ABSTRACT

Many narratives about evil women involve a scene in which the villainess narrates the reasons for her moral aberration; think of the femme fatale’s bid for sympathy at the end of many hardboiled detective movies. This rhetorical moment becomes so conventional that it ends in parody: Robert Zemeckis’s postmodern Jessica Rabbit captures the link between representation and gendered evil with a single, sultry line: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”1 Victorian literature is no exception, and many popular Victorian narratives use a confession or apologia scene to confine the morally errant female in categories that explain and thereby normalize her. The correlation between confession and categorical confinement helps to explain the attraction of popular nineteenth-century genres like sensation and detective fiction, because the correlation promotes a sense of closure and moral orthodoxy approved by typical readers of those genres.