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5. Strange Revelations: The Divorce Court, the Newspaper, and The Woman in the White
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|5| S T R A N G E R E V E L A T I O N S The Divorce Court, the Newspaper, and The Woman in White I “A C I” (), Sherlock Holmes declares to Watson that “life is infinitely stranger” than fiction. “If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on,” he remarks, “it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.” Watson is not convinced. The newspapers, he argues, push realism to its “extreme limits,” and yet what they report of London life seems bland and prosaic. Testing his theory, Watson reads at random a headline from that day’s newspaper: “A husband’s cruelty to his wife.” The headline is from the divorce column and the story, he tells Holmes, is “perfectly familiar.” Even without reading the article, he knows what he will find: “the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent nothing more crude.” Holmes disagrees. He has worked on the Dundas separation case, he tells Watson, and it supports his theory that life is “infinitely strange”: “The husband was a teetolaler, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife, which you will allow is not an action likely to occur to the imagination of 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. the average story-teller” (SSH, ). In Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper and the Law, –, Barbara Leckie uses this scene to illustrate the “potent complexity” and high visibility of adultery narratives in Victorian newspapers after the divorce court’s opening in January . Watson’s reaction, she argues, points to the commonness of adultery narratives in divorce court journalism, while Holmes’s theory asserts their multiplicity and constant creation of “new alignments and new meanings.”¹ The same visibility and complexity, I would urge, is true of wife-abuse narratives in the divorce columns of newspapers—indeed, the headline Watson reads is not about adultery, but about cruelty as grounds for judicial separation. After , the divorce court brought unprecedented publicity to wife abuse, as marital cruelty across all classes was dissected in the court and the newspapers. Women made up percent of petitioners in the new court (Horstman, ), and their most common allegation (other than adultery) was cruelty (Hammerton, Cruelty, ).² As the Times remarked in December , reflecting on the first year of the new court’s operation, divorce cases, taken “in a batch, . . . constitute a strange revelation of the secret doings of the middle classes in this country” (Times, December , f). This chapter examines the relationship between the “strange revelations ” of wife abuse in divorce court journalism and the representations of wife abuse in sensation fiction, the new genre that flourished in the same period. Tromp argues that sensation novels offered “a very different image of violence in the home than that contained in official reports” (Tromp, ), and that they launched an “alternative discourse” to that of the “scripted social text” of the law (Tromp, , ). Specifically, she locates in The Woman in White “an exposure” of marital violence in a wealthy home, a counter to the parliamentary debates on the divorce bill, which, she points out, located wife abuse in the “humbler ranks,” in which “workingclass men were perceived as ‘drunken, profligate husbands’ and workingclass women as provocateurs whose infidelity or dissolution forced their husbands into drunkenness and abuse” (Tromp, , ). There can be no question that The Woman in White exposes marital cruelty in the upper classes. In this “strange family story” (WW, ), Sir Percival Glyde— described as a “mean, cunning, and brutal man” with a “savage temper” (WW, , )—pressures his wife Laura to sign away her fortune to him, The Divorce Court, the Newspaper, and The Woman in White | 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. [13.58.39.23] Project MUSE...
