From Brighton to Bombay: Mobility and the Nineteenth-Century Female Detective

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Introduction: Historical Background This project examines the emergence of the fictional female detective in mid-nineteenth-century Britain in the context of the transport revolution and other technologies of mobility engendered by large-scale industrialization. In this period the railways transformed the landscape and the very "speed of movement" of human life, standardizing notions of time and activity and becoming synonymous for the next century with progress and "ultra-modernity" (Hobsbawm 153-4). This "circulatory ferment" spilled over into the publishing industry (Freeman 22). The audience's demand for sensation and intellectual engagement was instrumental in the creation of the first literary "petticoated policewom(e)n," Mrs Paschal and Mrs Gladden, in 1864. Although Laura Marcus has commented on the intimate connection between the arrival of the railways and "the new form of the detective novel" (viii), the relationship between female detectives, local and global transport networks, and literary circulation has yet to be fully charted. By looking at 9 English and 4 Bangla texts, from 1863 to 1910, my project will argue that the construction of these fictitious heroines was closely linked to Victorian cultures of mobility. This dissertation will therefore offer a detailed examination of the presence of the fictional sleuth in Britain and in British territories overseas. Given contemporaneous developments in urbanization and police procedures, the popular press in Britain, Australia and India (particularly Bengal) becomes a valuable source for a synchronic reading of the three locations, making the female detective an important conduit for tracing shifts in the domestic and colonial ideologies in these territories as well as in Britain.Research Questions and Critical Survey Although the female detective has received considerable critical attention, foundational critical responses have tended to view the genre's earliest exemplars in a simplistic fashion. More recent scholarship has added a new dimension to the figure of the female detective, historicizing its connection to nascent feminist movements and expanding print markets by scrutinizing the radical potential of the female gaze (Kestner) and the influence of magazines such as The Strand (Clarke). My project builds on this previous work, but goes beyond it by delineating the significance of the female detective both as a representation of female autonomy across the British empire and as gendering the occupation and traversal of national and international spaces, in addition to shedding light on certain aspects of the import of British goods, texts, and technologies into colonies. In these ways, it traces the impact of the global on the national and of the national on the global. Thus, Brighton to Bombay explores the relationship between mobility, women, and detective fiction from a new angle, by posing the following research questions within three larger arcs of gender, class, and race: 1) How did transport technologies facilitate distinctive modes of reading, and what role did they play in the birth of the fictional female detective? How did these narratives develop new forms of female identity and interiority premised on mobility? 2) As these texts and characters crossed international lines, how were they transformed in combination (or tension) with developing transnational print networks and mediatized cultures? 3) How far did the fictional figure of the female detective engage with the professional and migratory opportunities of actual women of different classes involved in forms of detection, from London, through Ballarat, to Bombay/Mumbai?