Doing justice: Gender, genre and crime in recent historical biofictions from Australia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Damned whores or founding mothers? Representations of convict women in Australian literature
Acta Scientiarum. Language and Culture, 2010
When writing about European settlement in Australia, nineteenth and early twentieth century writers focused on the lives of the male convicts and on the English middle class who were in charge of the colony. It was only in the latter part of the twentieth century that Australian feminist writers started to take an interest in the lives of women convicts. Working from different theoretical perspectives, feminist writers patiently unraveled the lives of convict women hidden within layers of archival material. Thus started the debate of whether convict women should be regarded as Damned Whores or Founding Mothers. Were these women all prostitutes transported for their vices? Or were they women, who struggling for survival in their native land were transported for trivial crimes in order to populate a country which had long been settled by Aboriginal nations? Were these women Founding Mothers who left a legacy not only of Australian born children but also of values embedded in Australian culture? How does Australian literature represent these women? This essay deals with female convicts transported to Australia from Great Britain and Ireland. In this essay I will look at the way writers have depicted their lives and I will examine the way their narratives helped to shape the culture in which they lived and if their legacy lives in today's Australia.
Gendering the Genre: three Australian women writers and their debut crime fiction novels
Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, 3 (1): 57-71. ISSN: 2045-5852, 2014
The creators and consumers of crime fiction have changed dramatically since the genre, established in ancient times to define legal and moral codes and indicate the consequences for breaking those codes, first started to gain widespread popularity as a form of entertainment in the eighteenth century. One of the most significant of these changes can be seen in the slow but steady rise of the female as consumer, creator and character. There are many ways to explore some of the gendered changes within the crime fiction genre, one of which is to examine novels written by women who have chosen female protagonists to tell their stories. Ostensibly quite different texts, Miles Franklin’s 'Bring the Monkey' (1933), June Wright’s 'Murder in the Telephone Exchange' (1948) and Elizabeth Antill’s 'Death on the Barrier Reef' (1952) are three debut crime novels that share some striking similarities. In addition to all three novels featuring female first-person narrators, these stories also tell tales of very violent crimes and contribute to documenting some of the shifts in views on gender, female friendship, marriage and class within what has become the world’s most popular genre.
A Woman's Place: constructing women within true crime narratives
TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Special Issue (34): 1-15. ISSN 2380-7679, 2016
Writers do not have to position the female body as a contested space: simultaneously conceived of as a commodity, honoured as a site of self-expression, and visualised as a vehicle for reproduction. This competition of ownership facilitates the commandeering of the female body for a variety of purposes such as the pursuit of financial or political gain. In this way, women who are central to true crime cases – as victims or as perpetrators – can be objectified by writers for the popular press in the rush to tell a story and, in some instances, marginalised, even as their stories are re-imagined. These ideas are explored through two cases that unfolded in Sydney, Australia, in the late-nineteenth century – the gang rape of Mary Jane Hicks and two murders ostensibly committed by Louisa Collins. A brief examination of the contemporary coverage of these cases unpacks how the bodies of both women were conscripted by writers for other purposes – first, to sell papers, and second, to argue for the abolition of the death penalty. This article then looks at the re-telling of these events in Frank C. Johnson’s "Famous Detective Stories", which allowed mid-twentieth century true crime writers to re-ignite debates around publishing and punishment found in the original reportage. Almost 130 years after the first of these crimes took place, this article contends offering a feminist framework to review these, and similar, cases demonstrate circulation figures and discussions around the ethics of punishment are not dependent upon the appropriation of the female body.
