CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Strike, Theresa |
|---|---|
| Title | 'Angels of Arsenic' and Ligatures: Analyzing Press Discourse and Expert Opinion on French Murderesses of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries |
| Summary | The purpose of this thesis is to explore perceptions about aberrant women in France between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by analyzing two case studies: the murder trials of Marie Lafarge (1840) and Marguerite Steinheil (1909). This thesis argues that across this span of time, French society, culture, and politics underwent dramatic transformations, and one of the realms where we may view this changing landscape was in specializations like psychiatry, which came into their own and were able to present an authoritative interpretation on women’s behavior ‘abnormalities’. By tracing what it meant to be ‘abnormal’, ‘normal’, ‘threatening’, or ‘pathological,’ in both public and expert accounts, we can trace social anxieties in response to these two infamous crimes. By engaging in this diachronic analysis, we are better able to understand the way that ‘deviant’ women were used as discursive subjects that reflected broader social concerns and echoed evolving discourses on social ills. |
| Supervisor | Lafferton, Emese |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/strike_theresa.pdf |
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