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Outlaw mothers: marital conflict, family law, and women's novels in Victorian England

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Outlaw mothers: marital conflict, family law, and women's novels in Victorian England

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Content OUTLAW MOTHERS: MARITAL CONFLICT, FAMILY LAW, AND WOMEN’S NOVELS IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND by Leslie Jeanine Bruce A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) December 2007 Copyright 2007 Leslie Jeanine Bruce ii Acknowledgements This project would have been impossible without the guidance and support of several people. My committee—Joseph Boone, James Kincaid, and Philippa Levine—gave me timely advice for the revision of chapters. Hilary Schor, my committee chairperson, continually challenged me to take my ideas further and supported me as a friend through trying times. I would not have achieved the level of scholarship I have without her help. I am also grateful to Paul Alkon, who advised me during the early stages of the dissertation process. I would like to thank the Feutchwanger Foundation, USC’s College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, and USC’s English Department for the fellowship support that facilitated my completion of the dissertation. I am thankful, too, for the kind assistance of the research librarians at USC’s Grand Avenue Library and UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. Over the years, several colleagues at USC—Beth Callaghan, Tanya Heflin, Kathy Strong, Marybeth Tegan, Alice White, Wendy Witherspoon, and Erika Wright—have offered advice on how to direct chapters in progress, and I thank them heartily for this advice and their friendship. Finally, I couldn’t have completed this work without the patience and loyal support of my husband, Brian Mullooly. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Abstract iv Outlaw Mothers: An Introduction 1 Introduction Endnotes 14 Chapter 1 15 Custodial Fictions: Narratives of Maternal Distress in England’s Custody Debates and Caroline Norton’s Early Writing Chapter 1 Endnotes 72 Chapter 2 78 Whispered Truths: Middle-Class Masculinity and Violence in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Chapter 2 Endnotes 121 Chapter 3 126 Strange Connections: Adultery, Clerical Autonomy, and Divorce Law in Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel Chapter 3 Endnotes 156 Chapter 4 161 “Illegitimate Fathers”: Fatherhood and English Bastardy Law in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Chapter 4 Endnotes 215 Bibliography 218 iv Abstract This project analyzes the subtle, yet powerful, engagement of women’s Victorian novels with evolving contemporary legal discourse regarding family relations. Reading fiction by Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Caroline Norton, and Margaret Oliphant, I argue that these authors’ representations of mothers confronting marital conflict denaturalize the legal fictions undergirding inequitable family laws as well as the reductive constructions of the proper family prevailing in the English novel. Because these writers commonly appropriate certain conventions of legal discourse (such as testimonial structures) while eschewing others (like dispassionate rhetoric), they unsettle the generic boundaries between legal and novelistic discourse. As a result, these women’s fictions generate a new authority for the novel that challenges the law’s nearly absolute jurisdiction over family conflict and holds out new possibilities for female agency. At stake in the contest for cultural authority between nineteenth-century legal and literary constructions of marital conflict is the power to define “natural” domestic relations, a power central to the reform of women’s legal status and rights. Excluded from the legal forums of Parliament and the courtroom and fettered by social and generic conventions, the authors I study nevertheless exploited the flexibility of narrative to unravel the fictions of family disseminated by law and the domestic novel. The narrative structures (such as narrative enclosures and generic hybridity) employed by these women both criticize gender disparity within the law and innovate formally from within generic tradition. I argue, in fact, that the subject v of marital conflict mandated women’s formal experimentation, which in turn enhanced the critical and didactic capabilities of domestic fiction. Rather than positing claims about the subversiveness of women’s novels, this project instead probes these authors’ divided impulses to sanction outlawed maternal behaviors— wives abducting their children in response to adultery, for example—and simultaneously to reinscribe Victorian gender, genre, and domestic ideologies. Outlaw Mothers draws upon a rich blend of nineteenth-century parliamentary documents, legal pamphlets and treatises, and judicial opinions as well as current legal and literary theory in its examination of controversial legislation regulating child custody, aggravated assault, divorce, and illegitimacy. 1 Outlaw Mothers: An Introduction In 1804, Lord Ellenborough, then chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench, awarded custody of an infant child to a Mr. De Manneville despite accusations of cruelty by the child’s mother. Before her marriage to Mr. De Manneville, Margaret Compton’s trustees settled £700 per annum upon her for her separate use for life, but Margaret’s husband eventually pursued these funds for his own uses. Mr. De Manneville—a French emigrant—threatened to send the couple’s five-month-old child to France if Margaret’s family would not grant him access to the disputed £700 per year. When the family refused to breach their settlement, the frustrated husband made good on his promise. Writing about this case in her polemical pamphlet, The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of Custody (1837), Caroline Norton narrates breathlessly that Mr. DeManneville “entered by force the house where she [Mrs. DeManneville] had fled for refuge, dragged the child (which she was in the act of nursing) from the very breast; and took it away, almost naked, in an open carriage, in inclement weather” (4). Norton reports that “it was established on . . . [this] case that ‘the father’s right’ extends to the hour of a child’s birth, and that he may tear it from the breast of its mother, in the act of affording it the nourishment which supports its life” (37). Consistent with the Francophobic sentiment of this war-torn period, Norton concludes that Rex v. De Manneville bore witness to the unjust extremity of fathers’ custodial rights: she marvels that although Mrs. De Manneville was “possessed of property, [and] married to a needy French emigrant,” the court would make no exception for her (37). 2 One of the more sensational custody cases of the early nineteenth century, Rex v. De Manneville became a powerful tool in the cause to reform common law custody rules. 1 Sergeant-at-Law Thomas Talfourd, Parliament’s staunchest advocate for mothers, continually rehearsed the details of the De Manneville and similar cases to underscore the affront to common sense he argued was embedded in existing English custody laws. Caroline Norton also circulated these stories in her political pamphlets, which biographers have credited with motivating legislators to amend English custody laws. 2 Norton’s and Talfourd’s arguments turned the tables on judges who had repeatedly relied upon these cases as precedents supporting fathers’ nearly absolute custody rights. Instead, Norton and Talfourd highlighted the injustice of the cases to agitate for change. Their efforts were successful: Parliament granted married mothers the right to petition for limited custody rights with the 1839 Custody of Infants Act. Though it seems trivial at first glance, the impact of this victory is difficult to overstate: granting married women this right destabilized the fiction of wives’ legal non-existence by obliging their recognition as legal persons with the right to file a separate claim in a court of law. Because the traditional English legal forums of the courtroom and Parliament excluded women from positions of legislative and judicial power, women’s enunciations of their stories became a potential (though limited) means for female intervention in legal reform. The influence of real women’s stories in Parliamentary conversations generated the question with which I approached this project: could women’s fictional representations of suffering mothers meaningfully engage legal 3 discourse despite the cultural obstacles impeding women from participating in most public controversies? While women’s novels were not cited by legislators, they were read by the rapidly expanding reading population in England; in this way, the authors I study added their voices to the diverse mix of texts constituting English conceptions of family, especially motherhood, in the period. Reading novels by Caroline Norton, Anne Brontë, Margaret Oliphant, and George Eliot, I argue that these authors’ varied representations of mothers confronting marital conflict interrogate the legal fictions undergirding inequitable family laws as well as the reductive constructions of the proper family prevailing in English fiction. 3 In doing so, their novels also revise traditional assumptions about domestic realism: the domestic novel can do more than remodel ideologies of the woman at home, it can join the discursive forces instigating Parliament’s reshaping of the law. At stake in the contest for cultural authority between nineteenth-century legal and literary constructions of marital conflict is the power to define “natural” domestic relations, an agency that significantly affects women’s lives. Offering alternatives to the mythologies of family disseminated by law and conventional domestic fiction, these four women’s works obliquely criticize the discourses constraining real and fictional women’s rights and trammeling the “plots” of their lives. Rather than positing overreaching claims about the subversiveness of women’s novels, this project instead probes these authors’ divided impulses to sanction outlawed standards of family behavior—wives abducting their children in response to adultery, for example—and simultaneously to reinscribe Victorian 4 gender, genre, and domestic ideologies. Exploring a cultural context for my study, I begin by arguing that Caroline Norton’s innovative deployment of sensational narratives of maternal distress in her polemical custody pamphlets established a mode in which women’s novels (including her own) could participate in legal discourse without wholly conforming to its generic conventions. Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) exploits the slippage between legal and novelistic genres so deftly plied by Norton, incorporating mock-legal narrative forms (which mimic trials by ordeal and cross-examinations, for instance) to indirectly condemn legal constructions of “reasonable” interpersonal violence. In my third chapter, I contend that Margaret Oliphant denounces Parliament’s limited definition of marital “cruelty” by juxtaposing realistic, sensational, and melodramatic styles in Salem Chapel (1863). I conclude with an exploration of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), which similarly incorporates multiple genres into parallel plots to expose as unreliable the forms of evidence of paternity affirmed by the law. The nineteenth-century was a revolutionary period in English family law. Like the Reform Acts that expanded voting rights only incrementally and with agonizing slowness, the harsh patriarchal codes characterizing family law were slow to crumble. I focus primarily upon Parliamentary texts, including statutes, bills, reports, and debates (as opposed to newspaper reports or local court records) because I wanted to explore the ways in which women’s novels and England’s most authoritative political discourse inform one another. Studying laws passed between the 1828 Offenses against the Person Act and the 1872 Bastardy Act, I examine 5 Parliamentary texts that influenced controversial legislation regulating child custody, aggravated assault, divorce, and illegitimacy. My decision to limit my dissertation to the study of novels was initially a personal one: the novel is the genre I most enjoy reading. But truly, the “loose, baggy monster” that is the Victorian novel allows a sustained exploration of family dynamics, one that can deliver a profound critique of unjust laws. With its extended narrative and multiple plots, the Victorian novel can trace and compare the relationships between numerous families in diverse configurations. With so many pages to fill, the novelist has the opportunity to investigate causation and circumstance, which allows her to attempt to educate readers and manipulate their sympathies. I also chose to write primarily about noncanonical texts in this project, mainly because many of these texts dramatize the unsavory subject matter with which family law deals. Noncanonical texts often achieve their underling status because their inclusion of such content violates critical expectations. On the other hand, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, my single canonical representative, deals just as freely with its unpalatable stories of outlaw families as my noncanonical selections do. Eliot’s text is an important endpoint for this project, for its examination of “illegitimate fathers” returns my readers to Caroline Norton’s complaint that fathers’ custody in many cases was merely “nominal and fictitious” (Letter 53). Eliot thus makes plain that England’s family law—despite the reforms made in the almost four decades between these women’s texts—still had a long way to go. Moreover, Eliot’s esteem in literary history, despite the similarities between 6 her themes and methods and those of the other authors I feature, suggests that perhaps Brontë’s, Norton’s, and Oliphant’s underrated texts performed important cultural work, breaking down critical resistance and thereby opening up new possibilities for future fiction. If this is true, these underappreciated authors should be placed more squarely in the feminist and nineteenth-century canons. My dissertation thus participates in the recuperative work of feminist scholarship: it strives to resuscitate an interest in and a valuing of women’s noncanonical texts. But asking how women’s novels intervened in legal discourse generates an important theoretical question: to what extent are novels like legal texts? There are undeniable similarities between legal and literary texts, but we must of course acknowledge their differences. In Law and Literature (1998), Richard Posner points out that the different functions of and intentions behind literary and legal texts make it dangerous to equate them. 4 And while Susan Stewart argues in Crimes of Writing (1991) that the law must police the boundaries of writing in part to reassure itself of its distinctness from its literary counterparts, we must reflect on the unique and terrifying physical power of the legal word: legal texts can order humans to imprison and execute one another just as they can justify past and future violence. 5 Certainly, both discourses are comprised of language, rhetoric, and narrative. Both are consequently liable to the failings of verbal communication—the imperfect signification of language or the power of narrative conventions to create expectations in judges and juries, for example. Most importantly for my purposes, both sets of texts construct realities for their readers: judges’ written decisions, courtroom 7 testimonies, and Parliament’s reports each select and tell stories that fabricate a reality as surely as a novelist does. Moreover, this selection process follows each author’s biases and is governed by the “rules” of each genre (e.g., exclusionary rules of evidence or the obligatory wedding at the end of a marriage plot). And while we are accustomed to understanding novels as works of fiction, we must break with custom to read the law as such. A judge’s written decision, for instance, includes and excludes details from a trial according to the leanings of a particular judge, and omissions of material mean that the whole story is not being told. In this and other ways, we may understand legal texts as possessing a kind of fictionality. As I analyze legal and literary texts in conjunction, I am mindful of their similarities and differences. I recognize that novels can suggest how and to what extent the law constructs realities and norms for relationships and that reading the law can inform our understanding of an author’s novelistic world. At the same time, however, I never forget the skewed balance of power between the two discourses: though the novel can indirectly alter a reader’s perception of reality, the law has the power to define reality directly for an entire society. Norton’s narration of the De Manneville case typifies many of ways in which women’s representations of mothers engage the discourse of family law. The most obvious way women’s novels could participate in legal debates was through their content. Mrs. De Manneville accused her husband of cruelty, and court records document Mr. De Manneville’s abduction of his child and his extortion of his in- laws. Despite the father’s abuses of his family, English law refused to help this 8 mother, and in fact contributed to her oppression. Likewise, the novels I analyze involve fathers who abscond with children and psychologically torture, cheat on, imprison, neglect, and beat their lovers or wives. Each of these familial offenses— only the last of which was coded as illegal in 1835—was at some point in the century a topic of hot contention within legal circles. But the authors I study don’t limit themselves to the literary and political rewards of melding legal subjects into their novels. They also practice a highly technical deployment of what Mary Poovey calls “strategies of indirection.” Poovey argues persuasively in The Proper Lady (1984) that nineteenth-century cultural and generic restrictions nurtured women’s development of narrative techniques for covertly conveying socially objectionable messages to the reading public. Most significant for my purposes are the narrative stratagems, such as ironic juxtapositions, narrative enclosures, and unresolved ambiguities and contradictions, that lead readers to search for meaning elsewhere in the text or in, for example, the novel’s historical or legal context. 6 With these subtle narrative structures, these novels participate in the contentious conversations regarding family law reform. My language at times gestures toward a conscious authorial intention to criticize the law. Because intention is generally so difficult to prove, however, I limit myself to occasional speculations that some elements of the authors’ lives and secondary texts (prefaces, essays, etc.) suggest that a critical aim was present. What I am more interested in for this study is the intervention itself, the ways in which these texts, regardless of their authors’ conscious plans, contribute to the ongoing and intensifying debates regarding family law reform. 9 Victorian ideologies were rife with contradictions; those describing women include some of the most flagrant inconsistencies. 7 In the same hour of a nineteenth- century Parliamentary debate, for example, legislators can paint women as so fragile and timid as to require the constant protection of a man and then demand legal protection for men’s property from scheming wantons. Though novelists reproduce (and at times promulgate) many of these cultural ambivalences, they also often leave them unaddressed and thereby call attention to the problems they generate for women. Given this similarity, we can profit immeasurably from comparing the manifestations of these contradictions in both sets of texts. Just as Norton’s emphasis on the interrupted act of nursing simultaneously elicits sympathy for mothers and supports an essentialized view of women, the other authors in this project at once reinforce conventional images of nurturing, angelic mothers and use these images to denounce women’s legal oppression. Brontë’s Helen Huntingdon and Oliphant’s Rachel Mildmay, for example, claim to leave their husbands not for their own pleasure, but for the safeguarding of their children. Even Eliot’s Lydia Glasher, a character who abandons her first child to live with her lover, evolves to suffer the pain of her fallen position only after she understands how it will harm her children. At the same time that these conventional representations of mothers as protective and emotional begin to create a maternal authority for women, they reiterate and thus sanction the very stereotypes that legislators used to justify women’s legal subjection. 10 Norton’s texts illustrate the double-bind nineteenth-century women faced: though her pamphlets and novels work to create a maternal authority, they document the impotence of such an authority when it is opposed by English family laws. By thus exhibiting women’s vexed position under the law, Norton and the other authors in the chapters that follow expose conflicts between English law and Victorian social and religious codes, novelistic conventions, and what we might call a common sense morality. Brontë’s heroine, for example, pits her own interpretation of Christian codes regarding marriage against those defended in Parliament, while Oliphant sets Parliament’s conception of marital cruelty in opposition to what she presents as family values. On the other hand, both Eliot and Norton seize upon the discrepancies between laws governing paternal rights and responsibilities and a common sense approach to nurturing. The illumination of these ideological conflicts suggests the archaic nature of England’s family laws as it evinces the oversimplifications in English conceptions of a mother’s position in her family. In a pamphlet addressed to a legal audience, Norton exploits the sentiment readily available in the De Manneville story—the blackguard husband doesn’t only abduct a young child, he “tear[s]” an unweaned infant from its mother’s breast as it obtains “the nourishment which supports its life.” Norton’s experiments with folding women’s sensational stories into her polemical pamphlets have far-reaching literary implications. By embracing the heightened emotion and improbabilities usually marginalized within sensational and melodramatic texts, women broadened the array of situations, plots, and characters they could represent in their domestic 11 novels. The hybrid forms they produce yield a more didactic text, one that expanded the social utility of realism by enhancing its critical capabilities. Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Oliphant’s Salem Chapel, for instance, juxtapose double plots—one conducted primarily in a realistic mode, and the other incorporating sensational, romantic, or melodramatic elements—which inform each other through their similarities and differences. In these novels, the interwoven genres tell readers more about women’s legal disadvantages than a realistic plot could on its own. The liberties afforded by forms other than high realism were by no means total, however. These novelists are therefore attentive to the boundaries sketched by critically lauded literature. So, while they may twist the traditional marriage plot with lurid stories of adultery and abuse, these authors rescue their novels from absolute critical contempt by writing conclusions that iron out their irregularities. Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall illustrates this tendency: although Tenant cautions readers about domestic abuse within the virtually inescapable bonds of nineteenth-century marriage, the novel closes with wedding bells for its outlaw mother. Oliphant’s Salem Chapel likewise concludes a story of marital misery and violence by forecasting the marriage of two of its emotionally scarred characters. Clarice, the heroine of Norton’s Woman’s Reward (1835), escapes the common fate of death for fallen female characters, but is nevertheless punished severely with the death of her lover and her child. Only Eliot’s Daniel Deronda unrepentantly bucks such conventions: the novel’s errant mother, Lydia Glasher, is rewarded when her illegitimate son becomes heir to Grandcourt’s estates. At the same time, however, 12 Eliot may be said to placate critics with a fairy-tale marriage at the end of her novel’s other, epic plot for Daniel. Even more bold than yoking literary genres in a novel, though, is Norton’s grafting of dramatic storytelling into the legalese of her pamphlet. Eschewing the dispassionate rhetoric and transforming the use of precedent typical of professional legal discourse, Norton turns to her advantage her impassioned narration of Mrs. De Manneville’s and other women’s real and fictional stories. Just as Norton’s legal texts increased their influence with this hybridization, her novels benefit from her arguments promoting an attention to women’s stories in legal decision making: Woman’s Reward parallels many of the real women’s stories narrated in Norton’s pamphlets and denounces the limited options available to women in violent marriages. Anne Brontë takes the marriage of legal and literary forms one step further, appropriating legal forms (such as the testimonial and cross-examination) and employing the very language used in Parliamentary texts (such as “provocation” or “grievous”) to place her work in the thick of the debates. Oliphant joins Brontë in imagining extralegal trials (the former a “solemn tribunal” conducted by a parish and the latter trials by ordeal) to highlight the inaccessibility of law to downtrodden mothers. These authors’ blending of legal forms into their literary works underscores the arbitrary nature of many of the distinctions supposed to obtain between legal and literary texts as it calls attention to women’s legal fetters. Norton, Brontë, Oliphant, and Eliot wrote during a period in which women were denied a voice in authoritative legal forums. These women, however, found 13 creative ways to sidestep these cultural obstacles. It is to their novels that I now turn in the hope of revising the idea that women’s novels were restricted to remodeling elements of domestic and gender ideologies. Instead, I will show in the pages that follow that women’s novels were one of several forces converging to advance the reform of mothers’ legal status and rights. 14 Introduction Endnotes 1 Rex v. De Manneville, 5 East 221, 102 Eng. Rep. 1054 (K.B. 1804), cited in Mary Lyndon Shanley’s Feminism, Marriage, and The Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895 ([Princeton, Princeton UP, 1989] 134). 2 James Hoge’s and Jane Marcus’s Selected Writings of Caroline Norton: Facsimile Reproductions offers a brief but insightful introduction to Norton’s life and writings ([Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978] vii-xix). Full-length biographies of Caroline Norton are limited to older texts, see for example Alice Acland’s Caroline Norton (London: Constable, 1948). 3 Throughout this project, I use the admittedly anachronistic term “family law” to denote succinctly laws that governed relationships among mothers, fathers, and children. For my purposes, this includes statutes controlling custody, marriage and divorce, aggravated assaults, and illegitimacy. 4 For Posner, the intentions motivating a legal text are ascertainable. 5 Robert Cover discusses this power in “Violence and the Word” (Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, et. al. [Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1992] 203-238). 6 Woolfgang Iser’s The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983) and Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1978) provide influential studies of narrative gaps and their imaginative filling by readers. 7 Two of the best analyses of these contradictions appear in Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) and Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988). 15 Chapter 1 Custodial Fictions: Narratives of Maternal Distress in England’s Custody Debates and Caroline Norton’s Early Writing “[O]ne of the privileges of the legal profession is to be able professionally to assert that which is untrue with impunity.” —Caroline Norton, Letter to the Lord Chancellor (84) Years of struggling to gain partial custody rights to her three sons taught Caroline Norton the power of fiction and narrative to influence law; her own writings from the 1830s bear the fruit of these hard lessons. Caroline Sheridan’s marriage to George Norton was unhappy virtually from the start, with George’s physical and emotional abuse often compelling her to seek refuge with her family. Near Easter of 1836, Caroline accepted her family’s invitation for a holiday visit, an invitation that excluded George on the grounds of his previous violence. Outraged, George sequestered the children with various agents who barred Caroline from their doors. Before 1839, England’s common law granted husbands absolute custody of their children; this included the right to exclude the mother from any access to her children. 1 With rare and brief exceptions, George persisted in his vindictive alienation of Caroline until September of 1842, when the Nortons’ youngest son died as a result of a neglected, infected wound. 2 George’s abuses incited Caroline to pen fiction and political pamphlets advocating the reform of England’s custody and divorce laws through much of the mid-nineteenth century. In 1835, Norton published her first novel, Woman’s Reward, in which a heroine absconds with her son when abandoning her abusive husband. Norton published three pamphlets during the years immediately preceding the 1839 Custody of Infants Act: 16 Observations on the Natural Claim of the Mother (1836), The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of Custody (1837), and A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Infant Custody Bill (1839). While newspaper reports and gossip regarding her familial and judicial traumas had scandalously publicized Norton’s story of domestic strife, neither her tale nor its publicity was singular in the two decades preceding the 1839 Custody Act. In the 1820s, for example, the Skinner v. Skinner and Ball v. Ball cases had riveted the public’s attention on two spectacles of abused mothers and broken families; in both cases, the courts protected the husbands’ absolute custody rights. These husbands then demonstrated their appreciation of these rights by enlisting other women to care for their children. In 1836—one of the many years Norton spent fighting to see her sons—a Mrs. Greenhill successfully whisked her three daughters to Europe after the Vice-Chancellor granted exclusive custody to her estranged husband, who was then living openly with a mistress. 3 The stories describing these and similar legal cases fomented a public outcry and propelled child custody to the forefront of family law reform efforts between 1835 and 1839. Advanced by a maturing ideological conception of women as moral centers of the domestic realm, child custody emerged as a powder-keg issue with striking potential to transform mothers’ legal status in nineteenth-century England. During the 1830s, Norton and her liberal allies in Parliament mobilized Mrs. Greenhill’s and other women’s narratives of maternal distress to reform custody laws that excluded women from rights to relationships with their children. Conservatives in Parliament, on the other hand, deployed the same narratives to very different ends, 17 aiming to conserve what they saw as the natural order of family life. What we see in the manipulation of these stories is a battle for legal authority between precedent and other forms of narrative—including women’s narratives of maternal distress—that betrays a persistent cultural anxiety about the power of fictions to shape our laws and our sense of reality. Both sides in these debates openly employed various fictions to advance their causes, at the same time denigrating their opponents’ use of fictions as inappropriate for legal argumentation. The ability to define credible fictions thus became the key to controlling the power of fictions in custody law. Conservatives contested the veracity of women’s emotional stories while offering precedent as the only valid authority in legislation. Progressives countered by underscoring the elements that mark the authority of precedent as artificial—its selectivity and biases, for example. By thus blurring the lines between fact and fiction, these arguments revealed the fictional aspects of all the texts vying for legal authority. More is at stake in these custody debates than the authority of various texts to influence legislation; also at stake is an individual woman’s agency to voice her personal tragedy to affect a political outcome and improve women’s status in general. The result of Norton’s victory is hard to overestimate: gaining a voice in custody law undercut the fiction of wives’ legal non-existence, enabling for the first time their recognition as legal persons with the right to file a separate claim in a court of law. Because the traditional English legal forums of the courtroom and Parliament excluded women from positions of legislative and judicial power, women’s enunciations of their stories became a potential (though limited) means for 18 female intervention in legal reform. Citations of precedent expunge the emotion and narrative from the legal cases from which they arise, while women’s stories about the conflicts engendering precedents can communicate the emotional and moral messages crucial to a comprehensive understanding of a complex situation. Caroline Norton recognized that without the sentiment and violence organic to many women’s domestic tragedies, the stories retailed in Parliament were dangerously abridged. To remedy this incompleteness, Norton transgressed the rigid generic conventions of legal writing by weaving women’s unsavory custody narratives into her polemical pamphlets. In her Letter to the Lord Chancellor, Norton implies that legislators should consider the emotional evidence of women’s stories alongside legal precedents in their deliberations over the 1839 Custody of Infants Bill. More broadly, Norton’s Letter suggests that if a text like common law can retain authority despite its fictional elements, perhaps other texts with fictional aspects merit some legal authority. This suggestion opens a space for women’s stories in legal debates and sets the stage for future women’s novels to intervene in legal discourse without mimicking its generic conventions. To eviscerate the conservative fictions she abhors and enfranchise the liberal fictions she sanctions, Norton develops a philosophy of legitimate fictions that demands verisimilitude and defends sentiment and violence as integral components of realism. While her theory is at times inconsistent, I argue that her ideas—and the innovative forms into which they shaped her writing—reformed custody law even as they broadened the restrictive conventions of domestic realism. 