(Rachel Franks and Wendy J. Dunn) The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction - Special Issue: editorial
The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction, 1 (2): online. ISSN: 2205-9849, 2015
Welcome to the second issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction": a project designed to deliver exciting and innovative scholarship on crime fiction in Australia and around the world. As Alistair Rolls and Marguerite Johnson note, within this issue: “Crime Fiction is now a more than respectable area of scholarly endeavour” (2015). This journal highlights the diversity of these scholarly endeavours. We begin with the work of Carolyn Beasley, Craig McIntosh and Jason Bainbridge: '"Social consequences be damned, it was money for jam": The Kennett Era, Shane Maloney and the Writer as Vernacular Theorist'. This work highlights Victorian politics in the 1990s and how this political environment provided a platform for crime fiction writer Shane Maloney. Focusing on the last two volumes of the Murray Whelan series, "Something Fishy" (2002) and "Sucked In" (2007) the paper identifies the ways in which Maloney engages with both the main tenets of Premier Jeff Kennett’s leadership style and the effects of Kennett’s political and social policies on the wider community. By placing Maloney’s work in the broader contexts of Australian crime fiction, the literature of protest and the politics of the Kennett era, this research suggests such works are as capable of critical reflection and insight as more traditional, or culturally legitimate, forms of theorising through the location of vernacular theory in these texts. Ideas of a killer’s code are taken up by Jason Bainbridge with his article: 'Seduction of the Serial Killer: Representing Justice with Lecter, "Dexter" and the "Death Note"’. Exploring ideas that circulate around the serial killer and how, since Jack the Ripper, the “serial killer has been the monster at the heart of modernity, [a monster that] society has sought to control and understand,” Bainbridge goes on to explore the evolution of this type of murderer and how the serial killer has become increasingly represented as sympathetic, almost seductive. This is demonstrated through an analysis of the serial killer in popular culture, killers almost as well known as Jack the Ripper, such as "Hannibal" (2001), "Dexter" (2006-2013) and the central figure in Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s 2003 manga "Death Note". The central theme is an argument that the serial killer maintains a position emblematic of the contradictions in modernity and speaks to ongoing tensions between law and justice. Our third article: ‘Getting under the Skin to Read the Signs: The Call of Classical Myths and Mysteries in Leigh Redhead’s "Peepshow"’, comes from Alistair Rolls and Marguerite Johnson. Rolls and Johnson contribute to the debate on the origins of modern crime fiction through an outline of the interconnection of ancient myth and the contemporary crime story. This is achieved through a clever case study of Leigh Redhead’s "Peepshow" (2004) that posits Redhead as “at all times a consummate, and self-conscious, performer of Crime Fiction.” In keeping with the genre of gritty, detective novels, "Peepshow" is a “realistic, colloquial read, complete with lots of sleaze, sex, drugs and thugs.” Yet, as this article demonstrates, the work offers a series of classical references and allusions, some overt and clearly intentional, others potentially more a product of the reader’s imagination or the author’s unconscious. In this way this article asks questions as diverse as: Why crime fiction?; and What’s on the page for the Classically-educated reader? Phryne Fisher and other Fantasies: The Female Detective in History In addition, this issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction", presents two papers, which resulted from the inaugural Historical Novel Society Australasia conference held this year in Sydney. Supported by Swinburne University, this conference saw a panel of academics (Wendy J. Dunn, Kelly Gardiner, Rachel Franks, Rachel Le Rossignol and Diane Murray) discuss the honorable Miss Phryne Fisher and the female detective in history. During a lively panel discussion, expertly chaired by Diane Murray, Rachel Le Rossignol established that the female detective in history was well and truly rooted in reality whilst Rachel Franks and Kelly Gardiner offered a first taste of papers now published in this journal. Rachel Franks’ paper, co-written with Toni Johnson-Woods, entitled: ‘Phryne Fisher: Feminism and Modernism in Historical Crime Fiction’, sets out the history of the unforgettable and delightful Miss Fisher, from the time this liberated, sensual, slender, stunningly dressed woman – red woollen coat with an astrakhan collar, Russian leather boots and gloves – first stepped into Kerry Greenwood’s imagination, becoming a vivid construction of the written word in twenty novels, to her later rebirth in the media of television. Franks and Johnson-Woods reveal Miss Fisher as "quintessentially Australian". Perhaps this is not surprising when you consider that Miss Fisher birthed into her author’s mind on a Melbourne tram. Kelly Gardiner sets out another type of overview – how Greenwood’s construction of Miss Fisher can be identified as fulfilling one of the vital archetypes in crime and mystery writing: ‘The Female Gentleman’. ‘The Female Gentleman’ breaks through the glass ceiling of a male-dominated world, with Gardiner proving: “that female sleuths could be rational and effective – and equal in intellect to their male counterparts. Her most adventurous, effective, ironic, and impeccably dressed descendant is, of course, Phryne Fisher. She smokes, drives, enchants, rescues damsels in distress (and herself), follows her own code of honour, and banters with artists as well as sportsmen and police officers”. The Honourable Miss Fisher is an unforgettable, indomitable character, loved by readers since 1989. As these two essays demonstrate, she also a subject we can learn much from through academic study. In Conversation The articles outlined above are supplemented by several interviews. Angela Savage talks to Nick Temelkovski about the themes and research in her novel "The Dying Beach". Carolyn Beasley interviews the increasingly popular Lenny Bartulin. And Amanda Frost catches up with David Whish Wilson, writer of the Frank Swann series and Elizabeth Heiter creator of the Profiler series, featuring protagonist Evelyn Baine. So – via a significant politician, serial killers, strippers, a dashingly dressed Lady Detective/Female Gentleman and several popular crime fiction writers – this issue of "The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction" demonstrates the diversity of scholarship in this continually expanding, and always fascinating, field of fiction. Rachel Franks and Wendy J. Dunn
„Writing Feminist Historical Crime Fiction as an Opportunity for a New Understanding of History” in Writing Academic Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing ed. Nina Lykke. Routledge, New York, London 2014. pp. 80-95. „Editorial Introduction”, Nina Lykke, Anne Brewster, Kathy Davis, Redi Koobak, Sissel Lie, Andrea Petö, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert. in Writing Academic Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing ed. Nina Lykke. Routledge, New York, London 2014. pp. 1-17.
