Violent Women and Sensation Fiction

Andrew Mangham's accessible study explores how ideas of violent femininity became integral to the workings of nineteenth-century culture. In the mid-Victorian era, society was rocked by the occurrence of a number of brutal crimes committed by women. In 1854, for example, Mary Ann Brough was tried fo [...]
Visa längre beskrivning

Andrew Mangham's accessible study explores how ideas of violent femininity became integral to the workings of nineteenth-century culture. In the mid-Victorian era, society was rocked by the occurrence of a number of brutal crimes committed by women. In 1854, for example, Mary Ann Brough was tried for cutting the throats of her six children; three years later Madeline Smith allegedly poisoned her fiance by lacing his cocoa with arsenic; and in 1865 Constance Kent confessed to savagely cutting the throat of her stepbrother. The period's psychologists suggested that women's bodies naturally predisposed them to such acts of 'insane violence'. In 1860, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White spearheaded the popular genre of sensation fiction - a genre that repeatedly portrayed women in the throes of crime and insanity. Andrew Mangham proposes that events in the Victorian courtroom, theories of female insanity and popular sensational narratives had a massive impact on each other.Using the violently explosive woman as his key point of focus, he suggests that medico-legal issues of the Victorian period are crucial to understanding the novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and Wilkie Collins.