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AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1277
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, August 19, 2004 - 6:17 pm: |       |
Missed this one, my invite must have got lost in the post:
Victorian Crime
University of London Institute of English Studies
Saturday 24 April 1999
Programme and Abstracts
Venue: Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Ann Heilmann (Manchester Metropolitan): What Kitty Knew: George Moore's John Norton and the Psychopathology of Late-Victorian Sex Crime
With the keen interest of the fin-de-siècle naturalist writer in probing the recesses of the human mind and exploring states of psychical extremity, especially those linked to sexual pathology, and in the wake of Robert Louis Stevenson's sensational story of schizophrenic doubling, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), George Moore embarked on a series of narratives in the 1880s and 1890s in which he anatomized the mental processes of a repressed and deeply tormented character. John Norton is torn between life and death wishes, philosophical quest and aestheticism, ascetic Catholicism and (homo)sexual desire. Incapable of facing the materiality of a heterosexual impulse which conflicts with his every conception of his life, he commits a sexual crime, killing the desire which threatens his conscious sense of self by enacting it violently, and subliminally, in the shape of a Hyde-like persona.
Destroying the woman who 'provoked' his violence, Norton reasserts a radical independence which is rooted in his anti-social and virulently misogynist nature. In this sense, sexual assault becomes a stabilising factor in the reconstitution of his warring psyche, with the split self now displaced by a self at peace (he decides to retire from the world and become a monk). For Kitty Hare, the assaulted woman, however, the impact is very different: her psyche disintegrates with the recognition of the essential identity of 'lover' and 'rapist' until, driven mad by the sense that there is no fundamental difference between a man's 'real' face and his 'mask', she commits suicide. The theme of split selves is reflected in the shifting narrative voice, with Norton's dominant perspective making way to Kitty's interior monologue and proto-Freudian dream sequences.
The fact that Moore devoted no less than four different narratives to the character of John Norton may signal his fascination with the intricate psychology of the sexual criminal (as well as that of his victim), and it could also be seen as a response to the contemporary social and literary preoccupation with the 'dark' aspects of the male psyche. This was a time enthralled by the concept of split selves and sadistic impulses, of insidious phallocentric desires metaphorically, and literally, inscribed on to the body of unconscious, hysterical or hypnotized women (Jack the Ripper, Svengali, Dracula, Freud). This paper aims to trace the development of this theme in Moore's John Norton narratives, paying some attention to Spring Days (1888) and Mike Fletcher (1889) - texts which place Norton in the philosophical context of Schopenhauer's pessimism and Pater's aestheticism - but concentrating on A Mere Accident (1887) and Celibates (1895). After the turn of the century, it seems, Moore was able to lay the ghost of the Ripper to rest: John Norton is significantly absent from Celibate Lives (1927).
Laura Marcus (Sussex): Reconsidering Jack the Ripper
Since news of the Whitechapel Murders first appeared in 1888, Jack the Ripper has been a figure of fascination to journalists, writers, film-makers, historians and amateur investigators. This paper will consider literary and filmic representations of Jack the Ripper, analysing and contextualising his now firmly established place in popular culture.
Barry Langford (Royal Holloway) From Hell: Gender and the Forensics of Urban Space after the Whitechapel Murders
This paper will investigate the cultural significance of tourist,journalistic and official accounts of Whitechapel in the decade following the murders of autumn 1888.
Monica Borg (Birmingham): New Woman/New Realism Self-Search and Cross-Class Representations of Prostitution at the Fin de Siecle
In this paper I intend to focus on the way prostitution and its representation in literature lost its criminal contours as it became more and more associate with the New Woman's struggle for socio-economic independence. My paper will concern itself primarily with the figure of the prostitute which was brought to the forefront in literature as well as the visual arts as a result of the radical class, gender and sexual politics engaged in by an avant-garde group of artists answriters both in England and on the Continent. I will explore the relationshipe between literary and artistic constructions of prostitution and will look in particular at the diverse interpretations that male and female writers in England assigned to this profession especially when viewed in connection with the class, gender and sexual issues raised by feminism and socialism.
4.00-4.30 Tea
I missed tea but someone we know didn’t:
Martin Fido (formerly of the University of the West Indies): Police Fact and Fiction: from Vidocq and Vautrin to Mr Assistant Commissioner
This paper will consider the establishment of policing by consent in the nineteenth century, and ways in which this is reflected and supported by crime novels of the time.
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