Ripper novels: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's “Rough Justice”, Marie Corelli's “Wormwood”, and Marie Belloc Lowndes' “The Lodger”
Abstract
During the fall of 1888, Jack the Ripper swept through the East End of London and left behind the mutilated bodies of what were presumed to be drunken prostitutes. Academic criticism recognizes Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Bram Stoker's Dracula as Ripper novels, but Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Rough Justice, Marie Corelli's Wormwood: A Drama of Paris, and Marie Belloc Lowndes' The Lodger are also Ripper novels. Braddon, Corelli, and Lowndes present their teleology of the Ripper and his victims to protest masculine surveillance of women. By doing so, these authors are able to critique the male arbitrated divide between high and low, or popular, literature as they sought to position themselves as professionals within the literary field. These novels are essentially Modernist texts which promote their narratives concerning Jack the Ripper and his crimes though they were dismissed as typical Victorian texts by contemporary critics. As Jean Francois Lyotard theorizes in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, the master narratives failed in the Victorian era and the competing narratives which arose could only do so in a Modernist context. Braddon's, Corelli's, and Lowndes' novels offer insights into what might be considered a Female Ripper genre. By recognizing their participation, our views on the history of women's writing and their engagement with the Ripper genre and aestheticism will by necessity be reshaped.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Palmer, Purdue University.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
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