Contemporary Rewritings of Liminal Women: Echoes of the Past (Among the Victorians and Modernists) [1 ed.] 0367277786, 9780367277789

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Contemporary Rewritings of Liminal Women

This book explores the concept of liminality in the representation of women in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, as well as in contemporary rewritings, such as novels, films, television shows, videogames, and graphic novels. In particular, the volume focuses on vampires, prostitutes, quixotes, and detectives as examples of new women who inhabit the margins of society and populate its narratives. Therefore, it places together for the first time four important liminal identities, while it explores a relevant corpus that comprises four centuries and several countries. Its diachronic, transnational, and comparative approach emphasizes the representation across time and space of female sexuality, gender violence, and women’s rights, also employing a liminal stance in its literary analysis: facing the past in order to understand the present. By underlining the dialogue between past and present this monograph contributes to contemporary debates on the representation of women and the construction of femininity as opposed to hegemonic masculinity, for it exposes the line of thought that has brought us to the present moment, hence, challenging assumed stereotypes and narratives. In addition, by using popular narratives and media, the present work highlights the value of literature, films, or alternative forms of storytelling to understand how women’s place in society, their voice, and their presence have been and are still negotiated in spaces of visibility, agency, and power. Miriam Borham-Puyal lectures at the English Department of the University of Salamanca. She is the author of the monograph Quijotes con enaguas. Encrucijada de géneros en el siglo XVIII británico (2015) and has published extensively on British quixotes. She has also authored pieces on women writers from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including Jane Austen, Jane Barker, Mary Brunton, Mary Hays, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, Scarlett Thomas, and Mary Wollstonecraft. As part of her research in Digital Humanities, she has published articles on female characters in videogames and women writers online. She is the editor of a volume on rewritings of Frankenstein (2018), which places particular emphasis on film, television, videogames, and e-lit.

Among the Victorians and Modernists Edited by Dennis Denisoff

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered. 18 Nordic Literature of Decadence Edited by Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Riikka Rossi, Viola Parente-Čapková, and Mirjam Hinrikus 19 The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain Victorian and Edwardian Inflections Edited by Maria K. Bachman and Albert D. Pionke 20 Poetry and Uselessness From Coleridge to Ashbery Robert Archambeau 21 The Ethical Vision of George Eliot Thomas Albrecht 22 Contemporary Rewritings of Liminal Women Echoes of the Past Miriam Borham-Puyal For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Among-theVictorians-and-Modernists/book-series/ASHSER4035

Contemporary Rewritings of Liminal Women Echoes of the Past

Miriam Borham-Puyal

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Miriam Borham-Puyal to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-27778-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29782-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

In loving memory of María, Aquilina, Pilar, Aurelia and Carmen Peralta Sanz. Your trace remains and makes us stronger.

Contents

Acknowledgments 1

Introduction: Liminality, Feminocentric Narratives, and the Polytemporality of the New Woman Liminality and Feminocentric Narratives Polytemporal (Feminist) History and the Trace Liminal Women and Popular Narratives

2

Female Vampires: On the Threshold of Time, Space, and Gender F(r)iends on the Threshold: Let the Right One In M/Others and Survivors through Time: A Vampire Story and Byzantium Eternity, Liminal Space, and the Outsider: Only Lovers Left Alive Empowering Liminal Women: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

3

Good and Bad, Private and Public: Prostitution as Liminal Identity Between Monsters and Machines: Frankenhooker The Freedom of the Prostitute or the Silence of the Wife: Dangerous Beauty Neo-Victorian Rewritings: Class, Gender, and Commodities in Slammerkin Sex and Power from the Eighteenth Century to Television: Harlots

4

Between Madness and Rebellion: Rewriting the Female Quixote Coloring Reality with Romance: from Bridget Jones’s Diary to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Escaping a Harrowing (Patriarchal) Reality: Pan’s Labyrinth and Sucker Punch Idealistic Individuals in a Fallen World: Amélie and The Bookshop

5

To Be and Not to Be: Female Detectives between Old and New Women Resurrecting Kate Warne: The Pinkertons and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Sherlock’s Sisters at the Turn of the Century: Houdini & Doyle and Phryne Fisher Invisible Women: Reclaiming the Spy in The Bletchley Circle Past in the Present, the Gothic in the Noir: Dolores Redondo’s Baztan Trilogy

Afterword Index

Acknowledgments

Several entities provided the financial support that made the research of this book possible. I gratefully acknowledge the Spanish Ministry of Education for granting a research stay under the José de Castillejo program (CAS18/00305), as well as the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness for the project “‘Orientation’: A Dynamic Perspective on Contemporary Fiction and Culture (1990-onwards)” (Ref. FFI2017-86417-P). I wish to convey my thanks to the faculty and librarians at the University of Manchester and at Manchester Metropolitan University for their invaluable help during my stay. Thanks are also due to the Department of English at the University of Salamanca for supporting the writing of this work. I am grateful to all the colleagues who helped me, providing ideas and time to write. Finally, a very special thank you goes to Daniel Escandell-Montiel for his suggestions, support, and early proof-reading of parts of this book. And, above all else, thank you to my husband Pedro for his unfailing emotional and culinary sustenance.

1 Introduction Liminality, Feminocentric Narratives, and the Polytemporality of the New Woman

In the middle of the night a young woman stares ahead with worry. She is surrounded by darkness, suspended in a black nowhere. She dresses humbly; she seems cold and wraps a shawl firmly around her, crossing her arms protectively. In the background it is possible to distinguish some lights and a windmill overlooking the water—the only reference to where this scene takes place. She is the unnamed factory girl in Annie Swynnerton’s painting The Tryst (1880). The setting is Peel Park Lake in Salford, with its landmark windmill and its surrounding textile factories. Inspired by a local legend, Swynnerton does not portray a couple’s romantic encounter, but focuses instead on the girl’s lonely wait. According to tradition, she would then drown herself after discovering that her lover had been sent away by his wealthy parents to prevent their union. He would subsequently commit suicide and a regretful father would preserve their trysting place, the windmill (Herrington and Milner 44). In Swynnerton’s piece, the miller’s daughter stands at a liminal place in time and space. She is in a moment of transition between night and the approaching morning, between despair and hope. Preliminally, she has separated from her family, leaving her sanctioned place in the home, and stands with her back to the factories, inhabiting a heterotopic space of subversion and possibility, created by the lovers’ meetings. Her narrative is also liminal, standing at a crossroad, the intersection of two genres, two modes, romance and reality: the story of two lovers’ tragic forbidden love and a nineteenth century narrative of the working class, with the background of an industrial world and increasingly separated social strata. Suspended, frozen, the miller’s daughter remains liminal, like Schrödinger’s cat alive and dead in the different possibilities facing her. Will she drown? Will she choose to escape or return home? Will this female liminal figure reintegrate into society and change it with her experience at the limen, or will she have become too marginal, seeking death as the ultimate subversion? A suffragist and a representative of the New (professional) Woman, Swynnerton portrayed many women in such liminal positions, reflecting the transformative moment in British history in which society was being forced to change by the pressure of these female liminars. In The Dreamer (1887) her knitting woman stares at the viewer from in-between past—with classical references and a traditionally silent feminocentric occupation—and future—for it is set in the Isle of Man, where unmarried women had recently won the right to vote in a

general election. The dreamer of the title, then, like the classical Fates, could imagine the possibility of determining her own destiny (Herrington and Milner 64). Other paintings, such as The Sense of Sight (1895), Illusions (1902), New Risen Hope (1904), or even The Southing of the Sun (1911), present female figures halfway between earth and heaven, realism and allegory, speaking of a new hope for women’s freedom. A hope in progress, still liminal in its transgression of societal norms, not yet fully assimilated for social change. A liminal stage toward revolution for which the New Woman stands as an emblem, an in-between identity that detaches herself from old tenets and circumscriptions to write new possibilities. Swynnerton herself would become such a figure, challenging conceptions of women artists and supporting their work, traveling and experimenting when propriety in Britain did not allow her to grow as an artist, and finally acquiring her place in the Royal Academy, opening the path for Laura Knight and other later artists. The centrality given to her female figures represents those new roads envisioned for women from the artist’s vantage point on the threshold between an old and a new world, between the prescribed exemplars of feminine passivity and the agency of the creator which challenges such ideals. In fact, her female portraits could have been painted a hundred years before, at the turn of the previous century, when Mary Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries were fighting to advance women’s rights. When writer and philosopher Mary Hays described herself as an “alien being,” a liminal subject, for her hope in progress and women’s advancement. Or they could have been created a hundred years later, in an era also determined by a feminist hope for change, seen in the vindication of exocanonical women —left on the fringes of history— by scholars in the 1970s, or in current movements such as #MeToo, Reclaim the Night, or the Women’s March, which retrieved lost voices or dangerous spaces and have moved from peripheral to mainstream actions. Swynnerton’s work then serves as a perfect illustration for the premises explored by this book. First, the relevance of the concept of liminality understood in its classical sense of transition toward, in-betweenness, or ambiguity when addressing feminocentric narratives that challenge gender, and often genre, conventions. Liminal women will be proven to stand at the threshold between an old order and a new one, transforming their own story but also threatening to alter their environment. In this sense, some of these figures will, in early narratives, move from the limen to the margins: denied the possibility of reintegration, they will remain cautionary figures that do not fulfil their potential as social reformers. Second, Swynnerton’s art proves a product of its time, gaining relevance for the liminality of the historical moment: at the turn of the century the old world is giving way to a new one in which these liminars might find their space. Yet the atemporality of Swynnerton’s feminist representation of the hope for change evinces that history can be understood as a succession of “transitions toward,” of ideological and aesthetic limens, in which these female figures appear to embody either the fear of or the hope for renovation, or even both. Especially in the case of women’s historical struggle for equality this will be made apparent in the recurrent presence of these liminal women in four hundred centuries of cultural objects. Finally, Swynnerton’s powerful imagery not only reflects or challenges her audience’s ideological stance but also shapes it, highlighting the wide-reaching influence of artistic artifacts and their role in the construction of a social collective consciousness.

Following the aforementioned considerations, this publication consists, first, of this chapter, an introduction, which delimits the discussion of liminality to those dimensions that are relevant for subsequent analysis. Furthermore, it expands on this concept to engage with other relevant notions, such as the idea of trace or temporal and spatial orientation, to further offer a theoretical background for a polytemporal concept of feminist history that solidly links these past and present narratives together. The main body then revolves around four liminal female figures with a recurrent presence in eighteenth and nineteenth century narratives, namely vampires, prostitutes, quixotes, and detectives, understood as acts of embodiment of those New Women who inhabit the fringes of society and from there also populate its narratives to comment on the past and advance the future.

Liminality and Feminocentric Narratives Liminality is ubiquitous in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, psychology, economy, geography, and literature, and the rich engagement of recent scholarship with the notion of the “liminal” proves both its relevance and its polysemy. Its employment in a myriad of academic and nonacademic contexts has contributed to its becoming a popular concept, often detached from its original meaning and used to celebrate the transgression or challenge posed by the liminal identity, or conceived erroneously as a synonym for “marginal” (Thomassen 7). Given the centrality of the concept for the present work, it seems advisable to undertake a brief review of both the term and how it applies to the study of women in literature as emblems of social change. From the Latin limen or “threshold,” but tracing back to the Egyptian and Greek words for “port” (Joseph 138), liminality denotes a site of passage from one space to another, from one room to the next, from sea to land and vice versa. These roots explain why it is a boundary concept, whether literally or figuratively. Anthropologists Arnold van Gennep (1909) and Victor Turner (1969) built on this original meaning, and employed “liminaire” and “liminality,” respectively, to describe a transitional stage. Turner’s now famous definition states that liminal entities “are neither here nor there” for “they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arranged by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (The Ritual Process 95). The key, then, as Thomassen has aptly indicated, is the notion of “transition” between two points, one of departure and another of arrival. In fact, both anthropologists conceived liminality as a three-stage rite of passage that included a preliminal or separation phase, a liminal or transitional one, and, finally, a postliminal phase or incorporation (Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid” 56–57). Therefore, in its original conception, the liminal figure was marked by its differentiation from the community, by a loss of status, and a phase of experimentation, transgression, or growth in which usual “ties” are undermined or broken (59). The liminars are “temporarily undefined, beyond the normative social structure,” which makes them more vulnerable but also “liberates them from structural obligations” (59), leading Turner to employ the concept of “anti-structure” to define this stage (60). Yet it also comprises a final return to a “new, relatively stable, well-defined position in the total society” from which they had become separated (57), to a new societal status. This is illustrated, for instance, by the rites of passage for adolescent or young males in the different tribes under

study in Gennep’s and Turner’s pivotal works, later developed in the traditional Western plot of the bildungsroman. More importantly, change not only befell the liminal subject or “initiand,” but the community itself was transformed by the reintegration of the transgressive subject, as meaning is generated by “cultural sub-systems” only to be “institutionalized and consolidated at the centers of such systems” (“Liminal to Liminoid” 72–73). In fact, for Turner the liminal is read under a conservative light: it is encouraged as a “ritual of reversal,” inverting rather than subverting the status quo, returning to order as the better alternative for chaos, something for him reflected in the “pseudo-liminal” genre of satire (72). This can be perceived in many of the eighteenth and nineteenth century narratives revolving around a liminal female figure. However, Turner also acknowledges the power of art and literature to be more subversive, to parody and lampoon the central values of society (72), also a constant in many of the analyzed works that often provide a dual satire or a parody/satire which destabilizes the message of easy transition and return to one’s place within society. Therefore, for Turner the liminal “can never be much more than a subversive flicker,” asserting that It is put into the service of normativeness almost as soon as it appears. … a kind of institutional capsule or pocket which contains the germ of future social developments, of societal change, in a way that the central tendencies of a social system can never quite succeed in being, the spheres where law and custom, and the modes of social control ancillary to these, prevail. Innovation can take place in such spheres, but most frequently it occurs in interfaces and limina, then becomes legitimated in central sectors. (“Liminal to Liminoid” 76) However, this seed of social development takes precedent in modern processes of “revolution” or “insurrection” or what Turner terms “romanticism in art,” in which cultural transformation, discontent with the status quo, and social criticism have become “situationally central” and lastingly subversive (76). Turner then distinguishes the liminal from this more permanent transformation, which he will label the “liminoid.” More liberated and liberating from the aforementioned sociocultural necessities then is Turner’s postindustrial and leisure-oriented concept of the “liminoid,” more individualistic and focused on social criticism, more a “choice” and a “commodity” than a necessity (85–86), which apparently loses its characteristic transitional nature and becomes associated with the “antistructural” forces of art and literature (Achilles and Bergmann 8–9; Thomassen 84). Although general and vague, Turner’s distinction might explain the differences found in the narratives of liminal women, in which the required rite of passage culminated in marriage or asexual spinsterhood for eighteenth century women, while the nineteenth century sees changes brought by the liminal New Woman. It also contributes to the centrality of the transgressive vampires, prostitutes, quixotes, and detectives in contemporary culture, in which liminality is now the norm, the praised individual experience at the center of modernity (Thomassen 11–12, 14) and its narratives. Given the transformative power of the liminal phase and its place in society, it would find its echo in the works of other scholars not belonging to the field of anthropology. Especially

significant to the present work are Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on carnival. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin defined carnival as an alternative or “second life” in which people temporarily “entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (9). More relevantly for the idea of a fleeting emancipation, he writes: “one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (10, emphasis added). Turner’s liminal phase was indeed characterized by subversive and ludic events, by “unnatural” or “grotesque” elements (“Liminal to Liminoid” 59–60), by “unprecedented freedoms…forms of topsy-turvydom, parody, abrogation of the normative system, exaggeration of rule into caricature or satirizing of rule,” which he also associates with the “liminal inversions” that mark carnivalesque experiences (73). Yet it is also important to highlight that carnival proposes a temporal subversion, a time of controlled transgression as will be emphasized when referring to women’s quixotic madness. Another important development in recent scholarship that has ingrained a positive reading of this inbetweenness would be Homi Bhabha’s idea of a “third space” as a liminal and counterhegemonic site for creative transformation and negotiation (28, 38), which resonates with Turner’s address of the power of “anti-structure” to “generate…a plurality of alternative models for living, from utopias to programs, which are capable of influencing the behavior of those in mainstream social and political roles” (“Liminal to Liminoid” 65). Yet, once more, liminality understood as “creative hybridity” without any hierarchy can be problematic (Thomassen 8), and would probably be better related to Turner’s creative agency of the liminoid. Even such a brief approach demonstrates that liminality comprises myriads of possibilities, and the present work will address different liminal subjecthoods, from the individual to the social, as well as the temporal and spatial dimensions of liminality. The classification established by Thomassen (90–91) taking into consideration three possible subjects (individual, group, society) and times (moment, period, and epoch), as well as varied spaces (thresholds, areas or borders, and larger regions) will be useful to understand the liminal experience of individual women during a period of time, such as puberty, which is recurrently associated with the liminal phase in life and literature alike (Joseph 139). It might also comprise a life-span duration, for instance a permanent transformation into a vampire. This categorization also serves to address the transformation of a group, in this particular case New Women understood as an example of Turner’s sympathetic communitas, which challenge oppressive societal norms. Also, that of society as a whole at a time of revolution or reform, as were the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, or at the present time of uncertainties and questioning of old tenets.1 Notions of liminality also become relevant when exploring the position of the female body as permanently mutable between stages— e.g., menstruation as the mark of the transition between pregnancies (Derr)—as well as the orientation toward it in the discourse of morality or in the Western mind–body dualism. The reasons for the individual or collective liminal position of women is to be found in how they are circumscribed within society. These young women’s willful or forced separation is motivated by the constraining spaces that have become “institutionalized to reflect a common orientation,” which sanctions the exclusion of the “other” (Arias and Bryla

4). This otherness is, of course, motivated by fear: for gazing and controlling the other only serves to consolidate the self and to reflect one’s own insecurities (Arias and Bryla 2–3). In this sense, women are the “other” par excellence. Under the male gaze, the female body is subjected to a “constant process of metaphorization as ‘other-than,’” for in the binary structure of society’s logocentric system, woman becomes “the other,” which “can be assigned to the most varied and often contradictory terms” (Braidotti 83). Women are seen and defined as the “other” in the sameness/difference opposition between masculinity/femininity and mind/body that shapes much of modern thought, resulting in the historical control that society has exerted over the female body, her site of potential subversion, as well as her identity and her possibilities. As a consequence, historically institutionalized spaces such as the workplace, the governments, higher education, became oriented to exclude them. Furthermore, women who challenged this orientation became “doubly disprivileged” (Bell 2), a double other in the “derivative couples inside the category of ‘woman’: good girl/bad girl, madonna/whore, normal/abnormal, licit/illicit, wife/prostitute, as well as the high and low images that have fragmented and categorized the female body” (Bell 40). As a result, the home, the traditional spaces for female education and work, might also exclude these women because they have re-oriented themselves liminally. Consequently, spatial liminality, on its part, illuminates the spaces inhabited by female liminars. For example, the alleys and brothels, factories and asylums, which rendered prostitutes and detectives (in)visible and dangerously subversive, while also symbolizing the control of societal institutions. Spatial considerations also address the importance of the distinction between public and private liminality (and spheres) (Joseph 139; Turner Anthropology), leading to present discussions on the new cyber spaces as transitional sites for experimentation of “becoming” (Madge and O’Connor), which are beyond the scope of the present work. Returning to the object of this book, Turner’s own reference to art and literature, to satire and parody, advanced his relevance in the field of literary and cultural studies, in which the terms “liminality” and “liminal” have become of common usage. More than just thematizing liminality, literary texts can be understood as liminal themselves, as a passage in-between reality and fiction, a transitional object that connects the real and the imaginary (Achilles 40), but also a liminoid site for experimentation, criticism, and the seed for social transformation, for literature may prove the “stimulus and catalyst of reflection, of potential innovation and transformation,” destabilizing tenets and values of reality and leading to “new perspectives and an expansion of consciousness” (Achilles 41). As will be made apparent in both past and present narratives, these texts give expression to times of revolution or transition by plots that depict the separation from society and the reintegration, or not, of the liminal character. Their transgression may be temporal or permanent, it might be a carnivalesque moment of subversion and return to the norm or move the character further to the margins, hindering her incorporation. When this happens, she is transformed into something more than liminal, she becomes an “inassimilable” marginal creature rather than an outsider by choice (Joseph 140). The ideological stance of the text and its form will determine the conclusion, yet most of them will enable a temporal transgression in order to liberate these creative and psychological energies, which then return and are “fed back into the system” so that “[s]ocial

rules, categories, classes, and institutions are strengthened by enacting a fantasy of their weakness” (Gilead 184). Following Northrop Frye’s reflections on comedy and tragedy in Anatomy of Criticism, Gilead proves that in the numerous narratives revolving around a liminal figure in Western literature, comedy thematizes the possibility of return while tragedy focuses on isolation. As the individual that has become separated from her society enters the “larger realm” of the communitas, she comes to “embody the communal wisdom [s]he had transgressed” and both comedy and tragedy respond to this in different ways: In both comedic and tragic patterns, the validity of the values or categories of a social structure is asserted by means of a kind of cultural imprinting on the figure of the outsider. The comedic pattern vindicates the social structure more directly, perhaps, by revealing its stability to be not rigid after all, not incapable of tolerance or growth, but rather open to entry by outsiders or malcontents. These outsiders or rebels are often revealed as carriers of communal values, which are ultimately shown to be compatible with social structure. In tragedy, the transgression of conceptual and behavioral rules leads to punishment and expulsion, which in turn enunciates a seemingly universal truth of the human condition, thus indirectly confirming the underlying models, systems, and frameworks that make possible the social order. Tragic suffering is justified as a culturally conserving force, not arbitrary, but part of an essential process that helps to fix social structure or that prevents its too-rapid revision. (Gilead 185) Despite these vindications of societal structures and order, solely by presenting these narratives, literary texts mediate between these two readings of the world and even if they punish the female character they already sow the seed for change. Also, often the portrayal of a liminal character will reflect the text’s own position on the threshold between the canonical and the marginal, serving to dwell on the hermeneutics of exclusion that shapes literary history and challenging generic boundaries (Soto 13). Hence, thematizing liminality is also an instrument from which to perform generic dialogism and transform the literary panorama of any age. The study of these narratives is then a valuable resource to explore the liminal processes of women who defy societal norms as they become detached, separated from the community in a preliminal phase, and later develop a liminal subjecthood while dwelling on the threshold, writing new roles and stories for themselves that become visible for their readership, imagining new possibilities that might finally become assimilated into the total society. After a period of controlled subversion, chaos brings a new order, in which these New Women have opened a door for at least the potential for change. By comparing narratives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which the power of the liminal often must be found in those levels of meaning concealed under “surface designs” (Gilbert and Gubar 73), controlled by the ending or the conservative frame, with later ones in which the centrality of liminality in contemporary storytelling will be evinced, the present work highlights not only the debt that current narratives have with the past, but also the fact that the story of women’s advancement inhabits a constant stage of liminal detachment and reform.

Polytemporal (Feminist) History and the Trace As hinted before, the liminal also has important implications for the understanding of history. For Turner, when persons, groups, sets of ideas, etc., move from one level or style of organization or regulation of the interdependence of their parts or elements to another level, there has to be an interfacial region or … an interval, however brief, of “margin” or “limen,” when the past is momentarily negated, suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun. There is an instant of pure potentiality when everything trembles in the balance … (“Liminal to Liminoid” 75) Turner’s idea of the present as a moment in time in which society becomes detached from its past, rejecting it, and stands suspended while eagerly awaiting the future(s) to play out depicts the “now” as permanently liminal, as a hopeful instant in which different outcomes are possible and transformation is imaginable. History could then be conceived as a succession of liminal stages, of transformative moments, in which past ideas and values are suspended in order to look forward to a future incorporation of the new that has been worked out in the “now.” What is then perceived as liminal or subversive will become an agent of change. Therefore, one’s position in the present is essential, as the “now” is also oriented toward the future, a word that “marks a space and time that is almost, but not quite, available in the present” (Ahmed 554), hence this orientation toward is aspirational but also hopeful because “moving toward” maintains available the “possibility of changing directions, of finding other paths,” even of finding “hope in what goes astray” (Ahmed 570). However, in order to experience that hope Ahmed includes another element: looking backward to see what cannot be perceived in our present orientation (570). If the present is liminal and a site for potentiality, it is as a “link in the chain between past and future” (Browne, “Backlash” 9), as a “complex and fragmentary conjunction of plural pasts, presents and futures” or a “generative caesura” oriented backward to move forward (Browne, Feminism 40). History is then multidirectional and polytemporal, a “dynamic interplay and interrelations between past, present, and future as modes of temporal orientation” (Feminism 2); it is constructed by orienting oneself backward and forward without a linear conception of past, present, and future. The temporal experience should rather be understood as a “complex blend of presence and absence, retentions and protention, recollection and expectation” (Feminism 28, 31), what remains, and what is anticipated. In this sense, one must acknowledge that there exists an interest in the “presentification of past worlds” (Gumbrecht 94, original emphasis), in the ways in which they are “made visible and present in contemporary cultural artefacts” (Arias et al. 172–73), especially to be consumed or enjoyed by audiences willing to engage nostalgically or emotionally with the past, often (re)creating “pasts” that never actually existed (Butt 160; Troost 80). Therefore, this embodiment always entails change, as in any revisionist approach the truth is constantly rewritten as we situate or “orient ourselves towards it” (Feminism 67), affectively or intellectually, merely to cater to a consumer culture that expects a certain experience of the past, or rather to engage critically with it to self-consciously (re)interpret, (re)discover and (re)vision these pasts (Heilmann and

Llewellyn 4). For Browne, among other scholars, the past leaves traces in the now as it “spills forwards into the present,” therefore vindicating the need to make sense of it because the “historical past is also ‘constituted backwards’ when traces are taken up and configured within a historical narrative” (Feminism 51). As Paul Ricoeur would have it, the trace “is left by the past, it stands for the past” (365), and as such it becomes dependent upon “the work of configuration to become absorbed into the meaningful reality of the present” (Browne, Feminism 64). Therefore, both for Ricoeur and Browne, reality emerges consequently as the “interplay between the fragmentary and indeterminate traces of past happenings that spill over into the present, and the ‘work of configuration’ that keeps those traces, and thus the reality of the historical past, in play” (Feminism 65). Approaching the trace requires acknowledging the fact that configuration or revisionism becomes transformative, a part of the event’s reality, together with the elusiveness of such past event, which will always “exceed any one specific interpretation or conceptualization” (Feminism 65). All these considerations frame the relationships between past and present narratives of liminal women, and enable a deeper understanding of feminist history as reflected in them. Under the light of liminality, feminist history is one of constant movement: questioning societal norms and pre-liminally choosing to become outsiders; developing the liminal phase in communitas, in waves or movements; then, over a period of time, winning political, social, moral victories and integrating society with more visibility, relevance and power than before. These phases could be easily illustrated by the radical “unsexed” women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the New Women of the following era, or by feminist scholars of the 1960s: breaking with custom, proposing new possibilities, and advancing the cause of women, while also dealing with the recurrent backlash and at times their marginal status, as will be addressed in the subsequent analysis of those characters that embody the rise of the New Woman and the criticism she experienced. This apparent cyclical movement has been traditionally described in “waves,” with a certain sense of “overcoming” or even rejecting past feminisms as obsolete or unsuccessful. However, the present work approaches these narratives, and the history they tell, from an alternative view of feminist history as polytemporal and multidirectional. Instead of reading from the present past narratives as failed feminist texts, they are seen as sites of potentiality, as past precursors, which in their nuanced depiction of women who navigate the cracks of society, open the way for contemporary narratives of otherized or different women. Consequently, assuming the “time of the trace” in terms of a “nonlinear” or “two-way” temporality, would enable feminists to cultivate a more generative relation to feminisms of the past: maintaining a critical reflexivity around what we bring to the idea and practice of history; yet also being open to the surprise and strangeness of the past, allowing the present to be interrupted and transformed through the re-emergence of the past in the form of the trace. (Browne, Feminism 51) This, in turn, might inspire new ways of thinking or acting, proving the “subversive power of history” (Feminism 71), especially as this also involves a reclaiming of forgotten or

obliterated feminist histories.2 Remembering what has been forgotten is a radical action that re-surfaces what has been left on the margins of history, disturbing historical “truths” or canonical visions of the past (Browne, “Backlash” 10–11), while also developing a “sense of connections” (Pickering 197). For Browne this proves particularly important for feminist history, as it would be an exercise in “recollecting forward,” recalling the possibilities generated by the past, taking them up and actualizing them in the present, hence transforming past and present simultaneously (“Backlash” 8). Past feminisms would then not be failed attempts at change that met with backlash and required new movements to appear, but rather precursors of the liminal present stages of experimentation that look backward in order to move forward. In this conception, past feminisms become a site to explore the different paths available with the aim of producing “multiple possibilities that stretch into the future” (“Backlash” 9). That is, neither the past nor the future can be seen as fixed and “finished,” and change can be brought to “social systems by remembering, repeating, and ‘recollecting forwards’” (“Backlash” 12). This means not simply acknowledging or commemorating past contributions or achievements, but allowing them to “act on the present and the future” (“Backlash” 13), establishing an active dialogue between past and present narratives, as will be the aim of the present work. Contemporary narratives are then oriented backward, but are in themselves sites of potentiality for future stories on liminal women.

Liminal Women and Popular Narratives Given these considerations, it is no surprise that in women’s writing liminality is a recurrent trope serving to depict “crises of identity encapsulated in moments or interludes of transition” (Drewery, Modernist 1), while the “subversive potential afforded by transitional, in-between states is commonly evoked…through confrontations with otherness, life crises, and glimpses of contingent social structures and identities,” as illustrated by modernist fiction written by women (Drewery, “Liminal and Liminoid” 52; Modernist). Framed in the discussion of liminality, the present work revolves around its prospective power of transformation. Each of the four chapters explores a female liminal identity and the context of revolution or reform in which these figures appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as how they changed to respond to their times in contemporary fiction or remediations, from novels and films, to television shows, videogames, and graphic novels. Chapters 2 and 3 concentrate on two especially transgressive characters, female vampires and prostitutes. Female vampires can be read as the embodiment of the in-between: they are dead and alive, past and present, identified with excessive female sensuality but also with masculine sexual appetite and strength. Especially conspicuous in nineteenth century narratives, they voice Victorian fears about women’s mutability, unruly appetites, and thirst for power. The discussion of works by Sheridan La Fanu, Bram Stoker, or Mary Elizabeth Braddon, among others, lay the foundations to understand the common places of female vampiric narratives and how they respond to a reactionary time and context. A century later they will still be portrayed as dangerous sirens or sexually liberated predators that deviate from more traditional models of womanhood. Later, the chapter addresses such films as the

Swedish Let the Right One In (2008), the British Byzantium (2012), the American Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), together with other contemporary references. These rewritings celebrate the vampire’s otherness, mainly consigning the representation of female sexuality as aberrant to past narratives, and instead highlighting the resilience to be found in these liminal characters. Chapter 3 addresses the liminality of the prostitute, who is signified differently in various discourses. It discusses the construction of prostitution and representation of the prostitute from the eighteenth century onward, using as illustrations Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), instances of the genre termed “whore biography,” as well as other popular sources, for instance, Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress and Harris’s List of Covent Garden Girls. It then moves on to the public debate concerning prostitution in the nineteenth century and the sentimental portrayals of the prostitute, exemplified by Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman (1798), which set the tone for subsequent narratives. Wollstonecraft’s criticism of the objectification of women will lead to a discussion of Frankenhooker (1990), which, via Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s masterpiece, reflects the dehumanizing approach of male authority to the female body. Connecting past and present, the film Dangerous Beauty (1998) employs the biography of a sixteenth century courtesan to reflect on the freedom of women, whereas Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin (2000), based on the life of an eighteenth century prostitute, will prove how performances of prostitution have not inherently changed in two hundred years, and neither have the ways in which society approaches the plight of the prostitute. Finally, the television show Harlots (2017–) will equally serve to address common places such as state control over women’s bodies, society’s double standards and violence against women, which still inform present-day performances of prostitution. Chapter 4 exposes quixotism as an in-between state, located between illusion and reality, freedom and submission. Its carnivalesque nature allows for a period of subversion in which class and gender restrictions are defied. The chapter will discuss the use of female quixotism from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century as an instrument in the hands of women writers to expose the limitations of society and the potential of women to become more than wives and mothers. It contends that these liminal characters anticipate the madwoman of the nineteenth century, as she is displaced to the fringe of society, silenced, imprisoned, or restored to her invisibility as a proper woman. The quixote’s integration would also require the metaphorical death of her quixotic persona, or her literal death in the more dystopian narratives. Examples such as Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), among others, will illustrate the defiance quixotism poses to women’s oppression. Contemporary examples in which women’s imagination questions or rejects patriarchal narratives include films, namely Amélie (2001), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Sucker Punch (2011), The Bookshop (2017), and Isn’t It Romantic (2019), as well as recent television shows such as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2014–19). Finally, Chapter 5 discusses the liminal position in society of nineteenth century detectives. These women worked for the police force or private agencies, but often unacknowledged and underpaid, and fictional accounts draw on real undercover journalists and private eyes, such as Nellie Bly and Kate Warne. As will be made evident, their value

was in their ability to rewrite themselves under different covers, infiltrating homes, asylums, factories, etc., often performing a persona in-between man and woman. Such liminal qualities were reflected in fiction from the early days of female sleuths to present-day detective narratives. To illustrate their representation, this chapter addresses ground-breaking works such as The Female Detective (1864) and Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864), among others written by E.T.A. Hoffmann and a range of women authors, to later move to contemporary rewritings of these early detectives. In order to do so, it analyzes three television shows—Houdini & Doyle (2016), The Bletchley Circle (2012–14), and The Pinkertons (2014)—together with the graphic novel published in 2018 My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Finally, it examines the Baztan trilogy written by a Spanish author, Dolores Redondo, seen as a rewriting of the liminal Gothic heroine, and, hence, also an echo of former narratives. Overall, it considers the discrimination against the female sleuth that permeates two centuries of fiction, as well as how the woman detective must perform a hybrid form of gender, appropriating prerogatives traditionally attributed to hard-boiled men. By means of a diachronic and comparative approach, these chapters will hence emphasize the similitudes and differences in the performance of women’s agency in these narratives. In this analysis, the liminality of these characters in previous centuries will be proven nuanced, manifesting differently depending on the figure or genre, especially in the postliminal phase of reintegration or the lack thereof. In addition, the centrality of the liminal in contemporary culture will be made manifest by the predominance of a less conservative reading of these characters, as well as their nature as recognizable and popular figures in the collective imagination. The liminal is now almost the norm, and yet many of the issues facing these women in previous centuries still resonate with current audiences. These rewritings will highlight the representation across time and space of female sexuality, gender violence, and women’s rights, also employing a liminal stance so as to “reflect the new through the looking-glass of the old” (Giles 33), facing the trace of the past in order to understand the present. As contemporary cultural artifacts recreate bygone times or rewrite traditional female liminal figures, they stand on the threshold between two different historical contexts, becoming a liminal area, a sphere of active mediation between cultural systems (Aguirre et al. 30). As such, these rewritings not only employ liminal characters’ place on the threshold to question their social context and to expose its hypocrisy, discrimination, and violence, but their vantage point also enables writers and directors to vindicate a less homogeneous and canonical vision of the past, while they bring such past closer to the present, highlighting the relevance that issues such as women’s rights and gender violence still have nowadays. While these characters and the concept of liminality are undoubtedly well-researched topics, they have, however, not often been brought together, nor has a tradition been traced from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century in the representation of these female figures. Throughout these chapters, then, this book aims to fill the existing gaps by working with a novel and relevant corpus that comprises four centuries and several countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Iran, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States). The comprehensive corpus offers more than just an Anglo-centric perspective, while for reasons of necessary concentration, it does not address works outside Western popular culture.

Another reason for this is to provide coherence in the discussion of the transformation of gender roles in societies that share a similar background, where these stereotypes and expectations spring from analogous religious, ideological, or economic principles, and where women share close trajectories in the achievement of basic rights such as suffrage or owning property. By underlining the dialogue between past and present in these cultural artifacts, this work intends to contribute to contemporary debates on the representation of women and the construction of femininity as opposed to hegemonic masculinity, both of which are informed by previous attitudes and beliefs. Exploring past stories and their contemporary rewritings will expose the line of thought that has brought us to the present moment, hence, challenging assumed stereotypes and narratives as seen in popular cultural artifacts throughout time (Feasey; Walton and Jones). In this sense, narratives that have been recurrently (and pejoratively) deemed popular, and therefore have often been liminalized in academia only to then infiltrate and revitalize it, must continue to be vindicated as useful instruments in order to lay the foundation for the discussion on women’s visibility in cultural artifacts, their agency within societal constraints, and the forms in which violence has been directed against them. As genres or forms that are acutely sensitive to what is aesthetic or socially relevant at any given moment in time, popular narratives are particularly apt to be described as “sociological events,” for they “build a credibility and significance of their own, because they negotiate and renegotiate both the aesthetic expectations and ideological investment of their readers in a pleasurable—and, for authors and publishers, profitable—way” (Walton and Jones 13). Popular narratives, in this way, are transitional in their own right, often standing on the threshold between the need to affirm the “ideological norms of its consumers” while also introducing “subtle changes within” that will reflect societal transformations and “provide a means of working through those changes in ‘controlled fashion’” (Walton and Jones 49). When it comes to feminocentric narratives, these popular artifacts can more easily revolve around liminal or even marginal figures that would not find a space in more canonical works, thereby providing these female figures not only with heightened visibility but also new agency, for their in-between stance in the conservative/subversive spectrum problematizes the need to renegotiate women’s position in society and these genres, reflecting as only popular fiction can do the changes in women’s roles, (self)perceptions and possibilities throughout time (Walton and Jones 13). So, by using popular narratives and media, the present work aims to highlight the value of literature, films or alternative forms of storytelling to understand how women’s place in society, their voice, and their presence have been and are still negotiated in spaces of visibility, agency, and power.

Notes 1 Thomassen’s employment of Karl Jasper’s theory of the “axial age” is then, indeed, relevant to understand the wider dimension of liminality as applied to ages of transition, of special creativity, and the questioning of old certainties (91– 92). 2 The “time of the trace” and its potential to recover obliverated or subversive past stories can be seen in recent literary studies. In particular, the field of Neo-Victorian studies has proved especially prolific in the use of the trace to connect past and present. See, for instance, Rosario Arias and Lin Elinor Pettersson’s Reading the ‘Trace’ in Modern and

Contemporary Fiction (Gylphi. Forthcoming).

