Drowned and Torn: Fantasies of the Female Corpse in the Victorian Gothic

by: Emily Cline , March 25, 2026

Introduction

Nowhere is ‘the necropornographic aspect of crime fiction’s Gothic inheritance’ more apparent than in accounts of the nineteenth-century French necrophiles that fascinated and horrified audiences of the periodical press (Close 2018: 38). In contemporary newspaper accounts of the crimes, women are almost exclusively corpses, dismembered and dehumanised as objects of the necrophile’s pleasure and for the entertainment of a reading public largely coded as masculine. Lurid descriptions of real female bodies mutilated and splayed over tombstones indulge in voyeuristic depictions of women’s corpses, which find a precedent in Gothic fiction’s eroticisation of death. Gothic texts’ thematic emphasis on violence against women’ continues to inform the ‘femicidal plots’ of popular crime narratives (Meyers 2001: xii). From the quintessentially Victorian genres of sensation and detection to modern-day true crime, women’s deaths often reconstitute Western cultural biases about gender roles. The female corpse is the ideal woman: she is beautiful, still, and, crucially, unable to resist men’s sexual advances. Beginning with the crime writing of popular Edinburgh-based author Catherine Crowe (1803-1876), this article examines women writers’ subversive responses to the necrophilic treatment of female bodies in the Victorian Gothic. Crowe’s 1841 proto-detective novel, published the same year that Edgar Allan Poe’s inaugural Dupin story ushered in the detective genre, trades the ‘poetical’ topic of women’s deaths for a critique of gendered violence (Poe 1846); likewise, her true account of a sensational case of necrophilia is topical in its counteracting of necro-romantic fantasies about charming, vampiric men.

Though well-known in her time, Crowe’s works are less familiar to readers today; however, her female-driven crime plots challenge traditional conceptions of crime writing as a historically masculine genre. My first text is Crowe’s true crime article ‘Lycanthropy’ (1849), originally published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and reprinted as ‘The Lycanthropist’ in her collection of short stories Light and Darkness (1850) and in the penny weekly Reynold’s Miscellany. As a popular reprint, this article may have been the introduction of many English-speaking readers to what would ultimately be a watershed case of necrophilia unfolding just across the channel. ‘Lycanthropy’ provides a translation of the Parisian newspaper accounts detailing the gruesome career of the ‘Vampire of Montparnasse’, a.k.a. the twenty-five-year-old French army sergeant François Bertrand. His exploits, which gave rise to other ‘vampires’ haunting graveyards from Le Muy to Saint-Ouen, saw French cemeteries—and newspapers—littered with female corpses. Bertrand was sentenced in July 1849, and Crowe’s article closely follows the widely-publicised accounts of the tribunal proceedings. However, the slight differences are also revealing; for example, Crowe changes ‘vampire’ to ‘lycanthrope’, as well as substitutes the newspapers’ fetishistic gaze on young women’s corpses for the more gender-neutral imagery of ‘the dead’ or, simply, ‘remains’ (1849: 124). Her rhetorical shifts resist the implicit sexualisation of the female victims and the romanticising of the young, male perpetrator.

The objectification of female bodies finds a less gory, but no less voyeuristic, counterpart in Crowe’s fictional depiction of a villain who weaponises cultural iconography surrounding female suicide to dispose of a sexually compromised ‘fallen woman’. In Susan Hopley; or, Circumstantial Evidence (1841), Crowe deconstructs the Ophelian image of the lovelorn drowned woman by questioning assumptions about women’s dependency on men and critiquing the objectification of their bodies. Olive Anderson notes that ‘“found drowned” was a recognised euphemism for female suicide’ in Victorian Britain and a widespread ‘romantic stereotype’ that reinforced ideas about sexual purity (1987: 43). Crowe subverts this trope by having her fallen woman survive, but the tacit alignment of suicide with outright murder underscores the devaluation of women’s lives in a culture obsessed with the inviolability of their bodies. The many artistic and literary renderings of water-logged corpses dredged up from the Seine or the Thames underscore the romanticisation and glamourisation of the female corpse, amounting to the same pornographic impulse that feeds into the erotic depictions of corpses found in contemporaneous accounts of consummate necrophilia.

I first examine the actual case of necrophilia and how it plays out in the popular press to focus my discussion of fictional, aesthetic delineations of beautiful female corpses. The conceptual gap between violently treated bodies and tenderly drawn ones is narrowed by Elisabeth Bronfen’s supposition that artistic representations of dying or dead women constitute a violent effacement of female subjectivity (1992: 50). The implied outrage towards Bertrand’s mutilation of corpses provides a stark contrast to the casual, and even callous, mistreatment of the myriad female bodies that decorate Victorian art and literature. This paper argues that Catherine Crowe’s emphasis on women’s vitality and participation in popular crime narratives critiques the sexist iconography of Gothic ‘corpse porn’ by rejecting the sensational exploitation of female bodies (Foltyn 2008: 166). The pairing of a contemporaneous case of necrophilia, a condition ‘new’ enough to not yet have a name, with the conventional imagery of the drowned woman reveals the real-life violent impulses underlying the Gothic aesthetic of death.

