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. |
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... spousal assault; and to the role of the courts in the punishment of the assailant. As such, it foregrounds many of the key themes of this book. You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press ...
... assault debates in the Victorian print media, and I was not aware that wife beating formed part of a web of Victorian issues surrounding marital power—coverture, married women's property law, divorce law, conjugal rights—that I ...
... assault. As these debates reveal, wife beating stood at the vortex of some of the most urgent issues of the period: marital coverture, divorce, domesticity, manliness, and women's rights. Did the husband control his wife's body? Her ...
... marital violence daily into the public eye. The act precipitated a significant cultural shift: newspapers like the Morning Chronicle and the Times, which habitually reported on police and judicial news, now reported on wifeassault ...
Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction Lisa Surridge. working-class spousal violence thus became part of middle-class culture. One might suppose that this public disciplining of working-class assaults allowed the middle-class readers of ...
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 |