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2 Female Vampires On the Threshold of Time, Space, and Gender

In Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses (1961), an adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s classical vampiric tale Carmilla (1872), the female vampire claims “My name is Millarca. I lived in the past. I live now.” Her statement emphasizes not only the endurance of the female vampire throughout generations of the same family or her own immortality, but also the trace of the past in the present, the continuum she represents. It also points to the persistence of the figure of the female vampire in popular fiction, further highlighted by the film’s trailer, which underscored that it brought a “storm of new sensations,” connecting with nineteenth century sensation literature and its chillingly subversive narratives. Both past and present fiction, then, reclaim this otherized and liminal figure. Vampires, maybe more than any other creature, live on the threshold. They wait on windowsills and doors to be invited in, or are associated with darkness, wandering the streets at night, surrounded by others at the fringes of society: prostitutes, criminals, the homeless. With them, they embody the fears of that other against which to become oriented, of the abject which must be rejected so that identity is distinguished and developed (Kristeva 3). By its intrinsic liminality, by “calling into question the delineation between inside/outside, I/Other, human/monster and living/dead, the vampire invokes the horrors of the in-between” and becomes a figure of abjection (Munford 259–60). Vampires become or are transformed into outsiders, and from that position offer a comment on the values of the society that has pushed them to the fringe. In fact, as “creatures of myth and cultural metamorphosis,” they become metaphors for disruption, for that which might be feared but also desired at different times, places, and cultures (Wisker, “Female Vampirism” 151), so that their liminality becomes in a sense a “cultural index of unease, disease and apprehension” (Wisker, Contemporary 157). Bram Stoker’s paradigmatic male vampire, Count Dracula, for instance, became “the epitome of the monstrous transgressor,” or a “representative ‘other’” employed to address “cultural anxieties” (DuRocher 45). On the one hand, he embodies Victorian England’s xenophobic fears, but he is also the epitome of a “hyper-masculine male,” with a heightened lust for young girls and capable of exerting his “raw sexual and masculine power” in his control over the brides or his ability to lure innocent women (DuRocher 45–46). In the end, Dracula is destroyed by his competitors, the Victorian white males who wish to kill the monster and so restore their supremacy. If hegemonic manhood is defined as “a man in power, a man with power, and a man of power” (Kimmel 184, emphasis in original), the

heroic man and the monster both claim the right to that manhood, to exert such power over women, while they attempt to outpower each other. Lucy’s transformation and final staking at the hand of men serve as well-known and graphic example of the male wish to control her body and her transgressions against patriarchal rule (Wisker, Contemporary 159). In recent adaptations of the myth, vampire men have inherited this violent dominance over women’s bodies, while their raw sexuality has become increasingly condoned by means of a romantic narrative usually involving a human woman. Contemporary vampire men might seem less overtly violent as they engage in relationships with human women; however, these affairs are marked by the vampire’s acts of violence, as well as by his wish to control his partner. Popular television shows and films, such as True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, The Twilight Saga, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all display vampire males who are presented as protective heroic ideals, drawing on the “idealized language of patriarchy to defend the women in their care” (DuRocher 53), which disguises for a time their more or less violent exertion of power over them. These characters have raised concerns about the normalization and harlequinization of controlling men by female audiences (Crawford 128–30; DuRocher 56; McMillan),1 while the eventual fallout of these relationships is read under a more positive light by other scholars (Boyer), serving as a warning for women. These narratives then reveal gendered concerns by exposing the “patriarchal, controlling, and violent male of the past … as a monstrous ‘other’,” for even “with the evolution of contemporary vampire men into tortured heroes who seek redemption and attempt to be ‘good,’ they ultimately share the same attributes as their predecessors: they are violent, powerful, and dangerous inhuman fiends, regardless of whether they are seducing English ladies in 1897 or romancing high school girls in 2014” (DuRocher 57). Patriarchal heroes and villains are both monstrous when placed in relation to their common other, woman. Also, the past vampiric narratives of male dominance prove to coexist with what is assumed to be a more advanced twenty-first century society, highlighting that violence against women has not yet been overcome. Like her male counterpart, the female vampire also embodies abjection because she subverts the “rules of proper sexual conduct,” together with her uncanny ambiguity, on the threshold between life and death but also “the human and the animal” (Creed 110), what can and cannot be controlled and regulated socially. If the male vampire is recurrently written as a “pre-eminently sexualized predator, who alternately uses horrific violence and smooth seduction,” the vampiress, both past and present, is usually “a hypersexualized image that blends that violence and seduction with fears of the destructive beauty and charm of womanhood” (Hobson 12). Fears concerning the female body and the “voracious and destructive nature of female sexuality,” together with the vampiress’ “heightened physical strength and her longevity move her firmly into the utterly uncontrollable category” (Hobson 12), and transform her into a liminally subversive figure. In this sense, the transgressive figure of the female vampire is especially suited as the fictionalized construction of the demonized other that the male representatives of conventional order desire, gaze at, and then reject and hope to punish. She is a liminal being that represents “terror at everything in flux, unfixed,” she “unsettles certainties expressed in the neat polarities of life/death, male/female, dead/undead” (Wisker, “Female Vampirism” 151), as well as signaling the female body’s mutability (Mulvey-Roberts, “Female Gothic Body” 113). She is “disruptive and

troublesome…an oxymoron, a thrilling contradiction, fundamentally problematizing received notions of women’s passivity, nurturing and social conformity;” the female vampire destabilizes “such comfortable, culturally inflicted investments and complacencies and reveal[s] them as aspects of constructed gender identity resulting from social and cultural hierarchies” (Wisker, “Female Vampirism” 150). These forms of monstrous identity have always been connected to the fear of the feminine, its association with blood, disease, and transitional transgressive states: with menstruation (Heller 81–82; Macfie 60; Mulvey-Roberts, “Dracula” 78), which is in itself liminal, or hysteria (Heller 78; Shail 235), an in-between state facing sanity and madness. Also with “aberrant” female sexuality, such as nymphomania or lesbianism, sexually transmitted diseases, and even emotional vampirism or the “psychic sponge” (Macfie 59–60). The female vampire would then be an overly feminine figure, epitomizing the atavistic fears of women— their powers of creation and the “unspeakable and unpayable debt to the maternal body” symbolized in menstruation (Mulvey-Roberts, “Menstrual” 150; Munford 260);2 their appetites, sexual (Wisker, “Love Bites” 169) or otherwise (Domínguez-Rué 299–300); and their thirst for knowledge or control (Dijkstra 351)—written into mythical constructs, such as Lilith or Lamia, and finding their way into modern rewritings of female vampirism, for instance, Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Stoker’s Dracula. Both texts have been hailed as the most influential representatives of the early narratives of female vampires, and they establish some of the topoi to be found in contemporary adaptations. Le Fanu and Stoker emphasize the disruptive power of the vampire, as first Carmilla and later Lucy become, to use Signorotti’s expression, “unframed,” which refers to that idea of detachment and freedom in the liminal phase, while Laura’s and Mina’s words also attempt to escape confinement by telling their story. Moreover, the female bond established between Carmilla and Laura, even evoking the absent mother, recalls the fear that female friendship or closeness arose in the nineteenth century, as a form of moral contagion (Macfie 60) or, if read liminally, female communitas. However, these authors maintain control over their vampires through agents of patriarchy: doctors, fathers, husbands. If the female vampire reclaims the phallic power of the fangs, she is cured by being impaled so the lost balance is restored and the powerful woman’s threat is neutralized. The female vampire is not allowed an integration after her experience in the communitas. Nor is her message unmediated. Men also aim to gain control over Laura’s tale, addressed to a woman, and Mina’s essential account is solidly framed within the male narrative. As Auerbach aptly asserts, even “[w]hen a woman becomes a vampire herself, she has no more agency than she did when she was human” (39). She does not become liminal by virtue of her vampiric nature: she was already pushed to the fringe by her condition as a woman, and she is further displaced to the margins by being one against which male fears are blatantly oriented. The need to regain control over these women’s voices, and sexuality, might explain why the female vampire often loses agency over her story and remained a warning against the siren-like qualities of the femme fatale or the inordinate demands of women’s bodies in modern rewritings, being denied a potential incorporation into society. Téophile Gautier’s “La morte amoureuse” (1836), for instance, takes the form of an older priest’s warning directed at a younger brother so as to avoid the temptation of women: one look at them could

prove enough to lose one’s soul (57). Framed in Romuald’s narrative, Clarimonde’s body is constantly gazed at and enjoyed, and her love drives him to lead a double life, in-between dream and reality, the lover and the priest (49, 55). She epitomizes all the common places of female vampires: she is not fully human but otherworldly, in-between an angel and a demon (21); she has an animal nature, sometimes reptile (24), and at others acting like a feline (51); and enormous appetites for men and money, blood and gold (56). She is described as a great courtesan, a Cleopatra given to orgies, a ghoul or vampire who leads her lovers to violent deaths (41). As a seductive woman, she drives the priest to obsess with her, becoming multiple women at once to fulfill his sexual longings (50), while she drains his life force by drinking his blood. Building on the long tradition of the femme fatale, Romuald presents himself as the victim, the infatuated lover, yet in both worlds, as a rakish aristocrat and a priest, he still holds the ultimate power over the female vampire. First, as Clarimonde’s lover he can instill life into her with a kiss, therefore fulfilling the traditional role in fairy tales. In addition, he still “owns” his lover (50), and determines her fate by her love for him. Second, together with another priest, he disrupts Clarimonde’s tomb to reduce her to dust with holy water: like Carmilla or Lucy, the female vampire is easily reduced to nothingness by the representatives of patriarchal institutions. Clarimonde is powerful in the liminal realm between illusion and reality, life and death; however, in her corporeality, in the concreteness of her body, she is controlled and her power neutralized. Embodying Romuald’s sexual fantasies, she is finally chastised for the danger she poses. He conjures the monster, but woman is punished for it. Furthermore, Gautier’s conservative narrative exposes what later feminist stories will highlight as well, among them Angela Carter’s “Lady” or the film franchise Underworld: that no matter how powerful the vampire, the woman might still be entrapped by conventional narratives, by romance or even by the demands and sacrifices of motherhood. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s story “Good Lady Ducayne” (1896), the eponymous lady also does not get a voice. Not even Bella, the victim and protagonist, does: the reader has only two of her letters to her mother, before she is conveniently saved by Dr. Stafford. After the engagement it is the narrator’s voice that reports her words: she is to be a married woman and the reader might no longer hear from her. Her narratability comes from the liminal status granted by courtship. In addition, Lady Ducayne is an older woman, not depicted as a seductress beyond the appeal her money has. She is a vampire of a different sort, and her connection to the upper classes that exploit the lower ones comes close to erstwhile and present reinterpretations of the vampire myth. For instance, in her appetite for fresh blood transfusions, the centenarian lady recalls the terrible Countess Elizabeth Báthory and her thirst for young girls’ blood to ensure her prolonged life. She also becomes a precursor of the celebrities who, using their wealth, pay for expensive treatments known as the “vampire facials” in order to remain youthful.3 Significantly, this obsession with beauty and impossible youthfulness is a narrative imposed by patriarchy on women. Braddon, and later Angela Carter or Moira Buffini, attest that society creates the monsters it then fears and wishes to eradicate, proving that past feminist concerns, as the vampiress herself, have indeed survived two centuries. The hunger for human energy is also portrayed in rewritings of the Medusa myth, such as

Catherine L. Moore’s “Shambleau” (1933) in which the creature draws “nourishment from the … life-forces of men” (278), by very explicitly raising their libido to then drain them of it. Mary Wilkins-Freeman “Luella Miller” (1903) and Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) portray the vampire as a young, attractive girl who lures people into doing what she wants. Whereas Wilkins’s Luella traps the spirits of men and women, consumes them while they serve her, Leiber’s “The Girl” becomes a siren that wrecks men from the advertising billboards, for with her eyes she can make them throw away money and life (347). The latter so returns to the fear of the ravenous woman, the siren gold-digger that Dijkstra described (351), which also inhabits popular fiction as the trophy wife in comedy or the nymphomaniac murderess of Basic Instinct (1992). Returning to Moore’s, Wilkins’s and Leiber’s stories, in none of them is the vampire’s voice heard; in fact, in the latter two the tale is conveyed by witnesses, two victims of the vampire, which emphasizes the bias with which their stories are framed. In recent times, the female vampire has remained in more conservative narratives a pornographic male fantasy, with numerous novels, films, television shows, and videogames exploiting the heightened sexuality of the brides of Dracula—e.g., a 1992 videogame entitled Brides of Dracula or the 2004 film Van Helsing and the subsequent videogame of the same name. A particularly relevant example of the remediation of the female vampire from this perspective is the fictional universe of BloodRayne, which started with two games, and prompted three films and a comic. The protagonist, Rayne, is liminal beyond her vampirism: she is a Dhampir, a human–vampire hybrid, which deters her integration within both communities. In addition, she is extremely powerful, but also faces the trauma of knowing that she is the product of the rape and subsequent murder of her human mother. Both games, in fact, focus on her quest for revenge, meaning the death of her vampire father and the overcoming of the male violence against women that permeates her world, as a reflection of ours. Despite these interesting premises, Rayne is nevertheless a highly sexualized character in games and films alike, and especially in the latter is reduced to the clichés of voluptuous action heroines. Other narratives, like The Twilight Saga, revolve around a teenager in love who is once more framed into a traditional patriarchal narrative of damsel in distress and whose vampiric nature serves the purpose of saving her from unwanted physical decay, in the tradition of other female vampiric narratives (Horner and Zlosnik 188; Mulvey-Roberts, “Female Gothic Body” 117; Santos 144–45). However, it is when contemporary narratives preserve the difference, the powerful otherness of the myth, and glorify the vampire’s liminal nature and its ability to escape easy voyeuristic male frames or narratives, that female vampires become more culturally, and politically, relevant. This is the case of Robert Aickman’s now classic “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” (1975). Written in the first person, taking the form of a secret diary, it tells the transformation of a young, enclosed eighteenth century girl into a powerful vampire after her encounter with an older and seductive revenant. Constrained by overbearing parents and by social norms, the protagonist mutates from child to woman—in the epitome of the liminal phase—and then to a powerful “elected” being that rules over creatures of the night (413–14). In the end, she remains in a liminal state, weak in life and powerful in her wait for death, limited as a young woman but limitless as a vampire, when

the diary comes to a conclusion. From the 1980s onward, contemporary women writers have created increasingly complex vampire figures, both exposing the threats of the monster yet celebrating its otherness, enacting and celebrating “liminality and new radical sexual energies,” opposing the sexual binaries and stereotypes, exposing romance as dangerous and reveling in women’s agency (Wisker, Contemporary 158, 160). Recent feminist readings of the vampire are seen to “unpick and expose limiting, damaging conventions with which women were portrayed, constructed socially and culturally in texts;” they can be employed to uncover past and present “political, social and cultural lies and mistakes” (Wisker, Contemporary 168), hence opening the way for transformation. A powerful example is found in Angela Carter’s short story “The Lady of the House of Love.” The tale focuses on a vampiric Countess, an heiress to Nosferatu himself, who lives entrapped in her castle, feeding from animals and men that cross the threshold first of her castle, and then of her bedroom. Yet, she is conflicted about her dual nature as animal and human, wishing to escape her heritage and destiny. One day, a handsome young British officer arrives and wakes her from her ennui, from her repeated cycle of seduction and death, condemning her to disappear. Carter creates a liminal figure, not fully human nor animal, conflicted and ravenous (95), as well as a liminal time and space, at the turn of the century approaching a time of change, World War I, and presenting Romania as a country both realistic and mythical, present and past. The officer rides his bicycle—the sign of progress for New Women—across the country and brings the outside, modern perspective, while the Countess remains trapped in time, as the land also seems to do. Her castle, surrounded by roses and decay, becomes reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty and her sleeping kingdom, a parallelism reinforced by her cutting her finger. The vampire is indeed only half alive, suspended in tradition: “she is a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit” (93). Carter’s text emphasizes the traces of the past in the portraits of centuries of vampires, in the family’s hunger within the Countess, which would “condemn her to a perpetual repetition of their passions” (103). Facing this deterministic reading, the Countess wonders whether there is hope for change, whether a bird can learn a new song (93, 103). While she places her hopes on romantic love to make her fully human, to help her leave her shadows (103), therefore overcoming her liminality, this ultimately means her death. In her portrayal of the inert and lethargic young woman, Carter mirrors the “constraints of past and current reconstructions of [women’s] femininity, built upon directives and narratives relying on a necessity to please, looking beautiful, being languid, supported and nurtured” (Wisker, Contemporary 42–43). This is emphasized by her reference to the Countess’s doll-like nature (102), her lack of possession over herself (103), the officer’s vision of her as a hysteric and helpless girl (107), and, of course, her hopeless ending brought by a reversal of the traditional fairy-tale ending: romance does not bring new life to the sleeping beauty, but another form of not-being, of disappearing from the narrative, as would happen to many of the liminal figures herein addressed. Carter’s vampiric tale, then, subverts many of the stereotypes of the vampiric femme fatale, exposing her Countess as a construction founded on male’s fantasies of the surrender of female power to convention. In addition, Carter will also make explicit the connection between female vampirism and prostitution, with the Countess’s lips and

seductive ways reminding that of whores and freakish brothels (103, 105). Another of her tales, “The Loves of Lady Purple,” which will be discussed in the subsequent chapter on the prostitute, resumes many of these themes and shows their importance in Carter’s body of work. Later narratives, like Octavia Butler’s novel Fledgling (2005), inherit many of these complexities. Lin Knutson has insightfully read this work under the light of liminality: pointing at literal and metaphorical thresholds, the subversion of the vampiric/human communitas, and the disruption of race and gender positions that the protagonist embodies— in that sense also recalling prior texts like Florence Marryat’s well-known The Blood of the Vampire (1897). In addition, evoking Carter’s hybridity of genres and voices—mixing fairy tales and vampiric Gothic, the first and the third person—Butler manages to introduce and then deconstruct topoi of the vampire genre, so that the text “disrupts the reader’s sense of narrative stability and creates a liminal space of indeterminacy” (Knutson 219). Therefore, both texts illustrate how contemporary female vampire narratives not only break gender boundaries, but generic ones too. Given that “the literary and filmic vampire has been seized on to entertain, explore and express ways in which we celebrate or abject difference” vampire fictions consequently “trouble, break and cross boundaries between genres, enacting their radical, liberating transgression which takes place at the level of narrative and interpretation” (Wisker, Contemporary 169). In this train, the examples that are subsequently presented, evince that the female vampire serves the purpose of highlighting that in-between empowering quality of women throughout the ages: the more vulnerable stranger or immigrant, navigating the border; New Women on the threshold, not quite invited in but pushing the door open, creating their own countersphere; the abused woman and the courageous mother; the rape victim who finds her voice and her story; the ageless recorder of human history; or the woman who reclaims the night back.

F(r)iends on the Threshold: Let the Right One In Thomas Alfredson’s 2008 acclaimed adaptation of Let the Right One In (2004), by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist, resumes many of the classic elements of vampire fiction, while portraying a distinct female vampire. The story is set in a suburb in Sweden, where Oskar is bullied by his classmates and ignored by his divorced parents, while he imagines violent schemes of revenge. One day a mysterious girl, Eli, arrives accompanied by the older Hakan. As Eli and Oskar become closer, a series of murders occur. One of Eli’s victims, Virginia, is turned and commits suicide. Finally, Eli is revealed as a vampire and almost dies at the hands of Virginia’s boyfriend, Lacke. She then brutally murders Oskar’s bullies and they leave together. Eli is a classical vampire in many aspects: she does not age, she is hurt by the light, and she cannot enter a room unless invited or she will bleed to death. She is therefore confined to live behind closed windows and doors until night falls; she is forced to stand on windowsills and doors, and the film underscores this motif to emphasize her position on the threshold, her liminality. Paraphrasing Bakhtin, this motif becomes, on the one hand, a chronotopic

threshold, a material “border that can be spatially transgressed, thus spatially traversed” (Bruhn et al. 10). The film also develops phenomenological thresholds. By means of the window, it develops manifold and deep meanings: both narratives, novel and film, “deal with the challenges of meeting the Other” and the window’s meaning is “the dynamic struggle between the impenetrable border as opposed to an open passage,” for physical passageways “can either prevent or facilitate meetings, dialogue—or love” (Bruhn et al. 11). Through the recurrent motif of the threshold, both novel and film, underline the need and importance of this encounter with the other. In her role as an outsider, Eli must be invited in to be able to cross to the other side. At one point, Oskar, already knowing she is a vampire, claims that there is no obstacle to Eli entering his room; however, not being invited, Eli starts to bleed from every pore as soon as she crosses the threshold. This rite of passage connected to blood symbolizes the strong association with menstruation or even with a violent breaking of the hymen—another physical threshold to cross or break—which would also signify the abandonment of childhood and innocence. Oskar, frightened, screams an invitation. After this scene, Eli can say that they are the same, and asks Oskar to inhabit her skin, to be in her shoes. Vampirism, as Delamotte suggests, represents this “threat of psychical violation—a transgression against the body, the last barrier protecting the self from the other” and leads to “[t]ransformation … a figurative crossing of boundaries. What was x becomes y, the line dividing them dissolving” (21), as Eli steps over the threshold. Oskar’s game at the threshold might entail his sense that this transformation is possible, and his fear of it. This scene could then also be explained by the Derridean concept of hostipitality [hospitality+hostility]: the invitation, the “greeting of the foreign other,” but on one’s terms as host (4), while there is a certain hostility and distrust toward the other as “stranger.” Slightly sadistically, Oskar brings Eli in but subverts the right of the guest not to be hurt. Eli’s obvious portrayal as the other—her dark hair and eyes, her slightly darker skin —makes this a not-so-subtle comment on the debate on immigration and border-crossing. Not properly invited, she might get hurt at the (invisible) wall of contention as immigrants jumping the wire-crowned fences at the south of Spain do. The title of the film echoes contemporary discourses on controlled immigration, on the idea that one should only let the right ones in. Is she the right choice? It would not seem that way. She is a foreign, strange being that disrupts the seeming balance of Swedish society. Except that the viewer is aware that there is no such equilibrium: Western welfare states are full of victimized, vulnerable selves often abandoned by the system or those meant to protect them. Eli changes that by bringing her different perspective into play; the outsider who transgresses societal norms also transforms Oskar’s reality, yet not without conflict and violence. In addition, she subverts acquired notions on masculinity and femininity: Oskar attempts to build muscle to defend himself from his bullies, yet the more powerful of the two is the seemingly young girl. She is also more knowing, less innocent than Oskar, who is also isolated and seeking belonging. In this sense, Eli is not the only liminal character. The Swedish suburb is full of “disregarded children—not seen by their own families” and “the socially excluded outcasts— not seen by the community” (Bruhn et al. 11). They are all at one point “depicted in threshold situations” (4), just as the female vampire navigates that border. On that liminal space, Eli

proves her generative power as a vampire. Her age brings her close to the moment in which she might have her first period, to the female transitional moment in life, and while she is too young to portray the motherly or exuberant figure of a Carmilla, she does generate others: she has that potential to become a creator and turns Virginia and also changes Oskar. Eli’s transformation of Oskar as her other self is reiterated in their mirror images through glass. Eli, the darker mirror of blonde Oskar, as Carmilla was of Laura (Dijkstra 343): the dark side of the self. In fact, she appeals to him to be “her” for a moment and his reaction to the killing in the pool asserts this transformation. Also, Eli fulfills the fears at vampiric motherhood for her “maternity” is consummated in Virginia being turned after her attack. Virginia is a potential female vampire. Attacked by Eli, she survives and slowly deteriorates in the hospital, becoming afraid that the strange girl might have infected her with a disease. As a consequence, rather than enabling the full transformation, she commits suicide by becoming exposed to the sun and self-consuming. Vampirism is not a form of empowerment, but perceived as a threat for those around her, especially in the current fear of contamination and disease spread by global migrations. Virginia wishes to escape what she perceives as a curse. The way in which she dies, exposed to the sun and in a horrible state of decay, contradicts the above focus in contemporary narratives on the eternal youth of the female vampire, which in Eli’s case is also detrimental, leaving her, at least externally, in the vulnerable state of childhood, exposed to potential pedophiles like Hakan. In its portrayal of everyday dangers, the film is more than a traditional horror story. The suburbs, with their apparent stable surface and their hidden violence, are perfect liminal spaces. Mostly empty, full of alleys and surrounded by the subversive space of the forest. The white snow, the eerie atmosphere adds to this feeling. In this sense, the blood and slaughtering scenes are “reflected and doubled by additional, non-traditional horrible aspects from the social realistic coming-of-age novel, which adds to the genre complexity and expectations” (Bruhn et al. 3). For example, the threat of pedophilia or the bullying that takes place at the school with no intervention from adults, all “disturbing issues” that are portrayed for the audience in a matter-of-fact manner by the narrator, who “presents a mixture of dialogue and internal and external descriptions that permit us to follow the reflective inner logic of the central characters” (Bruhn et al. 3). This narrative, then, also uses hybridity and ambiguity to take the viewer in and out, therefore making them also stand in-between, conflicted about Eli’s role as monster or savior, and about society’s own monstrosity. That fluidity is achieved in the film with the aforementioned motif of the windows and doors, with the camera “positioned as a remote onlooker” (Bruhn et al. 4): the viewer is left on that threshold, as an observer, a witness of the loneliness, the marginality, the violence, and desolation of an all-to-familiar scene of bullying and abuse, which audiences have become accustomed to watching through another window: their television set. The cold and detached form this liminality takes leaves the viewer in the uncomfortable position of not being able to make an easy judgment, as nothing is truly black or white, nobody is just victim or victimizer. In this context, the film offers a “happy” ending: Oskar and Eli literally move, transition, on a train to an unknown destination, leaving their isolation behind and establishing their own communitas in their shared outsider status.

M/Others and Survivors through Time: A Vampire Story and Byzantium Written in 2008 and originally intended to be represented in schools and youth theaters, Moira Buffini’s A Vampire Story plays with the mutability of the vampire myth, while rendering the reality portrayed on stage also changing and unstable. Two stories are being told: one, by the older sister, Claire, who claims she took her younger sister out of a care home after she was raped there; the other, by Eleanor herself, who identifies as a vampire who has lived for two hundred years with her vampiric mother, Claire. The elements they both share are Eleanor’s rape and Claire’s attempt to protect her at any cost, both from herself and the system. As both stories or “realities” are developed on stage, the main characters are played by different actresses in the past and the present, while, in Buffini’s words, “Fantasy and reality, past and present [are] going on at the same time, seeping into each other” (Moore “Vampire Story”). Therefore, both the play and its later film adaptation describe a two-way temporality in order to portray a dynamic approach to time that denies its definition as a series of successive, isolated moments or parts of time divided in past, present, and future, but rather sees Eleanor’s story as a complex conjunction of all three. Eleanor’s narrative is then presented as liminal, Juno-faced, oriented toward her past, but also projected toward the hope of the future. With this interplay between past and present, moreover, the abuses of the nineteenth century correlate to those of contemporary society, so as to prove that women are still vulnerable to violence and marginalization, supporting as well Browne’s claims that feminist history should exercise a mode of “recollecting forwards,” actively echoing history to transform both past and present, and that there are indeed no “outdated” feminisms, for the past, with its issues and concerns, spills into and orients the present (“Backlash” 9). Buffini’s original work opens with Eleanor, a 16-year-old in an 1822 costume, writing at her desk. The action moves forward to Ella and Claire in twenty-first century England, and in that time Ella uses her drama coursework to write a story that reveals her secret: she was born in the nineteenth century, her mother was a vampire who turned her to save her from dying after being raped and infected by Lord Ruthven—a name taken from Polidori’s famous vampire tale—and they are immortal. As Ella writes her story, roles change and Eleanor— who never leaves the stage—becomes a character, while Claire becomes Clara. Both stories start to collapse into one another: the role of narrator at the desk constantly changes, Clara and Claire conflate, Ella’s pink nightgown and Eleanor’s costume—the symbol of the moment in which they were raped whether in Claire’s account or in the vampire story— change from one to the other, and after the rape Ella/Eleanor face and address each other on stage, in shame and pain. Both past and present then, literally, coexist and dialogue as Eleanor tries to make sense of the unpunished crime of which she was a victim. In fact, in the end both narratives seem to come from the pen of an institutionalized Eleanor who shifts from one self and story to another. Throughout the play the concepts of time, and narrative as a way to shape history, become essential. While Claire aims to “live in the moment, in the eternal second of present time” (249), Eleanor cannot “discard the past like litter” (228), but feels compelled to rewrite it compulsively, becoming entrapped in a story where past and present are simultaneous.

Eleanor believes that “her past is gone; the present hurts; she has no future,” and feels the “beetle who crawled into amber” (290). While her story enables her to reconstruct and express her traumatic past, she is trapped in a continuum because the final step, orienting forward, has still not been achieved. Although she expresses some hope for change by creating a friend in her narrative, Franklin Stein, at the end of the play Eleanor is still living both past and present at the same time, confusing sister and mother, and changing into her nineteenth century costume. She is congratulated for writing a play, the one the audience has just witnessed, complicating even more the relationship between fantasy and reality, while highlighting the role of narrative as healer, as a way of making sense of what has none, such as rape. Especially when women who report it are often not believed, and are blamed, a fact reflected as well in Eleanor’s story. Byzantium, the 2012 film adaptation directed by Neil Jordan, starring Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan, and scripted by Buffini herself, provides an original approach to female vampirism, which highlights women’s exposure to violence and social marginality, as well as the use of storytelling to construct a self-narrative that asserts Eleanor and Clara’s identity and comes to terms with the past. It does so by adopting one of the narratives of the play, Eleanor’s story of vampirism and immortality, and using it to investigate if these eternal women are less vulnerable to patriarchal control and trauma two centuries later, hence blending in the second story of the play concerning present-day figures and institutions of control. The film revolves around the two vampires Claire/Clara and Ella/Eleanor, mother and daughter posing as sisters (from here on, only one set of names will be used to avoid confusion). Clara works as a lap-dancer, while Eleanor writes her story over and over again, later scattering the pages into the wind. Having had an encounter with a man who is searching for Eleanor, Clara kills him and they must escape, finally arriving at the coastal town where their story began, and where history becomes a composite of past and present. Here Eleanor tries to connect with Frank, a teenager with leukemia, by sharing with him her story: she was raped in the nineteenth century and her mother saved her from dying by turning her into a vampire. In the meantime, Clara has established a brothel in an old hotel, the Byzantium of the title, and the men that are looking for them are closing in. Frank gives the story to his creative writing teacher, Kevin, and the action escalates, as Clara is bent on silencing everybody who knows their past. In the end, Clara and Eleanor are about to be beheaded by the brotherhood of vampires that has been chasing them; they survive and Eleanor decides to turn Frank in order to save him from death. Buffini’s story and Jordan’s adaptation rewrite the myth of the female vampire not as a siren whose seductive sexuality ruins men, but as a survivor who, for centuries, must learn to adapt to a society that, under different forms, always means a threat to her. Gina Wisker, in fact, sees Clara and Eleanor as “survivors, imaginative, learning to change, living as they must according to how society constructs them, becoming agents in a depressingly seedy, continuously abusive cultural society—where Otherising and disempowerment are constant, morphing with time and place”; they are as a result “homeless transients, a product of two centuries of rootlessness” (“Female Vampirism” 161). This emphasizes not only their marginality, but also their resilience, their skills to morph while their relationship as mother

and daughter keeps them together. Byzantium is a tale of female survival and community: it reclaims women as agents of their own lives, as creators and narrators, and portrays men, both human and vampiric, as forces who oppress them and aim to usurp their agency and creative power. As vulnerable women, men can oppress them unchallenged, which is what Eleanor’s nineteenth century story in the play reflects. Two hundred years ago, Clara had her life taken away as she was forced into prostitution by Captain Ruthven, who reproduces the conduct of the debauched aristocrats that endanger the women around them. Ruthven’s corruption transforms her into a new self, a marginal creature. As a harlot she is subject to humiliation and an early death caused by venereal diseases and tuberculosis. Yet, Clara holds steadfast to life as she is earning money to keep Eleanor safe in a good orphanage. When Ruthven is given the chance of becoming immortal, and, hence, not dying of an STD, Clara steals this possibility from him and becomes a vampire herself, finally gaining power to fight back. Facing her doppelgänger, her past self, Clara dies and is reborn, becoming a new, vampiric self. Interestingly, like Carter, Buffini also connects both types of liminality hindered from incorporation, female prostitution and vampirism. An emblem of patriarchal and aristocratic rule, Ruthven then decides to steal a second life: he rapes Eleanor, infecting her and condemning her to die. The blood stain on the white gown after the rape, which in vampire tales signified the transformation into a formidable creature, now signals the beginning of decay. Ruthven demands her youth—“when I finish with you, you will no longer be a child,” he claims—and her life. The idea that life is a commodity that can be taken is reinforced by Ruthven’s statement that Clara stole something from him, and he is merely appropriating something from her in return, not considering that he already owed her a life. When Clara kills him for raping her daughter and transforms Eleanor into a vampire, she restores the balance, but becomes a target of the brethren of male vampires who deny her right to create, to mother Eleanor, just as Kevin doubts her capacity as a mother and threatens to call social services. In both centuries, Clara’s story then becomes a tale of a single and vulnerable mother, a woman on the fringes of society, who must protect her daughter at any cost. A daughter who might be a vampire, but is also a rape survivor who must come to terms with the violence she has experienced. The second story from the play, a sister taking care of her younger sibling, belongs to the present and reflects that same reality of oppression and danger. In this context, it is important to highlight that in Buffini’s script, it is Eleanor and Clara’s voices that are heard, framing the men and their violence in both centuries. Eleanor feels compelled to tell and control her story, as a form of self-assertion and construction. The threat of body fragmentation at the hands of men mirrors her scattered narrative, which signifies her patched self, the pieces of her that must come together to understand what happened to her and who she truly is—something highlighted in the play by the constant references to Frankenstein. The film starts with Eleanor’s voice-over stating that her story can never be told, and throughout the narrative, she attempts to connect with people by not living the lies that Clara conceives to protect them. Instead of the second narrative of the play, the story of two sisters and a legal guardian, Eleanor wishes to reassert her stronger identity and thus to regain her true voice, also acknowledging her rape. Eleanor states she

received the story that cannot be told from her mother, she gives it willingly to Frank and reasserts her identity by doing it: “I am Eleanor Webb. I have given you my secret. I have told you how I live.” It is through Eleanor and Clara that the viewers listen to the past narrative, they see the rape and violence against them through their eyes, experiencing women’s lived history as polytemporal, past, present, and potential future coexisting. In fact, as the film comes to an end Clara is warned that the vampire “brotherhood is strong, unchanging” and that “they will come.” By placing the nineteenth and the twenty-first century together, Buffini is hence able to represent the nature of the oppression of male power as endemic, static, and perpetual. From this, it is also possible to infer feminism’s need to address this historical reality backward—framing and narrating the past— and forward— with the “overflow of the past into the present, as traces of past events and ideas interrupt the present, and can provoke new ways of thinking and acting” (Browne, Feminism 70–71), to give women the necessary instruments to fight back. Power in the film is also equated with narrative, framing that past and passing on that story to new generations. When men try to reappropriate their tale—as happens with Kevin after Frank betrays Eleanor’s secret—they suffer the consequences. From his male perspective, Kevin does not understand the story of female vampirism as what it is, a testimony to Clara’s powerful motherhood and a way to deal with the trauma of assault. Instead, he reads it as a story of marginality and neglect—for even if not a vampire, Clara is a prostitute and hence a bad mother—to which he responds by exposing them to the patriarchal system of social services, which would separate them. In the play, those same services had not protected Eleanor from being raped—in fact, they had been complicit in it—nor had they dealt with the aftermath of the sexual assault. Clara asserts that they would not be able to protect her daughter, and so Kevin dies, while she recalls the murder of Ruthven. Whereas the rape is not revenged in the play, in the film the truly vampiric Clara can avenge the violence inflicted on her and her child, and can better protect Eleanor in the present. Female vampirism in Jordan’s film is once more associated with female power to subvert women’s vulnerability, and yet it also requires constant struggle for survival and agency. The fact that Clara and Eleanor live outside time enables their narrative to better expose the continuum in women’s marginality over two centuries, marked by their two names, the past and the present. They are the recorders of everything that has passed, for they carry the “burden” of being able to remember everything. When Eleanor becomes a vampire she is told by her double: “This is the end of time,” and from then on she claims that as she walks, the “past walks with [her]. It lives.” Recalling the play, the film cleverly superposes the past and the present, with Eleanor seeing her old self in the places where she once was. The return to the town where they were both transformed into vampires allows Jordan to develop this visual palimpsestic narrative in which places and times overlap, in which Ella and Eleanor face each other, and the abuses of the past correlate to those of the present and prove that women, vampiric or otherwise, are still vulnerable. The best example is Clara. She is made a prostitute by men, but she is rejected and abused by men for being one. When male vampires intend to evaluate her worth she claims, “I was a harlot.” This use of the past signals the change she hopes for with her new self. However, the other vampires state that a woman’s past is her present and her future. She will be left with

no resources, except going back to what she had become. While the ending is hopeful, the verbal abuse and violence of men against women demonstrate that the latter’s experiences are indeed cyclical and that two hundred years have not been enough to change society. The men that hunted them have also survived for two hundred years: they were aristocrats and army men in the nineteenth century, now they are pimps, policemen, doctors, social services, the emblems of institutions and order. Therefore, by making the past walk with the present Buffini creates a compelling narrative on trauma, gender violence, and, in a way, feminist history. In this sense, the ending of her film leaves the audience with the impression that by revisiting past narratives and finally facing the violence in them, there exists a possibility of change. Echoing those stories is, therefore, not an exercise of pessimism about how history repeats itself, but rather, an attempt to recollect forward, to engage with past voices as a “mechanism of change within a historical time that is multilinear and internally complex” (Browne, “Backlash” 12).

