I love the clichés of twee British TV murder mysteries – the village fete, the teacup switch, the gunshot in the dark room – but what I like best is the presence of lots of fantastic old ladies, a group which are underrepresented in nearly every other type of television genre.

In 1999, people over 60 made up 21 percent of the UK population, but just 7 percent of the television population (source) and in 2012 a BBC report (PDF) flagged the absence of older women on TV as a major problem.

I’ve said in another post that for the most part in popular culture, old women are given one of just two identities: dear old biddy or evil crone. In Twee British Murder there is a greater range of stereotypes to be found, although the biddy/crone dichotomy is still there. Through by no means a comprehensive list, I’ve identified five overlapping Twee British Murder character options for older women.

1) The Help

Rosalie Williams as Mrs Hudson. Image: Granada

An army of elderly female housekeepers, cooks, nurses, cleaners and secretaries form a vital part of the machinery of Twee British Murder.

Although they are rarely the killer, and tend to be only incidental victims (when they Know Too Much, for example) they have a vital dramatic function, especially as witnesses.

The cook remembers that someone different from usual offered to take the breakfast tray up to her mistress, the former nanny recalls a crucial detail from a suspect’s past…

It’s these long-suffering souls that make up the bulk of body-finders too, although they’re almost always questioned and dismissed with no further contribution except looking anxious.

But why are the servants and employees so swiftly ruled out? This 1928 article, 20 Rules for Writing Detective Fiction, states that:

A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.

Of course! Servants are a bunch of crims already: making one of them the murderer would be TOO OBVIOUS.

Moving on. An atypical member of this category is Sherlock Holmes’ tolerant landlady, Mrs Hudson. This is from The Adventure of the Dying Detective:

The landlady stood in the deepest awe of him and never dared to interfere with him, however outrageous his proceedings might seem. She was fond of him, too, for he had a remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women.

I am a little obsessed with the 1980s Granada series starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes. In this series, Mrs Hudson (played by Rosalie Williams) is an important part of the small ‘family’ which surrounds the detective. Here’s one of my favourite Mrs Hudson moments, from The Cardboard Box, at 4:40mins in:

2) Frail Rich Lady

Often bedridden, with elaborate medical care requirements, and generally found in a spooky old house surrounded by squabbling, grasping relatives, these women are often trying to make a last minute change to their will when they meet their demise.

Frail Rich Ladies tend to be victims, but can occasionally turns out to be killers. Letitia Blacklock in A Murder is Announced, Laura Welman in Sad Cypress, and Amelia Barrowby in How Does Your Garden Grow? are classic examples from the Christie canon, as is Emily Arundell from Dumb Witness.

Bearing in mind the underlying biddy/crone stereotype binary, most of the above examples are on the biddy side of things. But there’s a fabulous Frail Rich Lady getting her crone on in one of Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly stories, The Woman in the Big Hat (PDF). She’s 12mins in:

3) Eccentric Spinster

Eccentric Spinsters are also occasionally widows. The important thing is that they have been manless long enough for their eccentricity to flourish.

This is my very favourite old lady character type, and one that I aspire to. One of the best examples is the three sisters in Agatha Christie’s Nemesis. Here they are having tea with Miss Marple, at 7:09 mins in:

I love how there’s a bit of a maiden, mother and crone thing going on, with Clothilde, the more bookish, stereotypable-as-mannish, serious one (crone), Anthea the ‘girly’, immature one (maiden) and their more well-adjusted sister Lavinia, who tries to keep everything under control (mother). Lavinia’s the one who had been married, of course, so she’s coded as noticeably more ‘normal’ than the other two.

The Bradbury-Scott sisters above are at the biddy end of the spinster spectrum, but there’s a fantastic crone version called Honoria Lyddiard in the Midsomer Murders episode Written In Blood. She’s at 5:28 mins in:

Eccentric Spinsters can be victims, witnesses or killers, and can often be found providing another dramatic function: introducing a supernatural, prophetic red herring.

