Resumen de The literary trials of the murderess: Marriage and murder in anglo-american fiction, 1850s-1930s
The focus of this dissertation is on the figure of the murderous wife as depicted in courtrooms or alternative trial formats in eight works of fiction written by British and North-American authors over a period of time that ranges from the 1850s to the 1930s: The Ways of the Hour (1850) by James F. Cooper and Griffith Gaunt (1866) by Charles Reade; Lady Audley's Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Armadale (1864); Patience Sparhawk and Her Times (1897) by Gertrude Atherton and A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934) by F. Tennyson Jesse; Kerfol (1916) by Edith Wharton and A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell.
This dissertation contemplates the extent to which the fictional trial acts as a prism that reflects the tensions, contradictions, prejudices, injustice, and collective fear in a given historic moment in which men and women's social and political interests were diametrically opposed. It assesses the court as a microscopic space in which the social and political tensions between men and women are concentrated, and possibly reflected in the verbal and rhetorical competition in trial. Moreover, it explores the treatment of women's stories in courts of law in fiction in terms of marginalization, trivialisation or exclusion, and considers a potential parallel with women's fiction with respect to the literary canon.
