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BOOK REVIEW

Emelyne Godfrey. Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes. (Crime Files series), Gen. ed., Clive Bloom. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 192 pp. ISBN: 978-0230300316, hbk. £50.

Reviewed by Lena Wånggren.

Emelyne Godfrey’s Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes proves a great contribution to late-Victorian, Edwardian and New Woman scholarship. Picking up from her 2010 Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defense in Victorian Literature: Dueling with Danger, which explored crime fighting and self-defense in late-Victorian and Edwardian constructions of bourgeois masculinity, Godfrey’s latest book considers literary responses to “the everyday dangers facing British, middle-class women” (1) from 1850 to 1914. Godfrey discusses the developing movements and practices in self-defense for middle- and upper-class women during the period, as well as figurations of the late-Victorian and Edwardian female criminal, by examining authors such as Anne Bronte, H.G. Wells, Richard Marsh, Mona Caird, and Elizabeth Robins, among others.

Godfrey covers a wide range of sources across a wide chronological span – from self-help books and physiognomy guides to newspaper articles, essays, and Punch cartoons, and in literary works. While the field of New Woman studies has seen recent work on women’s sports and women’s emancipation (Kathleen E. McCrone’s 1988 Playing the Game: Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, 1870-1914), female detectives (Joseph Kestner’s 2003 Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864-1913), and female criminals (Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s 2008 The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle), Godfrey takes a new perspective, combining and linking these discrete areas in a novel and fruitful manner, and uncovering some exciting under-researched material (especially in the chapters on Elizabeth Robins and Richard Marsh). She argues that literature of the period is “littered with signposts on self-defense – tips, confessions, warnings, adverts – that sometimes lurk just behind the narrative” (157). Moving from the mid-Victorian era to the outbreak of the First World War, she shows an impressive grasp of just how prevalent self-defense narratives were in the popular imagination.

Godfrey reveals public opinion of the time, describing “the little incidents in women’s lives which would not have found their way into courts but nonetheless affected how they felt about themselves and their surroundings” (2). While a novel might be studied for its critique of marriage laws or sex trafficking, she writes, “it is the smaller events which are also of interest” (2). Godfrey argues that the literary self-defense texts she discusses acted as manuals for helping women recognize and counter danger. Thus, she asserts, these fictional texts did for late nineteenth-century female readers what the Sherlock Holmes stories did for male readers, in that they provided examples and tips for how to defend oneself against danger (67). Novels and stories that discussed the dangers that threatened women, both inside and outside of the home, illustrated for their female audience means by which women could protect themselves. Furthermore, the texts performed another kind of political work: by “demonstrating [women’s] capacity to protect themselves,” authors of these novels and stories campaigned to “reinstate women in the public and political arenas” (105).

Godfrey divides the book into three parts, each exploring different time periods, themes and writers. The first part, “A Door Open, A Door Shut,” considers harassment and self-defense both in public spaces and in the home in the late nineteenth century. The second part, “Fighting for Emancipation,” looks at the connection between sports and the fight for women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century. The third part, “The Pre-War Female Gaze,” examines female detectives in the years leading up to the First World War. The book’s introduction draws on an analysis of John Ruskin’s “Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865) – described by Godfrey as a “feelgood text for the middle-class wife” (7). By setting out with Ruskin’s classic text on female propriety, Godfrey situates female self-defense literature in the Victorian context of separate spheres and debates about women’s honor. Literary representations of women’s power to defend themselves, Godfrey suggests, react against Ruskin’s notions of women as “hot-house flowers” (11) in need of male protection since they portray how middle-class women reacted when they encountered strangers and attackers around their “gardens,” in their city streets.

The introduction also establishes a main point of return for Godfrey’s study: H. G. Wells 1909 New Woman novel Ann Veronica which Godfrey calls the “leitmotif” of her book. Wells’s novel depicts the ways a narrow construction of femininity and the dangers of public spaces hampered and constrained women in ways as varied as “declaring emotions to the act of walking down an urban road” (8). Wells’s novel forms a backdrop to the wider themes and narratives discussed in Godfrey’s volume. Like many other women of the time, the novel’s heroine, Ann Veronica, is stalked and harassed in the street. Just as she does with her other examples throughout the book, Godfrey links the fictional events in Ann Veronica to newspaper accounts and manuals. This boldly effective approach, along with her excellent close readings, makes the persuasive case for Ann Veronica as a generally desirable read and a significant book for Wells scholars.

