Analytic Framework

This chapter develops the framework for analyzing Prime Suspect. The framework will serve as a benchmark for examining gender and justice issues in cultural productions, including film and television. In contrast to some cultural studies approaches that claim to avoid value assessments of fictional works, the chapter adopts an approach that not only examines but advocates for works that promote hopes for and actions toward social justice. The first component of the framework rests on the idea that a feminist crime genre has emerged in the past few decades. The second and interrelated component of the framework is a model of progressive moral fiction. The model can be used as a framework for media research and for using media to teach about gender and justice issues.

Prime Suspect and Progressive Moral Fiction

This chapter discusses the strengths and limitations of Prime Suspect as a work of progressive moral fiction. It identifies ways that the conventions of the crime genre and the strictures of television work against the transformative potential of the series. It elaborates apparent flaws in the character of Jane Tennison: incidents of personality issues and unethical behavior that appear in the series. It suggests that Tennison's flaws can actually enhance debates about gender and justice. The chapter draws on the work of feminist critical race scholar Patricia Hill Collins (2000) in her work Black Feminist Thought to describe a “both/and” perspective for understanding Tennison's character. It compares Prime Suspect with other contemporary police procedural dramas. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and pedagogical implications of Prime Suspect and the model of progressive moral fiction. It focuses on how the model can be used in the classroom to address the justice implications in Prime Suspect and media productions more generally.

Doing Justice

This chapter focuses on Prime Suspect's treatment of justice issues. The main question is the degree to which the series fits within the corpus of a feminist crime genre and embodies a commitment to the tenets of a progressive moral fiction. The chapter considers Jane Tennison's role as a justice provocateur. Do the series and its chief protagonist merely reinforce restoration of the status quo, or do they convey a sense of the limits of law and the criminal justice system, of the fissures in societal and police organizational power structures? And to what extent, if any, is Prime Suspect imagery empowering with regard to individual or collective opportunities for promoting social justice or social transformation? The chapter also presents examples of action and dialogue that exemplify Jane Tennison as a justice provocateur. It then discusses the limitations of the doing of justice by Jane Tennison and in the series as a whole.

An Analysis of Octave Ségur’s Translation of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) into French

The Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) became very famous in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century thanks to her pedagogical works, regionalist and feminocentric novels, whose translations were eagerly awaited on the Continent. This paper analyses a hitherto totally unexplored field of research within Edgeworth studies: the French translation of Edgeworth’s most important English society novel, Belinda (1801), from the point of view of gender and translation studies. For this purpose, we will take into account the particular context of the work, its main features in English and French, and the particular procedures adopted by the French translator to transform Edgeworth’s tale into moral fiction for women. Octave-Henri Gabriel, comte de Ségur, adapts Belinda to the taste of French readers by sacrificing both the macrostructural and microstructural features of the source text. Despite the success of the book in France, Bélinde (1802) is not comparable to the author’s original idea, as the textual history of Belinda reveals. Edgeworth’s book deals with controversial issues at that time and features her most memorable female character, which is distorted in the French text. Ultimately, this paper confirms that the publication of Ségur’s translation has consequences on the transmission of Edgeworth’s oeuvre in other European literatures and on her image as a feminist writer.