Abstract
This thesis examines the representation of female criminality in contemporary French crime fiction, offering an interdisciplinary analysis of the stereotypes about women and crime which are both invoked and disrupted in Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex (2011), Fred Vargas’s Quand sort la recluse (2017), Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce (2016) and Hannelore Cayre’s La Daronne (2017). Each text features a female protagonist whose criminal character role — be it the serial killer, the killer nanny or the small-time gangster — is entwined with a recognisable archetype of female transgression: the femme fatale, the witch, the mère fatale and the bitch. These archetypes call to mind specific and purposefully reductive stereotypes about how and where women commit crime, what kind of women do so and why. While French crime fiction has historically indulged in such clichéd representations of femininity, recent decades have seen positive changes in the depiction of female characters in the field; likewise, scholarly interest in the legal and cultural representation of women’s criminality is vibrant. However, there is a lacuna in French and Francophone scholarship regarding the depiction of criminal women in crime fiction specifically. The present thesis addresses this gap, and evaluates the subversive approach to the female criminal character displayed by the above-mentioned authors — who deploy the archetypes of female criminality not as reductive shorthands, but as motors for innovation and resistance. This resistance is feminist in nature, as the female criminal is contextualised with reference to circumstances of inequality and injustice both fictional and real. I thus consider these novels as examples of the polar féministe, where the concerns of feminism are taken up and woven into the plot of the crime novel and even alter the genre conventions on which it draws. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the archetypes of female criminality are useful tools for the advancement of feminist principles in crime fiction, offering to writers and readers alike the opportunity to reassess our assumptions about female criminality, and about the feminist potential of crime fiction itself.Thesis is embargoed until 31 December 2028.
| Date of Award | Dec 2023 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Sponsors | AHRC Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership |
| Supervisor | Dominique Jeannerod (Supervisor) & Andrew Pepper (Supervisor) |
Keywords
- French crime fiction
- feminism
- female criminality
- polar féministe
- gender studies
- French