This provides a contrast with the detective’s rational method and cheap thrills for the viewer, as well as obfuscating the sequence of events for both. Prunella Scales turns in a scene-stealing performance as psychic Eleanor Bunsall in another Midsomer Murders episode, Beyond the Grave, and in Dumb Witness one of the two Miss Tripps receives a message for Poirot, at 15:13mins in:

4) Village Busybody

A provincial murder mystery staple. Like the servants and staff, this character provides vital information and misinformation, clues and red herrings for viewers. Without this character, there might be no mystery at all. She is a key witness, frequently a victim because she’s seen or heard something she shouldn’t have, but never the killer.

Although she’s only middle-aged in the TV adaption, Caroline Sheppard is worth a mention because of Agatha Christie’s comment in her autobiography that:

It is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the book – an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home.

My New Year’s resolution this year was to get the word ‘acidulated’ into every tenth conversation.

While Caroline Sheppard is relatively harmless, her crone counterpart uses her knowledge to manipulate others. Mrs Rainbird is an extremely camp example of this in the Midsomer Murders pilot The Killings at Badger’s Drift at 22mins:

5) Wise Woman

Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. Image: BBC

*Puts on What Would Miss Marple Do? t-shirt*

There’s not enough space here to do her justice, and I haven’t managed to find the perfect clip, but I wanted to share this: in her autobiography Agatha Christie likens Miss Marple to her grandmother in that “though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.”

That “frightening accuracy” is the hallmark of the Wise Woman, and Marple isn’t the only one in this role solving murders – I’d also put forward Gladys Mitchell’s creation Mrs Bradley.

The glamorous TV version of Mrs Bradley played by Diana Rigg departs pretty drastically from the description of her appearance in the books (she is emphatically witch-like: “She possessed nasty, dry, claw-like hands, and her arms, yellow and curiously repulsive, suggested the plucked wings of a fowl”). Nonetheless, she still provides a worthy crone counterpart to Miss Marple’s biddiness. In this clip, she’s driving away from her ex-husband’s funeral at 3:40mins:

Zoe Brennan, in her book The Older Woman in Recent Fiction, links both Miss Marple and Mrs Bradley (as well as other older women detectives such as Miss Silver and Miss Pym) with feminine archetypes, from fairytale witches to the Furies. This is a connection which Agatha Christie clearly had in mind when one character gives Marple the nickname ‘Nemesis’.

Postscript

For some more info about why this all matters, have a look at Understanding Age Stereotypes and Ageism (PDF). It’s also worth noting that while Twee British Murder is good on age diversity and features a lot of women characters, it fails dismally across other diversity strands.

However, in the pursuit of pop culture adventures I’ve recently found myself spending some time with Mary Russell, the heroine of a series of books by Laurie R King which also feature Sherlock Holmes as her mentor, and later her husband. Like Holmes, Russell (her preferred moniker) is intelligent, logical, brave, unconventional and excellent at fighting, with a superb aim and a talent for disguises etc etc. She is Jewish, British-American, and studies theology at Oxford. She also dresses in men’s clothes.

What drew me to the books was the fact that Russell is a self-described feminist. Although she mentions her political beliefs in the first book, 1994’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the second is all about feminism. Well, feminism and theology. And murder. It’s even called A Monstrous Regiment of Women. I enjoyed it immensely, despite many silly moments and patchy writing. Incidentally the majority of the writing is pretty good, and I feel that the voice of Holmes rings true most of the time, which is no mean feat.

The author says of the series:

Mary Russell is what Sherlock Holmes would look like if Holmes, the Victorian detective, were a) a woman, b) of the Twentieth century, and c) interested in theology. If the mind is like an engine, free of gender and nurture considerations, then the Russell and Holmes stories are about two people whose basic mental mechanism is identical. What they do with it, however, is where the interest lies.

