Women, Crime, and Character

Abstract

In this book, the disappearance of Moll Flanders, and her supercession in the annals of literary female offenders in the realist tradition by heroines like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, serves 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 and economic history, the book argues that these broad changes underpinned a radical shift in mechanisms of responsibility-attribution, with decisive implications for the criminalization of women. This work explores the meaning of key social concepts such as agency, identity, selfhood, responsibility, rights, truth, and credibility through a wide range of complementary sources and practices. It illuminates their fundamental dependence on institutions which develop unevenly across the various interlocking spheres of social space. It focuses in particular on the question of 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 sexual difference, social order and individual agency. This book 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 d…