Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes by Emelyne Godfrey (review)

Emelyne Godfrey’s Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society follows her 2011 study, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Culture. My sense of the first book, which I reviewed for RaVon, was that it read more like a highly informative (indeed, jam-packed) social history of some overlooked late Victorian texts than a comprehensive argument about gender and crime. This is my assessment of this book as well, which provides an in-depth look at H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889), Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert (1907) and Where Are You Going To . . . ? (1913), and Richard Marsh’s The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916), which originally appeared as a series of stories in the Strand. Godfrey uses these complex works to address an amazing array of topics, including train travel; suffragettes; hatpins (or the “hatpin-wielding suffragette” [82]); “moral panic” over the “White Slave Trade”; gentlemanliness and its relationship to physiognomy (so that women can assess the threat level of potential suitors); physical fitness (and its relationship to political freedom); and jujitsu (the Japanese martial art adapted by Edward William Barton-Wright and promoted by Edith Garrud and Emily Diana Watts in The Fine Art of Jujutsu [1906]).

This is not to say that Godfrey’s book does not make an argument. Godfrey begins her book with a reading of Ruskin’s essay “Of Queens’ Gardens” from Sesame and Lilies, which “echoes through the literature of women’s self-defence” and provides a defining example of how Victorian domestic ideology genders private and public spaces (4). In Ruskin’s formulation, female domestic spaces are associated with peace and male public spaces are fraught with danger. As late nineteenth-century social changes propel women from the garden into the wider world, both real and fictional women navigate the perils and possibilities of these new spaces. Sometimes this involves learning how to use martial arts to protect suffragettes from police and hostile crowds or how to protect oneself from intimate violence in train cars or at home. Godfrey argues convincingly (if a bit hectically) that the capacity to protect herself is a crucial component to a woman’s increasing freedom in public and political arenas.

The main interest of the book, other than reminding us of these fascinating yet weird primary texts, is its representation of the eclectic conversation in Victorian periodicals. Godfrey illustrates the diversity of opinion provided in these pages, from the practical perspective of Dinah Mulock Craik, who wrote a series of essays on women’s capacity for self-defense in A Woman’s Thoughts about Women (1858), first published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, to the provocations of Eliza Lynn Linton, whose “Out Walking,” published in Temple Bar in 1862, argued that “nine times out of ten” women were at fault if they were pestered in the streets (21). Like the rapidly changing fin de siècle society she chronicles, Godfrey’s book is so fast-paced and packed that it can be a bit disorienting (blink and you might miss the “dagger-fans” of the subtitle, covered hastily in two pages). But the range of her research gives a sense of the dizzying, if dangerous, opportunities of a pivotal historical moment.