This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of three Australian teenage novels – Melina Marchetta's 'Looking for Alibrandi' (1992), Randa Abdel-Fattah's 'Does my Head Look Big in This?' (2005), and Morris Gleitzman's 'Girl Underground' (2004). Drawing from feminist post-structural and post-colonial theories, the paper examines how each author has constructed the racialised-gendered identities of their female protagonists, including the ways in which they struggle to develop an identity in-between minority and dominant cultures. Also considered is how each author inter-weaves race, gender and class to produce subjects that are positioned differently across minority and dominant cultures. The similarities in how the authors have inscribed race and ethnicity on the subjectivities of their female characters, despite the novels being written at different points in time and focusing on different racial and ethnic identities, suggest that what it means ...
The Australian Journal of Crime Fiction 1 (2): online. ISSN: 2205-9849, 2015
The Honourable Phryne Fisher is a ‘Lady Detective’ living in Melbourne, Australia in the late 1920s. As an historical construct, she is the embodiment of the Jazz Age liberated female but she is more than this: she is also quintessentially Australian. Fisher is unlike earlier female sleuths such as the maiden aunt (Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple) or the partner (Dorothy L. Sayers’ Harriet Vane or Dashiell Hammett’s Nora Charles). Fisher is also a counterpoint to contemporary sleuth types including the ‘screwball’ (Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum), the forensically informed (Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta) or the ‘loner’ private eye (Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone). To date there have been relatively few Australian female detectives, with one of the better-known creations, Australian author Carter Brown’s Mavis Seidlitz, being essentially an American construct. Within the Fisher corpus, Australian sensibilities are highlighted when it comes to issues of class. In this way Fisher also differs from most historical detectives, in that she bears not only the burden of argument, that will be made through an analysis of the character against the historical backdrop in which these novels are set, but she also tests a character’s relevancy against a more contemporary environment. This demonstrates that Fisher, introduced to readers by lawyer Kerry Greenwood, personifies the independence of contemporary women through the main themes within the series – numbering twenty novels and a collection of short stories – including women’s liberation, financial independence, sexual freedom and motherly instincts.
Female Identities of the Interwar Period: A Feminist Narratological Analysis of British Literature
2019
During the interwar period (1918-1945), women in England were faced with conflicting roles and identities. The men had left to fight in the First World War, leaving the women, who had previously held domestic and, at times, subordinate roles, to take over jobs and leadership positions. Women were exposed to and able to participate in public spheres, which caused social changes to arise. However, as the men returned after the war, women were expected to fit seamlessly back into their earlier subordinate positions. Literature of the interwar period written by female authors represents the struggle of female identities for voice, agency, power, and relief from social oppression. This project explores the identities of women as represented in three British interwar period novels. In Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway is conflicted between her differing identities in public and private spaces, and her daughter Elizabeth dreams of her future opportunities while exploring public spaces. In Rebecca West's Return of the Soldier, Jenny, a spinster, struggles to define her social position. Mrs. De Winter of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier attempts to determine her place in a home haunted by the memory of the former mistress. These novels are analyzed through the lens of feminist narratology, a theory that is used to examine the narrative devices of a text, like setting, characters, and point of view, as they relate to gender. Primarily, this project serves to reveal how employing a feminist narratological perspective when analyzing a text provides an understanding of both female identities and the narrative's overall function. Secondarily, this project contributes to a larger effort to recuperate female authors to disrupt the traditionally-accepted and male-dominated literary canon.