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 Brontė'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-sičcle 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. |
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abused woman adultery Adventure Anne Brontė argues Baskervilles Bill Bozzle Brontė brutal Caird's chapter Charles Dickens coverture crime debates Dempster depicts Dickens Dickens's divorce court Dombey Dombey and Son Dombey's Edith Eliot Emily feminist fiction Figure Florence gender Hammerton Helen Hospital Patient hound Huntingdon husband ideological Janet's Repentance late-Victorian Laura magistrates manliness Marchmont marital assault marital cruelty marital violence marriage married women's property masculine middle-class home Morning Chronicle murder Nancy narrative narrator newspaper nineteenth-century novel Old Curiosity Shop Oliver Twist Parl passive Punch rape reader represents reveals role scene scrutiny selfhood sensation sensation novel sexual Sherlock Holmes Sibella Sidney Paget Sikes social spousal Strand Magazine suggests symbol Tenant of Wildfell text's tion Trevelyan Tromp Victorian Viola wife abuse wife assault wife beating wife's Wildfell Hall Wing of Azrael wives Woman in White women working-class
References to this book
The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot Rachel Ablow Limited preview - 2007 |