19 Storytelling and Fictions in England’s Custody Debates, 1837-1839 Harnessing a surge of public outrage evoked by the exposure of the Greenhill and Norton tragedies in English newspapers, Serjeant-at-Law Thomas Talfourd introduced bills to reform custody law in the House of Commons in 1837 and 1839. For all the rancor it produced, the bill that passed in 1839 was not the extensive measure one might think. The 1839 Custody of Infants Act merely empowered wives who were lawfully separated from their husbands to petition for the rights to visit their children and to request custody of their children under seven years old. Dramatic stories of marital breakdown and custody battles, like Norton’s, played an important, though controversial and inconsistent, role in the custody debates. 4 The legal proceedings governing these conflicts became crucial elements in the reiterations of these narratives of family dissolution because they revealed the law’s complicity in mothers’ victimization. 5 As conservatives and reformers told and retold stories of real and hypothetical mothers, fictions proliferated, though each side attempted to control and define the acceptability of these fictions. 6 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, anxieties blossomed concerning the truth status of texts. In a literary context, concern over the dangerous influence of romances and novels over readers’ minds was especially pronounced regarding female readers. Commentators worried that reading fictions would dangerously distort readers’ (especially women readers’) sense of reality. The critical controversy over James Macpherson’s Ossian poems and Thomas Chatterton’s literary frauds are good examples of this dis-ease, and Charlotte Lennox’s The 20 Female Quixote (1752) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) manifest this discomfort novelistically. 7 This uneasiness extended to legal discourse, where one could find theorists discussing, and commonly condemning, “legal fictions.” But Sir Henry Maine’s oft-quoted mid-nineteenth-century definition of a legal fiction as “any assumption which conceals, or affects to conceal, the fact that a rule of law has undergone alteration, its letter remaining unchanged, its operation being modified” is too limiting for the purposes of this study because I examine fictions not just in enacted law, but also in Parliamentary debates, legal testimonies, novels, and other texts (25). Similarly restrictive is Bentham’s bitter invective that a legal fiction is a “willful falsehood, having for its object the stealing legislative power,” which requires the speakers’ intent to deceive (qtd. in Ogden xvii). Instead, I find Lon Fuller’s twentieth-century analysis of fictions in Legal Fictions (1967) more useful because Fuller acknowledges that all verbal expressions are to some degree fictional. Glossing Hans Vaihingher’s theory of “As If,” Fuller explains that our minds must simplify and organize the infinite data continually showering our senses in order to make some sense of it and survive; language, at best an imperfect medium for expressing our interpretation of such data, prohibits us from accurately representing reality as it exists around us. From his analysis of Vaihinger’s theory, Fuller concludes that “Our language, our ‘common sense’ notions, our scientific theories, our legal constructs—all of these are conceptual devices for dealing with and organizing reality. ‘Facts’ are only those thought-constructs that are useful for so many purposes and are so commonly accepted that no one doubts their ‘existence’ or 21 ‘reality’” (134). Because every text (whether a history, a novel, a scientific report, a judicial decision, etc.) consciously or unconsciously selects certain data and omits others, uses metaphoric language to describe or analyze the selected data, and otherwise simplifies and organizes the total available information in order to communicate a message, all texts are in some ways fictional according to Fuller’s theory. Some fictions intend to deceive (e.g., lies), while others do not (e.g., assumptions, ideologies). Regardless of intention, all of the fictions circulating in the custody debates shared this element of incomplete and inexact representation. Serjeant Talfourd buttressed his custody bills by aligning them with a nineteenth-century construction of natural law and its supposedly unassailable authority; however, this analysis will demonstrate that natural law possessed only a fictional authority. Borrowing from Talfourd’s rhetoric, reformers attempted to legitimize their use of women’s stories of domestic and legal tragedy by emphasizing the morality they assumed resided in granting mothers custody rights. At the same time, they criticized the artificiality of existing custody law, insisting that the law’s response to these women had been “unnatural.” Talfourd, for example, exhorted his fellow legislators to “assimilate the law of the land to the law of nature,” insisting that the “feelings of our common nature, and the plain principles of justice” should “triumph over those of artificial law” (42: 1054; 43: 146). 8 Talfourd thus equates the “law of the land” for custody with “artificial law,” opposing it to “the law of nature” and “plain . . . justice.” Fortifying Talfourd’s construction of a “natural” sanction for the bill, three disappointed Members of the House of Lords wrote in 22 their dissent following the bill’s 1838 defeat that “nature and reason point out the mother as the proper guardian of her infant child,” thus personifying and linking “nature and reason” as the indicators of the “proper guardian” of children (44: 791). What did these MPs expect to gain by invoking the name and support of nature in their cause? Reformers justified their coupling of nature and the custody bill with natural law theories, which had experienced a revival in seventeenth- century Britain and which continued to influence legislation and jurisprudence in the nineteenth century. Although natural law philosophies were by no means monolithic, Paul Sigmund identifies a common thread in the theories espoused by seventeenth-century thinkers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf. 9 Each posits the existence of a common morality that rational men can identify; these theories categorize laws derived from this putatively universal morality as natural. Without a foundation grounded in this common morality, the theory goes, human laws are merely convenient rules set up by men to maintain an often unjust power; proponents of natural law thus understand the authority of such human laws to be fictitious. Arguing along these seventeenth-century lines, Talfourd contrasts the fictional authority of enacted law with what he presents as the universally or supernaturally-authorized status of natural law. This putative universality eliminates any suspicion of fictionality or subjectivity undergirding natural laws. Natural law, however, derives its authority from a demonstrably false assumption of a universal morality, an authority just as fictional as those supporting enacted law. 23 Both reformers and conservatives appropriated the term “morality” for their causes: whereas reformers attempted to establish the morality communicated through the emotional impact of women’s stories as “naturally” authoritative, conservatives challenged and confounded the issue of what was moral and enlisted morality for their cause. This confusion pitted the morality of keeping mothers and children together against that of keeping nuclear families intact. In this opposition, the term “family” becomes painfully problematic. Because legislators are primarily discussing families in which mothers and fathers have separated (or want to), “family” often silently stands in for the father and his child: the legal fiction of married women’s non-existence makes mothers irrelevant in an English “family,” for property and names typically descend through the male line. Consequently, while progressives emphasized the “natural” morality of keeping mothers and children together, conservatives urged Parliament to recognize that granting separated mothers any custody rights might immorally disrupt not only a nuclear family, but also a generational family, with its blood and property lines. Indeed, nineteenth- century social and economic contexts may have made it seem more moral to oblige children to live with their fathers (i.e., the “family”), who were usually the source of a family’s economic security and nominal status. Each of these positions presents a subjective view of morality, which directly undermines the assumption that rationality allows men to know innately a universal morality. By challenging the idea of a monolithic morality foundational to natural law, these contradictory claims 24 and texts undercut the validity of natural law itself, and thus the legitimacy of the women’s stories as reformers used them in the debates. Despite this challenge to his reasoning, Talfourd presents legal relief for mothers as the “plainly” and “naturally” moral choice and assumes that any man rationally considering the custody question will reach the same conclusions he has. The women’s stories told in Parliament resuscitated the sentiment of the tales that dry legal language and the compilation of common law had buried, and Talfourd and his sympathizers often substituted or conflated the language of emotion for the language of morality in their evocations of natural law. 10 In this they seem to rehearse Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s eighteenth-century revisions of natural law theories. Rousseau rejected the intellectualism of previous natural law theories, arguing instead that our emotions and consciences indicate “the law of nature, that holy and imprescriptible law which speaks to the heart and reason of man” (185). Exhorting his fellow MPs to allow the “feelings of [their] common nature” to guide their decision making, Talfourd asserts that nature aligns their “feelings” with justice. Merging these quantities, he argues, will guide them to a righteous path trumping “artificial law.” Amalgamating centuries of natural law theories, then, Talfourd construes human emotion and reason as the enablers of natural law finding: legislators simply need to consult their feelings rationally to find a moral and just law authorized by nature. Led by Talfourd, reformers thus tried to prove the “unnaturalness” of existing custody law by pointing to what they constructed as the MPs’ universally indignant and sorrowful affective response to actual stories of 25 cruel, but legal, separations of mothers and children. As we shall see, this tactic left conservatives squirming to sanction existing laws and to delegitimate women’s stories. The authority to draft, enact, and amend laws was a crux of the debates. In the decisions handed down during the notorious custody cases at the heart of these debates, judges at the highest levels had repeatedly complained that a lack of precedent tied their hands. The legal fiction that the courts had “no authority” to intervene in fathers’ custody rights is a circular argument, of course: judges create authority by handing down precedent-setting decisions, but because no precedent- setting case exists, these judges complain that they have no authority. Even Vice- Chancellors had lamented that they had “no authority to interfere with the common law right of the father” in cases like Mrs. Greenhill’s (44: 776). But the tautological nature of this assertion is only the most obvious reason this complaint is a fiction: it was also untrue. Previous judges had warranted the use of discretion in custody matters under certain circumstances—this Vice-Chancellor simply ignores these precedents. As Mary Shanley outlines in Feminism, Marriage, and the Law (1989), two eighteenth-century judgments handed down by Lord Mansfield, chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench, authorized the use of discretion in custody cases and granted mothers custody of children. In 1763, Mansfield awarded a mother custody because the child’s father was suspected of trying to prostitute his daughter. Mansfield granted another mother custody a decade later, in Blisset’s Case (1774), because the child’s father was bankrupt and practiced “cruelty” (Shanley 133). 11 26 This was a bright spot in custody law, one dimmed by Lord Ellenborough’s ascension to the position of chief justice in 1802. Lord Ellenborough’s tenure reverted custody law to a rigid adherence to the precedents set before Mansfield’s innovations. In 1804, Ellenborough decided the Rex v. Manneville case in favor of an exploitative father. Despite a marriage settlement protecting 700 L per annum for Mrs. De Manneville’s “separate use for life,” Mr. De Manneville threatened to send their child to France (his homeland) to extort money from her and her family (Separation 33). When the family refused to breach the settlement, he followed through with his threats: he forcibly abducted their five-month-old child. Mrs. De Manneville’s lawyer relied on Lord Mansfield’s 1774 Blisset decision as a precedent in his case to restore the infant to the mother’s custody, but Ellenborough rejected judges’ use of discretion as sanctioned by Mansfield and instead reasserted the earlier patriarchal common-law code granting exclusive custody rights to fathers (Shanley 134). This brief case history exposes the selectivity of what law makers call “precedent.” In his 1824 decision for the Ball custody case, Vice-Chancellor Shadwell concluded, “‘It resolves itself into a case for authorities; and I must consider what has been looked upon as the law on this point.’” 12 Besides implying the fictionality (“what has been looked upon as the law”) and temporality (“up to this point”) of common law, Shadwell’s decision ignores the fact that precedent did exist for granting mothers rights in some cases. This oversight reveals a fictional element to common law: in the establishment of a “common law,” judges only repeatedly 27 refer to certain cases as authorities, thus instituting a legal standard not on the totality of English legal cases, but on a small percentage of cases selected by lawmakers and judges. Moreover, such citations of precedent refer to a judge’s written decision, which presents only the elements of a story that that particular judge deems significant. 13 As Fuller observes, such selectivity and exclusivity constitute a fictitiousness in the law. Most significantly, the precedents produced at the end of these cases are typically affect-less because they omit many of the emotional details of the stories upon which the case was built. For example, lawyers citing “Rex v. Manneville” invoke only the final decision (for the father) and elide many of the circumstances leading up to it (the mothers’ sorrow and loss). Shanley’s custody case history exhibits that past cases had sanctioned judges’ discretion when children’s fathers were demonstrably unfit for custodial rights, but that later judges had rejected these cases as precedents (as in the 1804 De Manneville/Blisset illustration). Surprisingly, reformers rarely refer to these actual legal precedents in their arguments, perhaps in part because Lord Ellenborough’s rejection of them adhered to a longer tradition in common law, but perhaps also because they wanted to challenge the practice of stare decisis itself—citing precedents would simply reinscribe their exclusive authority. 14 Whatever their rationale, reformers substituted women’s narratives of domestic conflict for such non-conforming precedents. However, progressives overlooked, ignored, or denied the fictional elements of the women’s stories; like judges’ written decisions, the women’s narratives presented only selected items from their domestic histories, and presented them from biased 28 perspectives. Reformers, though, offered the narratives and their emotional “evidence” as if they were factual. Judging from conservatives’ attempts to minimize the legislative influence of actual women’s stories, the technique of employing narratives of distress in the interest of reform must have been quite persuasive. One way conservatives subverted the authority of mothers’ stories was to cast doubt upon their veracity, in effect fictionalizing them. The Conservative Sir Edward Sugden, one of the bill’s most vociferous opponents in the House of Commons, invented stories about hypothetical women, warning that “No woman [would] ever admit that she left her husband’s home on account of a short quarrel of five minutes’ duration”; instead, he argued, she would lie, embellishing the charges against her husband to win custody rights to her children (40: 1117). In Sugden’s iteration of abused wives’ stories, the fictions multiply: imaginary lying mothers will weave fictions about their imaginary family lives. Moreover, conservatives implied that all unhappy wives had somehow provoked their mistreatment, usually with adultery or other “misconduct” (40: 1118). They complained that the courts would fill with women, adulteresses all, clamoring to gain custody via the legal loophole created by judges’ inability to detect fictions in the women’s testimonies. Conservatives also portrayed mothers’ nurturing of their children as fictional by, for instance, wondering “who was to maintain and educate the child” if it was in the mother’s custody for the first seven years of its life (48: 160). By postulating imaginary cases of lying and neglectful 29 mothers, these politicians indirectly discredited the real women’s stories related in Parliament and in English courts and newspapers. Alternately, conservatives parroted the Vice-Chancellor’s argument that only precedent had a rightful place in Parliament’s debates. Lord Brougham, for example, remarked that there “was very little legal authority in . . . [the House of Common’s] support” of the bill (44: 780). Privileging the authority of past judicial decisions, Lord Brougham’s comment refers to the supposed lack of precedent endowing courts with the power to interfere with fathers’ exclusive custody rights. From Brougham’s perspective, the fictions of women’s stories, because English legal institutions had not legitimated them, were less authoritative than the fictions of precedent. The legislators’ disagreement over the role of women’s stories in these debates should be familiar to twenty-first-century legal thinkers, many of whom still contest the validity of using such stories in legal argumentation. Detractors of the employment of narrative in legal contexts complain that stories appeal merely to our emotions: they constitute pathos-based arguments and are therefore less intellectual and less valid than logos-based positions. However, other legal writers have vigorously defended the role of narratives in legal cases, explaining that stories can broaden a jury’s understanding of a complex situation. 15 As Peter Brooks explains in “The Law as Narrative and Rhetoric,” storytelling [in law] serves to convey meanings eluded or marginalized by mainstream legal thinking and rhetoric. Narrative has a unique ability to embody the concrete experience of individuals and communities, to make other voices heard, to contest the very assumptions of legal judgment. Narrative is thus a form of countermajoritarian argument, a genre for oppositionists intent on 30 showing up the exclusions that occur in legal business-as-usual—a way of saying, you cannot understand until you have listened to our story. 16 The “business-as-usual” to which Brooks alludes includes the rules of evidence governing and limiting what types of texts can be presented at trial, as well as the omissions routinely made in written judicial decisions. 16 While we typically think of these rules as regulating procedures for trials, the nineteenth-century custody debates clarify that legislators also sought to trammel the power of stories to influence human decision making. In part, Brooks’s “eluded or marginalized” meanings include the emotional impact or what we might call “common-sense morality” of a case’s details that the legal process minimizes or dismisses altogether, but which—if attended to—would have the power to persuade juries and judges. Brooks’s suggestion that an audience cannot understand without hearing the victim’s story, complete with its sentiment, resonates with nineteenth-century reformers’ belief that the emotional punch of stories can arouse the true empathy necessary to a holistic comprehension of a case. In “Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law,” Paul Gewirtz appends a warning to his defense of the use of stories in legal discourse. Gewirtz cautions that scholars must “take explicit account of the distinctive context within which legal narratives occur. Storytelling in law is narrative within a culture of argument” (5). Gewirtz’s warning points to the potential dangers of integrating the different conventions of these two discursive forms as persuasive tools in legal forums. As Shani D’Cruze observes in Crimes of Outrage (1998), we become accustomed to stories which 31 follow various generic conventions, and we begin to hold certain expectations for narratives’ ends—we “mind the story” (154). Hence, when a lawyer presents a woman’s victimization in terms echoing “maiden in distress” tales, listeners can develop expectations for the story, such as a conclusion punishing a villain and rewarding a hero, which may thus improperly influence listeners’ interpretation of actual events. In literary terms, the danger of employing narratives in a legal arena is the possibility of directing judges and juries toward a fictional conclusion (verdict) for a story (case) based on the influence of narrative conventions. Anticipating twentieth-century literary theorists, Caroline Norton developed a philosophy of fiction with which to justify her generic innovations in legal and literary texts. While her polemical pamphlets and novels disseminated stories of real and fictional women’s custody woes to transform custody law, her most powerful story was her own. Caroline Norton’s Philosophy of Fiction: Generic Blending in Letter to the Lord Chancellor The Nortons’ familial dissolution had been notorious since 1836, the year George Norton charged Lord Melbourne with criminal conversation with Caroline. 17 Newspapers such as The Times provided a forum for George’s excoriating accounts of Caroline’s behavior, to which Caroline felt compelled to reply. In effect, Caroline’s letters to The Times retell her story from her perspective, but they must compete with George’s stories for ascendancy. Unfortunately, Caroline began this 32 battle as an underdog, for as George Meredith so powerfully represents in his fictional account of Caroline’s troubles, Diana of the Crossways (1885), the English public typically considered even an accusation of adultery evidence against a woman’s character. 18 To Norton, it was clear that the mark branded on her by the newspapers’ imputations of adultery was ineffaceable. She thus prudently transformed a damning situation into a tool: she would embrace the publicity and write to reform the laws that had warranted her victimization by her husband. As Karen Chase and Michael Levenson note in The Spectacle of Intimacy, “Publicity had been [Caroline’s] curse; it would become her cherished instrument” (38). 19 The bill’s detractors inside and outside of Parliament exploited the Norton scandal unrelentingly to undermine Caroline’s character and reputation for veracity. Norton’s adversaries claimed the bill was, in fact, an attempt by the bill’s author, Talfourd, to help a particular, scandalous mother with whom they suggested he was romantically involved. By insinuating an intimate relationship between Norton and Talfourd, Edwin Hill Handley’s 1838 review of the bill in the British and Foreign Review seriously damaged Caroline’s reputation as a woman, writer, and thinker; it also impeded the progress of the bill. 20 Of course, ruining a woman’s sexual reputation in the nineteenth-century was an indirect—but forceful—way to sabotage her reputation for honesty. This endangered the credibility of Norton’s stories and thus her authority in the legal discourse. Norton’s defense against Handley’s defamation of her character arrived in her Letter to the Lord Chancellor (1839), a pamphlet that not only championed the custody bill, but also redefined and defended 33 the role of her own and other abused women’s stories in the legal debates over custody reform. Like the arguments in Parliament, Norton’s Letter betrays anxieties over fictions and uses them inconsistently. In her Letter, Norton sets out a philosophy of fiction with which she attempts to legitimize some fictions and invalidate others. However, the Letter categorizes acceptable and unacceptable fictions along less gendered lines than those drawn by conservatives, thus sundering the longstanding alignment of femininity with emotion, melodrama, and untruth. Norton goes further than even her supporters in Parliament, though, by not simply defining fact and fiction, but also by prescribing new boundaries for the conventions of legal discourse and generic realism. Most significantly, Norton’s Letter employs hypothetical and real women’s narratives of maternal distress—each endowed with multiple fictions via Norton’s retelling of it—to underscore the necessity of legal reform, to demonstrate that sentimental stories of legal injustice should be allowed to influence law (an early manifestation of the “personal is political” credo), and to highlight the “unnaturalness” of existing custody law. Elsewhere, Norton replicates the tone, language, and generic conventions of political and legal discourse to increase her pamphlet’s rhetorical strength and authority. To achieve her goals Norton must validate her uses of women’s stories and deflect conservatives’ attacks upon them. While Norton imagines hypothetical mothers throughout the Letter to introduce arguments, pose questions, and proceed through the logical sequence of her reasoning, she often shifts to using real women’s custody tragedies to exemplify the 34 courts’ misogynistic responses to mothers’ victimization by their husbands. Her innovation lies in her blending of genres: she seamlessly combines sentimental narratives of maternal distress with legal argumentation to influence the legislators who hold the power to transform English family dynamics. Besides narrating women’s domestic tragedies in her Letter, Norton also recounts what she perceives as the malfunctioning of the courts and Parliament: the custody case history she presents, which is similar to Shanley’s history, emphasizes the evolving legal landscape in which Lord Mansfield applied discretion in custody matters, only to have this innovation rejected by Lord Ellenbourgh at the start of the nineteenth century. Norton resuscitates the cases and stories that the compilation of common law had alternately privileged or buried to suggest that the courts had refused to grant women custody rights on the basis of fictions. Norton's use of the term “legal fiction,” which she commonly abridges to simply, “fiction,” greatly expands even Fuller’s notion of “legal fictions” to include our sense of “lies.” While Fuller argues that “a fiction is distinguished from a lie by the fact that it is not intended to deceive,” Norton believes judges and legislators are disingenuous in their arguments supporting fathers’ exclusive custody rights (Fuller 6). In the Letter, Norton addresses a diverse range of fictions; however, she also employs fictions of her own to condemn Parliamentary and judicial fictions, insisting that hers are acceptable for legal argumentation because they mirror real women’s stories. Norton’s favoring of the verisimilar anticipates ideas set forth by Michael McKeon in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (1987). McKeon contends that the 35 novel became possible when people began accepting the possibility that verisimilar fiction could impart a type of truth to readers. Likewise, Norton argues that stories that mimic reality should accrue legal authority because of their ability to communicate important truths. Most importantly, her inconsistent criticism of fictions suggests the impossibility of pure factuality or impartiality in any text, which enables her to argue that other texts should be considered potential authorities in legal discourse. From a more postmodern point of view, it also suggests the impossibility for any text, including the law, to have undisputed authority. From Norton’s perspective as an abused mother, the law’s strict adherence to precedent in legal decision-making has devolved into a tyranny of precedent. Nonetheless, she understands the usefulness of precedent in legal argumentation, and she is practical—she knows how the law currently functions and tries to work within its existing framework: she fights precedents with precedents. 21 By obeying the conventions of legal discourse, Norton imbues her pamphlet with rhetorical vigor and authority. She therefore never suggests eliminating the authority of precedent altogether; instead, she argues that various flaws in precedents indicate that they should be cited alongside other, equally legitimate texts. By citing cases in which judges refused to interfere in poorly-behaved fathers’ exclusion of well-behaved mothers from access to their children, the Letter demonstrates the immorality of some precedent-setting cases. By outlining the shifts between Lord Mansfield’s and Ellenborough’s decisions, she exemplifies the mutability and temporality of common law. These rhetorical maneuvers thus demonstrate that the common law governing 36 custody breaks with the tenets of natural law and with what she perceives as English standards of decency. Norton’s nuanced position allows her to highlight the moral or common-sense flaws in precedent-setting cases while using other buried cases to argue authoritatively. Thus, she sometimes embraces what she at other times scorns as “PRECEDENT, the lawyer’s God” to gild her arguments with an authoritative sheen, but she simultaneously demonstrates the moral injustice of many of the precedent-setting cases retold in the custody debates by unearthing the details of the stories attached to them (71). In addition to precedent, Norton argues implicitly that courts should legitimize women’s stories—the vehicles for communicating the emotional and moral messages of which she approves—as grounds for legal reform. In “Emphasis Added,” Nancy Miller explains that “sensibility, sensitivity, ‘extravagance’—so many code words for feminine in our culture that the attack is in fact tautological— are taken to be not merely inferior modalities of production but deviations from some obvious truth” (46). Miller cautions that critics have related this “truth” to plausibility, which they have long aligned with propriety, or social norms. These norms were defined or constructed largely by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century men and generally excluded the “extravagances” of women’s texts. Consequently, Miller argues, critics label women’s stories implausible when they cannot be reconciled with such norms. Legislators discredited women’s stories in part for their sentimentality, but Norton’s Letter works to reverse this judgment. This is Norton’s most significant generic innovation in her legal texts: whereas common law 37 expunges the emotion and the narrative from precedent-setting cases, Norton’s text recuperates the affect of women’s stories for reformist ends. This was a bold gamble, for many nineteenth-century thinkers considered women’s sensitivity a block to their rationality and thus a justification for stripping them of power. The publicity and contemporaneity of the Greenhill case allowed Norton to vitalize the emotional impact of her argument with the freshness of its insult to English “common decency.” Mrs. Greenhill, the woman who fled to the continent with her three young daughters to evade the Chancery Court’s mandate that she deliver the girls to her adulterous husband, became the subject of newspaper reports and gossip in 1835. Because Norton relies so extensively on this case in the Letter, I summarize her telling of Mrs. Greenhill’s story here. In 1835, Mrs. Greenhill discovered that her husband, who had been living abroad, had been cohabiting with another woman for over a year. Norton writes that “Mrs. Greenhill, overwhelmed with sorrow and indignation, returned to the protection of her own family, and commenced proceedings against her husband for divorce” (Letter 61). 