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  • Intimate Violence and Victorian Print Culture: Representational Tensions by Suzanne Rintoul
  • Katherine J. Anderson (bio)
Intimate Violence and Victorian Print Culture: Representational Tensions, by Suzanne Rintoul; pp. 189. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, £55.00, $90.00.

In Intimate Violence and Victorian Print Culture: Representational Tensions, Suzanne Rintoul establishes the abused female body as a disruptor of cultural hegemonies, a form of sedition that comes not from the agency of the abused woman herself, but rather from the representation of her vulnerable and supposedly passive corporeality. Rintoul tracks this abused female body across a variety of genres—broadsides, pamphlets, novels, and a slave narrative—in order to uncover the destabilizing potential that emerges from the contradictory ways in which Victorians portrayed violence against women: on the one hand, explicit depictions of brutal violence, and on the other, obfuscated narratives that require more unpacking. She argues that these representational tensions “trouble not just the legal and social status of women, but also class consciousness, notions of female creativity, religious institutions, and movements reacting against such institutions” (17).

The term intimate violence allows Rintoul to broaden the scope of her investigation, linking marital and extramarital violence in an attempt at an intersectional approach. Part I of the book examines broadsides, The Illustrated Police News, The Newgate Calendar, and Oliver Twist (1837–39), arguing that while explicit depictions of working-class women murdered by middle-class lovers seem to serve as warnings meant to shore up class boundaries, they also “corrode the myth of bourgeois domestic ethics” through references to the violence of the middle class (34). For Rintoul, Charles Dickens’s working-class Nancy likewise serves as a critical response to negative depictions of the poor. Nancy models middle-class femininity, but as a result, her death actually destabilizes the culturally constructed boundary between working-class and middle-class femininities.

The book turns from these explicit spectacles to more evasive depictions of middle-class intimate violence in the second section on authorship. Here Rintoul is concerned primarily with female creativity, arguing that in her pamphlets and the novel The Wife; and Woman’s Reward (1835), Caroline Norton transforms the fragmentation of her own identity from victimization into subversion, fighting back against both physical and rhetorical violence through the constant “rhetorical manipulation of womanhood” (93). Similarly, in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60), Anne and Laura demonstrate subversive power through their deliberate creation of “gaps in representation,” escaping the frame control of Collins’s male narrator by not narrating, and thus affirming both the “inherent value of the unseen and unsaid” and their own ability to “manipulate language even without their own legitimate voices” (109, 111). In Collins’s sensation fiction, erasure, absence, and silence thus become feminine mediums, disrupting authoritative masculine representation.

Rintoul delivers her freshest contribution in the final section on institutional authority, drawing on both disability studies and intersectional feminism in order to illuminate the role of the othered female body in Victorian representations of intimate violence. She argues that, in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers (1857), Madeline simultaneously displays and conceals her suffering body, manipulating scrutiny much as Collins’s female characters manipulate language. Building on the work of postcolonial and disability studies scholar Ato Quayson, Rintoul emphasizes the representational gaps that attend [End Page 516] Madeline’s disabled body, which thereby signal the “impossibility of defining, stabilizing, or normativizing the self through interrogating it” and disrupt the male clergy’s religious authority (123).

Rintoul also examines intimate violence in the genre of the slave narrative, reading Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (1831) as a text that simultaneously reveals the inadequacy of early feminist comparisons of married women to slaves and addresses the hierarchies of middle-class life that “fostered the conditions for publically and legally sanctioned brutality” (139). Rintoul acknowledges that comparing depictions of slave suffering and middle-class wife abuse may divert attention away from the slaves themselves in service of white women: an issue within white feminism explicitly addressed by the intersectional scholarship she references here. She insists that the mistress’s subjugation contributes to the oppression of her slaves, and thus...

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