By Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Framed makes use of fin de siècle British crime narrative to pose a hugely attention-grabbing query: why do lady legal characters are usually pleasing and beautiful whereas fictional male criminals of the period are unsympathetic or maybe grotesque?
In this elegantly argued learn, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller addresses this query, interpreting renowned literary and cinematic tradition from approximately 1880 to 1914 to make clear an in a different way ignored social and cultural style: the conspicuously glamorous New girl legal. In so doing, she breaks with the various Foucauldian reports of crime to stress the surely subversive features of those well known girl figures. Drawing on a wealthy physique of archival fabric, Miller argues that the hot lady felony exploited iconic parts of past due 19th- and early twentieth-century commodity tradition, together with cosmetics and garments, to style a bootleg identification that enabled her to subvert felony authority in either the general public and the personal spheres.
"This is a really striking argument, one who will ceaselessly modify our view of turn-of-the-century literary tradition, and Miller has validated it with an enrapturing sequence of readings of fictional and filmic legal figures. within the strategy, she has stuffed a niche among feminist reports of the recent lady of the Eighteen Nineties and extra gender-neutral reports of early twentieth-century literary and social swap. Her e-book bargains a very very important new option to take into consideration the altering form of political tradition on the flip of the century."
---John Kucich, Professor of English, Rutgers University
"Given the highbrow adventurousness of those chapters, the wealthy fabric that the writer has dropped at undergo, and its mixture of archival intensity and disciplinary variety, any reader of this striking booklet could be amply rewarded."
---Jonathan Freedman, Professor of English and American tradition, collage of Michigan
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is Assistant Professor of English on the college of California, Davis.
digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the college of Michigan and the Scholarly Publishing workplace of the collage of Michigan Library devoted to publishing leading edge and obtainable paintings exploring new media and their effect on society, tradition, and scholarly verbal exchange. stopover at the web site at www.digitalculture.org.
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Additional resources for Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siecle
Example text
T. Meade’s 1902–3 detective series The Sorceress of the Strand. , Madame Rachel was the object of widespread scorn among her contemporaries. I read Meade’s series, which details the exploits of a criminal cosmetologist, as a feminist intervention into the textual legacy that trailed Madame Rachel—a legacy that fueled cultural apprehension about female consumer power. In an era when advertisers and marketers were increasingly targeting women, and when detectives like Holmes dreamed of 18 FRAMED enhanced power through looking, consumerist rhetoric told women that to be looked at can be a form of power, if one has the right commodities.
The picture provides a full, frontal view of the itinerant young man, but an indirect view of the men on the stoop. If the image existed apart from the story, one might interpret the scene as dangerous, shady, or queer: the young man’s hat is pulled low over his eyes and his posture is hunched over, while the men on the stoop appear startled and anxious to enter the house. Perhaps the walker is considering robbing the older men, or perhaps his glance is one of sexual invitation. Perhaps the gentlemen fear him as a threat, or perhaps they are disarmed at ‹nding themselves cruised.
Watson remarks that he draws his revolver, like Holmes, “at the sight of ” Tonga. Tonga’s appearance—not behavior—elicits their repulsion. Watson describes this archetypal confrontation with the Other in almost exclusively visual terms, although “race” was not an exclusively visual category in nineteenth-century conceptions. The Holmes series, as a whole, makes a 38 FRAMED case for the immediacy and authority of visual epistemology in terms of race and criminality. THE FEMALE BODY AND THE FAILURE OF IMAGISTIC SEMIOTICS f the stories imagine race as a straightforwardly visible ontological category, gender proves to be far more protean.