Strangled Women: Popular Culture, ‘Conservative Modernity’ and Erotic Violence in Britain, c.1890–1950

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.