Working Women, Witnesses, and Wraiths: Gothic Investigations in the Crime and Supernatural Writing of Catherine Crowe
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Authors
Cline, Emily Marie
Date
2025-05-12
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Victorian Literature , Catherine Crowe , Gothic Fiction , Detective Novel , Women Writers
Alternative Title
Abstract
Crowe’s works not only fill an important omission in the development of several quintessential Victorian genres, from detection to sensation and the ghost story, but her writing also highlights the marginalized perspectives of female working-class heroines who experience first-hand the law’s impulse to pathologize and silence disruptive women. Her heroines’ strategic deployment of gender, class, and ability, advocate for their inclusion in patriarchal narratives of science, literature, and law. I contend Crowe’s use of supernatural motifs, such as superstition and “second sight,” critiques the imbalance in the types of knowledge and witnesses that generate authority. My dissertation highlights the intersectionality in Crowe’s depictions of working-class, disabled, beast-like, and gender-nonconforming women who reject lifestyles hemmed in by domestic plots. Chapter 2 examines Crowe’s characterization of the female detective in Susan Hopley; her sleuthing heroines not only utilize alternative clues and forms of communication, such as premonitions and finger-spelling, but also opt out of conventional marriage plots. Chapter 3 examines sensation and social commentary in Lilly Dawson, where a ghost-sighting catalyzes a murder investigation that is solved by both Gothic and forensic means. Chapter 4 focuses on how Crowe’s two werewolf short stories critique systemic oppression symbolized by the law by highlighting the dehumanization of marginalized characters as witches, wolves, and sexual deviants. In Chapter 5, I analyze how Crowe’s spiritualist collection of ghost stories, The Night-Side of Nature, blends folklore and science to inform its subversive approach to classed and gendered notions of credibility. Crowe’s work identifies models beyond paradigms of middle-class femininity associated with the emergent class of professional female writers in early Victorian Britain; her working-class, disabled, and queer-coded heroines’ uncanny investigations advocate for accessible approaches to Victorian science, literature, and law.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International