Eternity, Liminal Space, and the Outsider: Only Lovers Left Alive Whitley Strieber’s novel, The Hunger, introduces a female vampire, Miriam, who is described as “another species,” an “identical twin” of humanity, but “a twin glowingly superior, self-regenerating, attuned to the laws of history through surviving the repeated rise and decline of empires” (Auerbach 57). She is a “superior consciousness” who has survived for centuries (57). In Tony Scott’s homonymous 1983 adaptation, Miriam also “lives through her things” (57), giving her immateriality more corporeity. Jim Jarmusch’s 2013 script and film has similar premises, although while Miriam is accused of being incapable of love, the more contemporary vampires are defined precisely by their ability to do so for centuries. Jarmusch’s film focuses on two lovers, Adam and Eve. Eve lives in Tangiers; Adam in Detroit. They have been married for centuries, they complement each other, and they are two vampires who survive by buying uncontaminated blood in the black market. Adam is an underground musician who collects old instruments. Eve collects books. When Adam becomes depressed one more time by the state of human affairs, Eve flies to Detroit to make him want to live again. Their newly restored balance is unsettled by the arrival of Eve’s younger sister, Ava, who kills Adam’s friend and supplier, forcing them to flee Detroit and hide in Tangiers. There Eve’s friend Christopher Marlowe dies of contaminated blood and the couple is left having to find a way to survive. This rather simple plot hides a profound reflection on life, love, and liminality. In his Cannes advertisement for the film, Jarmusch described it as an “unconventional love story,” and its two lovers as archetypal outsiders, classic bohemians, extremely intelligent and sophisticated—yet still in full possession of their animal instincts. They have traveled the world and experienced many remarkable things, always inhabiting the shadowed margins of society. And, like their own love story, their particular perspective on human history spans centuries—because they happen to be vampires. … For our film, the vampire is a resonant metaphor—a way to frame the deeper intentions of the story. This is a love

story, but also the story of two exceptional outsiders who, given their unusual circumstances, have a vast overview of human and natural history, including stunning achievements and tragic and brutal failures. (“Press Release. Director’s statement” par. 1, 3) Jarmusch’s vision of the vampire stresses their liminality, their nature as outsiders from society and time who can gain perspective of human history from their vantage position on the threshold.4 As happened with Eleanor, Adam and Eve have lived it all and can recall the cyclical nature of human failings and horrors. The opening scenes of the film, with a record going round, at times superposed to the rotating images of the lovers, serves as powerful symbol of the circularity of eternal existence. However, the way in which the vampires approach such knowledge varies greatly. While Adam falls into spells of ennui and suicidal thoughts, Eve reaffirms the value of life and the beauty to be found in it. With her intervention, she “saves [Adam] from himself.” Therefore, Eve as a female vampire diverges from the temptress or femme fatale and becomes a more positive character, verging on the maternal like Clara. In her appearance, Eve does resemble prior vampires in film and fiction: she is pale and blonde. However, she lacks the carnality of other versions of the myth. Especially striking is the thinness of Tilda Swinton’s lips, which reverts the traditional voluptuousness of this feature in female vampires, as seen in Carter. There is no obsession with the vampire’s bosom either; the opposite of the Carmilla-fashioned Blood and Roses. Eve is thin, ethereal, slightly androgynous. Instead of establishing a contrast with a darker, more corporeal woman, which Vadim’s film did, Eve is the opposite of Adam, whose dark hair and clothes visually suggest opposition, but also the duality of the yin and the yang. This is emphasized as they often stand together, back to back, or side to side, highlighting their similarities and the contrast of dark and light, and more powerfully as they lie in bed, naked and with their hair spread on the sheets. Adam’s small and thin body, his long hair, is a mirror of Eve’s. Their arched bodies, leaning toward one another, resemble the Flemish paintings of the creation of Adam and Eve, one of which briefly appears in the film. This reference to the Biblical story of the origin of humankind, to the first man and woman, reinforces the idea that they are indeed one from the beginning of time and will remain so eternally. It also highlights their isolation, which resembles that of the first Biblical couple. However, as Adam’s partner, Eve differs from the patriarchal interpretation of her as reason for the Fall, and hence the association of female vampirism with the voluptuous femme fatale and source of evil is weakened. First of all, she is not created from Adam. Jarmusch points out that she is at least “several thousand years older” than him. She is older, wiser, and more balanced in her perspective (Taubin 70). This gives her a maternal approach to Adam: she not only saves him from himself, she worries about him as if he were a child. The viewer is left to wonder if she was the one who turned him, maybe his vampire mother after all. Second, the thirst for knowledge, seen as the foreground for pride and the fall, lies mainly in Adam. Interested in all the arts and sciences, Adam feels frustrated at the lack of development of humans—whom they call “zombies”—and has given them some of his creations throughout history—presenting Schubert with some of his compositions, for

instance—so that at least his production is “out there.” In this approach to his (eternal) life, Adam is said to have been negatively influenced by the Romantics, “Shelley and Byron” among them, and his vampirism is hence of a different nature to Eve’s. Adam’s could be described as a self-centered psychic vampire that can drain Eve emotionally, and while from his position as an outsider he gives great art to the world, his Romantic obsession prevents any real possible emotional investment, social interest, or integration. Eve, on the other hand, is more outward looking. She comes closer to the idea of an eternal consciousness; she can see the history of all objects with the touch of her hand, she interprets history in its cyclical movements, and she has insight into the future, claiming, for instance: “[Detroit] has water. It will survive when the cities of the South are burning.” Derelict Detroit, in its past glory and hope for the future, becomes a new frontier (Irwin), a space of transition for Eve’s twofold liminal look behind and ahead. She reminds Adam: “We’ve been here before. The floods, the plagues… remember?” recalling backward to move forward. She is also a recorder of human literary production. Her house is full of books; when she packs, her suitcase contains from Cervantes’ Don Quixote to a little known poem by Ramón de Campoamor titled “Lovers on the Moon.” She can read through them with uncanny speed, and she delights in their description of love and human folly. Rather than being presented as an aloof character in her infinite consciousness—as Strieber and Scott did with Miriam, looking at the world from rooftops—Eve is surprisingly at home with human emotions and works. If Eve and Adam are two sides of the same fragmented self, the female vampiric myth is also split in the film between the old and the new, the negative reading of the other and the centrality given to the liminally transgressive. The former is the more traditional approach to female vampirism, introduced in the film with Ava, Eve’s so-called sister. Much younger than her, Eve states that their kinship comes from sharing the same blood, which ambiguously points at a human blood relationship or the fact that Eve might have turned Ava by drinking her blood. The childishness of Ava—how she jumps into bed with them in the morning, how Eve cares for her—reinforces the idea that they might be closer to a mother– daughter relationship than that of siblings. This duality in their relationship is similar to the one between Eleanor and Clara, who are human mother and daughter, but in a sense also sisters for their have been created anew by the same force. Ava’s parasitic relationship— literally drinking their supplies of blood as a leech would do—also points at a troubled relationship, stressed by Adam’s lack of forgiveness for some problem caused in Paris in the 1920s. More importantly, Eve and Ava are two forms of the same name, Adam’s wife in the Book of Genesis. The figure of Lilith or Lilit, Adam’s first wife, has been strongly associated in ancient and contemporary folklore with darkness and evil, and more concretely with vampirism. Related to the later myth of Lamia, she has been represented as using her sexuality and sensuousness to seduce and corrupt, while exposing her as an opposite of the maternal woman, whose children she destroys. Although Lilith is said to have been the first wife of Adam, and should then be older, visually, Ava does resemble the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Lilith: revealing dresses, red lips, red hair. She embodies a negative stereotype of the vampire in her carnality, her wish to satisfy her desires disregarding the consequences.

Tempted by easy blood, she seduces Adam’s assistant and then kills him to satiate her appetite, and for that she is once more expelled from the “paradise” that the two lovers share. Again associating vampirism with blood purity and contamination, she feels unwell after drinking the blood of somebody “in the music industry,” which they can safely assume will be contaminated. The gates—and the doors of the fridge that keeps the “good stuff”—are closed for her, and she walks alone into the night. Ava has disrupted the harmony of the communitas and is expelled, proving that among the liminal there is order, even if not constrained by the same rules that govern the society to which they are strangers. Eve and Adam are then forced to dispose of the body and escape to Tangiers, another transitional space. Again differing from other vampires, Eve can easily leave her material possessions behind, while Adam is more trapped and defined by them. In Tangiers, left without the blood that Marlowe provided, Eve once more becomes the stronger, leading character who envisions the possibility of a new beginning. The city itself, the embodiment of her spirit, provides that chance. A liminal space, a threshold for influences of the East and the West, a city in-between tradition and modernity, it reinvents itself as a creative hybrid third space. As they watch Yasmine Hamdan, “a woman taking the sound of ancient Islam and making of it something utterly new,” they realize that maybe they “have not yet seen and heard it all” (Taubin 70). Nor has their story concluded. In the end, they decide to survive by turning a pair of young lovers that are kissing in the night. Their own immortal story would then begin and provide continuation to the eternal circular state of events. The conclusion to Jarmusch’s narrative is thus a final victory for Eve. Her approach to immortality as a “great gift” and to life as something “precarious and fragile” but “too precious to be wasted” carries more weight than Adam’s Romantic solipsism. While Adam’s ennui transforms him into a being similar to the “zombies” he so strongly despises,5 Eve is at one time more human in her curiosity, in her will to learn and relate to others, and more alive than any of the zombified human others. In the director’s words, both of them are “metaphors for the present state of human life—they are fragile and endangered, susceptible to natural forces, and to the shortsighted behaviour of those in power.” They are, then, intrinsically “human,” while Eve’s inner strength and her protective instinct, as in Clara’s case, ensures that both lovers—the first and the last in history—will be fully and eternally alive.

Empowering Liminal Women: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night In the opening scenes of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon 1997– 2003) two teenagers force their way into the school building at night so they can make out. The boy is forward and insisting; the girl seems hesitant and afraid. It would appear a typical scene in a high school drama, with a predictable ending: she will either be persuaded or forced into having sex with him. Or they will both be victimized by the monster lurking in the shadows. However, the innocent-looking girl is, in fact, a vampire who kills her partner. These very first minutes already subvert the audience’s notions of female victimization and warn them that this show will offer more than clichés. The same could be said about Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, whose very title suggests the idea of a woman exposed to the many (and real) dangers

that await women after dark, only to later undermine the portrayal of women as victims, which echoes the spirit of the movement Reclaim the Night.6 Its blurb reads, “In the Iranian ghost-town Bad City, a place that reeks of death and loneliness, the townspeople are unaware they are being stalked by a lonesome vampire” (IMDB). The vagueness of its composition plays with the acquired expectations of viewers, who, in the absence of a marker of gender, might assume that a night-stalking vampire who can terrorize a city should be male and the girl walking home alone his victim. However, this lonesome being is not a man: this vampire that lurks in the streets at night is The Girl. And her victims are always men. This fact, inscribed within Iranian culture, becomes a powerful message about women reclaiming public spaces and their agency in them. It also transforms Amirpour’s film into a particularly liminal narrative that subtly explores Iranian sexual politics. Amirpour’s characters have a first name, but are identified by their main activity: Hussein “The Junkie”; Atti “The Prostitute”; Saeed “The Pimp”; Shaydah “The Princess.” The main character, Arash, only has a first name as he drifts from handyman to drug dealer, while Amirpour’s heroine, as in Lieber’s previous story, is merely “The Girl.” She has no name; she is the embodiment of a new type of young Iranian woman, on the threshold between past and present, tradition and modernity, the East and the West, frailty and power. Resembling Jarmusch’s vampires,7 The Girl lives alone in a basement, surrounded by her posters, books, and music. She listens and dances to Western music before walking the streets of Bad City at night, looking for her prey, wearing a black chadur or veil that covers her head and falls around her body. What at first would be read by Western viewers as a symbol of oppression, in fact becomes an emblem of her empowerment: as she skates through the night, her veil floats around her resembling a cape, giving her the quality of a superhero watching the streets of a deadly city. The poster emphasizes this duality: the traditional image of an Iranian woman covered with the chadur is subverted by her bright red lips, a sign of her connection with blood which in Iranian traditional culture would be impure, highlighting even more her alien position. For she is never the prey, but the hunter, not the stalked but the stalker. The Girl occupies a liminal position as a single young woman whose traditional integration would involve marriage and motherhood, or who might fall victim to poverty and exploitation like the prostitutes that walk the night with her. Yet, she inhabits liminal spaces and times, the night, the back streets, and from there she cleans or improves society by subverting gender norms. In this film the female vampire fulfills the role of urban vigilante, focused on the misdeeds of men. The first of her encounters is with the pimp. One night she observes how he forces Atti to perform fellatio on him, and later robs her of her earnings. She then triggers an encounter with him and is invited to his home. The attitude that Saeed displays there emphasizes the traditional roles of powerful and powerless. He dominates his territory, he is not afraid of her, and assumes her sexual availability as she seems a creature of the night, like Atti is. The decoration—the tiger print on the sofa, the deer heads on the walls—reinforces this reading of the hunter who has trapped his prey. However, the roles are reversed. The Girl enacts the same script she has seen with Atti: after he caresses her lips, she places his finger in her mouth to imitate the fellatio as foreplay. But instead she bites his finger off. She later uses that same finger to touch his lips before exsanguinating him. The Girl then fulfills the

horror of the vagina dentata, so relevant in the fears of the sexually active woman and her body (Dijkstra; Wisker, Contemporary 159), as well as the unease created by the reversal of sexual roles: men, active, penetrating versus women, passive and penetrated (Creed 70; Wisker, Contemporary 161). She metaphorically emasculates the overtly manly—and misogynistic—Saeed. A Girl recalls another film, Teeth (2007), in which a girl who is raped discovers that her body protects itself by castrating her attacker—at other times also mutilating some dangerously placed fingers. Both films transform the scenario of potential sexual violence against women into a rape revenge story, in which men are victimized and their greatest fear embodied in the monstrously dented woman. As Katherine Farrimond has claimed about Teeth, this reverts the usual dynamic of victim/victimizer of the horror film, even more so when its reviews resort to describing men as “capable of being upset,” hence identifying them as the new “vulnerable audience” that requires to be patronized and warned about the contents of the film. This subversion of roles is a direct consequence of female vampirism, evincing the power of the liminal to question what seem monolithic assumptions and aspire to change. The Girl reverts traditional narratives in other ways. At one point she follows a young boy and asks him thrice whether he is good. This triple repetition reminds the viewer of the accustomed structure of a fairy tale. The Girl becomes the vigilant spirit that then places a curse on him: if he is not a good boy, she will know, for she will be watching him his whole life. “Naughty” girls in fairy tales transgress societal norms and are punished; the Girl proves that true wickedness lies in fact in the reproduction of violence against women. In previous scenes the boy has been a witness to the drug dealing and hardships of the city, and he might grow up to become a pimp or a junkie. The Girl’s intervention in this case could be read as a political statement, the need to subvert further evil by changing new generations, by monitoring and keeping society accountable. Her stealing of the boy’s skateboard could also symbolize her appropriation of his mobility, his space as opposed to the immobility associated with women. At the beginning of the film, a television host reminds women that they should fulfill their household duties, for there is the risk that their husbands might leave them for a younger woman. The domestic sphere is female; mobility is once more a masculine prerogative. And the Girl subverts those traditional assumptions by her wandering outside, now on her reclaimed skateboard. She is an agent of change. Finally, the Girl kills Hussein, the Junkie, when he injects the unwilling Atti with heroine. Hussein owns the prostitute’s body, he orders her to dance, he ties her hands to drug her; and as she lies unconscious at his side she is particularly vulnerable. It is at that moment that the Girl bursts into the room and kills Hussein. Until that moment, Hussein has been what Saeed called a “normal man,” a gambler and consumer of women’s services. He fears the women as other: he runs from the Girl when he sees her one night and is terrorized by the spirit of his late wife, whom he believes has been reincarnated in the cat. Yet he is not afraid to possess the vulnerable body of the prostitute. Finally, he falls a victim of another seemingly fragile girl “of the night,” with the film displaying the recurrent association between prostitution and female vampirism. The Girl thus also neutralizes the abusive father that had bullied Arash, who is more victimized than she is. Although she does not kill him, the Girl’s encounter with Arash is

again symbolic of this role reversal. High on ecstasy and dressed as Dracula for a costume party, Arash is stranded on the street when the Girl meets him. Arash reassures her: “I’m Dracula… Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” before surrounding her with his cape to protect her from the cold. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that the fragile girl he is protecting is the actual vampire; her black veil now under the vampire cape, superposing the two. Another powerful visual reminder of this comes in a beautifully shot scene in the Girl’s apartment: Arash approaches her from behind wearing his Dracula costume, and her neckline is exposed. She then slowly turns and reveals his neck, reminding the viewer of who is actually in danger. However, the Girl embraces him instead, longing for contact. In another moment of vulnerability, Arash pierces the Girl’s ears so she might wear the earrings he has given her. Afraid to hurt her he is unaware of her fangs. He also naively responds to the Girl’s statement: “You don’t know me…I have done bad things. I am bad,” with the equally sincere “And you don’t know what I’ve done.” His assumption of her innocence marks the adscription of traditional gender roles. In the end, he realizes she might have had a part in his father’s death, but after a moment of hesitation, he still decides to escape with her after she accepts to follow him. The Girl’s longing for contact is also established with Atti. As said before, both are nocturnal creatures as they walk the streets after dark. The Girl follows Atti home and offers her the spoils of her deadly encounter with Saeed in the form of his jewels. At the beginning Atti believes she wants to become a prostitute, strengthening the identification between the two and stressing the association of the night with women’s sexuality. After admitting to her observance of Atti, the Girl shares her conclusions: “You don’t like what you do. You’re sad. You don’t remember what you desire. … And nothing changes.” While the Girl sees hope for change, Atti admits that only idiots and rich people believe in it. When the Girl saves her from Hussein and they dispose of his body, she discards her protection. Atti is too afraid of what the Girl is. She never suggests becoming like her, she casts her off with the haunted cat, and remains immobile in her vulnerable and marginal position, rejecting the vampiric and female communitas. In this sense, the city itself is a character in the film, the liminal space that the otherized selves inhabit. Liminality is represented in the in-between spaces: shot in America, it represents an Iranian town, and moves between narrow streets and industrial outskirts. Eastern culture—exemplified in Hussein’s house, the veiled women, the Farsi dialogues and music—is permeated by Western narratives —the posters of films, the music, the idea of the vampire itself. Cinematographic genres also blend: the film was called the “first Iranian Western,” emphasizing once more the creative force of hybridity or in-betweenness. Nowhere is this better embodied than in the Girl herself: half veiled, half caped vigilante, dancing to Western music but observing tradition. Moreover, her position on the threshold between both sides of the grave mirrors the city in which the characters dwell: ghostly streets and lives, with the border between life and death traced by the ditch in which corpses pile up with no reaction from authorities —who are completely absent from the story— or even the population, who seem numbed, zombified by drugs and the lack of change. Once more, the vampire seems more alive than those around her. The final scenes bring hope for transformation. Echoing Swynnerton’s liminal tryst, the

Girl and Arash drive on a deserted road, leaving the lights of Bad City behind and heading for a new future as night advances and dawn awaits. These contemporary rewritings of the female vampire are only a small sample of the impact the myth has in popular culture, with television shows such as True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, or young adult films in the train of the Twilight Saga (Anyiwo). However, the examples here analyzed are particularly relevant in their re-visioning of the female vampire as a liminal character, for they show, as Wisker stated, that, in a feminist vision of the myth, the “transgression of gender boundaries, life/death, day/night behaviour…is no longer abject, rejected with disgust to ensure identity,” but rather has the potential to enable “us to recognise that the Other is part of ourselves” (original emphasis, “Love Bites” 168).

Notes 1 “Harlequinization” is a term first used by Deborah Kaplan in her article “Mass Marketing Jane Austen: Men, Women, and Courtship in Two of the Recent Films,” which she explains as referring to the “mass-market romance” and the focus “on a hero and heroine’s courtship at the expense of other characters and other experiences, which are sketchily represented” (par. 4). 2 Mulvey-Roberts discusses Kristeva, Bettelheim, and Freudian analysis for her approach to male envy and fear of women’s menstrual period and maternity. Kristeva’s idea of menstrual blood as “the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual)” and the threat it poses for “the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference” (71), is essential to understand this fear that is embodied in the cultural construction of the female vampire. Bettelheim’s study of the male envy towards menstruation is framed in his approach to rites of passage, which contextualizes the liminality of the (often) young female vampire as she turns and as she is hunted by men. 3 On Báthory see Wisker (Contemporary 160–61) and Santos (132–54). The latter provides examples of other women, equally known for their unruly sexual appetite, who according to legend bathed in blood or used it to enhance their beauty or extend their youth (144–45). For information on the aforementioned beauty treatment, see, for instance “Vampire Facial: What is it and why is it so popular?” (www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/vampire-facial-costbenefits-what-is-it-kim-kardashian-beauty-treatment-a8232696.html). 4 In her review of the film, Jenny McDonnell describes the vampire as “a typically offbeat, world-weary Jarmuschian outsider” (127) and a “curiously appropriate Jarmuschian figure, isolated and out-of-time” (129). 5 Jarmusch’s most recent film The Dead Don’t Die (2019) returns to the existential, and also political, reading of the zombie, as well as the power of the outsider to observe society and remain uncorrupted, in this case through a character named Hermit Bob who also arises suspicion, but who proves above a consumerist society that is bent on destroying itself. 6 A national women-only march against sexual violence and for gender equality. See www.reclaimthenight.co.uk. 7 Although not always explicitly connecting both films, A Girl’s Jarmuschean mode has been acknowledged by critics and reviewers. See, for instance, Alice Michaud-Lapointe’s review (2015).

Works Cited Aickman, Robert. “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal.” 1975. The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, edited by Alan Ryan, Penguin, 1987, pp. 382–414. Anyiwo U.M. “The Female Vampire in Popular Culture.” Gender in the Vampire Narrative. Teaching Gender, edited by A. Hobson and U.M. Anyiwo, Sense Publishers, 2016, pp. 173–92. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Bettelheim, Bruno. Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male. Thames and Hudson, 1955. Blood and Roses. Directed by Roger Vadim, Films EGE, Paramount Pictures, 1961.

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3 Good and Bad, Private and Public Prostitution as Liminal Identity

Prostitution is usually defined as sexual activity undertaken for remuneration. However, it has proven to be a fraught term which denotes a varied and complex reality, encompassing experiences that range from online pornography to sex trafficking (“Whores Day”).1 The word “prostitute” conjures in-betweenness or ambiguity, as it stands at a complex crossroads of discourses and approaches, at an intersection of class and gender (Walkowitz 19), on the threshold between visibility in everyday life and often a compliant political and social silence. For centuries, and up to the present moment, debates have been ontological (what sex for sale is), epistemological (how sex for sale is represented), and political (what should be done about it) (Spanger and Skilbrei 2). Ontologically, “the referent, the flesh-and-blood female body engaged in some form of sexual interaction in exchange for some kind of payment, has no inherent meaning and is signified differently in different discourses” (Bell 1–2). Legally and culturally throughout the modern era there was ambiguity as to what constituted prostitution and who prostitutes were (Rosenthal, Introduction xii). Therefore, it is useful instead to address how prostitution has been or is performed, how it responded to a particular space, time, and ideological mind-set. At different moments of history, the event of prostitution must be understood, then, as “an extended performance” with its “own spatial and temporal frame;” prostitution “may be said to have a sexual dimension, and an economic one, but also a social one, and [is] constituted as the sum of all the parts of this performance” (Ellis and Lewis 3), all of which must be taken into account. The eighteenth century, especially, marks a moment of transition between the pre-modern and modern world that would determine much of the contemporary approach to sexuality and prostitution, as the “historically enduring account of the prostitute in the early modern period sees her as an agent of corruption, a libertine seducer of men and a fornicating sinful adulteress, inhabiting a violent world of excessive consumption, insatiable desire, criminal behaviour and bestial depravity,” while a coeval “new, sentimental, construction of the prostitute emerges, transforming the prostitute from a criminal to a victim, from an agent of sin to an object of compassion” (Ellis and Lewis 11). Being a social and political construction, the transformation of the prostitute owes much to “the new language of commerce and sensibility, central to the eighteenth-century gendered transformation of manners,” which also “places the construction of femininity at the centre of the properly philosophical debates over the nature of the commercial impetus in eighteenth-century capitalism” (Ellis and Lewis

11). The idea of performativity also enables us to address how the prostitute has been represented, re-enacted in literature and screen, discovering a range of prostitution performances that escape easy categorizations and providing a more profound understanding of social values, together with the fascination and repulsion that audiences might experience toward the ambiguous figure of the prostitute. An illustration of that duality would be William Hogarth’s popular engravings entitled A Harlot’s Progress (1732), which depict a bawd’s entrapment of a young country girl and her descent into prostitution, imprisonment, and death, all displayed for the buyers’ voyeuristic pleasure. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—although they appear several centuries before—genres such as the “whore dialogues,” “whore letters,” “whore biographies,” or even the “scandal chronicle” flourished (Olsson viii–ix). Of the latter two, some were shaped as biographies and others performed the voice of the prostitute, so that at times the sense of verisimilitude and empathy is greater. Many fictional autobiographies, including the relevant The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1759/60), might well be based on actual stories of former prostitutes, but even in these mediated narratives, differences of performance and representation can be found. The approach to her voice and her story, the libertine tale of voracious sexuality or the sentimental one of reform (Rosenthal, Introduction xvi), embody the different discourses on prostitution, as well as the dialogue these genres establish with others, from erotic poetry and the criminal biography, to the female bildungsroman. Moreover, these genres influenced what was becoming the mainstream novel of the mideighteenth century (Olsson xi; Rosenthal, Introduction xiii), while the figure of the prostitute appeared often in sentimental or domestic novels as the antiheroine (Rosenthal, Introduction xi–xii). Whore biographies, for instance, shape two of the main works attributed to Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). In addition to these more literary narrative forms, the eighteenth century saw the success of nonfictional publications, such as Harris’s List of Covent Garden Girls (1757–1795), a catalogue of prostitutes available in London with a description of their characteristics, published annually and which is thought to have sold some 250,000 copies. Its readers probably employed it less as a guide than as pornographic material. In other cases, prostitution became the center of political or moral pamphlets, as in Mandeville’s Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724) or Defoe’s Some Considerations on Street-Walkers (1726), and the vision of the prostitute they deliver is also enlightening. Other portrayals of prostitutes were provided by personal journals, such as Boswell’s candid entries describing his encounters with lowly street-walkers, or anonymous ones that read as bildungs erotica, namely, the later Victorian My Secret Life (1888). Many of these representations can also be found in France—with the “romans-mémoires des filles du monde,” the presence of prostitutes in more canonical narratives (Ellis and Lewis 4), or Parent-Duchatalet’s groundbreaking reports on prostitution (Bell 45)—as well as in other European countries at the time (Evans; Ellis and Lewis), and lived well into the Victorian era, a period known for the increase of prostitution in its streets and in its public debate (Fisher vii–viii), in which it became termed the “Great Social Evil.” Harlots, whores, strumpets, courtesans, and mistresses have then peopled the streets and fed the imagination of European society for centuries. The dawn of cinema and television only provided new media to continue

expanding this fascination, often reflecting the diverse readings of the prostitute and societal responses to it, from early silent cinema to our days (Campbell). And, in all these performances, prostitution is defined by its liminality: a displacement from the core of proper society to inhabit its fringes, its back alleys, its nights, until disease and death hinder reintegration or old age and good fortune enable a possible integration. In this sense, from the beginning of time prostitution has been performed in liminal spaces. From Roman lupanare, to contemporary sites on roads and city outskirts, sex workers were and are physically on the peripheries of society. Their house often marked and singled out— with a phallus painted on the door, a red light attracting the gaze or the sight of nude women from the windows—but also hidden under euphemisms—with covert names such as “academy”— or respectable appearances (Evans; Walker). The brothels or houses of pleasure were on that threshold between public and private, having to make themselves known to attract clients, but bound by the intimate, and proscribed, nature of their business to secrecy and silence. Even shops or pubs, with a respectable appearance, might lend their less visible spaces to the practice of prostitution (Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce 53; Smith 46), becoming a counterpublic or third space, clearly ambiguous in its public and private division. When not in an enclosed space, prostitutes strolled along transitional places: ports, roads, or busy streets, where dark alleys would provide some privacy among the public life of the city. For sex workers of more means, the theater, the promenade, and the gardens were spaces where people went to see and be seen, and the body of the prostitute was paraded for viewers. Prostitutes in modern Europe were then not geographically or socially separated from the general population; in the English case, “they walked the same streets, drank at the same public houses and gin-shops, frequented the same parks, and in the many cases lived in the same houses as Londoners of most, if not all, social classes” (Ellis and Lewis 3), which reinforced their position on the social threshold. However, times of persecution often made it necessary to appear under the cover of domestic service (Evans 116), again a liminal position within the household in which to navigate the fringes of an apparently respectful position, which was nevertheless also subject to abuse. On the other hand, the influence that courtesans and mistresses acquired over time, and the imitation of their appearance and style, which this led to, finally rendered it difficult to distinguish them from other women, blurring the boundaries between public appearance and private activity, and breaching the divide between “the visible and illicit prostitute and the invisible respectable woman” (Attwood 6). Many texts of the time provide examples of this spatial and social liminality. Moll Flanders and Roxana, for instance, in the social ascent and descent of their main characters explore the different spaces that prostitutes inhabited, as well as how they managed to navigate their place in society, often playing with appearances and misunderstandings. Moll lives as a kept mistress and even bears a child by her lover; notwithstanding her fine house and her servants, she is dislocated from the center of her master’s life and has to employ subterfuges to access him when he falls ill. She breaks class boundaries and inhabits the same spaces as other women, but she remains incapable of crossing that threshold into respectability. In her lower moments, she meets another gentleman in the gardens, who takes her to a house, a place conceived for such clandestine encounters, while they later engage briefly in his coach. All these are transient places, social thresholds, that also mark Moll’s

decreasing value in the whore market. For her part, Mary Wollstonecraft’s biography of a former prostitute, Jemima, one of the inset stories of her incomplete The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria. A Fragment (1798), also moves her character from streets and alleys, to a brothel and then to the (in)visibility of a kept mistress. Where Jemima performs her role as prostitute also marks how she does so; so the transient place determines her fluid identity. As a street-walker, she must attract the clients’ attention in the most obvious manner. She enacts a very specific performance that defined the eighteenth century street prostitute: “breaching the established habits of manners by accosting male clients as they walked past” and hence contravening and subverting “all the approved modes of behaviour of normative gender roles for women: passive politeness, public invisibility, sexual submissiveness, social domesticity, linguistic refinement” (Ellis and Lewis 3). The street-walker then, “acted out” of the expectations regarding the gendered discourse on manners, which would demand her behavior to be “polite, domestic and feminine” (3). In fact, it is only as a street-walker that Jemima acknowledges certain “independence” (Wollstonecraft 98). A more acceptable gendered behavior would be performed, however, as she climbs the ladder of prostitution, as she moves first to a brothel and then to a private house as a mistress. These liminal places shape her new gendered performance: she now must avoid overexposure and polishes her manners, to the extent that during her time as mistress she acquires intellectual aspirations. Interestingly, as she becomes a more valuable prostitute, she also resembles proper womanhood more, proving the intersection of class and gender and how prostitutes might inhabit in-between social spaces. Jemima’s position as a mistress identifies her with the role of an upper-class wife: often a commodity exchanged in the marriage trade and requested to fulfill her husband’s sexual needs or become easily discarded, as Maria, Wollstonecraft’s eponymous heroine, experiences. As a commodity, prostitutes also become a threshold in themselves, their bodies in transition between the private and the public, their profession and other aspects of their identity. While tradesmen and women are separate from, though identified with, their places of business, a prostitute is her space of trade (Smith 38, 48). As clients cross the threshold they enter her body, she becomes a site of commerce while still a woman with an identity beyond her profession. In the eighteenth century a euphemism for female genitalia was “commodity” (Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce 6); therefore, her sex is her goods, her trade. She becomes her shop, which, although it grants her certain agency, also makes her identity particularly ambiguous. Her place of trade is permanently transitional, she stands in-between object and human, while her vagina stands as corporeal threshold through which clients enter her space of trade. In one very visual example, Sarah Priddon, known as Sally Salisbury in the scandalous chronicles of her age, is described by one of her “biographers,” Charles Walker, as standing on her head so aristocrats can throw coins into her vagina. The narrator assures the reader that in this “ancient game” whatever penetrated her body, was hers to keep (34). For Smith, however, this image is not one of degradation, but of power because “Sally is represented as having complete control over her body and, by extension, her product, her customers, and her trade” (39), while Rosenthal has highlighted how the coins replace semen and, hence, emphasizes the commercial nature of the performance of prostitution, for in this

case the transaction does not even involve sex (Infamous Commerce 102). In this narrative, and in similar ones, the prostitute is only body, “configured as an entrepreneur whose survival within the marketplace is dependent on the denial of the desires, passions, and reflections associated with inner selfhood—a denial, in other words, of inwardness or interiority” for these narratives “suggest that the entrepreneur thrives by focusing primarily on exterior matters, specifically those associated with trade, or ‘the shop’” (Smith 38), which in her case converges with her own body. Prostitutes then also stand on a liminal position between inner and outer identity, who and what they are, to which Walker’s biography also contributes, reducing Sally to mere anecdotes by former clients. Even if she proves a picaresque character, not the heroine of a morality tale, with more agency and character than the sentimental penitents (Rosenthal, Nightwalkers 1–2), she is still a spectacle on display for curious readers. Smith sees Roxana as having the same form of control over her body and her business. Roxana, more than Moll, understands her body as a commodity, as her asset, and carefully markets it. This is reflected in how she also maintains rigid control over her economic affairs, although this is diminished in marriage (Smith 42). This means rewriting her identity at different stages of her career, at one point stating her intention of becoming a man-woman, proving again that she is liminally ungendered, her commodity read as female but her selfownership in the sexual marketplace written as typically masculine (Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce 10; Smith 51), something that Walker also highlighted about Sally’s gusto for “masculine pleasures” and rakishness (4), as well as her interest in controlling her worth in transactions. In this they both resemble Moll’s strategic interest in and use of money, and the market value she grants her own self. Moll realistically, even comically, acknowledges the effect of age on her body and, hence, on her worth as a whore. She then changes her marketing strategies, and transforms as age and chance require, from mistress and wife, to thief and mother. In all these roles, Moll performs the mistress and thief better than the traditional wife and mother, indicating the lack of agency of the latter two and subverting them with a bigamous marriage and the abandonment of her children. The enactment and representation of prostitution often emphasizes the necessity to perform this “theatricalized self-division” as a Mandevillian strategy to succeed—which one sees in Moll’s, Roxana’s, or Sally’s adventures, especially as they are often compared to players on stage (Walker 24)—while less positive readings insist on the sacrifice of the “intimate part of the self to the marketplace” as “the most tragic form of human alienation possible” (Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce 14), as a form of living and not living as and within oneself. This fraught negotiation is brought to light in Jemima’s story. She is very aware that her body is nothing but a commodity to be exploited, sexually or otherwise, and given little value by her employers or clients. While Moll and Roxana conceived it as an asset and used it in their trade, Jemima does not portray herself as a businesswoman: she is “a slave, a bastard, a common property” (98). The former prostitute emphasizes her sense of alienation, constantly addressing the fact that the people around her did not consider her human because of her illegitimate birth and trade; therefore, she concluded the narrative by stating that she had lost her humanity. This descent starts with verbal and then physical abuses, continues with rape, pregnancy, and its termination, and concludes with her body

becoming a “machine” and a “monster” (104), an object for men’s gratification and then for the increasingly brutal capitalist economy, on which Wollstonecraft places the blame for Jemima’s transformation (Borham-Puyal 110). Resembling the vampire, Jemima is half human, half monster, but also part object: a mere commodity. Even today, the prostitute is identified with the external, visible signs of her trade, with the elements that single her out from other women (Campbell 8). This codifies her as an object to be consumed, but her intimate self persists once the colorful dress or the makeup is gone. After asking several prostitutes to give voice to the intimate side of their lives by means of self-portraits, Sealing concluded that the “juxtaposition of the mundane and the abject in these images crucially conveyed how sex work is, and can be, an integral part of everyday life and practices (though not without anxieties or insecurity), challenging the binary understanding of public and private, normal and abnormal, ordinary and exceptional”; in the dominant understanding prostitutes “have been constructed as ‘public women’ with no private face,” which has made them appear not fully human (Sealing 118). Moreover, when regulation is imposed on sex commerce, it is the prostitute’s body, her space of trade, rather than the clients’, which is inspected and controlled, again walking a thin line between reading the prostitute as self and product: as a woman to protect, but also as a commodity that requires medical or legal control, an assurance of quality that prostitutes displayed in the nineteenth century under the Contagious Disease Acts to prove that they were disease-free and somehow sanctioned (Attwood 82). This also distinguished them from other workers in political campaigns and discourses; a distinction that conforms much of today’s debate on prostitution (Walkowitz 20). The prostitute often inhabited, and inhabits, the space between supplier to the men who demanded her services, and a criminal persecuted by those who increased the demand—needed and rejected, seen as a solution to rape and abuse (Evans 94), but also a danger to marriage and public health (Borham-Puyal 103, 106). What it is possible to state, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, is that the prostitute results from a process of becoming “doubly disprivileged” (Bell 2) or displaced, a double other in the sameness/difference opposition between masculinity/femininity and in the “derivative couples inside the category of ‘woman’: … madonna/whore, … wife/prostitute, as well as the high and low images that have fragmented and categorized the female body” (Bell 40). This process of double othering, or its challenge, determines modern epistemologies, modern constructions of the prostitute. Thus, in Victorian England, for instance, when women fell from the pedestal of proper womanhood, they entered a new system of representation (Attwood 5); they were constructed into a stereotype, “produced and reproduced in both literature and art,” and lost their identity as part of the “social evil” of prostitution (5). Physically, the prostitute’s body was pitiful and, above all, liminal or transient: she was depicted as “the street-walker dressed in gaudy finery, sepulchral make-up, often drunk, sometimes diseased, always pitiful, and expecting imminent death,” and “it was the brevity of this career that was the point: the prostitute’s time in the trade was short, intemperate, degraded and diseased” (5). They were placed on a threshold between life and death, becoming ghostly figures that were endangered for being too visible for public taste, but not visible enough in public policies. The brief narrative of Hogarth’s harlot, who in six engravings moves from loss of innocence to the grave, is a paradigmatic example of the

recurrent narrative of descent, disease, and death that dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That is, after their displacement out of society and their subversion of decorum, they were hardly ever granted their societal incorporation, they would become permanent outsiders or fully disappear. And if they were reintegrated it would be to a position equally low or oppressive as penitent or factory worker, even if less marginal. Turner’s idea of recovering social holding in the postliminal phase would then be denied for these women. This complex portrayal of prostitution was further enriched by means of the reform movements of the nineteenth century, which campaigned against laws that punished the prostitutes themselves and which had an enormous impact on the sentimentalized depiction of harlots in fiction so as to support the awareness campaigns. Nevertheless, the double othering continued. Prostitutes were divided, a dichotomy was drawn between the preys, the hapless victims eager to be reformed, and those that entered prostitution voluntarily, the shameless outcasts (Attwood 73, 80), the liminal and the marginal outsiders. Prostitutes were “both victims and agents” but sometimes these facets were addressed separately; they were “both different from, and similar to, women in general” (Attwood 85). They therefore had the “potential for reformation and integration into society,” a notion “that co-existed somewhat uneasily with a qualification as to the social sites of that assimilation” (Attwood 85). Wollstonecraft’s Jemima, as Moll before her, attempts to leave her life as a prostitute and kept mistress behind by taking up needle-work or becoming a servant once more, and then by washing. However, the obstacles are many. First, she cannot provide a statement of character and she depends on the goodwill of her employers to grant her access to their homes. Then, her education and training have not prepared her for such tasks. Finally, and more importantly, women’s labor is limited and underpaid, so that she would not survive on her earnings. As she states, a man in her situation and with her skills would have fared much better (103). The same is the case with other prostitutes that seek reformation, while the difficulties experienced by trained Magdalen penitents to find a place in service or trade (Batchelor and Hiatt xii) testifies to the hardships experienced by women hoping to fend for themselves without resorting to the sex trade. Moreover, in the rhetoric of Josephine Butler and her fellow campaigners—which has set the foundations for much of the contemporary debate (Walkowitz)—prostitutes became “‘our fallen sisters’, ‘victims’, ‘these weaker vessels’, or women ‘outcast’ from society;” prostitutes were women “but remained ‘outcast’ and ‘fallen’, and thus clearly marginalized by comparison with respectable women” (Attwood 77); they were a separate “class” or “type of woman,” which also problematized the connotations of social distance that the label “prostitute” implied (Attwood 77). The word itself was termed “ugly,” and it was acknowledged that “although it appeared to denote a distinguishable type, it remained indefinable” (Attwood 77). The indeterminacy of the prostitute is also visible in the rich vocabulary in any language that denotes the diverse performances of prostitution. And the different accounts developed at this time respond to that variety, sometimes reformulating, challenging, or rejecting the traditional motifs and narratives of prostitution (Attwood 145). They exposed the variety of prostitutes—working-class, poor, professional, opportunistic or part-time, lovers of finery, single, married, victims of seduction who consider themselves

ruined or successful businesswomen who saw their sexuality as an asset (Attwood 147; Rosenthal, Introduction xvi). There were both stories of social descent and ascent, of misery and triumph, of regret and pride (Attwood 149; Rosenthal, Introduction x), of further marginalization or of successful postliminal integration, sometimes, as in Moll’s story, providing an ambiguous mixture of both. This inability to be all-encompassing in the definition of the performance of prostitution also explains the transformation in the reading of prostitutes in later centuries, in particular the changing portrayal from “deviants” or “poor souls” prior to 1970 (Spanger and Skilbrei 7) to resilient bodies, from nineteenth century victimized fallen and redeemable women, to historical actors capable of resistance, or at least “negotiation” within their usually limited circumstances (Walkowitz 23–24). In this act of bearing witness, liminal voices are recovered, for “beyond politics, cultural productions play a key role as they have the means (and the power) to capture acts of recollection, affirmation, and transformation when it comes to memory and creativity,” while they “play a major role in creating shared spaces and experiences and in shaping attitudes” (Gámez and Maseda 7–8). The realm of culture, of literature and cinema, “constitutes the arena for legitimizing or subverting contemporary imaginaries” (Gámez and Maseda 9), as they educate our gaze “to consider women’s bodies as transactional objects of male desire, violence, or simple use,” or to challenge the construction of the male gaze as the legitimated universal one (Gámez and Maseda 12). Therefore, to analyze how prostitutes’ bodies and voices are constructed, what they express about their society, and how our understanding can be enlarged by them, is essential in order to develop a truly transformative feminist agenda. Cases in point are Defoe’s aforementioned rag-to-riches novels or well-known whore biographies of the eighteenth century, depicting the rise to wealth and fame of Kitty Fisher and other successful mistresses. However, as said before, they usually come at a price and there are risks to the trade. An interesting literary example, closer in time, is George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893). The play revolves around the eponymous character, who was a prostitute but now owns several establishments in Brussels and other continental cities. Confronted by her unknowing daughter Vivie about her way of living and the identity of her father, Mrs. Warren defends her need to survive, as well as her wish to better her economic and social situation. Shaw’s play encountered strong opposition and censorship, for its “immoral” dialogue and subject matter (Conolly 13). The play adopts a similar approach to that of Wollstonecraft: poor women might be driven to prostitution by societal demands. However, the critics saw this as going too far, and as offering “one of the boldest and most specious defences of an immoral life for poor women that has ever been written” (St James’s Gazette, 7 January 1902, qtd. in Shaw 175). The problem was not only that it hinted at incest, but, that in contradistinction to what happened in other plays which presented prostitutes and procuresses, Mrs. Warren neither repents, nor dies. That is, she does not reform, but decides to continue running her business, which, ironically, gives her a claim to her restatement within society. Therefore, she indeed transitions from poor working girl, to prostitute, and, after a period, to apparently respected businesswoman. This postliminal ascent is problematic in the case of the former prostitute. In fact, critics complained of the sympathy that was sometimes drawn toward Mrs. Warren, the unrepentant prostitute, while giving Mrs. Warren, the procuress who exploits other women, a voice (Glasgow News, 11 April 1913, qtd. in

