be either 'better' or 'worse'. Being outside 'normal' society is ambiguous, but at least Thelma encapsulated only its 'good' aspects and Mareo its 'bad'.

Similarly, while the purchase and use of Morgan's drugs might have by the conventional standards of the time reflected poorly on both husband and wife, it seems that it largely indicated, at least to the juries, only Mareo's dubious moral standards. One would have thought that a married woman with a phobia of pregnancy would be an unlikely candidate for Angel of the House. Moreover, since the onset of the Depression birth rates had fallen and the incidence of abortion increased. Indeed, in the same year as the Mareo trials the new Labour government initiated an Inquiry into Abortion that called on 'the womanhood of New Zealand… to consider the grave physical and moral dangers, not to speak of the dangers of race suicide' consequent upon any form of birth control.²⁵ However, at a time of economic hardship it was not difficult for many to condone some forms of birth control, without questioning the higher calling of motherhood. The writer, feminist and family planning advocate, Elsie Locke, told the Inquiry that more than a half of women had attempted some kind of abortion during their married lives, page 102and others argued that some form of birth control would even allow for better childrearing practices. But, more importantly, according to historian Barbara Brookes, although '[i]t was technically illegal to abort oneself… this section of the law was generally regarded as a dead letter'.²⁶ Thus, while Thelma was an unlikely Angel of the House, there may have been some sympathy, at least amongst women, for her reluctance to have children. Moreover, there would have been some hostility towards the man who was (presumably) responsible for her (hypothetical) condition, and who had actually procured the drug from another man. Except for his alleged refusal to call a doctor, Mareo was always active in contrast to the invariably supine Thelma. If the juries were able to dispel doubts about the latter's sexuality, then they would not have had much problem dealing with her misapprehensions about motherhood when there were already two young adults to support and uncertain employment.

Thus, while Thelma had actually been a heavy-drinking, drug-taking 'theatrical' or 'bohemian', it would not have been difficult for the juries to imagine that a much older cosmopolitan womaniser with a dubious past and an uncertain nationality had poisoned the body and then the reputation of a virtuous woman. In fact, the virtuous woman's mother had already written this story. In a series of letters written to Stark just before the first trial, Thelma's mother implored her daughter's friend to help send Mareo to the gallows. Mrs Trott's first letter reads:

My Dear Miss Stark,

You have not the remotest idea the comfort your letter has given me.

I have longed for someone to write and say they knew my little girl. Do not be afraid to tell me all you know. My faith in God will help me over it all, and my darling forever near me. I shall never forget the week of his arrest. Thelma hovers around me day and night. I often wonder if she got my letter saying how worried I was over my dream.

I saw the darling on a ladder that almost reached Heaven. She awoke and was singing, and he was groveling somewhere page 103below. I remember Thelma saying she was going to Freda to do some sewing.

Was the little soul happy? I am told she kept all her sorrows always from me… I will pray to bring the fiend to justice.

Oh, Miss Stark, to think of a child so tenderly brought up and highly educated, not a shadow to cross her path. Thank God she spent the best years of her life in happiness.

Do the people over there believe Thelma would take her life? Never.

I will look forward to your letters as though you were dear little Thelma. Love from both…²⁷

About a week later she also wrote

My Dear Miss Stark,

… You have been in my thoughts day and night. It must have been a trying ordeal for you. You can rest assured we will ever remember you for defending our beloved daughter.

If all the world came and told me my little daughter Thelma was a drunkard I would tell them to go and lie no more. If a glass of wine or such like terms one a drunkard, well the rest of the world are such…

Thelma was the essence of refinement. He was not even fit for her to wipe her shoes on. They say love is blind. I am sure of it in Thelma's case. Oh, it makes me ill to think of it; a girl brought up, educated like Thelma was, to live under the same roof with such a criminal.

Do you know if he paid for the burial? It was just like burying a dog as far as he was concerned. If not paid for, I hope they can claim the insurance…

Can you imagine Thelma spending money on drink, and save as she did, and send money home every fortnight the years she was away? Always two letters a week. I asked her not to send any more money about six months before she died, as I read between the lines.

I hope you will be able to understand this scribble. My eyes are very bad tonight. Goodbye love…²⁸

In fairness to Mrs Trott, it should be pointed out that she was clearly devastated by her daughter's death. Thelma sent her page 104money regularly, presumably because she and her husband Henry, a Yorkshire-born carpenter who died in 1949, no longer had an income. Moreover, Thelma, her youngest child, was born when she was forty-one. Her beautiful, talented and university- educated daughter must have been the light of her life. Nevertheless, Mrs Trott's letters reduce the tragedy of her daughter's life to a kind of Victorian melodrama about female purity assailed by male depravity. Thelma is on a 'ladder that almost reached Heaven', whereas her murderer — a man she had never met — is 'groveling somewhere below'. And the article framing Mrs Trott's letters reinforces the distraught mother's point of view. Readers of the article would have seen a mother imploring the female friend of a daughter who was 'the essence of refinement' to bring a 'fiend' to justice, thereby contradicting the evidence of the 'fiend's' children.

Remarkably, this exchange between the main witness and the victim's mother, an exchange that should have resulted in a mistrial, seems to have concerned only Mareo's counsel. When her letters and Stark's replies became public, Mareo's solicitor did apply for a commutation of the prisoner's death sentence on the basis '[t]hat the obtaining of the conviction of Mareo became a duty she [Stark.] undertook for Mrs Mareo's relatives and a matter of the greatest personal importance to herself'.²⁹ However, there was never any official response made to these allegations, and it is clear from the article in which the letters were published that Truth and presumably most of its readers were not troubled by Mrs Trott's intervention. Nor was there any public outcry about the correspondence between the two women, a correspondence that also included a cable from Stark to Mrs Trott after the first jury had delivered its verdict, and a reply from Mrs Trott thanking Stark for her part in bringing Mareo to justice.

