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 57
... Feminism: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall . The Abused Woman and the Community: “Janet's Repentance” . Strange Revelations: The Divorce Court, the Newspaper, and The Woman in White . The Private Eye and the Public ...
... feminist and legal history, Anna Clark's article examines wife beating and the law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while Mary Lyndon Shanley examines campaigns for marriage law reform between and ...
... feminism, literature, and law, Marlene Tromp's study is closest to my own. We both see a close relationship between fiction and the law relating to spousal assaults; however, while Tromp argues that sensation fiction anticipated legal ...
... feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, the book's two final chapters illustrate how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. The study as a ...
... feminist discourse, Punch, and in Dickens's famous readings from to , the figures of Bill and “poor wretched Mrs. Bill Sikes” became cultural icons of the spousal abuse problem with which Victorians struggled from the ...
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 |