Shaw 179). Given what is seen as their social and personal responsibility, bawds and pimps always enjoyed worse reputation than the prostitutes; they were severely punished and condemned for their corruption of innocent youth. Whereas the prostitute could repent and reintegrate, these figures were not so easily justified for they often found their own validation in the fact that they provided society for a service it demanded, leading to no apology but also triggering no social improvement, no challenge to the status quo. Shaw’s play, in addition, condemns that status quo for it resonates with the echoes of the enquiries conducted years earlier on the white slave traffic that saw British girls being sold to brothels in Brussels.2 The location of Mrs. Warren’s establishments does not seem coincidental: again, they are removed from British society, marginal to it, but at the center of its public debate. In addition, they represent those sites that had become an important destination for Englishmen who wished to enjoy the services of prostitutes. More than in other cases, this points at the tourist as a liminal figure, transitional and searching for a temporal carnivalesque subversion of the norm. Here British men “remove” themselves from their society, transfer to a space of suspension of decorum and morality to then return to their homes and wives, to social and moral order. Yet, once more, their incorporation does not bring betterment. Rather, the increase in STDs that affected wives and children points at the opposite effect. In this respect, while some critics considered that this topic was not fit to be discussed in a play, or saw it as unrealistic, others praised the social value of Shaw’s work: it exposed a “society that tolerates Mrs Warren’s profession and fattens on it” (Birmingham Gazette, 28 July 1925, qtd in Shaw 180). Once more, the prostitute’s tale is one of survival, but also of economic betterment, which implies repeating the cycle of corruption that the prostitute once experienced and supporting a fierce capitalist system of demand and supply, even if of human flesh. The play then echoed contemporary debates and gave visibility to the “great evil” that had not been quenched, while it exposed some of the personal costs of Mrs. Warren’s profession. Another milestone in the representation of the prostitute as liminal, and as a product of narratives framed by the male gaze, is Angela Carter’s short story “The Loves of Lady Purple,” included in the aptly titled anthology Book of Wayward Girls and Wicked Women. Lady Purple was a “famous prostitute,” a “shameless Oriental Venus” (303, 304), who is now reduced to a puppet, a “doll” (304), while her story of lust and descent is performed for an audience every night under the mastery of the Professor. However, she comes back to life and in a “variation upon a theme” (311), bites the neck of her master, and drains him. She then cuts her ties and “out of logical necessity” leaves for the only brothel in town (313). Carter resumes the discussion of the identity of her courtesan as liminal other, as in-between object and subject, machine and mortal, monster and human (308), resorting once more to the comparison between prostitution and vampirism, which existed also in previous centuries.3 Yet the essential passage of the story focuses on what amount of agency Lady Purple has, for “even if she could not perceive it, she could not escape the tautological paradox in which she was trapped; had the marionette all the time parodied the living or was she, now living, to parody her own performance as marionette?” (312). The prostitute is trapped by the narrative

imposed on her, her commodification, so that this Gothic piece becomes an insightful critique “of the ways in which women’s agency is undermined by mythology and constructions of their femininity” (Wisker, Contemporary 44), as well as how the courtesan becomes an ambiguous figure, an “icon of desired and hated woman, an embodiment of men’s longings and fears” (44), which they wish to control or eradicate. Moving on to the performance of prostitution in film, one finds early representations that are embedded with the tragic tales of the nineteenth century: The Downward Path (1900) and Traffic in Souls (1913), respectively, provide Hogarthian vignettes of descent and death and social criticism toward a system that cannot prevent white slavery (Campbell 10, 17). Later films, such as Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986), for instance, emphasize once more Wollstonecraft’s stress on class and poverty, and the drudgery of the prostitute’s life, whereas the popular Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall 1990) glamorizes the experience of prostitution, transforming it into a Cinderella story. Vivian, as Jemima, climbs the ladder from the streets to becoming the mistress in the house—or, in this case, the hotel room: still a transient place that marks her unstable social position. However, contrary to her predecessor, she achieves the happy ending that former narratives reserved for the reformed prostitute: marriage, or at least a stable heterosexual relationship. Vivian becomes a referent in popular culture, to the effect that women speaking about their experience as street-walkers use it to deny this glamorized narrative that hides the harrowing reality they live (“Life Support”).4 The fact that twenty-first century cultural products are rewriting the figure of the eighteenth century prostitute is a powerful act of recovery and social criticism. Taking into account the fact that the construction of the modern prostitute determines contemporary attitudes toward her, the liminal approach of neo-Victorian or revisionist literature makes a statement about the importance of the topic of prostitution nowadays, and hence looks back to move forward. Historical fiction is then a political tool that enables to address relevant contemporary subjects, while also claiming those “illicit” or taboo voices of the past (Wallace 2). This facilitates a particularly relevant gender critique both of the past and the present. In this sense, prostitutes appear as a recurrent element in period dramas that wish to convey a sense of authenticity, or recover less canonical voices. Shows such as City of Vice (2008), The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015–17), Houdini & Doyle (2016), and films such as The Limehouse Golem (2016) or even Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009, 2011) include fleeting images of prostitution, usually the lower kind, the colorful street-walker, to complement their view of London’s underground. In the shows focused on crimes, lowly prostitutes continue in the tradition of Victorian sensation fiction, and become the disposable bodies, the perfect victims for those serial killers in the train of Jack the Ripper: human but dehumanized.5 Other period dramas, such as Poldark (2015–), allow the prostitute’s role to be more fully performed: Margaret is an elegant courtesan who is an important social element in her community. Together with these more anecdotal appearances, other historical recreations have given full preeminence to the complex experience of prostitution in the eighteenth century. Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin (2000) and Moira Buffini’s television show Harlots (2017–) are two such examples.

Other contemporary cultural products, such as Dangerous Beauty (1998) or the later Moulin Rouge! (2001) focus on past times in their narratives of courtesans to provide a current comment on women’s agency, the narratives that entrap them and the limitations of romance. Finally, with the rise of science and the cyborg, the liminal nature of prostitutes between humans and machines at the service of patriarchy and capitalism become apparent in cinema and television, for instance in Frankenhooker (1990) or Westworld (2016–), once more looking back to Wollstonecraft and her daughter’s most famous work, Frankenstein.

Between Monsters and Machines: Frankenhooker Indeed, Wollstonecraft’s story of a woman’s social descent and physical exploitation in an increasingly commercial world would find its echo in her daughter’s groundbreaking Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818). Both addressed societal responsibility in the creation of its own outsiders, its own “monsters,” objects of fear such as Frankenstein’s creature or the diseased and unruly harlot (Borham-Puyal 105). Furthermore, Mary Shelley explicitly addresses this fear of the female body in her scientist’s treatment of the female creature, a “thing,” which he never fully brings to life and quickly destroys (118–19). In a recent rewriting of Shelley’s masterpiece, the male gaze of the scientist and the creature dwell on the beautiful body of the “thing” before her parts are scattered on stage by Frankenstein and the creature then rushes to rape and destroy Elizabeth.6 Women’s bodies are commodities, torn to pieces by men in order to assuage their fears or to fulfill their own purposes, such as revenge. Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker (1990) resumes these issues with a story in which horror, pornography, and social comment intersect. Preceding Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 adaptation of Shelley’s classic, in which the scientist brings Elizabeth back to life by using her head and Justine’s body, this film revolves around a failed doctor and present electrician Jeffrey Franken who, after losing his fiancée Elizabeth in a gruesome lawnmower accident, preserves her head with the view of returning her to life. In order to do so, he decides to kill and amputate several prostitutes, after selecting the perfect parts of their bodies, not only to revive but to “improve” his former, slightly obese girlfriend. A low-budget horror film, it suffers from a pornographic approach to all women’s bodies —resorting to naked pictures, parties, and lesbian intercourse—even in the use of Elizabeth’s severed head as a date or to be kissed, equating her with an inert doll. Women serve the only purpose of being enjoyed by male viewers, and Jeffrey is intent on creating a new woman, a “goddess” with a “new look,” which in the pictures he selects corresponds exactly with the body image associated with male-centric porn. However, the film focuses particularly on the little value given to the prostitute’s inner and outer selves. When Jeffrey is looking for bodies, the answer is easily found: “If I need female body parts, I’ll buy female body parts. And there’s a place across the river with thousands of women anxious to sell their parts with no questions asked. [Of] course with the right amount of cash.” Prostitutes sell their bodies, hence they are reduced to just that, parts to be bought and commodities to be discarded if necessary—recalling once more the abovementioned murder of prostitutes in crime narratives, or the fact that in the eighteenth century their corpses could be sold to medical

students to practice on, as later Donoghue’s heroine states (414). For Jeffrey the streetwalkers he sees are a “buffet” from which to choose, he commodifies their bodies as he measures and selects the right legs, breasts, buttocks, in a scene designed to parade naked female bodies that offer themselves willingly to Jeffrey. Their value is so low, in fact, that he reasons he is not committing murder: crack is already killing them, he will only do it faster with a super crack that makes the prostitute’s body explode. He objects that they took the drugs freely, and therefore they are solely responsible for their fate. This discourse returns to eighteenth century justification of prostitution as springing from women’s lust and incapability of controlling their appetites (Ellis and Lewis 11), placing the blame on women rather than men. Prostitutes in this discourse are not given any identity beyond the name assigned by their pimp, and the physical attributes that Jeffery praises. They are branded by Zorro, their pimp, becoming his property, his “animals.” This reading is emphasized when Jeffrey experiments with his drug on a guinea pig while he talks dirty to it, as if it were a prostitute. They are objectified, never full subjects. When Elizabeth revives, she behaves like the prostitutes of which she is made. She repeats their phrases asking for money or looking for clients, and while claiming that there are “many different women inside [of her]” they are all reduced to their obsession with making money with their bodies. They are what they do, nothing more. Their lack of full agency makes them return in Elizabeth’s body to the streets, incapable of reintegration. In addition, Elizabeth’s body now kills all the men that come in contact with it, again performing the prostitute’s body as transformative because of its dangers for men’s health. In the end, the film wishes to provide women with some attempt of agency and revert the roles. At one point, a feminist parody belonging to an organization named HOOKER, which stands for “Hold On to Our Knowledge of Equal Rights,” complains about the vulnerability of these women to violence and drugs, and suggests the legalization of prostitution. Yet, the fact that Jeffrey agrees with her, only to then kill the street-walkers with more powerful drugs and to dispose of their bodies, indicates that patriarchal control supersedes any political or social initiatives. Even so, the film wants to have its cake and eat it too, pretending to conclude with a feminist message. Finally, the parts of the prostitutes come back to life and kill their abusive pimp, while Jeffrey, now dead, is revived by Elizabeth, in the role of conventionally sexualized female scientist. However, Jeffrey developed an “estrogen-based serum,” which can only resuscitate women. Therefore, Elizabeth gives him a female body like the ones he cut out of magazines and admired. Crying in horror and asking about his male genitals, Jeffrey concludes the narrative as part of the female “us” that Elizabeth recalls. He is now the same sexualized creature he wished to enjoy, which seems the most terrifying experience he has endured so far. While ironical, it is just one more female body that is exposed from head to toe for the audience’s voyeuristic pleasure, and it stills speaks to men’s greatest horror: becoming women. The same combination of technology at the service of men’s control over women’s bodies, and female lack of agency and commodification will appear in later cultural artifacts, and can be seen, for instance, in the television series Westworld (2016–), where the park has a stereotypical brothel, a madam and several prostitutes, which are popular attractions for

visitors. Creatures of the frontier, in the 1800s and 1900s prostitutes had a “peripheral status,” another example of double displacement, while they nevertheless contributed to the development of “frontier institutions” (Butler xvi), or even the towns themselves. In popular culture, they remain liminal, and inhabit a “demi-monde” (Butler xvii) between fact and fiction, historical records and fantasies fed by fiction and films. The television series, on its part, again looks back to the situation of these women in the frontier towns of the West as fulfilling a market demand, in order to reflect on present-day commodification, and even the mechanization of women’s body in a posthuman and highly technological world. They indeed inhabit the threshold between human and machine, victims and controllers, and provide the prostitutes with more agency than traditional Western narratives did.

The Freedom of the Prostitute or the Silence of the Wife: Dangerous Beauty Based on the nonfiction book The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (1992) by Margaret Rosenthal, Dangerous Beauty (Marshall Herskovitz 1998) recreates the main events in the life of Veronica Franco (1546–91), a renowned Venetian courtesan. Incapable of “buying” a marriage and in need of money for her brother’s commission, Veronica is instructed by her mother, herself a former courtesan, in the ways of high prostitution. At this time in Venice prostitution was an integral part of the city’s life, yet there were courtesans and harlots, “honest” or “low” prostitutes. The former were highly educated and were granted access to libraries and public spaces forbidden for other women, including respectable wives. Franco became notorious for her intelligence and published several volumes of poetry. She was involved in matters of state, yet when the plague hit the city she was also accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition, in their attempt to clear the city from sin. Acquitted given her influence in the highest spheres of the city, she apparently died in obscurity and poverty after her benefactors passed away. The film focuses on her training, her success, and her trial, and orients its vision toward the past to build a compelling vindication of women’s freedom. Constantly establishing parallelisms between the silent and invisible wives of Venetian noblemen, and Veronica’s freedom of movement and speech, it portrays how the latter comes to inhabit public spaces, appropriating male ones such as the printed word or the poetic and political dialectical battles. Confronted with the all-male court, she claims she chose the “whore’s freedom over the wife’s obedience.” Only as a courtesan could she learn, write, and reclaim those spaces. At one point, her friend Beatrice, forced to marry an old but extremely wealthy man and to remain confined in the private sphere of the home, wishes her own daughter to be trained as a courtesan, to escape the “perpetual state of inconsequence” in which domestic and uneducated women live. Yet, Veronica is also an outsider to them, she is barred from the female sphere of the home and the relatively guarded life of wives. When the war breaks out, the wives call her to know the fate of their husbands and have the conflict explained to them. However, she is thrown out when she challenges their ignorance and prudery. Veronica belongs in that in-between, on the fringe between women’s submission to male desires and her relative freedom. For even if Veronica becomes highly influential in the city’s culture and politics, at one point described as a “national asset,” yet when the Inquisition intervenes, she

reverts to becoming a “notorious courtesan,” which proves that despite her fame, wealth, and professional writing, Veronica’s identity and position in society is far from stable. Becoming scapegoats, high and low prostitutes are blamed and punished, whipped in the square, threatened to burn at the stake, for, like the witches in popular imagination, they are too powerful and free. Theirs are the bodies that can be branded and punished, never the men that consume them. The film then reflects the reality of the sixteenth century, but also current considerations on female sexual freedom or promiscuity, the role of women and the importance of equal opportunities. It also vindicates the struggle of past women, who opened the way for subsequent generations. While it seems faithful to the chain of events, the film, however, concludes with Veronica’s acquittal and her riding into the sunset on a gondola with her lover, Marco, after his grand gesture at the trial, confessing his love for her in public. Although the impossibility of their marriage speaks of the politics of matrimony for men and women, the rigidity of class and wealth, and the limited possibilities for women, the conventionally romantic ending leaves Veronica again on that threshold between subversive woman and traditional heroine of romance. The concluding statement emphasizes her indeterminate nature: “The age of courtesans had ended. In the years to come, Veronica Franco used her home as a sanctuary for victims of the Inquisition. She and Marco Venier remained lovers for the rest of their lives.” This, as in Pretty Woman, seems to erase Veronica’s nature as a courtesan, which continued after the events portrayed in the film, providing a more satisfying, because of “moral,” conclusion. Throughout the film, in fact, the only sexual scenes that are offered are those in which Veronica has intercourse with men that love her or whom she loves. It glosses over the less glamourized aspects of her life, just as in Pretty Woman the audience only hears from Vivian a brief summary of her life as a prostitute before Prince Charming came to the rescue. However, it is a slight reversal in an otherwise feminist approach to sexual inequality, the power conflicts between the sexes, and the courtesan as a liminal model for empowered past women. The same cannot be said of other contemporary cultural artifacts that present the same examples of high prostitution. A case in point would be Baz Luhrmann’s successful Moulin Rouge! (2001), which also looks back to fictionalize events inspired by an actual cancan dancer, Jane Avril (Celdrán). Set at the turn of the nineteenth century, it revolves around the love between impoverished writer Christian and star of the cabaret, courtesan Satine. In her first appearance, Satine flies through mid-air, out of reach yet enticing, a product on display that brings the owner wealth and fame, and she is promised to a rich Duke. As in Harlots, this exclusive patronage would enable her to become a different form of performer, a musical actress, another liminal female character in-between reality and fiction, focusing on pretense and exposure to the gaze of a consuming audience. However, it will be Christian’s love that will start Satine’s revolt against her former life and her wish to escape her gilded cage. Suffering from tuberculosis, between life and death, in the end, Satine escapes her destiny through the latter, staging the limited options she indeed had. Whereas Dangerous Beauty uses the background of Veronica’s profession to depict women’s invisibility and silence, Moulin Rouge! transforms instead into a romantic dramedy, also showing how generic hybridity might grant some moments of subversion, as in the harlots’ tango in which

their predicament is more evident, while providing a plot of condemned love that viewers have seen over and over again.

Neo-Victorian Rewritings: Class, Gender, and Commodities in Slammerkin In Slammerkin (2000) Donoghue explores the liminal identity of eighteenth century prostitutes, and women in general, by means of her protagonist, Mary Sounders. Inspired by a true case, Donoghue creates a fictional biography in sync with those eighteenth century accounts that wished to capitalize on the criminal life, while also providing an insight into the private self. Donoghue then portrays a story of descent similar to the sentimental narratives of the Magdalen penitents, focusing on Mary’s childhood, her pregnancy and her family’s rejection, which finally force her to resort to prostitution, but moves beyond the mercenary accounts of Sally’s life and depicts the self behind the commodity. Donoghue exposes how Mary’s identity it not stable, and neither is her position in society. She is many women: an honest schoolgirl, a fallen woman, a prostitute, a seamstress and Magdalen penitent, a seemingly virtuous maid, a future bride, a daughter, and a murderess. Moreover, responding to the fears of barrenness and unproductivity that moralists saw in the prostitute’s body (Batchelor and Hiatt xi), Mary’s abortion renders her infertile and without her period (70), transforming her into a different woman, an “unwomanly” woman. This liminal identity also responds to the fact that a prostitute’s life, in Mary’s words, is “made up of fragments of other people’s” (110), and resembles that of actresses, always pretending and selling themselves (62). As a harlot she does not have a stable space or life, and even constructs a proper version of herself and her story, in which truth and lies become increasingly entangled (243). She also rejects the “ending to every story she’d ever read,” the destination of all women: to be an “ordinary girl” and an “ordinary wife” (285). She wishes to revert the structured layers of society, and constructs her aspirations on the fictional rise of Pamela Andrews, Richardson’s famous maid turned lady (301). Mary must also fight to gain control over her trade, echoing Roxana and Moll, especially in the violence with which she defends it when Mrs. Jones gives away her money. Finally, she is altered again, halfway between herself and another, reality and fiction, now the main character in The Confession and Last Dying-Words of Mary Sounders, a pamphlet on her life that appears during her trial. It is a new self, a “guilty namesake,” “a heroine in print” (416), that has been granted a whole new past and a different identity to the one Donoghue has imagined. Mary believes books are full of lies (269, 416), and the hack story and the novel in which she is protagonist evince the malleability of her identity and situation. Her self is once again advertised for and consumed by the public, a moral warning about a repentant sinner (416). Ironically, it will be the only way in which her name will be preserved, but without none of her voice or true story. In her different identities she inhabits diverse spaces, but belongs to no place. Despite the less than ideal situation at her home and school, she loses her right to be a part of these respectable places. She is literally left outside, without the protection of her reputation or a home, and she is further disgraced by a gang rape. She then lives with Doll, they rent a space, but it is an in-between room, not fully theirs. Her time at the penitent house also highlights her sense of not belonging, of discomfort, especially in the scene during the religious service,

where the girls are mere objects on display for the benefactors. Mary’s inability to display the expected gendered manners, in particular humility, gratitude, and repentance, and thus undergo the transformation society requires of her, thwarts her reinstatement in society, but also results in her need to abandon the space from her old life, as Doll has died and she cannot pay the rent. Her journey to her mother’s village serves as a quest for a past, for a belonging, for a fresh start; however, the Joneses house is not hers, she is displaced to other liminal spaces, first, as a member of the service to the attic, and then to the upper room of an inn, when she returns to her activities as a prostitute. Finally, she concludes the story in prison, another transient location connected with the diverging roads of reinsertion or further marginality. Interestingly, her final position in the novel is between land and sky, jumping mid-air in order to die faster. Her descent into the margins concludes with her body suspended between life and death, history and story, unable to accept the strict codes of society for women. Donoghue’s portrayal of prostitution is complex and fraught. Scholars have highlighted how she portrays socially marginalized women as led into prostitution, and connects the discourses of sex and class (Mulvany 157), while O’Callaghan and Young suggest that Slammerkin “both critiques the sexual politics surrounding prostitution in its eighteenthcentury context and reflects present-day feminist debates surrounding the world’s so-called oldest profession” (138). In these authors’ account, Donoghue “underlines the challenging sociocultural and economic quandaries faced by women who…experience their work ‘choices’ as mediated by gendered, sexual and heteropatriarchal discourses”; she explores “the relationship between prostitution and the politics of choice, and exposes the complexities and contradictions faced by many women—in the past and present— with regard to their employment options,” placing therefore the responsibility “in the challenging sociocultural contexts and conditions” that situate women in this predicament (139). Although they conclude that the author could then be said to anticipate “the changes in approaches to prostitution witnessed in the new millennium, which have come to emphasize the diversity of women’s engagement with the sex trade” (139), it might be worth noting that the said “anticipation” responded, in fact, to prior debates and dramatizations, which, for three centuries, had revolved around the issues that contemporary society has inherited concerning prostitution, as will be subsequently shown. Donoghue’s reading and writing of the prostitute’s body reflect the aforementioned tensions between agency and slavery, self and product, external and internal self. First, Doll attracts Mary for her apparent freedom: the former’s colorful dresses and unrestricted attitude are in stark contrast with the latter’s dull clothes and cloistered existence in her mother’s house. Recalling Jemima’s words, Doll herself praises the freedom of her state as a streetwalker: she is a “lover of liberty” and considers her trade grants such autonomy (68, 75). However, her agency is not unproblematic. The scar on her face brands her, quite literally, as a “marked” woman: it is the stigma of her trade, the reminder that she is not, in fact, free, for she had to respond to pimps or bawds (75). Also, her insistence on not entering the Magdalen house leads to her death, which once more highlights her unprotected state. As Mary herself learns when she returns to their room, a prostitute must pay her dues or suffer the consequences; therefore, her freedom is certainly limited and closely linked to her monetary

power. The lack of agency is also expressed in their performance of prostitution. They are street-walkers, which limits their financial agency, but Mary glimpses at the possibility of “shortcuts, back alleys, gaps in the wall” that lead to becoming a mistress or even a wife after a life of servitude or prostitution (78). Finally, the fact that women’s stories, including prostitution, are often a form of slavery is reinforced by Abi’s story, which echoes Wollstonecraft’s earlier connection between these forms of oppression. A former slave both in Africa and the Barbados, she is an unpaid maid at the Jones’ until financed by the Quakers she heads to London to be a free woman, to become invisible and gain hope for a future (413), yet her brief encounter with Caesar, the references to the gutter or St. Giles, prove that it might not be as easy as she thought. As for control over her own choices, Donoghue limits the sense of agency by providing the conclusion of Mary’s death from the outset. This, of course, shifts the attention to how and why Mary came to that ending (O’Callaghan and Young 149), but it also exposes the inevitability of her fate. While Mary never stops challenging her destiny, making decisions, and revolting against control over her narrative, she is repeatedly redirected by other forces, for her “desire to be ‘better’ … to be an autonomous and free woman” is “continually restrained by society and the sexual ‘rights’ of men” (O’Callaghan and Young 149). Mary does not choose to become a prostitute: she is raped by the peddler and then the soldiers, ruining her chances of becoming something more than her mother and transforming her into an outcast. She wishes to find another profession, but there are no choices for her: “Mary was too young. Too ignorant. Lacked a cow, a barrow, a shop. Had no money to buy an apprenticeship, no husband to inherit a business from” (47). She also had no “character,” which, as Wollstonecraft’s Jemima reminds the reader, as a woman is essential to be trusted regarding your virtue. Mary also rejects the entrapment of the Magdalen house, and subsequently the landlady and the pimp drive her away. She rejects an offer of marriage and wishes to be someone different, but Cadwaladyr and Mr. Jones seal her destiny. It is possible, then, to agree with O’Callaghan and Young’s conclusion that Slammerkin “presents a broader social prejudice towards prostitution, in which such life decisions surrounding prostitution negate any notion of female choice and foreground female sexual degradation” (146); that is, despite the fact that society does not eradicate prostitution nor improve the lives of the sex workers, it still “normalizes hostile attitudes towards prostitutes rather than the male punters” and exposes the harlot to “a range of moralistic judgements and social condemnation based on her employment as a prostitute” (146). Related to the idea of limited agency, then, is the idea of self-reading and societal considerations toward prostitutes. Mary sees herself as the protagonist of her story, and she will become the main character of the mentioned criminal biography. Mary, in fact, at first struggles to consider herself a harlot (42), but all her experiences from childhood to her death, prove that society reads her differently: she is now a commodity, a product for sale. When none of her skills or assets can provide a job, it is her body that becomes her trade: “Young thing like you, fresh as lettuce virgin goods, practically—you should get two bob a throw” (50). Doll’s use of the word “goods” reinforces this idea that Mary will lose her humanity, her interiority, and become a product that must be marketed, even if Mary separates her self from her skin, her identity from her trade (70). Nevertheless, she will not

escape her commodification even in death. Another hint at the identity of the prostitute as dually human and other, subject and object, is Doll’s name, which recalls the objectification of her body, her passivity as a sexual object intent on gratifying men. It also echoes recent “post-feminist critiques of prostitution and the sexualization of contemporary culture” and its representation of women (O’Callaghan and Young 146), as well as the controversy on the growing quantity and quality of sex dolls, which increasingly resemble real-life women and contribute to the wish to gain control over and reproduce the female body. The title of the novel also supports this reifying reading: slammerkin is an eighteenth century word that means both a loose gown and a loose woman (Donoghue viii), identifying a sexually available woman with an object that can be acquired. The fact that Mary becomes a seamstress of slammerkins is no coincidence: they are both beautiful and colorful items for sale, and she tailors her gowns to satisfy her client’s wishes. Mary kills Mrs. Jones when she intends to stop her from reclaiming the gown and the conflation of the dress and the woman might allow to read this as Mary’s final attempt to gain possession of her own destiny, her own sense of self. In the end, she is granted one final act of defiance and agency as she jumps forward and hence completely loses her corporeity, her external self and becomes the Mary of narrative fiction. In a reversal of what prostitution does to Mary, to her body, Donoghue recovers and develops her interiority, which is now given a textual body, incarnated in the fiction that revolves around her.

Sex and Power from the Eighteenth Century to Television: Harlots The same act of recovery and vindication is perceived in Harlots. Inspired by Hallie Rubenhold’s The Covent Garden Ladies (2012), her book on Harris’s List, ITV’s Harlots (2017–) has probably become the boldest and most thorough recreation of eighteenth century prostitution. Following the rivalry of two bawds and their brothels in 1763, Moira Buffini’s and Alison Newman’s show offers a comprehensive view of the different performances of prostitution, the dangers and advantages it could offer women, and society’s cruelty and hypocrisy toward the “great evil” to which it was daily contributing. What is more, it aims to do it from the prostitute’s point of view, and with an all-female production team and cast. In the words of producer Alison Owen, by shifting the point of view, Buffini intended to avoid the familiar tropes of this subject, the male “titillating look at the world of prostitutes and sex,” and rather reclaim the prostitute’s voice and “celebrate the female gaze” (Stanhope). For eighteenth century scholars, an essential aspect of the “representation of prostitution performance is the narrative position,” as it is rare to have access to the “authentic voices of prostitutes” and hence they are reconstructed from records, imitated, or imagined (Ellis and Lewis 4). Often these imitations remained firmly established in the male gaze, and became a voyeuristic narrative of female sexuality. However, Buffini’s project, while based on such material as the highly objectifying Harris’s List, successfully reclaims the prostitute’s voice. In the first episode, the prostitutes read their descriptions from the List, so they become more than commodities described on a catalogue. Buffini, very literally, embodies them and gives them a voice. Contrary to Donoghue’s novel, from a textual body that can suffer no harm, the visual media enables Buffini to transform beings on paper into actual women who feel and

suffer. She then recovers the real eighteenth century prostitutes that were only textual shadows for twenty-first century readers, which is emphasized by the fact that two characters, Margaret and Charlotte Wells, have real-life counterparts that inspired their roles. The textual prostitutes have become human, an external and internal entity, and are no longer liminally existent. Moreover, the prostitute now reclaims the third-person description that objectified her, very literally “reading over” the male voice as the prostitutes do when they discuss their entries in the book. So if the most relevant question has always been who is telling the story, in Buffini’s conception the answer is clear: only the prostitutes and only women. This is not to say that the male gaze is not problematized. Even as they read the descriptions on the list, the audience understands how those words delimited who they were: what the quality of the asset was, what it could offer that others could not. It is a dehumanizing account of the prostitute’s body and self—half human, half object to be consumed—which she then needs to learn to use to her advantage. For instance, when Emily Lacey wishes to leave one brothel and move to another, she uses the list to advertise her worth. However, by presenting the lives of these women as mothers, daughters, lovers, and businesswomen, the show exposes the fact that the eighteenth century account reduced prostitutes to their trade. In fact, the show achieves to frame prostitution into a wider vision of eighteenth century society, and, as a consequence, to portray the prostitute much better into her context. Much like Mrs. Warren, Margaret Wells is a former prostitute who is now a madame that is hoping to move to a more distinguished neighborhood and clientele. Having been sold into prostitution at the age of 10, she has also introduced her two daughters, Charlotte and Lucy, into her world so as to avoid a life of hard work and no control over their money, as happened to ordinary wives. Margaret’s former bawd, Lydia Quigley, runs a high-class establishment that caters to noblemen, judges, and the clergy. Her feud with Margaret is the basis of the show, while the latter’s vicissitudes, and humanity, as a mother is another important element. In his review of the show, critic Eric Deggans highlighted that “this show created with a female gaze keeps its sights set on the humanity of its female characters despite their struggles working in an inhumane business.” This vindication of their humanity is most often addressed through motherhood, sisterhood, and sorority. It also highlights their humanity by presenting prostitution as a difficult choice at a time when women had limited options. Considering whether to sell Lucy’s virginity or not, Charlotte suggests marrying her to a tradesman. However, Margaret refuses the idea because Lucy would then never be the master of her own destiny or wealth. Nevertheless, she is aware that prostitution is commodification, becoming someone’s property for a price. As she insists that Charlotte sign an exclusivity contract with her lover, she claims “you need to become his: men don’t respect women, they respect property.” Prostitution is then represented on the threshold between slavery and freedom, submission and agency. Again a symbolic case is Harriet Lennox. A former slave in her husband’s plantation, she returns to London with him and their two children. When he dies she discovers he has not legalized their situation: they are now the property of his older son. Harriet then becomes a maid, but the pressing need for money to buy her children back induce her to become a prostitute.