Women’s Corpses in Accounts of Necrophilia: Spectacle and Sex

In recounting the case of Sergeant Bertrand, I am concerned only with the story as it was recorded in newspapers at the time. I make no claims to complete historical accuracy on either the details of the real sergeant’s crimes and legal proceedings against him or on the medical professionals’ psychiatric evaluations of the necrophile. Inasmuch as Bertrand is ‘patient zero’ in terms of Western cultural narratives about the figure of the necrophile (Malivin 2016), I am interested in how the popular press adapts this seminal case in ways that reinforce Victorian gender ideology. The accounts not only represent necrophilic desires, but, in some ways, participate in them through pornographic depictions of women’s corpses. The original accounts’ enthusiastic participation in the erotic use of female corpses is emblematic of crime fiction’s fetishisation and objectification of dead women. Through the sensational case of the necrophile, these reports themselves give in to a necrophilic impulse that is quintessentially Gothic in its violence towards abjected bodies.

While the French press dubbed Bertrand a ‘Vampire’, Crowe employs the more animalistic, less humanoid figure of the lycanthrope, more popularly known as the werewolf. In contemporaneous legends, the werewolf was also bound to the grave as ‘a metamorphosis forced upon the body of a damned person, who, ha[ving] torn his way out of [the grave …] bursts away as a wolf’ (Baring-Gould 1865: 107-8). Wolves could be seen in graveyards scavenging for bodies, a figure psychiatrist Joseph Guislain would employ when coining the term for ‘necrophiles’, ‘malades qui, comme des loups, rodent la nuit dans les cimetières et qui ouvrent les sépulcres’ (‘patients who, like wolves, prowl the cemeteries at night and open the sepulchres’, my trans.; 1852: 257). This shift in terminology, characterising Bertrand as a kind of rabid wolf rather than a vampire, resists the romanticising of the perpetrator as a typical Byronic hero. Classic vampires like Nosferatu and Dracula, with his canonically pointed ears and ‘rank’ breath (Stoker 2003: 24-25), were meant to be frightening, making the sexy, suave vampire of today’s teen flicks—True Blood (2008-2014), Vampire Diaries (2009-2017), and The Twilight Saga (2008-2012) to name a few—appear to be a distinctly modern phenomenon. However, the charismatic, seductive vampire can be traced back to at least 1819 with the publication of John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’, inspired by Lord Byron’s unfinished ‘Fragment of a Novel’. In Polidori’s story, the ‘irresistible powers of seduction’ of the aristocratic vampire Lord Ruthven attract young female victims (1819: 7). Before his capture by the gendarmes, the Vampire of Montparnasse is similarly shrouded in mystery, as the wild speculations about his identity and the stories of his fantastic escapes mythologise what Charles Dickens would later liken to ‘a sort of French “spring-heeled Jack”’ (1875: 108). Lost in the fascination with the perpetrator, the bodies of the victims are transformed into cyphers used to probe the necrophile’s criminal psychology.

The way that Bertrand, a young army sergeant, is often depicted as attractive and even popular with women seems incongruous with the antisocial nature of his crimes. His entrance into the courtroom is the scene of much anticipation and curiosity: the newspapers linger on his regular features, lively eyes, well-coiffed light brown hair with a goatee to match, and a profile ‘très purement dessiné’ (‘very finely drawn’, my trans.; ‘Juridiction Militaire’ 1849: 657). The psychiatrist Alexis Épaulard recorded Bertrand testifying, ‘J’ai toujours aimé les femmes à la folie … Dans tous les endroits ou j’ai été, j’ai toujours eu pour maîtresses des femmes jeunes et aimables que je savais contenter’ (‘I have always loved women madly … In all the places where I have been, I have always had as mistresses young and pleasant women whom I knew how to please’, my trans.; 1901: 55, original emphasis). In his later histories of criminality and sexuality, Colin Wilson reiterates in two places that Bertrand ‘had mistresses who testified to his sexual potency’ (1966: 153; 1990: 64). Amandine Malivin suggests that such descriptions of Bertrand informed the fictional archetype of the charming, uniform-wearing ‘supernatural lover’, with his melancholic attitude and soldierly physique (2016). Much has been written about the romanticisation of violent male offenders or ‘celebrity monsters’ (Bonn 2017), particularly with the recent popularity of Netflix biopics of American serial killers which star conventionally attractive young men in the lead roles (see Sims 2019; Dubey 2022). This type of glorification is, of course, not a modern phenomenon and can be found plentifully in the annals of the Victorian popular press. In her feminist biography of the five women killed by Jack the Ripper, for example, Hallie Rubenhold aims to dismantle the mythology surrounding the man who was perhaps the West’s first celebrity serial killer by reclaiming his victims’ lives. ‘By embracing him’, she says, ‘we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888, which teaches women that they are of a lesser value and can expect to be dishonoured and abused’ (2020: 348). While Bertrand was not a killer, since his victims were already dead, this point only seems to magnify the urge to disregard the women’s bodies, which are already—and conveniently—constructed as inert objects.

