The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century LiteratureThe 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. |
Contents
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ABJECTION | 41 |
VIOLENCE CAUSALITY AND THE SHOCK OF HISTORY | 61 |
THE SINS OF THE FATHER AND THE FEMALE LINE | 85 |
RAPE TRANSGRESSION AND THE | 105 |
WILL SHE END LIKE ME? | 125 |
CONCLUSION | 151 |
181 | |
195 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
alcohol Andrew Dowling Anne Anne's argues Aurora Leigh Aylmer Barchester Towers Barrett Browning's becomes Birth-Mark blank body of Marian bourgeois Bridget Fitzgerald cause chapter confession crucial culture curse daughter dead death Dempster discourse domestic sphere domestic violence doppelgänger Eleanor Bold experience eyes father Felman female body female line fiction figure function Gaskell Gaskell's Geoffrey George Eliot Georgiana Gisborne haunted Hawthorne's Hester husband impure Jacqueline Rose Janet's Repentance Lucy Lucy's male manifests Marian Erle Marian's body marked body marriage married Mary maternal metaphor mid-nineteenth-century middle-class misery mother narrative narrator narrator's nineteenth-century notion novel object phantom plot Poor Clare psychic psychoanalysis question rape readers realist realm representation repressed Romney says scene Scenes of Clerical secrets seed sense sexual Shoshana Felman signifier Signora Neroni silence Slope social story suffering tion trauma Trollope Trollope's Tryan uncanny unconscious unspeakable Vanity Fair Victorian wife Windygates woman