Victorian Murderesses investigates the politics of female violence in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897). The controversial figure of the murderess in these four novels challenges the assumption that women are essentially nurturing and passive and that violence and aggression are exclusively male traits. By focusing on the representations of murder committed by women, this book demonstrates how legal and even medical discourses endorsed Victorian domestic ideology, as female criminals were often locked up in asylums and publicly executed without substantial evidence. While paying close attention to the social, economic, judicial, and political dynamics of Victorian England, this interdisciplinary study also tackles the question of female agency, as the novels simultaneously portray women as perpetrators of murder and excuse their socially unacceptable traits of anger and violence by invoking heredity and madness. Although the four novels tend to undercut female power and attribute violence to adulterous women, they are revolutionary enough to deploy female characters who rebel against male sovereignty and their domestic roles by stabbing their rapists and even killing their newborns. Victorian studies on gender and violence focus primarily on female victims of sexual harassment, and real and fictional male killers like Dracula and Jack the Ripper. Victorian Murderesses contributes to the field by investigating how literary representations of female violence counter the idealization of women as angelic housewives.
I examine representations of Istanbul in the texts of contemporary Turkish and non-Turkish writers such as A. S. Byatt, Philip Glazebrook, Erendiz Atasü, Elif afak, Lynne Tillman, Zülfü Livaneli, Julia Kristeva, and Orhan Pamuk. My project highlights how multiple and even contradictory depictions of Istanbul in contemporary texts engage in cross-genre mergings (of fiction, autobiography and theory) that narrate plural accounts of Istanbul’s imperial past and its present role as Turkey’s largest industrial city. The texts that inform this study underscore the unique location of Istanbul that unites Asia and Europe, and connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. I argue that Istanbul’s liminal position between the two continents becomes the site through which cultural identities are articulated in contemporary fiction on Turkey. I investigate the diverse ways novels of the last three decades produce Istanbul as a Byzantine, Ottoman, Oriental, Islamic, or as a Republican city. The distinctiveness of my project lies in its focus on recent representations of Istanbul which have not been comprehensively studied by literary scholars. This book will contribute to current scholarship on Istanbul by investigating how contemporary texts underline the social and political significances of the city’s geography at the threshold.
Reviews
“Anyone who wishes to obtain a better understanding of this amazingly diverse, multilayered, complex city would do well to read this book.” – Michael McGaha, Pomon College
“…a nuanced and wide-ranging study that not only engages with an important literary corpus but that will also appeal to scholars and students working on theories of nationalism, travel, and the politics of representation.” – Sukanya Banerjee, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