The flattering description of Bertrand is pointedly omitted from Crowe’s account, where the accused is simply drawn as ‘pale and feeble’ (1849: 125). Crowe does not replicate the newspapers’ tendency to romanticise the necrophile. She admittedly leaves out ‘several painful and disgusting particulars’, which is perhaps also characteristic of the greater reserve of the British middle-class periodical press compared to the French newspapers. Still, in Crowe’s case, she is prepared to write that a young victim—presumably the daughter of one Monsieur Gillet interred at Ivry referred to in the newspaper accounts—was ‘frightfully mutilated, and [her] heart extracted’ (1849: 124). Sufficient to convey the nature of the violations, this description is condemnatory and clinical; it lacks the visceral language and the actual viscera of other accounts, but does not entirely defer to the polite censorship that might be expected, particularly in a female-written narrative of the case. As she says, ‘the facts, in short, are indubitable’—her account emphasises factuality, somewhat counter-intuitively to the expectations of gender and genre. Where the male-oriented journalistic press and medical narratives are sensationalised, Crowe’s account calls for a rational approach to ‘due investigation’ (1849: 125). The sensationalist accounts of the trial prioritise appearances, Bertrand’s and the bodies’, creating an image of violence against women that supports a Gothic aesthetic of death, but which undermines the sense of justice in these ‘true’ tribunal accounts, especially given the negligible one-year sentence Bertrand actually receives.

The newspapers’ detailed descriptions of the women’s bodies replay the trauma inflicted on their corpses, as the accounts mirror the necrophile’s mutilations by making a spectacle of dissection. Evident in accounts of Bertrand’s case is the press’s appropriation of Gothic modes through a fetishistic focus on women’s disembowelled bodies. La Presse, for example, depicts bodies in excess: ‘Chaque matin, les gardiens du cimetière trouvaient les cadavres de femmes arrachés de leurs sépultures, mutilées, étendues sur le sol, dans les allées peu fréquentées, jetées sur des dalles tumulaires’ (‘every morning, the cemetery guards found the corpses of women torn from their sepulchers, mutilated, stretched out on the ground, in the little frequented alleys, thrown on burial slabs’, my translation.‘Le Sergent Bertrand’ 1849: 3). Another newspaper, Le Droit, devotes three paragraphs to a graphic medical description of the wounds found on the corpses of two young women. The physician ends his testimony by clarifying, ‘Il est vrai que les sujets sont toujours des femmes; mais, sauf une seule fois, les organes génitaux étaient intacts’ (‘It is true that the subjects are always women; but, except once, the genital organs were intact’, my trans.; ‘Le Violateur des Tombeaux’ 1849: 295). The medical terminology does not disguise the voyeuristic tendency. The pathologist’s discourse incorporates the thinly veiled eroticism of clinical sexological studies of the period, which employ detailed case histories that ‘retain emotional and erotic intensity’ (Downing 2003: 35). This testimony emphasises not only the sex of the corpses, but also lingers over the ‘intact’ genitalia on its way to specifying that the genitals were actually not typically a site of focus, except in one case where ‘l’ablation des parties sexuelles ait semblé être le but du crime’ (‘the removal of the sexual parts seemed to be the object of the crime’, my trans.; ‘Le Violateur des Tombeaux’ 1849: 295). This last case may be the exception to the rule, but, for the papers, it creates a compelling image of sexual frustration and violence. In addition, the newspaper reports tend to repeat the point that the bodies were always female, despite Bertrand’s own testimony that he exhumed corpses of men and women indiscriminately.

The newspapers’ continued return to the image of the mutilated woman chimes with the rise of today’s television ‘crime porn’, where ‘it is no longer enough for women to be merely murdered or raped…They now need to be mutilated or made into fetishist objects for the titillation of the viewer’ (Penfold-Mounce 2016). The way the accounts also tend to gloss over the male bodies normalises violence against women while disregarding male victims of violence, revealing how victimhood is envisioned as essentially female. Crowe’s account leaves out not only the gory descriptions, but also substitutes the noticeably gendered language for the more neutral terms of ‘remains,’ ‘bodies,’ and ‘the dead’ to describe the victims (1849: 124). This rhetorical shift de-emphasises the gender dynamics and sexual politics associated with necrophilia, while perhaps more closely aligning with ‘the facts’ of Bertrand’s testimony that he disinterred men and women. Refusing to feminise the victims undermines the stock Gothic plot, also a heteronormative one, of vulnerable young women being pursued by male aggressors.

The lack of examination or description pertaining to the male victims exaggerates the gendered dimension of the crime, not only to better fit with Gothic paradigms of female vulnerability, but also to reiterate the explicitly heterosexual motivations of the crime. The questions steer Bertrand toward admitting that he only exhumed women. When asked whether he sought out females, Bertrand replies, ‘Non, pas plus que d’autres; je sais seulement que j’eparpillais les lambeaux de ces cadavres’ (‘No, no more than others; I only know that I was scattering the shreds of these corpses’, my trans.; ‘Le Vampire du Cimetière Montparnasse’ 1849: 3). In Le Droit, he insists that the reports are wrong: ‘Je ne faisais pas de distinction; … je suis certain d’avoir déterré dans le cimetière Montparnasse plus d’hommes que des femmes’ (‘I did not make a distinction; … I am certain I unearthed more men than women in the Montparnasse cemetery’, my trans.; ‘Juridiction Militaire’ 1849: 657). A third newspaper, Le Siècle, puts a spin on this statement with the addition of the reporter’s parenthetic asides. When asked why, by preference, he exercised ‘horrible profanations’ on women and young girls, Bertrand’s response is recorded as follows: ‘(Faite avec moins d’assurance que les autres.) C’est sans doute une erreur du procès-verbal… Je crois qu’il m’est arrivé aussi souvent de déterrer des hommes que des femmes…’ (‘(Made with less assurance than the others.) It is undoubtedly an error in the report… I believe I happened to dig up men as often as women…’, my trans.; ‘Affaire du Sergent Bertrand’ 1849: 4). The reporter’s aside and his inclusion of the two ellipses undermines the credibility of the defendant’s response, suggesting that Bertrand is lying or misremembering; in other words, it is taken for granted that only female bodies could inspire such desires and incur such heinous acts of violence. The insistence on female bodies has both ideological and aesthetic weight: it ensures that the heteronormative dynamic of passive female and active male remains unshaken, while also reinforcing the primacy of the male gaze in these accounts by featuring plenty of young, nude, dead women on display.

