Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction (review)

Lisa Surridge’s Bleak Houses is a fine study of nineteenth-century marital violence that significantly expands the range of cultural and literary materials in this growing body of criticism. She achieves this expansion in three central ways. First, Surridge’s admirably detailed exploration of primary materials—legislation, legal cases, and debates in the Houses of Parliament, the courts, and the public press—brings together nearly a century’s worth of legal and social history of marital violence. Second, her study draws on a wide range of contemporary literary and historical scholarship regarding marital violence. Finally, the literary scope is quite impressive; the book touches on fiction from the 1830s through the fin de siecle. It is this breadth, her careful attention to detail at every level, and some fine readings that are the book’s greatest strengths. Surridge investigates the social dialogue regarding marital violence, the presumed privacy of the home, and notions of manliness. Her argument usefully charts the evolution of feminist rhetoric against marital violence alongside the positions that tended to conserve traditional gender roles. Throughout, she finds much of the raw material for her study in the newspaper and literature, and this emphasis—which allows her to specify historical context very carefully—will make the book valuable to scholars of gender, law, and literature in the period.

Marrying the newspaper and literature to the issue of domestic violence makes Charles Dickens an apt starting point. Surridge takes on Dickens’s early writings as well as Dombey and Son. In a careful and highly readable style, she argues that Dickens, like many of his contemporaries, idealized the passivity of the wife—a move that put abused women in an impossible position. If one must submit to her husband and nurture the privacy of her home to be a woman deserving of legal and social support, how could she ever accuse her spouse of marital violence? For Dickens, the “good” woman’s body spoke post mortem. Indeed, according to Surridge, the working-class women represented in Dickens (like Nancy in Oliver Twist) reflected middle-class values of privacy—an intriguing analysis. When Dickens turned his eyes to violence in the middle class, as Surridge argues in her chapter on Dombey and Son, he linked manliness to personal and sexual self control. The middle-class home, though exposed to the intrusion of the public eye through domestic violence, is restored (and reprivatized) through feminine submission (represented in the Christ-like person of Florence). Still, Surridge notes, Dickens’s anxieties about an emergent feminism are embodied in the recalcitrant Edith. The attention here to manliness, privacy, feminism, and the state of the middle-class home are themes Surridge develops and reconsiders in different contexts throughout the book.

The study next turns to a well-developed argument about the growing resistance to the passive female and private home. She suggests that Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, while underscoring notions of manliness similar to those in Dickens, also provided the “foundation of the liberal feminist response to marital violence for the next three decades” in its “resistance to coverture, claim to children, [and advocacy for female] financial independence” (86). In George Eliot, Surridge also reads a turn from privacy, arguing that “Janet’s Repentance” suggested that wife assault was a “community issue rather than a private matter” (16). Janet’s rescue and rebirth in the arms of the villagers registered a call to respond collectively to acts of violence in the home. This, as Surridge sees it, is the “most significant challenge to contemporary views on marital cruelty” (115). Again, chipping away at notions of the “privacy” of violence, she argues that Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right “takes as its topic the fallacy of the very idea of the private self after 1858” and marks notions of “domestic privacy” as illusory (169). Trevelyan’s paranoia about public exposure is, ironically, materialized by his engagement of a private detective as well...