22 When Mr. Greenhill received notice of these events, he dispatched a lawyer to inform Mrs. Greenhill that if she proceeded with the divorce, he would demand custody of their three children—three girls under six years of age—all of whom lived with their mother. Unfazed, Mrs. Greenhill continued her divorce suit, and her husband’s solicitor in turn presented her with a writ of habeas corpus, ordering her to “resign her children” to her husband (61-2). Rather than obey these orders, Mrs. Greenhill attempted to make her girls wards of the Chancery Court. To this request, Norton 38 reports that “the Vice-Chancellor gave an adverse decision, and dismissed the petition; the mother’s separate claim not being acknowledged by the Court” (64-5). The courts could not “acknowledge” a “mother’s separate claim” because the legal fiction of coverture treated a married woman and her husband as a single person— the husband; a woman ceased to be a legal person upon marriage. 23 Undaunted, Mrs. Greenhill resorted to various legal appeals, to each of which she received rebukes from the courts ordering her to relinquish custody of the children to their father. 24 Mrs. Greenhill eventually recognized that she had exhausted her legal avenues. Norton writes that when Mr. Greenhill demanded to visit the children, Mrs. Greenhill became “alarmed lest [her children] should be seized from her, [and] withdrew precipitately and left the kingdom, taking with her her three little girls” (66-7). The Chancery Court then argued Mrs. Greenhill’s case in her absence, and again decided against her. In her previous pamphlet, Separation, Norton quotes the Vice-Chancellor’s decision that, regardless of Mr. Greenhill’s immorality, “‘the Court of Chancery had NO AUTHORITY TO INTERFERE with the common law right of the father, and that he had not THE POWER to order that Mrs. Greenhill should even SEE her children as a matter of right’” (61). Norton’s Letter to the Lord Chancellor is more effective than Separation for at least two reasons. The first is her appropriation of dispassionate, professional legal language and conventions. The second is a structural change that improved the coherence and persuasiveness of the Letter: her redistribution of women’s narratives of maternal distress. In Separation, Norton 39 sequesters her accounts and analyses of women’s legal stories in an “Appendix,” which is in itself an interesting read and showcases Norton’s prose at its most passionate (as signaled by her EMPHATIC USE OF CAPITALIZATION), but which subordinates the women’s tales to Norton’s attempts to oppose conservatives’ arguments with what is primarily natural law logic. In Separation, Norton invokes natural law to fortify her arguments and paraphrases Burke to advocate what she believes are mothers’ natural rights to custody. 25 In the Letter, on the other hand, Norton replaces her overt references to theorists with indirect invocations that mirror the legislators’ more self-confident voices. MPs don’t need to quote philosophers for external authorization because they’re legislators—members of the most authoritative institution in nineteenth-century England. Norton imbues her Letter with a similar assumed authority by mimicking this confidence; thus the locus of authority shifts from male theorists in Separation to the (supposedly) anonymous author in the Letter. 26 Like her allies in Parliament, Norton analyzes her rendition of Mrs. Greenhill’s story to rebut several of her adversaries’ arguments, many of which she portrays as fictions. To defend her damaged reputation, Norton attacks Handley’s salacious fiction that the bill germinated from the soil of an inappropriate relationship between Norton and Serjeant-at-Law Talfourd. Expressing her outrage at these innuendoes, Norton retorts that only her “Real History and Origin” of the bill can refute Handley’s misrepresentations of the bill’s genesis (Letter 59). This “Real History,” which Norton opposes to Handley’s “very ingenious little sketch of 40 invented and combined circumstances,” locates the origin of Talfourd’s interest in custody law in his participation as the fathers’ lawyer in two custody cases, one of which was the Greenhill case. Norton cleverly envelopes the Greenhill case in her “Real History,” retrieving all the sentiment and outrage expunged by the multiple legal decisions against Mrs. Greenhill, and concluding that it was Talfourd’s indignation over the outcomes of these cases that motivated him to switch loyalties and draft the bill after serving as a lawyer for these husbands. Especially interesting here is that Norton’s innuendo-laden story drops out of her self-defense for over fifteen pages as she resuscitates every legal and emotional detail of the less controversial Greenhill incident. Norton clearly understands and exploits the affective power of this story to build her case defending the authority of women’s stories to influence legal decisions. In so doing, she begins to unfold her theory of fictions. Upholding her presentation of the Greenhill case as the “state of facts,” Norton accuses Handley, along with conservatives in Parliament, of “smother[ing] all allusion” to the “Real History” of Talfourd’s motivation to write the bill (34, 73). She asserts they do so because [T]hey feared a case so clearly and iniquitously unjust, ending in decisions so palpably absurd, would prove too strong for all the plausibilities they could muster in behalf of the non-intervention system. They dreaded lest the hearts and minds of all unprejudiced men would be brought by this case to feel and understand the full importance of a subject hitherto shrouded from the public eye . . . . It was necessary to bring forward some more disputable case,--some case whose details were less known, and where they could therefore assume more, and admit less. 73-4 41 By relating the Greenhill narrative, Norton found a way not only to rescue her own reputation, but also to revive the buried elements of this story and repeat them for their “palpabl[e]” emotional effect. In this way, Norton elevates the stature of Mrs. Greenhill’s narrative of victimization: it is so powerful, so effective in influencing men’s “hearts and minds” and in assisting them to “feel and understand” the situation that opponents must “smother” it or risk defeat. With the phrases, “hearts and minds” and “feel and understand,” Norton links affect to intellect in an almost causative manner—both phrases list the emotional terms first, and the logical terms second, suggesting the didactic power of the emotions. In addition, Norton’s diction and syntax recall Rousseau’s assertion that the law of nature “speaks to the heart and reason of man” (185). Such indirect invocations of natural law mimic the legislators’ self-confident voices and imbue the Letter—including its unorthodox use of sentimental rhetoric—with a similar assumed authority. Although participation in a custody trial typically damaged a nineteenth- century woman’s reputation, Norton indicates that Mrs. Greenhill’s trials may have had an unforeseen benefit. Norton clarifies that because Mrs. Greenhill pursued her case in three separate courts, the public knew the intimate details of her case: the newspapers’ reports of her trials tell more, and tell it more accurately, than the gossip that “tells” other women’s stories. Here, she privileges the court’s records of Mrs. Greenhill’s case as factual. This public record impeded Handley’s and conservatives’ ability to fictionalize Mrs. Greenhill’s story in ways that could forward their cause. On the other hand, Norton’s case was “more disputable” 42 because she did not take her custody case to court in the 30s. Caroline desired a separation, but was stymied by the legal fiction of “condonation,” which assumed that a woman who returned to a violent husband condoned her husband’s abuses. Caroline’s lawyer advised her that the courts would reject her petitions for a separation when they discovered she had once returned to George, even though she did so to live with her sons (Letter 84-5). The Letter suggests that the resulting absence of publicly exchanged, legally recorded knowledge regarding the Nortons’ domestic dispute empowered Handley to “assume more, and admit less” as he manufactured his “history” and its “plausibilities” upon the foundation of the speculation and gossip surrounding the Nortons’ family history. By naming her opponents’ stories “plausibilities,” Norton generously acknowledges that their assumptions could be true, but she subsequently debunks their “history” by contrasting it with “a case so clearly . . . unjust”—the Greenhill story—which is no hypothetical or unknown case. Recognizing and rejecting the misogynistic cultural tendencies analyzed by Nancy Miller, Norton argues that women’s narratives and the sentiment they convey belong in the debates—they shouldn’t be discredited. 27 In fact, she shows that these narratives belong at least as much as the hypothetical stories with which she and her opponents joust. With the word “plausibilities,” Norton blurs her line between acceptable and unacceptable fictions in legal discourse. As we shall see, Norton favors as “real” stories that square with the cases Chancery has recorded—regardless of their degree of sentimentality and violence. Fiction has its place in legal argumentation, she argues, as long as it is verisimilar. 43 “Plausibility” is insufficient justification for Norton; the fiction must resemble reality to accrue influence. By suggesting that a lack of narrative details empowers Handley to fabricate unrealistic stories, Norton can argue that warranting the introduction of the full stories in these debates will actually increase the credibility of legal discourse. Thus, Norton privileges the putative factuality with which she imbues actual women’s legal histories over the “ingenious little sketch” retailed by the Review. But Norton doesn’t limit her use of Mrs. Greenhill’s story to disarming Handley, she also employs it to contest conservatives’ arguments in Parliament, which she portrays as equally fictional. For example, in her rejection of the conservative canard that the bill would encourage separated mothers to abandon their husbands and abduct their children, Norton uses the outcome of the Greenhill narrative to portray existing law as an oppressor of women and a motivator of outlawry in mothers. In her recounting of the case, Norton claims that Mrs. Greenhill submitted to the courts’ protection of her husbands’ custody rights and merely requested a guarantee of access to the children; to this end she had unsuccessfully appealed to multiple levels of the English court system (35). Continuing, Norton insists that it was only when Mrs. Greenhill had exhausted her legal options and realized that the judges refused to apply discretion in the interest of a maternal morality that she fled with her three daughters to the continent—thereby removing them from English jurisdiction (34). Inverting her opponents’ logic that custody rights would encourage abductions, Norton asks, “Was not, in short, the 44 abduction of [the Greenhill] children caused by the want of that very power which it is urged will give rise to abductions? And is it not equally unfair and absurd to persist in inventing results for imaginary cases, which the results in real instances exactly contradict?” (36). Though she has earlier berated judges for their circular and demonstrably false argument that they had “no authority” to interfere in a father’s custody rights, here she writes as though that lack of power were real. But she assumes this position only to make her point: if courts assert the power they have used in the past, she claims, mothers will stop feeling cornered and consequently will stop abducting their children. Indeed, Norton argues that women like Mrs. Greenhill are only “lawless” because the law does not recognize or protect married women as legal persons; they are literally “without law.” Moreover, her question directly censures her opponents’ use of fictions in their argumentation: “imaginary” tales can only muddy their consideration of “real instances.” Perhaps to excuse her own use of invented cases, Norton’s query distinguishes “imaginary cases” that reverse the outcome of court-recorded “realities” from the “real instances” that square with her arguments. In other words, Norton ignores the probability that some wives had behaved and would continue to behave as conservatives feared they would. Norton’s application of words linking stories to literary writing (such as “imaginary” and “fictitious”) to her opponents’ texts, and her reservation of more scientific terms (like “hypothetical”) for the stories she uses in her own arguments is key to her nuancing of acceptable and unacceptable fictions. Nonetheless, her technique is complicit with the wholesale devaluing of fiction. Just 45 as she does with precedent, Norton refines her analysis of fictions in these legal debates to favor her reformist agenda. If the new law would truly encourage wives to abandon their husbands, Norton argues, women would have already done so in droves, because up to this point women had been ignorant of their lack of legal custody rights. In other words, Norton claims that women had believed all along that they had some custody rights, and yet they had—by and large—remained with their husbands. Of course, Norton is battling one fiction with another: some women (including Norton) knew the state of the law. While both sides of this argument ignore or elide wives’ economic dependence upon their husbands, such an elision is characteristic for Norton: she approves of wives’ dependency and subordination to their husbands, though she argues that only husbands who love and “protect” their wives deserve such deference. Exploiting the sentimental power of the women’s stories told in Parliament, Norton assures her readers that “Till the painful disclosures consequent on the discussion of this Bill, were made; (sic) it was never publicly known or understood that the father had a right to deprive his wife of her infant children at any moment, and for any cause” (13-14). Hence, she claims, the outing of these women’s stories has had a didactic function in society: the press’s sensational coverage of these mothers’ tragedies has enlightened the general public to the proverbial “letter” of the law. To validate her suspicion of women’s legal ignorance, Norton cites the Greenhill case, arguing that Mrs. Greenhill would not have asked the courts to protect her “rights” had she known that those rights did not exist (14). 46 But Norton takes this claim further, extrapolating from Mrs. Greenhill’s ignorance to all English women’s lack of legal knowledge. Mrs. Greenhill, Norton pronounces in a righteous tone, knew nothing of the operation of the law which aided the oppressor to tyrannise, punishing the innocent and letting the guilty go free. Simply imagining that her own blamelessness and affection for her children, (to whom she had been acting a mother’s holy part, while their father was living with a wanton,) would suffice to establish her claim to protection, she appealed to the English law; and appealed in vain. 15 The women Norton conjures in her reasoning seem to ground their claims to their assumed custody rights in their morality. If a mother behaved morally, Norton explains, women “imagin[ed]” that English law would support her claims to custody—this suspicion in turn implies that Englishwomen believed English law was derived from a common view of morality, or more theoretically, that it was derived from natural law. Norton plays upon this delusion, protesting that the judges reached their Greenhill decision “not because [Mrs. Greenhill] had in any way deserved that heavy sorrow; not with any reference to real and natural justice; but simply because PRECEDENT (the lawyer’s God,) was against the admission of her claim” (71). This judge cannot order Mrs. Greenhill access to her children “as a matter of right” because no such right exists for married mothers. As with her earlier arguments, this complaint of Norton’s is related to the legal fiction of women’s non-existence—the law cannot legislate for legally non-existent parties. But the words “right” and “justice” reverberate in this passage: Norton demonstrates that English women have no redress at law, which deigns to respect only claims deriving from precedent, 47 because they derive their right to custody claims merely from morality and “natural justice.” With this jab, Norton shows that England’s custody laws pit legal justice against the justice derived from natural law and common sense. Norton argues, though, that the publicity of the Greenhill and other cases have demythologized law for English women. With her construction of English mothers’ disillusionment, Norton hopes to shame the quintessential Englishman—the Member of Parliament— and thus advance custody reform. As she develops her theory of legitimate fictions, Norton refines the traditional distinctions between romance, sentiment, lies, and truth. Norton embeds maternal and melodramatic rhetoric in her analysis of the Greenhill story to sway readers’ sentiments in her favor, an often heavy-handed, pathos-based rhetorical technique. Norton’s Mrs. Greenhill is “innocent,” “blameless,” “affection[ate],” and even “holy” (though it’s a mother’s “holy part” she’s acting here). In this way, Norton manipulates the contemporary fiction of mothers’ innate morality to support her arguments. As Elizabeth Gruner notes, the Custody of Infants Act made maternity women’s first “source of political power” in the 30s and 40s (307). 28 And while this was true for the limited number of women rich enough to file a suit in Chancery, Norton recognized and exploited this new source of political power before the bill became law. 29 In fact, Norton’s texts at once constructed this power and mobilized it to persuade MPs to ratify the bill. To be sure, this technique had its drawbacks: this construction of mothers as innately moral empowered some women in some ways, but it also limited such powers to the domestic and maternal realms. 48 Manifesting the contradictions inherent in domestic ideology regarding women, Norton’s texts repeatedly substitute a trope of “protection” for a demand for women’s rights; by couching her demands for reform as feminine requests for chivalric protection of women by men, Norton shields herself and her reform attempts from the criticisms and dismissal meted out to avowed feminists in the Victorian period. 30 While nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists have criticized Norton for her frequent capitulation to patriarchal norms and limited claims for reform, her claim for “protection” is actually a claim for a right—in this case a woman’s right not to be excluded from her children’s company. Her trope of protection also melds easily with Norton’s masterful exploitation and subtle revision of the familiar melodramatic figures of the maiden in distress, the villain, and the rescuing hero. 31 In Norton’s telling of the Greenhill tale, melodrama’s distressed maiden is embodied sentimentally by the “holy” mother and its villain by the adulterous father, while the hero neglects his role: the “English law,” which Norton complains boasts falsely of its “protection of the oppressed,” refuses to succor the maiden—in fact, it aids and abets the villain in his crimes (13-14). Norton successfully gambled that lawmakers’ embarrassment about their transgression of generic expectations would galvanize MPs and the English public to support mothers. Though eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criticism had censured romances and melodramas as unrealistic, kidnappings, rapes, adultery, and domestic abuse were realities, not merely relics of medieval times. Such criticism established terms 49 like “melodrama” and “romance” as code for words like “implausible” and “fictional”—words linked with all things feminine. As I shall argue, however, Norton’s argumentation indirectly involving genre challenges this schema: in her Letter, her conceptions of genre and fictions are complicated and occasionally contradictory, reflecting the problematic understandings of fictions in the legal discourse. Norton defends her folding of melodramatic conventions into her polemical Letter by firmly rejecting the traditional identification of sentiment and heightened emotions with fiction and lies outlined by Nancy Miller. Norton asserts that some sentimental portraits, like those describing her own domestic tragedies, are completely real. As noted earlier, conservatives had attempted to undermine the authority of mothers’ distress narratives to influence legal argumentation by suggesting that mothers fabricated their legal testimonies, embellishing their tales of domestic abuse with false violence and overblown emotion. The dichotomy Norton constructs between facts and fictions concerning women’s lives becomes especially forceful in her rebuttal to Handley’s review. In a footnote attacking Handley, Norton seethes, “one of the privileges of the legal profession is to be able professionally to assert that which is untrue with impunity,” and opposes her presentation of the “simple facts” in her own case to what she terms the reviewer’s “legal fiction” about her story (84n). Norton equates Handley’s “legal fictions” with outright lies. What Norton presents as “simple fact” stories, on the other hand, include the melodramatic mode, with its heightened emotion and sensational events. She thus implies that when such elements are linked to the historical details of women’s stories, they 50 belong in the “fact” category. Norton doesn’t reserve “simple fact” status exclusively for her own story, however; she extends it to other women’s testimonies, and finds it especially useful in her analysis of the Greenhill case. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Norton employs sentimental rhetoric to buttress her legitimation of melodramatic elements in women’s stories. In so doing, Norton neatly assimilates elements typically labeled sensational (domestic violence, heightened emotion) into her legal rhetoric, thus challenging that genre’s restrictive expectations. In her rebuttal to Handley’s vitriolic essay, for example, Norton attacks the author’s humanity in a sentimental and nationalistic way. Addressing his consistent construal of women as lying “devils incarnate,” she asks incredulously, Where was the mother of this man?—in her grave, or on this earth, when he undertook to speak of the whole female sex, as of animals who required caging and chaining?—of English wives and mothers as if they all desired to forsake their homes—as if they all hated and rebelled against their husbands . . . . Did this author never see that very usual and customary sight, a modest and affectionate wife? Did he never see a woman watching the cradle of her sick child? Did he never see a mother teaching her little one to pray? Did he never see the welcome of a long absent son to his home, the embrace of the aged mother, the tears of the young sisters? Did he never see, hear, or read any of the instances of devoted fondness and unswerving faith shewn (sic) by women to their husbands, in danger, in temptation, in distress? 94-7 In this defense of women, Norton retails many of the sentimental pictures of women proliferating in nineteenth-century gender ideologies. And yet she concludes these maternal tableaus with an explicit denial of romance: “Such pictures are, I thank God, no images of romance, but common everyday scenes from English domestic life” (94-7). With the terms “usual and customary” and “common,” Norton gestures 51 at the importance of her notion of probability to her arguments. In A Likely Story, Robert Newsom writes that probability is increased by “likeliness”; Norton’s acceptance of fictions that are like the stories told in the court cases squares with this idea—these stories, because they are like the others and thus “probable,” gain access to Norton’s category of “realism.” On the other hand, Norton and Greenhill are no fictional characters, fitting a stereotype or generic mold; instead, they are particular women with particular names and histories, a fact that lends their stories realism. As Catherine Gallagher suggests in Nobody’s Story, however, it is possible that readers (here legislators) sympathized more readily with “nobodies”—non-historical characters that belong to no one and whose feelings can thus be appropriated by anyone—and that consequently fictions featuring such characters could better arouse their compassion than those about real women (165). Norton fights against this possibility, urging legislators to find compassion for the real women’s case histories. Moreover, she seems to challenge literary critical history by distinguishing between sentiment and romance and aligning realism with the former and unacceptable fiction with the latter. Norton extricates sentiment from the critically dismissed genres of romance and melodrama and attempts to assimilate it into contemporary cultural understandings of truth and “realism.” As she did with her representations of the sensational violence and cruelty she faced in her husband’s home, Norton insists on the realism of her sentimental portrayals of women; she thus pushes subtly against the generic boundaries of the more staid realism favored by nineteenth-century critics. Differentiating her rhetoric from Handley’s, Norton 52 renders her female portraits more persuasive by acknowledging the presence of women who do not fit her ideological mold, those “whom early seduction or instinctive profligacy has reduced to a life of habitual and mercenary sin” (97). Although she qualifies these transgressive exceptions by adding that even such a woman commonly has “some link to better feeling, from the very strength of ‘woman’s nature’ preponderating over the revolting circumstances of her lot,” she still presents a less simple, and therefore more convincing and realistic, portrait of women for her readers’ contemplation than does the Review (97). While many nineteenth-century writers privileged the oversimplified representations of women created by ideology, nineteenth-century people could not deny the existence of “ruined” women, who peopled their streets, their gossip, and their fictions. Such attempts at realism via comprehensive rather than ideal representations make Caroline’s story, and those of the other women that she presents, more authentic and probable, and therefore more authoritative than Handley’s wholesale blackening of women’s characters. By defending her incorporation of the sentimental and unsavory into her pamphlet, Norton facilitated the melding of genres by future women writers. As though she worried that savvy readers might reject her recuperation and validation of melodramatic elements in women’s “real” stories, Norton later tried to sidestep the issue of melodrama in her own story by insisting that Parliament’s task in these debates was to consider “the propriety and necessity of the ALTERATION OF THE LAW” rather than “the paltry and ridiculous doubt whether Mrs. Norton 53 used her woman’s tears, and her woman’s arguments” to influence the legislation (90). Here, Norton appears complicit with legislators’ disregard of sentimental or “feminine” argumentation: this statement genders, scorns, and invalidates sentimental and pathos-based arguments. This seriously complicates Norton’s attempts to gain credibility and respect for the emotional evidence she locates in women’s stories. As Kieran Dolin remarks, Norton’s “denial of ‘romance’ does not disguise the sentimental idealism of these pictures or the text’s investment in the image of woman transfigured into domestic angel as a strategy for expanding the legal rights of mothers” (520). I concur with Dolin, but Norton’s rhetoric accomplishes more than a simple denial of romance: in fact, it reconsiders rhetoric, genre, and textual authority altogether. It denies the traditional equating of sentiment and the melodramatic mode with fiction, romance, and untruths. Indeed, Norton would rather persuade her readers that her sentimental pictures are realistic than disguise her use of sentiment. Though her arguments become inconsistent and contradictory at times (thus reflecting the cultural anxiety regarding fiction), the preponderance of her arguments attempt to persuade that some sentimental portraits, like her own, are real, and thus deserve a place in legal discourse and decision- making. Towards the end of her Letter, Norton abandons the Greenhill story momentarily to accomplish her self-defense more directly. First, she attacks conservatives, especially Handley, for using her story as “a handle” in their efforts to defeat the bill (88). This is ironic, of course, because her letter urges MPs to 54 consider other women’s stories as grounds for reform. Nuance is the key again: she denounces her adversaries’ use of her story because they coupled it with “falsehood[s],” whereas she constructs the stories she employs in her argumentation as factual. She insists that her stories are plausible and truthful, whereas her opponents’ are implausible and include deliberate lies. When introducing her supposedly unbiased narration of her conjugal history, she succinctly links her story to the “state of facts” she believes characterizes other women’s narratives with the key word, “facts.” “The facts are as follows,” she begins, and she ends nine pages later after dragging all the reputation-defiling details of her story back into the public eye (76-85). In her construction of a “Real History and Origin” of the bill and in her retelling of her own story, Norton’s text mirrors the type of competition for credibility that occurs in trials. 32 In a way, her pamphlets, the debates, and her novels begin to resemble a trial, one in which the testimony (at least for the nineteenth-century newspaper reader) is written. At stake in this extra-legal trial is the potential creation of new rights for wives—the right to a protected relationship with their children, the right to a voice in legislation, and most symbolically, the right to be counted as a legal “person.” Reserving her most interesting attack on the legal fictions affecting custody law for the closing section of her Letter, Norton rolls out the whole arsenal of mothers’ court narratives to argue that fathers’ custody, as constructed by the law, is merely “nominal and fictitious” (53). To advocate the propriety of fathers’ exclusive custody rights, the bill’s detractors had alleged that fathers educated children while 55 mothers primarily corrupted them. Norton counters these misogynistic claims with evidence from women’s actual court narratives to bolster her claims that fathers’ custody is merely “nominal.” Assuming a representative status for these domestic dramas, Norton asserts that “the custody of the father is scarcely ever a bona fide custody on his part, but a mere exertion of authority to wrest the child from the mother” (103). In a single paragraph, Norton uses every case retold in Parliament to “prove” the veracity of her “nominal” custody argument. In this dense paragraph, Norton dispatches the outcomes of the De Manneville, McClellan, Ball, Skinner, Greenhill, and Norton cases: in each case, a father fought for custody, won custody, and then assigned custody to another woman (104-5). While Norton paints all fathers as passive bystanders to the nurturing process, she attempts to justify her oversimplification with appeals to a natural law. To construct fathers’ custody in this reductive way, Norton must compare fathers’ and mothers’ custody; it is in this comparison that her understanding of natural law emerges most clearly. Because Norton relies upon the authority of natural law, however, she counters the fictions in her opponents’ arguments with fictions of her own. Norton contrasts the “purely nominal” custody she concedes to fathers with the mothers’ custody she insists “God and nature point out as only fit” (4). Invoking natural law very early in the Letter, Norton poses and answers a rhetorical question: To what . . . does . . . the present admission by law of ‘the father’s right,’ so hotly raved about by the opponents of the Bill, amount? Simply to this, that while the child is of such tender years that the custody of the father must, from the nature of circumstances, be 56 purely nominal; while he is obliged to provide it with a nurse, or some other substitute for its banished mother; in short, during that period of its life which God and nature point out as only fit for female care and tenderness—the right of the male parent shall be strictly enforced and supported. 4 In this passage, a rhetoric of motherhood instills the Letter with cultural currency by evoking tender feelings for the dependent infant and the “banished mother” in the interest of legal reform. Norton’s rhetoric urges Victorians to consider the plight of these women who had—because of the law’s injustices—lost their homes and their children. Attempting to strengthen the “universal” morality foundation of natural law, Norton adds the biological obligation of maternal sustenance to support her arguments. Nature, in the form of this biological obligation, reduces a father’s custody to “nominal” status—only legal words validate him as the custodian. Moreover, Norton’s alignment of “God and nature” conflates natural and divine laws and accordingly doubles the authoritative sources backing her demands. 