Lacerations with the phallic weapons of a knife and a sabre stand in as a Freudian figure for sexual penetration. The questions continue to press Bertrand about the gender of his victims until he admits, ‘Je déterrais les uns et les autres, mais je ne mutilais jamais le cadavre des hommes…’ (‘I dug up all of them, but I never mutilated the corpses of men…’, my trans.; ‘Affaire du Sergent Bertrand’ 1849: 5). This qualification functions to confirm the (hetero)sexual motivations of these acts by preserving the integrity, or impenetrability, of the male bodies as opposed to the female ones. The court’s linking of the case of necrophilia with anthropophagy also serves to illustrate Jacques Derrida’s concept of carnivorous virility or ‘carno-phallogocentrism’, a structure of male dominance based on ‘accept[ing] sacrifice and eat[ing] flesh’ (1991: 114). The women’s bodies are treated like meat, both figuratively and literally, as the prosecution cites additional cases of men cannibalising women and girls. Bertrand is asked, ‘certaines parties du cadavre d’une jeune fille avaient été … mâchonnées… Est-ce que vous vous seriez servi de vos dents?’ (‘certain parts of the corpse of a young girl had been … chewed… would you have used your teeth?’, my trans.; ‘Affaire du Sergent Bertrand’ 1849: 5, original emphasis). He denies having done so, but the symbolic image of bitten flesh is posed as a confirmation of male dominance and female abjection. The reporter of Le Droit concludes, euphemistically, ‘cette circonstance que les cadavres arrachés de leurs tombes appartenaient à de jeunes filles ou à de jeunes femmes, ont donné une tout autre explication à ces scènes lugubres’ (‘This circumstance that the corpses torn from their graves belonged to young girls or to young women, gave an entirely different explanation to these lugubrious scenes’, my trans.; ‘Le Violateur des Tombeaux’ 1849: 295). That ‘other explanation’ being, of course, sexual gratification, assuming the reader also recognises the allure of young, dead women.

Necromance-y: Preserving the Lovely Dead

For its potential to prolong the ‘beauty’ of death, the well-preserved corpse of the mummy looms behind the vampire-werewolf duo as a third figure of un-dead desire that has special currency in Victorian imaginings of dead women. The mummy, not unlike the vampire/lycanthrope, is eroticised for its proximity to death and its links to the past, whether a past era of base desire or a past lover exhumed from the grave. Patrick Brantlinger cites a ‘lengthy tradition of romantic stories about necrophilia, specifically involving mummy love’, from Théophile Gautier’s The Romance of the Mummy to H. Rider Haggard’s She (2011: 174). The racialised female body of the mummy in Victorian fiction inverts the power dynamic of the necrophile and his corpse-bride by trading the pale, passive body for the exoticised and eroticised darkness of the femme fatale. The fascination with the well-preserved corpses of Egyptian mummies led to a traffic in bodies through the colonisation and theft of archeological sites and artefacts, as well as a co-opting of historical narratives in service of Europeans’ ‘porno-tropic’ fantasies (McClintock 1995: 22). In the Imperialist milieu of mid-Victorian Britain, the non-European female body becomes a site for unearthing ‘forbidden sexual desires and fears’, as demonstrated through Haggard’s ‘Gothic and necrophiliac treatment of archeology’ in romances that plumb a fictionalised African interior (McClintock 1995: 22; Brantlinger 2011: 171). Haggard’s ancient Arabian queen Ayesha, the titular She, is villainised for her beauty and power. Through the magic of necromancy, the mummy romance imagines what might happen if the corpse were to respond to necrophilic desires; the result is an emasculating return of the gaze, as the dominatrix-like queen undermines the superiority of the archaeologist-adventurer’s ‘civilised’ vantage point by unearthing his primal desires. In these necro-romantic fictions, the monster is not the man with the dark appetite, but the beautiful un-dead woman who seduces him. Here, alliances with the dead frustrate simple evolutionary progressions from past to present, from non-human to human, simultaneously destabilising the gender and racial hierarchies informed by Darwinian constructions. The female mummy represents the marginalised body of the ‘Other’ and her desirability poses a Gothic threat to the Imperial stronghold of Western European masculinity.

