'Mrs. Pace' and the ambiguous language of victimization

'Justice' is a historical phenomenon: legal institutions and cultural attitudes (along with their various languages) vary across geography and time. At the same time, enduring elements of human psychology and recurring patterns in social structures provide continuities which allow the past to speak to contemporary issues. To understand the 'experience of justice', the historical tension between continuity and change and the many factors influencing the perceived boundaries of acceptable behaviour must be addressed. One approach involves examining specific experiences of victimisation, which is particularly important in the case of those who have traditionally been socially, legally and politically disadvantaged, such as women. However, while it is primarily an admission of powerlessness, 'victimhood' - the active claiming of victim status - can also be a source of social power. Only 'victims', after all, are in the position to claim some form of justice, whether retributive or restorative. However, one of the main problems with gaining a historical perspective on female victims of domestic violence is that their voices have relatively rarely survived in the public record. A valuable exception is the case of Beatrice Annie Pace. The wife of a Gloucestershire quarryman and sheep farmer, she was tried and acquitted for murdering her husband with arsenic in 1928. Extensive pre-trial hearings had revealed the horrifying extent of the dead man's physical and psychological brutality throughout eighteen-years of marriage. The dramatic twists and unexpected developments in the case were eagerly picked up by the voracious newspaper media, making the trial a sensation. 'Mrs. Pace', as she was known, achieved celebrity status; no longer simply an individual, she also became a popular and sympathetic media persona. This chapter explores the issue of justice by looking at the languages surrounding the Pace case. While legal issues raised in the trial (such as the accused's treatment by the police and coroner's jury) even led to questions being asked in Parliament, Pace was not only talked about but also received the rare opportunity to present her own version of events to the public which had so eagerly supported her. Following her acquittal, she sold her story to a tabloid, and the married 'martyrdom' which she revealed in a serialised memoir riveted newspaper readers across Britain. In this context, she had a great deal to say about her experience of abuse, the nature of married life and her treatment by the British legal system. The result is an invaluable resource for examining not only how one woman came to grips with her experience but also to compare her own views with those of other observers of the case. For some, Pace's suffering was evidence of serious shortcomings in British society and law. Pace's own commentary is both more personal and, ultimately, more ambiguous about the meaning of her victimisation and ultimate vindication. Thus, this case allows a unique, historically aware consideration of the complicated nature of the ways in which one woman created justice and resisted injustice through one of the only vehicles available to her: language

Bringing the past to heel: History, identity and violence in Ian McEwan's Black Dogs

Ian McEwan's 1992 novel Black Dogs employs postmodern understandings of history while also critiquing these same perspectives. In particular, by depicting the efforts of its protagonist, Jeremy, to write a memoir of his parents-in-law, it draws attention to the subjectivity of historical writing. While this quality has led some critics to condemn the novel for its escapism and amorality, the authors of the essay argue that Black Dogs is a statement about the necessity of history rather than its futility. Indeed, they read the text as a dramatization of humanity-s ability to bear rather than escape the often troubling burden of the past and an endorsement of the writing of history despite the awareness that historiography, while serving deep-seated human needs, is always problematic

Criminal violence in modern Britain

Although studying the history of violence invites a broad methodological and topical diversity, three issues have predominated: the relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods, the notion of a "civilizing process," and the topic of gender. As "violence" refers to physical acts as well as to cultural understandings of those acts, coming to terms with its history has meant fusing quantitative, social-history emphases on social structure and behavior with qualitative, cultural approaches to understanding narrative and discourse. There is now a consensus that, over the long term, rates of interpersonal violence declined between the late Middle Ages and the middle of the twentieth century; nonetheless, over the same period violence played an ever more prominent role among people's social fears. Building upon these findings, some historians of violence assert that a "civilizing process"– involving new patterns of social interaction and psychological restraint – has affected both the social reality and cultural construction of violence. In these and other approaches, gender has emerged as the most prominent of a variety of central concerns, although its specific role in shaping the cultures and patterns of violence remains unclear and debated

Locating violence: the spatial production and construction of physical aggression

