"This is a truly extraordinary argument, one that will forever alter our view of turn-of-the-century literary culture, and Miller has demonstrated it with an enrapturing series of readings of fictional and filmic criminal figures. In the process, she has filled a gap between feminist studies of the New Woman of the 1890s and more gender-neutral studies of early twentieth-century literary and social change. Her book offers an extraordinarily important new way to think about the changing shape of political culture at the turn of the century." ---John Kucich, Professor of English, Rutgers University

"Given the intellectual adventurousness of these chapters, the rich material that the author has brought to bear, and its combination of archival depth and disciplinary range, any reader of this remarkable book will be amply rewarded." ---Jonathan Freedman, Professor of English and American Culture, University of Michigan

Framed uses fin de siècle British crime narrative to pose a highly interesting question: why do female criminal characters tend to be alluring and appealing while fictional male criminals of the era are unsympathetic or even grotesque?

In this elegantly argued study, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller addresses this question, examining popular literary and cinematic culture from roughly 1880 to 1914 to shed light on an otherwise overlooked social and cultural type: the conspicuously glamorous New Woman criminal. In so doing, she breaks with the many Foucauldian studies of crime to emphasize the genuinely subversive aspects of these popular female figures.

Drawing on a rich body of archival material, Miller argues that the New Woman Criminal exploited iconic elements of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commodity culture, including cosmetics and clothing, to fashion an illicit identity that enabled her to subvert legal authority in both the public and the private spheres.

Read Online: Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle

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Hardcover: 296 pages
Publisher: University of Michigan Press; illustrated edition edition (October 30, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0472070444
ISBN-13: 978-0472070442

INTRODUCTION
In 1901, R. W. Paul, one of Britain’s first filmmakers, released The Countryman and the Cinematograph, a film that reflexively “explains” cinema just five years into this new narrative form. It depicts a countryman at the movies, who mistakes cinematic illusion for real-world phenomena: he attempts to dance with a lovely on-screen dancing girl (figure 1) and flees a filmic train seemingly moving in his direction (figure 2). Bewildered by these images, he tears down the film screen, only to find the projector and operator behind it.

Movies that mocked the ignorant or uninitiated film viewer were common at the turn of the century; they served as elementary primers on cinema spectatorship, disseminating a culture and ethics of audience behavior for a new form of narrative entertainment. The Countryman taught filmgoers that savvy spectatorship is a necessary condition of modern subjectivity, that only a “bumpkin” or “yokel” would be taken in by film’s illusion, and that sophisticated film viewers are not distressed by what they see on screen.

The message of the film is that to be a “modern” rather than a “primitive” subject, one must adjust to the shock of modern narrative forms. At the same cultural moment, however, many critics were arguing that shocking fiction and film were not tests of one’s poise, but symptoms of cultural degeneration, part of that “strange disease of modern life” that Matthew Arnold had diagnosed nearly fifty years earlier. ...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

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