‘Eat thy heart out in impotent desire, says Ayesha when the hero begs to see her face, ‘eat out thy breast with love of me, and die!’ (Haggard 1889: 115, 143). Her figure of speech again links ingestion, death, and erotic desire. As with the vampire who tears out the hearts of his victims and the wolf-like lycanthrope who consumes corpses, the ‘impotent’ sex of necrophilia is replaced by a carno-phallagocentric consumption of flesh. The necromantic fantasy of the Cleopatra-like mummy is characterised by an excess of food and of fleshliness, as Lucy Snowe describes in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette:

[The painting] represented a woman, … extremely well fed: very much butcher’s meat—to say nothing of bread, vegetables, and liquids— must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay half-reclined on a couch: … out of abundance of material—seven-and-twenty yards, I should say, of drapery—she managed to make inefficient raiment. On referring to the catalogue, I found that this notable production bore the name ‘Cleopatra’. (1853: 201)

A crowd of men, from which Lucy is excluded, openly admire this ‘affluence of flesh’ and sensuous scene, dubbing its subject ‘le type du volupteux’. The men’s interpretations of ‘Cleopatra’ project taboo desires onto the ‘Other’, as the forbidden sexual attraction—as a function of both race and historicity—is articulated in Dr Bretton’s pejorative comparison between the model he designates as ‘that mulatto’ and his blond-haired, blue-eyed fiancée (Brontë 1853: 201, 207). Dr. Bretton pathologises the men’s desires for Cleopatra’s ‘voluptuous’ corpulence, which is inextricable from the ‘meat’ and ‘flesh’ of the food imagery, yet the cannibalistic underpinnings of their desire for this preserved image wrapped in yards of cloth finds a real-life counterpart in the customary consumption of ‘mumia’—the remains of mummies—as a component of popular medicine (Cohut 2020). If the necrophile ‘chewed’ the remains of his victims, so, too, was the public’s appetite for bodies a notorious feature of a Victorian culture preoccupied with mourning, death, and dominion.

By emphasising the spectators’ erotic ideas about the Cleopatra portrait, Brontë showcases the ‘porno-tropic’ dimension of the Imperial Gothic as well as the scopophilia projected onto reclining female forms and artistic nudes, for example, in Gothic tales such as ‘The Victim’ and N.P. In Willis’s ‘My Hobby,—Rather’, compiled in The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre alongside Polidori’s handsome and predatory Lord Ruthven, the woman’s corpse is explicitly tied to artistic delineation. The dead woman is the ‘ideal picture of female loveliness’; she ‘mingles with every conception of female beauty’ (Anonymous 1998 [1831]: 91; Willis 1998 [1834]: 140). The corpse of a beautiful woman is imagined as a piece of art; for example, the narrator of ‘The Victim’, a medical student, describes the corpse as an ‘ideal picture … painted by the hand of Death’ in language that echoes the poetic sublime, all while sketching a cadaver obtained for autopsy practice (1831: 91). It is in yet another portrait of a mysteriously attractive woman, the Mona Lisa, that the art and literary critic Walter Pater finds a link between death, desire, and even decay:

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. … It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. … She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave. (1906 [1873]: 129-130)

Like the other uncanny figures alluded to here—the vampire, the mummy, the lycanthrope—the Mona Lisa is a ‘strange’ and arcane figure for desire; she is also un-dead and immortal, having been resurrected from the grave, through artistic representation, with an intimate knowledge of death. The description of her beauty is corpse-like in its evocation of decay, with flesh ‘wrought out from within’ and deposited, decomposing ‘cell by cell’. Pater imagines her feeding off men’s desires in a vampiric fashion; however, in the fantasies and ‘exquisite passions’ derived from her flesh, the men’s gaze is also infused with the morbid appetite of the vampire/necrophile. These sentimental artistic descriptions provide a stark contrast to the chaotic and violent display of women’s bodies in the earlier accounts of necrophilia; yet, a necrophilic impulse is detectable in the male spectator’s longing gaze. Poised beside the waters, Mona Lisa also prefigures the feminine death of one of Victorian art’s favourite subjects, the beautiful drowning victim.

Death, Purity, and Pleasure: Picturing the Drowned Fallen Woman

Malivin notes that, in the wake of the Bertrand case, images of the necrophile vampire gave way to a familiar tableau of a handsome young man embracing bride-like corpses dressed in white— ‘pas d’entrailles lacérées, pas de corps putrefies’, like the romantic scene in Figure 1 (2022: 50; ‘no lacerated entrails, no putrefied bodies’, may trans.). The violence done to the female body is sanitised so that her beauty might explain his desire, even justifying a necrophilic urge to dominate the unresisting bodies of women. In the absence of decay, death preserves the youth and beauty of a woman in her prime, with the kissable lips of a Sleeping Beauty or a Snow White in her glass coffin. The death aesthetic pervades Victorian art and poetry, from Robert Browning’s murderous speaker in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, who strangles a woman with the relief that at ‘That moment she was mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly pure and good’ (1912 [1836]: 857), to George Frederic Watts’s painting Found Drowned (c. 1850) of a prostrate young woman lying dead on the banks of the Thames, inspired by the suicide in Tomas Hood’s poem ‘The Bridge of Sighs’: ‘Death has left on her / Only the beautiful’ (1912 [1844]: 759). This image of the female drowning victim was pervasive, as Anderson suggests: ‘In the iconography of the day any young woman depicted as lingering near deep water was immediately understood to be deserted or “fallen,” and contemplating suicide’ (1987: 197). The trope that death is preferable to a life of infamy for the ‘fallen woman’ who violated the norm of female sexual purity meant that the murky waters of the Thames formed a purifying font and a watery grave for many deserted women in art and literature. Until the 1882 Internments Act, suicide was a criminal offence, defined as felo de se or ‘felony against the self’, and prevented religious rites at burial; however, female suicide by water is one instance where the death is reframed as redemptive and purifying, an antidote to the sinful fallenness of sex outside marriage. The artistic and literary renditions of women drowning glorify women’s self-sacrificial role. The ‘passive’ nature of drowning, the fact that it required ‘less preparation and less gore’ than the rope, blade, or gun preferred by gentlemen, made it not only a stereotypically feminine method of suicide, but also a picturesque one (Gates 1988: 126; Anderson 1987: 367). Despised as a social outcast in life, the fallen woman transforms into the image of ideal femininity in death.

