6 - Technologies of Detection

Summary

Along with new technologies of modernity, the late nineteenth century saw an upswing of detective fiction, following the success of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character. Many New Woman characters in the works studied in previous chapters – such as Bella in The Girl Behind the Keys, Lois in Miss Cayley's Adventures and Hilda in Hilda Wade – all solve mysteries at some point, coming to work as detectives while in other professions. This is not a coincidence, but rather a sign of the popularity not just of the New Woman figure but also of detective fiction in the late nineteenth century. While women could not enter the British police force until well into the twentieth century, female detectives had been a part of British crime and detective fiction since the 1860s, culminating in the 1890s with the rise of New Woman detective fiction. The modern female detective becomes the ultimate embodiment of the New Woman's engagement with technology, as many New Woman detectives employ not just the technologies most commonly associated with the figure – the typewriter, the bicycle or medical technologies – but also other technologies of late nineteenth-century modernity, in order to hunt down criminals and provide evidence of their guilt. This chapter concludes the book's examination of gender and technology at the fin de siècle by focusing on the figure of the New Woman detective and the specific technologies of detection she employs.

Through a consideration of the changing nature of forensic evidence in the late nineteenth century, for example by the introduction of composite photography and fingerprinting, the chapter explores the gendered use of technologies in producing new forensic knowledge. Reading Mathias McDonnell Bodkin's Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900), alongside other literary figurations, the chapter considers the figure of the female detective as a culmination of the New Woman's use of technologies at the fin de siècle. The heroine of McDonnell Bodkin's novel is not only a Girton graduate, but a bicycling female doctor who has previously worked as a telegraph girl, a telephone girl and a lady journalist. She finally settles as a lady detective, solving crimes with the help of modern technologies and using them to produce evidence in her investigations, proving her place in knowledge production.