Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian FictionThe 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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 52
... argue—in their fiction, Victorians questioned the limits of male authority, the husband's power to chastise, the definition of matrimonial cruelty, and the commu- nity's role in regulating domestic violence. This book examines Victorian ...
... argue, common assault and battery in a familial context assumed unprecedented visibility in the public press. This decade, then, marks the cultural moment when—to use Kaye's words—workingclass wife assault became an “every-day story ...
... argue, middle-class models of marriage infused both the press reports and the fictions of the period, even while their ostensible topic was working-class violence. This is especially relevant in light of D. A. Miller's suggestion that ...
... argue that the novel increasingly takes the public scrutiny of private conduct as a theme in itself, ac- tively contemplating the construction of the private through and by the public eye of the newspaper. When I started research on ...
... arguing that marital cruelty cases provide important evidence of shifting views on marriage, both in the judges' domestic ideals and in the expectations and grievances of the applicants.8 On the subject of divorce and marriage breakdown ...
Contents
1 | |
15 | |
Domestic Violence and MiddleClass Manliness Dombey and Son | 44 |
From Regency Violence to Victorian Feminism The Tenant of Wildfell Hall | 72 |
The Abused Woman and the Community Janets Repentance | 103 |
Strange Revelations The Divorce Court the Newspaper and The Woman in White | 132 |
The Private Eye and the Public Gaze He Knew He Was Right | 165 |