The most famous example of the fetishisation of the drowned woman is the history of L’Inconnue de la Seine, the Unknown Woman of the Seine. As the story goes, a young woman, an apparent suicide, was found drowned in the River Seine in the late nineteenth century. Her body went unidentified, but the morgue attendant became so enamoured by her face that he had a plaster mould taken. Her alleged death mask became an artistic muse and has since been reproduced countless times, most famously as the model for the CPR mannequin Resusci Anne. An anonymous dead woman with the dubious distinction of having the ‘most-kissed lips in history’, L’Inconnue is symbolic of the erotic pull of feminine death (Dockrill 2018). It has been speculated that the mask is not a death mask at all, but simply the cast of a living model; however, the legend of the drowned woman has more currency because the woman’s death is integral to the romantic myth, where her silence, her non-resistance to such caresses, produces the license to exploit her form. The exploitation of this unknown woman’s likeness removes ‘any sense of agency or right over her body as she is stripped of all privacy, becoming an aesthetic object to be owned, bought, and sold’ (Mulhall 2017: 5). Analogous to the body parts of the necrophile’s dismembered victims, the face of the dead woman is objectified as a powerful fetish object when her beauty is separated from her person as ‘an abstract aesthetic category’ (Foltyn 1996: 73). Comparing the body of the drowned woman to the women disinterred by Bertrand demonstrates how both are reduced to body parts—faces, intestines, genitals—as well as placed on display and consumed, as art or as flesh. These necro-sadist assaults on women’s bodies, which combine violence and desire, are implicit in artistic deconstructions of the female subject.

Crowe examines the relationship between these two images of female death, violent and nonviolent, in the near-death experiences of Julia Clark, a single mother in Susan Hopley’s Or, Circumstantial Evidence (1841). In this novel, which contains elements of Gothic parody, sensation, and detection, death stalks women at every turn; however, it is mainly men who die as a result of male-on-male violence, undermining expectations about female vulnerability and victimhood. The male villain’s attempts to murder Julia and, failing that, stage her suicide are unsuccessful because they rely on erotic stereotypes about female bodies that take the victims’ lack of personhood for granted. Julia’s resiliency and will to live ultimately deny the realisation of such fantasies.

The villain of the novel, Walter Gaveston, seduces Julia and leaves her pregnant before eventually returning to get rid of her. Razor in hand, he sneaks up behind Julia in her home. The narrator offers a glimpse into Gaveston’s mind, saying, ‘it was a savage heart that … could think of pouring her blood on her own hearth, and leaving the yet warm body stretched in death, that he had so lately pressed to his own bosom’ (Crowe 1841: 3.211). There is an excessive, almost indulgent, quality to this image, with the dousing of blood and the intimate figure of loving embrace. Gaveston’s cruelty is aligned with his lust, as he imagines the ‘yet warm body’ stretched out sensually in the same breath as he remembers their romantic ties and past sexual encounters. The evident corporeality of this hair-raising scene creates the physiological effects of the sensation genre, with its ‘characteristic adrenaline effects [such as] accelerated heart rate and respiration’ (Miller 1986: 107). The Gothic excess of the scene is meant to be titillating; however, it is instantly deflated by Gaveston’s impotency when a night watchman looks in to warn Julia to lock her doors. Where the would-be murderer imagines the woman as incorporated into ‘his own’ person in an insular fantasy, the entrance of the watchman with his familiar address shatters his sense of privacy and ownership. His inner life is frustrated by her outer one, destabilising his control over her body and her fate. The entrance of the watchman signals Julia’s autonomy by implying legal repercussion, self-reflexively exposing the carnal death scene as unrealistic—Julia is not an anonymous body so easily disposed of, but is, instead, identified as a member of a community with, unusually for an unmarried young mother, ‘her own’ property and agency. The desire to permanently silence Julia is implicitly tied to Gaveston’s desire for control, especially sexual power, over her. Here, it is linked to their ‘bosom’ embrace, and, later, he considers ‘actually marrying her’, finding Victorian marriage laws sufficient to ensure his control over her person (Crowe 1841: 2.275). Her singleness, therefore, protects her, despite the popularity of marriage plots that celebrated wifehood as the Victorian woman’s primary vocation. Gaveston’s attempt to drown her is tied to erotic and domineering impulses since he not only impregnates her but also uses that illicit affair to manipulate the narrative about her death.