Part I, “A Door Open, A Door Shut,” explores the dangers for late-Victorian women in the streets and other public places. Using instances of harassment and female self-defense in public spaces and also of the “slavery”’ of marriage in the domestic sphere, Godfrey moves through works by Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charles Dickens, and then on to those by Mona Caird. Here, as in subsequent parts of the volume, the literary analyses and many references are interspersed with newspaper references to actual events, demonstrating the richness and diversity of Godfrey’s sources. In chapter 1, “On the Street,” Godfrey examines street harassment and other forms of public abuse: on the streets and roads, and in railway carriages. Here, Wells’s novel provides the framework for the discussion through Ann Veronica’s account that her stalker’s presence alters her relation to her surroundings: “the city becomes a phantasmagoria of uncanny, unstable male spectres [sic]” (18). Chapter 2, “Danger En Route,” uses combined examples from the Sherlock Holmes stories, Dickens, a self-defense book for cyclists, and more real-life cases to highlight the paradoxical danger that the safety bicycle, that major symbol of female emancipation in the 1890s, and travels in train carriages, could bring to women. This chapter also explains the “dagger-fan” of the book’s title, a knife made specifically to be hidden in a lady’s fan. Chapter 3, “Behind Closed Doors in Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889),” moves us away from the public and into the private sphere with its dangers that lurk in the home. Concentrating on texts by Caird, a novelist known for her published criticisms about marriage, Godfrey cites other examples -- Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Dickens’s Great Expectations, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – that portray the need for self-defense in the home. Seeing these novels as instructive “manuals,” Godfrey suggests that female readers would be able to apply methods and approaches portrayed in The Wing of Azrael, and thus avoid the fate of the unlucky heroine. They could “unmask a fake gentleman and, in doing so, avoid a rogue husband” (39).

Part II, “Fighting for Emancipation,” moves into the early twentieth century, detailing the importance of sports and physical exercise to female emancipation, and specifically to women’s suffrage. Chapter 4, “Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert,” examines suffragette literature in a close discussion of this novel by the American author, actress, and suffragette. Like contemporary factual accounts, The Convert shows the brutality and danger that women suffrage campaigners might encounter and depicts the methods women often used to counter that violence, perhaps, for example, using hatpins and dog-whips for self-defense. Robins’s writing, Godfrey demonstrates, “is infused with illustrations of perilous everyday situations” in which women could find themselves (67). Chapter 5, “The Last Heroine Left?,” places Wells’s Ann Veronica and her physical prowess in relation to other athletic feminists of the time and reads early twentieth-century physical culture as a backdrop to the fight for women’s rights and for the vote. Noting the establishment of the “Bartitsu Club” in London in 1898, and with it the introduction of Japanese martial arts in Britain, Godfrey examines women’s use of jujutsu in the late-Victorian and, more particularly, in the Edwardian popular imaginations. Self-defense in the form of jujutsu was popular among the suffragettes (leading to the coining of the term “jujutsuffragette” (102)), with the noted martial arts teacher and suffragette Edith Garrud training WSPU campaigners to defend themselves against policemen and violent members of the public. This is a very exciting chapter, and Godfrey skillfully traces instances of suffragette literature’s engagement with physical culture.

Part III, “The Pre-War Female Gaze,” concerns the years before the First World War, focusing on literary female detectives. However, despite the section’s absorbing materials, this part of the book is the weakest in its thematic construction and its expansive focus on hitherto under-researched female detectives and pre-war crime. “Elizabeth Robins and the ‘White Slave Trade’ Panic” discusses Robins’s novel Where Are You Going To? (1913) which highlights the dangers in allowing women to lead too sheltered lives. Women need to be aware of existing crimes in order to guard themselves against the perils of a criminal underworld. Chapter 7, “Read My Lips,” focuses on the crime writer Richard Marsh, and specifically his stories about the lip-reading detective Judith Lee which were published in the Strand Magazine, 1911-1912. Lee is a kind of female Sherlock Homes complete with her own Moriarty-like nemesis, and with her own special skills such as lip-reading and jujutsu. Godfrey considers how Lee’s “prowess of observation” (136) – lip-reading is also a kind of detective work – allows this investigator to escape and defend herself from dangerous criminals.

Throughout the book Godfrey links the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries’ social constraints and gender constructions to those still prevalent today, and that fuel our own time’s campaigns for women’s safety. At one point she describes her own experience arriving in London as a young woman, recounting her own attendance at a self-defense course. Godfrey shows the striking resemblances between her experiences with “victim-blaming” and those of women in the past decades and centuries. As she explains about novels like Ann Veronica, the main character scolds herself after being attacked: “’I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners,’ she said … ‘If I had been quite quiet and white and dignified, wouldn’t it have been different? Would he have dared?’” (qtd in Godfrey 51). In her conclusion, Godfrey demonstrates the theme and the reality of women’s internalized guilt about abuse remains a powerful cultural trope showing up even in late twentieth-century television dramas like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its dramatized discussions about women’s safety in relationships and public spaces.

Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes, well-researched and entertaining, makes valuable contributions to the existing scholarship on notions of gender in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. The one weakness is in its occasionally unfocused structure. While the book is marvelous in its impressive breadth and depth of research, and in its excellent literary analyses, it sometimes leaves the reader trying to figure out crucial links between themes and texts, and, at times, even within story plots. Clearer signposting for these connections would have made for more accessible reading and a better overall synthesis of the study’s wide-ranging argument. At points there are slight repetitions; on page 157, for instance, is the unfortunate almost verbatim repetition of the same sentence just a few lines apart which adds to the unstructured quality. Nonetheless, these slips will not hinder a perceptive reader from appreciating the stirring material and insightful arguments of Godfrey’s book. Femininity, Crime and Self-Defense is a superb addition to New Woman studies and a potential rich resource for scholars in late-Victorian and Edwardian literary scholarship.

Lena Wånggren is a Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where she also teaches. While her main research concerns questions of gender in late nineteenth-century literature and culture, she also works on feminist theory, teaching and politics, and the history of medicine. She has published on gender transgression, feminist pedagogy, and the New Woman cyclist.