33 Harmoniously, “God and nature” “point out” to humans signs—the biological exigencies of infants—that rational humans must read to reach a moral interpretation of the custody dilemma and to pen a just law. Norton constructs the cause of this dilemma as either conservatives’ misreading of the signs, or their reading of the wrong signs, say money and common law words instead of an infant’s dependence. Norton presumes that the verbal and man-made signs upholding the conservatives’ ideas of rightful custody cannot compete with these natural signs. While both authorities are in many ways fictional, Norton favors the authority of her concept of natural law as unquestionable. 57 Reinforcing the dichotomy she constructs between mothers’ “factual” custody and fathers’ “fictitious” custody, Norton insists that law conceptualize a way to protect a proprietal relationship other than those involving material riches or land. Nonetheless, the proprietal relationship for which she demands protection requires the justification of a legal fiction just as the traditional property relation does. When she recounts her own and other women’s narratives of maternal distress in her Letter, Norton challenges Parliament to protect something besides “pounds[,] shillings, and pence” in custody cases (2). She exhorts legislators to consider the mother-child bond a type of abstract property, a property of at least equal legal value to the tangible inheritances that existing custody law protected, a property she argues nature obliges law to protect. Norton stages her property argument by opposing an emotional relationship between mothers and their children to the financial relationship to which she reduces the bonds between fathers and their children. For example, Norton asserts that the real question of the debates is “whether there shall be an interference [by the courts] for the sake of the mother, as well as for the sake of pounds; shillings, and pence” (2). The true balance she pleads for is, of course, interference for the sake of the mother in addition to interference for the sake of the father, but such a proposition is dangerous because it smacks of feminism. She consequently constructs the opposition as between mothers and tangible property (“pounds”)—a less inflammatory request. Less obviously, she’s requesting a legal protection for both material wealth and a mother’s loving relationship with her child. She clarifies the latter point in an emotional assertion that for mothers, the value of 58 love far outweighs that of material property. She argues that motherhood “is the master feeling of [a woman’s] life; the strong root of all the affections of her heart,” and that a woman “may bear cheerfully the poverty which anomalies in the laws of property may entail upon her[,] . . . but against the inflicted and unmerited loss of her children she cannot bear up” (11). Like Talfourd, Norton applies Rousseau’s connection between “hearts and minds” by expecting reasoning legislators to respond to mothers’ strong emotions and suffering by granting mothers separate custody rights. Norton alludes to the legal disabilities facing wives from the moment they marry—their inability to own most forms of property or to make legal contracts, for instance—and for sentimental comparison, argues that a woman can tolerate these property disabilities, but that her lack of rights to her emotional mother-child relationship threatens her very existence. By focusing on a mother’s emotional and physical ties to her children, Norton resolves just what it is that she considers worthy of the law’s protection (besides pounds, that is). Norton must have surmised that skeptical legislators would deny the need to protect this abstract, emotional bond, however, perhaps because it would seem foreign to the legal fictions protecting material property to which they were accustomed. Therefore, Norton appropriates the legal language of property, of something physical needing protection, to capture the MPs’ attention and to supplement her otherwise emotional construction of the mother-child bond. To fortify her assertion that mothers’ relationships to their children deserve legal protection, Norton utilizes the maternal fluids she insists bind mothers and children 59 (blood, milk) to embody this otherwise abstract bond. Norton solidifies her construction of the mother-child bond by dramatically foregrounding the biological connections between mothers and infants in stories of women’s victimization. Her technique must have been persuasive, for her supporters in Parliament mimicked it in their debates. 34 She finds her key evidence for this bond in her telling of the De Manneville case. Norton writes that Mr. De Manneville, “wishing to compel a disposition of [his wife’s] property, entered by force the house where she had fled for refuge, dragged the child (which she was in the act of nursing) from the very breast; and took it away, almost naked, in an open carriage, in inclement weather” (Separation 4). Norton’s language in her iteration of the De Manneville case transforms an angelic familial tableau into a demonic one and thereby gains affective power. The initial image coalesces the duo of infant and mother (especially the mother’s breast, which represents her metonymically) into a domestic and familial image evoking peace, continuity, domesticity, and biology—all in the interest of the mother’s claim to rights in this relationship. Furthermore, this image of a family of two, mother and nursing child, contests legislators’ unspoken assumption that the familial relationship worth protecting is the bond between the father and his children. The father interrupting the “natural” exchange of milk and love between mother and child in order to force an increased symbolic exchange of money between him and his wife’s family topples the expected harmonious tableau of mother, father, and child as it demonizes the man who values wealth above love. Significantly, Mary Wollstonecraft includes the imagery of a babe torn from its mother’s breast in Maria, 60 Or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), which suggests that Norton may have been reviving a novelistic trope. 35 However, with Norton’s appropriation, the trope transcends the fictional realm to enter the legal discourse, where progressives in Parliament would employ it later in their arguments. This blurs the boundaries between legal and novelistic discourse and strengthens Norton’s argument that extra- legal texts might merit inclusion in the debates. Norton’s opposition of the mother-child bond (both its emotional and physical aspects) with people’s bonds to tangible property (such as money or land) may have gained a foothold in Parliament because both involve exchanges and circulation. Blood and milk circulate between mother and child, while financial wealth circulates between individuals (in the familial case, the dominant exchange is between fathers and sons). While Norton’s reasoning follows the tradition of granting money a fictional worth, the Letter suggests that nature grants milk a factual worth—sustenance and the continuation of families and the species. 36 Once again, she confutes her detractors’ assumption that the transmission and thus continuation of families depends solely upon men and their children. Though she spitefully labels fathers’ custody “nominal and fictitious,” Norton never denies fathers’ rights to a relationship with their children—she is too prudent to present her demands as either/or propositions. Instead, she works to dismantle the exclusivity of fathers’ rights to their children. As C. B. MacPherson explains, “property, in the works of most modern writers, is usually treated as identical with private property, an exclusive individual right, my right to exclude you 61 from some use or benefit of something” (2). MacPherson locates the origin of this modern concept of property in the seventeenth-century rise of a “full capitalist market society” (7). In other words, philosophers and judges had not always considered property rights private, but the concept of common property had lost currency by the nineteenth century. Norton’s Letter thus gestures toward a time and a law that more freely accepted the possibility of multiple “owners” to rights in a relationship. In this vein, she argues for dual protection of inclusive rights to common property: she implies that both mothers and fathers can enjoy the benefits of a relationship to a child. Of course, Norton’s construction of the mother-child bond and her argument that legislation should protect it like a property relation are also supported by fictions. If property is a relationship between two people in relation to a “thing,” and the “thing” she constructs (the bond) is only physical (blood/milk) for a few years, then the physical attribute of the bond is a fiction in one way, and yet real in a different way that Norton could not articulate without modern biology’s understanding of the material nature of genetic inheritance. 37 This construction of what Norton might call natural custody is also problematic because wealthy fathers’ farming out of their children to other women for feeding shows that this “natural” bond can be satisfied by any number of nursing women. 38 Finally, Norton oversimplifies the father-child relationship as a purely legal bond, ignoring the emotional and genetic bonds that correspond to the mother-child bond. Though Norton creates her own species of fictions throughout the Letter, she does so as 62 Vaihinger explains most thinkers do: she simplifies and organizes data from the real world with imperfect (i.e., metaphorical) language in order to reach a new level of thought, and in this case to gain a new legal right for mothers. Her success is groundbreaking, for this right will afford married women their first opportunity to be considered separate subjects under the law. We can gain a more comprehensive understanding of how Norton’s writing reformed nineteenth-century genres by considering one of her early literary fictions, which differs perhaps more in degree than in kind from those that proliferated in the debates. Woman’s Reward (1835) Norton’s Letter has important implications for the rising genre of realism and for women’s novels at the boundaries of that tradition. Like nineteenth-century common law, literary realism depends upon “precedents” to govern its boundaries and the canon of reputable realism; however, realism and common law generate these precedents themselves and construct partly fictional authorities to uphold them. In the case of the novel, critics (literary judges) create precedents via their biased approval of certain novels, and popular novelists reinforce the conventions created by those sanctioned novels in their future texts. How do Norton’s criticism of stare decisis and her refinement of a fact/fiction dichotomy in her polemical pamphlets affect the borders of a literary realism governed by its own literary precedents? More importantly, how do “rebellious” women’s novels—those on the edge of literary realism—penetrate and engage concretely with legal discourse? An 63 examination of Norton’s first novel, Woman’s Reward, helps us begin to answer these questions. Though Norton reviles the fictions used by her opponents and the fictional authority they grant their own words and laws, her writing demonstrates that this aversion did not extend to her own texts. Just as she had used hypothetical—or fictional—cases to illustrate her logical trajectories, Norton creates fictional women’s domestic tragedies in her novels to disseminate her judgment of mothers’ legal disabilities. Published just one year before her first custody pamphlet, Woman’s Reward anticipates elements of the stories told in Parliament. In fact, I contend that the interpenetration of Norton’s texts with the custody debates exposes the artificiality of the generic distinction between hypothetical women invented in legal discourse and heroines in novels. Like the translocation of the image of the nursing infant torn from the breast from Wollstonecraft’s Maria to Norton’s Letter and then to the debates, Norton’s reproduction of similar women in two distinct genres confuses the demarcations allegedly separating these genres. 39 Widely read by her contemporaries, Woman’s Reward features a single male character in three interlaced narratives of domestic conflict. 40 The first story traces the life of Mary Dupre, whose dying father binds her to serve her emotionally abusive brother, Lionel, in an almost marital ceremony (complete with vows) at his deathbed. 41 In the novel, this sibling relationship stands in metaphorically for marital relations and demonstrates the feebleness of the moral authority Mr. Dupre and Victorian society supposed middle-class Victorian women possessed innately. 42 In the novel’s second narrative of family conflict, Lionel impregnates but refuses to 64 marry his childhood sweetheart. The third plot, which speaks most directly to married women’s custody issues, represents Lady Clarice Altonby’s unfortunate marriage to Lionel Dupre. Lionel abuses Clarice emotionally from the beginning of their relationship and physically after she bears him a son. In response to the physical assault, Clarice abandons Lionel and abducts their child. When Norton’s Clarice experiences her marital crisis, custody law looms as an unspoken obstacle to her escape from Lionel’s abuses; because Norton both breaches and reinscribes social and generic conventions in this novel, it anticipates both progressive and conservative arguments about custody in Parliament. The constraints imposed by realism and gender expectations precluded Norton’s overt discussion of custody law in her novel. Just as she would use historical and hypothetical women’s stories of maternal distress as persuasive tools in her custody pamphlets, however, Norton employed fictional—but verisimilar—women’s stories to circumvent these restrictions and to criticize legal structures indirectly. Woman’s Reward participates in the legal debates over custody and meshes with Norton’s political pamphlets most powerfully with its portrayals of fatherhood. The novel anticipates the Letter’s unflattering constructions of fathers as well as its declaration that fathers’ custody is purely “nominal” and “fictitious.” Although Woman’s Reward commends the widower Mr. Dupre for raising his children himself, it also accuses him of dangerously over-indulging Lionel and thereby creating his son’s violent temperament. Norton’s representation of fatherhood becomes more venomous in Lionel’s marriage plot. When Lionel discovers Clarice 65 is pregnant, he is overjoyed, but Norton quickly disabuses readers of any sentimental notions: Let it not be thought that the character of such a man could suddenly alter. It was not all fondness and fear for the fragile girl who was to be his child’s mother; nor was it the deep and planning tenderness of a young father for his expected son. Lionel had already been a father . . . ; and we have seen that he cared little for the existence of that pledge of early love and selfish treachery. But with Lady Clarice’s infant came other dreams.—Moreton Park became an hereditary possession . . . [and his] connexion with the great and noble families of Altonby and Clavering, seemed more certain and acknowledged. II.217 Lionel’s reveries about his wealthy “connexions” exemplify Parliament’s favoring of the father/child “family”: Lady Clarice cannot inherit Moreton Park, but her son can. In the meantime, Lionel imagines that the property can be enjoyed by the heir’s father—a kind of reverse inheritance. Norton’s depiction of Lionel as a father is a clear embodiment of her “nominal” custodian. To his first child, Lionel offered only a material settlement, which the abandoned mother refused as an insult. The narrator insists that material interests again predominate as Lionel prepares to welcome a second child to the world, as Lionel is most interested in how having a male heir will increase his material wealth and social status. 43 Thus, while Norton’s novel portrays fathers’ custody in more diverse ways than the Letter, all of her examples are unflattering. On the other hand, the novel rejects an oversimplified construction of gendered parental differences. For instance, the narrator chastises Clarice for waking her infant child simply to play with it, though he/she acknowledges that Clarice “passionately loved her child” (II.232-3). Despite this light slap, the novel as a whole assumes that even silly or flawed mothers like Clarice enjoy the “innate” 66 emotional bond with their children that Norton wields as a persuasive tool in her Letter. Like Norton’s qualified construction of mothers in the Letter, in which she had claimed that even sinning women had a sentimental side, the narrator’s exposure of Clarice’s maternal imperfections seems to gild her emotional portrayal with greater verisimilitude. Reinforcing the critique of custody law dealt by the subject matter of Woman’s Reward, the novel’s form also intervenes indirectly in the legal discourse: in fact, the transition between its second and third volumes subtly calls the issue to readers’ minds. Once Lady Clarice suspects Lionel of adultery, she threatens divorce, but she does not mention their child or who will take custody in the event of a divorce. 44 Terminating this argument, Lionel strikes Clarice. Norton rejects melodrama in her novelistic representation of physical violence, reserving its affective power for her mother-child scenes. Denying that Clarice faints or swoons, she writes that Clarice responds to the blow with controlled emotion, but tells Lionel, “‘You will madden me into doing what I shall curse myself for” (II.308). Readers soon discover what this madness entails: Clarice writes a letter to an admirer, apparently inviting him to accompany (and of course protect) her as she abandons Lionel (II.309). 45 The narrator recounts that during Clarice’s non-narrated deliberations over how to respond to Lionel’s violence, the distressed mother “relapsed into a reverie. Suddenly she uncovered her face; gazed wildly round, flew up stairs, and kneeling by her child’s cot, exclaimed with passionate tears, ‘I am not gone—I am not gone—I dreamed myself away from you, Charles; but I am here, my 67 own, my blessed boy—I am here still!’” (II.309). Unclear in this sentimental reverie is whether Clarice’s dreaming (“I dreamed myself away from you”) is a fantasy of escaping her maternal obligations to the child, or the nightmare of losing her child legally if she were to abandon her husband (as in “I dreamed we were separated”). The ambiguity lies in whether the condition of being “away” occurs as a result of Clarice’s hopes or “dreams,” or as a result of some other active party dividing the mother and child. Considered in the context of Norton’s political writing and the conclusion of Clarice’s deliberations, the latter seems more a reasonable interpretation of this murky sentence. 46 Most significantly, this ambiguity evokes the legal discourse surrounding custody: readers must interpret this sentence for themselves, a process likely to bring to mind England’s contemporary custody controversies. Eventually, Clarice decides to accept an apology from Lionel: the second volume concludes with Clarice’s resolution to “forgive all, for the sake of that sleeping cherub’” (II.311). At this point, a blank page confronted the nineteenth-century reader (and the twenty-first century reader, since this novel has never been printed in a single volume). At the opening of the third volume, Lionel dashes Clarice’s, and perhaps readers’, optimism by returning home, dining, and then going out for the evening without speaking to his wife. Clarice responds to this neglect by gazing momentarily at her bruised shoulder and then turning to leave her room. But Norton’s narrator then informs readers that Clarice “lingered pausingly at the door—looked with eyes, dimmed by tears, towards the white curtains of the little cot—returned—lifted him 68 softly in her arms—wrapped him in a fur mantle—and, unattended and unprepared, walked down stairs” (III.4). In four pages, the steadily widening fissure in the nineteenth-century family ideal initiated by Lionel ruptures to a chasm with Clarice’s flight. Because this scene narrates so few of Clarice’s thoughts, readers are left to imagine them. The spatial and temporal silence between the novel’s second and third volumes interrupts this fictional mother’s deliberations over whether or not she should abduct her son when she quits her abusive husband. Within this space, readers might have considered how Norton would resolve her “cliff-hanger,” but they might also have reviewed Clarice’s options: given husbands’ absolute custody rights at this time, what options could they have imagined for Clarice? How could she consider defying the law to take her son? As a devoted mother, how could she consider leaving without him? Of course, some women did abduct their children illegally, and if readers considered this possibility, the difficulties besetting such mothers would likely be conjured in their minds. How would absconding with her son affect her reputation and her son’s future? How could she support herself and the child? Where did “justice” stand in custody disputes such as Clarice’s, and according to which of the various authorities invoked in the custody debates? The heroine’s vacillation and the space the text allows for it (and for readers’ related deliberations) suggests an unnarrated rejection of enacted law, which the heroine transgresses by fleeing with her son. This fictional mother has no legal warrant to the custody of her son, but she, like Mrs. Greenhill and the other outlaw mothers inhabiting Norton’s and Parliament’s legal discourse (and this dissertation), 69 legitimates some other, perhaps “natural” or “moral” justice during these moments of hesitation. This scene is obviously sentimental, but it echoes the painful separations of the real families described in the debates and newspapers. Evidently, Norton believes such sentiment cannot be extricated from her tale of domestic conflict without damaging the integrity of her realism. By blending marital violence and heightened sentiment in a novel that is otherwise conducted in a realistic mode, Norton forges a new path for the domestic novel, one which the remaining authors in this study will travel. Law and literary realism conspire in this novel to trammel Norton’s plot for Clarice. Her initial decision to forgive Lionel conforms to their precedents, but she transgresses both by leaving her husband and taking her child. Faithful and yet inconstant to the conventions of the fallen heroine’s plot, this novel must punish its lawless mother. But Norton flouts the precedent of death for such a heroine, choosing instead to allow Clarice to live, though in misery: Woman’s Reward dispatches both Clarice’s lover and child in a single sentence. However, multiple contradictory impulses linger in tension in the novel: its sentimental depiction of Clarice’s vacillation and eventual flight with her child elicits sympathy for this legally powerless, abused mother, but with the child’s death, the novel can arouse a competing readerly distress and thereby encourage readers to learn from her mistakes. Compounding this tension is the possibility that the child’s death has a more complicated function than simple punishment or the garnering of sympathy in the novel. At the most basic level, the death of an innocent infant, rather than a 70 “fallen” woman, could increase the grief and lessen the vindictiveness readers might feel for Clarice. More profoundly, however, the infant’s death could represent figuratively the physical sundering of the mother-child bond by a father’s use of his absolute custody rights to exclude the mother from a relationship to her children. Read in this light, the child’s death symbolically represents or even evokes the emotional trauma of existing custody laws for receptive readers. The infant’s death may reify for readers the nightmare of enforced separation suggested in Lady Clarice’s “dreaming herself away” from her child: Norton might have hoped that such a literary trauma could help readers empathize with separated women powerless to see their children under unreformed custody laws. Norton’s writing simultaneously helped and hindered women: her texts aided the passage of England’s first major family law reforms, but her biological and emotional constructions of the mother-child bond as well as her melodramatic rhetoric allowed conservatives to justify their limitations for women in the Victorian period. Distributed throughout the public sphere and perused by the growing readership of nineteenth-century Britain, Norton’s Woman’s Reward engages in the legal discourse concerning custody in a way similar to the fictions she created in her pamphlets—both fictions advance her agenda of reform by representing the trauma faced by many mothers in a realistic, though fictional, form. Her generic innovations—her folding of sentiment and storytelling into her legal pamphlets and her subtle critique of women’s custody disabilities in her novels—paved a smoother road for future women authors to traverse in their own novel writing. As we shall 71 see, Anne Brontë, Margaret Oliphant, and George Eliot each benefited significantly from the groundbreaking generic work performed by Norton’s legal and literary texts in the 1830s. 72 Chapter 1 Endnotes 1 This was a common law right, but the Chancery Courts upheld it almost unvaryingly until the ratification of the Custody of Infants Act of 1839 (2 & 3 Victoria, c. 54). 2 For an extended biography of Caroline Norton’s life, see Jane Perkin’s The Life of Mrs. Norton (London: J. Murray, 1909). 3 Skinner v. Skinner was decided in 1824 (9 Moore. 78), Ball v. Ball in 1827 (2 Sim. 35), and Rex v. Greenhill in 1836 (4 A. & E. 624). Norton writes in Separation that the adulterous and brutal Mr. Skinner gave the Skinner’s child to various third parties and eventually to his mistress, who brought the child to him every day while he was in Horsemongerlane gaol; the Chancery Court rejected Mrs. Skinner’s attempts to retrieve her child (38-44). In the Ball case, Norton writes that Mr. Ball relegated his daughter to a “‘female servant of all work,’” but the Vice Chancellor rejected Mrs. Ball’s requests for access to her daughter (Separation 49- 52). 4 In the discourse preceding the reform of England’s custody laws, authors and politicians mobilized the same few women’s stories repeatedly to forward reform; these women included Mrs. Greenhill, Mrs. Emanuel, Mrs. Skinner, Mrs. M’Lellan, and Mrs. Ball. For a quick summary of these women’s stories, see 3 Hansard 44 [1838] 774-7. Other cases were cited, but these are the stories most often repeated. Talfourd was a Liberal Member of the House of Commons. 5 In this way, the legal proceedings function almost like plot elements constraining and enforcing the trajectory of mothers’ “plots.” 6 I use words like “real,” “actual,” “factual,” and “facts” in this essay hesitantly, acknowledging that they simplify events, people, and data, but I must occasionally use them to contrast historical people and events from people and events imagined by legislators and Norton. 7 Robert Newsom reviews the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries’ discomfort with fictions in A Likely Story: Probability and Play in Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1988). See Susan Stewart’s Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation for an analysis of this anxiety (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994). 8 All references to the custody debates cite the Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3 rd Series. The parenthetical references indicate the volume number first, and the column number second (Great Britain, Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 3 rd Series). 73 9 For overviews of natural law theories and philosophers, see Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979), Paul Sigmund’s Natural Law in Political Thought (UP of America: Lanham, MD, 1971), or Howard P. Kainz’s Natural Law: An Introduction and Re- examination (Chicago: Open Court, 2004). 10 As Paul Sigmund observes in Natural Law in Political Thought, natural law thinkers have often combined their theories with emotional, biological, or physical laws, among others (viii-ix). This is just one example of the fluidity and diversity of these theories over time. 11 According to the legal historian J. H. Baker, Lord Mansfield was “one of the boldest of he judicial spirits,” one who “often acted on the principle that ‘as the usages of society alter, the law must adapt itself to the various situations of mankind’” (200) (An Introduction to English Legal History, 4 th ed. London: Butterworths, 2002). 12 Ball v. Ball in 1827 (2 Sim. 35), quoted in Norton’s Separation (52). 13 J. H. Baker analyzes the compilation of common law in his Introduction to English Legal History (ibid). It is interesting to note that this makes judges’ enunciation of precedents as authorities a type of speech act. 14 J. H. Baker disputes the contention that common law solidified during the 1830s, but he points out that this putative solidification varied by area of law (ibid 199-200). In custody law, I would argue that this increase in rigidity began not in the thirties, but rather with Lord Ellenborough’s tenure at the opening of the nineteenth century, though legislative intervention reversed it in 1839. 15 As an example of the continuing contention over the use of narratives in legal argumentation, one need only consult the diverse responses to the essays of Patricia J. Williams, who uses anecdotes and other narratives to persuade. 16 The rule disallowing the introduction of hearsay into a trial is one such limitation on evidence. 17 Up until 1857, a successful criminal conversation suit was a prerequisite to a legislative divorce. In such a proceeding, a husband charged another man with “criminal conversation” with his wife, who was disallowed from any part, even a defense of her character, in the trial. 18 Meredith models his eponymous heroine in Diana of the Crossways (1885) after Caroline Norton. He alters the details of Caroline’s history significantly, however. For example, Meredith’s heroine has no children; much of the emotion is thus lost from the story—Diana is primarily concerned with her freedom to live 74 independently and to fall in love. Moreover, Diana’s estranged husband has no voice in the novel, nor does he ever take legal action to appropriate Diana’s income from writing—these changes are vast improvements to Caroline’s circumstances. 19 Chase and Levinson also remark on the sudden importance of “private histories” in newspapers and on the necessity of the public exposure of broken families to define the appropriate “family tableau” (12). 20 James Hoge and Jane Marcus discuss the impact of Handley’s letter in their introduction to Selected Writings of Caroline Norton (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978). Also see Jane Perkins’s The Life of Mrs. Norton (London: J. Murray, 1909) and Alice Acland’s Caroline Norton (London: Constable, 1948) for further remarks on this review. 21 Kieran Dolin observes in “The Transfigurations of Caroline Norton” that “[i]mpersonality of voice and the authority of precedent are two key elements of legal discourse adopted in” the Letter (519) (Victorian Literature and Culture 30.2 (2002): 503-527). 22 In the year 1835, Mrs. Greenhill could only apply for a divorce a mensa et thoro from the Ecclesiastical Courts for her husband’s fault of adultery. If granted, she would have been entitled to a separation and maintenance payments from her husband, but she could not have remarried. 23 There is an enormous difference in the legal treatment of married and unmarried mothers. Whereas married mothers, largely because they became legally non-existent upon marriage, had no custody rights to their children regardless of age, unmarried mothers had total control over their children, at least until the age of seven, when a father could press a suit for custody. Progressives actually used this difference as one of their major arguments for reform: they insisted that married mothers, because proper, should have at least the same rights England granted its fallen mothers. 24 A single judge recommended, but did not order, mediation. When mediation failed, this judge returned to a traditional path and ordered Mrs. Greenhill to deliver the children to their father. 25 Norton writes that Burke “somewhere observes in better words, [that] man, in a civilized country, tacitly AGREES to exchange SOME PORTION of his natural rights, for the necessary legal protection of the rest” (Separation 27). 26 Norton published the first two tracts under her own name, despite opposition from her family. She used a pseudonym for the Letter, probably because essayists had recently linked her name slanderously to Talfourd’s. It thus appears that she used the pseudonym in order to avoid the Letter’s dismissal as written by her 75 specifically, rather than by a woman generally. See Kieran Dolin’s “Transfigurations of Caroline Norton” (ibid) or Jane Perkins’s Mrs. Norton (ibid) for analyses of Norton’s use of the “Pearce Stevenson” pseudonym. 27 In “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction,” Nancy Miller writes that much of women’s literature has been “discredited,” by which she means “literally and literarily denied credibility” (36) (PMLA 96.1 [36-48]). 28 See also Kieran Dolin (ibid), Karen Chase and Michael Levenson (ibid), and Laura C. Berry (The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel, Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1999) for similar observations about the political power of maternity. 