Project Proposal: “Rosenglory”: Infantilism and Free Agency in the Case of Amelia Norman

         In the 2006 article “Law, Seduction, and the Sentimental Heroine: The Amelia Norman Case,” Andrea Hibbard and John Parry argue that seduction tales made nineteenth- century fallen women objects of sympathy and granted them enough agency for sexual consent. Using the example of Amelia Norman, I complicate that argument.  I  argue that, although the fallen woman could achieve some measure of public sympathy through the popular literature of the seduction novel, she must also be infantilized, which precludes any semblance of independence or free agency. In other words, Amelia Norman became sympathetic only after the public believed her incapable of rational and logical thought.

            Using news articles contemporary to the trial, I plan to trace the evolution of public opinion of Amelia Norman from distain and condemnation to sympathy, ultimately culminating in Lydia Maria Child’s fictionalized account “Rosenglory.” Using a close reading of these texts I will explore how the sentimental depiction of Norman evolved counter to her criminal culpability. After her trial, Amelia Norman vanished from public record, but her fictional counterpart, Susan Grey, remains in a socially accepted role: stripped of free agency, responsibility, and redeemed through a tragic death.

            While the Amelia Norman trial influenced legal reform, as Hibbard and Parry claim, Lydia Maria Child’s fictional account forces us to reevaluate the inverse relationship between responsibility and sympathy. Public sympathy may have saved Amelia Norman from the noose, but she only gained that sympathy through the loss of her personhood.