I find this intriguing, and I’m tempted to read the books again with that genderless mental mechanism in mind. For Holmes, the mind as an engine is his proclaimed ideal; flawless logic and cool rationality. Watson (in Conan Doyle’s A Scandal In Bohemia) famously describes Holmes’ low opinion (and fear?) of those “softer passions” which “might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.”

Of course, it’s Holmes’s human deviation from this mechanical ideal that is often most interesting to readers and fans. (See also: Mr Spock.) Russell is more well-adjusted; that is to say she acknowledges her emotions, and her desire, although grudgingly. Whether this is because she is a woman, because she is a citizen of the 20thC or because we as readers have more access to her thoughts than we do Holmes’s I couldn’t say.

She’s also very androgynous, something I enjoyed reading in a historical setting. But her masculine traits made me wonder if a feminine female Holmes is an impossibility. Would the character be in a permament spasm of contradiction or would they make a better go of reconciling femininity and reason than Holmes seems to be able to? Perhaps Conan Doyle came closer than most himself with Irene Adler, often positioned as Holmes’ female counterpart. While she is formidably intelligent, she is also impulsive, emotional, and sexual.

The thing I found most difficult to deal with, like many readers I suspect, is their May to December romance. When they meet, he is 52. And she is 15. When they marry they are 58 and 21 respectively. And for added creepiness, after their first (awful, awful) kiss: “By God,” he murmured throatily into my hair. “I’ve wanted to do that since the moment I laid eyes upon you.” What is there to say except *vom*?

Thankfully, the first hint of anything sexual between them arrives right at the end of the second book in the series when Russell is 21. Holmes just spends most of the first novel in which she is a teenager stroking her hair in a fatherly fashion. Still, there are some unsettlingly groom-y undertones which means the novels rely very heavily on the reader’s trust in Holmes as the embodiment of honour.

The other bothersome thing for me is Russell’s unavoidable Mary Sue-ness. As well as acting as an avatar for the author (also a Jewish, British-American, feminist theologian) she ticks lots of the boxes: succeeds at everything, is effortlessly friends with everyone, has a dramatic and tragic backstory, no flaws that aren’t endearing, and so on.

Arguably though, as far as being a freakish overachiever goes she is no more of a Mary Sue than Holmes himself. I think there’s a lot of truth in the argument that Mary Sue and her counterpart Marty Stu face double standards, and that successful, powerful female characters are dismissed or undermined through accusations of being a Mary Sue. Rhiannon at Feminist Fiction writes:

…once the words “Mary Sue” have been uttered, all productive conversation is shut down. It says that the character is not worth talking about, not worth analyzing, because she’s somehow incomplete… She’s not a character but a projection of female fantasy, and therefore innately, indisputably bad. Any character who falls into this category might be somewhat one-dimensional, lacking the depth and flaws needed for a really compelling character, but the term goes beyond that, throwing on implications of worthlessness (at best) and a kind of superior disgust at girlish dreams and ambitions (at worst). Because “Mary Sue” only refers to female characters.

Although I picked up the first book because of the fandom, I found myself wishing the Mary Russell books had simply been a series of novels about a feminist woman detective in the early 20thC. I think Russell would make a fine addition to the ranks occupied by Miss Marple and Mrs Bradley, being a little less genteel and younger, more impulsive, and more of an action detective in the manner of Holmes, employing disguises and fisticuffs as necessary. They’re good stories, and although Holmes is in the background I’m not sure he needs to be there at all.

• Awesome photo of two 1980s punk girls on the Tube.
• Retronaut: the most horrendous and terrifying vintage valentines imaginable. More here! And finally, a bit of 1900s those-humourless-suffragettes sentiment here via Brainpickings… some things never change, eh ;)
• The Case of the Sudden Femme Fatale: author Delilah Des Anges guest blogs for author Melanie Clegg (whole lotta authorship in here) on reimaginations of Irene Adler.
• Scandalous Women Celebrates Black History Month (note: the USA has BHM now, the UK in autumn)
• Female Illustrators You Should Know, plus more, more, and more!