29 Because the 1839 Custody Act allowed mothers to petition for custody of their children in the Chancery Court, the Act only assisted women wealthy enough to travel to the Court and press such a suit. 30 The Letter is adamant in its rejection of feminist claims for legal equality. Norton’s other texts, fictional and political, are similarly contradictory: they work to improve women’s lives, but they do so through claims of women’s natural inferiority and consequent right to male protection. 31 Mary Poovey’s “Covered but not Bound: Caroline Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act” (Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, Chicago: UP Chicago, 1988) and Elaine Hadley’s “The Queen’s English: Melodramatic Rhetoric in Victoria’s England” (Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-1885. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995) analyze the use of similar melodramatic conventions in Norton’s English Laws for Women (London: 1854). 32 Gewirtz describes this competition between narratives at trial in “Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law” (Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. Ed. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996: 14-22). 33 Howard P. Kainz notes that philosophers began distinguishing divine law from natural law in the medieval period (2n) (ibid). 34 Liberals borrowed Norton’s construction of the mother-child bond to buttress the alleged naturalness and morality of their reforms. To attenuate the power of this construction, some conservatives explicitly advocated utilizing the bond as a handy tool for oppressing women in the interest of keeping nuclear families intact. 35 I am grateful to Mary Beth Tegan for this insight. 76 36 John Locke declares that money accrues worth by a social “consensus,” (which consensus is arguable) in his Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government (Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988). 37 Informed by her nineteenth-century conception of natural law and a devalued notion of common property, Norton’s theory also relies upon a modern definition of property summarized by Alan Macfarlane, who writes in “The Mystery of Property: Inheritance and Industrialization in England and Japan” that property “is a three-way matter: that is, a relationship between people in relation to a ‘thing’” (113) (Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition. Ed. C. M. Hann. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 104-123). Using this notion of property, we can understand English custody laws before 1839 as protecting a relationship between a father and his child in relation to a material property inheritance (such as an estate). Norton’s Letter expands and challenges this model of property relations. 38 As Elizabeth Gruner notes in “Plotting the Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, and Isabel Vane,” Norton’s Letter insists that “a father can provide only a pale substitute for maternal care. . . . If fathers cannot perform such functions, it must be because maternity, not paternity, confers a natural link with morality” (316). However, Gruner adds that this argument “puts women in a theoretical double-bind: either maternity is natural and naturally moral—which the ‘fallen’ or adulterous mothers of the debates seem to disprove—or it is a role performable by others” (316) (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 16.2 [1997 Fall]: 303-25). 39 In Crimes of Writing, Susan Stewart asserts that the law must police the boundaries of legal writing to disguise its own literariness (ibid). 40 Lois Josephs Fowler writes in a biographical essay that Norton’s fiction was widely read, though her poetry seems to have been even more popular (Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 21, 234-38). 41 Soliciting Mary’s promise, Mr. Dupre says, “Promise me never to forsake him [Lionel]—to prefer him to other ties, if they should be incompatible with the love and protection I depend on your shewing (sic) him. If, in the unseen future, something should tempt you to falter in the duty you have taken upon yourself, think that a dying father’s voice cheers you on, and tells you that you stand in a parent’s place’” (22-3). While Mary’s relationship with Lionel is superficially maternal, Lionel’s later insistence that she choose him or her lover (who has proposed to her) suggests a more conjugal tie. 42 Though Mary’s father evokes this female source of power and asks her to use it to guide her brother, the novel shows that Mary’s moral “influence” cannot always “sway” her brother: she cannot convince him to stop wasting their money, to 77 protect his health by not hunting, or, most importantly, to marry his childhood sweetheart after he impregnates and abandons her. 43 The Altonbys are aristocratic, as was Lionel’s and Mary’s mother (who was a Clavering). However, the Clavering family disapproved of their daughter’s marriage to the beer merchant, Mr. Dupre. Lionel thus believes that his male child will persuade his estranged relatives to welcome him into the fold with open arms and billfolds. 44 Clarice threatens divorce in response to his presumed adultery, but also after he threatens to have her institutionalized as mad for her violent response to her suspicions. Because divorce was legally possible for the rich, novels representing aristocratic lifestyles occasionally mention it as a threatening spectre of family breakdown (cf, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess [1720] or Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall [1848]). 45 There is a serious omission here in the novel: Clarice tells her servant not to send the letter, but the admirer later responds to it, indicating either an oversight on Norton’s part, or that the servant disobeyed Clarice’s instructions. 46 Clarice’s maid increases this ambiguity by asking, “with a pitying smile, ‘And could it come into your heart to leave a lamb like that?’” (310). 78 Chapter 2 Whispered Truths: Middle-Class Masculinity and Violence in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall At the time of its publication in 1848, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall garnered harsh criticism for its frank portrayal of its heroine’s abusive first marriage. In her preface to the novel’s second edition, Brontë acknowledges the controversial nature of her tale and attempts to justify her novel’s perceived excesses: she confides that “if [she] can gain the public ear at all, [she] would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much soft nonsence” (3, sic). More recent scholars have appreciated Brontë’s whispered “truths” and have accordingly valued the novel for its feminist critique of women’s oppression in the Victorian era. 1 The majority of criticism of Tenant, however, has focused on the outrages of the heroine’s first, aristocratic husband and overlooked the abuses of her second, middle-class suitor: the novel’s ostensible hero, Gilbert Markham, is a belligerent man who forcibly controls the shape of the marriage plot he narrates. This makes him an unusual protagonist, since Victorian discourse typically imagined the middle- class family as a violence-free domain. Nineteenth-century Parliamentary discussions regarding aggravated assault and divorce, for example, establish a stereotypical batterer: typically working-class, Parliament’s wife-beater is a lazy drunkard who returns home only to pocket his wife’s meager earnings. By breaking this mold, Brontë’s portrayal of middle-class male aggression contests Parliament’s dangerously myopic portraits of abusers and denounces its broad, class-inflected constructions of warranted violence within families. While recent critics have 79 argued that reading Helen Huntingdon’s diary reforms the impulsive, aggressive Gilbert, I will argue in this chapter that his narrative consistently defends a frightening masculine prerogative for violence and closes with a disturbing form of marriage in which husbands silence wives. 2 Although nineteenth-century gender ideology and novelistic conventions worked in unison to exclude women’s voices from public discourses, the structure of Brontë’s novel intervenes in the legal discourse regarding evolving family laws. The novel’s two narratives—one enveloped within the other—function as extralegal testimonies competing to define ideal English marital and gender relations. Gilbert Markham presents the secular content of his narrative in a traditional, if somewhat feminine form—an epistolary Bildungsroman describing his exploits and self- proclaimed reform as he courts and wins the upper-class woman of his dreams. Helen’s narrative, on the other hand, takes a Christian, feminine form—a diary relating the trials of her first unhappy marriage and her attempt to support her young son while she is illegally estranged from her alcoholic husband. In the extralegal trial constituted by these narratives, Gilbert’s violence becomes evidence that the text must repress if the marriage plot is to reach fruition. Read in this light, Brontë’s competing testimonies expose a conflict between England’s religious and civil family law codes. Moreover, Brontë’s employment of mock-legal narrative forms (which mimic trials by ordeal and cross-examinations, for example) increases her text’s authority and indirectly condemns wives’ and mothers’ legal disabilities. While Gilbert Markham’s narrative defends his violence and his fitness to marry 80 Helen Huntingdon, Tenant’s content and blended legal and literary forms undermine his testimony, destabilize Victorian assumptions about middle-class families, and innovatively censor England’s custody, assault, and divorce laws. Male-Initiated Interpersonal Violence in the Nineteenth Century: A Victorian Context In fiction by the Brontë sisters, a certain level of violence between men and women is unexceptional, which might lead us to believe that all three women understood a degree of aggressiveness to be desirable in a male lover. We would be mistaken if we lumped the sisters together thusly. It is undoubtedly true that the Brontës often create heroes who physically restrict female characters’ movements and who psychologically or emotionally torture their lovers. Door blocking, wrist holding, and emotional torturing only seem to draw heroines like Jane Eyre, Helen Huntingdon, and Catherine Earnshaw closer to their lovers. The frequency of this type of behavior and the absence of criticism of it in Victorian novels—in fact the rewarding of it with a blissful marriage by many authors—suggest that a certain level of violence against women was acceptable in the ideal “manly” Briton. 3 Anne Brontë, however, distinguishes the abusive relationships in Tenant from those created by her sisters with a Christian fervour in her heroine. Of all the Brontë siblings, Anne was the most religious. 4 Her faith is evident not only in her novel’s content (Helen, too, is devoutly Christian), but also in its form: Helen’s testimony takes the form of religious witnessing, and she describes her marital distress in a 81 form familiar to religious discourse: the trial by ordeal. Helen’s narrative suggests that Anne Brontë disapproved of the level of male-initiated violence accepted in domestic fiction and sanctioned by Victorian law: her heroine repeatedly attempts to convert her suitors into temperate, pacifistic Christians. Brontë builds Tenant from two, first-person narratives—one Helen Huntingdon’s journal describing her unhappy marriage, and the other a series of letters in which Gilbert Markham describes his courtship of Helen while she is illegally separated from her husband. Gilbert writes his letters to his friend, Halford, and supplements his story by enclosing Helen’s journal in the middle of his letters. In the opening half of Gilbert’s narrative, he describes meeting and falling in love with Helen, the townspeople’s gossip about Helen, and his own jealousy of and violence towards Frederick Lawrence, who, unbeknownst to anyone in Gilbert’s village (Linden-carr), is actually Helen’s brother. Next, the insertion of Helen’s narrative interrupts Gilbert’s story with the tales of Helen’s courtship by and marriage to Arthur Huntingdon, the birth of their son, Arthur’s many abuses (including two adulterous affairs conducted in the Huntingdons’ home), and Helen’s plotting and accomplishment of an escape with her son. Finally, Gilbert’s narrative resumes, recounting the stories of Arthur’s death from alcoholism and Gilbert’s successful wooing of the newly widowed Helen. Contemporary British critics condemned Brontë’s graphic depiction of the violence and debauchery in her heroine’s first marriage. The Spectator, for example, denounced Tenant’s “morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal” (250). Critics 82 reserved their disapproval for Brontë’s portrayal of the Huntingdon marriage, which Helen describes in her journal as a union destroyed by her husband’s drinking, infidelity, brutality to animals, laughing condonation of a friend’s physical and verbal wife abuse, and attempted corruption of their young son. Though Helen suffers Arthur’s maltreatment for years, she, like historical women in her position, had no legal redress against these types of behavior in a husband. 5 In the first half of the nineteenth century, the legal principle of coverture and the legal fiction of marital unity left wives with a diminished legal status and limited rights. For example, because they lost their status as separate legal persons upon marriage, wives could not make contracts or sue; they therefore could not prosecute their husbands or demand that they satisfy their part of the marriage contract. 6 Compounding these disabilities, in 1827, the year Tenant’s heroine flees from her husband, only the very wealthy had access to divorce. Only Parliament could grant a divorce a vinculo (a total dissolution of the marriage contract, allowing remarriage), which, since 1798, had required a complicated and expensive three-step process. 7 More significant than the expense and inconvenience of the divorce process for my argument, however, is the sexual double standard in Parliament’s application of the process: a man could receive a divorce for a wife’s adultery, but a woman would not be granted a divorce if her husband strayed. As Caroline Norton decried in English Laws for Women (1854), a wife, “though nominally able to apply for a divorce, seldom or ever obtain[ed] one” (148). Indeed, the Parliamentary debates in the 1840s and 50s concerning divorce illustrate that Parliament considered male 83 infidelity an inconsequential offense, one not worthy of divorce. In fact, until 1854 only four women had ever received Parliamentary divorces, and Parliament only granted these exceptions when a husband compounded his adultery with an additional offense, specifically bigamy or incest. 8 As I explored in the previous chapter, contemporary custody laws further oppressed unhappily married women: the passage of the 1839 Custody of Infants Act merely empowered mothers to petition for rights to custody or visitation to their children under seven (2 & 3 Vict., c. 54). Many women consequently felt obliged by inequitable custody laws to remain with even abusive husbands. Tenant stages an indirect criticism of women’s legal disadvantages as well as the violence inherent in Victorian middle-class masculinity; this critique anticipates and begins to fill a gap in Parliamentary discourse. Nineteenth-century legal texts, newspapers, and novels each contributed to the social construction of a domestic tyrant, who was typically portrayed as a working-class or aristocratic man. Though these constructions are diverse, they typically ignore the historical presence of middle-class abusers. Tenant, on the other hand, features abusive upper- and middle- class men; significantly, it presents the latter as uneasily accepted by nineteenth- century society. In her exploration of Brontë’s representation of Arthur Huntingdon, Juliet McMaster argues that Brontë safely critiques the masculine ethos of the Regency rake from the “outsider” status of a Victorian perspective (357). 9 While I agree with McMaster’s analysis, I contend that Brontë’s text transcends this temporally restricted criticism with its portrayal of the novel’s middle-class hero, 84 Gilbert Markham, as abusive. As we shall see, while Brontë’s depiction of the Huntingdons’ dysfunctional home attracted much contemporary evaluative bile, it disguised a well-deserved criticism of Victorian law by appearing to restrict its condemnation to alcoholic, aristocratic, Regency-period men. The complexity of the term “Victorian middle-class man” demands some attention to prevent an oversimplification of this analysis. While no single, monolithic type of masculinity dominated the Victorian middle-class landscape, it is possible to outline a few attributes of the larger set (especially with regard to violence), which will help us understand the inconsistent character Anne Brontë creates in Gilbert Markham. 10 Elizabeth Foyster offers a nuanced assessment of middle-class masculinities by outlining the contradictory nineteenth-century expectation that men behave with both “self-restraint” and “courage and fortitude”; she concludes that “the question of how and when men could express an emotion such as anger remained . . . largely unresolved” well into the nineteenth-century (164-65). The indeterminate and shifting standards governing when men were to show restraint and when they should express their anger posed a threat to women bound by the virtually inescapable nineteenth-century marriage contract. My analysis of Tenant exposes the presence of this two-sided, unstable norm in Brontë’s depiction of the middle-class Gilbert Markham, who calls himself a “gentleman farmer,” and illustrates how this representation demonstrates the need for family law reform (9). 85 Even as Gilbert admits his propensity to violence in his narrative, he attempts to downplay it and to control others’ perception of it. This tension in Gilbert’s self- representation illuminates both a contradiction in the nineteenth-century middle-class masculinity norms he embodies as well as the danger these norms posed to married women and their children. While I agree with the argument that Gilbert changes after reading Helen’s diary, I disagree with the common conclusion that he transforms into an ideal husband for Helen. Instead, I argue that in the second half of his narrative, Gilbert demonstrates that he has learned to manage violence and narrative (oftentimes in unison) for power. His desires are invisibly enforced, as written laws are, by a thinly veiled, barely suppressed violence that is acceptable under specific, yet indeterminate circumstances, circumstances which only men have the power to define. His often violent attempts to control the story of his courtship of Helen reveal the darker side of Victorian standards of middle-class masculinity. Tenant consequently challenges the accepted totality of the stereotypes offered by Parliament’s more authoritative texts and thereby demonstrates the necessity of divorce reform for all women, not just those in working-class or aristocratic marriages. As Parliament considered increasing punishments for assaults against women and children in 1853 and facilitating divorce in the 1840s and 50s, their arguments disclosed two major class-inflected stereotypes: the working-class physical abuser and the aristocratic emotional torturer. In both sets of debates, Members of Parliament evoke portraits of working-class men brutally beating their wives; the 86 MPs supplement this construction with drunkenness, laziness, and a propensity to steal working wives’ paltry earnings to spend in the local pub. 11 The aggravated assaults debates are more graphic than the divorce debates; Members of Parliament routinely paraded the gory stories reported in newspapers about husbands beating their wives. While the graphic descriptions fall away in the divorce debates, the stereotype of the drunken, working-class brute persists. At the other end of the economic spectrum, and more relevant to this analysis, the MPs discuss aristocratic husbands’ domestic abuses during the divorce debates. Aristocrats, unsurprisingly, are excluded from the Aggravated Assaults Act debates. The aristocratic wife abuser in the Parliamentary stereotype might be drunken, but he never lowers himself to physical assaults against his wife. Instead, he abuses her emotionally by flaunting his adulterous affairs before her. Brontë’s portrayal of Arthur Huntingdon squares with Parliament’s construction of aristocratic domestic abuses. While Arthur does not physically abuse Helen, he drinks to excess and brings two mistresses, first the married Anna Lowborough, and later the “governess,” Alice Meyers, into his home where he continues his relationships with them in the supposedly sacred domestic nest. A husband’s adultery, however, did not qualify wives for a Parliamentary divorce or separation, nor would this disability be removed by the 1857 or 1878 Divorce Acts, which would not identify adultery as legal “cruelty.” In a discussion of legal cruelty intended to make the 1857 Divorce Bill too liberal for even the most progressive legislators, William Gladstone (a Liberal-Conservative who would join forces with 87 the Liberals just two years later) bemoaned the “multitude of instances in which no remedy has been sought for, or none granted by our law—instances in which the adulteries of the husband have not only been occasional, but continuous; not only continuous, but open; not only open, but committed under his very roof, and in connection with persons placed in the closest relations with the wife” (147: 1275- 76). 12 While Gladstone staunchly opposed the passage of the Divorce Bill, his argument reveals much about how Victorians understood domestic violence and “cruelty.” In the divorce debates, legislators continually referred to Lord Stowell’s 1790 Evans v. Evans decision for authority about what qualified as “cruelty.” The 1853 Royal Commission Report . . . to Enquire into the Law of Divorce (commissioned to assist MPs as they considered multiple divorce bills in the 50s) praised Stowell’s famous definition of cruelty: “‘[I]f it were at all necessary to lay down an affirmative rule, I take it that the rule cited by Dr. Bever from Clarke, and the other books of practice, is a good general outline of the Canon law, the law of this country, upon this subject. In the older cases of this sort, which I have had an opportunity of looking into, I have observed that the danger of life, limb, or health, is usually inserted as the ground upon which the Court has proceeded to a separation. . . . I have heard no one case cited, in which the Court has granted a Divorce without proof given of a reasonable apprehension of bodily hurt; I say an apprehension, because assuredly the Court is not to wait till the hurt is actually done; but the apprehension must be reasonable, it must not be an apprehension arising merely from an exquisite and diseased sensibility of mind’” (Stowell qtd. in Royal Commission Report 13). Stowell’s words influenced divorce and separation legislation and judicial decisions until late in the nineteenth century and were the source of much female misery. 13 In addition, the discretion allowed to judges in ambiguous words like “reasonable” 88 continually endangered women’s lives and family unity throughout this period of family law reform. While Brontë’s representation of Arthur Huntingdon fits neatly with Parliamentary stereotypes of aristocratic wife abusers, her depictions of other male characters challenge Parliament’s limited constructions of masculinity. Perhaps Brontë’s critics disapproved specifically of the scenes featuring Hattersley, who, though an upper-class man, brutalizes his wife in public. His wife’s tearful response to this treatment, “‘Do let me alone, Ralph! remember we are not at home,’” implies that she suffers even greater violence in the privacy of their home (266). For average Victorians, this type of behavior belonged amongst the “lower orders” of Englishmen, not amongst its “respectable” landowners. Although Brontë’s representation of Hattersley contests Parliament’s class- inflected assumptions, her depiction of violence in the middle classes is even more significant for my purposes, as it fills a gap in Parliamentary constructions of male- initiated domestic abuse. In the 1840s, newspapers, the divorce debates, and much fiction had already established this gap, so Brontë is culturally in the thick of the controversy with her defiance of these stereotypes. 14 Moreover, her novel anticipates the difficulties caused for women by the perpetuation of this gap in the debates preceding the 1857 Divorce Act. Modern social histories like A. James Hammerton’s local studies of domestic violence help us address Parliament’s silence regarding violence in the middle classes. Examining cases of domestic abuse reported in Preston’s newspapers from 1836 to 1913, Hammerton finds that about 89 twenty-five percent of Preston’s wife beaters were from the lower-middle or middle classes (36). 15 And yet Parliament virtually ignores this sizeable group. It is likely that the authority of Parliament’s discourse about domestic violence influenced the realities of average Victorians—what they would find convincing or plausible. As legal scholar George Fletcher asserts, “in making evaluations of fact and law, police, prosecutors, and judges not only perceive the world, but structure it as they see fit. They exercise . . . the power to define the world” (50). In her recent argument defending cultural analyses of legal texts, Susan Silbey agrees with this idea and adds that “law is a part of the cultural processes that actively contribute in the composition of social relations” (41). Nineteenth-century newspapers and court papers suggest that many Victorians—consciously or not—shared Silbey’s belief that laws helped shape interpersonal relationships: several essays coauthored by Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill in the 1840s, for example, suggest that Victorian newspaper readers—and more importantly, men on trial for their violence against women—understood legal interpretations and judgments regulating domestic violence as dictating behavioral norms. 16 The authoritative voices of nineteenth- century legislators and judges, then, probably helped construct the average Victorian’s idea of who was capable of committing physical and emotional violence upon women; they most likely also influenced the creation of “realistic” characters by novelists. In their psychoanalytic study of representations of domestic violence in literature, Kate Lawson and Lynn Shakinovsky observe that many Victorian 90 novelists adhered to the stereotypes offered by Parliament and newspapers, and even used the absence of violence to circumscribe the middle-class families in their stories. We can see this tendency in the many Victorian novels that reproduced and helped construct a standard working-class picture of domestic violence. In Dickens alone we might consider the examples of Sykes’s murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist (1838) or Mr. Flintwich’s multiple assaults upon his wife, Affery, in Little Dorrit (1857). Alternatively, mid-nineteenth-century fiction retreated somewhat from representing the abuses of aristocratic men according to Parliament’s stereotype, perhaps because the aristocratic stereotype involved sex, and in the Victorian period (as in ours), the respectable public stomached narrative representations of physical violence but eschewed portrayals of sexuality. An obvious exception to the typical exclusion of the middle classes from stories of domestic abuse is the sensation novel, which flourished in the 1860s. While social histories help modern readers discern a fuller picture of familial violence than that offered through an examination of Parliamentary and most fictional texts, a few Victorian novels serve a parallel function. Such novels help us to fill the middle-class gaps in the “official” portrait of domestic violence in Victorian England. For example, we might look to novels like Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861), Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (1869) and Can You Forgive Her? (1865), or George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), each of which features a middle-class husband abusing his wife either directly in the text or in its narrator’s speculations. 17 Before any of these texts emerged, however, Anne Brontë daringly 91 published a novel that contributed to the ongoing public conversations fueling a nineteenth-century transformation of family law by suggesting the dangers of marrying, without the possibility of divorce, a Victorian middle-class man. Man, Interrupted: Helen Huntingdon’s Critique of Unjust Divorce and Custody Laws Because an examination of Gilbert’s tale as a cohesive whole (without the interruption of Helen’s story) is so instructive, I will disrupt the order in which Tenant’s two stories are told by studying Helen’s diary before turning my attention to Gilbert’s narrative. Scholars who have read Tenant through a feminist lens have tended to focus on Helen Huntingdon’s narrative, minimizing their considerations of Gilbert’s story. I concur with these critics that the content of Helen’s diary challenges the inequities in Victorian upper-class marital relations. I will add to these analyses by explaining how the Christian, feminine form of this abused wife’s diary fortifies the critique dealt to divorce and custody laws by its content. Helen Huntingdon’s journal of her abusive marriage interrupts Gilbert’s defense of a masculine prerogative for controlled violence. As such, her diary exposes the dangers of such an assumed right; at the same time, it reveals a conflict between Christian and English legal codes governing violence. England’s laws regarding custody and divorce shackle Helen in her abusive first marriage. Custody laws excluding mothers from rights to custody trapped many women in abusive marriages. 18 This is clearly the case for the fictional Helen 92 Huntingdon, who, as Laura C. Berry notes in her analysis of Tenant’s creation of a new, transgressive subjectivity for mothers and children, flies only after she devises a way to support her son. To evade these oppressive laws, Brontë’s Helen creates an extralegal system to justify her abandonment of her husband with her son. In a perceptive recent essay on Tenant, Deborah Morse reflects upon similarities between Helen Huntingdon’s journal and religious “witnessing” and describes her journal as a substitute for the legal testimony that nineteenth-century law would have disallowed. 19 Morse, however, argues that Helen’s “witnessing” reforms Gilbert. While I disagree with the claim that Gilbert reforms into an ideal husband after reading Helen’s diary, Morse’s idea about witnessing is a useful tool with which to examine how the religious form of Helen’s narrative affects the novel as a whole. For example, Helen repeatedly refers to her sufferings under Arthur Huntingdon’s abuses as “trials” and links her distress to her strong religious faith; this link in turn suggests a connection to the ancient legal practice of the trial by ordeal. Most of Helen’s narrative, in fact, takes the form of a Christian pilgrimage impeded by multiple trials. Before the English developed a jury-based legal system, they commonly employed the trial by ordeal to determine a person’s guilt or innocence. J. H. Baker describes these ordeals as “appeal[s] to God to reveal the truth in human disputes”; whether an accused person faced water or fire, her body’s response to the ordeal proved her innocent or guilty in the eyes of the law (5). 20 Immediately after discovering Arthur’s affair with Annabella Lowborough, for example, Helen prays, perceives a “heavenly influence” fortifying her inner strength, and declares inwardly, 93 “God . . . would not leave me comfortless: in spite of earth and hell I should have strength for all my trials, and win a glorious rest at last!” (292). Three years later, she bemoans another trial: to avoid her husband’s suspicion as she prepares for her escape, she must leave her son in the custody of Arthur’s second mistress, Alice Meyers, whom Arthur has introduced to the household as the new governess (371). Finally, after escaping from Huntingdon with her son, she fears the possibility of finding the boy kidnapped by his father, but she comforts herself with her faith: “God in His mercy will preserve me from so severe a trial” (379). Nineteenth-century divorce practices not only permitted husbands’ adultery within the home, they also forbid wives from presenting a case to the court, as the legal doctrine of coverture did not consider wives separate persons under the law. Helen sidesteps the nineteenth-century rules disbarring her from bringing a suit against her husband by resorting instead to the archaic legal practice of the trial by ordeal. At the same time, her substitution of civil codes with an obsolete legal practice highlights her lack of agency. If we perceive Helen’s narrative as extra- legal testimony or evidence a court of law would deem inadmissible or irrelevant in a Parliamentary divorce case, then her journal becomes a protest against wives’ legal obstacles as well as a call for reform. This protest has multiple audiences: Helen inscribes this challenge in her diary for her God and conscience, Brontë proposes it to her readers, and Gilbert (ironically) poses the challenge to Halford. Each presenter of the narrative hopes his or her audience will recognize the injustice of England’s legal system and its conflict with the Christian code that Helen advocates. 