These letters were only published soon after the second trial and so could not have influenced the juries. However, it is clear that Stark's testimony about her friend's refinement and abstemious habits and Mareo's heavy drinking, verbal abuse of his wife and callous refusal to call a doctor accorded with the conventions of Mrs Trott's melodrama. This was also the story page 105told by the Crown, particularly after the first trial, when Meredith decided to make more of Mareo's lesbian accusation. It is likely, therefore, that the two juries, and especially the second, would have shared the same motivations as Mrs Trott - not only to bring 'a fiend to justice', but to clear the name of a virtuous woman. Indeed the logic of the case dictated that a guilty verdict and a verdict that cleared a Pure Woman's name were the same thing. Mrs Trott had observed in one of her letters that 'Deeming (a notorious killer) was a scoundrel; he murdered his wives, but he faced the gallows like a man. He did not drag his wives' names through the mud to save his skin'.³⁰ Although Truth reported after the second trial that Mareo's 'allegation against his wife after she had died by his treacherous hand and he was within the clutches of the law were [sic] also the subject of much comment', it also makes it clear that all this comment had been made during the trials. Thus, while unlike the heroes of melodrama the men of the juries could not actually rescue the heroine from the clutches of the villain, they could rescue her spiritually by restoring her reputation.

The adversarial nature of courtroom proceedings and their culmination in the dramatic denouement of the verdict mean that criminal trials are particularly amenable to the hyperbolic dichotomies of virtue and vice that characterise melodrama. As in other Western countries, melodrama was probably the most popular dramatic genre of the nineteenth century, but it remained popular in the early twentieth century in film and in the 'new journalism' of papers such as Truth, particularly when its subject matter was feminine.³¹ However, only a guilty verdict in the Mareo trials would have produced a clear melodrama. While not guilty verdicts can sometimes be represented as melodramatic vindications of the accused's innocence, this could not have been the case here. If the juries had decided that it was not clear 'beyond reasonable doubt' that Mareo had murdered his wife, a moral cloud would still have hung over the musician, if only because his behaviour had been less than exemplary. A not guilty verdict would not have morally vindicated Mareo.

But even to the extent that it could be equated with innocence, page 106a not guilty verdict would have implied, given the logic of the case, four possible basic alternative narratives, all of which are far less compelling than the melodrama we have been describing. A not guilty verdict might imply that, for all their unusual aspects, the Mareos were really just a normal middle-class family which had suffered the tragedy of the accidental death of one of its members. However, this is hardly a satisfying narrative since it leaves death in a contingent realm that lacks any moral dimension. Alternatively, if the death of Thelma was a conse- quence of the couple's morally flawed or depraved lifestyle, then why should only the wife pay and the husband be allowed to return to his previous life?

Given the historical context of the case, the remaining two narratives are more plausible and yet still far less ideologically compelling than the melodrama about the virtuous woman poisoned by the brilliant but depraved musician. We have been stressing the importance of the discourses of female purity in early twentieth-century New Zealand, but of course there were also counter discourses of equal if not greater ideological power. New Zealand literary nationalism was soon to myth-ologise-or at least subsequently be seen by many to mythologise- the figure of the New Zealand male as a Man Alone battling against a stultifying matriarchy of wowsers.³² Obviously, however, while all the talk about Thelma and Stark's feminine virtue was very likely to provoke the ire of the country's more conventionally masculine types, a loquacious, overdressed and cosmopolitan musician was hardly a Man Alone figure.

The fourth alternative was that there were misogynist discourses in New Zealand as in other Western countries that might have portrayed Mareo as a battling Breadwinner figure victimised by two evil lesbians. However, this would have been even less convincing since, not only was Mareo as little like a conventional Breadwinner as a Man Alone, but such a narrative would imply, as we have just argued, that sexual perversion could be found within Godzone. A guilty verdict would imply a far more comforting picture of New Zealand society than the four alternatives implied by an acquittal.

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The melodrama that emerged from the trials was convincing in part because, as Harcourt argued, it reproduced that oldest of social structures, the sexual triangle. Because of all the positive publicity Mareo received before his arrest, there is no reason to doubt Harcourt's claim that many women did find Mareo an attractive figure; certainly he was much admired by many men. However, for all his charm Mareo was the kind of man who got women into trouble, and the kind of man who could easily be resented by men. Moreover, by turning him into a diabolical wife-poisoner, public opinion was not just warning women against falling for dubious foreign theatricals and cutting down for men a proverbial tall poppy. Mareo's vices - alcoholism, drug abuse, violence against women - were also those of many New Zealanders, including, in all probability, some of the members of the jury. By convicting Mareo, the vices of New Zealand men were in a sense also being denied.

But, as we have been suggesting, there is a more fundamental story underlying this sexual triangle. Not only had Mareo poisoned his virtuous wife with a dangerous and yet medicinal drug, and then befouled her reputation with the allegations of alcoholism and sexual perversion, but he had also introduced an attractive and yet morally dubious bohemian lifestyle into a small country still in economic depression. Mareo the pharmakon had killed a virtuous woman with a pharmakos and thereby infected the body politic. By pronouncing Mareo guilty, the juries were containing the dangerous aspects of the 'artistic', denying the existence of sexual 'perversion' (or keeping it safely closeted), and re-establishing a clear boundary between New Zealandness and foreignness. The courtroom melodrama in which the male jurors backed by public opinion rescued the reputations of two virtuous women and cast from the body politic a dastardly wife-poisoner was also a tale of the re- establishment of social order. At a time of considerable anxiety about social and sexual purity, the Mareo trials were in one respect a form of social hygiene.