Confronted about her choice, she claims at least now she is paid for her work. Other references to slavery and exploitation are found throughout the show. Emily is told by Quigley that she will work “like a black” before she locks her in her room. She is subsequently “tried” by Quigley’s son to see the quality of the product, and forced to pay for her accommodation, dress, and education, which will trap her in debt. At the same time, they have the sense that safety can be obtained by a promotion and money. Quigley’s son tempts Emily stating that they had “a girl who left to become mistress to the Duke of Norfolk,” which is the destiny Margaret wishes for her daughters. Emily later becomes a bawd, Quigley has achieved a certain safety by her wealth and the secrets she trades in, and Margaret honestly claims that “the only safety is in money…wealth will make you free.” Trapped by conventions of gender and class, the only way out is by becoming successful tradeswomen with their own body, or with that of others. However, the “integration” of these women into society from its margins does not change or transform society, but rather caters to the patriarchal oppression of women as Wollstonecraft had vindicated. What seems liberating for some, only entraps other women. The show thus displays more than one representation of the performance of prostitution. It is peopled by street-walkers who conduct their business in alleys; members of lower brothels and of higher establishments; and kept mistresses, such as Charlotte. It also explores the many spaces that they inhabit, the “sanctuaries” or “houses of recreation,” or the more euphemistic “boarding houses for young ladies,” from Cheapside to Soho, and the different conditions and customs of each area. Prostitutes are then shown as socially mobile; the liminal territory they inhabit enables them to climb or descend in class as well as in means. Buffini’s intention was precisely to tell the “story of a whole society through these really socially mobile women,” who from “a very humble background can find [themselves] highly elevated very quickly, and the other way around” (Kilkenny), also evincing the comprehensive position of prostitution within society. The show does indeed prove that it was an intrinsic part of society: improper but given a respectable name, known but silenced, so also (in)visible. And by presenting the clients as well, the show emphasizes this pervasiveness. From Mr. Boswell, Johnson’s famous biographer, who, as his journal asserts, could only afford street-walkers in gardens and alleys, to the magistrates who punished these women while availing themselves of their service. Harlots also exposes the vulnerability of these women both to the law and to double standards: the prostitute is again doubly disprivileged as a woman and as an illicit other. Husbands could employ courtesans or visit brothels. At one point a noble client brags about deflowering virgins in front of his wife, who blandly adds that he has a weakness for a “hymen.” However, women’s virtue or reputation could suffer irreversible damage from the loss of their virginity. One of Wells’ girls, Kitty, implies that she resorted to prostitution after being raped by one of her father’s friends, echoing Mary Sounders’ fate. As for the law, the show references the Disorderly Houses Act (1752), which could be used to bring bawds and brothel owners to court. When Margaret is fined with 100 pounds and threatened with whipping and transportation if she is condemned again, their vulnerable state as women and prostitutes is called out by Charlotte: “We are pursued and harried like prey.… My mother protects her girls because the law does not. … She is the exemplar of all the bawds in

London.” Margaret complains about the corruption of the system, the bribes to the law, and their defenselessness. Not even Quigley is above the servitude to the corruption of the law. The commodification of women’s body and its vulnerability is very evidently represented in the show’s own interpretation of Hogarth’s work and in the rewriting of instances of documented violence against women. Quigley is compelled by the same magistrate that has condemned Margaret to find a “new” girl to be enjoyed by him and his friends. This means a girl who is innocent, a virgin. She then dupes a young girl from the country into believing she will become a maid. The girl is then bound and, the audience assumes, gang raped. The following morning, Quigley tells the traumatized victim to take comfort in the money and dispatches her to a house. The show’s intertextuality with A Harlot’s Progress is not only evident in the plot, but also visually. The girl’s appearance (her dress, her hat) and Quigley’s attire replicate the first engraving of the series: “Moll Hackabout arrives in London and meets Mother Needham, a notorious procuress.” As in Hogarth’s series, the vulnerable body of the prostitute is now exposed to violence, detention, disease, and death, a fate forewarned by this similarity. Moreover, she cannot seek justice because the criminals are those who administer it. Second, later in the first series, a group of violent and powerful men commit several rapes and murders. A flawed justice system and the complicity of society hinders the women’s attempt to hold the culprits to account. The show then echoes former representations of vulnerable women as victims of male violence, such as the Ripper’s murders. In its interpretation of the past Harlots follows recent feminist trends in vulnerability and resilience, denying them the status of mere “victims” and rather portraying “survivors,” women who resist and fight back as a community. As Margaret says: “This city is made of our flesh—every beam, every brick. We’ll get our share.” Finally, the show fulfills the political role of historical fiction by bringing to the forefront the contemporaneity of the struggle depicted on screen. It exposes the flaws of the justice system not only to regulate or abolish prostitution, but, more importantly, to protect prostitutes. It highlights the hypocrisy and immobility of politicians, religious zealots, social reformers, and journalists or writers who could shape the public opinion. All elements that conform the ongoing debate on the sex trade. However, it goes beyond prostitution. The show’s contemporaneity also addresses the vulnerability and resilience of women in general, their often in-between position within society, or the value given to their bodies and lives. The rape and murders that go unpunished pose the question of the validity of a system of justice decided by men, which Buffini perceives as “still so relevant when you think about how difficult it is to prosecute a man for rape and assault” (Kilkenny). Moreover, the manner in which these extremely vulnerable women raise their voices and seek retribution, echoes the coeval #MeToo movement, which was gaining strength as the second season was being developed. In the end, Buffini claims, “the message of Harlots is, lest we forget what the world is like without votes for women and without rights for women, this is it. … This is why we must continue to fight” (Kilkenny). These final examples resort to the discussion of prostitution as a site in which class and sex discrimination intersect, and which serves to address feminist concerns of past times in present forms. All these cultural artifacts give visibility to the prostitute, so that she leaves the fringes of society and gains center stage. In the more feminist revisions, she is even

granted her own voice and claims her own story. As Moll Flanders aptly phrased it, “this is my own Story,” not any man’s (250), vindicating her agency but also her difficulties in a world that offered few chances for women to complete their ascent in society.

Notes 1 This wide range of practices also defines the debate on what prostitution is and what should be done about it. This episode of Netflix’s Follow This series, which revolves around burning issues, focuses on these varied performances, the positions taken by regulationist and abolitionist factions, but is especially relevant for the emphasis on how prostitutes experience violence, insecurity and even the persecution of the law, rather than their clients. 2 To understand how the play responds to its context, see John Allett’s “Mrs Warren’s Profession and the Politics of Prostitution,” Shaw, vol. 19, 1999; and Raymond Nelson’s “Mrs Warren’s Profession and English Prostitution,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 2, 1972, pp. 357–66. 3 Evans records how Mabel Gray, a famous courtesan, was described as “the most notorious … vampirish demi-mondaine of her day” (112). 4 Interviewing a former prostitute who is now homeless and depends on benefits, this woman claims: “As a small-town girl watching Pretty Woman, let me tell you: it ain’t nothing like that” (“Life Support”). It is interesting that Isn’t It Romantic, a parody of romantic narratives which will be discussed in the following chapter, also sets to de-mythologize the romance behind this Cinderella story without addressing the fact that it is set to the background of prostitution. 5 This is particularly evident in The Frankenstein Chronicles. See Leonor Ruiz-Ayúcar’s “Adaptation and Repurpose of Frankenstein and its Creature in Neo-Victorian Gothic Mash-up The Frankenstein Chronicles,” Frankenstein Revisited: The Legacy of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece, edited by Miriam Borham-Puyal, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2018, pp. 81–95. 6 I am referring to Nick Dear’s 2011 adaptation, directed for the stage by Danny Boyle, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonnie Lee Miller exchanging the roles of scientist and creature, which I have addressed before in relation to Wollstonecraft’s Jemima (Borham-Puyal 105–106).

Works Cited Attwood, Nina. The Prostitute’s Body: Rewriting Prostitution in Victorian Britain. Pickering & Chatto, 2011. Batchelor, Jennie, and Megan Hiatt. “Introduction.” The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt, Pickering & Chatto, 2007, pp. ix–xxiii. Bell, Shannon. Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Indiana University Press, 1994. Borham-Puyal, Miriam. “Jemima’s Wrongs: Reading the Female Body in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Prostitute Biography.” International Journal of English Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2019, pp. 97–112. DOI: 10.6018/ijes.341191. Butler, Anne M. Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery. Prostitutes in the American West, 1865–90. University of Illinois Press, 1985. Campbell, Russell. Marked Women. Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema. The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Carter, Angela. “The Loves of Lady Purple.” Book of Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, edited by Angela Carter, Virago, 2016, pp. 299–313. Celdrán, Helena. “Jane Avril: la musa de Toulouse-Lautrec en el Moulin Rouge que inspiró el papel de Nicole Kidman.” 20 minutos, 2011, http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/1087266/0/jane-avril/toulouse-lautrec/exposicion/. Accessed 28 September 2019. Conolly, L. W. “Introduction.” Mrs. Warren’s Profession, edited by L. W. Conolly, Broadview Press, 2006, pp. 13–74. Dangerous Beauty. Directed by Marshall Herskovitz, Regency Enterprises, 1998. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. 1722. Edited by Linda Bree, Oxford University Press, 2011. ———. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress. 1724. Oxford University Press, 2008. Deggans, Eric. “Hulu’s ‘Harlots’ Follows Prostitutes in 18th Century London.” All Things Considered. 29 March 2017. www.npr.org/2017/03/29/521954075/hulus-harlots-follows-prostitutes-in-18th-century-london. Accessed 30 August 2018.

Donoghue, Emma. Slammerkin. Virago, 2000. Ellis, Markman, and Ann Lewis. “Introduction: Venal Bodies –Prostitutes and Eighteenth-Century Culture”. Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture, edited by Ann Lewis and Markman Ellis, Routledge, 2012, pp. 1–16. Evans, Hilary. Harlots, Whores & Hookers. Taplinger Publishing Company, 1979. Fisher, Trevor. Prostitution and the Victorians. Sutton Publishing, 2001. Frankenhooker. Directed by Frank Henenlotter, Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment, 1990. Gámez Fuentes, María José, and Rebeca Maseda García. “The Configuration of Gender Violence. A Matrix to be Reloaded.” Gender and Violence in Spanish Culture. From Vulnerability to Accountability, edited by María José Gámez Fuentes and Rebeca Maseda García, Peter Lang, 2018, pp. 1–18. Harlots. Created and scripted by Moira Buffini, ITV Encore, Hulu, 2017. Kilkenny, Katie. “Why We Must Continue to Fight”: Inside ‘Harlots’ Season 2.” The Hollywood Reporter, July 11, 2018. www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/harlots-season-2-preview-1125541. Accessed 30 August 2018. “Life Support.” Follow This, season 1, episode 5. Netflix. 2018. www.netflix.com/watch/80241723 Moulin Rouge! Directed by Baz Luhrmann, Bazmark Productions, 2001. Mulvany, Maria. “Spectral Histories: The Queer Temporalities of Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin.” Irish University Review, vol. 43, no. 1, 2013, pp. 157–68. DOI: 10.3366/iur.2013.0062. O’Callaghan, Claire, and Emma Young. “‘Lovers of Liberty’? Prostitution and the Politics of Choice in Emma Donoghue.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 27, no. 2, 2016, pp. 137–52. DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2016.1227153. Olsson, Lena. “Introduction.” The Prostitute’s Life: Sally Salisbury and Fanny Hill, edited by Lena Olsson, Pickering & Chatto, 2004, pp. vii–xviii. Pretty Woman. Directed by Garry Marshall, Touchstone Pictures, 1990. Rosenthal, Laura J. Infamous Commerce. Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. Cornell UP, 2006. ———. “Introduction.” Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century, edited by Laura J. Rosenthal, Broadview Press, 2008, pp. ix–xxx. Sealing Cheng, “The Voice of Images: Photovoice, Sex Workers and Affective Engagement.” Prostitution Research in Context. Methodology, Representation and Power, edited by Marlene Spanger and May-Len Skilbrei, Routledge, 2017, pp. 101–22. Shaw, George Bernard. Mrs. Warren’s Profession. 1893. Edited by L. W. Conolly, Broadview Press, 2006. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 1818. Edited by J. Paul Hunter, W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. Smith, Sharon. “Defoe’s The Complete English Tradesman and the Prostitute Narrative: Minding the Shop in Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn, Sally Salisbury, and Roxana.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2015, pp. 27–57. DOI: 10.1353/jem.2015.0012. Spanger, Marlene, and May-Len Skilbrei, editors. Prostitution Research in Context. Methodology, Representation and Power. Routledge, 2017. Stanhope, Kate. “‘Harlots’: How Hulu’s Period Prostitution Drama is Helping Women in Hollywood”, The Hollywood Reporter, 29 March 2017. www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/harlots-inside-all-female-creative-team-989308. Accessed 30 August 2018. Walker, Charles. “Authentic Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues, and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury. With True Characters of her most Considerable Gallants.” Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century, edited by Laura J. Rosenthal, Broadview Press, 2008, pp. 1–68. Walkowitz, Judith R. “History and the Politics of Prostitution. Prostitution and the Politics of History.” Prostitution Research in Context. Methodology, Representation and Power, edited by Marlene Spanger and May-Len Skilbrei, Routledge, 2017, pp. 19–32. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers 1900–2000. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Westworld. Created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, HBO Entertainment, 2016. “Whores Day.” Follow This, season 1, episode 6. Netflix. 2018. www.netflix.com/watch/80241732. Wisker, Gina. Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction. Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary and The Wrongs of Woman. 1788, 1798. Edited by Gary Kelly, Oxford University Press, 2007.

4 Between Madness and Rebellion Rewriting the Female Quixote

Nowadays the term “quixotic” has entered common usage. Defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “having or showing ideas that are different and unusual but not practical or likely to succeed” and “having intentions or ideas that are admirable but not practical,” it inherently implies a confrontation between an individual and society: the quixote defends or embodies a personal vision or ideology that clashes with what is allowed or perceived as “feasible” within his or her context. In this sense, Miguel de Cervantes’ famous knight, Don Quixote, with his conflict between fiction and reality, has transcended his author, his time and his narrative, to become one of the great myths of Western culture, an easily recognizable figure adaptable to any age, society, ideology, or cultural media (Iffland “Part I”, “Part II”; Riley, “Don Quixote”). In addition, it has embodied the tensions of its particularly liminal position within literature and culture. In what Harry Levin identified as the “quixotic principle” (58), this figure is defined by a dialogical nature in which opposing principles are sustained through irony and parody, in particular, those of history and fiction, life and literature. The most striking particularity of the quixotic principle or “fallacy” is hence the ironic conflict between reality and romantic imagination, between the real world and the literary interpretation made of it (Brown 251; Levin 58). Again this leads to the use of the term “conflict” in its dialogical sense: at the core of the quixotic principle one finds how different ways of perception, different realities, come in contact in a quest for ultimate meaning. In Pedro J. Pardo’s words, the quixotic principle can incorporate “not just the conflict between the romantic imagination and reality, but also between vision and reality, world and worldview, and of course between different visions and worldviews, and therefore implies a representation of reality as a dialogue of perspectives” (“Tobias Smollet” 98–99). What is more, in this dialogue of perspectives one is confronted with the difficulty, or almost impossibility, to know the truth about the world or even about oneself, as those systems of meaning used to make sense of the world prove fallible. The epistemological conflict is, of course, epitomized by Don Quixote and by subsequent quixotic figures. Confronted with their social reality, the quixotes try to make sense of the world and their role in it. Quixotic madness is then an ethic, a method, a logic, an epistemology, which consists “in the assertion of a hope” (Levi 136) for what at a given time is rationally, or rather socially, impossible or, at least, perceived so.1 That hope is founded on a code learned from different narratives, different ideological supersystems found in

literature, philosophy and politics, religion and ethics.2 Depending on the source of their quixotism, it would be possible to establish the following taxonomy: the literal and literary, whose misconceptions are based on their reading of fiction; the ideological, who reads nonfiction and whose quixotism is defined as an “enthusiasm”; and the displaced, whose flawed perception of the world is triggered by some innate qualities, as her youth or extreme idealism, a characteristic obsession or a romanticized vision of reality not directly connected with a particular reading, but of an implicit literary origin (Borham-Puyal, Quijotes 13–14). These supersystems fulfill two essential functions: on the one hand, they motivate the action by providing the illusions or ideals by which the quixote will think and behave; on the other, they will build a dichotomy between the quixotic aspirations and the disillusioning or threatening world in which they inhabit. They manifest themselves in different characters: the ladies-errant who defy sexual stereotypes and their domestic confinement, the visionaries who wish to become social reformers and the romancers who color or idealize their reality (Borham-Puyal, “Ladies-Errant” 108). Therefore, the chosen supersystem and the consequent course of action would put the quixote at odds with her society. In the eighteenth century, reading was a politically and morally charged activity; especially when it came to women, moralists warned that you became what you read, whether literature or propaganda (Borham-Puyal, “Seduction” 11; Pearson; Raff). In particular, conservative fears saw intellectual seduction as a prelude to a physical one, with what that meant not only for the fallen woman, but for society as a whole (Borham-Puyal, “Seduction” 19). A predecessor of the famous feminist motto “the personal is political,” at this time moralists and politicians developed what Anne Mellor termed “the family-politic trope” (Romanticism 84). In that, women’s roles took predominance in the political dialectics at the turn of the century, with radicals and antiradicals, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah More, appropriating woman as an emblem of revolution or reform, respectively (Borham-Puyal “Madres”; Mellor Mothers; Tomaselli). For two hundred years, the family was seen as the core of the nation and the basis of stability was female virtue, with propriety guaranteeing the legitimacy of property, and women’s morality supporting the religious status quo (Wood 36). Therefore, the subversion of the moral and social principles in a search for personal fulfillment was perceived as particularly dangerous, especially in the later eighteenth century, amidst the threats of revolution, or during the Victorian age, bent on glorifying the image of the “angel in the house” also in the context of reform and change. As women became more visible in their role of writers and readers, philosophers and moralists, historians and artists, this conservative reaction to the advancement of women populated fiction with warnings in the shape of female quixotes. Because quixotism was no longer identified with old knights. With the widespread reception of Cervantes’ text and the changing considerations of the mad, so did quixotism come to embody a more general experience and encompass all these possible delusions. In particular, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—often considered the Golden Age of the quixotic reception and rewritings (Pardo, “Siglo de Oro”)—it become associated with the young and understood as a youthful delusion or romantic coloring that does not pervert the intellect (Welsh, Reflections 149). A more common experience associated with a state that “can be grown out of” and which is then “quite acceptable, even salutary” (Welsh,

“Influence” 91), it became a transitional experience, a coming-of-age or rite of passage toward the integration within society. Especially when creating female quixotes, their young age is important to understand their delusion not as a sensorial distortion that mistakes windmills for giants, not a transformative experience, but as a romantic reading or interpretation of a reality that did not live up to their expectations (Pardo, “Heroina” 357–58). Thus, the conflict could be not only epistemological, but also axiological. Female quixotism, in particular, will not revolve only around an erroneous perception of reality, but rather a negative assessment of it: it will become explicitly a conflict between individual aspirations and the social context, the symptom of the quixote’s discontent with that reality and, ironically, sometimes a sign of their superiority to their environment (Pardo, “Heroina” 358). In this sense, female quixotes often become moral milestones that serve the purpose of criticizing the shortcomings of their society (Pardo, “Quijote femenino” 1636). They are transformed, then, into a hybrid character: a warning and a model, a highly commendable female figure who is nevertheless used as a “scarecrow to frighten women away from the fertile fields of romance and back onto the straight and narrow paths of duty and virtue” (Pawl 158). This is so because, despite this positive reading, as occurs in all conflicts, the end entails a form of defeat: imagination must be overcome through a process of disillusionment, intrinsic to it, and which becomes the summit of the process of self-awareness and maturation (Levin 65). Cervantes portrayed the failure of literature as the system used to make sense of the world, the failure of what imagination saw as possible, of what should be as opposed to what could be (Riley, Teoría 305), and the later female quixotes will develop this epistemological and axiological problem in their final progression toward awakening. Brown has described this dichotomy between “should” and “could,” in terms of “quixotic mimeticism” and “social mimeticism,” that is, the need to transition from their individual supersystem to that sanctioned by society, finally “joining and affirming a common reality” (260). In fact, the final problem with quixotes, in general, and female ones, in particular, is that they are “not mimetic enough,” or “mimetically incorrect,” leading Brown to read the quixotic fallacy as a “fable about solipsism” (259). Therefore, female quixotes symbolize the universal quest for meaning and a system of reference, and embody this liminal stance in the conflict between literature and life, imagination and reality, or idealism and facts. In their delusion, they refuse to comply with their peers’ perceptions about the role of women, and to walk the path of marriage and motherhood set for them as soon as they come of age. They embody the restrictions of old supersystems—of what could be—while imagining the possibilities of the new—what should be—at the same time they reclaim different models of the past that could advance the position of women in their society by example. Nevertheless, in the end the female quixote’s integration would require the metaphorical death of her quixotic persona in the form of marriage, which is the conclusion of most Cervantean narratives, starting with the foundational The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella (1752), by Charlotte Lennox. However, quixotism might also conclude with her literal death in the more dystopian narratives. Similarly to the warning implicit in the violent death of female vampires, the quixotes that had “fallen” sexually, that had proven more disruptive, concluded their narratives ostracized, dead to society—for instance, what happens

to Margaret, the quixote in Sarah Green’s parodic Romance Readers and Romance Writers (1810)—or losing their life to complications with illegitimate births or disease, sometimes in a house for poor or loose women—as is the case of Julia in Elizabeth Hamilton’s anti-Jacobin satire Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1801). In other cases, it is simply the excess of passion and frustration that seems to kill the quixote. The exceptionally sentimental Theresa in Elizabeth S. Tomlins’ The Victim of Fancy (1787) dies consumed by her emotions, without achieving the intellectual fulfillment she hoped for. Her final illness and fever represents the ambivalent position of women in the mind–body dualism, educated as creatures of sensation and yet owners of powerful intellectual capacities that go underdeveloped. It also symbolizes the struggle between a “cure” and marriage, or defeat and disappearance before submission, and will be a recurrent presence in other sentimental quixotic narratives—present even in Austen’s later Sense and Sensibility (1811), where Marianne recovers to finally marry Brandon. Yet, the epitome of a sentimental quixote, Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771), does not meet such a tragic ending; but, then, he is not defined by what seems an asphyxiating domestic circle and can ramble the world while Theresa is confined first in a nunnery and later at home. A man of feeling and a woman of sensation were meant to fulfill different destinies, just as male and female quixotes are granted different notions of “adventure” and “mobility” (Pawl 149). Yet, even if for women quixotism implies the progression toward a metaphoric or literal death, their period of quixotic delusion at least grants them an in-between position between freedom and submission, which usually coincides with their transition between adolescence and adulthood, innocence and knowledge. Quixotism, defined by its carnivalesque nature, allows for a period of subversion in which gender, and even class, restrictions are defied. In it, the voices of the double other, subversive women, are given expression, while their temporal delusion, seen as some form of social or epistemological madness, allows for temporary freedom and subversion of the established roles in a Bakhtinian sense of the term madness. Under this light, quixotic delusion would be a space in which a momentary liberation from constraint is possible, thereby an expression of the carnivalesque. James Iffland, following Bakhtin’s study of quixotism, adduces that carnival symbolizes foolishness, irrationality, temporal madness, and, most importantly, a momentary liberation from all restraint and a subversion of established hierarchies (De fiestas 165). This idea would be developed further in relation to quixotism understood as “interspersed madness,” especially concerning the knight’s quixotic sisters, who are entrapped in a limiting society and granted freedom on the threshold between madness and sanity, subversion and acceptance (Borham-Puyal, “Run Mad”). This liminal position in and out of society, inbetween the old and the new, or the private and the public will provide female quixotes with a privileged vantage point from which to offer a comment on literature, society, and the narratives to which women’s lives were circumscribed. First, the quixotes are usually deluded by the genres in vogue, those considered “popular,” so they become barometers of the shifts in taste that had or were taking place, of the popularity or decay of certain genres, as well as struggle for literary authority during the eighteenth and later the nineteenth century. For instance, Sarah Green’s little known Scotch Novel Reading, or Modern Quackery. A Novel Really Founded on Facts. By a Cockney

(1824), portrays a quixote who imitates the craze for Scottish fiction, language, history, and culture fueled by Walter Scott’s popular historical romances. The title itself is revealing of Green’s mockery of the Scottish obsession as absurd—described as quackery and opposed to English cockney, which this cultural and literary trend seems to threaten—as well as her insistence on plausibility in fiction rather than romantic imagination. It is also the case of a woman writer mocking the cultural authority of figures such as Scott or even Byron. Nevertheless, probably the best example is Lennox’s novel. The Female Quixote depicts a reader of heroic romances who confuses real life and literature, leading to a series of situations that range from the absurd to the dangerous, and to her final disappearance in marriage to the suitor chosen by her father. Lennox places Arabella’s literary supersystem to the test of the everyday in eighteenth century polite society, and mocks the results, hoping to provide a better model for her young readers. Together with her recantation of all autonomy and power in her relationship with her fiancée, Arabella repudiates her former favorite readings in favor of a more Johnsonian taste in fiction—establishing an interesting parallel between what is being condoned in fiction and its real-life meaning for women within patriarchal structures. In fact, this newly acquired literary taste is embodied by the new species of fiction that would claim to abandon flights of fancy, or wishful thinking of female power, to instead portray “life in its true state,” as Samuel Johnson himself heralded in The Rambler, a form of fiction that would come to be termed the novel. This genre, associated with men and a more middle-class, educated readership, came to be juxtaposed to the romance, which was pejoratively termed a more feminine and popular genre (Ballaster, “Romancing”). In this context Arabella’s choice of reading is anything but innocent: her romances prove her position on the threshold between two times and spaces—the foreign past represented in historical romances and eighteenth century British society—and two narratives—the power of romantic heroines over their lovers and the submission of women in love and marriage. In addition, it places her as a medium for absent women. Her books belonged to her dead mother and have been appropriated by her father, to be included in his own library. Finding them there, she reclaims them and reads them in her own personal space, her closet. This action vindicates, on the one hand, the trace of the absent mother, who died in childbirth, and, on the other, the matrilineal line of fiction that leads from these heroic romances to the current sentimental novel that Lennox is writing, from writers such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Jane Barker, to Lennox, Frances Burney and Jane Austen (Borham-Puyal, “Madres ausentes”). As a woman writer, Lennox’s own position in this fraught balance between past and present forms is liminal: she seemingly acknowledges the current supremacy of the (male) novel, yet she proves its symbiotic relationship with the (female) romance (Borham-Puyal, “Madres ausentes”). In addition, she grants her sympathetic quixote an extended period of freedom in courtship, while still exposing her to social and physical dangers: Arabella mistakes a prostitute with a damsel in disguise, she herself is read as sexually available and almost kidnapped, and, in the end, nearly dies of a fever brought by her jumping into a river to escape imaginary ravishers. This balance between propriety and freedom leads to the ultimate paradox of the condition of both woman and writer: while openly displaying their authorial skills, competing in the saturated market of fiction, and claiming a place for

themselves as acknowledged professionals, fiction written by women recurrently contained an adherence to values ascribed to the female cultural construction developed throughout the eighteenth century, which emphasized female traits such as self-effacement, invisibility, domesticity, or subordination to patriarchy, embodied in their highly virtuous heroines or their re-educated quixotes. In that sense, as Ballaster has asserted, … the ‘story’ of the female protagonist is very different to that of her female author. The female protagonist must seek shelter from the risks attendant on public exposure of her body and her attempts to speak her desire and autonomy publicly: countless novels by women entail a vain or egotistical heroine’s learning, often at an extreme emotional or physical cost, the limits of her freedom, in order to prepare her to marry an older, worldly, judgemental, and authoritarian man. By contrast, her author evades the need for a male protector precisely because the novel allows her to enter a form of authoritative discourse without the “risk” of physical display of her own proper body (the heroine stands as surrogate). (“Women” 198)3 That is, novels by female authors would preach a final invisibility their very same existence was denying; creating a “cover story” that would question the seemingly compliant lesson in subordination (Gilbert and Gubar 154), and allowing an ambiguous subtext to emerge in which many women authors challenged some of the conventions that constrained them and their female readers. Because Lennox’s novel would also expose the limitations that narrative offered women writers who wanted to be successful, and so needed the support of public opinion, and how this also reduced the plots they could offer their fictional surrogates. In particular, heroic romance, with its insistence on female virtue, is presented as more morally appropriate than other narratives to guide young female readers, for in its parasitic presence in the sentimental novel of the mid-eighteenth century, it provides the same conclusion: a period of controlled visibility to end in marriage and invisibility (Borham-Puyal, “Madres ausentes”). In the temporal continuum that the liminal quixote highlights, the narrative for women has not changed; however, in the frame of plausible sentimental fiction, and the verisimilar values it is said to represent, quixotism at least has granted Arabella a story to tell before becoming unnarratable as a proper heroine of fiction, or merely as an eighteenth century lady. More than these romancers, ideological quixotes posed a threat to the silenced and invisible female ideal and a challenge to the reading of sanctioned supersystems. In the same manner they should not fall prey to a libertine or a revolutionary, women should not succumb to the allurements of narrative fiction that proved dangerous from a moral or political point of view. In this sense, quixotic narratives are also the vehicles to satirize ideological stances, in particular as the radical/antiradical debate escalated at the turn of the century (Grenby). By following radical tenets learned from fiction and nonfiction alike in their period of carnivalesque subversion, female ideological quixotes experiment with the freedom that a true revolution would bring to women: the possibility of a full rejection of domesticity and the claim of equality in marriage and society. However, most female quixotes will be, once more, used as warnings for readers, for authors will highlight the impossibility to fulfill their

philosophical or political aspirations, as well as the immorality most of them entail for a conservative frame of mind. Especially conspicuous in this context is Dorothea, the quixote and eponymous heroine of Mrs. Bullock’s Dorothea; or, A Ray of the New Light (1801), who demands absolute equality in marriage and even abandons her husband to fulfill her revolutionary ideals. In another conservative narrative, Eaton S. Barrett’s The Heroine, or The Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader (1813), Cherry Wilkinson renames herself Cherubina de Willoughby and expects not only to delay or cancel her arranged marriage, but to become a political leader of an Irish army, creating all forms of disruption. Maybe the most interesting case is the philosophical quixote portrayed by Mary Hays in Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). Emma has read and studied extensively and wishes to be free from the “magic circle” of prejudice that constrains women of her age and educates them in sensibility, but not to gain a position in the public sphere by having a profession like men do (65–66). She complains about women’s insulation and marginality (116), and claims against their slavery (173). She wishes to break free from prejudices, and pursue her passions, sexual or intellectual, in complete freedom. However, her desires will be thwarted, while both Hays and her heroine will be mocked for their forward nature (Borham-Puyal, “Quixotic pioneers”). As can be perceived in these examples, their literary, ideological, and sentimental choices once more run parallel to and affect the traditional feminocentric plot of courtship and marriage; consequently, they also threaten to undermine the core of national identity: the family. In Mrs. Bullock’s narrative, Dorothea almost destroys her reputation and her marriage, and, more shockingly, sacrifices her own baby to “mistaken principles” (151). Hamilton’s quixotes become barren members of society, uniting their subversion to the lack of (re)production that was associated to prostitutes: Bridgetina, a parody of Mary Hays, remains unmarried, and Julia dies in ignominy. The sufferings or tragic endings of the abovementioned quixotic heroines prove that their delusion is no longer merely a benevolent parodic instrument as in Lennox’s novel; their quixotism is dangerous and, therefore, it must be not only eradicated, but somehow punished. Quixotic readers provide a strong moral lesson for implied ones: to become liberal women undermines the stability of the nation and has terrible consequences—a warning that has lived well into the twentieth century, for instance, in horror films that killed the promiscuous female characters and preserved the life of the virgins. However, in the context of more moderate reform, these authors also offer an in-between alternative for reformed quixotes: philanthropy, a liminal space, a countersphere between the public and the private. Dorothea closes her radical school and returns to her husband, but she then becomes a beacon in her community. In fact, once she is restored to her “proper place,” Dorothea engages in active philanthropy and even her husband seconds “her plans of benevolence” with the less fortunate (196). The radical knight-errantry of her liminal phase has then found a more appropriate channel to be expressed, also fulfilling her role in society as a lady once she has been reincorporated. Another important example in this sense is an American quixote, Tabitha Tenney’s eponymous heroine in Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801), a parody of British sentimental novels written by men (Borham-Puyal, “Seduction”). These readings have provided Dorcas Sheldon

with romanticized notions that hinder her happy integration in society. In the end, she remains an elderly spinster, but one who has been granted an alternative ending to the true sentimental heroine of the novel, the perfect daughter, wife, and mother Harriot. Dorcas is no longer a romantic idealist, but a philanthropic one. While her quixotism had provided an otherwise invisible domestic woman with visibility and action, even if related with romantic emplotment—a fact reinforced by the skips in the narrative from suitor to suitor and Dorcasina’s domestic disappearance in the meantime—Dorcas’s final philanthropy offers a more appropriate context and activity for female agency. After her senses are restored, the narrator states that she turned “all that enthusiasm, which love formerly inspired, to acts of benevolence and charity” (323),4 a change reinforced by her return to her original name, Dorcas, a woman in the New Testament known for her good deeds toward those less fortunate and, in particular, poor widows (Acts 9. 36, 39). This choice of name has deeper meanings: Dorcas is the Greek version of Tabitha, the author’s own name (Gámez 108). Dorcas and Tabitha share their philanthropic views and actions in one aspect in particular: female education and their contribution to it through their warning expressed in the quixotic narrative. This points at another important liminal characteristic of the female quixotes: their double nature as butt and instruments for the authors’ satire. Satire does not fall exclusively on the quixote and her aspirations, but she is used to highlight the shortcomings of society. As a consequence, women writers of quixotic fictions develop the plot of a character whose values are incongruous, but not always despicable. That is, the young female quixote can be praiseworthy not only in spite of her misconceptions, but also precisely because her delusion and liminal experimentation has prevented her from becoming like everybody else. The abovementioned axiological superiority of the quixotes, added to their circumscribed situation as women, enables the authors to criticize the system of education provided by parents or the shallow accomplishment expected from ladies by the whole of society. From Lennox to Austen, blame for quixotic reading is usually placed elsewhere, on ineffectual parents and governesses, or on a society that does not encourage critical thinking in its women. In Maria Edgeworth’s works, for instance, this criticism at the poor systems of female education can become the core of the quixotic novel, as is the case with Virginia, her quixote in Belinda (1801), who was educated following Rousseau’s principles for the training of women epitomized in the character of Sophie in Emile, or, On Education (1763). From an educational point of view, quixotism is particularly relevant in the young woman’s life: it is her liminal moment of temporal subversion, of circumscribed freedom from all of those limitations, in her road to integration and acceptance. This moment of madness, once overcome, marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood, from courtship to marriage, from visibility to invisibility. It is the liminal space between the public and the private, between being narratable and unnarratable, between the heroine of a novel and a domestic woman. It is not coincidental that this moment of frenzy coincides with the crucial feminocentric experience: the moment of courtship. At this time women gained not only visibility in fiction, but also allegedly more control over their lives. Quixotic fictions exploit this fact by introducing women who desire to prolong their autonomy or control by their enactment of literary tenets, or by putting into practice idealistic principles, in order to claim

prerogatives as heroines of romance or as radical philosophers. In some extreme examples, they claim power and freedom within marriage, like Dorothea, or, like Emma Courtney, they flout all convention, even matrimony itself. In addition, the quixotes’ aspirations can relate not only to marriage, but to other areas of life. Women aspire to heroic fame, like Arabella; to an education that equals that of men, and even to a profession, like Emma Courtney; or to political power, like Cherry. This desire can entail advantages and dangers for the young heroine: the happy or tragic conclusion, the integration or rejection, will depend on how the quixote resolves the conflict between her individual aspirations for love, independence, education, fame, or a profession, and the constraints of society. The eighteenth century stories of women’s development are then peopled by quixotes that inhabit “two major nodes of conflict, two areas of dense ambivalence about how to plot a girl’s life” (Fraiman 16); “one area concerns what we could loosely call affiliation: the desire for dyalic, familial, and also wider communal ties” and it usually relies on “the trajectory of courtship, marriage, and motherhood” (16), while “the other area has to do with ambition, especially the ambition to study, to gain intellectual authority, and perhaps to write” (16). The focus on these feminocentric experiences, on the period of courtship, on the entrance into society, and on the transition toward adulthood, allows a gentle evolution to the early nineteenth century novel of female development in which quixotism is, at last, fully displaced. As the new century advances, the tale of female development or female bildungsroman will progressively abandon literary mania or ideological enthusiasm to signal its heroine’s struggle to preserve her unique vision against a pressing uniformity. Instead, it will universalize this feminocentric experience of trying to find an acceptable place in society in the negotiation between her self-perception and that of others, her agency and her objectification under the patriarchal gaze, in order to become reintegrated within society (Ellis 23, 27). This narrative still constructs the paradoxic space in which a limited female autonomy is granted while criticizing “societal expectations that constrict women” (Ellis 29). The heroine is now only deluded by her own expectations and her own dreams of independence, happiness, or love. With this change, narrative fiction at the turn of the century anticipates the Victorian novels that feature a young girl trying to find a profession, a husband, or both, in the midst of the increasingly antiromantic reality of industrialized Britain. Thus, eighteenth century quixotic fictions precede the Woman Question and the novels by George Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell. Defined by scholars as a transitional figure, Jane Austen certainly serves as the best brooch to close the analysis of eighteenth century female quixotes and to become a bridge toward Victorian tales of reading heroines or women in their path to self-discovery. Her novels masterly conclude the progressive displacement of quixotism away from literature and the universalization of the mistaken notions of the young heroine, noticeable throughout the century. This is perceived in her transition from the focus on literary delusion in Catherine Morland or Marianne Dashwood, to Emma’s self-delusion based on the idea of her worth and her ability to critically read people—a different form of reading, but which still requires discernment. Northanger Abbey (1818) epitomizes that transition perfectly, for it portrays two heroines: the literary quixote at Northanger Abbey who expects life to behave like literature, and the bildungsroman heroine who must come to read people and herself critically

(Borham-Puyal, Quijotes 122–23). Both conflate in her mistaken reading of General Tilney, first as a Gothic villain and then as a generous man with no ulterior motive for his kindness toward her (Quijotes 125). The Gothic plot will be soon overcome, and social anxiety will become predominant. Catherine will come to learn that her value responds to her worth in the marriage market, while Austen’s readers will be educated in not expecting romantic outcomes in fiction and life alike (Quijotes 127–31). Austen’s idealists and ingénues will then learn to navigate sexual politics, and prove clearly superior to their environment: they symbolize a better society in which women’s reputation or wealth are not the only assets they possess. These traits, as well as the good nature and innocence of the quixotes, will be resumed by Eliot. Her Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871) have an exalted vision of life, an extreme idealism that makes them behave like true quixotes. Both are clearly superior to the world they inhabit, both defy conventions in their own way, and both will suffer for it, therefore offering a portrayal of the nineteenth century heroine that will last well into the following century. It is impossible not to see the transition: the nineteenth century image of the “angel in the house” inherits the model of propriety of the previous century, and also demands a cure for female transgressors (Arias et al. 175). These previous liminal characters anticipated the New Woman and her aspirations, which were also described as quixotic chimeras, and also her negative counterpart, the recurrent “madwoman in the attic” (Gilbert and Gubar), who was displaced to the fringe of society, silenced, imprisoned, or restored to her invisibility as a proper woman. These innocent and idealistic women, the women who stand at a crossroads and are axiologically superior to their environment, like Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905), or the women who want to escape their own “magic circle” and break the gender boundaries, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s mad woman in The Yellow Wall-Paper (1892), continue to be described as deranged, they are still ostracized, and even die unfairly. The idealistic young woman who wishes for change once more becomes a tragic heroine and the means through which to criticize the crude society she inhabits. The influence of the female quixotic tradition is evident as well as the later twentieth century narratives of emotional and professional female development: from the rom-coms that actualize the courtship plot in which the female character must shed her unrealistic expectations, implicitly based on romantic narratives learned from books or films, and awake to her true feelings for a better man (e.g., Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sabrina, While You Were Sleeping), to the stories of working girls having to face many obstacles in order to achieve a happy integration in society, as respected professionals and yet also as happy partners in a heterosexual relationship (e.g., the 1988 film Working Girl). The romantic narratives are still followed or parodied to expose what society believes are women’s aspirational purposes, and the transition that is expected from youthful fantasies to adult conformity. Nevertheless, popular media also portrays an idealistic woman who fights individually and against all odds for change, in a more displaced form of quixotism, closer to the definition that opened this chapter: proposing ideas that are admirable, but clash with what is seen as feasible, proper, or even safe in their context (e.g., the aid worker Tessa in John le Carré’s 2001 The Constant Gardener).

