Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

4. The Abused Woman and the Community: "Janet's Repentance"

|4| T H E A B U S E D W O M A N A N D T H E C O M M U N I T Y “Janet’s Repentance” T -  of the late s, which pitted emergent feminists against those who wished to preserve current gender roles, set the stage for the intense debate during the s on women’s place in marriage. Imbricated in this debate was George Eliot’s story “Janet’s Repentance,” which depicts with incisive realism Janet and Robert Dempster’s abusive marriage, in which Robert throws Janet out of their home and Janet recovers through community support and healing. Serialized in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from July to November , the text was published in the midst of social agitation on the marriage question. Moreover, it appeared at a time when people across the political spectrum believed wife beating to be increasing (Doggett, ). On  May , as he moved for the appointment of a select committee to examine the operation of the  act, Viscount Raynham said to the House of Commons that “the number of these offenses had increased to such an extent as to become a disgrace to the country” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ); Mr. P. O’Brien supported him, saying that “[h]e was certain that there was no one who read the papers but must feel that there was a system of brutality pursued by husbands towards women in England” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). Punch testified to this growing concern with a cartoon entitled “The Expressions  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. of the Hand” (fig. .), showing the man’s hand that offers the wedding ring before marriage raised in a fist afterward (Punch,  October , ). During the s debates on divorce, married women’s property, and the woman question, both legal sides of the marital-assault issue—the criminal punishment of the abuser and the availability of divorce for the abused wife—came under scrutiny. In , debates on the Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults on Women and Children focused national attention on family violence. In , , and  Parliament considered (and rejected) flogging as a penalty for violent assaults on women and children. Wife assault also gained prominence during the debates on the divorce bill, as members of both Houses struggled with what redress there should be when “a noble wife was united to a vicious  | The Abused Woman and the Community Figure .. “The Expressions of the Hand,” Punch  (): . 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. husband . . . or where—as in the lower classes was especially the case— they led a life of bickering and disunion, sometimes ending even in the death of one of the parties” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. –). During the same debates, Gladstone took up the cause of abused women, as he unsuccessfully pushed to expand the legal definition of matrimonial cruelty under the divorce bill to include mental suffering as well as “mere force” ( Parl. Deb. s., col. ). Meanwhile, feminists mounted a sustained critique of women’s legal inequality. In , Marian Evans’s friend Barbara Leigh Smith published A Brief Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws concerning Women, which outlined women’s legal “nonexistence.” On  March , Smith presented to Parliament her Petition for Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law, signed by Marian Evans among three thousand others. Not until  would a bill giving married women control over their income and property pass through parliament, but in June , as well as February, May, and July , MPs debated this issue. As they realized , married women’s financial autonomy threatened male supremacy and marital coverture; many feared it would set up a “separate interest between husband and wife” ( Parl. Deb. s. col. ). To feminists, economic power promised women greater ability to resist marital violence. As Marian Evans wrote to her friend Sara Sophia Hennell, “Miss Leigh Smith has sent me a copy of a Petition to be presented to Parliament praying that married women may have a legal right to their own earnings, as a counteractive to...