Revisiting the Murderess Representations Of
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UC Research Repository REVISITING THE MURDERESS REPRESENTATIONS OF VICTORIAN WOMEN’S VIOLENCE IN MID- NINETEENTH- AND LATE-TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English in the University of Canterbury by Jessica Ritchie University of Canterbury 2006 Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... ii Chapter One: The Victorian Murderess: A Cultural Problem for the Twenty- First Century? ............................................................................................................ 1 1. Murder, Representation and Multiple Subjectivities 2. Victorian Femininity, Power and the Mythology of the Bad Woman 3. Gender and Violence: Knowing the Violent Woman 4. Gender, Narrative and Performance: Representing the Murderess in Victorian Fiction Chapter Two: Rebellion and Conformity: Narrative Competition and Female Subjectivity in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale .............................................................. 34 1. The Murderess as Shadow 2. Diaries and Self-Representation: Women’s Writing as Poison 3. Male Antidotes: Writing Over the Violent Woman 4. Conclusion Chapter Three: Authenticity and Artificiality: Performing Femininity in Victorian Women’s Sensational Writing ............................................................... 61 1. “Most corrupting influence”: The Madeleine Smith Affair 2. Mary Braddon as Sensation Author 3. “A woman cannot fill such a part”: Lady Audley’s Secret 4. Conclusion Chapter Four: Returning to the Victorian Murderess: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace .......................................................................................................................... 95 1. Patriarchal Discourses: Women in the Public Realm 2. Women’s Private Discourses 3. Conclusion Notes ........................................................................................................................ 126 Works Cited ............................................................................................................ 138 i Abstract The murderess in the twenty-first century is a figure of particular cultural fascination; she is the subject of innumerable books, websites, documentaries and award-winning movies. With female violence reportedly on the increase, a rethinking of beliefs about women’s natural propensity towards violent and aggressive behaviours is inevitable. Using the Victorian period as a central focus, this thesis explores the contradictory ideologies regarding women’s violence and also suggests an alternative approach to the relationship between gender and violence in the future. A study of violent women in representation reveals how Victorian attitudes towards violence and femininity persist today. On the one hand, women have traditionally been cast as the naturally non-aggressive victims of violence rather than its perpetrators; on the other hand, the destructive potential of womanhood has been a cause of anxiety since the earliest Western mythology. I suggest that it is a desire to resolve this contradiction that has resulted in the proliferation of violent women in representation over the last one and a half centuries. In particular, an analysis of mid-nineteenth-century popular fiction indicates that the stronger the ideal of the angelic woman was, the greater the anxiety produced by her demonic antithesis. Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret illustrate both the contradictory Victorian attitudes towards violent women and a need to reconcile the combination of good and bad femininity that the murderess represents. Revisiting the Victorian murderess in the late twentieth century provides a potential means for resolving this contradiction; specifically, it enables the violent woman to engage in a process of self-representation that was not available to her in the nineteenth century. Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace suggests that any insight into the murderess begins with listening to the previously silenced voice of the violent woman herself. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Dr Jed Mayer, Ms Helen Debenham and Associate Professor Mark Williams for their encouragement and assistance with this project. Thanks also to Dr Tiina Vares who contributed at the proposal stage and suggested essential background reading on the twentieth-century context. I appreciate the sound advice provided by Dr Huw Griffiths, Postgraduate Coordinator, during some of the more fraught moments of this thesis. Thank you to the University of Canterbury for providing me with financial assistance throughout my studies. Special thanks to my parents and family for their ceaseless support and encouragement during the course of this thesis and throughout my education. Thank you to Fiona Tyson for easing the insanity and for graciously putting up with the encroachment of my work into her space. Many of the finer points of this thesis evolved out of discussions with Mandala White. Mandala, your empathy, aptitude and laughter have been invaluable to me during this project. 1 Chapter One The Victorian Murderess: A Cultural Problem for the Twenty-First Century? The violence of the ocean waves or of devouring flames is terrible. Terrible is poverty, but woman is more terrible than all else. – Euripides As the most extreme and traumatic act a human being can commit, murder has in equal portions captivated and repelled the Western cultural imagination throughout history. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, our fascination with violence is manifesting itself in a seemingly endless proliferation of representational media. More and more graphic violence is being shown in television programmes and 1 films which has led to concerns about desensitisation. Furthermore, vicarious violence – reading about or watching other people performing acts of violence – has been surpassed by virtual violence – performing violence on fictional victims – in the form of computer, video, online and virtual reality games. Violence in representation, it seems, is indicative of both gritty realism and artistic merit, judging by the Academy Awards lists from the past fifteen years. 1991 saw a clean sweep for The Silence of the Lambs which won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and, of course, Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins in the role of a pathological cannibal. Violent films are consistently nominated for the Best Picture honour, including Goodfellas and The Godfather III in 1990, Pulp Fiction in 1994, Fargo in 1996, LA Confidential in 1997, and Traffic in 2000. Even more revealing are the recent back-to-back wins by movies whose main characters are violent women. In 2003, Charlize Theron won Best Actress for Monster , the story of real-life prostitute and serial murderess Aileen Wuornos, and the following year Hilary Swank won for her role as a boxer in Million Dollar Baby , 2 2 which was also awarded Best Picture. Women’s violence, on screen at least, appears to be in fashion. Of course, one must be wary of crediting Oscar with reading the pulse of Western society, but it is an influential entertainment institution; an estimated 41.5 million people watched the seventy-seventh annual awards in March 2005 and Oscar nominations are consistently tantamount to high box-office revenue (Kilday). Add to this the phenomenally successful PC and PlayStation game Tomb Raider , originally released in 1996 and later adapted into two movies starring Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider , 2001; Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life , 3 2003). The story follows Lara Croft, a gun-toting British archaeologist, as she hunts for artefacts from ancient civilisations. Although the game is based around a quest narrative and violence is used only minimally, the imagery designed to promote Tomb Raider emphasises a potent mix of brutality and hypersexuality. The cover of the PlayStation version (Figure 1) depicts Figure 1. PS Tomb Raider an exorbitantly disproportioned Croft, a take-no- prisoners look on her face, wielding a semi-automatic in each hand; it is fair to say it is not archaeology that sells this game. Perhaps it is this decidedly mythological combination of sex and violence that ensures that the violent woman continues to occupy a prime position at the heart of the Western cultural imagination. Violence and sexuality have always been conflated in representations of murderous women, from the seductive dance of Salome to the femmes fatales of the fin-de-siecle to the psychotic vixens of Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992), illustrating the fascination with women as both life-giving and life-taking agents. In raising women to a position of ultimate dominance over men 3 through the possibility of eliminating life, women’s violence centres on the problematics of power and subjectivity. Womanhood in Western culture is tantamount to giving life; conception, gestation, birth and lactation are all made possible by the uniquely female anatomy. In carrying a foetus in utero, sustaining her child by her own sustenance, the woman blurs the boundary between self and other, literally enabling another human being to feed off her. When a woman kills she destabilises her ideological