94 Even as this obsolete form points to Helen’s lack of legal recourse, the diary exonerates its author in a mock-legal way—it is consequently also a self-defense. On several occasions, Helen acts as her own judge (a presumptuous act in itself), acquitting herself in the name of her religion for breaking England’s marriage and custody laws. For instance, in deciding whether or not to abandon her husband, Helen declares that her religious duty to raise her child as a Christian trumps her legal obligation to remain with her husband under all circumstances. After crediting heaven for her successful escape as she and her son flee from the Huntingdon estate under the cover of night, she rejoices that she waited for Arthur to sin repeatedly, “for now there was no doubt about the propriety of such a step—no shadow of remorse for him I left behind” (373). Though the Parliamentary divorce debates illustrate the importance of Christian codes to the drafting and revision of bills, MPs’ interpretations of the Bible vary wildly, with some citing harshly misogynistic texts and others quoting more liberal ones. Helen, on the other hand, insists on the justice of her feminist interpretation of Christian codes: she proclaims that Christian law overrides England’s civil laws. In this, Helen exposes a conflict between England’s marriage laws, which enforce the Bible’s harsher marriage coda, and a liberal Christianity, which authorizes a more equitable treatment of the sexes. With her Christian testimony, Helen creates an alternative, extralegal system that allows her to present her evidence and to warrant her own judgment and self-exculpation. Furthermore, the inclusion of Christian legal forms authorizes the diary’s didactic purposes. 95 A similarity in the structure of Helen’s and Gilbert’s narratives paradoxically underscores the disparity between men’s and women’s access to the law. Both seem to be, at least in part, narrative alternatives to legal trials. As noted above, Helen presents her evidence, testifies to her faith in the propriety of her behavior, and exonerates herself from guilt: in the absence of legal adjudication for women in her situation, Helen becomes her own lawyer, judge, and jury. On the other hand, common law would have granted Gilbert a trial if Frederick had charged him with his assault. Because Gilbert has evaded legal retribution for his violence, he attempts to judge and justify himself, as Helen does. Gilbert mimics Helen’s narrative, presenting his evidence, testifying, and exculpating himself from wrong-doing, but in doing so, he also marks the form of Helen’s diary as authoritative. Interestingly, Helen relies on her God’s authority for judgment, while Gilbert depends upon his own as a propertied Victorian male (he acquires Helen’s property when they marry). Helen self-consciously opposes her conclusions to social mores, and Arthur’s convenient death by alcohol abuse seems to sanction her decisions. The text thus appears to urge readers to validate Helen’s judgment, and to reject Gilbert’s. The near total absence of civil law in this text and these characters’ attempts to adjudicate their own “cases”—to defend their behavior using extralegal forms—not only underlines women’s legal disabilities, it also simultaneously suggests men’s privilege of choosing when to use and when to eschew civil law. The form of Helen’s narrative also anticipates the use of “oppositionist” narratives in modern courtrooms. Regarding the current controversy surrounding the 96 deployment of such narratives, Peter Brooks writes that “[n]arrative has a unique ability to embody the concrete experience of individuals and communities, to make other voices heard, to contest the very assumptions of legal judgment. Narrative is thus a form of countermajoritarian argument, a genre for oppositionists intent on showing up the exclusions that occur in legal business-as-usual—a way of saying, you cannot understand until you have listened to our story” (16). Paul Gewirtz adds that the narratives routinely excluded from legal forums can evoke empathy and “increase the range of understandings among listeners” (6). Because Victorian women were not allowed to speak, even in their own self-defense, in marriage and divorce causes, a text such as Helen’s diary functions much like an oppositionist narrative in that it can arouse readers’ sympathy by revealing the motives that might drive a woman to risk outlawry and flee her husband’s home with her child. Excluded from her country’s legal system, Brontë’s Helen tells her unspeakable story in one of the few forms allowed to women: the journal. Brontë’s text thus anticipates the usefulness of such narratives for oppressed groups and employs one in her heroine’s interest. The most significant effect of Tenant’s incorporation of legal forms is only recognizable when we read the novel as a nested whole. While some critics have interpreted the novel’s enveloped structure as protecting and authorizing Helen and her narrative, others have argued that the structure mimics the smothering, controlling effects of coverture. 21 In fact, the structure has both effects, as did, it can be argued from an optimistic point of view, coverture itself. The nesting structure 97 has a third effect, however, for Helen’s “nested” narrative interrupts and competes with Gilbert’s “nesting” story, simulating a cross-examination. If we analyze the narratives from this angle, Helen’s narrative disruption questions the credibility of Gilbert’s story, but only temporarily, as Gilbert insists on having the final word in his closing narrative. While a legal system might not consider its trial process in terms of competing stories, Peter Brooks writes that “law is in a very important sense all about competing stories, from those presented at the trial court—elicited from witnesses, rewoven into different plausibilities by prosecution and defense, submitted to the critical judgment of the jury,” and appealed at the hierarchical court levels (16). However, the form of the trial process rarely allows for a linear presentation of competing narratives. These interruptions yield trials that, according to Paul Gewirtz, “consis[t] of fragmented narratives and narrative multiplicity. . . . ‘[R]eality’ is always disassembled into multiple, conflicting, and partly overlapping versions, each version presented as true” (8). Readers must evaluate the “plausibilities” of Helen’s and Gilbert’s competing stories and try to construct their own sense of this couple’s “reality.” From this perspective, we can examine Helen’s and Gilbert’s narratives as conflicting, yet codependent testimonies regarding nineteenth-century courtship and marriage, one of which includes evidence which a nineteenth-century court of law would rule inadmissible but which adds depth to readers’ understanding of the problems vexing England’s family laws. Eventually, Gilbert’s narrative quashes Helen’s challenge to the supposedly ideal state of marriage, but she has given her testimony, her evidence, and it can reemerge in 98 readers’ minds later as they consider the controversies involving family law reform in England. Gilbert Markham Testifies: The Male Prerogative to Controlled Violence With his letters to his brother-in-law, Halford, Gilbert intends to make amends for an extended silence between the two men. But Gilbert’s narrative has an unstated purpose as well. Gilbert breached class boundaries when he married the upper-class Helen, and his narrative reads very much like a defense of this transgression. His letters suggest that Helen helped transform him from an impulsive brute to a gentleman who reserves the right to use violence when he deems it acceptable. However, his novel intimates that even this form of masculinity poses risks for a marrying woman. In order to show himself in the best possible light, Gilbert manipulates the evidence introduced in his case defending his marriage to Helen: he controls what others say in his tale and tries to shape readers’ interpretation of it. Nevertheless, the form and content of Gilbert’s narrative undermines his carefully crafted self-defense. Because Gilbert writes the narrative in 1847, twenty years after the period he narrates, the text represents his retrospective perspective on these events. In his introductory framing letters, Gilbert voluntarily presents himself as volatile and pugnacious, yet the text does not overtly signal his behavior as abnormal or unacceptable. In fact, because Gilbert’s voice provides the framing narrative, it transmits precisely the opposite message. For example, though Gilbert is twenty- four during the period he narrates, he and his brother clash physically as a matter of 99 course: they routinely “colla[r]” and “whack” one another, and Gilbert “dash[es]” his brother, Fergus, against walls until the latter fears they will be “‘plastered with [his] brains’” (10, 103-4). Significantly, many of Gilbert’s assaults are compelled by Fergus’s teasing comments about Gilbert’s feelings for Helen. Marking the first time that Gilbert uses violence to control others’ stories about him, Gilbert justifies his fraternal aggression by claiming he had “‘told [Fergus] to hold [his] noise’” before striking him, and he uses the threat of increased violence to enforce Fergus’s continued silence on the subject of Helen (103-04). Suggesting the unexceptionality of these brotherly interactions, Mrs. Markham merely shakes her head and scolds. Gilbert writes that she intervenes only once; he explains that she does so because she fears that Gilbert will “inflict some grievous bodily injury” upon Fergus (104). Gilbert’s interpretation of Mrs. Markham’s belated and limited response suggests a reliance upon law as an arbiter of normative behavior. The 1828 Offenses against the Person Act, the Act penalizing aggravated assaults at the time Brontë was writing Tenant, marks only the infliction of “grievous bodily Harm” as a felony (9 Geor. II IV, c. 31). Brontë’s fictional and yet plausible characters (Gilbert and his mother) apparently understand violence not causing “grievous bodily Harm” as acceptable because the law does not expressly forbid it. Gilbert’s violence is most disturbing in his interactions with his misperceived rival for Helen’s affections, Frederick Lawrence. During an encounter early in the novel, Gilbert angrily stops Frederick and his horse, unconcernedly injuring the horse with his aggressive handling of the bridle (86-87). Frederick responds to 100 Gilbert’s initial hostilities by calling him “‘coarse and brutal’” and by referring to his behavior as an “‘assaul[t]’” (86-87). Frederick’s response may suggest that Gilbert’s behavior transgresses Victorian norms, unless we consider that Frederick is in some ways shown to be the novel’s model male—he is gentle, kind, and non-violent. 22 In addition, the wealthy Frederick’s disapproval of Gilbert’s violence may reflect a perceived distinction between middle- and upper-class conceptions of acceptable violence. In any case, it is not long before Gilbert again loses his self-control and deals Frederick an almost fatal blow with the metal handle of his horsewhip (109- 110). This assault, like the one on Fergus, is motivated by Gilbert’s unwillingness to hear an unflattering story about his relationship with Helen: Frederick has been trying to soothe Gilbert over his rejection by Helen. Gilbert writes to Halford that “some fiend” “impelled” him to strike Frederick savagely, causing that concerned friend to “say no more” (109). Twenty years after this incident, Gilbert writes that if he had admitted his guilt after striking Frederick, people would have judged him “a madman, unless [he had] acknowledged the motive too” (112). Explaining this motive, Gilbert claims that Frederick’s suspicious behavior with Helen “made [Gilbert] think he had a right to hate [Frederick]” (393). In other words, he believes that hating a man as one’s rival, and perhaps as the destroyer of one’s future property (Helen’s chastity), justifies violence, and that assault is an appropriate tool for conflict resolution. At the same time, however, Gilbert names this chapter, “An Assault,” showing that although he convinces himself that his actions were justified, he acknowledges the seriousness of the incident. 101 Contemporary laws governing violence reveal the difficulty men must have faced in deciding when and to what extent to repress or indulge their violent impulses. In July 1828, the revised “Offenses against the Person Act” made “unlawfully assault[ing] or beat[ing] any other Person” summarily punishable by a five-pound fine or two-months’ prison time, that is, unless the justices “f[ou]nd the Assault or Battery to have been justified, or so trifling as not to merit any Punishment,” in which case they would dismiss the complaint (9 Geor. II IV, c. 31). Moreover, many judges dismissed cases of assault if they decided the assailant had been “provoked” by his victim. These qualifications help explain Gilbert’s insistence during his reluctant apology to Frederic that his attack was “provoked” and relates indirectly but ominously to the frequency with which juries and judges exculpated abusive husbands found to have been “provoked” by their wives’ behavior (393). This Act left the parameters of terms like “justified” and “trifling” to the discretion of individual judges, and historians’ studies and contemporary essays indicate that many judges threw out cases as “justified” or “trifling” unless the violence threatened the victim’s life. Penalties were stiffened in 1853, when the Aggravated Assaults Act empowered local magistrates to summarily punish aggravated assaults against male children and any female with six months in prison or a twenty-pound fine, leaving assaults against men to be punished according to the less stringent 1828 Act (16 Vict., c. 30). As was the case with the 1828 Statute, however, the omission of specifics defining terms like “aggravated” vexed the application of this law. 23 102 With the courts excusing much violence as “trifling” or “provoked,” individual men were left to their own “discretion,” left to define their own parameters for justifiable violence, as Brontë’s Gilbert does in his narrative. The ideological tension Foyster describes between self-restraint and “courage and fortitude” combines with the law’s ambiguous evaluation of violence in Tenant’s mixed representation of Gilbert’s aggression in the second half of his framing narrative. While the two men involved in the horsewhipping assault agree to agree that Gilbert was “provoked” in attacking Frederick, their agreement is uneasy; their friendship eventually dissolves. Further, they sense a need to conceal the violence, betraying their perception of the conflicting norms governing masculinity and violence. Both men act to protect their honor (Gilbert in protecting Helen’s and his own reputation by perpetrating the attack, and Gilbert and Frederick in preserving their reputations by concealing the assault), but their secrecy suggests that they understand that others might not evaluate the violence as they do. That shame might result either from Frederick’s acknowledging his victimization or Gilbert’s confessing his assault illuminates the contradictory nature of mid-Victorian masculinity ideals and the problems they engendered. Even after reading Helen’s journal and discovering that Frederick is her brother, Gilbert’s use of the word “provoked” in his insincere apology demonstrates his lack of reform by resonating with his earlier claim that people would have understood his attack if he had “acknowledged [his] motive” (393, 112). Gilbert’s narrative thus builds a case that men are entitled to use violence under certain circumstances, and his marriage to 103 Helen at the novel’s end intimates that men who apply their prerogative to violence judiciously are well suited to become Victorian husbands. On the other hand, the guilt he refuses to embrace consciously in the narrative permeates the novel’s form as he attempts to submerge and otherwise efface his violence and guilt. It is the form of his own narrative, then, that undermines the content of his story. Moreover, Gilbert’s voluntary and rationalizing description of these events to his friend twenty years on suggests not only that he continues to consider his violence an acceptable response under Victorian standards of middle-class masculinity, but also that he assumes that Halford will judge the incident in a similar manner. Gilbert’s unrestrained and unapologetic disclosure in his letters therefore suggests the normalcy of his violence in this sociohistorical milieu. By forcibly controlling the testimony appearing in his narrative, therefore, Gilbert gains the privilege of defining acceptable violence almost exclusively upon his own terms. 24 In doing so, he attempts to shape readers’ interpretations and judgments of these events. While Gilbert unhesitantly describes his violence in the opening half of his narrative, he then allows suspense, lengthy narrative interruptions, and a marriage- plot form to obscure it in the second half of his story. Brontë slyly evades judging Gilbert’s violence by presenting the story as his first-person narration. While this technique provides Brontë with an authoritative male voice with which she can more securely present controversial material, it also eliminates or colors criticism of Gilbert: his privileged narratorial position allows him to omit, negate, or soften the 104 understandably limited chastising he receives from the wounded, vulnerable Frederick. On the few occasions that Gilbert scrutinizes his own behavior, he rationalizes his violence and exculpates himself. There is a single moment in Gilbert’s concluding narrative during which he considers the effect of his violence on Frederick. Immediately after he reads Helen’s journal, Gilbert attempts to persuade her that they should continue their relationship despite her existing marriage. When she suggests that they correspond through her brother, Gilbert cringes, thinking, “A pang of remorse and shame shot through me. She had not heard of the injury he had sustained at my hands; and I had not the courage to tell her. ‘Your brother will not help us,’ I said: ‘he would have all communion between us to be entirely at an end’” (385). A “pang” indeed: Gilbert’s remorse is fleeting and insufficient: he is not motivated to reveal the truth behind Frederick’s disapproval to his future wife. From this moment forward, Gilbert never again mentions his violence; instead, he begins burying it, most immediately by displacing Frederick’s reasons for disliking him from his violence to his class. In the first place, the “friendship” between Gilbert and Frederick needs closer scrutiny, as it seems more like a fiction created by Gilbert. In fact, much of their friendship after the assault is based on Gilbert’s exploitation of Frederick’s sibling relationship with Helen. Gilbert admits to Halford that he “never sought his [Frederick’s] company but with the hope of hearing something about her [Helen], and he never sought mine at all” (422). When Frederick is no longer useful, Gilbert drops him, explaining to Halford in his letters, “You see Lawrence and I somehow 105 could not manage to get on very well together. The fact is, I believe, we were both of us a little too touchy. It is a troublesome thing Halford, this susceptibility to affronts where none are intended” (437). Besides forcing us to question Gilbert’s reliability as a narrator, this confidence transforms Gilbert’s grave assault into a piddling, unintended “affront.” Though nineteenth-century assault laws excused much of male aggression, Gilbert’s assault is no “trifling” one, and Frederick surely could have prosecuted him successfully. But Gilbert knows and fears Frederick’s relationship to Helen; his letters to Halford repeatedly betray his anxiety that Frederick might expose to his sister the true source of what he portrays as illness. Gilbert writes to Halford “that Lawrence was indeed averse to the idea of my union with his sister” (434), but does not offer his violence as a motive for Lawrence’s antipathy. Instead, he says he suspects that Lawrence considers Gilbert “too poor— too lowly born, to match with his sister” (433). Besides contributing to Gilbert’s efforts to suppress the evidence of his past violence, Gilbert’s fear of exposure again reflects the contradictory nature of Victorian expectations for masculine behavior— he cannot be sure that Helen will condone his earlier display of what he thinks was chivalrous strength and “courage,” even if he explains his “provocation.” At the same time, however, this suppression highlights Gilbert’s privilege to narratively dismiss as “trifling” his aggression—he won’t even consider it as a motive for Frederick’s coolness. While the first person narration allows Gilbert to omit a self-judgment, the architecture of the novel also problematizes a readerly judgment of Gilbert’s 106 violence. The interruption of Gilbert’s failing courtship narrative by Helen’s narrative of marital conflict introduces a suspenseful new plot for which readers anticipate resolution. Significantly, this disruption occurs just one short chapter after Gilbert’s assault upon Frederick; it thereby immediately submerges Gilbert’s violence for two hundred and seventy pages under Arthur’s seemingly more egregious faults. As readers anxiously root for Helen’s escape from the abusive Arthur Huntingdon, they are apt to forget Gilbert’s flaws, as much Tenant criticism demonstrates. By listing Gilbert’s violent assaults in this paper without the interruption of Helen’s narrative, I eliminate the suspense and intervening pages in Brontë’s novel that divert many readers’ attention from Gilbert’s volatile nature. Though Gilbert receives, reads, and returns Helen’s journal in fewer than twenty- four hours, the journal covers several years of Helen’s life; the text thus introduces a misleading and disorienting time lapse. The narrative intrusion by these intermediary pages affect what Susan Lanser and Joan Radnor call a narrative “distraction”—the drowning of a controversial message with various narrative strategies, in this case, with hundreds of pages of seemingly unrelated text (15-16). Why would an author drown her own message? Lanser and Radnor explain that techniques of “implicit coding,” which do not announce their presence in the text, enable the oppressed to convey subversive messages in the face of the threat of censorship (5). 25 In other words, Brontë must “whisper” her “truths” if she wants to publish them. Of course, contemporary British critics—mostly male—found the intermediary pages of Helen’s journal offensive and Gilbert’s framing narrative more 107 acceptable, suggesting that the text’s coding succeeded in evading potential censors. 26 I am arguing that, contrary to most criticism of Tenant, both narratives are truly transgressive. Gilbert’s narrative is only less obviously so because it portrays normative Victorian behavior while Helen’s narrative represents aristocratic Regency behaviors that Brontë’s middle-class contemporaries found offensive, but not personally so, thanks to the temporal distancing Brontë employs. Aiding in Gilbert’s erasure of his violence from the second half of the text, Frederick conditionally promises Gilbert not to reveal the true source of his injuries to his sister. After Gilbert apologizes (albeit insincerely), Frederick promises Gilbert, “‘I shall say nothing against you, as long as you keep your good resolution of maintaining aloof from [Helen]’” (394). Frederick’s honoring of his promise, despite Gilbert’s breaking of his end of the deal, generates a contradiction between Gilbert’s violence and the novel’s putatively happy ending; the two men thus maintain a secret that reflects the contradictory state of Victorian standards for masculinity. Tenant’s form seems to mirror Gilbert’s and Frederick’s uneasiness about their violent altercation by simultaneously concealing and revealing Gilbert’s aggression. The novel’s pivotal silence, maintained first by Gilbert and Frederick, and smothered later by Gilbert’s narrative manipulation and his marriage plot, helps determine the novel’s course of events. Surely we cannot believe that Helen would marry Gilbert if she knew of his assault on her brother—especially considering her journal’s condemnation of the violence on the Huntingdon estate and her assertion to Gilbert immediately preceding her marriage proposal that she “hate[s] mysteries and 108 concealments” (463). The novel’s marriage plot thus exists in a strange relationship with this secret: it depends upon two men’s acceptance of a certain level of and rationale for violence while it must simultaneously smother that violence—because in this period of conflicting and unstable masculinity paradigms, readers and the heroine might not judge it as “acceptably” masculine. 27 In his case to define proper marital relations, Gilbert must exclude the evidence of other characters regarding his assault on Frederick if the novel is to end with wedding bells. As the novel does reach a nuptial conclusion, it seems Gilbert’s story wins “officially,” but the holes remain—his violence and Helen’s eventual silencing are never addressed—leaving a perspective void for readers to consider uncomfortably. While it is true that Gilbert exhibits less physical violence in his narrative’s second half than in its first, certain incidents manifest the endurance of Gilbert’s propensities towards physical violence even after he reads Helen’s diary. In fact, what changes after Gilbert reads his lover’s instructive diary is his level of self- control. As the novel progresses, he learns to practice the “self-restraint” discussed by Foyster. However, we see from his continued aggression against others that only his discretion governs his decisions about when and where to use violence. More than this, the degree of violence that he thinks appropriate, while an improvement upon his original inclinations, still jeopardizes the coherence of the Victorian family. After reading Helen’s journal, Gilbert relates various incidents that demonstrate the types of violence he continues to consider appropriate, and he does not limit himself to assaults against men. In another instance of Gilbert’s molding 109 his narrative with violence, Gilbert traumatizes his old flame, Eliza, when she relates a false rumor about Helen in the hope of regaining Gilbert’s attentions: “checking the word on her lips, I seized her arm and gave it, I think, a pretty severe squeeze, for she shrank into herself with a faint cry of pain or terror” (444). Perhaps unsurprisingly, legal practices legitimized a degree of violence against women just as they did for violence against men. As Maeve Doggett writes in Marriage, Wife Beating, and the Law (1993), nineteenth-century legal theorists declared women’s behavior to be under the control not of themselves, but rather of their husbands. Parliament embodied this assumption, Doggett argues, in laws allowing men to beat or confine their wives in the name of domestic “government.” Doggett traces an oft- cited “authority” for this prerogative to The New Natura Brevium (1516), a text written by Sir Anthony Fitzherbert. Fitzherbert writes that supplicavits took the following form: A. the wife of B. has besought us that whereas she is grievously and manifestly threatened by the aforesaid B. of her Life, and maiming of her Members . . . you will answer to us . . . that he shall well and honestly treat and govern the aforesaid A. and that he shall not do, nor procure to be done any Damage or Evil to her of her Body, otherwise than what reasonably belongs to her Husband, for the Sake of Government and Chastisement of his Wife lawfully . . . (qtd. in Doggett 5). Doggett observes that centuries of judges and legal theorists quoted this passage to justify husbands’ abuses of their wives (5). The first noteworthy element of this supplicavit procedure is that it forces the wife to continue to live with her abusive husband, which gives her no physical security, just a promise that the husband sharing her domicile will be punished if he beats her severely again, or if he kills her, 110 small comfort to a battered wife. The second significant aspect—that a woman’s abuser must threaten her life or limbs to justify her application for a supplicavit— matches much of the assault legislation we have examined thus far in that only assaults resulting in death or maiming sufficed to obtain protection for women (and men in other statutes). Finally, the legitimation of husbands’ “reasonable . . . Government and Chastisement” of wives returns us to the ambiguity inscribed in these assault laws. Robert Cover has written extensively on the physical repercussions of legal texts. Most dramatically, he has proclaimed that “[l]egal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death” (203). Legal officials’ decisions and interpretations are not purely academic and linguistic; they produce physical results, such as incarceration and execution. Thus, the discretion the supplicavit granted each official in the interpretation of the word, “reasonable,” often led to grave physical suffering for women and children. Besides squeezing Eliza’s arm until she squeals, after reading Helen’s journal, Gilbert also forcibly stops Frederick’s horse a third time to slander the woman that Frederick has been courting. Perhaps Brontë intended this repetition of the horse episodes to show us a change in Gilbert (because he doesn’t harm the horse or Frederick during this third encounter). Much like a Heathcliff or Rochester, however, Gilbert compels Frederick to stay somewhere he doesn’t want to be having a conversation he doesn’t want to have. Later, in his desperate search for transportation to the town where he believes Helen is marrying Hargrave—he hopes to stop the marriage, even if that entails interrupting the ceremony—he admits to 111 “frequently invading the [villagers’] cottages . . . –sometimes knocking up the lazy people from their beds, . . . they cared not to curtail their slumbers. [He] had no time to think of them, however” (446-47). As Gilbert considers why he must prevent Helen’s marriage, he writes that he “must see her—she must know my truth even if I told it at the church door!” (445). This declaration opposes Gilbert’s “truth” to the stories—like Frederick’s—he has worked to exclude from his testimony. The narrative justifying his violence must win authority. Gilbert’s repetitive silencing of others, as we shall see, is merely a prelude to his final appropriation of control over these narratives, which he achieves by suppressing his wife’s voice once they are wed. As these later examples demonstrate, what Helen’s narrative seems to have changed in Gilbert is his ability to manage his anger selectively, in ways that promise to reward him with increased power and control over others and over his courtship narrative. Besides the violence Tenant actually represents Gilbert perpetrating, there are two aspects of the novel that suggest that the type of relationship he considers healthy may be less than so for his future wife and family. I locate the first in unmistakable similarities between Gilbert’s and Hargrave’s courting of Helen, and the second in Gilbert’s eventual silencing of Helen. In her journal, Helen describes being pursued romantically by her husband’s friend, Hargrave, who courts her behind a mask of chivalry: he claims he wants to save her from her abusive husband and shelter her from the judgmental world (341). Helen finds Hargrave odious and rejects his propositions repeatedly and unambiguously. 28 In their final scene 112 together, Hargrave confines Helen, attempting to blackmail her sexually into allowing him to accompany her as her lover when she leaves Arthur. Deborah Morse has observed that this scene approximates an attempted rape, from which Helen escapes only via the threatened violence of her palette knife, the artists’ tool with which she plans to support herself and her son (342-43). Given the violence Hargrave perpetrates and threatens against Helen, we must consider the implications of the text’s direct parallels between his character and Gilbert’s. Like Hargrave, Gilbert pleads a chivalrous case that he wants to save Helen from her abusive husband. Gilbert also stalks Helen by waiting in places he suspects she may go, or by violating her privacy. In fact, Gilbert exceeds Hargrave’s faults by spying on Helen; he even admits (and justifies, as he does his assault on Frederick) his voyeurism during an argument with her (120). Most provocatively, Brontë also constructs scenes between Helen and Gilbert that mirror earlier scenes between Helen and Hargrave. For example, after Helen chides Hargrave for his offensive behavior, he begs forgiveness; consistent with her Christian faith, Helen answers that she will forgive, but she conditionally demands that he “‘sin no more’”(307). As she did with Hargrave, Helen forgives Gilbert’s transgressions and simultaneously insists that he must never repeat his offenses if their friendship is to continue (384). Immediately after reading Helen’s journal, Gilbert himself perceives his similarities to Hargrave, though he dismisses them by rejecting a supposition he attributes to Rachel, Helen’s friend and servant: she “doubtless . . . saw in me 113 another Mr. Hargrave, only the more dangerous in being more esteemed and trusted by her mistress” (382). Indeed! Brontë’s irony here is thick. Though he denies the resemblance, he proceeds to narrate his attempts to force an entry into Helen’s house against Rachel’s orders. After Rachel denies him entry, Gilbert writes that little Arthur, by inviting him in against Rachel’s wishes, prevents him “from committing the impropriety of taking the citadel by storm, and pushing forward unannounced” (382). Brontë thus parallels Hargrave’s attempted rape with Gilbert’s metaphorical one. During the conversation that follows, Gilbert, as Hargrave had, justifies a deepening of his relationship with Helen by claiming that “Heaven” would deem her marriage void, and thus excuse a relationship with Gilbert. It is at this point that Helen begs, “‘For God’s sake, don’t you attempt these arguments!’” (385). Coming as it does immediately after Gilbert’s denial of the similarities between him and Hargrave, we must consider Brontë’s irony here. Feminist scholars have analyzed women’s use of the technique of “doubling” to communicate potentially transgressive information about fictional characters, although they typically examine this technique as it is used for female characters. 