Crime and Gender from Moll Flanders to The Woman in White

Bc. Věra Hanzalová

Master's thesis

Abstract:

Hlavním cílem této diplomové práce je výzkum a popis procesu všeobecného vnímání kriminality a zločinců v Británii od konce 17. do 19. století, kdy se formoval jak morální, tak i právní řád. Způsob, jakým veřejnost vnímala zločinnost, se měnil podle sociálních a politických událostí dané doby. Poznatky, které v tezi přináší výzkum těchto změn, jsou doplněny příklady z knih Moll Flandersová od Daniela Defoe a Žena v Bílém od Wilkieho Collinse.

Abstract:

The main aim of this diploma thesis is to examine and describe the transition of general perception of criminality and, consequently, criminals in Britain from the end of the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century when new moral and legal orders were established. In consideration of the social and political changes of the times, the way the public viewed criminality altered as well. The observations in the thesis are illustrated with the examples from Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). The thesis is divided into three main chapters. The first part provides the cultural and literary backgrounds. The historical events that occurred from the seventeen to the nineteenth centuries and that accelerated the development of legal and penal justice, such as the English Revolution, the instalment of the Bloody Code, and the arrival of the Victorian Age, are analysed. Literary context is also given. The second chapter analyses the development of penal institutions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and the conditions of the prisoners. Due to the social and political changes mentioned in the first section, the perspective of the eighteenth-century society on convicts differed from the one of the nineteenth-century. Thus, the constructions of prisons of and other institutions were slowly progressing towards more humane approach to the prisoners as well. The transformation is demonstrated on the prison of Newgate. The third chapter focuses on the literary works of the times that deal with criminality, Moll Flanders and The Woman in White in particular, but also on the Ordinary’s Accounts. Due to the plentiful representations of female protagonists in the novels, who either fight the conventional standards of femininity or fall prey to them, the role of gender and criminality is also discussed in the last part of the thesis.

Keywords

Criminality, Punishment, Moll Flanders, The Woman in White

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 18. 5. 2015

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 18. 6. 2015
• Supervisor: Bonita Rhoads
• Reader: Ph.D. Stephen Paul Hardy

Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Master programme / field:
Philology / English Language and Literature