A Husband's Jealousy: Antebellum Murder Trials and Caroline Lee Hentz's Ernest Linwood

Abstract

worlds away from the antebellum woman’s novel that is the main subject of this essay. But I want to begin my discussion of Caroline Lee Hentz’s Ernest Linwood (1856) with David Buss’s controversial The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (2000). According to Buss, jealousy is an integral part of heterosexual relationships, serving the function of policing women’s sexuality and ensuring a husband’s paternity. Moreover, even while Buss recognizes that much domestic violence is rooted in jealousy, he argues that the smarter evolutionary move for men is to suspect their wives rather than naively spend time and money raising another man’s child, thus also losing the chance to extend their own genes.1 My principal disagreements with Buss’s thesis are, first, that he claims even violent jealousy to be a functional part of sexual relationships, and, second, that he ignores any sociocultural influences on jealousy and ensuing violence. His book encourages us to look no further than the heterosexual couple for the violence that erupts within it. One of the reasons I believe Hentz’s Ernest Linwood is an important novel is precisely A Husband’s Jealousy: Antebellum Murder Trials and Caroline Lee Hentz’s Ernest Linwood