Overview

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.

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9781443887281

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Reviews

In Victorian Murderesses, Ayse Naz Bulamur probes beneath Victorian Britain's facade of tranquil domesticity to reveal the many ways in which that society discriminated against women, driving surprising numbers of them to commit shocking acts of violence. Analyzing four important novels published between 1859 and 1897, Bulamur demonstrates how their courageous authors - three of them female themselves - took risks to write about taboo subjects, shedding a subversive light on social injustice against women. Exhaustively researched and refreshingly free of jargon, Victorian Murderesses is both highly informative and a pleasure to read. Michael McGaha, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor of Modern Languages, Pomona College

Author Information

Ayşe Naz Bulamur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She received her PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of How Istanbul's Cultural Complexities Have Shaped Eight Contemporary Novelists: Tales of Istanbul in Contemporary Fiction. She has written articles on the works of British, American, and Turkish female writers from the early seventeenth century to the present, including articles on Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, A. S. Byatt's ""The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye,"" and Elif Şafak's The Bastard of Istanbul. She has recently published on the politics of love in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee and the representations of Scheherazade in Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow. Her research focuses on postcolonial theory, urban theory, feminist criticism, and nineteenth-century and contemporary fiction.

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