29 Here, however, Brontë employs doubling to great effect with the characters of Hargrave and Gilbert. Considering that Hargrave stalked, propositioned, forcibly confined, and perhaps attempted rape alongside these seemingly deliberate parallels between the two characters should cue us to the potential for Gilbert to commit similar violence upon Helen. While many critics have assumed that Gilbert inserts Helen’s diary in a show of support for her feminist ideas, it seems more likely that he includes it because it 114 bolsters his case that he had a right to marry her. The sensational aspect of the journal can arouse readers’ sympathy and their desire for a better life for Helen, and the fictional Gilbert may hope that such a desire may support his class-crossing intentions. In other words, while Gilbert does exhibit sympathy for Helen’s situation, we may exaggerate his benevolence if we assume his inclusion of her diary demonstrates feminist impulses in his character. Most significantly, we must consider that, after transcribing Helen’s journal in his letters to Halford (a transgression of his promise to Helen that he would keep the journal private), Gilbert steadily decreases the role of Helen’s voice from his narrative of their relationship. Gilbert’s final manipulation of the story of his courtship of and marriage to Helen is his suppression of her words regarding their seventeen-year marriage. Like his physical silencing of Fergus, Lawrence, and Eliza earlier in his story, Gilbert’s textual silencing of Helen points to his abuse of power, the inherent violence in middle-class masculinity, and his need to control others and their narratives concerning him using any means necessary. Though Helen escapes her first marriage via her husband’s death, the legal system that entrapped her during her first marriage persists; she consequently lacks any legal redress against the possibility of a second abusive husband. Considering Gilbert’s continuing acceptance of certain types and levels of violence and his strained control over his anger, we must ponder his potential for violence in his future married life, which life, of course, comprises the text’s final silence. The silencing of Helen’s voice, like the text’s downplaying of Gilbert’s violence, should make us suspicious about the Markham’s future marital 115 relations. By exposing this typical middle-class man’s excesses, Brontë gives readers a more informed perspective from which to view the debates regarding family laws. In fact, while the Huntingdon marriage is controversial, it is the suspicion Brontë engenders that legal and social standards governing the form of Victorian marriage were dangerous for any woman, not just the very rich or the very poor, that is truly revolutionary. When we examine the repetitive, cyclic nature of Helen’s and Gilbert’s courtship narratives, we must consider the possibility that Helen will be dissatisfied again and want to leave her second husband. Gilbert’s and Helen’s narratives follow similar patterns, with Gilbert’s narrative enclosing Helen’s like the outermost of two concentric circles. In both narratives, Helen begins single and wary of suitors. Then, she falls in love with a flawed character she believes her feminine influence can reform; her aunt discourages and warns her about the perils of marriage; she has misgivings about her lover; she refuses to heed her aunt’s advice and her own doubts; and finally, she marries. Helen’s narrative forms a complete circle, as she experiences marital conflict which causes her to flee, thus returning her to her original single, wary state. In Gilbert’s enveloping narrative, Helen’s life follows the same trajectory, except the final arc of the circle (that describing her marriage) is missing, leaving readers to complete it imaginatively. If we extrapolate by following the pattern provided by Helen’s narrative to complete the concentricity of the circles, we might finish Gilbert’s narrative as Helen completes hers—she experiences marital conflict and returns to a single state. 30 Alternately, Peter Brooks’s theory 116 might help us explain these narratives as illustrating “repetition with a difference,” since Helen has remained in this second marriage for twenty years. This, of course, would not eliminate the possibility that Helen experiences marital conflict with Gilbert. I am not insisting here that Brontë’s Helen remains in an unhappy or violent marriage. Rather, I am suggesting that the novel’s form provocatively gestures toward the potential for future unhappiness and consequently prompts us to consider the oppressive legal context under which Helen struggles. Even before he excludes her words utterly from his story, Gilbert first transforms Helen’s narrative mysteries into glowing reflections on himself. Before Helen, out of utter frustration that gossip has destroyed her reputation in Linden-car (and presumably in Gilbert’s mind), thrusts her diary in Gilbert’s hands to clear her name, she “hastily t[ears] away a few leaves from the end” (121). 31 In his zeal to create an idealized love between two “kindred spirits,” Gilbert imagines what may have filled these torn away pages, but Brontë never resolves this silence for the reader (379-80). Whether or not we assume that these pages discuss Gilbert favorably (as Gilbert does), we must consider Gilbert’s substitution of his own ideas and words for Helen’s reality. Confronted with a two hundred and seventy-page journal of his wife’s life that includes no more than a single, incomplete sentence about himself, Gilbert writes to Halford what he assumes must have been the pages’ content. Instead of respecting the missing pages as Helen’s private thoughts, Gilbert appropriates Helen’s story, weaving his own thread into her narrative tapestry. He 117 assumes that, though they begin “not very favorably,” these pages reveal her growing regard for him: I was convinced that now my deserts were lower than her opinion; and if the former part of this continuation had been torn away to avoid wounding my feelings, perhaps the latter portion had been removed for fear of ministering too much to my self-conceit. At any rate, I would have given much to have seen it all—to have witnessed the gradual change, and watched the progress of her esteem and friendship for me, . . . to have seen how much of love there was in her regard, and how it had grown upon her in spite of her virtuous resolutions and strenuous exertions to—but no, I had no right to see it: all this was too sacred for any eyes but her own, and she had done well to keep it from me. 380 Following his speculations on why she tore away the pages with “At any rate,” Gilbert’s words indicate that though her motive for tearing away the pages might be a mystery to him, the contents of the pages are not. In Gilbert’s mind, the “progress” of her love for him is unquestionably the content of the missing pages; they flatter him. And though he concludes that he “had no right to see it,” he still impresses readers’ minds with the idea that the pages contain what he has described. While we as readers may also be curious about the content of these pages, what is more important here is Gilbert’s insertion of his own voice and thoughts to complete Helen’s narrative. We never know what Helen thought of Gilbert at this point; instead, Gilbert assumes the authority to tell Helen’s story for her. Brontë’s persistent silence on these missing pages (we never read them) compounds the contradiction between the novel’s supposedly happy ending and Gilbert’s lingering belligerence. This appropriation of Helen’s voice in her diary is just the first step in Gilbert’s eventual and total silencing of her point of view from his narrative, a 118 silencing that allows Gilbert’s perspective to go unchallenged and that should pique our curiosity about Helen’s opinion of their marriage. As he did with her journal, Gilbert co-opts Helen’s letters, at times blending his voice indistinguishably with hers. Elizabeth Langland has observed that in Gilbert’s relation of Helen’s last few letters to her brother (those describing Arthur’s death), he blurs Helen’s and his own focalizations; at some points they become indistinguishable. It is as though Gilbert were in the room with the dying Huntingdon (“Voicing” 120). While Langland argues that this vocal blending signals Gilbert’s acceptance of Helen’s brand of feminism and her negative assessment of her husband’s debauchery, I perceive a more ominous possibility in this narrative structure. In this polyphony, I read a symbolic representation of Gilbert’s early attempts to enforce coverture, the legal principle that eliminated a woman’s personhood and rights when she married. Gilbert appropriates Helen’s diary and letters, edits them, and then merges their two voices into “one” in his mind and narrative: Gilbert thus enforces coverture and begins terminating Helen’s narrative existence and point of view even before he marries her. After reading these polyvocal letters, we no longer hear directly from Helen. The description of Gilbert’s agonized waiting for Helen’s return, his frenzied pursuit of her when he hears (mistakenly) of her impending marriage to Hargrave, the scene in which Helen proposes marriage to Gilbert, and the state of their marriage are all narrated exclusively by Gilbert. As a result of Helen’s silencing, we receive our only sense of the Markham’s seventeen-year marriage from Gilbert’s pen, and he provides 119 only two sentences for these seventeen years. Brontë’s contemporaries may have been tempted to assume that married life, because uneventful, was unnarratable, but as Elizabeth Rose Gruner notes, the inclusion of Helen’s journal relating her miserable first marriage should have disabused them of this overgeneralization (304). Thus, this silence and Gilbert’s character flaws leave the future largely to our imagination. 32 Once again, considerations of the novel’s form return us to the unchanged legal status of marriage and custody. Not until 1857 would a woman have legal recourse to escape a violent marriage, and even then, the grounds of “cruelty,” which the statute problematically left undefined, would only earn her a judicial separation (20 & 21 Vict., c. 85). Moreover, the 1839 Custody Act would only authorize a woman to request the custody of her children under seven years of age (2 & 3 Vict., c. 54). Despite the fact that Gilbert falls into neither of the categories constructed by Parliament to describe abusive husbands, Tenant encourages us to reconsider the legal crisis facing unhappily married women. Tenant’s portrait of Gilbert Markham helps readers see the connections between masculinity, violence, and family law across the social spectrum, not merely in the working and upper classes. Despite the cultural conventions restricting women writers from participating in public controversies, Anne Brontë found a way to criticize insufficient and inequitable laws. By combining religious, legal, and traditional marriage plot forms in her novel, Brontë held an unflattering mirror up to Victorian law, marriage, and masculinity. Tenant’s legacies have been twofold: it contributed discursively to 120 evolving attitudes about masculinity and marriage, and it thereby participated obliquely in nineteenth-century calls for legal reform. Considering Tenant’s form therefore enriches recent Brontë criticism and should convince us to position this undervalued novel more squarely within the feminist canon. 121 Chapter 2 Endnotes 1 Most recent criticism lauds Tenant’s feminist impulses. Three insightful discussions of the novel’s form include Jan B. Gordon’s “Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text: Anne Brontë’s Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel” (ELH 51.4 [Winter 1984]: 719-45), N. M. Jacobs’s “Gender and Layered Narrative in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (The Journal of Narrative Technique 16.3 [Fall 1986]: 204-19), and Tess O’Toole’s “Siblings and Suitors in the Narrative Architecture of the Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 39.4 [1999]: 715-31). 2 See Elizabeth Langland’s “The Voicing of Feminine Desire in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, ed. Anthony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor [DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 1992] 111-123), N. M. Jacobs’s “Gender and Layered Narrative . . . ” (ibid), Jan Gordon’s “Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text . . . ” (ibid), Juliet McMaster’s “‘Imbecile Laughter’ and ‘Desperate Earnest’ in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (Modern Language Quarterly 43.4 [Dec. 1982]: 352-68), and Deborah Denenholz Morse’s “‘I Speak of Those I Do Know’: Witnessing as Radical Gesture in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë, ed. Julie Nash and Barbara A. Suess [Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001] 103-26) for analyses claiming a reformed Markham. Elizabeth Langland, although she acknowledges Gilbert’s character defects, concludes that the “Gilbert who marries Helen Graham is chastened before he can become corrupt” (“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: ‘Wholesome Truths’ Versus ‘Soft Nonsense,’” Anne Brontë: The Other One [Hampshire: Macmillan, 1989] 118-147). 3 This desirability in turn suggests a related female norm of masochism in heterosexual relationships. Pointing up the fictionality of such a suggestion, Hilary Schor writes about the tendency for Victorian (and modern) storytellers to “romanticize” abuses of power in “Storytelling in Washington, D. C.: Fables of Love, Power, and Consent in Sexual Harassment Stories” (Southern California Law Review 65 [1992]: 1347-51). 4 For a biographical review of Anne Brontë’s short life, see Elizabeth Langland’s Anne Brontë: The Other One (ibid). 5 While beaten women could obtain some relief by seeking “articles of the peace,” Arthur’s abuses were not illegal. Maeve Doggett explains in Marriage, Wife-Beating, and the Law in Victorian England (Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1993) that exhibiting articles of the peace, “sometimes referred to as ‘swearing’ or ‘praying the peace,’” is now often called “binding over to keep the peace” (4-5). 122 6 The legal doctrine of coverture dissolved a woman’s legal personality within her husband’s upon marriage. Nineteenth-century legal scholar William Blackstone asserts that the fiction of “marital unity,” which claimed that a husband and wife were one person before the law, generated the doctrine of coverture (Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. I. [Oxford: Clarendon P, 1765-69]). See Mary Lyndon Shanley’s Feminism, Marriage, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989) for a modern analysis of these principles. 7 First, a husband had to prosecute his wife in a common law suit for criminal conversation (i.e., adultery); next, he had to present evidence of his successful suit to the ecclesiastical courts for a divorce a mensa et thoro (a separation from bed and board), and finally, he had to appear before the House of Lords for a special act of Parliament dissolving his marriage and enabling him to remarry. In other words, divorces a vinculo were legislative, not judicial acts. A Lord Loughborough established this process in 1798, which may be related to Brontë’s decision to name the one male character who divorces in the novel “Lowborough” (3 Hansard 145 [1857] 483-490). In these endnotes, I cite Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates as follows: the number preceding “Hansard” refers to the series number; the number following “Hansard” denotes the volume number of the series; the year is in brackets; the column number follows the year. A. James Hammerton’s Cruelty and Companionship (New York: Routledge, 1992), Mary Lyndon Shanley’s Feminism, Marriage, and the Law (ibid), and Lee Holcombe’s Wives and Property (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983) provide histories of British divorce law and its reform. 8 For one of many Parliamentary conversations reasserting the double standard regarding men’s and women’s infidelity, see 3 Hansard 134 [1854] 7. 9 More interesting to me than Brontë’s “outsider” status to the Regency culture she represents is her “insider” status to the Victorian culture she inhabits. This ideological immersion causes her to reproduce the ideology’s contradictions in her representation of Gilbert Markham’s masculinity. 10 As James Eli Adams argues in Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity, “multiple, complex, and unstable” constructions of masculine identities coexisted in the Victorian period (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995. 3). 11 Of course, some men did fit these descriptions; the point here is that the MPs spoke as though domestic violence existed only in these upper- and working- class forms. 12 Parenthetical citations of Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates within this essay list first the volume number and then the column number (all citations in this essay are from Hansard’s Third Series). 123 13 Hammerton discusses the profound impacts (both negative and positive) of Lord Stowell’s judgments (ibid 120-122). 14 See Hammerton for a thorough study of newspapers and police reports covering domestic violence. Especially interesting are his studies of newspaper letters written by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor (ibid 57-59). 15 Hammerton observes that in some of these reports, the perpetrator’s class is omitted. He speculates that these omissions might mask an even higher percentage of middle- and upper-class abusers. See Shani D’Cruze’s (ed.) Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850-1950: Gender and Class (New York: Longman, 2000) and Anna Clark’s Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England: 1770-1845 (London: Pandora, 1987) for additional studies of class and domestic violence. 16 Hammerton reviews Mill’s and Taylor’s letters (ibid 57-59). 17 These novels feature middle-class husbands who abuse their wives physically, emotionally, or psychologically. Some of the class distinctions are problematic, however. For example, in The Odd Women (1893), Gissing’s Mr. Widdowson lives a middle-class life only after being raised from the working classes by an unexpected inheritance. 18 Frances Power Cobbe explains this dilemma in her essay, “Wife Torture in England” (Contemporary Review 32 [1878]: 55-87). 19 Morse argues that Helen’s narrative casts a minor character, Lord Lowborough, as its Christian hero, one who converts from Regency debauchée to pious Victorian under the influence of Helen’s testimony. 20 J. H. Baker writes that the ordeal was commonly used to “back up” an accused person’s oath. First, the trial by oath was applied, and if the accused’s word needed more authority, the trial by ordeal was applied. In a trial by fire, the accused’s hand was burned with hot iron—if the wound festered, “God was taken to have decided against the party” (5). In a trial by water, the party was “trussed and lowered into a pond; if he sank, the water was deemed to have ‘received him’ with God’s blessing,” and he was rescued (5) (An Introduction to English Legal History, 4 th ed. [London: Butterworths LexisNexis, 2002]). 21 Jan B. Gordon’s “Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text . . . ” (ibid) and N. M. Jacobs’s “Gender and Layered Narrative . . . ” (ibid) assert that Markham’s framing narrative protects Helen and legitimizes her character and her controversial narrative. In contrast, Elizabeth Signorotti’s “‘A Frame Perfect and Glorious’: Narrative Structure in Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (Victorian Newsletter 87 [Spring 124 1995] 20-25), and Tess O’Toole’s “Siblings and Suitors . . . ” (ibid) conclude that Gilbert attempts to control and silence Helen’s version of events. 22 Tess O’Toole argues that Frederick Lawrence is Tenant’s ideal male character, though I would qualify her argument by noting that Frederick keeps the secret of Gilbert’s violence even when his sister prepares to marry Gilbert—thus exposing her to the potential of a legally inescapable, violent second marriage (ibid). 23 A. James Hammerton and Frances Power Cobbe discuss the legal excuse of “provocation” (ibid; ibid). Hammerton reviews contemporary texts to demonstrate the insufficiency of assault laws (ibid). 24 Gilbert’s justification of his violence accords with Shani D’Cruze’s assertion that “elite” men’s privileges allowed them to “define a much larger amount of their violence as honourable and legitimate” (ibid 13-14). D’Cruze does not define “elite” here, but in the context of her work, she seems to refer to non-working- class men. 25 Lanser and Radnor distinguish between explicit and implicit coding, the former being “dangerous, for it constitutes an announcement that coding is taking place, and opens the possibility that the code will be cracked by the ‘wrong’ audience. Sometimes a code is not visibly signaled, but the fact of censorship is sufficiently foregrounded that the possibility of a coding practice becomes evident” (“Strategies of Coding in Women’s Cultures,” Feminist Messages: Coding in Women's Folk Culture, ed. Joan N. Radner [Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993] 5). In addition, these critics and others agree that these techniques can be in play in a text with or without the author’s consciousness. 26 Miriam Allott’s selection of reviews of the novel shows that American critics were much more likely to find both narratives offensive than their British counterparts (The Brontës: The Critical Heritage [London, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974]). 27 Like most novels’ secrets, this silence helps fuel Tenant’s marriage plot (the love story would probably be over if Helen discovered Gilbert’s violence). Conversely, the resolution of a secret usually ends a novel’s plot: the secrets between Jane Austen’s Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill in Emma (1815) and Dickens’s Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit (1857), come to mind. On the other hand, Tenant can only achieve a conventional conclusion by maintaining its secret indefinitely. 28 Margaret Mary Berg (“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Anne Brontë’s Jane Eyre,” Victorian Newsletter 71 [Spring 1987]: 10-15) contrasts Gilbert and Hargrave “emphatically,” while Marianne Thormahlen (“Aspects of Love in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë, ed. 125 Julie Nash and Barbara A. Suess [Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001] 153-71) calls them doubles and focuses on what she sees as Helen’s desire for Hargrave. Debra Morse also sees the doubling, but believes that Gilbert is more “honorable” than Hargrave. I believe, however, that Helen’s refusals of Hargrave are clear and these readings support the “romanticization of the abuse of power” Hilary Schor discusses (ibid). 29 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore the technique of doubling extensively in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979). 30 Leona Toker coins the literary use of the term “extrapolation” in a study of novelistic repetition in Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1993). 31 Jan Gordon writes about the novel’s attempt to control the proliferating narratives (especially those constructed by gossip) surrounding Helen’s life, but she views Gilbert’s narrative control as beneficial for Helen (ibid). Also, we must distinguish between the two characters’ attempts to control their narratives. While Helen tries to control her reputation to protect herself and her son, Gilbert attempts to control Helen: by controlling his own and others’ narratives, Gilbert will win his “case” and Helen’s hand. His control is abusive and has the potential to harm Helen in the future (because she marries a violent man without knowing it). 32 The novel does provide a final, explicit note of forewarning in its final pages, during Helen’s proposal scene. Gilbert asks Helen, “‘But if you should repent!’” to which Helen answers without hesitation, “‘It would be your fault, . . . I never shall, unless you bitterly disappoint me’”—surely an ominous way to commence the marriage ending a novel (467). 126 Strange Connections: Adultery, Clerical Autonomy, and Divorce Law in Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel “Why, he asked, was he brought into this strange connection with Her relations and their story? what could be . . . the purpose of that Providence which shapes men’s ends, in interweaving his life with Hers by these links of common interest?” —Margaret Oliphant, Salem Chapel (120-21) Baffled by the web of circumstances entangling his staid clerical existence with the harried life of a poor seamstress, Arthur Vincent, the male protagonist of Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel (1863), asks himself the questions above, only to have them repeated—never satisfactorily answered—by the novel’s narrator. For over a century, critics have echoed Arthur’s confusion by denouncing the seeming implausibility of the “strange connection” between the novel’s parallel plots. 1 Accusing Oliphant of unaccountably joining a realistic plot with a sensational one, such scholars have neglected the novel’s temporal proximity to and discursive imbrication with the social repercussions of the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act. 2 During their debates over clauses in the Divorce Act regulating adultery and clerical autonomy, Members of Parliament unwittingly aligned abused wives and priests in ways that brought into focus both groups’ economic dependence upon their superiors. 3 I will argue here that Oliphant’s Salem Chapel, published six years after the passage of the 1857 Act, employs the very alignment Parliament had overlooked to criticize the law’s treatment of abused wives in unexpected ways. Formally, the novel juxtaposes the sensational and realistic plots of its two primary characters—an emotionally abused wife and an imposed-upon minister—and thus 127 invites a revealing comparison between the dilemmas confronting these protagonists. Resonating with Parliament’s debates, the novel’s content condemns the plot- determining gender disparities between men’s and women’s legal status. In the context of the newly ratified law, the alignment and eventual divergence of Salem Chapel’s plots unveil a nexus of contracts, authority, and ideology in the legal discourse that shackled real and fictional Victorian wives’ reputed moral authority. Although Oliphant’s novel reveals that nineteenth-century gender and domestic ideologies masked the harsh implications of divorce legislation, it simultaneously manifests her internalization of these ideologies: Salem Chapel breaks with convention even as it reinscribes it. My analysis of Salem Chapel within its legal context illustrates the subtle ways in which women’s novels engaged with the contemporary discourse of family law in a cultural and generic environment militating against such participation. 4 Because domestic ideologies and novelistic conventions constrained Oliphant from openly scrutinizing women’s legal disadvantages in her fiction, Oliphant had to finesse her criticism or risk relinquishing her fragile authority as a woman writer. Oliphant thus eschews forthright condemnation of the law, manipulating instead narrative techniques that covertly convey socially unpalatable messages to the reading public. 5 While critics have discredited Oliphant’s generic combination, I contend that the novel’s pairing of a wife’s sensational tale with a minister’s realistic plot interrogates the Victorian legal and economic constraints that left wives vulnerable to spousal abuse and jeopardized the coherence of families. In short, the 128 novel’s formal hybrid pits legal authority against the moral authority of what we might today call “family values,” and by implication against the women whom Victorian ideologies charged with protecting those values. Contrary to the criticism that this generic mix pollutes an otherwise realistic text, I argue that the nineteenth- century novel of marital conflict demanded this combination, and that Oliphant’s employment of sensation expanded the didactic dimensions of domestic fiction. Because my observations about Salem Chapel’s minister also apply to male characters (soldiers and factory workers, for example) in other Victorian fiction, this study has wide-ranging implications: like Oliphant, other Victorian novelists mobilized nineteenth-century anxieties over male employees’ economic dependence to cast an indirect light upon women’s legal disabilities. My study of the illumination of the heroine’s plot by the hero’s story in Salem Chapel demonstrates how one Victorian novelist transformed a dissenting minister straining against his lack of autonomy into an acceptable novelistic surrogate for abused wives mired in marital conflict. The 1857 Divorce Act’s Marital Dissolution and Remarriage Clauses After decades of neglected committee reports, rejected proposals, and derailed bills, England’s first Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act received the royal assent on August 28, 1857. 6 Parliament affected three primary changes with this statute: it transferred the formerly legislative procedure of divorce to a newly established judicial court; it reduced the cost of divorces; and it established distinct, 129 non-Ecclesiastical procedures for separations and divorces. 7 Reflecting Parliament’s divorce practices since the late seventeenth-century, the House of Lords’ marital dissolution clause allowed a husband to divorce his wife for any instance of adultery, while it permitted wives to divorce only if their husbands committed incestuous adultery (145: 822). 8 Disgusted by this glaring sexual inequality, the House of Commons attempted to liberalize the Lord’s clause by adding several new grounds for which women could divorce, including bigamous adultery, rape, sodomy, bestiality, “Adultery coupled with . . . Cruelty . . . or Desertion,” and adultery “committed in the conjugal residence.” Though the Lords reluctantly approved the majority of these additions, they struck “adultery committed in the conjugal residence” from the amended clause. After resolving some ineffectual complaints over this erasure, both houses ratified the new clause. 9 Hence, in 1857, Parliament implicitly sanctioned husbands’ adultery outside of or within the home as well as mistresses’ intrusions into the homes, the bedrooms, and even the beds wives shared with their husbands. Rancorous debate also erupted over the question of how granting the divorced permission to remarry would affect Anglican priests. Surprisingly progressive, the Lords’ remarriage clause empowered any divorced party, male or female, guilty or innocent of adultery, to remarry in both civil and religious services. 10 Bishops and church supporters in Parliament lamented the burden that performing second marriages would place on priests who believed the Christian Bible proclaimed the marriage contract indissoluble (145: 1415-20). In an attempt 130 to placate these dissenters, the Commons replaced the Lords’ clause with two new clauses: one permitting a conscientiously objecting minister to refuse to conduct second marriages, and the other compelling such a priest to surrender his church temporarily to another minister willing to execute that service. Though many in the House of Lords opposed these clauses, the majority eventually approved them. 11 Unfortunately, because the marital dissolution clause restricted the grounds for which women could now apply for a divorce, the remarriage clauses extended their balm to few unhappy wives. Consequently, wives and clergymen found themselves occupying similar cultural spaces: the Divorce Act implicitly authorized mistresses’ intrusions into wives’ homes and explicitly warranted a consenting priest’s encroachment on another clergyman’s church. Moreover, these seemingly disparate clauses authorized the performance of conjugal and clerical services (specifically, sex and the marriage ceremony) by these intruders. In so doing, the Act undermined the moral authority that Victorian ideologies theoretically granted ministers and wives. Most significantly, the Act revealed a conflict between domestic and religious ideologies, which expected women and ministers to cultivate the morality of other individuals, and English law, which denied them the legal authority and autonomy necessary to fulfill this obligation. 