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humanities 227 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 >distinctions among law, power and politics became very much blurred.= In the end, >the establishment of the rule of law= became >the veil behind which arbitrary power= was exercised. Also intriguing is Greenwood=s evaluation of the General Court Martial of Montreal in light of British justice in Ireland at the end of the previous century and the discussion by Beverly Boissery and Clara Paterson about why women who actively supported >treasonous= activities were not brought before the courts. The volume concludes with extensive appendices that include very useful discussion of sources in the National Archives and the Quebec and Ontario Archives, together with selected supporting documents including the enabling acts passed to deal with those involved in the rebellions and how some leading jurists interpreted and intended to implement them. All of the articles of Rebellion and Invasion in the Canadas, 1837B1839 rest on a careful reading of the rich legal sources of the period and an appreciation of the current debates about the nature and the legacy of the rebellions . And this is a welcome and overdue addition to our ongoing understanding of a critical period in colonial development. (E. JANE ERRINGTON) Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky. The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature SUNY Press. vii, 204. US $19.95 In The Marked Body, Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky argue that the abused bodies of women reveal the otherwise-unrepresentable acts of domestic violence that permeate the middle-class home, and that the marks borne on women=s bodies >point beyond the violence that begets them to broader areas of female experience, sexuality, and consciousness.= Employing a psychoanalytic framework to examine denial, repression, and diversion in a range of nineteenth-century texts, the authors explore both the psychic reality of intimate violence and the social constructs that shape and silence it. Though they use theory deftly, they do so without losing the consistent gracefulness of their prose. This important study demonstrates that women=s struggle to speak about domestic violence is figured by social limitations, as well as personal ones, and that when voice is suppressed, the marked body speaks volumes. Lawson and Shakinovsky are sharp readers, and they cover a wide range of texts, from the realist to the sensational, the short story to the novel; they read Hawthorne, Barrett Browning, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, and Collins. Their exploration of fiction is subtle and complex. Most impressive are their discussions that break down the binaries used to shore up violence. For example, in a fascinating analysis, they foreground Eliot=s deconstruction of >opposing= medical models and turn, instead, to a hermeneutic model, using this as a means of reading violence in >Janet=s Repentance.= They argue that, in this way, Eliot renders Dempster=s violence visible B through Janet=s body 228 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 B >but Aunreadable,@ morally incoherent.= In Barchester Towers, they explore the relationship between Signora Neroni and Eleanor Bold, which allows one to appear pure and the other abject, while expressing the social interdependence of the two figures. Similarly, in their discussion of Aurora Leigh, they emphasize the significance of Marian in Aurora=s struggles, finding the >blanks, absences, illegibilities, and contradictions [of Aurora=s development] largely figured in the body of Marian.= In >The Poor Clare= and Man and Wife, they point to the ways that the bodies of Lucy=s ghostly double and Anne=s working-class double, Hester, bespeak the bourgeois violence that can find its way into the narrative by no other means. In these chapters, they reveal that the walls surrounding the >comfortable, customary domestic middle-class environment= are breached by the >spectral manifestations of what may not be mentioned,= even if readers are returned to that normative space in the tale=s close. Though their arguments are quite persuasive, it is when they reproduce the strict boundaries that they tackle elsewhere B between the public and private, between body and speech B that the study falters. In >The Poor Clare,= the authors read Bridget=s >unrepresentable= confession as inefficacious...

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