Women, Crime, and Character: From Moll Flanders to Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Nicola Lacey - OUP Oxford, 2008
In
the early 18th Century, Daniel Defoe found it natural to write a novel
whose heroine was a sexually adventurous, socially marginal property
offender. Only half a century later, this would have been next to
unthinkable. Lacey explores the disappearance of Moll, and her
supercession in the annals of literary female offenders by heroines like
Tess, serving as a metaphor for fundamental changes in ideas of
selfhood, gender and social order in 18th and 19th Century England.
Drawing on law, literature, philosophy and social history, she argues
that these broad changes underpinned a radical shift in mechanisms of
responsibility-attribution, with decisive implications for the
criminalisation of women. This book examines how the treatment and
understanding of female criminality was changing during the era which
saw the construction of the main building blocks of the modern criminal
process, and of how these understandings related in turn to broader
ideas about gender, social order and individual agency. Lacey tells the
story of the shifting relationship between informal codes of norms such
as the 'cult of sensibility' and the formal system of criminal justice,
and of the impact on women and on understandings of femininity of these
complementary systems of discipline. By drawing on a wide variety of
sources, it casts light into corners which remain obscure in accounts
informed by a single discipline.
