a composed Everywoman. âAttired in sombre velvet, bare headed, with a certain self-possessed demureness in her bearing â at the first glance she seems as common-place a woman as the world might well contain.â There is âno perceptible blush or tremorâ â which could suggest guilt or indeed a greater modesty than Christiana possesses â as she stands âin her solitudeâ in the dock and looks âstraight to the frontâ, or inspects the courtroom, âdwelling specially in her gazeâ on the benches where the âlady spectatorsâ sit and occasionally raising her brows with âa sudden quick flash of the dark eyesâ as she perhaps recognizes someone she knows. Once more, Christiana, an ardent writer, âtakes copious notesâ: âher daintily gloved hand pushed a quill pen again and again up to the inkholder bedded in the flat top of the front of the dockâ. Smiling occasionally, perhaps at what she is writing, she listens with âattentive composure, watching every wordâ the prosecutor utters, occasionally darting a sharp glance at him.
On the other hand, Christiana is also a much more troubling creature than this would suggest. The reporter delves into animal imagery to conjure up a portrait reminiscent of the mad and prowling Bertha in Mr Rochesterâs attic, a creature of dangerous instinctual and criminal force all set to burn down the respectable edifice of bourgeois life. Marking the transition between the innocent and the madly bad is the figure of the governess. Aside from the teacher, the governess is the only other respectable working woman Victorian England permits. But this respectability itself is open to challenge. Not only does the governess have to work as something of a servant. She is also the outsider in the sanctuary of the home, the âotherâ woman. Christiana, this ârather careworn, hard-featured woman of 35â, might have been a âday governess for years â might have acquired the patience and chilled self-control that prolonged teaching under precarious conditions is calculated to impart, and that half sullen resignation â with an only occasional flash of self assertion â which successive batches of children and successive exigeant lady mothers are apt to engenderâ.
And now the reporter, having pitied, is freed to move into the terrain of bestial ugliness:
The face is plain, decidedly plain; the complexion rather dark with some colour underlying the swarthiness. The forehead, and whole forefront of the head is large, and projects with somewhat exceptional prominence ... But the character of the face lies in the lower feature. The profile is irregular, but not unpleasing; the upper lip is long, and convex; mouth slightly projecting; chin straight, long and cruel; the lower jaw heavy, massive and animal in its development. The lips are loose â almost pendulous â the lower one being fullest and projecting, and the mouth is exceptionally large.
Like a good Victorian characterologist influenced by the ever popular âscienceâ of phrenology â an invention of the Viennese Franz-Joseph Gall, who had begun his work with criminals and the insane and in his hypotheses on brain localization had linked particular skull areas and their exaggerated bumps with murder and destructiveness â the Daily News reporter sees physiognomy as speaking a personâs essence. Just four years later, in 1876, he would have had the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso to hand to argue that criminality could be read from physiognomy and inherited facial features, and to confirm him in finding something sinister, a mark of the inborn female criminal, in the unsightly sensuality of Christianaâs pendulous lips and the force of that large, primitive, animal jaw.
Whether or not this description of Christiana is accurate we have no way of knowing. But the unsettling clash of
On the other hand, Christiana is also a much more troubling creature than this would suggest. The reporter delves into animal imagery to conjure up a portrait reminiscent of the mad and prowling Bertha in Mr Rochesterâs attic, a creature of dangerous instinctual and criminal force all set to burn down the respectable edifice of bourgeois life. Marking the transition between the innocent and the madly bad is the figure of the governess. Aside from the teacher, the governess is the only other respectable working woman Victorian England permits. But this respectability itself is open to challenge. Not only does the governess have to work as something of a servant. She is also the outsider in the sanctuary of the home, the âotherâ woman. Christiana, this ârather careworn, hard-featured woman of 35â, might have been a âday governess for years â might have acquired the patience and chilled self-control that prolonged teaching under precarious conditions is calculated to impart, and that half sullen resignation â with an only occasional flash of self assertion â which successive batches of children and successive exigeant lady mothers are apt to engenderâ.
And now the reporter, having pitied, is freed to move into the terrain of bestial ugliness:
The face is plain, decidedly plain; the complexion rather dark with some colour underlying the swarthiness. The forehead, and whole forefront of the head is large, and projects with somewhat exceptional prominence ... But the character of the face lies in the lower feature. The profile is irregular, but not unpleasing; the upper lip is long, and convex; mouth slightly projecting; chin straight, long and cruel; the lower jaw heavy, massive and animal in its development. The lips are loose â almost pendulous â the lower one being fullest and projecting, and the mouth is exceptionally large.
Like a good Victorian characterologist influenced by the ever popular âscienceâ of phrenology â an invention of the Viennese Franz-Joseph Gall, who had begun his work with criminals and the insane and in his hypotheses on brain localization had linked particular skull areas and their exaggerated bumps with murder and destructiveness â the Daily News reporter sees physiognomy as speaking a personâs essence. Just four years later, in 1876, he would have had the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso to hand to argue that criminality could be read from physiognomy and inherited facial features, and to confirm him in finding something sinister, a mark of the inborn female criminal, in the unsightly sensuality of Christianaâs pendulous lips and the force of that large, primitive, animal jaw.
Whether or not this description of Christiana is accurate we have no way of knowing. But the unsettling clash of
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