The new woman criminal: Crime fiction, gender, and British culture at the turn of the century

My dissertation considers British literary and filmic depictions of female criminals in relation to social-scientific work on gender and deviance from approximately 1885 to 1913. I treat crime fiction by authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, L. T. Meade, C. L. Pirkis, Emma Orczy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Isabel Meredith, as well as early British crime film, and I focus on the discursive overlap among four developments: the proliferation of crime fiction as a popular genre, the emergence of cinema culture in Britain, the formation of criminology as a discipline, and the opening up of new social freedoms for women. My study posits literary and filmic representations of the female offender as an ambivalent response to first-wave feminism, and uncovers their intertextuality with social-scientific theories of gender and crime.; Turn-of-the-century criminal science tended to follow the orthodox post-Darwinian understanding of female physiology and psychology, which held that women were biologically ingrained with passive, domestic instincts, and that criminal women were thus inadequately feminine. Fictional representations of female criminality borrow heavily from this model, but are more varied and ambiguous. My study focuses primarily on crime fiction, by which I mean narratives that engage in following the execution or detection of a crime. Crime fiction and criminology at the turn of the century have a special intertextual relationship: other genres were influenced by scientific theories of criminality, but were not as invested in carrying on a dialogue with them. Emerging at the same time, and engaged with the same problems, turn-of-the-century crime fiction and criminology constitute two new languages with which to talk about crime at a time when older discourses of crime were becoming ineffective.