Brändle, LaraLaraBrändle2025-12-012025-12-012025978-3-98989-055-8https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/111814The Victorian era is an era of change. Among these changes are developments in medical and legal discourse, specifically a shift in the perception of madness. It becomes a condition primarily associated with women. Alongside this shift, the insanity-plea arrives in Victorian courtrooms. Considering these shifting discourses, this chapter will examine how different modes of Victorian fiction participate in and respond to these discourses. It will analyse Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) as an example for Victorian Gothic fiction and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) as an example for realist fiction arguing that the degree of social criticism that is negotiated through the representation of madness in connection with murder committed by women in Victorian fiction is tied to the realist or Gothic mode. The more Gothic a novel is, the more murder is the pinnacle symptom of the female perpetrators’ madness, thus recontextualising murder as madness and reducing a woman’s agency. The more realist a novel is, the more murder is the transgression and not recontextualised as madness, thus leaving more agency to women. This chapter will further complicate these transgressions of murder and suicide by further considering the female characters under scrutiny and their transgressions in light of their race (Bertha Mason) and class (Tess of the D’Urbervilles). Both women’s actions and depictions are heavily influenced by these circumstances: They are condemned and judged on more than one level.engVictorian literatureGothicrealismrealismmurdermental illness820bookpart