SELCS

Dangerous Bodies and Lady Killers


Course code: ELCS4015
Tutor: Dr Jann Matlock
Level: Advanced
Mode of Assessment: 2 assessed essays of 3000 words each
Term: taught in term 2

Course Description:
An old adage holds that the female is deadlier than the male. In this course, we’ll consider what makes women so dangerous by asking questions about the violence they perpetrate in literature, film, and “real life.” This course will put women on trial, but it will also consider our complicity in trying them and imprisoning them – even before their murderous acts. We will ask questions about women and the art of murder in order to find out what we admire about their murderous arts, what we want from their danger, and what they teach us about transgression. We will also ask how our fascination with their criminality puts us on trial and teaches us to gain new perspectives on our own desires.

During the first weeks of the term, we will look at a series of intrigues around criminality and murder. The Ripper myth and Poe’s detective stories will complement our discussions of the nineteenth-century criminal dossier of Pierre Rivière. For the remainder of the term, we will consider female criminality as a literary and historical problem in the nineteenth century. How does the nineteenth century construct a fantasmatic female criminal? Excerpts from nineteenth-century criminologists, psychiatrists, police bureaucrats, and charity workers (Lombroso and Ferrero, Frégier, Mayhew, Mallet, Ryckère) will help us to establish the parameters of this fantasy criminal. As we read novels and memoirs by both men and women, students will work on projects relating to historical murder cases.

We will ask how our literary understanding of female criminality relates to the sensation trials and scandal sheets that printed versions of them. We will look at the insanity defense in history and its relationship to questions of women’s rights in the nineteenth century. What did its use have to do with fears of infanticide, divorce, and the rights of working-class women? We will consider the substitution of the madwoman for the female criminal in the literary versions of female murdering. What kinds of crimes make women dangerous in the novel? What crimes does the novel excuse? Do women novelists engage these lady killers in plots different from those of male novelists? To what extent are the bodies of these killers more dangerous than the weapons they wield? Are they yet more dangerous when they write, like Marie Cappelle-Lafarge, or does their writing give us a chance to catch them in the act? Finally, we will ask what kind of bodies we have investigated, what interests we lodged in these deadly corpuses, and what kinds of crimes we have come to these texts to commit.

Primary Texts:

  • I Pierre Rivière (Moi, Pierre Rivière), ed. Michel Foucault
  • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Roget”
  • M. E. [Mary Elizabeth] Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
  • Barbey d’Aurevilly, “La Vengeance d’une femme”/”A Woman’s Revenge,” and “Le Bonheur dans le crime”/”Happiness in Crime” from Les Diaboliques (The She Devils)
  • Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
  • Emile Zola, La Bête humaine
  • Marie Cappelle-Lafarge, Mémoires / Memoirs
  • A dossier from the Choiseul-Praslin murder (1847), with excerpts from popular novels, a popular history (Stanley Loomis, Crime of Passion), and archival materials, including the unpublished memoir of Henriette Deluzy-Desportes + a film, All This and Heaven Too
  • Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

Initial Secondary Bibliography:

  • Judith Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper” (from City of Dreadful Delight)
  • Amy Gilman Srebnick, “The Murder and Mystery of Mary Rogers”
  • Ruth Harris, “Female Crimes of Passion” (from History Workshop Journal)
  • Elissa Gelfand, “Female Criminality: The Biological Monster”
  • Mary Hartman, Victorian Murderesses
  • Jann Matlock, “The Memoirs of the Devil and Madame Lafarge” from Scenes of Seduction
  • Ian Burney, Poison, detection, and the Victorian Imagination
  • Susanne Kord, Murderesses in German Writing
  • Lynn Hunt, “History as Gesture, or the Scandal of History”