Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian FictionOhio University Press, 2005 - 271 pages The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat “private” family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century. Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's Janet's Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right. Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 Private Violence in the Public Eye | 15 |
2 Domestic Violence and MiddleClass Manliness | 44 |
3 From Regency Violence to Victorian Feminism | 72 |
4 The Abused Woman and the Community | 103 |
5 Strange Revelations | 132 |
6 Strange Revelations | 165 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
adultery Adventure animal appear argues authority beating becomes Bill brutal century chapter closed concerning conduct contrast crime cruelty death debates depicts described Dickens Dickens’s divorce court Dombey domestic early Eliot example eyes face fact female feminist fiction Figure first Florence force Hall hand Helen Holmes human husband ideal illustration imagine issue Janet’s John leave lives look magistrates male manliness marital violence marriage married middle-class moral murder Nancy narrative nature newspaper notes novel passive points police position protection published question reader refuses relationship reports represents reveals role says scene seems sensation separation sexual shows social story Strand suggests symbol tells tion Trevelyan trial Tromp turn Victorian Viola White wife abuse wife assault Wing wives woman Woman in White women writes
References to this book
The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot Rachel Ablow Limited preview - 2007 |