“Seeing the Actual Physical Betty Kane”: Reading the Fille Fatale in Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair in the Age of #metoo

Abstract

This article offers a feminist reading of Josephine Tey’s 1948 Domestic Noir novel The Franchise Affair, with a specific focus on the figure of the fille fatale. I investigate the gender-political dimensions of justice and the law, in order to establish the psychological, literary and legal contexts for representing female sexuality and social class in the late Golden Age crime genre. The article furthermore discusses pedagogy, specifically using The Franchise Affair as a teaching and learning case study for the employment of critical pedagogy in the contemporary diverse undergraduate classroom.