Domestic violence in Victorian and Edwardian fiction / by Jina Moon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Moon, Jina, author.

Contributor:

Clyde de Loache Ryals Endowed Acquisition Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Family violence.

Physical Description:

viii, 211 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.

Summary:

This book opens the curtain on the crucial role played by Victorian and Edwardian novelists in changing views of domestic violence. Examining the mechanisms of domestic violence through the historical lenses of the law, crime, and economics, this study illuminates these novelists' depictions of wife-battering, including scenes in which women witness their children being beaten or children witness their mothers' beatings. This book also shows how these representations interacted with changing paradigms of masculinity and femininity at the time. Extending from the decades before the 1857 Divorce Act to the Suffrage era, the book details the changing circumstances of conjugal violence and divorce in England. William Makepeace Thackeray's The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. (1844) and Caroline Norton's Stuart of Dunleath: A Story of Modern Times (1851) expose the impact of class on reactions to domestic Violence. Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady (1875) and Ouida's (Marie Louise de la Ramé) Moths (1880) depict proto-New Women figures who resist domestic violence, while traditional wife figures continue to fall victim. In Mona Caird's The Wing of Azrael (1889) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and The Adventure of the Abbey Grange" (1904), protagonists exact their own justice on perpetrators of domestic violence. By the Edwardian period, it was clear that legislation alone could not solve the problems of domestic violence. Constance Maud's No Surrender (1911) adroitly links wife-battering with public violence against suffragettes, exposing the underlying British socio-cultural system that maintained women's subordination. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part 1 Domestic Violence and the Justice System in the Early to Mid-Victorian Periods 17

Chapter 1 An Upper-Class Woman Encounters Domestic Violence in William Makepeace Thackeray's The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. (1844) 19

Chapter 2 Separation and Alimony before the 1870 Married Women's Property Act in Caroline Norton's Stuart of Dunleath: A Story of Modern Times (1851) 45

Part 2 The Married Women's Property Act and the Shifting Economic Paradigm of Matrimony 63

Chapter 3 Suicide: "The foulest and the vilest of all murders" in Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady (1875) 65

Chapter 4 Companionate Marriage and the Victorian Wifely Ideal in Ouida's (Maria Louis Ramé) Moths (1880) 91

Part 3 Precarious Domesticity and Poetic Justice in the Late Victorian to Edwardian Periods 115

Chapter 5 Mona Caird's The Wing of Azrael (1889): "A symbol of the troublous age" 117

Chapter 6 Policing British Domesticity and Querying English Legality in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange" (1904) 139

Part 4 Domestic Violence and Public Violence Against Women in the Suffragette Moment 159

Chapter 7 From Behind Closed Doors to the Streets in Constance Maud's No Surrender (1912) 163.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Clyde de Loache Ryals Endowed Acquisition Fund.

ISBN:

9781443889483

1443889482

OCLC:

946607113

Publisher Number:

99967709155