Marital Violence

BOOK REVIEWS passage across complex definitions of gender and respectability and the subject 's relation to desire, pleasure and power in looking. (182) Which seems to mean no more than that persons of various degrees of respectability , various ages, and both sexes could view objectionable pictures in print shop windows and be affected in various ways—salacious, indignant, innocence-shattering. At $35.00 the book is a bargain for both the information to be found there and the trove of good quality illustrations. But oh, that there had been a thoughtful, questioning, no-nonsense editor on duty. Wendell V. Harris Santa Fe, New Mexico Professor Emeritus Marital Violence Marlene Tromp. The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. χ + 289 pp. $37.50 THE PRIVATE ROD centres on a detailed textual analysis of the representation of marital violence in five Victorian novels: Oliver Twist, The Woman in White, Aurora Floyd, Salem Chapel and Daniel Deronda. Only two of these works have traditionally been categorised as sensation fiction, but part of Tromp's argument is to suggest a blurring of the categories of realism and sensation so that the former is seen to be "reconfigured " by the latter. Importantly, this reconfiguration also extends to what Tromp calls "the real" itself; by this she means that sensation fiction helped to bring about a new social and legal understanding of what constituted marital violence. According to Tromp, after "nearly two centuries of selective vision," the novels in question revealed for the first time the presence of violence in middle-class (as opposed to merely working-class) homes, thereby shattered what she terms the "middleclass vision of domestic peace and propriety" and the "cultural disbelief in women's ability to retaliate." Evidence for that "selective vision" is located primarily in the debates surrounding the 1857 Divorce Act (which Tromp interprets as seeing "only poor women ... as sufferers of violence at the hands of their husbands " who in turn were presumed to have been provoked by their wives' "infidelity or dissolution"), and in the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 (which Tromp again reads in terms of an attempt to preserve the "domestic space as an untainted haven of safe gentility and fidelity " from "contamination" by "dangerous women"). Tromp's concern 83 ELT 45 : 1 2002 is with the way in which literature "might (dis)engage constructions of gender that left fictional women ... at the mercy of their partners and violence itself nearly invisible in dangerous domestic situations"; and through that critique literature might participate "in a transformation of the terms of the legal debates"—as seen, for example, in later legislation such as the married women's property acts. By "re-presenting" the normative discourse of marital violence, Tromp argues, sensation fiction "may have offered not only women, but the men who wrote the legislation that has often been perceived as providing a frame for their lives, a means of addressing sexual violence, of imagining what might be real." At the heart of her argument, then, is the suggestion that the nineteenth -century dismissal of sensation fiction as lurid exaggeration in fact disguised an anxiety that it spoke a truth hitherto too unpalatable to be publicly acknowledged: the reality of sexual violence and the dangers (to women) of domesticity. The value of sensation fiction thus lies in the way in which it functioned to "expose and denaturalize ideology." Such a thesis, not surprisingly, requires that the fiction (which has been seen as stereotypical in its representation of gender) be read "indirectly "—for the contradictions and tensions in the way violence is represented . For example, in The Woman in White, Tromp acknowledges that the violence against Laura Fairlie and Madame Fosco may appear to be contained and conventionalised by the revelation of the base origins of Percival Glyde, the foreignness of Count Fosco, and the shifting class identity of Laura herself; but Tromp also suggests that this troping of violence as "other" to normative middle-class domesticity and female passivity is simultaneously disrupted by the righteous anger of Marian: "her fantasies represent the potential for violence in the other women characters as a response...