Wilkie Collins and the Victorian murderess
Date
2001
Authors
Dusseault, Kecia Yvette
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Abstract
In Victorian Britain, people were fascinated with both fictional and non-fictional narratives of murder, particularly when the alleged offender was a middle-class woman. For a "respectable" murderess' violent transgression threatened nineteenth-century society' s belief in the innate goodness of women and the inviolability of the domestic sphere. In Wilkie Collins' lifetime (1824-1889), relatively few middle-class women were charged with murder, but their cases were sensational. Contemporary accounts of the trials of Maria Manning (1849), Madeleine Smith (1857) and Adelaide Bartlett ( 1886) reveal that belief in a woman's guiIt or innocence was often predicated on the extent to which she fulfilled Victorian expectations of feminine behaviour. Wilkie Collins was intrigued by the idea of a murderous woman, an interest reflected in a number of his novels, all of which feature women who kill or attempt to kill: Lydia Gwilt in Armadale (1864-66); Hester Dethridge in Man and Wife (1870); Madame Fontaine in Jezebel 's Daughter (1879); and the Prisoner, Eunice Gracedieu and Helena Gracedieu in The Legacy o,/Cain (1888). This thesis examines the cases of the aforementioned real-life murderesses in order to establish general Victorian beliefs about women who kill and, using these attitudes as a reference point, explores Collins' manipulation of these stereotypes in his fiction, discussing the extent to which he challenged, or conformed to, nineteenth-century preconceptions about such women. Unlike many Victorians, Collins depicted murderesses with compassion, intimating that they deserve understanding, if not sympathy. Though he never suggested that a murderess should escape punishment, he did not blame a female character' s homicidal inclinations solely on inherent sexual or moral deviance or lack of feminine sensibility. In fact, Collins not only suggested that murderous women were indistinguishable from "normal" women, but he repeatedly stressed that they were "normal" women, seeking the same domestic happiness as their non-criminal counterparts.