Father Christmas begins his judgement of whether or not potential gift recipients have been Naughty or Nice well back in February. January is his holiday month, where no paperwork is done. It all starts in February, that judgement process. He’s got a lot of people to get through, and the judgement of Naughty or Nice is perilous. Some people write him letters. That makes it easier; except those bastards who write something extolling how such a polarised morality system is flawed, and the whole concept of “Naughtiness” is subjective. These people usually get a lump of coal, a black top hat and the GPS location of my bedroom.

As you can imagine, the more Father Christmas can mass-judge and dispense identical recompense or reward – known as “blanketing” – the easier his job is. So any opportunity he has to reward an entire section of humanity in one go, he takes it. Of course he does. Wouldn’t you?

Anyway, that’s why Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows exists. Father Christmas noticed that an awful lot of people who had exhibited exemplary behaviour this year were linked by their communal desire to see Robert Downey Jnr. touch Jude Law with as much of his naked body as possible, and pulled a few strings at Warner Brothers – he has fingers in many pies, you see – and here we are.

I got all this, incidentally, from a few of my double-agent elves stationed in his workhouse. I intend on repurposing his operation for my own, er, purposes.¹

So: Sherlock Holmes 2 (let’s call it that for short) follows in the grand tradition of making Holmes and Watson as blatantly married as possible without allowing them to actually kiss. From my perspective as an audience member, it looks almost like a game directors (in this case, Guy Ritchie) play: given that both Holmes and Watson have female love interests, how can they convey just how deeply involved with each other they are without resorting to boring, obvious techniques such as having them snog or surreptitiously shag in a train? Ritchie leaps the first hurdle – that of the lady interlopers – with little difficulty. He kills off Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) in a single scene with no ambiguity or remorse. Thought she was fun and interesting and looked forward to seeing more of her in this film? Tough! Down she goes in a fit of unceremonious bloody coughing under the impassive gaze of Dr Moriarty (the terrifying Jared Harris) from behind a teacup.

Watson’s wife, Mary (Kelly Reilly), though clearly a bit of an unflappable, gun-cocking badass herself, gets about ten lines in total, and is dressed up and polished as a dreadful gooseberry to Watson and Holmes’s gay domestic bliss. It’s a shame, and, you know, I’d hiss and spit about it more and about how it seems that people are resentful of any differently-gendered third party to a homoerotic pairing (canon or not) as if any hint of heterosexuality immediately ruins everything like bisexuality or polyamory don’t fucking exist BUT YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND, THERE WAS HALF-NAKED SPOONING AND LOTS OF HURT/COMFORT. I CAN’T STAY ANGRY AT IT.

I just penned a paragraph listing all of the things Holmes and Watson do or say to each other that could have been replaced wholesale with extended, visceral scenes of them fellating each other’s tongues, but then I ran out of recommended wordcount for the article and I don’t want to anger my editor. Suffice to say, it’s a lot, verging on ALL THINGS. You’re probably not very surprised. I did say the film was a reward for the RDJ/JL cabal and the Holmes/Watson contingent. That’s a lot of people who’ve been basically Mahatma Ghandi this year. Well done those people.

But it does bring me back to the point I always get up in my grill when I watch “bromances” such as this, and that is: it’s not enough. Don’t you dare call this a queer film because it isn’t. It mollifies, rather than actually addresses any visibility issues. It flirts, but is ultimately a bit of a cocktease. I know there’s the argument that emotionally intense (but not actually sexual) relationships between women get a lot of screen time in fictional media, and intimate inter-female friendships have a bigger presence in the collective conscience of Western culture (that group toilet trip thing, for instance) so it’s not fair that men can only slap each other tentatively on the back or – gasp! – they’ll be branded as “gay”, but what I’m most concerned with is the abandonment of all this bollocks heterocentrism. Let’s just stop erecting the acceptable-emotional-involvement barricade just shy of physical intimacy just in case we end up ruining Western civilisation with these thoughtless same-gender relationships. Go the whole bloody hog, would you? Or are you only flirting with the idea of homoeroticism because you think it’s ridiculous? Neither is good.

