The Pistol as a Novel Weapon

This essay traces the emergence of a philosophical and narrative conceit of the pistol as an alleged power equalizer following its mechanical developments in the mid-nineteenth century. Over this period, pistols transformed from the tools of trained combatants into newly plausible weapons in the hands of the amateur. This new (theoretical) utility radically altered the weapons' narrative potential from the props of a few character types into objects which might equalize violence between characters. I examine four novels, by M. E. Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, and Anna Katherine Green, in which women are suspected of killing men with pistols as examples of how novelists experimented with this new narrative device, and I theorize why each author ultimately declined to realize their putative democratic power.