The Marked Body

Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature

Kate Lawson, Lynn Shakinovsky

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780791453766, 9780791453759
• eBook ISBN: 9780791488621
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Discusses portrayals of domestic violence in six major works of mid-nineteenth-century literature.

The ambiguities and paradoxes of domestic violence were amplified in Victorian culture, which emphasized the home as a woman's place of security. In The Marked Body, Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky examine the discarded and violated bodies of middle-class women in selected texts of mid-nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. Guided by observations from feminism, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory, they argue that, in these works, domestic violence is a crucible in which the female body is placed, where it becomes marked by scars and disfigurement. Yet, they contend, these wounds go beyond violence to bring these women to a broader state of female subjectivity, sexuality, and consciousness. The female body, already the site of alterity, is inscribed with something that cannot be expressed; it thus becomes that which is culturally and physically denied, the place which is not.

Table of contents

• THE MARKED BODY
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “A Frightful Object:” Romance, Obsession, and Death in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark”
• 2. Domestic Violence, Abjection, and the Comic Novel: Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers
• 3. Violence, Causality, and the “Shock of History:” George Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance”
• 4. “The Sins of the Father” and “The Female Line:” Phantom Visitations and Cruelty in Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Poor Clare”
• 5. Rape, Transgression, and the Law: The Body of Marian Erle in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh
• 6. “Will She End Like Me?:” Violence and the Uncanny in Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index