The historical development of attitudes toward violence has been connected to changing ideas about space. The connection between 'cultures of violence' and particular 'geographies of violence' is of increasing interest within historical violence studies; nevertheless, there is a continuing need to explore ways of conceptualising that interaction. This essay concentrates on two aspects of the space-violence nexus: the interaction between space and the production and construction of violence. The production of violence refers both to the forces that lead to it as well as the forms that it takes. There has been a long-running debate about where violence comes from: in this sense, 'locating' violence has been a challenging project. Even among those who agree that violence has a primarily environmental origin (as opposed to those who locate its origins within the mind or genetics), there have been a variety of perspectives on the spaces most likely to generate violence. For instance, both urban crowding and rural isolation have been pointed to as predominant sources of violence. Moreover, particular spatial arrangements have tended to be associated with certain kinds of violence. Alongside the relationship between space and the 'production' of violence is the influence of particular kinds of spatial thinking on the ways that violence is 'constructed', i.e., the ways that a physically violent act is culturally interpreted. For example, the notion 'violence' is almost inescapably connected to the issue of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of physical force (as what is 'violent' is generally what is seen as illegitimate). Imaginations of space play an important role in defining this legitimacy. As a result, violence is connected to particular spatial issues. For example, particular kinds of violence are seen as legitimate within particular kinds of public or private spaces. Along with the use of particular kinds of space, the legitimacy of violence is tied to particular ways that space is used

A Theoretical Treatment of the Steady-Flow, Linear, Crossed-Field, Direct-Current Plasma Accelerator for Inviscid, Adiabatic, Isothermal, Constant-Area Flow

The theory is developed from the individual equations of motion of the three components of the plasma. The effect of the ion cyclotron angle (omega tau), which is the product of the ion cyclotron frequency and the ion mean free time between collisions with neutral particles and which is proportional to the axial component of the ion slip velocity, on both Joule heating rate and accelerator length is included in the results and is shown to be small only for values of about 10(exp -3) radian or less

Pink Lady & Sundowner apples

This bulletin summaries for all Australian growers the present technical information concerning Pink Lady and Sundownerhttps://researchlibrary.agric.wa.gov.au/bulletins/1273/thumbnail.jp

On the Lubricity and Comparative Life Cycle of Biobased Synthetic and Mineral Oil Emulsions in Machining Titanium Ti-6Al-4V at Low Cutting Speed

The paper discusses an instrumented tapping test method using a CNC machine tool to compare the lubricity of MWFs by cutting threads in a Ti-6Al-4V alloy at low speed. The method uses a spiral flute tap size typical of industrial practice. A soft synchronous tap holder and spindle mounted dynamometer were incorporated on the machine to measure torque and thrust force. The tapping test method was demonstrated on three groups of MWFs that were commercially available and classified by ASTM E2523-13:2018. The method developed stable results free of chip clogging in tool flutes which could otherwise mask their comparative lubricity. The fully synthetic (FS) group displayed the best lubricity and within this group the FS from renewables (FS-bio) was the best overall. The method was shown to be effective in mitigating biasing effects on lubricity performance due to the generous tool chamfer angle tolerance and was practical and economical to implement. The significance of the results is discussed enabling an understanding of friction effects in tapping using a soft synchronous tap holder. A life cycle assessment of each MWF group found total Greenhouse Gas emitted from the FS group was 17% of the hydrocarbon group whilst FS-bio emitted just 7%

Hipparcos period-luminosity relations for Miras and semiregular variables

We present period-luminosity diagrams for nearby Miras and semiregulars, selecting stars with parallaxes better than 20 per cent and well-determined periods. Using K-band magnitudes, we find two well-defined P-L sequences, one corresponding to the standard Mira P-L relation and the second shifted to shorter periods by a factor of about 1.9. The second sequence only contains semiregular variables, while the Mira sequence contains both Miras and semiregulars. Several semiregular stars show double periods in agreement with both relations. The Whitelock evolutionary track is shown to fit the data, indicating that the semiregulars are Mira progenitors. The transition between the two sequences may correspond to a change in pulsation mode or to a change in the stellar structure. Large amplitude pulsations leading to classical Mira classification occur mainly near the tip of the local AGB luminosity function.Comment: 10 pages with figures, accepted by ApJ Letter