Empire, Women, and Epistemology in the Victorian Detective Plot
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The Victorian detective plot often depicts Empire as a frequent source of criminal agents, criminal means, or criminal incentive. In many cases, such a narrative places the Englishwoman in a position of potential victimization by colonial forces, and the colonial detective plot at times becomes a version of the romance narrative: the (often male) detective figure becomes the hero that protects the Englishwoman in what is at once a chivalric and a nationalistic project. At the same time, the detective's need for an epistemological power depends upon the innocence/ignorance of the (female) supplicant. This essay examines Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four as two representative Victorian detective plots concerned with the problem of women's epistemology in the face of a detective/colonial plot. Both novels presume the women characters' epistemological innocence, and further extend such innocence/ignorance to a rather unceremonious deprivation of their property rights. While both Rachel Verinder and Mary Morstan are potential heiresses to a great colonial fortune, neither is in possession of that fortune by novel's end. Rather, the detective plot intersects with a domestic plot to end in nuptials that safely neutralize the women's relationships with that colonial property.
Abstract
The Victorian detective plot often depicts Empire as a frequent source of criminal agents, criminal means, or criminal incentive. In many cases, such a narrative places the Englishwoman in a position of potential victimization by colonial forces, and the colonial detective plot at times becomes a version of the romance narrative: the (often male) detective figure becomes the hero that protects the Englishwoman in what is at once a chivalric and a nationalistic project. At the same time, the detective's need for an epistemological power depends upon the innocence/ignorance of the (female) supplicant. This essay examines Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four as two representative Victorian detective plots concerned with the problem of women's epistemology in the face of a detective/colonial plot. Both novels presume the women characters' epistemological innocence, and further extend such innocence/ignorance to a rather unceremonious deprivation of their property rights. While both Rachel Verinder and Mary Morstan are potential heiresses to a great colonial fortune, neither is in possession of that fortune by novel's end. Rather, the detective plot intersects with a domestic plot to end in nuptials that safely neutralize the women's relationships with that colonial property.
참고문헌 (17)
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