Scrutinizing the Disabled Body in Barchester Towers

Abstract

Barchester Towers provides more evidence of the ways in which representations of abuse could compromise traditional hierarchies, particularly those that involve gender- and class-based identities. Like Woman’s Reward and The Woman in White, Anthony Trollope’s novel thematizes intimate violence, but resists describing it in any detail. However, while Norton makes the abuse plot conspicuous through layered and often veiled references to her own violent past, and Collins does so, at all instances, by only alluding to violence without actually showing it, Trollope portrays signs of abuse as, paradoxically, both on display and carefully concealed. He thus renders the suffering female body conspicuous by virtue of its difficult intelligibility; the battered woman is fascinating because her injuries are discernible yet ambiguous. As such, Trollope illustrates the paradoxical (in)visibility of Victorian intimate violence embodied on a single person. Specifically, Trollope portrays Madeline Neroni’s injuries—the presumed result of a violent marriage—as patent but abstruse; she draws attention to her physical abnormalities, but the exact nature of the damage remains shrouded in mystery. Such reticence about representing domestic violence and its consequences, of course—typical of Victorian novels—risks interfering with the politicization of an issue that was (and still is) inextricably bound not just to women’s rights, but also to historical understandings of class, morality, and respectability.