Writing Murderesses: Feminine Crime and Autobiography in Wilkie Collins.

Admittedly, Victorian popular novelists drew inspiration from murder cases involving female perpetrators which, increasingly after the mid-century, raised interest in the question of women’s capacity for violence. Sensation novelists, in particular, gave fictional shape to notorious cases of feminine crime which were widely reported in the coeval press. The thrilling stories concocted by these novelists were usually set in upper- or middle-class environments, in which apparently respectable women challenged gender stereotypes by attempting or committing ‘unfeminine’ violent crimes. Quite shocking in their implications, Victorian narratives of feminine violence posed the problem of accounting for a phenomenon that was viewed as a cultural taboo at the time. By turning the ‘unimaginable’ figure of the domestic murderess into a new literary protagonist, writers like Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon raised pressing questions regarding the psycho-social identity of nineteenth-century women and their ‘proper’ representation in coeval literature. After ascertaining the main meanings attached to the homicidal conduct of nineteenth-century women, this chapter explores some differences emerging in the portrayals drawn by Victorian sensationalists, who uneasily wavered between defiance and re-affirmation of dominant stereotypes. If it is true that the murderesses featured in their novels are all inherently perturbing as agents of destruction, it is also true that their representations vary in modes and cultural implications. Most interesting, in this regard, is the shift between Braddon’s and Collins’s characterization of female killers. Braddon tends to curb the trangressiveness of her murderers, whose aberrant conduct is finally (and often arbitrarily) justified in terms of mental derangement. The charge of madness is made more effective by the silencing of her heroines, whose stories are reconstructed, sometimes deceivingly ‘manufactured’, by intra- or extradiegetic authorial voices (male professionals or omniscient narrators). Much more limited is Collins’s pathologization of homicidal conduct amongst women. The analysis of four novels written in different decades – "Armadale" (1864-66), "The Haunted Hotel" (1879), "Jezebel’s Daughter" (1880) and "The Legay of Cain" (1888) – reveals his attempts to explore the depths of female criminality without using biased categories. Even though they are vaguely associated with mental vulnerability, the murderers who occupy centre stage in these novels are not simplistically dismissed as ‘mad’. The allure of their characterization resides in the rationality of their motives, as well as in the humane traits they exhibit while analeptically reconstructing their crimes. All of them are in fact authors of autobiographical narratives (letters, diaries, and a play) embedded within the novels’ texts, which fill in many gaps of their otherwise ‘unspeakable’ stories.