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
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... novel played an important disciplinary role for the liberal subject. In The Novel and the Police, Miller suggests that the novel takes social discipline “out of the streets and into the closet”—that is, “into the private and domestic ...
... novel—with its scrutiny ofintimate behavior and spaces—also functioned as a locus in which such negotiations occurred. Like Leckie, I perceive an intense relationship between the Victorian newspaper and the novel in their public ...
... novel on this issue. I also perceive a greater role being played by realist fiction and the newspaper in bringing marital violence into the public eye. While I sometimes differ from Tromp, I am always indebted to her insightful and ...
... novel's child heroine, whom Quilp fantasizes about raping. From an ideological point of view, the novel's most interesting figure is Mrs. Jiniwin, Quilp's mother-in-law and antagonist. When Mrs. Jiniwin and her friends gather at Quilp's ...
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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 |