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

本项目考察了19世纪中期英国在大规模工业化带来的交通革命和其他移动技术的背景下，虚构的女侦探的出现。在这一时期，铁路改变了景观和人类生活的“运动速度”，标准化了时间和活动的概念，并成为下一个世纪进步和“超现代性”的代名词（霍布斯鲍姆154 -4）。这种“循环发酵”溢出到出版业（Freeman 22）。1864年，观众对感觉和智力参与的需求促成了第一部文学作品《女警察》的诞生，即《帕斯卡夫人和格莱登夫人》。尽管劳拉·马库斯曾评论过铁路的出现与“侦探小说的新形式”之间的密切联系（viii），但女性侦探、地方和全球交通网络以及文学流通之间的关系尚未得到充分的阐述。通过查看1863年至1910年的9个英文文本和4个孟加拉文本，我的项目将论证这些虚构的女主人公的构建与维多利亚时代的流动文化密切相关。因此，这篇论文将提供一个详细的检查，虚构的侦探在英国和英国海外领土的存在。考虑到城市化和警察程序的同步发展，英国、澳大利亚和印度（尤其是孟加拉）的大众媒体成为了对这三个地点进行共时性解读的宝贵来源，使得女侦探成为追踪这些地区以及英国国内和殖民意识形态变化的重要渠道。尽管女侦探受到了相当多的批评，但基本的批评反应倾向于以一种简单化的方式看待该类型的早期典范。最近的学术研究为女性侦探的形象增加了一个新的维度，将其与新兴女权主义运动的联系历史化，并通过仔细研究女性凝视的激进潜力和克拉克等杂志的影响来扩大印刷市场。我的项目建立在之前的工作基础上，但超越了它，通过描绘女侦探的意义，既是大英帝国女性自治的代表，也是对国家和国际空间的占领和穿越的性别化，此外还揭示了英国商品、文本和技术进入殖民地的某些方面。通过这些方式，它追溯了全球对国家的影响以及国家对全球的影响。因此，《从布莱顿到孟买》从一个新的角度探讨了流动性、女性和侦探小说之间的关系，在性别、阶级和种族三个更大的范围内提出了以下研究问题：1)交通技术如何促进独特的阅读模式，它们在虚构的女侦探的诞生中发挥了什么作用？这些叙事是如何在流动性的前提下发展出女性身份和内在的新形式的？2)当这些文本和文字跨越国际界限时，它们是如何与发展中的跨国印刷网络和媒介文化相结合（或紧张）的？3)从伦敦到巴拉瑞特，再到孟买/孟买，虚构的女侦探形象在多大程度上参与了不同阶层的实际女性从事侦探工作的职业和迁移机会？

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?