Author: Elena Mary, Faculty of History, University of Oxford - ORCID

Abstract: »This article analyses popular novels and films in early-mid twentieth-century Britain. It argues that strangled women were increasingly depicted in violent narratives of adventure and domination by a male lover. The mass female audience for these erotic fictions demonstrates the psychic realm of escapism embedded within Alison Light’s paradigmatic framework of ‘conservative modernity’. During the interwar period, an erotic imaginary of sexual violence emerged that glamourised non-fatal manual strangulation as a transgressive form of courtship. This built on a late-Victorian cultural script of the ‘monstrous stranger’ that persisted into the twentieth century. Strangled women were commodified and normalised as mass entertainment by the 1940s, becoming the acceptable face of sexual violence.« (Source: Cultural and Social History)

Contents:

	Abstract (p. 1)
	Introduction (p. 1)
	Monstrous violence: Late-nineteenth-century precedents (p. 5)
	Erotic violence: Strangulation as mass entertainment (p. 7)
	Obscene violence: Censorship & the boundaries of acceptability (p. 12)
	Conclusion (p. 15)
	Acknowledgments (p. 16)
	Disclosure statement (p. 16)
	Funding (p. 16)
	Notes on contributor (p. 16)
	Bibliography (p. 17)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of England | Film: Films based on British novels / No Orchids for Miss Blandish (film), The Sheik (film), The Wicked Lady | Literature: English literature / James Hadley Chase, E. M. Hull | Literature: Fiction about rape / No Orchids for Miss Blandish (novel), The Sheik (novel) | Sex and the law: Rape