Gaveston weaponises Julia’s compromised reputation by drawing on sexist tropes about lovesick fallen women committing suicide. Valerie Meessen suggests, ‘The abandonment or rejection by the male seducer can be seen as the catalyst for the eventual suicide of the fallen woman in the stereotypical narrative. … These associations mostly stemmed from the belief that disappointed love caused female hysteria and madness, leading to suicide’ (2016: 21-2). The trope reframes social pressure, from poverty and the demands of the sexual double standard, as devotion in order to redeem the dead woman. Gaveston hears a version of this narrative in his enquiries about Julia: ‘For, at last, being actually driven to desperation, what should she do but go to one of the bridges, and attempt to jump into the water, with her child in her arms’ (Crowe 1841: 3.196). This description emphasises Julia’s desperation, the financial pressures of being a single mother with no prospect of reputable employment, as her motivation for contemplating suicide; the suggestion that there is no other option shows how the deaths of such ‘surplus’ women are normalised. Two gentlemen who later witness Julia’s rescue casually discuss the ‘vast number of suicides in this river’, stating, ‘[i]t seems either to be a fashion or an epidemic. I have seen six bodies lying together at the Morgue’ (Crowe 1841: 3.285). Their discussion implies that suicide-by-drowning is so pervasive an image that it has become clichéd. It is in this trivialisation of women’s deaths that Gaveston spies the means to get away with murder by completing the fallen woman narrative so casually written off by the passing men.

The gentlemen’s dismissive statements about suicide by drowning as a ‘fashion’ and spectacle on display at the Morgue contrasts with the urgency and compassion of the beggar boy who helps rescue Julia from the river. The alliance between two social outcasts—a street urchin and a fallen woman—reveal the bourgeois nature of the artistic imagery surrounding women’s deaths: ‘For the middle class, the female suicide was essentially a sinner; for the working class she was a victim’ (Anderson 1987: 199). These classed attitudes show how the iconography of the drowned woman reinforces middle-class ideologies about gender and domesticity by victim-blaming the fallen woman for the cultural values that define her body in terms of sexuality. The social stigma attached to being sexually ‘compromised’ enables the figurative prostitution of her corpse through artistic reproduction and display. The pervasiveness of the myth practically overshadows Julia’s life when, peering at the still-breathing woman, one bystander says, ‘What, is she drowned? You should have taken her to the Morgue’ (Crowe 1841: 3.290). The multiple references to the Paris Morgue underscore the role of the scopophilic gaze in constructing the dead woman. Unidentified cadavers were placed on display at the Morgue in the hope that someone would claim them; however, with its public display of nude corpses, the dead-house soon became a popular, if morbid, tourist attraction. Charles Dickens, for example, visits the Morgue to speak with the clerk in an 1853 article ‘Dead Reckoning at the Morgue,’ where his macabre discussion with the clerk reiterates a gendered view of death: ‘“A woman, Monsieur,” said the greffier, “when she has made up her mind to die, chooses the speediest and most passive form of self-destruction. Shrinking from the thoughts of blood, she seldom employs firearms or a sharp instrument—these are a man’s weapons”’ (1853: 115). This dichotomy between violent men and ‘passive’, ‘shrinking’ women extends gender roles beyond the grave, where the ideal feminine death also visually represents purity with a body that is free from marks of penetration.

The Morgue continues to feature as a site, and sight, of necrophilic fantasy in Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin (1867). The protagonist, Laurent, finds pleasure in the taboo exposure of nudity and death: ‘He then became a simple spectator, who took strange pleasure in looking death by violence in the face, in its lugubriously fantastic and grotesque attitudes. This sight amused him, particularly when there were women there displaying their bare bosoms. These nudities, brutally exposed, bloodstained, and in places bored with holes, attracted and detained him’ (Zola and Vizetelly 1910: 93). As Laurent ogles dead women’s breasts, the ‘brutal’ display of nudity, as well as the indignities showered on the corpses by passing boys and workmen, become part and parcel of the ‘violence’ of death just as much as the blood and gore. The spectator’s eyes bore into the corpse, penetrating her like the weapons or marks of decomposition that have left disfiguring, but suggestive, holes in her skin. This conflation of violence and voyeurism mirrors Crowe’s competing narratives of murder and suicide, where the hidden motives driving depictions of death allow for re-evaluations of the visible and invisible violence done to bodies. Julia’s ‘suicide’ is, in fact, a murder attempt; however, Victorian gender ideology works in favour of her would-be-killer, who exploits his own intimate ties to her by staging a death that aligns with stereotypical portrayals of women ‘deflowered’ and deserted by men. Julia subverts this trope by surviving and exposing Gaveston’s crimes at a public trial. While he does escape sentencing, he does not escape a violent death. His decision to ‘bl[o]w out his brains’ with a gun is, ultimately, a stereotypically masculine death (Crowe 1841: 3.334). As a counterpart to the suicide he stages for Julia, Gaveston’s ‘gentlemanly’ demise suggests he continues to perpetuate violent fantasies that concede to cultural norms about gender and status.