And I know a million people before me have complained about the lack of queer visibility in mainstream media, and how mixed-gender couples get an awful lot of privilege in terms of representation, but seeing something like Sherlock 2 – whereby the two heroes come so close to just coupling it up all over the screen but are clearly prevented by the fear that the merest hint of consummation will send the Straight Cis Male audience members fleeing like Bill Bailey from the Trollhunter – just makes me see red. The Rage Cage descends. (I have actually written this part of the review through the Rage Cage after all!)

…Which might explain why there’s very little actual review. I’m sorry. Let me fix that. The violence is up in this film: it’s very gritty and very hard-hitting compared with its predecessor, and there’s a lot of Ritchie’s favourite slo-mo impacts and explosions. A lot of the violence focuses on the militaristic, rather than the directly interpersonal as in the first film. There’s a scene wherein our heroes and the amazing Noomi Rapace (who was Lisbeth Salander in the original Girl With The Dragon Tattoo films) as a tousle-haired “Gypsy” knife-fighting fortune teller (oh my god I’d bloody love to see a Traveller character of any ethnic background who wasn’t at least one of those things) charge through a forest whilst being shelled by heavy artillery. They all survive, miraculously, but the actual filming of the ballistics in graphic, almost comic-book-style, all slow motion and muted sound, makes it so brutal that I found it quite difficult to watch. And I’m all over my violence, usually – as we know. It was probably the intended effect, anyway; so a winner is you, Mr Ritchie! You harrowed me out with artillery explosions, and this isn’t even a “war film”. Well done.

As this film also caters to those steampunk kids, there’s lots of machine porn: lots of mechanical extreme close-ups and sweeping racks of armaments. Everyone gets armed with new, shiny, extremely destructive firearms. Bullet-holes are examined, and Watson’s military past is brought up often. War pervades. Terrorism happens: “extreme political movements” and “anarchists” are framed for the detonation of bombs, carefully engineered to pit the European powerhouses against each other in bloody conflict.

With this backdrop of indiscriminate, impersonal violence, Watson and Holmes’s adoring, frequently tactile relationship sticks out like a sore, er, thumb. It’s amazing. Their emotional interplay – the most profound moment for me was when Watson fished Holmes out of a collapsed tower and stroked his hair – is like a warm, soft thing in amongst rubble and bullets. Ahhh. It’s ever so nice. Still not enough, though.

But I wish they’d had Rapace’s lovely lady in it more. She was resourceful and believably earnest; her performance refreshingly down-to-earth and human next to RDJ and Law’s saucy ping-pong. There’s several gorgeous scenes where Mycroft (played by the oozingly lovely Dame Stephen of Fry), Sherlock and Watson have a sort of banter-off, and Simza sits watchably increasingly perplexed, alternately following their conversation and letting it pass her by. She was very real. She even bled and reacted to pain in real, non-dramatic, human ways, which is unusual in films of this genre – and makes a particular contrast with the theatrical, fancy-hatted Irene. But she didn’t have nearly enough presence, losing out drastically to Sherlohn Watsolmes in terms of screen time – which, you know, fair enough: the film is about them, but she really was wonderful. I think she and Fry’s Mycroft should have their own spin-off where they ooze and stab their way around Europe in search of the perfect hat.

