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 81
... suggesting their relationship to the Victorian debates on marital violence. At all times, I intend as far as possible to reinsert such texts into the cultural nexus from which they originated. The many bleak houses and black eyes in ...
... suggests that the novel takes social discipline “out of the streets and into the closet”—that is, “into the private ... suggest, were not separate from this scrutiny of marital conduct, but actively participated in it. Moreover, I will ...
... suggest that the newspaper played a central role in mediating between these two apparently very separate discourses. Court reporting in newspapers, as Shani D'Cruze and Barbara Leckie have shown, provided an important arena in which ...
... suggests that narratives of marital violence permeated Victorian middle-class culture, even as these very narratives ... suggest that insofar as such fiction portrayed marital assault it was always more or less overtly po- litical. If we ...
... suggests the extent to which the figures of Sikes and Nancy became a kind of shorthand for wife beater and victim 15 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying ...
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 |