Women and Murder in the Victorian Era

The importance of narrative fiction to the identity of Victorian culture is so obvious as to be a commonplace. Yet it is instructive to realize that the appearance of such classic Victorian fiction as Vanity Fair (1848) and David Copperfield (1849) was backgrounded by such world-roiling events as the Revolution of 1848 and promulgation of the Communist Manifesto. Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles was published in 1891, when Jack the Ripper furor was page-one news throughout London. Then there was the ongoing Woman Question, which vexed England in one way or another throughout the Victorian period. Hartman's thesis about the Victorian murderesses she describes is that they were motivated chiefly by desperation at the dislocation of the domestic life that was the only respectable option for women of any class. In her study of prostitution in Vict

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Hospital. Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson UP 1990. Reierstad, Keith. "Innocent Indecency: The Questionable Heroines of Wilkie Collins' Sensation Novels." Victorians Institute Journal 9 (1980): 57-69. Showalter, Elaine. "Desperate Remedies: Sensation Novels of the 1860s." Victorian Newsletter 49 (1976): 1-5. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Feminist scholarship since the 1970s has ably demonstrated the solid history of disparity in social valuations of men and women. In Victorian England, what were called redundant women became a major subject of discourse because a combination of protracted warfare and large emigration numbers had led to a male-female population disparity consisting of perhaps a half million "surplus" spinsters and widows of or beyond what was considered marriageable age; 500,000 is statistically significant in a general population of 10 million. Pundits and policy makers agonized over what was to be done about them (Greg 275ff; Cobbe passim). No one--including the female pundits--seems to have asked what the women themselves wanted to do, but by the end of the 19th century, as agitation for women'
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Approximate Word count = 1969
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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