’19c Female Serial Killers in American Horror Story: Coven (2013) and Crimson Peak (del Toro 2015)
My research interrogates the representation of nineteenth-century female serial killers through critical analysis of their depiction in the neo-Victorian visual narratives American Horror Story: Coven (2013) and Crimson Peak (2015). In studying the characters of Delphine La Laurie, a serial killer and socialite in 1834 New Orleans, and Lucille Sharpe, an heiress and serial killer who operates in 1887 Cumbria, my work examines visual contemporary narratives that employ the tenets of Victorian Gothic novels and their attempt to subvert the Victorian stereotype of passive female victim by allowing Delphine and Lucille to reclaim a sense of agency through modern cinema. By interrogating the extent to which the texts accept and reject Victorian Gothic tropes and the narrative devices which are employed to update the figure of the violent nineteenth-century woman, my research questions the texts’ subversion of passive, punished femininity to ask how they empower Delphine and Lucille to reclaim their original voices. In analyzing these texts through an interdisciplinary lens comprised of forensic psychology, feminist theory, and Victorianist scholarship, my work not only articulates a new way of reading these texts but a new genre of literary criticism: a neo-Victorian lens that examines the role of violent women in film. My conference presentation would center primarily on the role of poison as a weapon as seen through Lucille’s murders in Crimson Peak. By contrasting Lucille’s use of poison with Delphine’s sadistic torture experiments, my work compares the methodologies, motivations, and psychology of female serial killers in these neo-Victorian films.
Alyssa-Caroline Burnette is a first-year PhD student and Wolfson scholar at the University of Southampton. Her dissertation conducts a feminist reading of nineteenth century female serial killers and their representation in the contemporary Victorian gothic as seen through the television series American Horror Story: Coven and the film Crimson Peak. You can find her on Twitter at @alyssacwrites and Instagram at @acbandthefloofs