Actual photographs from the set.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It’s very funny
• It’s very beautiful to look at
• The action sequences are slick and well-designed
• Moriarty is well hot
• IT IS A SPECIAL PRESENT FOR THE HOLMES/WATSON FANDOM
• A SPECIAL PRESENT FROM PROBABLY GOD

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• Er.
• Well, it’s quite violent, I guess? If that’s not your thing, you should leave it aaht
• Moriarty hangs Sherlock on a meat hook and tortures him while singing Schubert’s Die Forelle no wait that’s a reason to see it

1. If you read to the end of this sentence, you will forget everything I have said in this article. No! Wait! Not all of it! Remember the review! Remember the rev- bugger.

VITRIOL

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697)

This Corrosion.

Vitriol is more properly known by its scientific name: sulphuric acid. Or additionally, ‘Any of various sulphates of metallic elements, especially ferrous sulphate.’ The only reason I get to do it for V is because the late c13th had a rather fanciful approach to science (no offence guys), and dubbed this chemical vitriol, from the Latin vitreus (= ‘of glass, glassy’). Cos, in certain states, sulphuric acid looks ‘glassy’. Geddit?? Ahem. Actually, there’s nothing whimsical about vitriol in its everyday life: it’s extremely corrosive (hi, GCSE Chemistry), and has an exothermic reaction with water, basically meaning it dehydrates anything it comes into contact with… but then liberates extra heat through the very process of reacting with water, causing more burns. Nasty.

Catherine de Medici, attributed to Francois Clouet, c.1555

Of course, like its sibling term acid, vitriol is also a lovely little example of a word whose literal and figurative meanings have almost equal prominence in modern English. Thus, around 1769, vitriol started meaning ‘Acrimonious, caustic or scathing speech, criticism or feeling’ and – naturally – this sense was in figurative relation to sulphuric acid’s ‘corrosive’ qualities. These are the same corrosive properties that made sulphuric acid every murderer’s friend throughout criminal history – every Wikipedia fan given to perverse procrastination knows about John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer, who dissolved the bodies of his victims in a bath full of acid (but was eventually dobbed in by a couple of stray gallstones and part of a denture)… Shudder.

My pain, your thrill.

Anyway, vitriol has apparently been around since ancient times, but came into prominence during the late c19th, owing to its use as a cleaning product. Of course, since it was suddenly considered fine for trying at home, it was easily purchased at your local chemist by every housewife on her weekly shop.

In this context, I’ve always thought of vitriol as a pendant to arsenic, a household poison used for pest-control, cosmetics and suicide (if you’re French, bourgeois and in a Flaubert novel). Particularly suggestible Victorian women would mix this one with chalk and vinegar to improve their complexion, with occasionally fatal consequences for their hapless spouses. History is correspondingly full of tales of malevolent arsenic-armed females, including the eighteenth-century Mary Blandy, who put it in her father’s tea so she could marry her lover. (In a little pendant of my own: she continued to take tea herself in prison – and to receive visitors for tea – apparently unencumbered by squeamishness, or the leg-irons she had to wear as a murderess on death row).

Vitriol throwing in Le Petit Journal - image from http://theatredamned.blogspot.com/

These cases are part of a long tradition of female poisoners going back to Catherine de Medici and the Emperor Augustus’ wife Livia, both politically powerful women who were the subject of (probably apocryphal) rumours of poisonous ingenuity. Livia supposedly killed Augustus by poisoning figs that were still on the tree (the last in a line of such crimes, if you like a bit of I, Claudius. As everyone should.) and that old gossip-monger Alexandre Dumas describes how Catherine de Medici used to poison casual household objects – ranging from books and gloves to lipsticks – to relieve herself of Inconveniences who just happened to be breathing.

The logic behind this tradition seems clear enough: unaccustomed to the brutalities of war and macho posturing, the female murderer is nonetheless skilled in the arts of household management, food preparation and cosmetics. Her arsenal is correspondingly domestic, and widespread reporting of female poisoners presumably relates to a kind of fear of the unknowably deadly potential of the home (and all it represents), not to mention the oft-observed ‘fact’ that the female of the species will tend towards silent attack, backstabbing and general wiliness when settling her battles. The bitch! Thus, like vitriol, poison too has a transferred sense: to be poisonous is to be ‘deeply malicious, malevolent’ – ‘sly’ – in a way which is almost antonymic to simple ‘brutality’.

