Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction (review)

"Bill, Bill, for dear God's sake, for your own, for mine, stop before you spill my blood!" One of Charles Dickens's most famous scenes, the death of Nancy in Oliver Twist (1838) shocked audiences and reverberated throughout Victorian literature. Bill's ruthless attack and Nancy's stubborn devotion to him compress into a single literary moment the cultural tensions that Lisa Surridge explores in Bleak Houses. Is the scene supposed to work as a condemnation of masculine brutality or a celebration of feminine loyalty? Surridge suggests both. A carefully researched and lucidly written investigation of literary portrayals of domestic violence, Bleak Houses complements recent historical work on the subject by Martin Wiener and Elizabeth Foyster by focusing on Victorian fiction's engagement with this important social problem. Surridge tracks fiction's struggle to reconcile the traditional authority of masculine violence in the home with new ideals of middle-class domesticity and manly self-control.

Surridge argues that Victorian novels illuminate the shifting attitudes toward domestic violence that first emerged in the 1830s in the wake of new legislation, including but not limited to the 1828 Offenses Against the Person Act and, later, the 1853 Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults on Women and Children; the 1857 Divorce Bill; and the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act. These laws increasingly brought marital conflict into the courtroom and before the Victorian public. Responses were inevitably mixed. As Surridge demonstrates, on one hand, the dominant middle-class ideology of this period denounced violence in the home. On the other hand, that same ideology also revered the absolute privacy of the domestic sphere, preferring to rely on the idea of feminine passivity as well as new forms of masculine authority—rather than public scrutiny—to regulate the home. Dickens's Oliver Twist thus censures Bill but also endorses Nancy's masochistic loyalty to him. Her refusal to denounce Bill publicly exemplifies the ideal of marital privacy that the middle classes imposed upon working-class women over the course of the nineteenth century. Surridge contends that Dickens's "reverence for the passive victim" (18) promotes a bourgeois ideology that guards the home against the intrusions of the press or law, but misrepresents the historical reality, as working-class women often resisted abuse by engaging in "mutually combative" behavior (95). Surridge's thoughtful readings of Dickens—who, not surprisingly, occupies the first two chapters of the book—help to explain the weird, nervous energy that emanates from most of his depictions of domestic violence, such as the extreme narrative disruption caused by Mr Dombey's slapping Florence. (One cannot help but wish that Surridge had extended her analysis to Estella in Great Expectations [1860–61], "bent and broken, . . . into a better shape" [(Penguin, 2002) 484.]) These opening chapters on Dickens and the periodical press set the stage for Surridge's analysis of later works of Victorian fiction, many of which resist Dickens's glorification of the submissive feminine victim.

Surridge develops her thesis chronologically, in cogent readings of individual texts that include Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848); George Eliot's "Janet's Repentance" (1857); Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859–60); Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (1868–69); Mona Caird's The Wing of Azrael (1889); and, finally, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories of the 1890s. Each chapter carefully positions fiction in relation to historical debates over wife assault, divorce, and marriage, particularly as those debates were reflected in the Victorian press. Surridge argues that the press plays a leading role in shaping attitudes toward domestic violence. It not only provided a forum for debate—she cites articles by Annie Besant, Frances Power Cobbe, J. S. Mill, and others—but also regularly published accounts of marital cruelty. Surridge weaves both kinds of periodical writing into her analysis, at one point spending a good page and a half simply listing "a sampling of the domestic threats and...