Coloring Reality with Romance: from Bridget Jones’s Diary to Crazy ExGirlfriend Contemporary female quixotes most often fall within the aforementioned category of romancers, women who develop expectations based on principles acquired from literature, cinema, or even commercials aimed at creating aspirational models of femininity. These characters construct a narrative of unrealistic love, which is meant to define them according to traditional notions of feminocentric narratives, where fulfillment is achieved by means of a stable relationship with which to conclude. The customary happy ending is, as it was in previous centuries, meant to satisfy the implied readers/viewers, also interspersed romancers who could suspend disbelief and accept the implausibility of these romantic plots so as to “read” themselves in the heroine’s narrative and experience the satisfaction of the expected resolution. Once more, the heroine will stand as surrogate, this time of an audience that escapes an antiromantic reality in fiction, as Austen tellingly mocked in Northanger Abbey. In fact, recent adaptations of Austen’s early novel evince this emphasis on the romantic coloring of reality and the progression toward a happy ending. Although preserving Austen’s commentary on society and appearances, twentieth century adaptations tend to rely more on Catherine’s Gothic reimaginings and sexual attraction to Tilney, probably attempting to reproduce for more knowing audiences the thrill that Gothic romances must have meant for readers in Austen’s times. The 1987 BBC adaptation, for instance, was marketed as “a dramatic production of Jane Austen’s classic gothic romance” (my emphasis), which, of course, Austen’s novel is not. Its summary highlights the chilling mysteries of the Abbey and the threatening nature of the General, while the Gothic iconography and sexual innuendo in the film is anything but subtle. On its part, the 2006 version remains more faithful to Austen’s intentions, with several characters expressing the difficulties of trusting people and appearances, Catherine’s change from childhood to adulthood better developed, and the parallel between literature and life also traced: in Byron’s or Captain Tilney’s equation with a Gothic hero, the General’s cruelty described as a form of vampirism, the importance given to Eleanor’s secret beau, etc. However, the emphasis remains on the delusion brought by reading, as well as Catherine’s sexual awakening by means of her Gothic readings. Throughout the film she daydreams of abductions and dark men, while her perusal of Matthew Lewis’ “shocking” and “horrid” The Monk (1796) is expressed in vivid dreams with Tilney and her implied sexual arousal. This displacement from Radcliffe’s texts, the focus of Austen’s novel, to Lewis’ allows Andrew Davies to write in his signature update of the sexual tension of Austen’s novels, as he already did in Darcy’s famous white shirt scene in the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Thus, audiences can enjoy the ride in the rain and a more romantic declaration of love and proposal of marriage than Austen conceived. Instead of gratitude and duty, Tilney feels ardent love for Catherine, finally sealed in an equally passionate kiss on her side, wedding bells, and even a christening. The happy ending is complete and her romantic coloring has proven accurate. Actually, Catherine’s lesson is only related to not reading the world romantically beyond the sentimental plot. As happened in the novel, Tilney’s encouragement for Catherine to “read” Northanger Abbey romantically is explicitly acknowledged by him stating that she

could write “her own Gothic novel” with Northanger Abbey as an adequate title, thus heightening her romantic coloring only to immediately chastise her for imagining the worst about his tyrannical father. In the novel Catherine often displays better judgment than others and errs when she defers critical authority to authors or men (Borham-Puyal, Quijotes 124– 27), so her awakening relates to the fact that she should have trusted her better understanding, which defies contemporary notions on women’s intellectual need of referral. Yet the adaptation follows the recurrent reading of Catherine as merely a deluded reader, a literary quixote, in need of guidance from her male mentor. Therefore, in the end she burns Radcliffe’s novel and waits love-stricken for the romantic resolution. Austen’s defense of fiction in the novel makes it unlikely that she would have sanctioned the burning of one of her favorite authors, while she mocked sentimental conventions in her ending, highlighting the readers’ own quixotism. Contemporary adaptations do not wish to awaken their viewers: they might reject Radcliffe but they provide new romancing sources by means of Austen’s adaptation itself, proving the connection between eighteenth century romancing and current rom-coms and chick-lit. Women’s aspirations are still limited to romantic love, and the feminocentric liminal experience reduced to courtship and finding an appropriate male partner. This is a connection that another less faithful adaptation of Austen also makes evident: Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel and the subsequent film Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). Once more, Andrew Davies works on an update of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in this comic tale of a 30-year-old spinster in contemporary London, trying to find her place in life by choosing between the rakish Daniel Cleaver and the haughty Mark Darcy. In both the novel and the cinematic version, social acceptance and personal success for women are reduced to the search for “Mr. Right,” focusing on how society builds pressure for women and how they unquestionably accept this narrative imposed on them. Bridget fears dying alone, and relates to other reductionist narratives such as Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne 1987). When she fantasizes it is always about a long-term commitment and weddings, and her behavior is constructed around a prescribed conduct for women: playing hard to get, teasing, working hard on one’s physical appearance. On the other hand, she has no career ambitions. In fact, she is recurrently portrayed as an incompetent worker with no intellectual aspirations, as well as a clumsiness that will define romantic heroines in most contemporary narratives. Problematically, this endears her to the male characters. While at one point there seems to be a change, as a heart-broken Bridget replaces her books on what men want for others focused on women, looking for new narratives by which to live, in the end even her professional advance relies on Darcy and she is willing to run half naked through the snow to find him. When she rejects Daniel it is only because she is looking for something “more extraordinary,” not because she has renounced the feminocentric romantic narrative. Bridget is not cured from her romantic coloring, and the happy conclusion is not designed to awaken the audience either. While the pressures society places on women to marry prove equally limiting and unjust after two centuries, Austen’s strong and intelligent Elizabeth Bennet, a woman that defied many of the conventions of proper femininity, has been reduced to a formula, a rom-com cliché, who rather reinforces the limiting narrative than subverts it. The quixote is liminal in Turner’s more conservative sense: she is no longer subversive, because

her fantasizing is, in fact, condoned by society and her integration depends on fulfilling her romantic fantasies. However, other rewritings of the romantic quixote return to Lennox’s or Austen’s parody of the tenets of romance. Netflix’s Isn’t It Romantic? (2019) uses a similar premise to these authors’ novels: placing all the conventions of romantic films within a more realistic context, so as to parody them while satirizing the societal values they endorse. As a child who dreams with experiencing a love life modeled on Pretty Woman, Natalie is told by her mother that girls like her, overweight and not particularly pretty, do not experience such narratives in reality or even in fiction. She goes on to state that there are no fairy tale endings, and that men might marry her for a visa but never for love. This last comment could be a veiled reference to Muriel’s Wedding (1994), an Australian film directed by P.J. Hogan in which Muriel, also quixotically obsessed with fairytale weddings, must awaken to her own worth and her fake marriage to a swimmer looking for a visa. It will hint at what the resolution of Natalie’s story will be. An adult working in New York, Natalie is underappreciated sentimentally and professionally and rejects the truth of romantic comedies, listing to her romantically obsessed secretary everything that is wrong with them. And yet, after hitting her head, she awakens inside one of those romantic comedies and relives all the elements she had previously mocked, providing also many intertextual references to iconic romantic comedies. In the end, in the often climatic scene in which she must interrupt her friend/real love Josh’s wedding, Natalie’s epiphany resembles Muriel’s: she must reject all romantic narratives because her self-love is the only worth pursuing to have a better life. After this realization she awakens from her coma and becomes an assertive woman, who advances in her job and finally acknowledges her feelings for her friend. Natalie is a negative romantic quixote: she reads life as an impossible or failed romance, seeing herself as a “failed” heroine against the aspirational model developed in romantic narratives. She insists women in these comedies are only made complete by achieving their romantic ending, without regard to their hard-earned career, yet she has failed on both of the epitomes of the bildungsroman. On her part, her secretary Whitney is a romantic quixote because she reads these artifacts as a reflection of the best part of life, and is so obsessed she cannot perform well at her job. Yet Natalie becomes a different kind of liminal character: suspended in her coma-induced romance she still highlights the problematic treatment of beauty, love, clichéd gay characters, or female rivals, and, nevertheless, she learns and grows by applying a principle found in many of these films, that romantic happiness can only be achieved once self-discovery has taken place. For the typical happy ending is still in store for Natalie, and the viewers. Therefore, she is both a heroine and antiheroine, much like Austen’s Catherine. The film’s subversion of romantic clichés is then problematic, as it attempts to be a satire of the same genre to which it is contributing, funding much of its comedy on Rebel Wilson’s physique and pairing her with the “proper” suitor in the end. In the film’s conclusion, Natalie insists that Josh does not complete her: she completes herself, while Whitney now draws Natalie’s life as the aspirational ending for viewers: with a great job, the guy and the female friend, Natalie does live in a romantic comedy after all. In addition, the affirmative lessons on self-worth are also an important part of many current romantic comedies in which a head trauma is involved, symbolizing the change in

perception and principles that must guide the female character in the process of development, once more transitioning from mere romance to a female bildungsroman, including work and personal life.5 While they do not reduce women merely to sentimental readings, it is still an important part of their development, as it was in previous centuries. Hogan’s Muriel was much more subversive: she concluded the film without a male partner, standing on her own two feet and even supporting her friend Rhonda, still liminal but now by choice and not by her rejection as a single delusional woman. In contradistinction, Natalie’s new self-worth expressed itself in the success of the sentimental plot. Maybe a more cynical approach to romantic principles is the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–19). The show follows Rebecca Bunch, a Yale and Harvard-educated lawyer pressured by her mother to be as successful in her profession as possible. Highly medicated and stressed, she encounters her former summer-camp romance, Josh, and decides to quit her job and pursue him to his small California town, in what she sees as her road to happiness. Her obsession with love and Josh, as well as her failed relationships with other men, involve many jocular situations, including her initial romantic coloring of the small town itself. Her quixotic imagination also focuses on musical theater. It manifests itself in musical numbers that she plays in her head at crucial moments in her story, which relate to other films, musicals, and popular video clips, parodying them and highlighting many of the clichés that she expects to fulfil. For instance, in “The Sexy Getting-Ready Song” she explores preparing for a date and the double beauty standard, while the physical duress it causes her mocks expectations and women’s objectification in musical videos alike. Among these songs “Rebecca Reprise” stands out. In it she displays how far the traditional romantic narrative has been interiorized, as she hopes that marrying Josh she will make her father and mother proud, solve her problems, and finally become the hero of her own story, or “the princess in the tale.” The fairy tale narrative is then explicitly connected with the patriarchy, pleasing the father and seeing marriage as the conclusion of the narrative of development, and yet it is not the end of Rebecca’s story, as the love and acceptance she longs for proves flawed and unsatisfactory. Moreover, musical numbers also serve to trace the differences between fiction and reality by the incongruity of form and matter: Broadway-like numbers that pay homage to Astaire and Rogers now revolve around settling with second-best options (“Settle for me”), parodies of Disney display how reality contradicts fairy tale dreams that can never be achieved (“Maybe this dream”), or an upbeat song claims that without love you can focus on more important matters (“Without love you can save the world”). Finally, they also point at the audience’s acceptance of the implausible conventions of romantic or musical genres, in which characters break into song and dance, and the spectators’ own knowledge of the intertextual references. In the end, Rebecca’s self-centeredness, manipulation, and obsessions have consequences. She not only spends some time in jail, but also gets a proper diagnosis, finally dealing seriously with her mental health issues. She ultimately acknowledges that she is not going to find happiness in love, because she must piece her fragmented selves together, going beyond the usual “feel good” message of the abovementioned films. Instead of deciding among her three possible lovers, she allows her best friend Paula inside her Broadway-themed interior

world, following her advice and working on her music. The show concludes with Rebecca, for once, singing out of her imagined world and in the real one, with the cured quixote capable of actually making a difference, moving from self-centeredness to idealism like Tenney’s Dorcas. Rebecca, nevertheless, is a different quixote for she was doubly liminal, bearing a twofold stigma: her failed romantic aspirations, but, more importantly, her hallucinations and mental condition, which lead to her social awkwardness, her outsider status. Romantic obsession is then one more product of a deluded mind, this time literally, and one of the many elements at which Rebecca hopes to excel but does not. In the final episode she claims romantic love is never the end, for only after being on her own and developing her true passion can she be ready for a relationship that will only be a part of who she is. Until she sheds all societal expectations on professional and personal success, honestly addresses the taboo of mental health, and works through her self-deprecation, she cannot become a successful member of society.

Escaping a Harrowing (Patriarchal) Reality: Pan’s Labyrinth and Sucker Punch If Rebecca built a parallel world in her mind, so did two other quixotes in more harrowing circumstances: Ofelia in Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece Pan Labyrinth (2006) and Babydoll in Zack Snyder’s controversial Sucker Punch (2011). Both quixotes build a fantasy world that parallels real events marked by fear and violence, especially against women, and which attempts to provide an escape from the narratives that are written for them. Del Toro’s film is set in the aftermath of the Spanish civil war, the fascist repression of the republican faction and the survival of small rebel guerrillas in the mountains, who echo the subversion of a young quixote. The quixotic figure is Ofelia, a girl whose mother has remarried the sadistic captain Vidal and is expecting his child. Missing her dead father and trapped in a repressive atmosphere, she is a devoted reader of fairy tales. As they move in with Vidal, she encounters what she perceives as a fairy who guides her to a Labyrinth in which a mythical creature lives. This Pan claims that Ofelia is the long-lost princess Moana, who must pass three tests to leave the world of men and return to her kingdom, where her father rules and is expecting her. As Ofelia accomplishes the increasingly dangerous feats, violence escalates around her with terrible consequences. As the picture opens with a shot of an agonizing Ofelia, the narrator’s voice-over tells the story of the underworld princess who, seduced by the sun, escaped her world only to experience pain and die. From there it moves to the wreckage of war; in fact actual ruins of Belchite, a village in Aragon destroyed during the conflict. The parallel between reality and fantasy becomes apparent throughout the whole narrative, as each of Ofelia’s tests has its real-life counterpart: the old tree that is being killed by a huge toad represents what fascism is doing to Spain, for instance. At one point, her mother Carmen accuses her of not understanding the cruelty of the world by expecting a fantasy, yet Del Toro’s crafted fairy tale, supported by uncanny imagery, reinforces the role of literature as means to explain and make sense of an often incomprehensible world—a lesson also found in Austen. The traditional fairy tales are full of violence and death, sacrifice and heroism, and Ofelia,

quixotically reading herself as a princess, also gives expression to her wish to escape her reality, to protect her mother, to fight back against the villain. Ofelia then stands at the crossroads between reality and fantasy, but also between submission and subversion. She is a victim of Vidal’s violence, and yet she feels empowered by her imagination and her constructed identity. In this context, Ofelia proves a stubborn quixote. Carmen despairs of ever correcting her, while her daughter smiles with satisfaction at having displeased the Captain for not knowing how to behave properly. In fact, the more she understands the world around her, the more she takes refuge in her fantasy world. As the rebels dismiss the idea of surrender, so does Ofelia hold on to her rewritings in the face of her mother’s impending death in childbirth or Vidal’s violence. Her imagination is perceived by both of them as disruptive, the former because she has lost hope and the latter because disobedience, subversion, threatens his way of living. Vidal accuses Carmen of fueling Ofelia’s imagination with all the “shit” she allows her to read, identifying her clearly as a literary quixote, and Carmen once more tries to warn her daughter out of her illusions. Carmen desperately entreats Ofelia to change, to outgrow her fairy tales and to understand that the world is a cruel place, where there is no magic, especially, as she hinted earlier, not for women alone and with children to support. Nevertheless, their ending is similar. Carmen dies because of Vidal’s wish to control the birth of his son and his untimely murder of the doctor. Ofelia’s refusal to overcome her quixotism concludes with her death at the hands of Vidal. And yet there is hope as Ofelia’s last thoughts transport her to her imaginary world, where she meets her father and mother again. The narrator explains that the princess was loved and ruled wisely for many years, while she left “traces” in the world for those that knew where to look for them. As on the dead tree a flower blossoms, Ofelia’s story and example stands a beacon of hope, evidence of the lasting power of narrative and subversion. As a creator, a writer of her own story, Ofelia reclaims the narrative from the victors after the war; she becomes a rebellious voice that echoes the story of the oppressed. Moreover, in her rewriting of history by means of what had been considered mainly a “feminine” genre for centuries, she also challenges the narrative of a patriarchal society that reversed all the advancements of the Second Republic. Her fixation with the moon, traditionally associated with the female, and the princess’ death by becoming exposed to the sun, a male symbol, also genders her story and the official one. Both the fascist and the patriarchal narratives are embodied by Vidal, proving that they are in fact one and the same. And whereas Vidal dies and his name will be erased from memory even in his own son, Ofelia’s impact remains on other characters, especially on the other important female character, Mercedes. Mercedes claims to have believed in fairy tales and many other things, but to have lost her faith. Nevertheless, unlike Carmen, she cannot give up and continues risking her life to help the antifascist guerrilla. She is the only character that understands and encourages Ofelia’s fantasies, which mirror her own hope. Mercedes is then an ideological quixote that risks everything and who survives precisely because of her otherness, because she is a woman: as she revealingly tells Vidal, she has managed to spy in his house for so long since for him women are invisible. The same could be said of Ofelia, who observes and knows more than Vidal thinks. In the end, Mercedes not only survives but contributes to bringing down Vidal.

She is the one who finds and cries over Ofelia’s body, and who will be left to retell her story. Distinct from conservative quixotic tales and closer to Cervantes’ exaltation of his idealist, Del Toro’s fantastical narrative does not condemn but praise liminal female characters, quixotes that dare to dream alternative stories and challenge oppression. Similar to Del Toro’s fantasy, other narratives offer a female quixote that creates an alternative fantastical world. Katherine Paterson’s novel Bridge to Terabithia (1977), later adapted to screen in 2007 by Disney, is a relevant example. Leslie, ostracized as the new and weird girl, strikes a friendship with shy Jess. Inspired by her, they create their own world in the nearby forests, Terabithia, peopled by fantastical creatures and full of adventure and wonder, where they can escape their homes and the school bullies. Jess is transformed by Leslie’s quixotism and outlook on life, and they even befriend one of their bullies when Leslie discovers she has a dysfunctional family herself. After Leslie’s death in an accident while playing in Terabithia alone, Jess deals with emotions of regret and pain. However, he finally pays tribute to his quixotic friend by keeping Terabithia alive and crowning his sister as new queen of the imaginary land. The transformative power of quixotism, and female narrative, is once more acknowledged, while Leslie becomes a different liminal character, as she dies, but her legacy remains alive. More problematic proves Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, which has divided critics in their opinion of the picture as a fantasy of female empowerment (and its impossibility in a world of male violence), or as a misogynistic glorification of violence against women. It tells the story of a young heiress who is sent to a mental asylum by her abusive step-father to prevent her from testifying against him. There he bribes a vicious orderly who runs the asylum, Blue Jones, to have her lobotomized, which he recurrently does to female patients by forging the signature of the psychiatrist, Dr. Vera Gorski. The doctor has a particular method to treat patients: she has them enact their traumas on stage in front of an audience, claiming that they can fantasize and control their imaginary world, which for them becomes just “as real.” The patient, nicknamed Babydoll, then creates an alternative fantasy world: in it they are sex slaves in a brothel, which she plans to escape with other patients/dancers. Her quixotism then “reads” her reality under a different coloring. When she is asked to perform erotic dances, Babydoll escapes to a second level of her imaginary world, this time building a parallel universe completely. In it she envisions different scenarios that mirror their real situation: the first time she goes to feudal Japan where a Wise Man tells her to collect several objects and forewarns the need of a final sacrifice in order to escape. Then, each scenario takes her and her fellow patients to different battle situations while the real-life counterparts collect the actual objects and literally die at the hands of the abusive male personnel of the institution. In the end, she will sacrifice herself to save Sweet Pea, another inmate. Finally lobotomized and almost killed by Blue, Babydoll concludes the story lost in her own crippled mind, in what is termed “paradise,” a mental escape from the asylum and her guilt over the death of her little sister. Differently to Del Toro’s, Snyder’s is then a fairy tale story in which female empowerment is only achieved in the realm of the imagination, while in reality the quixote and her companions are constantly subjected to sexual violence. From her step-father at home to Blue at the institution, Babydoll encounters one rape threat after the other and while her fantastical

scenarios enable their agency, in the end the establishment is not defeated. The fact that in her imaginary world the four women are sex slaves and their identities have been lost to those given at the brothel (using the rather derogative names Amber, Blondie, Rocket, Sweet Pea, and Babydoll), undermines the subversive nature of quixotic fantasizing or at least points at the fact that Babydoll’s imagination is thwarted by what her experience in a world of men has been so far. She can only enact fantasies for which there is a known narrative, one of sexual violence against women in any scenario. All male representatives (father, priest, pimp, doctor, major) are participants in the sexual exploitation and entrapment of these women. Actually, the viewer does not even fully perceive the “reality” of the asylum as much as the illusion of the sex club, but the correlations between the brothel fantasies and the circumstances of the female inmates are stressed at the beginning and the end, when the narrative returns to reality: the girls work hard and are sexually harassed by male members of staff. In this sense, the film is unclear to say the least. It starts with Sweet Pea’s voice-over explaining that Babydoll was an angel sent to save her by instilling in her the rebellious will to fight, and concludes addressing viewers, stating that the power to be free is within, referring to the subversive significance of Babydoll’s revolt. In fact, as an invisibilized woman, the latter’s small and fragile appearance is deceiving as she fights against the men that threaten her. Nevertheless, the absolute control over the institutionalized women (limiting the power of madness as subversion) and, especially, the oversexualizing of the fantasizing arch and the female characters restrict the quixote’s power of change. While Babydoll fights back, saving Rocket from rape, stabbing Blue while he was attempting to do the same to her, or starting a fire to escape, she uses her sexual allure to attract the male gaze and use it to her advantage. The fact that even in her own fantasies they are still sexualized complicates Snyder’s apparent criticism to the objectification of women for men’s pleasure. When performing on stage, Sweet Pea talks about the limits of male fantasies, but Snyder’s film caters to a male audience breaking those very limits, offering sexual violence, female immobility, and silence, as well as exotic dances—including an unnecessary final show during the credits. Therefore, despite claims to the contrary, the illusions of Snyder’s quixote are not based on true feminist empowerment, but rather on post-feminist liberal notions based on looks and a false sense of revenge at the patriarchy, which never actually occurs. Babydoll is then ambiguous in her subversion: quixotism ignites insurrection and even the questioning of the institution when Blue is arrested, but she is still trapped in traditional patriarchal narratives. Women still die at the hands of men, and they are erased and silenced by the male hand of the law or the lobotomist. Even as she escapes, Sweet Pea needs the help of the wise man, now turned bus driver. Snyder’s fantasy is then closer to contemporary portrayals of action heroines in films and videogames that still cater to the male gaze while disguising under a feminist message (Borham-Puyal, “New Adventures” 1328), and echoes the limitations that women also experienced in prior conservative quixotic plots, as they concluded the narrative once more circumscribed by patriarchal structures, invisible and immobile, proving a continuum in the feminist agenda to address these narrative entrapments.

Idealistic Individuals in a Fallen World: Amélie and The Bookshop In the final category of the female quixote one finds idealists who are morally or axiologically superior to their environment, echoing Cervantes’ knight and also his Romantic and Victorian daughters. These women’s quixotic nature impulses them to bring change to their community and to improve the lives of those around them. However, they also face frustration, incomprehension, and even cruelty in a world that proves less deserving than the quixote. In this sense, contemporary idealistic women resemble Eliot’s heroines and place the focus of criticism on society, rather than on the quixote. A clear example is found in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s very popular Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001). Also framed with a voice-over and a fairy tale atmosphere, the film retells the peculiarities of Amélie’s childhood, in particular, the emotional detachment she experienced from her father and her neurasthenic mother. Isolated from other children, Amélie builds a fantasy world of her own. As an adult, her isolation and imagination become recurrent traits of her character, highlighting her liminal nature, both in and out of society. When she discovers a hidden box with children’s treasures in her apartment, she makes a resolution: she will devote her life to helping others. While executing several plans to improve her father’s, her neighbors’, and her co-workers’ lives, she falls in love with Nino, another outcast character who also has an active imagination. Through elaborate stratagems she delays meeting him, until she is confronted with the ultimate epiphany of a romantic comedy: she is alone because she is afraid to get hurt and must take chances, and she must help herself instead of others. This leads to the happy romantic conclusion, and Amélie’s greater integration in the real world. Quixotism in this film is treated as a hobby-horse, an obsession or a form of idealism. Jeunet’s world is populated with minor quixotes, obsessed with their own hobby-horses and their particular worldview: working in the garden, painting the same picture every year, collecting discarded pictures at photo booths, obsessing over Lady Di, hypochondria, jealousy, pessimism, cruelty, fear, etc. The recurrent figure of a blind man serves as a symbol of these varied forms of epistemological distortions. Amélie excels as a more obvious, but also more generous, quixote. At one point, she imagines her own funeral being aired on television: the broadcaster explicitly compares her to Don Quixote and claims she died of exhaustion after attempting to fight against the “windmills” of all human miseries. At other, she asserts that it is better to devote herself to others than to a garden dwarf, as her father obsessively does. Despite the positive reading of the quixotic character and the good she achieves, Jeunet seems to emphasize the need to overcome one’s hobby-horses, even one’s isolating idealism, and connect significantly with others. Isabel Coixet’s La librería (2017), an adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978), also provides a positive reading of quixotic idealism but creates a bleaker contrast with the surrounding characters and circumstances. A widow, Florence Green, moves to a little town on the English coast to fulfill the dream she shared with her late husband: to open a bookshop. Her love for literature will become contagious, affecting Christine, a young girl who works for her at the shop, and will bring her closer to another outcast on the fringe of society, Edmund Brundish, who lives as a recluse in his mansion among piles of books.

However, while she endeavors to extend that passion for books to a village with none or little literary interest, she will face the opposition of the most powerful woman in town, Violet Gamart, whose contacts and stratagems ensure that Florence must relinquish her dreams and her bookshop. Florence is clearly superior to her environment: she is good and naïve, to the point that even young Christine must warn her not to trust people in the village. She is also quixotically idealist in her love for literature and her idea that books are good companions, a thought that shapes Brundish’s worldview as well. Although they both remain on societal margins, never fully integrated in the village community, they both start a friendship and Florence’s courage inspires him to wish a better life were possible, to become involved and challenge the tyrannical Violet. They become quixotic partners against the windmills of tradition, aristocratic power, and fear of what is different, which drive Violet in her impulse to expel Florence, to break down her idealistic dream. In addition, the people in the village do not question her power and witness or even actively participate in forcing Florence out of her home and shop. The villagers embody Burke’s maxim that evil triumphs when good men and women do nothing, and both Fitzgerald and Coixet emphasize the courage and subversion that Florence embodies, in contrast with their conformism and acceptance of the status quo. Very connected to the idea of quixotism, a passion for reading also marks the difference between active and passive characters, those that have a wider view of the world and greater aspirations (Florence and Brundish), and those whose narrow perception marks their cruelty or lack of ambition for change (Violet and the villagers). In the end, the quixote seems to be defeated: apparently idealism will never conquer a world that does not wish to change. The quixotic idealist is expelled from society, her integration is not possible, and she lingers on the threshold. And yet, Florence’s subversive courage has unexpected consequences: Christine fights back against tyranny, setting fire to the shop so Violet cannot own it, and opening a bookshop of her own as an adult. Florence’s love for literature and life is contagious, transforming Brundish and Christine, remaining even when she is gone. Therefore, this story of individual fight for a worthy dream even against all odds concludes in a bitter-sweet message of hope for liminal quixotism and its impact on society. In 2012 a play appeared on the Spanish stage titled Yo soy Don Quijote de la Mancha (J.R. Fernández 2014). The old knight is about to retire, and who reclaims his legacy in the end is not Sancho, but his daughter Sanchica. Women inherit his idealism and drive to change the world. Displaced female quixotes in contemporary culture, even if mockingly, expose the romantic narratives that are still expected to be performed by women. They also speak of the power of imagination and reclaiming the power of narrative to oppose different forms of oppression: fascism, violence against women, sexual objectification. And they continue to vindicate the power of literature in women’s hands to change the world, or at least to try. Looking back then at the long tradition of female quixotes, one agrees with Elizabeth Barrett Browning when she wrote that “women are knights-errant to the last” and what remained to make Cervantes greater still would have been to make “his Don a Donna” (Aurora Leigh 1856).

Notes 1 A prior version of this general discussion on quixotism appeared as part of my unpublished thesis Quixotic Readers and Quixotic Writers: Cervantes’ Daughters in British Narrative Fiction from Lennox to Austen (University of Salamanca 2013). 2 I am employing here Susan R. Suleiman’s (76) and Lisa Wood’s (66) use of the term. The notion of “supersystem” is borrowed from the fields of engineering or medicine and synonymous of an ‘organic whole.’ Therefore, I employ it as the set of ideas that supports a particular political, religious, or moral stance, as well as a set of literary principles that characterize certain genres (e.g., the conservative conception of women in romance). 3 Another character closely resembling the female quixote in her subversion and later recantation, as well as in her endangered virtue, is the recurrent coquette. Ballaster also refers to the narratives of reformed coquettes as an example of this narrative surrogacy. She states that in these fictions “it is the female scriptor, in the shape of a narrator explicitly identified as female, who manages to negotiate a space for female autonomy even while she tells the story of her heroine’s submission to male authority. The author’s ‘vanity’ about the ‘beauty’ of her own images is licensed where that of her heroine must be curbed” (“Women” 205). 4 Brown reads a political conservative approach behind this transformation and Dorcasina’s attention to those in a worse class position. For her, she now “serves the principle of aristocratic values rather than the notion of social mobility that so many of her previous actions have promoted, however unwittingly;” while her quixotism, which had “initially gave scope to her own and others’ individualistic impulses,” “ultimately comes to serve a conservative reaction to the progress of democratic values, consolidating the wealth of the gentry” (265). This also speaks about class liminality in the mobility granted by quixotism. Scott P. Gordon, on his part, reads this ending, as well as Arabella’s, as harsh condemnations of their characters’ romantic principles and, hence, their quixotic nature. In his opinion, “no matter how sympathetically we might understand the oppressions that lead them to embrace romance as a solution, these texts severely chastise their imaginative distortions of reality and treat their remaking of the world not as a creative response but as an illegitimate one that demands a cure” (141). While agreeing with his interpretation of quixotism as a delusion that demands a cure to allow the quixote’s reintegration in society, nevertheless, his generalization may need some qualifying, for Lennox and Tenney contrive a different degree of condemnation or tolerance towards their character’s quixotism, whether romantic or ideological delusion. In Tenney’s case, she does indeed jocularly ridicule her quixote’s romantic follies throughout her novel and provides the harshest and most anti-romantic ending imaginable. Nevertheless, after Dorcasina’s cure from her romantic quixotism, Tenney contrives a more sanctioned form of illusion and transforms her romantic quixote into a different sort, a philanthropic enthusiast, a condition that still allows her character agency and visibility. 5 Recent examples include I Feel Pretty! (2018) and What Men Want (2019), prompting critics such as Christopher Orr to conclude that there is “an official subgenre of pseudo-feminist movies in which a woman is initially presented as completely unattractive; is concussed into a fantasy in which she becomes impossibly desirable; and from the experience gleans important, affirmative lessons about believing in herself” (The Atlantic, 12 February 2019, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/02/isnt-it-romantic-review-rebel-wilson-romcom-satirereview/582541/).

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5 To Be and Not to Be Female Detectives between Old and New Women

It is impossible to deny the ubiquitous presence of crime fiction and detective procedural in current popular media. Every year films, television shows, novels, and videogames appear revolving around a mystery to be solved, with one or more investigators as protagonists. These cultural artifacts embody the liminal stance of popular narratives or “formula fiction” between the old and the new: they must invoke the conventions of the genre, while finding something original for its audience—be it a new quirkiness or trauma in the investigator, the blending of genres, or the inclusion of hot topics at the time (e.g., Unforgettable, where the lead female detective is traumatized by her sister’s murder and uses her hypermnesia to solve crimes; Forever, featuring an immortal M.I; House M.D. a medical Sherlock Holmes; or the Law and Order franchises, a show that draws heavily on current issues, just to mention some of the numerous recent examples). As a genre that looks back to move forward, that works between the aesthetic and the socially relevant, these popular narratives are particularly apt to be described as “sociological events” (Walton and Jones 13). And in this intersection between popularity, profitability, and ideology one finds the rise of the female sleuth. Nowadays the figure of the woman detective is not uncommon, and has proven extremely popular. Novels, TV shows, or films portray a wide array of female sleuths, from hard-boiled policewomen to endearing elderly amateurs. Yet their status in the genre, and how this mirrors their position in society, has been questioned and debated. On the one hand, early female detectives have been described as “anomalies” or even (female) imitators, “freaks” or “honorary men” (Klein 29; Roberts 4), understood in terms of how they adopt male attributes in order to become detectives or, more generally, adventurers who conform to traditional male-centric tales. In the first case, Sherlock Holmes becomes the yardstick, and early young detectives or elderly spinsters will be measured against him, even if some of them actually precede Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation. In fact, in order to differentiate them, what in Holmes is rational and exceptional thinking, in women will be categorized under more traditionally feminine attributes: curiosity, intuition, imagination (Craig and Cadogan 13; Reddy, Sisters 19; Slung xxi–xxii). Furthermore, they will be given a reason for their activity in accordance to propriety: they are widows, devoted spouses, fiancées, daughters, helping their loved ones. In other words, they will be “domestic but desperate” (Roberts 4). In that way their anomalous nature is emphasized: as happened with quixotic madness, for many of

these women detecting would be a transitional activity that concluded at the altar, once more reestablished in their proper (domestic) sphere. The light comic or even parodic form in which several writers address the creation of these women highlights that they were not taken seriously; they were a popular and entertaining form of literature for female magazines and little else. An example would be Mrs. Julia Herlock Shomes, an obvious pastiche of Doyle’s hero and a mock-female detective. Appearing in The Student: A Journal for University Extension Students in 1894, Mrs. Julia, now a widow, decides to assume the role of private investigator left vacant by her husband, and even recruits a female Watson-like sidekick. Julia imitates Holmes’ method of rambling and smoking, yet, unlike her male counterpart, she is not usually right (Craig and Cadogan 19). One can understand these burlesque pieces as yet another conservative reaction to one more space that had opened for women at the turn of the nineteenth century, for female sleuths, as their real-life New Women counterparts, meant a subversion of the traditional roles assigned to women in the genre. In his etiology of adventure fiction, which includes detective narratives, Martin Green described the role of women as mere “motives for the actions of men” rather than “actors in themselves” (72); they were “usually minor and centrifugal,” and they would “form the disturbance, the distraction, the reward, the decoration, the horizon point, for the heroes of this male enterprise” (Green 58). And if indeed they gained any notoriety it would be, then, to become an “adventuress and not an adventurer, and that is a morally inferior destiny” (Green 73), the term holding pejorative sexual connotations for which she has been “given a less serious story to tell, something closer to scandal or mere pornography” (Green 162). As women became more present in certain forms of adventure fiction, especially as sleuths and not mere femme fatale,1 Green establishes a difference between, for example, a Miss Marple type of detective and the heroines of Sue Grafton’s and Sara Paretsky’s novels, in which the female detectives “inflict violence (using guns and martial arts) and so become adventurers” (202). Of them he states that “they are among the first women adventurers in modern literature, if we take into account that they remain assertively female figures even as they enter the world of violence” (202). Such violence has been established as a trait of the male hero, which, once more, highlights canonical detective fiction as a male realm and the perception of women as “outsiders” in it—especially as female sleuths are often wary of using violence (Reddy, Sisters 113). As proved by Raymond Chandler’s famous description of the hard-boiled hero, the traditional protagonist of detective narratives should be “the hero,” “everything,” he “must be a complete man and a common man, yet an unusual man” (qtd. in Reddy, “Women” 193), not just a generic human being but an exceptional representation of a single sex. His great creation, Philip Marlowe, embodies all these characteristics: tougher, more intelligent, more in control than any of the men around him. In The Big Sleep (1939), the very first page introduces Marlowe as a present-day knight in shining armor, about to rescue women in danger (9). Whereas women will, of course, become attracted to him and indicate his exceptionality, he will assess their attractiveness and depth. “She was worth a stare. She was trouble” (22), he states of Mrs. Reagan before minutely describing her legs, in a powerful illustration of the male gaze. He will also often slap women out of “hysterical” fits (68), and

claim the danger they pose: “You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick” (156). In addition, Marlowe fulfills another of the adventure fiction premises stated by Green (58)—the rejection of “unmanly men”— by his homophobic attitude to the gay characters in the novel (99). Bogart’s portrayal only added a new layer of male iconicity in the remediation of this novel to film. This literary/cinematic hero would become an ideal and narrow image of masculinity that, despite only ever being “embodied by mythical figures, legendary heroes and a very small number of men in society” (Feasey 3), still fueled the popular imagination and informed a standard against which men would be judged (Kimmel 184; MacKinnon 115)—and against whom women sleuths will come to be measured as well, and whose example they will often reject. In hard-boiled fiction written by and centered on women singularity usually gives way to community, “male-identified women” become the villains and not the heroines, and the personal becomes political as women’s lives are threatened (Reddy, Sisters 103, 106). In addition, Reddy distinguishes between the American and the British tradition: while the former is influenced by these classic male-centric narratives, the latter is enrooted in a long female literary tradition, going all the way to the Gothic and sensation fiction (Sisters 100– 01). These literary forms, as the narratives of female detection, all appeared in moments of particular advancement of women’s rights and echoed each other in many of their concerns (Sisters 148–49), among them their fear but also their anger at the discrimination and even dangers that threaten women in and out of the domestic sphere (Ross 30–31, 37). This idea also supports the second interpretation: the rejection of the idea of a limited presence of women in detective fiction, this historical “outsiderness” from the genre. Scholars have indeed traced a much longer and distinct tradition of female detectives, recovering texts and voices that had been forgotten, which proved that female sleuths peopled the pages and the streets of Victorian England and nineteenth century American society (Gavin; Ramón Torrijos; Reddy “Women”; Slung). In this view, the abovementioned traits of the female detectives do not transform them into a marginal trend in detective fiction, but rather into a rich branch that expands the scope of the genre. Characterized by their acute powers of observation and infiltration, women detectives in fiction were recurrently described as circumscribed to the domestic sphere, not analytical but intuitive, habitually limited to working minor cases, and often made to conclude their narratives in marriage—especially if the writer was a man (Gavin 260). And, of course, their stories fell into the category of fiction for ladies, appearing in magazines whose intended audiences were female. The female detective’s stance on the threshold between private and public, domestic and public, has fueled a debate on whether they condone or condemn traditional gender roles, whether they could be considered an advancement of women’s struggles in the age of the New Woman, or a critique to such a figure and what it embodies. It would be difficult to provide a simple answer, for popular fiction, by definition, “is (or can be) both conservative and innovative,” at the same time, for while “the overall movement of the particular genre may work to affirm the ideological norms of its consumers, subtle changes within it also reflect changes in the social climate and provide a means of working through those changes in ‘controlled fashion’” (Walton and Jones 49). In this sense, the first female detectives were no longer sidekicks, but heroines of their own story, and while they responded to the values

of their time, they also subverted them in innumerable ways. Women detectives perform gender expectations in often varied and conflicting ways, as they write their own identity and seek their own place. These sleuths then provide an enlightening approach to professional women in the nineteenth century, often inhabiting the in-between, a liminal position in society: neither public nor private, subversive yet employing the discourse of traditional femininity when it serves their purpose—or when it is demanded by the publishers or readership. In fact, from its origins in the genre the female detective has been considered a destabilizing element, because, as the criminals she chases, “she is a member of society who does not conform to the status quo,” and her “presence pushes off-center the whole male/female, public/private, intellect/emotion, physical strength/weakness dichotomy”; therefore “her facade of normal respectability—like the criminal’s—must be stripped away” (Klein 4–5). Consequently, the ontological parallel criminal/detective that the genre develops is further emphasized by the “outsiderness” of her sex (Miller 50), which can be traced even in the predecessors of the Noir, from the Gothic to sensation fiction. These eighteenth century heroines advance later detectives’ stance as they are forced outside the domestic sphere by circumstances beyond their control—abductions, family matters—and must elucidate dark recesses of their family history, which often involves some form of crime, by means of “proto-detective methods” (Gavin 259) or their observation and intuition, while also exposed to the threat of violence, sexual or otherwise, as well as the scandal of their precarious position. Under this description, it would possible to understand later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century fictions as proto-detective novels or tales, with a woman thrown by chance into the need to solve a mystery. A proto-detective narrative would be E.T.A Hoffmann’s 1819 Das Fräulein von Scuderi. Erzählung aus dem Zeitalter Ludwig des Vierzehnten—for some scholars, in fact, the actual beginning of the detective tradition (McChesney 4), while for others not even a strong predecessor (Sims xviii). In McChesney’s opinion, Hoffmann creates a protagonist who occupies a mediating or liminal position as a “societal outsider” because of her “feminine-encoded qualities” (5). Rather than a passive woman who will act as muse or victim, McChesney describes her as an “active, rational and creative poetic force” (13), who triumphs precisely for employing “female-coded” attributes like “intuition, compassion, and imagination” (4), all qualities that could be found in Gothic heroines, for instance. Interestingly, Hoffmann’s character is based on an actual writer, the French Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701), cited by Lennox’s Arabella, among other female quixotes, as an important source of her confusion between reality and imagination. In the same manner Scudéry imaginatively rewrote actual characters for her historical romances, Hoffmann creates a heroine in-between fact and fiction, which also reflects the stance of the detective as a seeker of truth among lies and deceptions. Scuderi’s connection with romance also serves to establish an interesting female literary heritage for contemporary detective fiction, including the later Gothic romance and romance-permeated Victorian genres. According to Reddy, sensation fiction can be understood as a “Victorian development from gothic fiction” (“Women” 191) and, while it became more conservative, with more female villains and victims than active detecting agents, it still “contributed to the rise of detective fiction generally by centring on secrets, deceit, and murder” (Reddy, “Women”

