From Folk Tales to Detective Stories
Transgressive women have made many appearances in oral and written tales. Greek myths recount the lives of many criminal women including Medea, who is spurned by her lover and so kills their children in an act of vengeance. Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth goads her husband to commit murder in order to fulfil her desire for power. The morality tale Moll Flanders, written by Daniel Defoe in 1722, tells the story of a baby born to a criminal mother who grows up to be a felon herself. The novel mirrors a real concern of the 18th century that the degenerate underclass would breed and overrun the cities. The linking of female carnality to criminality forms the plot of Thomas Hardy’s popular novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) in which an innocent maiden who is ill-used by men becomes mentally unstable and, as a result, commits murder.
The archetypal wicked woman is the fairytale witch. Intent on causing murder and mayhem, she appears in folk stories throughout the world. As young children we hear stories of jealousy, avarice, hatred and murder: the plot of Snow White revolves around an ageing queen who conspires to have her beautiful stepdaughter murdered; in Hansel and Gretel a cannibalistic witch lures unsuspecting children into her gingerbread house; and in Sleeping Beauty a demented fairy curses a baby because of the parents’ breach of etiquette. Although some of these stories have been softened for modern children, they remain testimony to the belief that evil may lie within even the most harmless looking woman.
smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, my lovely, Penguin Books, London, 2005, p205. First published 1940
The early 20th century produced another stock character in literature – the ‘femme fatale’. The meaning of femme fatale is the subject of heated debate among various scholars with an interest in literature, film, history, mythology and gender studies. The term has been applied to seductive women who are dangerous to know, either because of their own perfidy or because their paramour becomes the target of evildoers. The charm of the French phrase disguises its true meaning, ‘fatal woman’, just as the glamorous version of female criminality portrayed in literature and cinema of the period belies the unfortunate reality of female offenders. A particular type of femme fatale appeared in the detective literature of the 1920s. These women were not just ‘naughty’, they were wanton criminals, and the femmes fatales featured in the images here belong to this category.
In the 1837 preface to Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens wrote, ‘In every book I know, where such characters [criminals] are treated of … the thieves are represented as leading a life to be envied than otherwise’. This idea is reflected in the representations of criminal women in pulp fiction published from the 1920s to the 1950s, including magazines such as Detective Tabloid and Gun Molls, and detective novels like Farewell my lovely by Raymond Chandler and Ssssh … she’s a killer. The femmes fatales are active forces, creating opportunities and manipulating events in order to achieve their goals. They are ‘smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin’. Attractive, independent and intelligent, they willingly use their sexuality against men who are weak and unable to resist the lure of their feminine wiles.
How to Punish the worst Cases?
During the early years of the 20th century many new ideas were suggested for the control, punishment and management of female offenders. Strongly supported by feminists and prison reformers was the integration of female officials into the justice system to deal specifically with women and children. In 1915 the New South Wales Government employed its first female police officer, Lillian Armfield. Employment conditions for the first women police were appalling: the pay was abysmal, they were not issued with a uniform, were not entitled to superannuation and the government was not liable if they were injured in the workplace. Their special charge was to watch over young women and children and guide them away from moral danger. Female police officers supported rape victims in court and dealt with offences committed against children, as their ‘womanliness’ was thought to make them more empathetic towards victims. It was also hoped women police might exert a positive, reformative influence on hardened criminals. Lillian Armfield said of her work with female offenders, ‘I always felt that most of them had a chance of redemption and I tried to see that they got that chance’.
Disputes about the punishment of female offenders dominated press coverage of the 1888 trial of Louisa Collins, the ‘Lucretia Borgia of Botany’. The allusion to the Borgia family, who were infamous throughout the Renaissance for corruption and murder, referred to Collins’s chosen method of murder, poison, which is viewed as a particularly female modus operandi as it does not need physical strength and can be secretively administered in food. It was alleged that Collins, a flirtatious drunk, grew tired of her older first husband, so fed him rat poison containing arsenic. After collecting his life insurance she married her lover, Michael Collins, and they continued to drink and frolic in the hotels of Botany Bay until the money ran out. Her spendthrift second husband soon developed an upset stomach and died. Suspicions were aroused when the widow rushed off to collect his life insurance and medical analysis revealed Michael Collins had died of arsenic poisoning. Collins was arrested and charged with his murder.
The press reported that Collins displayed an unwomanly self-possession: ‘her demeanour in the dock [was] cruel and callous’. She was convicted and sentenced to hang, leading to much debate in the press and parliament about the ethics of hanging a woman. A Sydney phrenologist declared Collins had ‘an irregular mental organisation’ and was therefore not morally responsible for her actions. Collins’s role as a mother was also put forth as a mitigating circumstance but in 1889 she was executed at Darlinghurst Gaol.
Another famed case is that of Eugenia Falleni who was known as the ‘man–woman murderer’. In 1917 the charred remains of a woman were discovered in bushland at Chatswood. The remains were eventually deduced to be those of Annie Crawford who had been reported missing by her son from her first marriage. The search for Annie’s second husband, Harry Crawford, began in 1920. He was located living with his new wife and working as an odd-job man in a hotel.
Upon his arrest Crawford denied committing the murder but, when informed he was about to be searched and sent to the cells, confessed he was actually a woman – Eugenia Falleni. This created a frenzy in the press and at the centre of the maelstrom was the ‘article’, or dildo, found in Falleni’s possession. Her trial was overshadowed by speculation about her ‘deviant’ sexuality and images of her dressed in both male and female attire were printed in the newspapers. Although Falleni pleaded not guilty to the murder, her perceived duplicity in convincing her family, friends and workmates that she was a man was used as proof of her immoral nature. She was convicted and sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison. Falleni was released from prison in 1931 after serving 11 years and died in a traffic accident in 1938.