Women, Crime, and Character from Moll Flanders to Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Nicola Lacey (review)

244 society wherein moral pressures to be frugal, modest, and humble must contend with economic and social pressures to participate in the ostentatious new world of conspicuous consumption.’’ Katherine E. Ellison Illinois State University NICOLA LACEY. Women, Crime, and Character from Moll Flanders to Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Oxford: London, 2008. Pp. xiv ⫹ 163. $45. Did female criminal agency become unthinkable in the late eighteenth century ? Did women disappear from the criminal world in the nineteenth century ? To what extent were the changes in the legal system—including the rise of the legal profession, the right to defense counsel, the establishment of the police, regularized law reporting, a developed law of evidence, and a more elaborated set of legal principles governing the attribution of criminal responsibility—reflected , foreshadowed, or prompted by the novels of the same period? Ms. Lacey maps the social and economic history of women and crime onto the depiction of women in English literature from Moll Flanders (1722) to Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Realistic novels were indexes of the changes in social practices that criminalized women’s behavior. They developed at the same time as the changes in the legal system. Discussions of free will and determinism , debates about the essential goodness of human beings and their reformability as well as the influence of nature and nurture preoccupied jurors trying to assess the character of defendants . Novelists expounded on these same issues. England’s judicial system relied on the voluntary participation of middling men who served as justices of the peace, coroners, and jurymen—the same group that consumed novels and their bourgeois values; and in the case of Defoe and Fielding, the two groups overlapped entirely. The first of three chapters provides historiographical context. Between the late seventeenth century and the early nineteenth, the process of judgment and character assessment took a turn ‘‘from character- to capacity-based responsibility attribution in criminal law.’’ In the earlier period the evaluation of conduct was not based on ‘‘volitional and cognitive capacity.’’ Instead juries used common sense to evaluate the quality of the character of the persons in question based on their behavior and other outward signs such as age, status, disposition , and reputation. Over these centuries , modern social mobility made it more difficult to rely on these indicators as measures of a person’s credibility. In the face of deceptive appearances, jurors and readers adopted new empirical strategies to construct a case for credibility. Still based on a physical encounter during the altercation of the trial, they used close examination of words, demeanor, and body language to access the elusive, interior qualities and motivations that were believed to reside in the essential self. The second chapter leaves the realm of the abstract to provide examples of criminal women from eighteenth-century literature and an analysis that explains the changes in responsibility attribution , in particular relating to female protagonists and the purported disappearance of active, rational, calculating agents like Moll Flanders, Roxana, and Pamela, and their replacement with more self-contained, seemingly passive women such as Clarissa, Cecilia, Fanny 245 Price, and Tess. The final chapter analyzes the female literary characters who emerged in late nineteenth-century realist fiction. Ms. Lacey argues that while the female criminal had disappeared, active, vivacious female agents lived on, embodied by Thackeray’s Becky Sharp and Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke. Ms. Lacey provocatively and originally discusses sensibility as a means by which women responded to the gender norms that proscribed emotional expression . The characters who people nineteenth-century novels do not share their feelings and strategies with their readers the way that Moll, Roxana, and even Pamela do. Instead, as Ms. Lacey argues, the early nineteenth century produced protagonists such as Fanny Price whose seeming passivity Ms. Lacey reads as a testament to emotional discipline and self-control. By redefining self-denial and self-containment as positive values, what has been read as female powerlessness actually developed into a means of empowerment. The book’s perspective focuses on the middling sorts and displaced aristocrats and their values. Given how much crime was imagined and perpetrated by people in the lower orders, their absence is profound . Rising literacy rates and the...