192). For Pykett, on the contrary, sensation fiction shifts the focus from crime to detection, especially in opposition to the Newgate novel, and becomes “a means of both articulating and managing the universal suspicion on which modern urban society was founded,” especially given important changes such as the creation in 1842 of the Detective Police, the passing of new divorce laws, and the “army of private detectives” or “spies of modern times” that were charged with discovering family secrets (Pykett 34–35). For this scholar, the female amateur detective is born with Wilkie Collins’ Marian Halcombe (The Woman in White 1859) and Magdalen Vanstone (No Name 1862), or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Eleanor Vane (Eleanor’s Victory 1863) and Jenny Milsom (Run to Earth 1868), as examples of women who escape a “petticoat existence” to “right private and social wrongs” (Pykett 35). These fictions, then, reflect the liminal reality of women: trapped between the strict emphasis on female propriety (especially in family matters that could be taken to court), and the rise of the New Woman and the new possibilities that opened for her. In this sense, it is important to highlight the real cases that might have also shaped these fictions. Among them, one stands out: Kate Warne. Although Vidocq’s groundbreaking Parisian Suretè occasionally employed female undercover agents, Kate Warne is considered the first professional female private detective in history, hired and trained by the famous Pinkerton Agency in the States—the same that coined the term “private eye.” An aspiring actress and recent widow, in 1856 Warne responded to an ad for a new agent and had to convince Allan Pinkerton to hire her. Her argument was simple: she could elicit secrets in a way no man could, as she was also able to access spaces denied to them (Ramsland 70). Disregarding his partners’ advice, Pinkerton employed her, later stating that she became indispensable and “never disappointed him” (qtd. in Ramsland 70). She could adopt different accents, identities, and even pose as a young man. In fact, she seldom used her own name and went by several alias: M.B, Mrs. M. Barley, or Mrs. Cherry. She was described as commanding, captivating in her manners, a skilled conversationalist who also knew how to use silence to her advantage, while she hid her Northern birth with Southern identities and opinions in order to foil crimes there (Pinkerton’s record book, 1861 qtd. in Cuthbert 21). It is said that she even went to war disguised as a Union soldier, fulfilling the role of adventurer denied to women. She was part of the tail that accompanied Abraham Lincoln and was famous for remaining awake the whole night to prevent his assassination. She was later in charge of supervising the Female Detective Force within the agency, training new female agents. In several documents she appears as Pinkerton’s “Lady Superintendent” and “one of the most valuable members of his corps,” or “the chief of his female staff” (qtd. in Cuthbert 2, 144), while Pinkerton stated that he sent her to the most delicate cases because he could rely upon her discretion (Pinkerton’s account 1866, qtd. in Cuthbert 9). At this time, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic started advertising for women who could be employed in cases that required a certain invisibility or that were circumscribed to female spaces: surveillance of department stores to prevent theft, infiltrating families to solve domestic disputes, etc. (Bredesen, “On the Trail” vi–ii; Young 17). Despite Warne’s professional capacity, her reputation also suffered given the rumors of a possible affair with her boss: even Pinkerton’s brother could not see any other reason for his unbounded admiration and trust in a woman.

If Kate Warne embodied the spirit of the New Woman, breaking boundaries and proving professional excellence, so did the reporter and adventurer Nellie Bly (1864–1922). Her response to an article that ridiculed women who wanted to work outside the house granted her the attention of the editor, who hired her. She was a foreign and war correspondent, and a famous interviewer, while in 1889 she also traveled the world in 72 days, to emulate Verne’s famous novel, beating a rival woman traveler and opening the way for the first woman who circumnavigated the globe on a bicycle, Annie Londonderry. Bly was an industry owner, a columnist, and a suffragist. She also became a form of detective by her undercover work at different locations in order to claim social justice for the poor, the imprisoned, and women. Thanks to her a host of female imitators were hired by other newspapers. In her most remembered stunt, she went undercover for ten days as a lunatic in a mad house, describing the terrible conditions that patients experienced there. In her ability to use her invisibility to her advantage, her initiative, and her use of new technology and means of transport, she resembled the anonymous female detectives that Pinkerton and other agencies were now recruiting—and their fictional alter egos as well.2 These cases evince that times, and with them the role of women, were changing.3 Fiction responded to these social transformations and the 1860s saw the publication of two volumes revolving around a professional female sleuth: Mrs. Paschal in William Stephens Hayward’s The Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) and Mrs. G. in James Redding Ware’s The Female Detective (1864), written under the pseudonym of Andrew Forrester. Their cases involve theft, embezzlement, bigamy, family secrets, and false identities. Their greatest assets are their invisibility as police recruits who can infiltrate domestic spaces, their ability to impersonate others, their intelligence, and their unknown marital status or even class. They subvert traditional sexual stereotypes, and, more importantly, revert the position of gazer/object, although they become cultural products to be marketed often highlighting their quality as observed rather than observing agent. All these elements signal their liminality within society, their nature as transitional figures between the old and the new. Although receiving less attention than Mrs. Paschal, Ware’s G embodies better than any other nineteenth century female detective the ambiguity of the woman sleuth. In her own introduction, she deliberately refuses to specify her identity, motivations—she might have been driven by need or choice—marital status—she could be single and independent or a widow in need for money to support her children—and age (1). Her class is never stated, but her ability to move vertically in society marks her ambivalence. The reader does not even receive a name, and she will sometimes go by the cover name Gladden or merely G. She moreover highlights the moral ambiguity of her position: having hidden her profession from friends and strangers, the former believe her to be a dressmaker while the latter decide on a questionable life, while she mocks this dichotomy between innocence and guilt that characterized women with no gray areas (2). Finally, she makes a strong case for the need of female detectives given that they can infiltrate spaces inaccessible for men, they can see and hear what is barred for them, and become the better “family spies” at this key moment in Britain’s legal history (4). Moreover, she vindicates her role both as experiencing-I and narrating-I, as detective and writer (4–5). Most of her stories will be based on her own experiences, while she will also give form to the reports of her male colleagues, which is

indicative as well of the cultural authorial struggle over narrative at this time. As for her worth as a detective, in one of the most representative cases, “The Unknown Weapon,” G displays her incredibly methodic and rational nature, using evidence and forensic analysis as a basis for her inferences—recurrently emphasizing her use of solid proof and logic over mere intuition (244, 246, 247, 269–70, 272–73). Appearing several years before Conan Doyle’s creation, she advances the ratiocination of his detective and rejects the immediate association of the female figure with imagination or clairvoyance. In addition, she inscribes herself within the structure of the law—calling herself “constable” and “police officer” (222, 253), using the plural “us” and “we” to discuss detective methods and experiences (239, 241, 268–69) and collaborating with another female detective (293)—as well as outside it by her independence to work her cases, together with the amorality of some of her acts—lying and stealing to get evidence (288). G becomes paradigmatic of that (dis)order epitomized by a woman detective who disrupts gender boundaries, and subversively unites the concepts of “police officer” and “petticoats” (240), also blurring the thin line between right and wrong, a morally dubious parallel between detective and criminal that will determine the genre (e.g., Holmes/Moriarti in Doyle’s franchise, Patrick Jane/Red John in The Mentalist, etc.). As a narrator, G is also a mediator, addressing the readers, correcting preconceptions, referring to other cases and even to Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, establishing the place of her own narrative within a wider detective tradition in life and fiction, rooted in realistic crime fiction and the Gothic heritage, also displaying the hybrid or liminal nature of the noir genre itself. This connection to the Gothic and to the later tradition of penny dreadfuls is what Ashley sees as characterizing the experiences of Mrs. Paschal (Revelations 13–14), more an adventurer than an analytical investigator as G was. Paschal introduces herself as a widow who must work to support herself after her husband left her in a difficult situation (18). She is well-educated and a consummated actress (19), who can play her part(s) from high to low life, pointing at the instability of social identity and, as she will later prove, gender stereotypes. Paschal does not renounce her female identity; she uses it to her advantage, but at the same time, she subverts many of the expectations associated with gender roles. In this sense, she sometimes eschews the customary role of an observant or infiltrated female detective, as well as the symbols of traditional femininity, to become an adventurer in Martin Green’s terms: for instance, in order to chase a criminal through a tunnel, she divests herself of her “obnoxious” crinoline (33). So as to forget about the death of a kind woman and continue with her investigation, she resorts to, in her words, her “hardened” or even “callous” nature (70, 75), which she claims is unusual for a woman—and which brings her closer to her male and female villains—and, at one point, she even refers to herself as a “sportsman” and to the criminal as her quarry (77). In this sense, Paschal sometimes enacts the traditional role of temptress in detective fiction while also appropriating the part of her male colleagues. Both Paschal and Ware’s coeval Gladden place their value precisely on this ambiguity, that is, their distinct femininity, which ironically makes them no-bodies, invisible, and capable of entering any space, but also on their ability to perform detective work as professionally as men. This instability between the public and the private, visibility and invisibility, is also directed at the female detective’s moral value, as well as her cultural and economic one in her

capacity to attract readers. While Paschal never works undercover as a prostitute—only coming close when she mixes with low-life scoundrels at bars and poses as her informant’s mistress—the cover of the book, where Paschal is portrayed displaying her petticoats with a cigarette in her hand and a direct and coquettish stare to the audience, highlights the fact that gender roles and who holds the power of the gaze in these adventures are matters far from stable. In fact, a “lady detective” is a concept hard to reconcile as working women are recurrently associated with degradation and prostitution (Bredesen, “Conformist” 28; Miller 55–56), so the idea of a “lady” becomes an unstable signifier of class (Bredesen, “On the Trail” xx) and of femininity when it is associated with the traditionally male detective. Furthermore, the marital status of these women, a confirmed widow and a possible one, does not mark them as gender neutral, but rather as liminal figures with more freedom to move and act than married women, or even single ones, and yet bound by some propriety (Bredesen, “Conformist” 21–23). Therefore, rather than considering both early detectives “honorary men” (Klein 29), it would be necessary to question gender signifiers as something stable and unchanging, precisely at a time when the first feminist movement was advocating for them to change. The female detective then embodies the in-between state of the transition from old to new women, from supported widows to self-supporting working women, conquering new spaces while they also claim their authority over the domestic ones in which they work better than their male colleagues. As illustrated by these works, then, the female detective, embodied in Gladden and Paschal, but also in their subsequent sleuthing colleagues, is an oxymoron, a living paradox: she is a disruption in the order that she herself upholds as an investigator (Bredesen, “Conformist” 21; Kinsman 22). Therefore, other popular detective narratives will conclude with a restoration of that order, resolving their female protagonist’s liminal position with a reintroduction into society by means of marriage. Clarence Rook’s Miss Van Snoop only becomes a detective until she can find the man that shot her fiancé in front of her. Her task implies a suspension of gender norms, for only once it is fulfilled can she cry and have the “luxury of hysterics” she has earned, right before resigning from the force (69). Similar are Grant Allen’s adventurers and amateur investigators, Lois Caley and Hilda Wade, both of whom conclude their last narrative at the altar. Young and attractive, Caley is a New Woman (college educated, riding a bicycle) who rejects the option of teaching and Hilda is a mesmerizing nurse trying to prove the innocence of her father. They both embody that liminality between gazing and gazed at, new woman and heroine of romance. Illustrated by Miss Snoop and Hilda, in most cases, this transitional professional period was owing to dire circumstances. George Sims’ Dorcas Dene, Detective: Her Life and Adventures (1897) portrays a former actress turned detective because of her devotion to a blind husband, proving a “brave and yet womanly woman” (35). Intelligent and rational, she has a male self-appointed “assistant” who records her impressive deeds (36). She deals with similar cases to other female detectives, revolving often around family matters, which call for her impersonating powers and returning to her full devotion as wife at the end of each adventure (61). Created by Anne Katherine Green, socialite Violet Strange’s unconventional profession given her large fortune and high class is only explained at the very end of her adventures, after she marries: she was saving money for her disinherited sister to study

music. She thus has a noble and socially acceptable reason for her transitional breach of decorum, which also concludes with her becoming a respectable wife. Those narratives that wished to defy this conventional return to social order had to choose between the female figures that challenged it in themselves: the aforementioned widow, or an even more disruptive woman, the spinster, such as Loveday Brooke. Created by Catherine Louisa Pirkis, her adventures were published as The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1893–94) in Ludgate Monthly, a magazine with a female target audience that women could peruse uncensored. Maybe because she is penned by a woman, Loveday is more subversive than other detectives of her time: she is in her thirties, stubbornly unmarried, and although her circumstances have forced her to find a job, detecting has been her choice. An instance of George Gissing’s (in)famous odd women, unmarried and unemployable unless in a liminal position that would include governesses or companions (Miller 54, 60), Loveday Brooke is a female detective that embodies more than any other the ideals of the new unmarried, professional women at the turn of the century—while by recalling George Eliot’s own Dorothea Brooke she still highlights the limitations they faced (HendreySeabrook 77). Very characteristic is the way in which she defies sexual stereotypes, emphasizing her detecting qualities and professionalism, rejecting patronizing attitudes, as well as romance. In Hendrey-Seabrook’s words, she has chosen a vocation that acts as a “fulfilling substitute for the culturally constructed alternatives that would place her as, at best, an ‘odd woman,’ at worst, as pitiable and degraded” (82). She has no personal reason to investigate, no marriage proposal to provide stability. She represents the dangers Gissing saw for women who had to stand on their own two feet: they could rise, or fall, which is no innocent word for women at this time. In fact, as Miller has aptly demonstrated, throughout her stories the subtle relationship between the working woman, including the detective, and prostitution is developed (55). This was perceived as well in the abovementioned cover for Hayward’s work, and the images that accompany the Brooke stories often dwell of the female figure, returning the power of gaze to the audience (Hendrey-Seabrook 81–82), and yet portraying also the liminal space she inhabits: alone at home or performing her job. A job in which she could reclaim the position of the observer, as her fellow sleuths, no longer merely the object but the subject, the surveilling agent. Yet she is also somehow extending the male gaze of authority into the (female) domestic realm, claiming again an ambiguous position toward patriarchy and subversion. Loveday’s work as a detective in this domestic realm, as G’s and Paschal’s, is to give visibility to that which goes unnoticed, using her own female invisibility or unimportance and often crossing the boundaries of class. Brooke’s stance then remains on the threshold between male/female, order/disorder, public/private, and high/low class. Another important detective is Miss Amelia Butterworth, considered the first spinster sleuth, and the predecessor of Christie’s Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher, the protagonist of Murder She Wrote (1984–96), older women who are spinsters or widows, therefore on the threshold of society and able to subvert the established roles for women: they have no husband at home to hinder their investigations, or their curiosity. For they respond to another sexual stereotype: the charge of nosiness is frequently leveled against them. However, in the end they prove much more effective than the male professional that dismisses or mocks their

talents. Created by Green, Butterworth, as later Fletcher, is the narrator of her own stories and this first person approach is also illustrative of where she stands in society. As a highclass single woman, she can support herself and is capable of complete independent action. In fact, for Roberts she is unique in many ways: for she is not a “freak, … an honorary male, …not domestic or desperate…not a lower-class contemptible” (10), defying sexism and agism from within society and yet supported by male authority embodied in the police. Nevertheless, Butterworth herself is aware of her liminal position, inside and outside, belonging to a high-class domestic sphere, yet stepping outside her boundaries and looking for adventure. In fact, she often retells in self-righteous indignation the references to her age, her nosiness or her female sensibility, only to show how she behaves more wisely than her male counterparts. Even thought at times she wishes to be a man so she could do more (174), the semantic fields of vision, perception, supposition, and order abound and evince that she is performing her role affectively. The recurrent employment of the word “odd” points both at the strange circumstances she perceives, and the ambiguous one she finds herself in as a woman detective. These fictional women might be understood as merely a “fantasy of female empowerment completely at odds with reality” (Kestner 13), but they expressed transgressive “cultural aspirations” (17). They paved the way to imagine a new reality, a new employment possibility for the New Woman, at a time in which the police force still had no professional female members, and only relied on undercover operatives (Bredesen, “On the Trail” v, xxii). The London Metropolitan Police Force included two women in 1883, to supervise female prisoners; by 1918 25 women were appointed to this force but denied the power of arrest and exposed to harassment both from colleagues and the general public; some years later a small number of them remained, mainly to deal with women and children in cases of spousal abuse or sexual assault, taking statements and trying to comfort them (Craig and Cadogan 92). In America, the first official policewoman would not appear until 1908 (Ashley, Introduction vii). The First and Second World Wars provided new opportunities for women, this time as undercover or intelligence agents, often unrecognized and dismissed once the war was over. Once more, fiction proved more advanced than society, as with quixotism picturing images of what should be, and finally was. As the twentieth century moved on, both society and the genre become more comfortable with female detectives, and yet, in the multidirectional movement of feminist history, many of the issues that were at the heart of the early narratives resurface in later fiction. To start with, detective fiction is still an attractive genre for writers because it “actually prescribes that a marginal figure lay claim to the narrative’s central perspective” (Walton and Jones 40). For instance, the groundbreaking Remington Steele (1982–87) saw Laura Holt having to create a fictional male boss to be hired as a detective, showing that much was still to be done in the 1980s, but also giving her the protagonist role: she was Remington Steele, not an assistant but the actual boss and effective detective, although later Pierce Brosnan’s character assumed the name and got all the credit. So together with the visibility of that “marginal” figure—working mothers, lesbians, racialized figures, or just women in what is still a man’s world—they revolve around the need to negotiate women’s position in society and this genre, reflecting as only popular fiction can do the changes in women’s roles, (self)perceptions and

possibilities throughout time (Walton and Jones 13). Even if it might lose them readership, feminist appropriations of the genre display the potential to fulfill the aesthetic and ideological premises of popular fiction, satisfying and yet renegotiating the attitudes of its audience (Rowland; Walton; Walton and Jones 39), hence remaining financially viable and still relevant as a cultural product. The popularity of Grafton’s and Paretsky’s hard-boiled detectives, or the lead investigators in primetime shows from the 1990s onward, such as Crossing Jordan, Cold Case, The Closer, Major Crimes, Law and Order: SVU, and Rizzoli & Isles (the latter based on Tess Gerritsen’s novels), prove that women are no longer relegated to the role of sidekicks or love interests and that a change in attitude might go beyond the need to attract new audiences. In addition, with some notable exceptions—such as the character of Kate Beckett in Castle—we have come a long way from the 1990s, when Paretsky’s strong V.I. Warshawski was remediated on screen into a highly sexualized portrayal by Kathleen Turner, surrounded by a campaign based on sexual innuendo and liberal claims of a post-feminist kind (Munt 32–33). The gaze now belongs strongly to the female detective, avoiding her glamorization and not distracting from her intellectual capacities and emotional depths, especially if she holds a position of power, as seen in the mainly gray suits—and strong leadership—displayed by Olivia Benson in SVU or Captain Zoe Andersen in The Rookie, an example of how the glass ceiling has been shattered in fiction. Nevertheless, in this later show, the rookie Lucy Chen is also warned that an affair with her colleague will tarnish her reputation and hinder her promotion—exposing the existence of the old double standard, for the same, of course, does not apply to her male partner. Fiction, once more, exposes what is left to be transformed. Because this recurrent presence of the female detective in successful cultural brands provides the chance to bring to the fore feminocentric issues: from the pressure to balance work and family, or even to have one, to harassment in the workplace, sexual abuse, or other forms of violence, from which she is not exempt. While not portraying her as a passive victim or a damsel in distress waiting for a rescuer, a recurrent narrative arc revolves around the duality of the female detective: on the one hand, they are the defenders of the order they have sworn to uphold, with authority and power; on the other, they are women in a world in which they are the recipients of most violent acts. Female detectives are not only exposed to the regular share of aggression that comes with the job, but are also threatened with sexual violence. Some, as Veronica Mars or Jessica Jones, were raped before becoming private investigators, and it becomes part of their motivation. A more significant instance would be Olivia Benson’s assault, as she has worked for years dealing with victims of predators. These threats shed more light on the menacing reality in which women live, while they also build the empathy the audience might feel toward the detectives that seek justice. In these shared interests and threats, contemporary narratives reclaim the tradition of women detectives, from the eighteenth century Gothic and nineteenth century early female detectives, to the intelligence agents that solved clues in the war and beyond. By so doing they vindicate the ongoing struggle of women, as they revert the invisibility of these female investigators, real or fictional, who were obliterated from history and the detective genre.

Resurrecting Kate Warne: The Pinkertons and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Set one hundred years apart, in the 1860s and 1960s, respectively, the Canadian television production The Pinkertons (2014) and Emil Ferris’ graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Volume I (2018) appropriate the real-life story of Kate Warne to reflect on women’s stance at moments of change. On the one hand, the postwar United States that was rebuilding itself, while its women struggled for new opportunities and rights. On the other hand, the 1960s, a time of free love and revolution, when Betty Friedan diagnosed women’s “problem that has no name” in The Feminine Mystique (1963), highlighting their liminality. They had college degrees, could develop careers, yet the aspirational model was still to become relegated to the domestic sphere. WASP wives and mothers were heralded once more as the core of the wholesome American family and nation, advertised on billboards and magazines, the subject of studies and conduct books, and yet largely invisible outside the limited space promoted for them. Warne will become the symbol of change, of the conquest of rights and spaces, in these remediations of her life story. The Pinkerton agents were well-known and have inspired several fictional characters, among them a female detective created at the beginning of the twentieth century by Mary Roberts Rinehart, who is a nurse and amateur investigator whom the police nickname “Miss Pinkerton” for her skills. This Pinkerton will also have to face patronizing attitudes while her adventures reflect the more general experience of women under oppressive circumstances (Ross 36). However, The Pinkertons (2014) goes beyond mere homages and uses the Pinkerton archives and what is known of Warne from Pinkerton’s and other operatives’ mentions to reconstruct some of the actual cases in which she was or might have been involved. They use facts such as the dates in which she started working for the agency, her widowhood, her ability with accents and disguises, her participation in the protection of Lincoln, as well as her pioneering work as a detective and the trust that the head of the agency had on her. The main characters are Allan Pinkerton, his son William and Kate, although other operatives, male and female, as well as Allan’s associate, his brother Robert, have a recurring presence. The show focuses on the different approaches that Will and Kate have toward their job: one the representative of tradition and the hegemonic masculinity of the West, the other offering a new approach to detective work, the role of women and even the state of national affairs. Set in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1865, the American West becomes an important element in the show. The frontier is a liminal space more than any other, portrayed full of marginal creatures such as former slaves and prostitutes, but also as a space of potentiality for pioneering women like these first detectives. At one point, another female operative also working in the frontier thanks Warne for her own “career,” for opening “the door,” and as “the first female detective in the world,” setting an example for other female detectives (“To the death”). The setting, the land of opportunity, is also the place for adventure, real or not, experienced by these self-made characters. Pinkerton, whose agents had persecuted famous outlaws, published a series of sensation books that contained autobiographical elements and which borrowed heavily from popular genres set in the West. The genre is hybrid, and this

moment marks another transition: if the American detective story is understood as a Western transposed to an “urban environment,” and “the relationship between western vigilante and detective has become traditionally viewed as progressive, the former leading into and becoming the latter” (Witschi 382), Warne’s urbanite and Northern vision of the West, her condemnation of old notions of honor and masculinity, and her approach to forensic and rational detection transform her into a signifier of not only gender but also genre advancements. The show, in fact, opens with an episode titled “Kansas City” that revolves around the tensions between the North and the South, and the wish to return to how things were as opposed to how they were becoming. It involves a band of criminals who wish to gain revenge on union soldiers, and start a new war. This band fails precisely because they underestimate Warne and cannot even conceive she might be a detective: because she plays a southern belle, a defenseless woman, it immediate falls within their worldview. Their plan is foiled because they cannot acknowledge advancement and change. The same could be said of William: at first he rejects the notion that a woman can teach him anything, rejecting the idea of a lady detective and even her techniques of evidence collection. As the show advances, he will come to recognize that Warne is a skilled and professional detective, and yet the sexism that the detective faces is evident inside and outside her organization. She will state that a woman operative still needs to prove herself by working harder than men, she will be valued as Pinkerton’s “best man” (“Kansas City”), or be considered unwomanly by her directness, while still sexually threatened in the first and last episodes by Jesse James. In the conclusion to the season, the difficulties of achieving change will be stressed: she is silenced and her opinion rejected when William accepts the challenge of Jesse James to fight a duel (“To the Death”). Warne’s rejection of the Western form of past masculinity is confronted by the narrative tradition and the strong social conventions about manliness and honor, with even Pinkerton stating that Warne could teach William something about his manhood. Although Warne has been able to renegotiate her position, she remains at the threshold between the old and the new in a world that is slowly changing but which holds on to the past. As stated above, this negotiation and liminality is recalled in later works, also in the context of times of change. Set in Chicago during the 1960s, Ferris’ graphic novel portrays a young heroine, Karen Reyes, who wants to become a detective. Her liminal identity is shown in her strangeness or outsider status among her community: she is marked by her latinidad, how she dresses in Bogart-style, her obsession with monsters, how she portrays herself as a werewolf, the manner in which she is rejected and associates with other outcasts, and, finally, because she identifies as a lesbian who is told she must remain closeted for protection. To emphasize this permanence in liminality, Karen has a weed-induced hallucination in which she talks to this first American detective, Kitty (Kate) Warne. This encounter of two detectives separated by a century highlights the in-betweenness that a hundred years later women sleuths, or subversive women, still experienced. Warne died young, and an admiring Pinkerton buried her in his family plot at the cemetery of Chicago, fueling the speculations about the nature of their relationship, although Pinkerton himself denied any improriety and manifested his sincere professional and personal admiration for Warne. It is at this cementery that Karen sees Warne as a ghost, a liminal

figure between death and life, in this case representative of Warne’s fall into oblivion for so long before becoming known again in the 2010s. At first Karen is not aware of whom she is adressing, and asks why other female ghosts look at her disapprovingly. Warne states that it is because she dresses like a man when she pleases and works as a detective, hence, becoming Karen’s own double in their defiance to female sterotypes and their liminal position within respectable society. She then relates her protection of Lincoln and how she became the source of the expression “private eye.” Warne establishes her importance in the female sleuth tradition, and Karen then confides in her as a “fellow detective,” which recalls Warne’s training of other female detectives, establishing this profession as suitable for women and building a sorority among colleagues, as seen as well in Gladden’s relationship with her fellow women sleuths. As they speak, Warne appears in other disguises that she used to solve some of her famous cases. Her form constantly changes, her identity is fluid, just as Karen becomes a monster, a werewolf in her own eyes, and mutates when she is finally confronted with her identity as a young girl, not a monster. However, as the ghostly Warne vindicated her difference from the disapproving ladies, so does Karen revealingly re-appropriate the concept of monstrosity as a form of empowerment, revolting against traditional readings and claiming that people should be who they want to, and not whom others make them to be. As she confesses her homosexuality to her brother, his fear at the consequences it might have for Karen in their homophobic neighborhood again makes it necessary to use a metaphoric disguise of normality, which Karen rejects. She continues to see herself as a werewolf, to write her own story, and to act as a detective. Warne’s spirit then remains alive in the female detective, as she faces the limitations and incomprehension of society, advancing a future yet to come.

Sherlock’s Sisters at the Turn of the Century: Houdini & Doyle and Phryne Fisher The importance of the female detective as a New Woman who is negotiating new spaces in society is evinced by the rewriting of late nineteenth and early twentieth century voices in contemporary artifacts. The television series Houdini & Doyle (2016) and Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher novels, as well as their small screen adaptation, are two relevant examples of the representation of these women as liminal, in-between two times, within a society that is looking backward with nostalgia, while its women are pressing to move forward. Houdini & Doyle (2016) revolves around the eponymous characters, their friendship, and their work as amateur detectives. It introduces a fictional policewoman of Scotland Yard, Constable Stratton, who shifts from mere secretary to full-time investigator. Stratton embodies those early detectives and policewomen, and the struggles they had to face in a mysoginistic environment, by addressing many of the issues that limited women in late Victorian England. Moreover, the show also covers different forms of violence against women as seen in the different cases they must investigate. Given the context of the changes in the actual police force discussed above, the television show, set in the late 1890s, envisions the rise of the New Woman in the transition from private to public female detectives, and the

birth of the policewoman. When she first appears Constable Stratton is summoned from the basement where she works as a secretary, to look after Doyle and Houdini as they investigate a murder. This spatial transition symbolizes the aforementioned movement from private to public figure of detection, and from sanctioned female roles to new professions. However, this does not grant immediate recognition. As the chief of police states, “while they play detective, you’ll play nurse maid, nothing more,” dismissing the male amateur work as futile, but still identifying Stratton with traditionally feminine activities. This returns to the limited work that policewomen were granted at the dawn of their presence in the force. Trapped in a stereotypical job, Stratton complains of this to Doyle when she states that he has had it easier as a man: he is an educated doctor and a succesful writer. She had to work harder than anybody else, only to be granted a space in the basement, and the opportunity to prepare tea for other constables. She sees her chance of working with them as a means of spending more time performing as an “actual policeman.” Interestingly, Doyle makes sure Stratton remains in the job and performs his detective work with her, maybe in an allusion to his role in popularizing detective fiction and enabling the creation of British female detectives, often termed by the critics “sisters” or “daughters” of his Holmes. He even continued Hilda Wade’s saga until its conclusion for The Strand after the death of Grant Allen (Craig and Cadogan 27). The fact that fictional detectives preceded actual policewomen might also be suggested by this patronage from the writer. And as a policewoman, Stratton does resemble Mrs Paschal: she goes to disreputable places, such as a Whitechapel tavern, she uses physical force to reduce a suspect, and she is apt at finding her way into places where men could not go. Nevertheless, she must face the customary misogynist criticism of the time. As they investigate the murder of a Maggie, one of the fallen women of the Magdalen laundry, Houdini questions her as a “real cop” and later disregards her professionalism and women’s aspirations. Stratton responds: “You know, this might be some kind of bet for you, but for me, this is my life. You saw those hopeless girls in the laundry. Do you know how many women live in fear of that fate? This is not just a job for me. This is a hope we can avoid not only those laundries, but something almost as bad: a life of pretty dresses and condescension” (“The Maggie’s Redress”). Stratton embodies the New Woman trapped between the propriety of the home and a vapid life, and the risk of becoming a marked or fallen woman. She represents the women movement’s search for new spaces that grant them more alternatives. She is opening the way for novel employment opportunities that prevent the oppression of women by institutions, whether marriage, the church, or the government. Throughout the show, she must earn her companion’s respect as a woman, calling out his sexist jokes and attitudes, and also avoiding the usual romantic plot. Her role as a widow offers the chance of speculation on her morality and her independence, proving as unstable but freeing as it had been for G and Paschal. Moreover, the fact that she is good at such an exposed work also affects her reputation and poses a threat to her male colleagues, resembling Warne’s own stance. Having successfully concluded her first investigation, she is summoned by the chief, who questions both her morals and her skills by stating: “I’m going to move you upstairs. Mr Houdini seems to think you’ve done a good job. Therefore, I

assume you’re having an affair. And when I have proof, I’ll not only fire you, I’ll make sure no woman is ever hired again.” The Chief’s subsequent comments on the suffrage movement (“I used to come home every day to a meal on the table. Then some frustrated spinster decides women should have the vote”) and the suffragette’s admiration of Stratton’s work (“Impressive. Our first female constable. Glad to see someone has the starch to take on this fortress of masculinity”) expose the tensions at a time in which women’s advancement was met with double moral standards, incomprehension, and even violence. As Stratton investigates crimes involving Maggies, suffragettes, or mediums, she proves herself as liminal as those women: part of society but still condemned, controlled, and often marginalized, while attempting to conquer new spaces and increased visibility. Her interaction with male colleagues, suspects and criminals, together with womanizing Houdini and patronizing Doyle, exposes the prejudices even enlightened Victorian men had about women’s new roles, and the ways in which this challenged their worldview. The show then mirrors the often ambiguous discourse of the age concerning the New Woman and her place in society, at the same time it illuminates the negotiation of their identity and role that these women had to perform. Although the action in Kerry Greenwood’s novels takes place 30 years later, in the 1920s, she still portrays this world in transition. Set in Australia, in the aftermath of the First World War, it deals with the impact of that war on class and gender. Phryne, born in poverty in Australia, rises to a title and a fortune by the death or disappearance of her father’s family during the conflict. After the opportunities that the war gave to women at the front or back home, Phryne finds that the options offered to her—marriage or charitable work—are just not enough. Therefore, when a rich family in England is impressed by her detecting skills (she recovers a stolen necklace in the first couple of pages) and requests that she travels to Australia to discover what is happening to their daughter Lydia, she takes that opportunity to decide what to do with her life. She decides trying to become a “perfect Lady Detective” (Greenwood 10), and, resembling Violet Strange, she is perfectly at ease with the contradiction between both terms. Elegant, sophisticated, adventurous, and sexually active, Phryne’s personal life and cases involve many of the issues of her time: the rise of family planning and Marie Stopes’ advances, double sexual standards and female desire, harassment of female workers and illegal abortions, prostitution and poverty, women’s advancement in the work place, etc. Ahead of her time, the detective contrasts with, while the narrator mocks, Victorian sentiments and attitudes in women. Phryne is then part of a bygone time— embodied in aristocracy and their concern with the appearance of decorum—but advances a new one, when women became sexually liberated and professional. She also destabilizes class and sexuality, equally comfortable in grand settings and in bohemian lesbian bars. Phryne also effectively subverts the power of the male gaze: hers is the control over the male form and her own objects of desire. When the novels were adapted to the screen as a television series, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012–15), Phyrne’s character and circumstances were faithfully presented for a wider audience. The show also echoes the female detective’s recurrent association with the prostitute or a spectacle, with the titular character posing as a street-walker, an exotic dancer, and a circus performer. However, the remediation did bring some changes. Her relationship

with inspector Jack Robinson was harlequinized and became one of the core narrative arcs that advance the plot. The “will they, won’t they” so common in other detective television series (e.g., Remington Steele, Castle, etc.), sustains the tension between both characters, yet with an important difference: it is Phryne’s wish to remain free, her unwillingness to commit, and her multiple lovers, which hinder the desired romance. While in the novels he is a happy family man, in the show Robinson is a former husband, who wishes a more conventional relationship and who is resisting her attempts at seduction. A gentleman and a former soldier in the war, he embodies also the transition to new values and novel perspectives on women’s freedom and the struggle of that old society to accommodate change. These contemporary narratives, then, expose how these detectives stand on the border between past and future, advancing women’s narratives but still trapped by a less advanced society—which is a familiar context in the nineteenth, the twentieth and the twenty-first century alike. They portray detectives as liminal women who are the object of the male gaze —Houdini’s, the chief’s, the criminals,’ Robinson’s—but also as extraordinary beings that defy conventions and who orient their gaze at those same men, at society, as they investigate. They are instances of a New Woman, a persona that moves from private to public and vice versa, from traditional female roles to new subversive ones, and hence open the way for other women to follow in their path.

