Assassin's Creed Syndicate and the Depiction of Female "Britishness" in Victorian London

This paper examines how Assassin's Creed Syndicate (Ubisoft Quebec, 2015), a French-owned, Canadian-developed action-adventure game set in Victorian London, depicts female "Britishness," meaning the traditional cultural and social values associated with women in nineteenth-century Britain. Rather than approaching British identity in games from the standpoint of national representation, the study asks how an externally produced title constructs gendered notions of Britishness through its characters and setting. Its central focus is the dual protagonist Evie Frye and her antagonist counterpart Lucy Thorne, whom the analysis presents as embodying values that contrast with the subservient, domestically oriented image of Victorian women, such as independence, ambition, and engagement with education and enterprise.

The analysis extends beyond the two leads to the wider game world, where female characters hold leadership roles within gangs and organized crime. The authors argue that such portrayals, though potentially read as tokenistic given the franchise's earlier criticisms of female representation, are not wholly anachronistic, since female-led criminal groups and reported female involvement in violence existed during the period. Feminist film theory, including Laura Mulvey's concept of the male gaze and Linda Williams's work on the female body, is applied to consider how audiences may perceive violent female characters and how such figures function as objects of visual pleasure within a historical game space.

The study draws on a broad base of secondary sources spanning Victorian social history, female entrepreneurship, education reform, and game studies, supplemented by critical reception of the game, including a historian's commentary. The methodology is interpretive and theoretical rather than based on player surveys or quantitative sampling, so its conclusions rest on textual and critical analysis. The paper positions its findings as a contribution to debates on the historical representation of women in Victorian Britain and on the broader, persistent gender imbalances within the games industry.