ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the portrayals of murderous women in two well-known eighteenth-century novels: Daniel Defoe's Roxana, the Fortunate Mistress and Henry Fielding's Amelia. It draws from both legal and feminist approaches to eighteenth-century fiction to explore these novels' representations of the eighteenth-century female criminal subject. Roxana is a prostitute who is deeply implicated in, but does not commit the murder of her daughter. In Amelia, the murderess, Miss Mathews, is a minor character that functions as a foil to the novel's eponymous heroine. Roxana is famous for its tension, at the level of plot and narration, between moral gestures and fetishistic delineation of the pleasures of its criminal anti-heroine. Like Roxana, however, Amelia reveals the paradoxes at work in some frangible conventional formulations of female nature. The female criminals that populate the Newgate of Amelia are notable not for their violence but for their excessive and criminalized sexuality.
