| "Investigative Fictions: Victorian Mystery Novels and the Science of Criminal Anthropology, 1860--1913" compares representations of the criminal in late nineteenth-century popular fiction and the emerging science of criminal anthropology. Putting crime at the center of their respective projects, scientists and novelists created narratives in which the criminal signaled a crisis of social stability: from increased fraud to impersonation to murder, sensational criminal acts threatened to overturn received assumptions about gender, race, and class identity. While the criminal's presence in these texts inevitably indicates a social breakdown, I show that grappling with criminals often provoked scientists and novelists to mobilize innovative narrative forms that sought to recuperate the loss the criminal represents. For criminal anthropologists, recuperation of this loss involved devising new types of scientific investigation; Victorian novelists responded to the management strategies scientists proposed by adapting, deliberately ignoring, or rejecting the narrative paradigms that underwrote investigative techniques. In creating their own "investigative fictions" to solve the problems that criminals posed, novelists devised narrative modes that could apprehend the criminal and bring about textual closure. Reading these discourses in relationship to one another contributes to an understanding of the way in which mystery novels produce their own epistemological systems or ways of knowing. Through a comparison of these two kinds of texts, I argue that novelistic representations of criminals are not so much reflections on the failures of Victorian society at large as opportunities to develop novelistic interrogations of personal identity, progress, and perception. Among the texts this dissertation considers are Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and Armadale, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Henry Dunbar and Lady Audley's Secret, Bram Stoker's Dracula, R. L. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. In addition, I read these novels with and against numerous texts from the science of criminal anthropology, as articulated in literature on fingerprinting, anthropometrics, photography, psychology, biology, ethnology, archeology, and the museum, all of which contribute to the strategic management of the Victorian criminal. |
