Disordered Gender And Disordered Genre: How The Restoration Of Order Fails In The Woman In White, Revelations Of A Lady Detective, The Sign Of Four, And The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Crime and detective fiction is often considered to be a problem-solving genre that serves to reify existing binaries by introducing subversive elements only to solve those elements by the end of the story and restore the normative order. Early and foundational detective fiction has most often been accused of this – Poe’s stories of ratiocination, for example, which are often credited with the creation of the genre. Much Victorian detective fiction has also often been written off in this way, as people argue that any subversive element is resolved and punished by the end of each story or novel and that detective stories serve to reinforce conservative values. This idea is at the heart of much existing scholarship on the Sherlock Holmes stories and at the heart of many of the debates around Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. Can a subversive character restore or reinforce a conservative order or do they inherently fail? This is the question my thesis thoroughly explores.