Invisible Women: Reclaiming the Spy in The Bletchley Circle Together with the many female detectives that have permeated popular fiction in the last two centuries, another important figure rose to prominence: the female spy. These figures were at first identified with the femme fatale role, with stories of “seduction, ruthlessness and betrayal,” prior to the First World War, although later fictional women spies could also become symbols of “patriotic determination” and even “independence,” with the possibility of proving themselves more adventurous and subversive (Craig and Cadogan 52). Identified with an undercover agent or an intelligence officer, these women existed and played an important role in both global wars, while their stories were later forgotten or relegated once the conflicts were over and women had to return to a more domestic sphere. That is the premise of The Bletchley Circle (2012–14). The show opens in 1943 at the code-breaking headquarters in Bletchley Park, where the four protagonists work deciphering the German codes. Thanks to their efforts, many soldiers are saved: they are able to make a difference, something important especially for Susan, a gifted mathematician and code-breaker. The action then advances to the 1950s, when these women are not recognized for their service and they must hide their former profession in their new “ordinary” lives. When a serial killer threatens young women in the London area, Susan and her former colleagues start their own investigation, and finally solve the case that had been puzzling the police and endangering their own lives. The 1950s in the United Kingdom has always been described as a transitional time, a time of postwar disillusionment and change in values. It was the decade of the “angry young men,” but also of the anger of women as seen in Shelagh Delaney’s work, among others. Women in the 1950s stand at the threshold between a bygone era that disappeared with the

war, and a moment of possibilities, which ironically opened with the conflict and their role in it. The revolution of the 1960s is still ahead, so these women are left in this negotiation of past and present, of previous ambition and current limited possibilities. The show portrays this in different ways through the four protagonists, also highlighting feminocentric issues of past and present concern. Susan is a genius who performed a skilled job at Bletchley, but her secrecy agreement forbids the disclosure of her past. Her husband condescendingly believes her merely good with puzzles and is embarrassed by her insistence on bothering the police with her theories. He, an honored and acknowledged war hero, insists she must place her duties of wife and mother above all else. Susan has settled into the ordinary life she once rejected, but wishes to make a difference again, so she sets their detective work in motion. Trying to convince the others, she states that they could be really useful again, to be like they were: making a difference, saving lives, and fighting in their own way. She claims that they are the same women who did all that, and should be given the chance to continue doing their work. Millie, the adventurer and traveler, single and capable of shooting a gun, or smuggling goods to survive, is nevertheless harassed by her boss and sees her employment possibilities diminish because of her sex. She wished Susan to travel with her after the war and to abandon the idea of an ordinary life, and she fulfills more than any other the idea of a New Woman, independent and resourceful. Lucy, a young wife with an abusive husband and a photographic memory, after a brutal beating abandons her husband and finds clerical work— not as an agent—at Scotland Yard, while during the investigation she is almost raped by a man just because she looked available. Finally, Jean, a former head at Bletchey, now a spinster and a librarian, possesses an invaluable knowledge of secrets and a network of contacts, proving the ambiguity of her position: seemingly powerless, she is powerful in the shadows. All of them were invisible during the war: their work was and is a secret. In their role as detectives they employ this network of invisible women—now clerks, secretaries, housewives—to solve the cases, and yet remain unacknowledged. Even Susan’s husband will not discover that his wife captured the murderer, and almost got killed in the process. It is not until the second season that he hears of her work at Bletchey and also that she has now discovered a conspiracy in the army—when the high ranks call him because his wife has trespassed on military grounds. In fact, Susan had hidden her detecting activities under the pretense of a female book club, which, tellingly, is reading Dickens’ Great Expectations. Their work is dismissed by the deputy of police as chasing “phantoms,” “conjecture, imagination, theories that are disrupting proper police work,” a “mistake” that might cost Susan’s husband his promotion. In the end, he can only state “I should’ve listened.” As Susan and her family move to the continent at the end of season two, her husband finally acknowledges her as well and wishes her to find a job in their new station. The case which they investigate is also one of violence against women. As Lucy reflects, men are particularly vicious in their hatred against women. When they find the crime scene, they discover the murderer calmly smoked after his crime, which for Millie is proof of the little value given to women: they are casual victims, he feels safe killing them. The investigators or even Susan’s husband give little value to these women because they were out

at night, because of their makeup or clothes. They were not the proper kind of women, not like them, Susan’s husband claims. As the victims start to appear over the country, unsolved or attributed to somebody else, the case echoes Jack the Ripper’s unsolved feminicides. The motivation behind the killings also connects past with present, traumas of the war, and rejected love with present sexual violence against women. It unearths as well how women were used as “weapons” of war during the conflict, with the propaganda threatening to rape the wives of the Germans while they were at the front. The violence against women is presented as endemic, and also a continuum that feeds itself. The killer went from creating that propaganda, to performing those acts on actual women. In addition, the classical myth of Eurydice is quoted by the murderer while he explains his deeds to Susan. The choice is significant. Not only is she a transitional figure, between life and death—relating to the killer’s triggering trauma and his murders—but in Ovid’s story she is also a cipher, a nobody defined by the male gaze, whose story has been reclaimed by different artists to provide her with a voice and significance of her own (Fernández-Caparrós 123–24). The killer is surprised at Susan’s ability to find him; he sees her as his nemesis, but only possible because of him. He wants to make her his new Eurydice, again claiming control over her life and death. Once more past and present women are connected, together with the control men want to exert over their fates. The second case they solve also involves reflections on women’s unacknowledged work, the poor or limited education of girls, the demands of motherhood, and the power of sorority, which in this case brings an innocent woman out of jail. It also develops not only their intellectual abilities to solve crimes, but their greater attention to detail and practical matters, connecting with prior female detectives as well. In that way, it vindicates the silent and invisible women of the past, and portrays these spies turned detectives as the foundation of advancement, the motor of change toward the following decade and the achievements of the second wave.

Past in the Present, the Gothic in the Noir: Dolores Redondo’s Baztan Trilogy Dolores Redondo, winner of the 2016 Planeta Award, first came to notoriety with the Baztan Trilogy (2012–14): The Invisible Guardian, The Legacy in the Bones, and Offering to the Storm. These novels follow the main character, Amaia Salazar, a tough detective who has trained with the FBI, and who returns to her native Elizondo, the site of her childhood trauma, when the murdered body of a teenager is found. As she investigates a series of ritual murders throughout the books, her past becomes intertwined with her case, as well as with her own abilities to connect with the otherworldly. The first book sees a series of ritual murders of young girls, attributed to the basajaun, a mythical Basque creature of the forests, which becomes, in fact, a protector of Salazar herself. The resolution of the mystery leads to the plots of the second and third books, in which the bodies of small baby girls are unearthed, again echoing supernatural stories of the valley. Finally, Amaia discovers the truth behind the murders of all three cases, as well as answers to her own personal trauma: why her mother has tried to kill her from the moment of her birth. Although Redondo’s novels present a

realistic approach to the forensic and legal aspects of police work, the Baztan trilogy can be read as a contemporary instance of the female Gothic, rather than a simple hard-boiled or procedural whodunit, enrooting with the abovementioned female tradition of the noir, also proving the hybrid nature and double orientation of the genre toward past and future. Its setting, narrative arc, supernatural elements and main character recall classic instances of feminocentric Gothic tales, such as those penned by Ann Radcliffe. In the end, finding the criminal mastermind means, more than anything else, unearthing Amaia’s secrets in the attic, but also recovering lost female voices. As detective fictions, Redondo’s novels display similarities with other Spanish narratives revolving around female sleuths—for instance, Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Petra Delicado series, or, more specifically, María Oruña’s later trilogy set in Cantabria, another northern territory full of history and legends, where inspector Valentina Redondo must also come to terms with her own ghosts. In all these fictions, women detectives are experienced and effective, but they must face opposition from their male peers. They embody the future of the police force, while the misogynist atmosphere in which they live and work is criticized as outdated. In these novels, the dangers of this repressive past are usually directed at women, at the heroic detective, but also at the vulnerable victim. They, therefore, inhabit that liminal space between past and present that the Gothic noir has come to represent, a hybrid between the narrative of a new woman and the patriarchal oppression that has not yet been overcome. The focus of the novel, then, is both on the police case to solve, and making sense of Amaia’s traumatic past and the other she feels in her own self. Again, this relates for instance to the heroines’ predicament in Radcliffe’s novels, in which they must “unveil the stories of other women” (Talairach-Vielmas 31), in order to make sense of their own. The eerie atmosphere in which it is set also adds to its nature as a contemporary Gothic tale. Set in the Baztan valley, it combines wild natural landscapes with Basque mythology and its history of witch-hunting and religious persecution. As usually happens in Gothic tales, women are particularly attuned to the otherworldly presences, connecting with the ever-present figure of the medium in nineteenth century fiction and also seen in Houdini & Doyle. Amaia’s aunt, for instance, represents the position of women on the threshold, as she can communicate with the spiritual world through her card reading. Her aunt is who recognizes Amaia’s special sensibility to the spirits. In the end, Amaia sees her visions and her connection to the old forces as instruments to solve the crimes, rather than distractions or symptoms of madness, becoming a detective/medium, a modern woman that uses her training, but who also recovers the voices and customs of the past to heal the wounds that have been left open. Amaia, then, fulfills the role of other Basque women as preservers of tradition and as the link between past and present. Her friendship with a detective from New Orleans who also has a spiritual sensibility only reinforces that role as bridge between a repressed culture and the contemporary world. It is, in fact, in the role of women where one might say to find this Gothic reading in the noir more clearly. They are victims, heroines, protectors, witches and mediums. First of all, the victims of the crimes, both past and present, are all women. This victimization of women is characteristic of the Gothic and the later Noir, which reflects women’s predicament throughout time and space. They are babies killed at birth, and young girls murdered. There

is a rape and even a case of domestic abuse. The dark forces of the world, supernatural or not, still claim women as main victims. The little girls are sacrificed to a cruel dark, atavistic force, which relates to other stories in which the purity and innocence of women, their bodies, are the appeasing offering, from classical mythology to modern tales of women presented at the altar of marriage or nunneries. This idea of the obsession with a pure female body, which is later subjected to a man’s gaze or his violence—a trait that has characterized Gothic and Noir heroines for so long—explains the first murders: girls who were no longer pure, no longer fit sacrifices, are made to appear so, by shaving their pubis and making the bodies adopt a virginal pose. As seen in eighteenth or nineteenth century Gothic tales, the heroine’s virginity is a commodity, something that makes her desirable, something she must protect, but also what transforms her into the paradigmatic innocent sacrificial figure. The murder of the “whores” transformed into “virgins” again highlights the sexual reading of women in the Noir, and the conventional dichotomies in which they are placed. As in other Gothic noirs, the main female character is at the same time heroine and victim, in this case embodied in two different people: Amaia and her twin sister. Amaia has visions in which another self appears. She later discovers that two girls were born, and one was murdered. Amaia’s sister, then, becomes the hapless female victim whose story is erased and must be retold—even more: her whole self is obliterated, she is a ‘no body’ that must be reclaimed, as previous Gothic heroines had to recover the lost stories of “imprisoned, silenced and invisible women,” as seen in Radcliffe’s narratives (Wright 21). This reclaiming of imprisoned women and the threats of the familiar characterize much of twentieth century detective fiction, especially after the publication of Friedan’s foundational text (Ross 37), once more highlighting a continuum in women’s history of repression. On the other hand, Amaia becomes the savior not only of her sister’s memory, but of other victims. Moreover, she fights against the evil forces that try to destroy her and her family, and in that sense she resembles other Gothic heroines. Nevertheless, as them, she is also attracted to and, in the end, seduced by the villain. Here, once more, contemporary thrillers come close to Gothic tales, as it is now a recurrent trope that the protagonist, whether a professional investigator or a woman at the center of a mystery, must learn to discern evil and resist falling prey to its seductiveness, a plot we can see from low-budget television shows to acclaimed films, such as Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), for example, in which the heroine succumbs to the villain’s advances and by losing her purity is exposed to be killed. In the end, Redondo’s Gothic noir proves an illuminating example of the past in the present: the polytemporality of feminist history, the recurrence of women’s concerns and the double orientation of detective fiction between past forces of oppression and the new women who fight against them. “It can matter little who I am,” claimed the anonymous heroine of Ware’s The Female Detective. And yet these past and present examples evince that it did matter. It does. From its birth, the figure of the female sleuth has become a culturally significant one in literary rewritings, and in the plethora of remediations that have followed, from films to videogames.4 In these instances she has shown to be advancing the genre and permeating popular fiction, refracting and becoming multiple but nevertheless recognizable in many of her traits, changing with her times and foreseeing new paths that were to be trodden by

women.

Notes 1 An interesting vindication of liminal women in the Noir was developed by novelist Fernando Marías in the project HNegra (Editorial Alrevés 2017). This included a book with 22 Noir short stories written by 22 women and portraying female protagonists on the wrong side of the law. They were illustrated by 22 different artists, and an itinerant exhibition accompanied the book presentations. Diverging from the femme fatale, it included criminals and vigilantes from different social extractions and with varied motivations, presenting more nuanced portrayals of these women. 2 For more information on Bly and a critical approach to her writings, see Jean Marie Lute’s edition Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings (Penguin 2014), as well as her enlightening introduction. 3 It would, therefore, be possible to qualify Klein’s statement that Gladden and Paschal are “anomalies” presented as “honorary men” because “nothing of the historical realities for women in 1864 anticipates the portraits of these two characters” (Woman 29). The change in Divorce Laws and the demand for private detectives in the 1850s and 1860s would suggest otherwise. 4 In the forthcoming “El surgimiento de la detective: género negro y mujeres en la industria del videojuego” [The Rise of the Female Detective: the Noir and Women in the Videogame Industry], Daniel Escandell-Montiel and I have provided a succinct analysis of the presence of female detectives in videogames, focusing on A Case of Distrust, a game set in the 1920s and also recovering the often forgotten tradition of early women detectives.

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Houdini & Doyle. Created by David Hoselton and David Titcher, ITV Studios, 2016. Kestner, Joseph A. Sherlock’s Sisters. The British Female Detective, 1864–1913. Routledge, 2016. Kimmel, Michael. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” Feminism and Masculinities, edited by P.F. Murphy, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 182–99. Kinsman, Margaret. “A Question of Visibility: Paretsky and Chicago.” Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995, pp. 15–27. Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender & Genre. University of Illinois Press, 1995. Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Created by Dick Wolf, NBC, 1999-present. Mackinnon, Kenneth. Representing Men: Maleness and Masculinity in the Media. Arnold, 2003. McChesney, Anita. “The Female Poetics of Crime in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘Mademoiselle Scuderi’.” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture, Vol. 24, 2008, pp. 1–25. Miller, Elizabeth C. “Trouble with the She-Dicks: Private Eyes and Public Women in The Adventures of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 33, no. 1, 2005, pp. 47–65. Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Created by Deb Cox and Fiona Eagger, ABC, 2012–15. Munt, Sally R. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. Routledge, 1994. The Pinkertons. Created by Kevin Abrams and Adam Moore, First-run syndication, 2014–15. Pykett, Lyn. “The Newgate Novel and Sensation Fiction, 1830–1868.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 19–39. Ramón Torrijos, María del Mar. “Dentro y fuera de la norma: representación textual de la mujer detective en la literatura anglo-norteamericana.” Garoza: revista de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Literarios de Cultura Popular, vol. 7, 2007, pp. 249–71. Ramsland, Katherine. “Kate Warne: First Female Detective.” The Forensic Examiner, Spring 2010, pp. 70–72. Reddy, Maureen T. Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel. Continuum, 1988. ———. “Women Detectives.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 191–207. Redondo, Dolores. El guardián invisible. 2012. Ediciones Destino, 2017. ———. Legado en los huesos. 2013. Ediciones Destino, 2017. ———. Ofrenda a la tormenta. 2014. Ediciones Destino, 2017. Remington Steele. Created by Robert Butler and Michael Gleason, NBC, 1982–1987. Roberts, Joan Warthling. “Amelia Butterworth: The Spinster Detective.” Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction, edited by Gleenwood Irons, University of Toronto Press, 1995, pp. 3–11. Rook, Clarence. “The Stir Outside the Café Royal.” Crime on Her Mind: Fifteen Stories of Female Sleuths from the Victorian Era to the Forties, edited by Michele B. Slung, Michael Joseph Ltd, 1976, pp. 62–69. The Rookie. Created by Alexi Hawley, ABC, 2018-present. Ross Nickerson, Catherine. “Women Writers Before 1960.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 29–41. Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell. British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Scream. Directed by Wes Craven, Woods Entertainment, 1996. Sims, George R. “The Man with the Wild Eyes.” Crime on Her Mind: Fifteen Stories of Female Sleuths from the Victorian Era to the Forties, edited by Michele B. Slung, Michael Joseph Ltd, 1976, pp. 34–61. Sims, Michael. “Introduction”. The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, edited by Michael Sims, Penguin Books, 2011, pp. ix–xxiii. Slung, Michele B. “Introduction”. Crime on Her Mind: Fifteen Stories of Female Sleuths from the Victorian Era to the Forties, edited by Michele B. Slung, Michael Joseph Ltd, 1976, pp. xv–xxx. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. “Madwomen and Attics.” Women and the Gothic, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, pp. 31–45. Walton, Priscilla L. “‘E’ Is for En/Gendering Readings: Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.” Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995, pp. 101–15. Walton, Priscilla L., and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. University of

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Afterword

Thus concludes the exploration of the past of these liminal female figures and the connections they establish with contemporary ones, proving the recurrent presence of vampires, prostitutes, quixotes, and detectives in cultural artifacts spanning four centuries, together with their relevance in our shared Western culture. In this examination, popular fiction has proven indispensable in order to understand the movements forward for which women were pressing, as well as the impulse backward that often society wished to impose. These innovative/conservative tensions are inherent to our conception of multidirectional feminist history, together with the idea of genre as hybrid and unstable. In this sense, the present work remains at the threshold of further research on the new forms of production and reception nowadays, and the ways in which they reflect current ideologies. It could hence serve as basis for inquiries on the place liminal women have in new media or in our current collective culture. We inhabit a digital age where audiences request more “unmediated” fictional experiences (Bolter and Grusin 4), as well as becoming more involved in the creation of popular artifacts, understanding culture as collective and participatory (Chau; Jenkins). Fiction has developed to adapt to these new demands, again with this idea of recollecting forward, for new media “refashions” older media, while older media “refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (Bolter and Grusin 15). The new and the old (re)define themselves against each other, in constant dialogue, and also transform the manner in which fiction engages and impacts its audience. For example, videogames offer increasingly complex narratives and have the potential of intensifying empathy toward what is being told (Cremin 3–4). This is particularly important given the number of players that exist, together with the fact that this empathy can be translated from the narrative to the real world, molding attitudes and values in matters as essential as gender equality (Maloney et al. 1709–10). From this we might derive that past and present media dialogue, not only in form but in content. In fact, contemporary rewritings and hybrid genres, such as the omnipresent mashup, serve as revision or homage to prior ideas, values, or tastes, addressing burning issues regarding postcolonialism or women’s rights, among others (Borham-Puyal; Ursa). In addition, new media has developed new spaces and new channels for past narratives to reach contemporary audiences (Morán; Mulvey-Roberts), opening the way for a reorientation toward the past that might rewrite the present and build a hope for the future. Therefore, this is not the end of the road, but one more connection between past and present media, narratives, and milestones in women’s advancement, an investigation that should continue expanding to include such varied cultural artifacts as videogames, blogs,

vlogs, twitterature, or the multimedia universes that expand our experience as consumers of fiction.

Works Cited Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999. Borham-Puyal, Miriam. “New Adventures in Old Texts: Gender Roles and Cultural Canons in Twenty-First-Century Mashups.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 51, no. 6, 2018, pp. 1312–31. DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.12738. Chau, Clement. “YouTube as a Participatory Culture.” New Directions for Youth Development, no. 128, 2010, pp. 65–74. DOI: 10.1002/yd.376. Cremin, Colin. Exploring Videogames with Deleuze and Guattari: Towards an Affective Theory of Form. Routledge, 2015. Jenkins, Henry, et al. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. MIT Press, 2009. Maloney, Marcus, Steven Roberts, and Alexandra Caruso. “‘Mmm… I love it, bro!’: Performances of Masculinity in YouTube Gaming.” New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 5, 2018, pp. 1697–714. DOI: 10.1177/1461444817703368. Morán-Sánchez, María. “Incorporating Popular Culture in Transmedia Storytelling: The Case of Frankenstein M.D.” Frankenstein Revisited: The Legacy of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece, edited by Miriam Borham-Puyal, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2018, pp. 65–79. Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. “Mashing-up Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the limits of adaptation.” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, vol. 13, 2014, pp. 17–37. Ursa, Mihaela. “Media Pride and Prejudices of Transmedial Traffic: Enacting Jane Austen with Zombies.” Caietele Echinox. Neo-Gothic—Hybridizations of the Imaginary, vol. 35, 2018, pp. 175–89. DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2018.35.11.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Adam 35–38 adaptation: contemporary adaptations of liminal narratives 20–21, 88 from literature to cinema 19, 26, 30–31, 35, 59, 87–88, 97 from literature to television 72n5, 87–88, 120 to the stage 72n6 agency: ambiguous 51, 57, 60, 65–66, 69 of the creator 2 creative 6 financial 66 lack of 52, 60–61, 66 limited 66–67 losing 22 women’s 14–16, 22, 25, 32, 34, 39, 52, 57, 59–61, 67, 72, 83, 85, 95 Aickman, Robert 24 Alfredson, Thomas 26 Allen, Grant 113, 121 Amelia Butterworth (Green) 114–15 Amélie (Jeunet) 13, 96–97 Amirpour, Ana Lily 39 angry young men 124 Aurora Leigh (Barrett Browning) 98 Austen, Jane 13, 43n1, 80, 84–85, 88–90, 92 Bakhtin, Mikhail 5, 27, 79 Barker, Jane 80 Barrett, Eaton Stannard 82 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 98 Basic Instinct 23

Báthory, Elizabeth 23, 43n3 Baztan Trilogy (Redondo) 14, 126–28 The Invisible Guardian 126 The Legacy in the Bones 126 Offering to the Storm 126 Belinda (Edgeworth) 84 Bhabha, Homi 6 The Big Sleep (Chandler) 106 The Bletchley Circle 14, 123–26 Blood and Roses (Vadim) 19, 36 The Blood of the Vampire (Marryat) 26 BloodRayne 24 Bly, Nellie 14, 110, 129n2 Bogart (Humphrey) 106, 119 Book of Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (Carter) 57 The Bookshop: the film 13, 97–98 the novel 87 Borden, Lizzie 58 Boswell (James) 49, 70 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 12, 23, 108–109 Branagh, Kenneth 59 Brides of Dracula 24 Bridge to Terabithia (Paterson) 94 Bridget Jones’s Diary 13, 86, 87–89 Buffini, Moira 23, 29–34, 58, 68–72 Buffy, The Vampire Slayer 20, 39 Bullock, Mrs 82 Burney, Frances 80 Butler, Josephine 55 Butler, Octavia 26 Byron (Lord) 37, 79, 87 Byzantium 12, 29–34 Campoamor, Ramón de 37 Carmilla (Le Fanu) 19, 36 Carmilla 21–22, 28 carnival: Bakhtin’s notion of 5, 79 carnivalesque subversion 5, 7, 13, 57, 82 carnivalesque nature of quixotism 79 as temporal subversion 5, 7, 13 Carter, Angela 23, 25–26, 32, 36, 57 Castle 116, 123 Cervantes, Miguel de 37, 75, 77, 94, 96, 98

Chandler, Raymond 106 Christie (Agatha) 114 Cinderella 58, 72n4 City of Vice 58 The Closer 116 Coixet, Isabel 97–98 Cold Case 116 Collins, Wilkie 108 commodification 57, 61, 67, 69, 71 commodity: liminoid as 5 virginity as a 128 woman as 32, 51–53, 64, 67 communitas 6, 8, 11, 26, 29, 38 female 22, 42 Conan Doyle, Arthur: as author 104–105, 111 as character 120–22 The Constant Gardener (Le Carré) 86 courtship: as liminal stage 23, 84–85, 88 feminocentric experience of 84–85, 88 feminocentric plot of 82, 86 focus on 43n1 freedom in 80 The Covent Garden Ladies (Rubenhold) 68 Craven, Wes 128 Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 13, 87, 90–92 Crossing Jordan 116 Dangerous Beauty 13, 59, 61–63 Davies, Andrew 87–88 Defoe, Daniel 13, 48, 56 Del Toro, Guillermo 92–94, 95 Delaney, Shelagh 124 Disney 91, 94 Disorderly Houses Act 70 divorce laws 108, 129n3 domesticity 50, 81–82 Don Quixote 75, 77 Don Quixote 37, 79, 96, 98 Donoghue, Emma 13, 58, 60, 63–68 Dorcas Dene, Detective 113 Dorothea (Bullock) 82 Dorothea Brooke (Eliot) 86, 114 The Downward Path 58

Dracula 21 Dracula 19–20, 24, 41 Edgeworth, Maria 84 Eliot, George 85–86, 96, 114 Emile, or, On Education (Rousseau) 84 Eurydice (Ovid) 125–26 Eve 35–38 The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (Pirkis) 113–14 Fatal Attraction 88 female body 6–7, 13, 47 categorized 53 control over 67 fear of 21, 59 fragmented 53, 60–61 mutability of 21, 128 The Female Detective (Ware) 14, 110, 129 The Female Quixote (Lennox) 78, 79–81 Female Quixotism (Tenney) 83 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan) 117 feminism: agenda 55, 61, 96 appropriation of genres 116 debates 65, 67 empowerment 96 engaging with the past 9–11, 23, 33, 72 feminisms 11, 30 history 3, 9–12, 30, 34, 115 128 hope 2–3 interpretations or revisions 25, 43, 63, 72 movement or waves 11, 112 motto 76 scholars 11 stories 23 texts 11 trends 71 parody of 60 post-feminism 67, 96 pseudo-feminism 99n5 Ferris, Emil 117, 119 Fielding, Helen 88 First World War 25, 115, 122–23

Fisher, Kitty 56 Fitzgerald, Penelope 97–98 Fledgling (Octavia Butler) 26 Forever 104 Franco, Veronica 61, 63 see also Dangerous Beauty; Rosenthal, Margaret Frankenhooker (Henenlotter) 13, 59–61 Frankenstein (Shelley) 33, 59, 72n6 The Frankenstein Chronicles 58, 72n5 Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Hoffmann) 108 freedom 2, 5, 13, 21, 61–62, 112, 123 in courtship 80 liminal freedom 69, 79, 80 limited freedom 66, 79, 81, 84 relative freedom 62, 65 sexual freedom 62 within marriage 84 Friedan, Betty 117, 128 Frye, Northrop 8 Gaskell, Elizabeth 85 Gautier, Téophile 22–23 Gerritsen, Tess 116 Giménez Bartlett, Alicia 127 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Amirpour) 12, 39–42 “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (Leiber) 23 Gissing, George 113–14 Gladden (Mrs) (also G) 110–12, 119, 121, 129n3 “Good Lady Ducayne” (Braddon) 23 Gothic: detectives 117 as genre 126–27 female gothic 126 fiction 106, 108, 126–28 heritage 111 hero 87 heroines 14, 108, 128 iconography 87 noir 127–28 novel 88 plot 85 readings 87 reimagining 57, 87, 127 romance 87, 108 vampiric gothic 26

villain 85 Grafton, Sue 105, 116 Great Expectations (Dickens) 125 Green, Anne Katherine 113–14 Green, Sarah 78–79 Greenwood, Kerry 120, 122 Hamilton, Elizabeth 78, 82 Harris’s List of Covent Garden Girls 13, 48, 68 A Harlot’s Progress (Hogarth) 13, 48, 71 Harlots 13, 58, 63, 68–72 Hays, Mary 2, 13, 82 Hayward, William Stephens 110, 114 Henenlotter, Frank 59 The Heroine (Barrett) 82 Hilda Wade 113, 121 The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House 48 see also Magdalen Hoffmann, E.T.A. 14, 108 Hogan, P.J. 89–90 Hogarth, William 13, 48, 54, 58, 71 The Honest Courtesan (Rosenthal) 61 Honourable Phryne Fisher (Greenwood) 120, 122–23 Houdini 120–22 Houdini & Doyle 14, 58, 120–22, 127 House M.D. 104 The House of Mirth (Wharton) 86 The Hunger 35 see also Scott, Tony; Strieber, Whitley hybridity: creative 6, 38, 42 generic 26, 29, 63, 111, 118, 126–27, 133 I Feel Pretty! 99n5 intelligence: agents 115, 117 officer 123 invisibility 13, 50, 63, 81, 84, 86, 109–12, 114, 117 Isn’t It Romantic 13, 72n4, 89–90 Jarmusch, Jim 35–38, 39, 43n4, n5, n7 Jesse James 119 Jessica Fletcher 114 Jessica Jones 116 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 96–97 Johnson, Samuel 70, 80

Jordan, Neil 31, 34 Julia Herlock Shomes (Mrs) 105 “The Lady of the House of Love” (Carter) 25 Lamia 21, 38 Laura Holt 115 Law and Order 104 Law and Order: SVU 116 Le Carré, John 86 Le Fanu, Sheridan 12, 19, 21 Leiber, Fritz 23–24 Lennox, Charlotte 78, 79–81, 82, 84, 89, 99n4, 108 Let the Right One In (Alfredson) 12, 26–29 Lewis, Matthew 87 La librería 97 see also The Bookshop Lilith 21, 37–38 The Limehouse Golem 58 limen 1–3, 9 liminaire 4 liminality: concept of 4–9 and history 9–12 and literature 7–8, 12, 15–16, 26 and point of view 7, 29, 79 and space 7, 42, 50 and sexuality 19, 25: societal liminality 7, 99n4, 110 liminal women: concept of 1–3, 5, 9–10, 12–16 liminoid 5–7 Lincoln, Abraham 109, 117, 119 Lindqvist, John Ajvide 26 Lois Caley 113 see also Allen, Grant Londonderry, Annie 110 Loveday Brooke 113–14 “Lovers on the Moon” (Campoamor) 37 “The Loves of Lady Purple” (Carter) 26, 57 “Luella Miller” (Wilkins-Freeman) 23 Luhrmann, Baz 63 Mackenzie, Henry 78 madness 21, 75, 127 Bakhtinian 79 epistemological 79

social 79 power of 95 quixotic madness 6, 76, 105 temporal or interspersed madness 79, 84 Magdalen: house 66 laundry 121 Maggie 121–22 penitents 54, 64 see also Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House Maggie Tulliver 86 Major Crimes 116 The Man of Feeling (Mackenzie) 78 Mandeville (Bernard) 48 Marlowe (Philip) 106 marriage 53 arranged 82 bigamous 52 fake 89 as form of oppression 40, 52, 66, 78, 80–82, 84, 121, 128 market or trade 51, 61, 85 as prescribed ending 5, 58, 78, 80, 84, 91, 107, 113, 122 politics of 62 proposal 114 traditional feminocentric plot of 82 Marryat, Florence 26 Marshall, Garry 58 medium 80, 122, 127 Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Hays) 13, 82 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Hamilton) 78 The Mentalist 111 Middlemarch (Eliot) 86 The Mill on the Floss (Eliot) 86 Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries 123 Miss Marple (Christie) 105, 114 “Miss Pinkerton” (Rinehart) 117 Miss Van Snoop (Rook) 113 A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (Mandeville) 48 Moll Flanders (Defoe) 13, 48, 50, 52, 64, 72 The Monk (Lewis) 87 Moore, Catherine L. 23–24 More, Hannah 76 Moriarti 111 “La morte amoureuse” (Gautier) 22 Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann) 59, 63

Mrs Warren’s Profession (Shaw) 56–57, 69, 72n2 Murder She Wrote 114 Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan) 89–90 My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Ferris) 14, 117, 119–20 My Secret Life 49 Neo-Victorian: literature 16n2, 58 mash-up 72n5 rewritings 63 New Woman (also New Women) 1, 6, 11, 25, 105, 113, 115, 120–22, 124 age of the 107 backlash to 11 change brought by 9 as emblem 2 as liminal figure 3, 5, 26, 86, 104, 123 rise of 11, 109, 120 spirit of the 110 Noir: as genre 111, 126–27, 128, 129n1 Gothic noir 127–28 noir heroine 128 in videogames 129n4 predecessor of 107 Northanger Abbey (Austen) 13, 85, 87–88 Nosferatu 25 Olivia Benson 116 Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch) 12, 35–38 orientation 3, 6–7, 9–10, 126, 128, 134 Oruña, María 127 “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” (Aickman) 24 Pamela Andrews (Richardson) 64 Pan’s Labyrinth (Del Toro) 13, 92–94 Paretsky, Sara 105, 116 parody: 72n4, 75, 78, 82–83, 89, 9, 105 of female performance 57 feminist parody 60 and liminality 4–5, 7 Paschal (Mrs) 110–12, 114, 121, 129n3 Paterson, Katherine 94 Perkins Gilman, Charlotte 86 Petra Delicado (Bartlett) 127

Pinkerton: Agency 109–10 agents 117 Allan Pinkerton 109–10, 117–19 –archives 117 The Pinkertons 14, 117–19 Pirkis, Catherine Louisa 113 Poe, Edgar Allan 111 Poldark 58 police: as body 115, 117, 124 case 127 chief of 120 deputy of 125 Detective 108 force 14, 115, 120, 127 officer 111 policemen 34, 121 recruits 110 policewomen 104, 115, 120–21 work 125–26 Polidori (John) 30 polytemporality 1, 3, 9–11, 33, 128 popular: figures 104–105 imagination 106 literature 79–80, 107, 113, 116, 118, 121, 123, 129, 133 media 86, 91, 104 narratives 104 Pretty Woman (Marshall) 58, 63, 72n4, 89 Priddon, Sarah 51 see also Salisbury, Sally Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 87–88 Prince Charming 63 princess 39, 91, 92–93 property: legitimacy of 76 right to own 15 women as 52, 60, 69 propriety 2, 76, 80, 86, 105, 109, 112, 121 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 5 Radcliffe, Ann 87–88, 126–28 Redondo, Dolores 14, 126–28 Remington Steele 115, 123 Revelations of a Lady Detective (Hayward) 14, 110–12 Richardson, Samuel 64 Rinehart, Mary Roberts 117

Ripper (Jack the) 58, 125 Ripper’s murders 71 Ritchie, Guy 58 Rizzoli & Isles 116 Romance Readers (Sarah Green) 78 Rook, Clarence 113 The Rookie 116 Rosenthal, Margaret 61 Rousseau (Jean-Jacques) 84 Roxana (Defoe) 48, 50, 52, 64 Rubenhold, Hallie 68 Sabrina 86 Salisbury, Sally 51–52, 64 satire 83, 90 anti-Jacobin satire 78 and liminality 4, 7 Scotch Novel Reading (Sarah Green) 79 Scotland Yard 120, 124 Scott, Tony 35, 37 Scott, Walter 79 Scream (Craven) 128 Scudéry, Mademoiselle or Madeleine de 80, 108 Second World War 115 sensation: creatures of 78 fiction 58, 106–108, 118 literature 19 new 19 woman of 79 Sense and Sensibility (Austen) 78 silence: conversational silence 109 women’s silence 49, 63, 96 silenced women 13, 70, 81, 86, 96, 119, 128 social silence 47 siren 12, 23, 31 siren-like 22 “Shambleau” (Moore) 23 Shaw, George Bernard 56–57 Shelley, Mary 13, 59, 72n5 Shelley (Percy) 37 Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle) 104–105, 111, 120–21 Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie) 58 Sims, George 113

Slammerkin (Donoghue) 13, 58, 63–67 slave: former 66, 69, 118 sex 95, 118 white 56 woman as 52 slavery: prostitution as 69 women’s slavery 65–66, 82 white slavery 58 Sleeping Beauty 25 Snyder, Zack 92, 94–96 Some Considerations on Street-Walkers (Defoe) 48 spy: detective as 108, 111 women as 94 see also intelligence; undercover Stoker, Bram 12, 19, 21 Stopes, Marie 122 Strieber, Whitley 35, 37 submission 13, 62, 69, 78–80, 93 subversion: ambiguous 96, 114 of clichés 90 controlled 9 of decorum 54 of hierarchies 79 of the norm 57 potential 7 of principles 76 temporal 5, 7, 13, 63, 79, 82, 84 of roles 40, 105 as rebellion 1, 26, 79, 82, 92–93, 95, 98 Sucker Punch (Snyder) 13, 92, 94–96 suffrage 15, 122 see also vote suffragette 122 suffragist 1, 110 Swynnerton, Annie 1–3, 42 The Dreamer 2 Illusions 2 New Risen Hope 2 The Sense of Sight 2 The Southing of the Sun 2 The Tryst 1 Teeth 40 Tenney, Tabitha 83, 91, 99n4 third space 6, 38, 49

threshold: and liminality 2–3, 8–9, 19–20, 26, 28, 42, 47, 54, 61, 63, 69, 79, 98, 107, 114, 127, 133 spatial 6, 19, 25–26, 27, 38, 49–51, 80 temporal 2, 14, 19, 39, 80, 119, 124 as vantage point 29, 35 Tomlins, Elizabeth Sophia 78 trace 3, 9–11, 14, 16n2, 19, 25, 33, 80, 93 Traffic in Souls 58 True Blood 20, 43 Turner, Victor 4–7, 9, 54, 89 Twilight Saga 20, 24, 43 undercover: agent 109, 115, 123 journalists 14, 110 operatives 115 work 110, 112 Underworld 23 Unforgettable 104 Vadim, Roger 19, 36 Valentina Redondo (Oruña) 127 The Vampire Diaries 20, 43 A Vampire Story 29–31 Van Gennep, Arnold 3–4 Van Helsing 24 Verne (Jules) 110 Veronica Mars 116 V.I. Warshawski (Paretsky) 116 The Victim of Fancy (Tomlins) 78 videogames 12, 24, 96, 104, 129, 133–34 Vidocq (Eugène-François) 109 vindication: of liminal women 2, 68–69, 129n1 of social order 8 of women’s freedom 62 Violet Strange (Green) 113, 122 visibility 72, 81, 83–84, 112, 114–15, 122 vote: right to 2 for women 72, 122 Walker, Charles 51–52 Ware Redding, James 110, 112, 129 Warne, Kate 14, 109–10, 117–20, 121

Westworld 59, 61 Wharton, Edith 86 What Men Want 99n5 While You Were Sleeping 86 Wilkins-Freeman, Mary 23–24 Wollstonecraft, Mary 2, 13, 56, 58–59, 66, 70, 72n6, 76 Working Girl 86 Working Girls (Borden) 58 The Wrongs of Woman (Wollstonecraft) 13, 50–54 The Yellow Wall-Paper (Perkins Gilman) 86 Yo soy Don Quijote de la Mancha 98