Neo-Victorian Violence

Although violence has been critically examined in relation to neo-Victorian subgenres—such as trauma, crime, and Gothicism—the nature, form, and purpose of violence in neo-Victorian fiction and film have yet to be fully accounted for and theorised. This chapter provides a summary of these approaches within neo-Victorian studies, while also arguing for another consideration: the ethics of representing graphic violence in a displaced neo-Victorian setting, specifically in the light of expanding definition(s) of “neo-Victorian” and the subsequent problematising of neo-Victorian texts and studies in their engagement with global, colonial, and Anglophone contexts. Considering “canonical” English writers, specifically Emily Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, alongside their respective twenty-first-century adaptations, the chapter explores the making and breaking of (neo-)Victorian conventions through the enhancement of explicit physical violence in the texts’ afterlives. This is followed by a focus on “non-canonical” case studies, namely the film Lady Macbeth (2016) and Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019), which use violence to confront and complicate neo-Victorian/neo-nineteenth-century articulations of race, colonialism, and health, pointing to future research avenues regarding neo-Victorian violence’s relationship to illness and wellbeing.