Abstract
This chapter will examine The Bletchley Circle’s depictions of femininity in crisis that manifest as a result of deviation from the postfeminist script. In Bletchley, these crises can only be resolved through an acceptance of and adherence to postfeminist gender norms. In its representation of its characters’ attempts to reject or move outside the normative boundaries of postfeminism, Bletchley demonstrates the futility of the attempted alternatives. With reference to aspects of horror scholarship, this chapter will discuss the series’ depiction of gender as a whole and particularly the depiction of Susan, the series’ ostensible main character. In this way, it will seek to demonstrate the ways in which the space outside of postfeminism and those who willingly occupy it are constructed as dangerous, deviant and destructive.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This narrative setting is strongly reminiscent of the first series of Marvel’s Agent Carter, which will be discussed in detail in Chap. 4.
- 3.
This conceptualisation of the slasher genre, and the horror genre more generally, as driven by misogyny has been challenged by scholars such as Derose (2005), Nowell (2011) and Weaver et al. (2015). This chapter does not seek to enter into the debate as to the veracity of Clover’s argument about slasher/horror as a genre more broadly, but rather to suggest that the understanding of slasher/horror deployed in Bletchley speaks productively to Clover’s model.
- 4.
This also ties in with contemporary debates around rape culture and victim blaming, in which blame is apportioned to victims of sexual assault based on their clothing or the fact that they had been drinking at the time of the assault. A salient example of this is the case of Brock Turner who was convicted of three counts of sexual assault but given only a six-month prison sentence. His victim was intoxicated and unconscious at the time of the assault (Carroll 2016). Here again is evidence of a series ostensibly about the past that is inflected by the politics of the present.
- 5.
Within the chronology of the first series, the Second World War ended nine years previously.
- 6.
This bears striking resemblance to the opening sequence of Marvel’s Agent Carter, which will be discussed in Chap. 4, and, in the same way, juxtaposes the central character’s exciting and vital wartime work with their dull and domestic post-war lives.
- 7.
In the series, and in reality, all staff working at Bletchley Park were required to sign the Official Secrets Act and forbidden to discuss their work at the Park even with their families. Information regarding Bletchley Park was declassified in the mid-1970s (Lewis 2014: no pagination).
- 8.
For an example of this, see Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë (1847), in which Jane’s love interest Mr Rochester uses a secret room in the attic of Thornfield Hall to hide his insane wife.
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Mahoney, C. (2019). The Horror of Transgressive Femininity in The Bletchley Circle . In: Women in Neoliberal Postfeminist Television Drama. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30449-2_3
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