Agency, Autonomy and Assaults: The New Woman and the Criminal Woman in Late Victorian and Edwardian Fiction by Hardy, Doyle and Conrad

Persistent URL of this record https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3188842

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Engelse taal en cultuur (BA)

Monnickendam, Josephine (2022)

Agency, Autonomy and Assaults: The New Woman and the Criminal Woman in Late Victorian and Edwardian Fiction by Hardy, Doyle and Conrad

Bachelor thesis | Engelse taal en cultuur (BA)

This thesis examines attitudes towards feminism and the New Woman movement in the 1890s and 1900s in relation to the representations of female criminal characters in the following works: Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891); Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories; and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). The thesis argues that the texts all contain a paradox considering the agency of criminal women. On the one hand, Hardy, Doyle and Conrad depict the criminal woman as a symbol of choice and agency. On the other hand, the texts also cast doubt on the idea that agency is possible for anyone when the criminological (often deterministic) explanations for the crime are taken into account.

Thomas Hardy

Arthur Conan Doyle

Joseph Conrad

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Sherlock Holmes

The Secret Agent

New Woman

Late Victorian fiction

Criminal women

Agency