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|3| F R O M R E G E N C Y V I O L E N C E T O V I C T O R I A N F E M I N I S M The Tenant of Wildfell Hall A I     , between the s and s the Victorians’ daily exposure to newspaper accounts of marital violence changed radically, a shift propelled by the  Offenses Against the Person Act. An important aspect of this newspaper coverage was the ideological tension surrounding intervention in working-class marriages, in which women had traditionally maintained a right to defend themselves against violence. As I have argued, Dickens’s fiction allayed this tension by celebrating the figure of the passive woman who is protected from violence by paternalistic intervention. The middle-class impetus to regulate domestic behavior was thus articulated in opposition to an earlier model of combative marriage in the lower classes. However, social historians also observe that during the early decades of the nineteenth century, the same Victorian middle classes articulated a new model of domestic manliness in opposition to earlier aristocratic models . As Davidoff and Hall argue, “Christian manhood had to be created anew from the tissue of ideas associated with masculinity in the eighteenth century. . . . Masculine nature, in gentry terms, was based on sport and codes of honor derived from military prowess, finding expression in hunting , riding, drinking and ‘wenching’” (Davidoff and Hall, ). As indicated in chapter , this new model of domestic manliness was linked to the issue  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. of marital assault, since many Victorians hoped to solve wife beating by reforming masculinity rather than by changing the rights of women. Dombey and Son followed this fundamentally conservative impulse by reconstituting the private home around the reformed Mr. Dombey and the forgiving Florence, while exiling the recalcitrant Edith, who represents the rebellious women who haunt Dickens’s fiction from the s onward. In this chapter, I turn to Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in , the same year that Dombey and Son finished serialization. Unlike Dombey and Son, which is set in the era of its publication, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is largely set in the s, narrated by the middle-aged Gilbert Markham as he looks back from the late s onto the scenes of his youth. It thus reflects on the momentous shift that occurred in ideals of marriage and domesticity between the Regency and the Victorian periods. But whereas, as I have argued in chapter , Dickens’s early texts were contemporary with—and indeed helped to facilitate—that shift, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall looks back on it. Through its double time frame, the novel contrasts the s and the s, and so contemplates the differences between Regency and Victorian mores.¹ By juxtaposing Helen’s first and second marriages, the novel compares the moral unrestraint and domestic disharmony of the aristocracy under the Regency and George IV with the disciplined manliness and domestic harmony of the Victorian middle class. Characters’ lives thus exemplify the nation’s development: Arthur Huntingdon ’s violence dies with George IV, while Gilbert Markham matures with the century, starting as a “puppy” (TWH, ) and “coxcomb” (TWH, ) in the s and steadily exerting “rule” (TWH, ) over his impulsive spirit. By , Gilbert exemplifies Victorian manliness and self-control.Thus The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, like Dombey and Son, helps to consolidate a new model of Victorian manliness at midcentury. Yet while the two novels share an emphasis on nonviolent masculinity, Brontë does not support female passivity or the doctrine of the closed home. Instead, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall criticizes marital coverture as an underlying cause of domestic assault and abuse, and compares women to domestic animals abused by their owners . Thus although it sets its violent scenes in the Regency past, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall forms part of the emergent feminist discourse of the late s and early s, which linked marital violence to concerns over marital coverture and connected animal and wife abuse. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. [3.140.198.43...

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