Lizzie Seal: Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representations of Women Who Kill

Abstract

It is a truism that, statistically, women commit fewer murders than do men. We may, as feminists, be irritated that, when women do commit murder, their act may be regarded with more apparent severity than that shown to a male offender. We may be irritated by attempts, conscious or subconscious, to explain why a woman should have acted in a manner that appears to violate the norms of feminine behaviour. We may be tired of the depiction of women murderers as being either mad or bad—nothing in between. The canon of literature surrounding those cases of women who kill tend to concentrate on a few, well-known and seemingly ubiquitous cases in order to provide some kind of explanation why these women acted as they did, or to examine their treatment within the legal system (see for example Birch 1994; Schone 2000; Allen 1987). In ‘Women, Murder and Femininity’, Lizzie Seal moves beyond those ‘‘usual’’ cases of women who have killed in order to examine more completely the ways in which women killers are represented by the media. She also moves away from the ‘‘usual’’ kinds of murder that women commit—those of an abusive spouse or of children—to examine how women killers have been perceived and presented in our society. These violent women, as she notes, have caused anxiety in society, and she links examination of her case studies with a micro-history of her chosen period. The book is very much a sum of two distinct parts. In the first, Seal examines a number of discourses used in the presentation of women who kill. She has chosen five typologies: the masculine woman; the muse/mastermind dichotomy; the damaged personality; the respectable woman; and the witch. By discussing cases that are well known, she illustrates how the presentation of these women has been affected by their inclusion in one or more of these typologies. This is, in the main, successful. However, I was left slightly uncomfortable by the inclusion of Mary Bell as an example of a ‘‘damaged personality’’, not because I dispute the typology that Seal has applied, but