Narrative agency of women accused of homicide: New York City and London, 1880-1914
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Date
30/11/2020Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
30/11/2024Author
Sutton, Rian Ann
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Abstract
This thesis examines the role of narrative agency in the meaning-making
process of cases of women accused of adult-victim homicides in New York
City and London from 1880 to 1914. The place of women as perpetrators of
homicide and the experiences of accused women in both a legal context and
a broader cultural context is a growing area of academic inquiry in the fields of
history and criminology. Situated at the convergence of a number of gaps in
the existing scholarship, this thesis brings together comparative, empirical,
and theoretical approaches to shed new light on a key historical period and to
contribute to interdisciplinary debates regarding the gendering of criminal
justice. The study examines the court records (including trial transcripts and
clemency casefiles) and newspaper reports of 169 cases in relation to the
legal, social, and cultural contexts in which they were produced.
Feminist criminological studies speak of the agency of female offenders
almost exclusively in terms of its denial. It is typically argued that the criminal
justice system and the media utilise stock narratives to place accused women
into limiting categories of ‘bad’, ‘mad’, and ‘victim’ so as to ameliorate the threat
such women are presumed to pose to the patriarchal order. These
oversimplified narratives deny the accused her status as a fully-human,
volitional subject by removing her humanity and/or her intentionality.
This thesis shifts the focus from the agency ascribed to the act to the
agency of the accused in narrating the act. It argues that women endeavoured
to use victim and madwoman stock narratives tactically to disrupt the
deployment of the villain stock narrative and thereby secure both sympathetic
coverage by the press and lenient treatment from the criminal justice system.
In demonstrating this, the thesis examines the circumstances that enabled or
constrained the successful deployment of this narrative agency, including
dynamics of gender, race, ethnicity, and class, as well as the specific nature
of the alleged homicide and the particular court system in which that homicide
was tried. While theory-based research of this nature has in large part focused on trials occurring in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this thesis
incorporates nineteenth-century cases so as to expand the scope of this
method of inquiry generally and to generate a more complex understanding of
cases in this period specifically.
The discussion in this thesis regards the trial as a space of meaningmaking in which the legal and cultural significance of the accused and her
alleged crime was negotiated and established through a series of narrative
exchanges. Accused women participated in this process through a variety of
narrations, including pre-trial exchanges with witnesses and representatives of
law enforcement, discussions with counsel, provision of testimony, and
communications through physical appearance, dress, and emotion. Employing
both press records and court records allows for consideration of a range of
narrative situations that neither source in isolation reveals in full.
Ultimately, this thesis concludes that accused women were not merely
passive recipients of meaning made by others; rather, they were active
participants in the process by which meaning was made. Due to a variety of
structural and cultural factors, this participation prompted anxiety in New York
City regarding the stability of the criminal justice system that does not appear
to have been similarly present in London.