Discourse and detection: Gendered readings of scientific and legal evidence in the Victorian novel

My dissertation examines the link between representations of gender professionalization in the Victorian novel and changing methodologies in the field of forensic science. Using Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1848), Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady (1875), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), I examine how female investigators go about locating new evidence and developing new ways of interpreting it to produce socially-productive information. In particular, the dissertation focuses on three key issues: First, women in the Victorian novel demonstrate the problems with existing professional methodologies not by rejecting them entirely, but rather by subtly modifying them and by demonstrating the inherent instability of interpretive methods understood as stable by male professionals. I argue that female investigators in the Victorian novel employ the traditional methods of investigation and argumentation that such fields as science, medicine, and law use, integrating them into more subjective approaches such as memory and intuition to generate new models of narrative construction for forensic investigation. Secondly, women are the objects of gender expectations within the novels and must find ways of operating within these expectations as they engage in the act of detection. Thirdly, the success of female investigators does not rest with their ability to produce useful information alone, but rather is in part determined by the extent to which their new methods are accepted by and adopted by male professionals. The central claim that emerges from these issues is that women gain agency and authority within the novel not by rejecting male professional authority, but rather by working within existing gender expectations.