The female offender / by Cæsar Lombroso and William Ferrero.

  • Lombroso, Cesare, 1835-1909.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The female offender / by Cæsar Lombroso and William Ferrero. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    265/398 (page 185)
    As we have already mentioned, women, unlike men, do not embody their crimes in writing or drawing ; hence the more imperious longing to invoke the memory of their acts by narrating them. A woman talks of her crime just as a man will revive the recollection of it by written allusions, or by some drawing or engraving on an utensil, &C.1 Very singular is the confession which a woman sometimes makes to her lover. The female delinquent will reveal her crime to the man she loves, even if he neither questions nor suspects her. She will even sometimes force him to accept written proofs of her guilt, thus furnishing him with a weapon against her, of which she feels the full gravity when her mad but brief passion is over, and which often leads her to commit a fresh crime in order to rid herself of an inconvenient witness. V. confided to Signorini, her lover, that she had stolen some Government coupons; and later, when tired of him, she killed him to save herself from being accused of the theft. Menghini, in a letter to her latest lover, D’Ottavi, avowed the murder of her husband, and when D’Ottavi left her she induced her preceding lover to kill the confidant, who had now become dangerous. We have in all this a natural consequence of the tendency to mutual confidences which prevails among lovers, and especially of the need which every woman feels, when in love, to give some extraordinary proof of devotion to the man of her heart. The greater the pledge of love, the more the woman desires to bestow it; and what more can she do than to make 1 See “ Uomo Delinauente,” vol. i.