Abstract
Reviewed by: Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction Marlene Tromp Lisa Surridge. Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005. xiv + 271 pp. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Lisa Surridgeâs Bleak Houses is a fine study of nineteenth-century marital violence that significantly expands the range of cultural and literary materials in this growing body of criticism. She achieves this expansion in three central ways. First, Surridgeâs admirably detailed exploration of primary materialsâlegislation, legal cases, and debates in the Houses of Parliament, the courts, and the public pressâbrings together nearly a centuryâs worth of legal and social history of marital violence. Second, her study draws on a wide range of contemporary literary and historical scholarship regarding marital violence. Finally, the literary scope is quite impressive; the book touches on fiction from the 1830s through the fin de siecle. It is this breadth, her careful attention to detail at every level, and some fine readings that are the bookâs greatest strengths. Surridge investigates the social dialogue regarding marital violence, the presumed privacy of the home, and notions of manliness. Her argument usefully charts the evolution of feminist rhetoric against marital violence alongside the positions that tended to conserve traditional gender roles. Throughout, she finds much of the raw material for her study in the newspaper and literature, and this emphasisâwhich allows her to specify historical context very carefullyâwill make the book valuable to scholars of gender, law, and literature in the period. Marrying the newspaper and literature to the issue of domestic violence makes Charles Dickens an apt starting point. Surridge takes on Dickensâs early writings as well as Dombey and Son. In a careful and highly readable style, she argues that Dickens, like many of his contemporaries, idealized the passivity of the wifeâa move that put abused women in an impossible position. If one must submit to her husband and nurture the privacy of her home to be a woman deserving of legal and social support, how could she ever accuse her spouse of marital violence? For Dickens, the âgoodâ womanâs body spoke post mortem. Indeed, according to Surridge, the working-class women represented in Dickens (like Nancy in Oliver Twist) reflected middle-class values of privacyâan intriguing analysis. When Dickens turned his eyes to violence in the middle class, as Surridge argues in her chapter on Dombey and Son, he linked manliness to personal and sexual self control. The middle-class home, though exposed to the intrusion of the public eye through domestic violence, is restored (and reprivatized) through feminine submission (represented in the Christ-like [End Page 227] person of Florence). Still, Surridge notes, Dickensâs anxieties about an emergent feminism are embodied in the recalcitrant Edith. The attention here to manliness, privacy, feminism, and the state of the middle-class home are themes Surridge develops and reconsiders in different contexts throughout the book. The study next turns to a well-developed argument about the growing resistance to the passive female and private home. She suggests that BrontĂ«âs Tenant of Wildfell Hall, while underscoring notions of manliness similar to those in Dickens, also provided the âfoundation of the liberal feminist response to marital violence for the next three decadesâ in its âresistance to coverture, claim to children, [and advocacy for female] financial independenceâ (86). In George Eliot, Surridge also reads a turn from privacy, arguing that âJanetâs Repentanceâ suggested that wife assault was a âcommunity issue rather than a private matterâ (16). Janetâs rescue and rebirth in the arms of the villagers registered a call to respond collectively to acts of violence in the home. This, as Surridge sees it, is the âmost significant challenge to contemporary views on marital crueltyâ (115). Again, chipping away at notions of the âprivacyâ of violence, she argues that Anthony Trollopeâs He Knew He Was Right âtakes as its topic the fallacy of the very idea of the private self after 1858â and marks notions of âdomestic privacyâ as illusory (169). Trevelyanâs paranoia about public exposure is, ironically, materialized by his engagement of a private detective as well...
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