HIS AND HERS: GENDERED OWNERSHIP AND MARRIAGE INDOMBEY AND SONANDLADY AUDLEY'S SECRET

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, middle-class marriage was built on women's unique relationship with and authority over the domestic space, including its pin cushions, diaries, tea sets, mirrors, and boudoir furniture. What would a husband do with his wife's hair brushes? What claim could he have to her workbasket? Though the common law of coverture gave nearly all legal rights of ownership to husbands, leaving married women a mere smattering of ambiguous claims to pin money and paraphernalia, married women were nonetheless encouraged to cultivate ownership of objects through access, proximity, use, and emotional connection. Such unofficial ownership of household objects did not pose a threat to men's legal ownership or economic power, but was instead a necessary component of marriage since it allowed women to participate properly – according to domestic ideology – in the union of “one flesh.” Historians and literary critics of the last twenty-five years have explored the power Victorian middle-class women gain from their gendered relationship to the domestic space. My interest in this topic, however, is less about the agency women gain from their unique ownership of domestic things and more about what this mechanism of heteronormativity reveals about Victorian culture when it breaks down.