Don’t look back in anger.

But in the late 1800s something changed, and there was an apparent epidemic of vitriol throwing in addition to arsenic poisoning – so much so, that it got its own verb: to vitriolize was to ‘throw sulphuric acid at a person with intent to injure’. Thankfully, this verb is now ‘rare’ (although on this, see more below), but its usage was overwhelmingly nineteenth-century. Moreover, a cursory look at newspaper records reveals these were overwhelmingly perceived to be female crimes against an erstwhile lover or a rival. A ‘crime of passion’, in fact, in a way that poisoning (slow and subtle) is not. My pal Stewart has recently started resurrecting the Parisian Grand Guignol, a Parisian theatre of horror whose depiction of acid-throwing was only one of many acts of mutilation presented onstage between 1897-1962, and I’m quoting him quoting Anne-Louise Shapiro:

In the 1880s, vitriol began to acquire the symbolic associations traditionally linked to poison; l’empoisonneuse was joined by a new rhetorical (and actual) figure, the vitrioleuse. […] Women who were dangerous through their very domesticity – who transformed the ordinary and the womanly into the menacing – underscored not only female duplicity but male dependency.

Anne-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in fin-de-siecle Paris

The Grand Guignol play La Baisir dans la Nuit hinges around a disfigured acid victim exercising (literal) eye-for-an-eye revenge on the lover responsible for his wretched state. This sort of thing is perhaps to be expected in a ‘theatre of horror’, but vitriol throwing also appears in the broadly passion-free Sherlock Holmes stories, most fully in the Adventure of the Illustrious Client (1924) where the crime in question is perpetrated by a Fallen Woman on her Base Seducer – over ten years after the frequency of cases had prompted calls to make the purchase of vitriol more difficult.

Anyway, this ‘Kitty Winter’ is full of vitriol of both kinds: as Watson puts it, ‘there was an intensity of hatred in her white, set face and her blazing eyes such as woman seldom and man never can attain’, and her hysterical ranting and raving against the ‘instrument of her demise’ is – throughout the story – placed in opposition to the calm and aristocratic air of her Don Juan’s next victim. Throughout the story it is made clear that vitriol throwing is the sort of thing possible only for a woman full of a special kind of fury – and, as Watson makes clear, that fury is something ‘man never can attain’. The lambs.

The interesting thing here, of course, is the transition from silent, wily domestic poisons to public acid attacks that hinge around the old adage that ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ (a misquote from Congreve that endures to this day). This, of course, is a woman armed with vitriol of one kind or another, and the idea was clearly much-repeated, because by the mid-century we also had the word vitriolic, meaning… well… ‘like vitriol’. That said, it is frequently unclear whether this is vitriol in a literal or figurative sense: in 1919 the Sarah Palin of the nineteenth century, Mary Kilbreth (President of the American National Association to Oppose Woman Suffrage), questioned Emmeline Pankhurst’s patriotism on the grounds that Pankhurst and the Suffragettes had led a ‘reign of terror’ that involved ‘bombs, kerosene and vitriol throwing‘, but whether she meant words or household cleaner remains tantalisingly unclear.

Unfortunately, for many around the world today vitriol is all too literal. This article has been interested in exploring the criminal female in history but – in the UK and abroad – acid attacks are still common, particularly (but not exclusively) as part of a culture of ‘honour violence’ directed against women. While it would be disingenuous to suggest exclusivity on either side, it does seem that these are increasingly male-on-female attacks in contrast to the apparent gender-split in the nineteenth century. This article has a rather good summary of the current situation, and recommends places you can find out more, including the Acid Survivors Trust.

NEXT WEEK: W is for Widow