Mid-Century Corporeal Hauntings

BOOK reviews that will certainly make it easier to figure out where to send students who need the various kinds of help that each of these books can usefully provide. SALLY MITCHELL ------------------------ Temple University Mid-Century Corporeal Hauntings Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky. The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. viii + 204 pp. Cloth $59.50 Paper $19.95 RECENTLY, feminist psychoanalytic readings of nineteenth -century literature have insightfully and fruitfully delved into the "unconscious" of Victorian literature and culture. Such approaches investigate the meanings that texts seek to keep hidden and explore how the Victorian social order depends upon exactly what it seeks to exclude — the Other. Feminist psychoanalytic scholars have furthered this line of inquiry by pointing to the ways in which the Other of Victorian culture is specifically feminine. In The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature, Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky continue in this vein by examining the function of domestic violence in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Romantic short story "The Birth-Mark," Anthony Trollope's comic novel Barchester Towers, George Eliot's realist short story "Jane's Repentance ," Elizabeth Gaskell's ghost story "The Poor Clare," Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, and Wilkie Collins's sensation novel Man and Wife. By looking at domestic violence in this range of authors, styles, and genres, Lawson and Shakinovsky argue that violence within the Victorian home represents a "rupture in a cultural order that stressed the home as a woman's sphere, as the place of her security and rule." They also argue that women's bodies marked by such violence act as reminders ofthat rupture even as they are marginalized within texts. Although applying the term "domestic violence" to nineteenth-century literature seems anachronistic, Lawson and Shakinovsky have chosen this specific term with all of its connotations in order to convey the precise nature of the violence that they are highlighting in each of their readings. They acknowledge that using a word of such recent coinage runs the danger of making nineteenth-century texts fit into a twenty-first-century viewpoint. Still, the term can work, and works very 425 ELT 46 : 4 2003 well in fact, when contextualized with the nineteenth-century middle -class home: "we have chosen to employ it [the term domestic violence ] since the ongoing critical analysis of nineteenth-century bourgeois women's lives in relation to domestic sphere provides the critical backdrop for interest in texts in which violence—actual or threatened —challenges the integrity of that domestic sphere from within." The authors use the term domestic violence in their readings so as to mark the presence of instability and danger to women's bodies within the sphere that is constructed as their haven from all the perils of the outside, public world. The term domestic violence enables the authors to look at the violence visited upon women's bodies that is "endemic even as it obscured." This veiling is particularly powerful in the middle-class home, where both class and gender come into play as problematically unstable categories . As the authors point out through their readings of lower-class women in these bourgeois-centered texts, "outright physical violence is consistently seen throughout the century in the working classes, and seen not merely as typical of the class, but in such way as to be foregrounded and sensationalized." Violence against working-class women can be articulated within Victorian literature and culture because these women do not gain the same degree of supposed protection those middle-class women possess within the bourgeois domestic sphere. Consequently, when violence is depicted within a middle-class context, that violence and feminine bodies upon which it leaves its marks cannot be articulated and instead is "unspeakable, evaded, deferred , denied." The representation of domestic violence against middle -class women in mid- nineteenth-century literature occupies the space of the absent center, the nonpresence that is always threatening to be present. This violence and the bodies it marks hence are spectral rather than spectacular. As they read these liminal acts and bodies, Lawson and Shakinovsky highlight the moments where Victorian writers push realism...