Victorian Murderesses
Title | Victorian Murderesses PDF eBook |
Author | Naz Bulamur |
Publisher | Cambridge Scholars Publishing |
Pages | 185 |
Release | 2016-02-08 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1443888672 |
Victorian Murderesses investigates the politics of female violence in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897). The controversial figure of the murderess in these four novels challenges the assumption that women are essentially nurturing and passive and that violence and aggression are exclusively male traits. By focusing on the representations of murder committed by women, this book demonstrates how legal and even medical discourses endorsed Victorian domestic ideology, as female criminals were often locked up in asylums and publicly executed without substantial evidence. While paying close attention to the social, economic, judicial, and political dynamics of Victorian England, this interdisciplinary study also tackles the question of female agency, as the novels simultaneously portray women as perpetrators of murder and excuse their socially unacceptable traits of anger and violence by invoking heredity and madness. Although the four novels tend to undercut female power and attribute violence to adulterous women, they are revolutionary enough to deploy female characters who rebel against male sovereignty and their domestic roles by stabbing their rapists and even killing their newborns. Victorian studies on gender and violence focus primarily on female victims of sexual harassment, and real and fictional male killers like Dracula and Jack the Ripper. Victorian Murderesses contributes to the field by investigating how literary representations of female violence counter the idealisation of women as angelic housewives.
Victorian Murderesses
Title | Victorian Murderesses PDF eBook |
Author | Debbie Blake |
Publisher | Pen and Sword History |
Pages | 242 |
Release | 2022-12-02 |
Genre | True Crime |
ISBN | 1399094548 |
The Victorian belief that women were the ‘weaker sex’ who were expected to devote themselves entirely to family life, made it almost inconceivable that they could ever be capable of committing murder. What drove a woman to murder her husband, lover or even her own child? Were they tragic, mad or just plain evil? Using various sources including court records, newspaper accounts and letters, this book explores some of the most notorious murder cases committed by seven women in nineteenth century Britain and America. It delves into each of the women’s lives, the circumstances that led to their crimes, their committal and trial and the various reasons why they resorted to murder: the fear of destitution led Mary Ann Brough to murder her own children; desperation to keep her job drove Sarah Drake to her crime. Money was the motive in the case of Mary Ann Cotton, who is believed to have poisoned as many as twenty-one people. Kate Bender lured her unsuspecting victims to their death in ‘The Slaughter Pen’ before stripping them of their valuables; Kate Webster’s temper got the better of her when she brutally murdered and decapitated her employer; nurse Jane Toppan admitted she derived sexual pleasure from watching her victims die slowly and Lizzie Borden was suspected of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe, so that she could live on the affluent area known as ‘the hill’ in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Victorian Murderesses
Title | Victorian Murderesses PDF eBook |
Author | Mary S. Hartman |
Publisher | Courier Corporation |
Pages | 340 |
Release | 2014-05-05 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0486794938 |
Riveting combination of true crime and social history examines a dozen famous cases, offering illuminating details of the accused women's backgrounds, deeds, and trials. "Vividly written, meticulously researched." — Choice.
Victorian Murderesses
Title | Victorian Murderesses PDF eBook |
Author | Mary S. Hartman |
Publisher | Courier Corporation |
Pages | 340 |
Release | 2014-06-18 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0486780473 |
Riveting combination of true crime and social history examines a dozen famous cases, offering illuminating details of the accused women's backgrounds, deeds, and trials. "Vividly written, meticulously researched." — Choice.
Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels
Title | Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels PDF eBook |
Author | Laurence Talairach-Vielmas |
Publisher | Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. |
Pages | 212 |
Release | 2007 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780754660347 |
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in fairy tales and sensation novels by authors such as George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens. In the clash between fantasy and reality, these authors create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body, and illuminates the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.
Gender, Crime, and Murder in Victorian England
Title | Gender, Crime, and Murder in Victorian England PDF eBook |
Author | Anna Kay |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Pages | 204 |
Release | 2023-09-25 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1000933075 |
Gender, Crime, and Murder in Victorian England seeks to provide a comprehensive examination of the notorious Mannings' ‘Bermondsey murder’, and its wider implications in Victorian criminal narrative and popular culture. Exploring the ongoing textual afterlife of Maria Manning, including significant literary contributions by Charles Dickens through his characters Mademoiselle Hortense and Madame Defarge, this volume illuminates representations both echoed and challenged in mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of gender, sexuality, class, nationality, religion, and criminality. This volume also examines the five largely forgotten cases of female homicide from the same year and the imagined discourse perpetuated in fictional personifications. Utilising a wide breadth of literary and historical research, this volume provides readers with a thorough understanding of the various cultural implications of crime and gender in the Victorian period to be read, remembered, and reinterpreted today. Located simultaneously in the fields of feminist, historical, and literary criticism, this volume is invaluable to students of nineteenth-century literature and culture, and researchers with an interest in criminology and media culture.
Victorian Murderesses
Title | Victorian Murderesses PDF eBook |
Author | Mary S. Hartman |
Publisher | |
Pages | 452 |
Release | 1978-02 |
Genre | Female offenders |
ISBN | 9780671818869 |