ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses popular eighteenth-century narratives of female homicide within the contexts of contemporaneous discourses on criminality, murder, gender, and fiction. Murder is a crime that requires plot, that story that lurks underneath and apart from the body's remains. Unlike a male murder, a woman who kills is portrayed in terms of the ways in which her violent act either belies or reveals aspects of her gender. In the eighteenth century, female transgression of even the most minor ilk was thought to implicate a woman's natural role. Augustan legal writings and codes about the status of women exhibit a schizophrenic view of female criminality similar to that in the popular imagination. Eighteenth-century common law collapsed women's domestic crime and crime against the state, viewing them as equally dangerous to the social order. Eighteenth-century calls to arms about crime demonstrate a particular fear of criminal behavior that slides into a generalized fear of the moral and physical decline of English society.