Gaveston’s ultimately self-destructive violence is an indictment of Victorian expectations about masculinity, perhaps as much as expectations about femininity. The novel ends with several bodies, not female but male: besides Gaveston himself, there are the bodies of his two accomplices, sentenced to execution; of Duke Rochecouart, shot in pursuit of those accomplices; of Gaveston’s father-in-law, Mr. Wentworth, whom he murdered; and of Andrew Hopley, whose corpse is found in a well where Gaveston had stashed it. The women are not unaffected by this orgy of violence, having lost their fathers, brothers, and lovers. The carnage provides a counterpart to the Gothic ‘corpse porn’ of the Bertrand accounts, which refused to acknowledge the male victims. While Julia escapes death, the sanctioning of male aggression and female oppression symbolised by the failures of law—Bertrand’s light sentencing, Gaveston’s escape—is not without its casualties. The bodies left here showcase the social violence embedded in Victorian gender orthodoxy, which also has the potential to dehumanise men as monsters, predators, and, like women, as prey to naturalised expressions of male power and control.

Afterlives in Victorian Women’s Ghost Fiction

One venue where corpses do not sleep peacefully is in Victorian ghost stories, a genre adjacent to the popular crime fiction narratives that rely on similar Gothic imagery. Not only have Crowe’s works been identified as one of the precursors to the popular sensation novels of the 1860s (Heholt 2021: 9), but her ghost stories, too, were published in a well-known book called The Night-Side of Nature (1848), where she challenged the objective and objectifying gaze of masculine rationalism. Female-written ghost stories often recover the ‘ghostly’ positions of the Victorian woman by grappling with her ‘visibility and invisibility, her power and powerlessness’ in a culture of male-determined values (Dickerson 1996: 5). Just as Crowe refuses to let the drowned woman narrative supersede her heroine’s life, sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon does not let the male artist compose and put to rest the corpse in her ghost story ‘The Cold Embrace’ (1860). This mid-Victorian ghost story about a young artist haunted by the spectre of his drowned lover provides one example of the ways that women writers continued to resist the commodification of women’s deaths.

Braddon’s ghost story denies the artist’s rendition of peaceful repose as the heroine’s final legacy, privileging spiritual agency over her inert corporeal form. The protagonist is a stereotypically self-centred artist, who abandons his childhood sweetheart only to unwittingly stumble upon her corpse:

‘Drowned?’

‘Yes, drowned. A young girl, very handsome.’

‘Suicides are always handsome,’ says the painter ….

Life is such a golden holiday for him—young, ambitious, clever—that it seems as though sorrow and death could have no part in his destiny.

At last he says that, as this poor suicide is so handsome, he should like to make a sketch of her. (Braddon 2016 [1860]: 32)

The description of the young artist has a satirical tinge, as his indifferent attitude, unconscious of his own privileged position, contrasts starkly with the suicide victim’s tragedy. He is also naïve in believing himself beyond consequence, imagining mortality only in aesthetic terms. The young girl, whom the artist does not recognise as his betrothed at first, is reduced to her ‘very handsome’ appearance and then further depersonalised as one of many suicides. Bronfen discusses the ‘violent’ rhetoric of aestheticising feminine death, how the artist’s rendering aims at ‘de-individualising the real body referred to in these representations, at diminishing the material physicality of the model in favour of an allegorical reading that re-establishes the image of the artist’ (1992: 49). In Braddon’s story, the artistic gaze succeeds in depersonalising the woman so that the artist is unprepared to sympathise with her. Devoid of emotional significance, her body becomes merely an aesthetic object.

Braddon responds to this erasure by reviving the woman in the form of a revenant. The woman’s haunting does not allow the artist to divorce her personal and affecting presence from the anonymous ‘handsome’ corpse. With an unpleasant texture suggestive of decay, the cold and clammy grip of the woman’s hands overturns the sanitised image of the woman found drowned. The drowned woman is no longer a beautiful, incorruptible image of desirability, but a revenging spirit who haunts her former lover to his grave. The titular embrace implies a necrophilic consummation similar to romantic renderings of the vampire’s embrace of a beautiful dead woman; however, the drowned woman’s stranglehold belies the fantasy of the male artist as she refuses to lie in still repose. Transcending the confines of the coffin and the canvas, the woman in this story denies the aestheticising of death and, with it, the subjection of women’s bodies.

Conclusion

The male voyeurism and sexual sadism that infuses journalistic and legal narratives of the ‘Lycanthropy’ case reveal the Gothic ‘corpse porn’ of early true-crime accounts that cast women in the role of the victim, most fascinating for her fleshy and fleshly body. The dominating gaze of the vampiric suitor, with his taboo appetite for flesh, subjects women to the metaphorical dissections of an artistic fetish that romanticises women’s corpses and reconstructs their forms to transform degenerate bodies and desires into pictures of purity and aesthetic pleasure. The stories I have discussed offer up female corpses in many forms, from the necrophile’s refuse of dismembered and tooth-marked cadavers, to the kissable lips of the well-preserved woman ‘found drowned,’ the undead mummies of erotic-exotic fascination, and, finally, the avenging revenant of the jilted woman. Each version of the dead woman imagines female bodies returning—rising from the grave or surfacing in the water—in a way that challenges constructions of feminine passivity and masculine control to, ultimately, reveal the gendered tensions that inspire impotent desires for the beautiful dead.