The Marked Body, livre ebook

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

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