Women, Crime and Character: From Moll Flanders to Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Nicola Lacey
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2009.789.x |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
REVIEWS
Nicola Lacey, Women, Crime and Character: From Moll Flanders to Tess of
the D’Urbervilles
,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008,164 pp, hb d19.9 9.
For decades, criminology has grappled with the issue of under-representation of
women inthe criminal process,providing mostly essentialist explanations forthis
phenomenon. Newer research conducted since the 1990s has added a historical
dimension to the debate, by demonstrating that the percentage of women in the
criminal process had declined over time.The explanations for this curious trend
are hotlydebated by historians and social scientists.Nicola Lacey’s new bookpro-
vides a fresh cultural perspective on the debate, relying on period literature as an
index forgenderperceptions in general and criminalculpability in particular.
Lacey’s metaphor for this process of decline is the literary shift from Defoe’s
Moll Flanders, an independent, smart and entrepreneurial woman who shapes her
own destiny as a free, fully responsible agent, to Hardy’sTe s s o f th e D ’ U r b e r v i l l e s ,
who, despite a strong sense of personal responsibility, is ultimately powerless to
make her destiny.While Moll-esque characters could be tolerated (perhaps even
endorsed) in the18
th
century, their 19
th
century sisters - sassy, cunning, resourceful
literary heroines - were penalised in the age of Tess. As Lacey argues, the literary
transformation re£ects a shift in broader social paradigms regarding women’s
autonomy and the realities of female criminality.
Through an analysis of substantive and procedural law, as well as historical
accounts of its application, Lacey argues that the late 18
th
and 19
th
centuries saw a
shift in the concept of criminal responsibility, from ascribing criminal culpability
based on external markers of reputation and character to an analysis of the crim-
inal’s internal state of mind. She ascribes this transformation to three factors:
changes in perceptions of selfhood; the impact of the emerging realist literary
¢ction (which was highly in£uential and served a didactic function at the time);
and the shifting practices of proof due to thedecline of religious in£uences onthe
increasingly professionalised legal process.
This transformation had, according to Lacey, particular implications for the
perception of female crime. She argues that the earlier reliance on character and
reputation, which characterisedmuch of the18
th
century, may have been relatively
hospitable to an ethos of female transgression. Bycontrast, laterdevelopments in
conceptions of the female role during the course of the19
th
century made a deci-
sive di¡erence tohow women’spotentially conduct was perceived, giving birth to
a new, and more passive, ‘economy of feminine character’. This new model of
desirable passivity (and undesirable entrepreneurship) was mirrored in literature,
and consisted of several important features: a constant representation of women’s
proper comportment, accompanied by literary warnings as to the consequences
of transgression (heeded by women, who were their primary audience); a shift
r2010The Authors. Journal Compilation r2010The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2010)73(1) 155^173
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