12 In addition to unintentionally forging these surprising cultural parallels, Members of Parliament on both sides of the issue often aligned wives and ministers by masking both groups’ economic dependence with the rhetoric of gender and domestic ideologies. These ideologies permeate the arguments of even the most 131 ardent supporters of gender equality in the adultery clauses. For instance, in his rebuttal of conservative arguments that women would petition for divorce over trivial spats, Lord Lyndhurst insisted that “[e]very man who has studied the female character must know that nothing but a long, deliberate, hopeless suffering—nothing but intolerable agony, would overcome her patient endurance—would induce her to come to the court for a divorce” (145: 502). Like Lyndhurst, most legislators recognized women’s propensity to endure much abuse, but they tended to ignore or misrepresent a common motivation for such tolerance: wives’ economic reliance upon their husbands. A discussion of this dependence could have edged MPs uncomfortably close to acknowledging the unsavory economic exchange between husbands and wives that underpinned the Victorian marriage contract. Dodging this contentious subject, they call women’s patience an aspect of the “female character,” a natural gender difference, thereby eliding the economic dependence binding wives to even abusive husbands. 13 Although legislators’ disregarded wives’ economic constraints in their arguments regarding the adultery clauses, their rhetoric concerning priests and remarriage equated the feelings, attitudes, and legal status of objecting ministers and abused wives in ways that unveiled the relationships between women’s “female character” and economic dependence. 14 I am arguing, in other words, that MPs’ consideration of clergymen’s property disabilities—conducted in terms strangely domestic and feminine—indirectly illuminated wives’ legal and economic disadvantages. Linked to legislators’ appeals for State protection of objecting priests 132 are qualms about the ministers’ domestic relationship to their property in the church. In the House of Commons, for example, a Mr. Malins bemoaned that one “could not touch a clergyman on a more tender point than the surrender of his church for the performance of any service of which he did not approve. The church was his freehold, was committed to his care” (147: 1871). Malins’s sentimental emphasis on the “tender point” of priests’ feelings for the buildings “committed to [their] care” echoes Victorian rhetoric describing women’s connections to their homes and families. His feminization of priests’ concern for their churches thus aligns domesticity and property overtly, and women and clergymen silently. These arguments regarding a clergyman’s relationship to his property in the church evoke the significance of what Margaret Jane Radin terms “personal property,” or property in which one has an emotional interest, but few or no legal rights. In Reinterpreting Property (1993), Radin theorizes that property is personal “if its loss causes pain that cannot be relieved by the object’s replacement,” while it is “fungible” if it is “perfectly replaceable with other goods of equal market value” (37). Radin asserts that people “constitute [them]selves as continuing personal entities in the world” in part via relationships to personal property, such as photo albums, family homes, and wedding rings (37). Radin’s theory values the emotional attachment to personal objects through which many people define themselves—a sentiment which figures prominently in the legislators’ discussions of clergymen’s relationships to their churches. 133 English Canon Law vested each beneficed Anglican clergyman with a “freehold” in his church, which held him to a large degree responsible for what happened in and to the building. However, as Canon Law scholar E. Garth Moore explains, “the rights of the incumbent as legal owner of the church and churchyard were so severely limited that in popular parlance he would scarcely be described as owner” (101). If an incumbent clergyman surrendered his living, for instance, he could not keep, rent, or alienate the church’s property; he had to find new housing and employment. And yet, over time, it is reasonable to assume that a priest could form an emotional attachment to the church in which he performed the clerical services by which he, at least in part, constituted his personhood. Dismissing these concerns, politicians focused on clergymen’s possible emotional responses to the encroachment this law authorized rather than on priests’ economic dependence upon the Church and State, which would oblige their compliance with that intrusion. Like ministers, wives could form emotional attachments to the buildings in which they resided and worked, but neither could own this property. Because wives and ministers could hold their domestic property only emotionally, they shared a diminished legal status. 15 In both cases, some MPs argued that the State should respect emotional relationships to property by preventing undesirable intrusions, though in the end, both ministers and wives discovered how few rights England granted them in what Radin would term their personal property. Most significantly, Victorian law bound the clergyman’s inability to control his personal property to his economic security: the minister was economically dependent upon the legal owners 134 of his church. Given the legal status they shared, a minister’s economic dependence upon the owner of his church, whether a diocese or a parish, informs a wife’s economic reliance upon the owner of her home, her husband. The differences between wives’ and clergymen’s legal circumstances, however, are at least as important as the similarities. It is to these vital divergences that Salem Chapel calls attention. 135 The Economic Realism of a Minister’s Place Salem Chapel is guilty of the generic crimes of which critics accuse it: it conducts its minister’s plot primarily in the realistic mode, while its abused wife’s plot relies heavily upon the sensational mode. A subject of contention in the 1860s, sensational fiction was denounced by many critics for (among other things) its arousal of heightened emotion and breaches of the bounds of probability. While Oliphant contributed to the contemporary blackening of the genre, she cleverly devised a loophole for her own fiction. In her Blackwood’s Magazine essay “Sensation Novels” (1862), Oliphant applauded sensation fiction in which the “means” employed to arouse sensation were “legitimate, natural, and possible” (566). Inveighing against novels that depended upon the “machinery of miracle,” the “overstraining of nature,” and “the wild devices of . . . romance which smil[e] at probabilities” for their emotional effects, Oliphant applauds Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White (1860) for thrilling readers with “the common mechanism of life, and by means of persons who might all be living in society for anything we can tell to the contrary” (565-66). With her praise of Collins’s “legitimate” folding of the sensational mode into a realistic narrative, Oliphant justifies the generic blending in her fiction. In her argument that Salem Chapel’s sensational plot helped to reshape realism itself, Marlene Tromp concludes that when Oliphant’s sensational heroines speak, they must do so “outside the normative cultural discourse—[in] the space labeled sensationalized . . . to narrate their experience” (157). Despite the dismissive attitude of critics towards sensation fiction, it is just such a liberating space that 136 makes this generic combination useful for Oliphant. Even this freedom, however, fails to deliver Oliphant from the mental fetters of Victorian ideology that constrain her narration of Rachel Mildmay’s story: she remains hesitant to represent the marital abuses Rachel suffers (including serial adultery and child abduction) or to criticize the law for its role in Rachel’s troubles. Oliphant’s reviews thus offer a nuanced perception of the sensational mode, one that suggests that blending sensation into an otherwise realistic novel can expand its instructive potential: together, Salem Chapel’s realistic and sensational plots tell readers more about Victorian law than either genre could have communicated singly. The plot of Salem Chapel that critics have admired traces a minister’s ambitious quest for autonomy, delineating the gradual dissolution of the clerical contract between Arthur Vincent and his Dissenting parish in Salem as well as Arthur’s eventual self-promotion to independent journal editor. Because Arthur is not an Anglican, the Divorce Act will not compel him to perform second marriages, but like the Anglicans discussed in the divorce debates, he does face an intrusion into his church and is obliged to conduct duties he considers repugnant. 16 Arthur’s story begins with his introduction to his new congregation and the “extracurricular” duties they expect of him as their minister: in addition to conventional clerical responsibilities, such as preaching and tending to the sick and dying, his parish expects him to participate as an equal in the community’s daily social gatherings. Though he objects to their meetings as frivolous, Arthur finds himself mired in his parish’s very material world—presiding over pretentious teas, declining advances 137 from a pink, plump butterman’s daughter, and mingling with self-aggrandizing poulterers. Compounding their disagreements over Arthur’s duties, Arthur insults his flock’s class sensibilities by romantically pursuing the beautiful, aristocratic widow, Lady Western. 17 A recent graduate of “Homerton” seminary, the socially ambitious and intellectually haughty Arthur expects a relatively solitary life of contemplation, one in which his parishioners will bow to the moral and spiritual authority he assumes his training and position have bestowed upon him. His congregation, on the other hand, believes their payment of the minister’s salary endows them with the authority to direct all of parish life—including the minister’s private activities. Although Arthur’s clerical contract is unarticulated in the text, his deacons make plain that it involves an exchange of clerical services for a salary. As one deacon, Mr. Tozer, admonishes Arthur, “‘If a minister ain’t a servant, we pays him his salary at the least, and expects him to please us’” (174). Summarizing his alternative perspective, Arthur declares to the Salem flock, “‘I am either your servant, responsible to you, or God’s servant, responsible to Him . . . . [N]o man can serve two masters’” (453). Nonetheless, the contract governing their exchange ensures that the congregation’s desires prevail: if Arthur refuses Salem’s extracurricular duties, the parish can simply fire him. This contract and Arthur’s resulting economic dependence undermine the moral authority he takes for granted. Because the Divorce Act sanctioned the execution of clerical duties by outsiders to a particular Anglican Church, it not only subverted priests’ moral authority, it simultaneously exposed the interchangeability of ministers and the 138 fungibility of their services, unsavory circumstances that Arthur confronts in his dispute with his congregation. Midway through the novel, Arthur leaves Salem in a failed attempt to rescue his sister, Susan Vincent, whom Rachel Mildmay’s estranged husband has seduced and abducted. To rectify his absence, Arthur invites a colleague, Mr. Beecher, to provide Salem’s religious services. Although Arthur proposes this substitution, he seems to experience the presence of this other minister in his church performing his services as a displacement not unlike adultery. Arthur thinks “with a certain pang of Salem, and that pulpit which was his own, but in which another man should stand to-morrow, with a quickened thrill of something that was almost jealousy” (208). By animating Arthur’s jealousy for “his own” pulpit with the gestational adjective “quickened,” Oliphant feminizes Arthur and imbues him with some of the clerical domestic feeling predicted in Parliament. Despite his annoyance with his parishioners’ social demands, Arthur indicates with this reflection that he has developed possessive feelings for his pulpit even in the short time he has occupied it. 18 In Margaret Radin’s terms, Arthur “constitutes [himself]” through his property in the church: he defines himself in part through the religious services he provides within its doors. We might consequently regard Salem Chapel as Arthur’s “personal property,” over which he commands as little power as a wife holds over her household. Arthur discovers his interchangeability when his parishioners cheerfully embrace Mr. Beecher as he delivers the accustomed Sunday sermon in Arthur’s place. Their easy substitution awakens Arthur to his true status in the community. 139 His flock esteems him less as a respected, integral part of the congregation, and more as a tool: they value his personality, knowledge, and orational skills not for themselves, but for the “pew rents” they can draw. 19 Their primary concern with profits commodifies the minister’s services and his supposedly sacred connection with his flock. Salem Chapel, then, unmasks the economic relationship between a parish and its minister that MPs like Malins had attempted to sentimentalize with a rhetoric of domesticity. Arthur’s fictional dilemma and the legal discourse clarify that the Victorian world derived final authority not from morality, but from law, contracts, and wealth. With the contractual and economic contexts suppressed by the debates made visible by the novel, Arthur’s response to Beecher’s trespass manifests the outrage and hurt conservative politicians presaged conscientiously objecting priests would experience as a result of the Divorce Act’s remarriage clauses. 20 As Oliphant’s novel evacuates the sentiment from Parliament’s representation of the relationship between a minister and his parish, it indicts this fictional community’s— and the law’s—transfer of moral authority from a man of the cloth to wealthy buttermen and poulterers. Oliphant spotlights Arthur’s attenuated authority and his contractual contest with his parish by staging dramatic mock-trial scenes, thereby assimilating into her novel a modified legal discourse that evokes the Divorce Act’s recent controversies. Responding to Arthur’s temporary abandonment of his pulpit and his reluctance to participate in all of Salem’s social hours, Salem conducts a “solemn tribunal,” during which many censure Arthur’s unsatisfactory performance of what they consider his 140 clerical responsibilities (380). In so doing, the novel highlights the contractual nature of their dispute. In his defense of Arthur, Mr. Tozer attempts to redefine the terms of Salem’s contract with their minister, suggesting that their social expectations may be inappropriate for a clerical contract, and that perhaps they need to judge only his fulfillment of more orthodox clerical obligations (387). Arthur’s resignation speech, which serves the dual purpose of a defensive testimony, also criticizes the terms of his contract with the parish. Specifically, he censures the parish’s economic perspective of his job: “[W]hat I received from you I can but render up to you. I resign into your hands your pulpit, which you have erected with your money, and hold as your property. I cannot hold it as your vassal” (453). Arthur’s declaration suggests that he cannot discharge his clerical responsibilities without absolute ownership of his pulpit. With her quick allusion to feudalism in the term “vassal,” Oliphant simultaneously links property, economic dependence, and authority. Thus she makes explicit in Arthur’s disputes with his parish the very connections she obscures in Rachel Mildmay’s plot. A Wife’s Sensational Fall In sharp contrast to the detail with which Salem Chapel treats Arthur Vincent’s contract dissolution plot, the novel offers readers only broken promises of storytelling about its heroine’s attempts to dissolve her failed marriage. Repeatedly, Rachel and other characters pledge to tell the stories of Rachel’s abusive marriage and her attempt to murder her estranged husband, but instead they tell their tales 141 offstage or fade out of the novel. The connections between Arthur’s and Rachel’s parallel plots, to which the novel’s narrator and characters repeatedly call readers’ attention, invite us to mine Arthur’s plot to furnish some of the details missing from Rachel’s story. Although Rachel’s plot shares elements of the stories created by Parliament for abused wives, her attempts to resolve her abuse diverge from the latter by offering an alternative portrait of a woman confronted with her husband’s adulteries. Two types of betrayed women appear in the divorce debates: one a “homeless, helpless, hopeless” victim whose lustful husband flaunts his extramarital sexuality in her home, often with the family’s domestic servants or guests; the other a conniving woman using the law to obtain a divorce by “plac[ing] in . . . [the husband’s] way an intriguing chambermaid, who might induce him to forget what he owed to himself and to society, and cause him to yield to temptation to which he had been designedly subjected” (142: 410; 147: 2030). Oliphant’s rejection of Parliament’s “helpless” victim and pandering wife plots for her heroine brands Rachel an outlaw from the Victorian novel. And while Oliphant could not openly sanction Rachel’s refusal to play the Victorian victim, she could, and did, authorize Rachel’s behavior indirectly by warranting Arthur’s surrogate rebellion and quest for autonomy. While the text offers readers no specific evidence about what Rachel suffered in her marriage with Mildmay, Rachel’s words and other characters’ speculations point to various domestic abuses, none codified as criminal in English law. From Rachel, we learn that Mildmay “blasted [their daughter’s] life before she was born, 142 and confused her sweet mind for ever”; the novel thereby cryptically suggests that Mildmay infected Rachel and her unborn child with venereal disease (106). 21 We learn more from a minor character who, after informing Arthur that Rachel is “in hiding” from her estranged husband, admits she “can’t exactly tell” why Rachel’s husband is pursuing their daughter, but that she suspects him of plotting to “sell her somehow, either to be married, or worse—” (28, 253). Indeed, the novel “can’t exactly tell” what “worse” plans Mildmay has for his daughter; no respectable Victorian novel can. In this bare-bones storytelling, we see that Oliphant’s impulses regarding genre often conflict: although she approved of the “legitimate” use of sensationalism, she here manufactures a plot around the existence of domestic abuse, but stops short of representing that abuse. This discrepancy also suggests the difficulty Oliphant experienced as a female writer in negotiating the contradictions in Victorian ideology regarding women. 22 Compounding his previous unspecified abuses, the upper-class Mildmay later breaks the Parliamentary mold circumscribing wife-beating within the working classes by threatening Rachel with a murderous physical assault. 23 Rather than submitting docilely to Mildmay’s abuses and threats, however, Rachel severs her marital contract with him without recourse to a legal separation and abducts her adolescent daughter when she flees. She thus flouts the 1839 Custody Act, which afforded women the right to petition for custody of their children under seven years of age, but denied them custodial rights to their older children. 24 Rachel’s plot then veers irretrievably into the sensational. First, Oliphant outlines Rachel’s attempt to murder Mildmay after he absconds with their daughter, 143 and by the novel’s end, Oliphant suggests that Rachel has declined into madness by confiding that she “wander[s]” aimlessly through town, a “restless soul” (460). Oliphant’s amendment of the Parliamentary plots constructed for betrayed wives allows her to represent maternal strength in the face of legal constraints even as she dramatizes the dehumanizing effect of the law with Rachel’s apparent madness. To be sure, Salem Chapel judges Rachel harshly at times, but the novel’s revision of the legal discourse intimates an underlying ambivalence on Oliphant’s part regarding Rachel’s decisions. This ambivalence may engender the tension between “moral and didactic” and “emotional and psychological” economies that, according to Lyn Pykett, often coexist uneasily in women’s sensation novels (130). In Salem Chapel, these conflicting economies reflect Oliphant’s attempt to deal with contradictory Victorian ideologies about women and families. These tensions are most obvious in the text’s treatment of Rachel and her distressing circumstances: the novel morally condemns Rachel’s violent protection of her daughter even as it elicits sympathy for her as a mother legally oppressed by her husband. While the most obvious condemnation of Rachel’s illegal, and thus sensational, choices takes the form of her madness at the novel’s close, the text rebukes Rachel in more subtle ways as well. In part, the novel censures Rachel’s defiance of the law by sanctioning the proper model of Victorian motherhood exhibited by Arthur’s mother, Mrs. Vincent. Most telling is a selective focalization by the omniscient narrator: though both Mrs. Vincent and Rachel attempt to rescue their children from harm or ruin, the narrator depicts Mrs. 144 Vincent’s psychological distress comprehensively but omits Rachel’s perspective of her equally maternal quest. 25 The novel’s portrayal of Mrs. Vincent’s plot edifies potentially wayward female readers. For example, because defending her son publicly during his “trial” would breach social mores, Mrs. Vincent instead exploits Mr. Tozer’s religious pride before the trial, warning him that parishes’ social expectations for and restrictions upon ministers have lately caused many promising young Dissenters to “‘throw it all up’” (364). Salem Chapel rewards Mrs. Vincent’s manipulative mode of agency when Tozer unconsciously appropriates her line of reasoning in his own public defense of Arthur. This proves to be a successful maneuver: the congregation absolves Arthur and extends a renewed welcome to him as their minister. In contrast to her verbal machinations in her son’s case, Mrs. Vincent employs lies and silences to quell the gossip concerning Susan’s seduction and kidnapping and to suppress the town’s suspicion that Susan attempted to murder Mildmay in retribution for his crimes against her. 26 Like the alignment of Arthur’s and Rachel’s tales, the correspondences between Rachel’s and Mrs. Vincent’s maternal plots make the omissions in Rachel’s story conspicuous. The passionate details of Rachel’s story may be too controversial to represent in the realist novel, but there is more to the narrator’s selectivity than generic reticence: a judgment resonates in this silence. By focalizing the narrative through Mrs. Vincent’s perspective during her maternal quest but sketching only faintly Rachel’s rescue attempt and viewpoint, the narrative privileges the former woman’s quiet, “proper” 145 methods of mothering and condemns Rachel’s actions as inappropriate for life or narrative. Yet even as this narrative selectivity censures Rachel’s maternal model, the novel extends sympathy to this outlaw mother by highlighting the legal disparities between Arthur’s and Rachel’s “cases.” The novel’s inclusion of Arthur’s “trial” underscores the absence of a legal, or even fictional, trial for Rachel. Salem Chapel’s mock trial marks a crucial divergence between Arthur’s and Rachel’s plots by demonstrating the relative ease with which Arthur can dissolve his clerical contract in order to negotiate a contract more gratifying to his ambition. Whereas Victorian law rendered the marriage contract nearly insoluble for women, it regarded the contract binding a clergyman to a parish, like most other English contracts, as soluble: one party could legally terminate a compact if the other party breached its contractual obligations. 27 Arthur’s gender also permits him an economic latitude inconceivable for a Victorian woman: as his mother simpers while defending her son to Mr. Tozer, “‘an accomplished young man has so many ways of getting on now’” (364). 28 Indeed, Oliphant’s clerical plot validates Mrs. Vincent’s supposition by representing Arthur’s eventual abandonment of his pulpit for a more autonomous position as the founder and editor of a philosophical journal. In short, the novel provides a forum for Arthur and his parishioners to arbitrate the contract with which both parties are dissatisfied as well as an account of Arthur’s relatively simple process of dissolving and establishing contracts. On the other hand, Rachel’s substitution of her own form of maternal justice for a trial of her domestic “case” 146 subtly reminds readers that without laws prohibiting Mildmay’s excesses, Rachel could not protest his marital transgressions with any tangible result. 29 Throughout Salem Chapel, Oliphant’s mixed and incomplete representations in Rachel’s plot begin to create a space for the unpalatable realities of marital strife within the domestic novel. Salem Chapel also elicits sympathy for Rachel by demonstrating indirectly the property disadvantages and economic dependence she shares with Arthur Vincent. In contrast to its open examination of Arthur’s property rights, however, the novel only gestures toward Rachel’s lack of control over her “personal” property in each domestic space she inhabits, including the impoverished home she establishes in Salem. 30 While living with Mildmay, Rachel could not secure her conjugal residence from sexual intrusions without legal backing, nor could she defend her new home in Salem from further encroachments. Although she quakes at Mildmay’s violations of the refuges she creates for herself and her daughter, Alice, she has no legal recourse to prevent them: he is not committing any crime; she is. As an estranged wife without separation orders, any property Rachel procures with money she earns can be legally entered or confiscated by Mildmay. Moreover, like Arthur’s personal property in his church, Rachel’s property in her former home with Mildmay was linked directly to her economic stability. The novel illustrates Arthur’s economic reliance upon his parish employers, while it evades a discussion of Rachel’s dependence upon her husband with a focus on her labors as a seamstress. In her efforts to protect Alice, Rachel has assumed a new 147 identity, sewn for income, and paid another woman to care for Alice. Rachel’s sewing simultaneously denies and hints at her economic dependence: the novel presents her as independent but poor, yet history assures us that a seamstress could barely support herself, let alone pay another woman to raise her adolescent daughter. Rachel’s occupation was traditionally associated with prostitution, primarily because seamstresses’ wages were so meager as to disable women’s economic independence. This association, of course, adds another layer of condemnation to Rachel’s character even as it censures women’s limited economic opportunities. Significantly, when she deserts her marital contract, Rachel confronts more dire circumstances than does Arthur—a Victorian woman would be hard pressed to establish and edit a philosophical journal. The novel’s preoccupation with Rachel’s continual sewing and bleeding fingers displaces any speculation about the source of her dependence from unjust family laws to the limited economic opportunities available for single women. Both factors, of course, contributed to women’s dependence, but the novel shies away from blaming marriage law explicitly, and accuses women’s limited opportunities only implicitly. When studied alongside similar explorations of economic issues in other women’s novels (such as Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley [1849] and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South [1855]), this narrative choice suggests that women writers felt more at liberty to scrutinize economic inequities than those related to family law. At first glance, we might consider this ironic given the “natural” domestic authority Victorian ideologies theoretically granted women. I would argue, however, that the narrative decision to substitute economic matters for 148 family issues plainly reveals the fiction of this reputed authority. Victorian culture may have authorized women like Brontë, Gaskell, and Oliphant to write about courtship, marriage, and interpersonal relationships, but the same culture often admonished women writing about marital conflict, as it did Anne Brontë for penning The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Alternately, critics clothed disapproval of “inappropriate” content with condemnation of a novel’s quality, as they did, in fact, in the case of Oliphant’s Salem Chapel. The different degrees of freedom women possessed to interrogate economic versus family matters is further suggested by the juxtaposition of the novel’s comic and tragic modes: while Oliphant softens Beecher’s trespass into Arthur’s church with class-biased comedy, her allusions to the two domestic invasions suffered by Rachel are unambiguously tragic. Mildmay exhibits Rachel’s interchangeability as his lover first with the unnamed mistress who apparently infects him with venereal disease, and later with the naïve Susan Vincent. Mirroring the implications of Arthur’s crisis, Rachel’s interchangeability suggests the fungibility of her conjugal services and undermines her moral authority. Just as the novel imperfectly conceals Rachel’s dependence upon her husband, it also subtly reveals the broken terms of their economic, marital exchange. When juxtaposed with Rachel’s marital dissolution plot, the novel’s explicit recognition of Arthur’s clerical services as commodities to be purchased evokes a comparison with Rachel’s legal status and marital services, including her maintenance of her family as well as her sexual, reproductive, and childrearing labors. 31 With regard to women’s conjugal duties, 149 Victorian discourses conflicted: enacted laws and the market economy commodified wives’ marital services, while novels and middle-class norms promoted companionate marriage ideals, which disguised the economic implications of marriage by constructing conjugal duties in more affectionate terms. 32 Under the archaic family model reasserted by the 1857 divorce law, mistresses could enter married couples’ domestic realms, where, in exchange for their sexual services and companionship, they often received goods, services, or housing from their lovers. This sanctioned negotiation in turn suggests the wife’s similarly dependent and commodified position: in return for her conjugal services, her husband shelters and supports her. Mildmay’s adulteries sabotage the expected marital exchange and expose the obvious: Victorians could obtain the performance of sexual services outside of the bonds of the marriage contract. Mildmay’s eventual admission that he intends to coerce his daughter into a lucrative marriage, moreover, suggests that he has few qualms about exchanging women for financial gain. 33 As Shirley Jones observes in her analysis of sensation novels, “for many [sensation] readers what is brought to light is not unknown, but unacknowledged” (247). While Salem Chapel may indeed “expose” known elements of Victorian society, it is nonetheless daring for a woman’s novel to admit that some fathers and husbands regard women and sexual activity purely as commodities, exchangeable for the right amount of cash (or goods or services). Such an admission chafes against the assumption of domestic ideologies that male-headed families naturally offer protection for their vulnerable female members. 150 Salem Chapel Cross-Examines the Divorce Act When we analyze the legal and economic contexts surrounding Arthur’s and Rachel’s parallel stories, we see that both plots highlight a distinction between legal and moral authority that guts any agency held by the latter. When Members of Parliament consciously refused to grant women the right to divorce their husbands for adultery “committed in the conjugal residence,” they contradicted the popular Victorian notion that wives possessed an inherent moral authority over domestic matters. Thus, while legal discourse subordinated wives’ rights to their husbands’, the domestic novel and Victorian ideologies attempted to justify this oppression with the story that wives had a feminine moral influence over their husbands within the domestic realm. Rachel’s economic dependence upon her husband leaves little room for her to wield this presumed influence, however. Wives and clergymen occupied similar cultural and legal spaces in the mid-Victorian era, and Oliphant deploys this likeness to make plain that women, though expected to nurture the emotional and moral development of their families, could not satisfy this responsibility without legal rights and protections. Consequently, wives might educate their husbands as to the religious, moral, or emotional transgression they committed via adultery, but the 1857 Divorce Act contradicted such lessons by warranting men’s extra-marital sexuality within the home. As her desperate flight from her conjugal home suggests, any possible exertion of Rachel’s moral influence to prevent or halt Mildmay’s early sexual 151 transgressions failed. More explicit in the novel is the ineffectiveness of Rachel’s moral authority in regard to the inequalities of custody law. While Salem Chapel frequently admonishes readers against following Rachel’s passionate but illegal path, it alternately invites us to commiserate with Rachel in her quest to shield her daughter from Mildmay’s impulse to marry her to the highest bidder. Though we might assume that Mildmay’s past domestic abuses would qualify Rachel for custody by default, Mildmay avers counterintuitively that “no court in Christendom would keep . . . [Alice] from my custody now” (105). Mildmay is right: the 1839 Custody Act did not identify adultery or violence as disqualifications of fathers’ custodial rights. 34 Oliphant’s novel never specifies what transgressions might have disbarred Mildmay from custody before “now,” but his attempts to regain custody within the novel’s time frame coincide with his adulterous pursuit of Susan Vincent, reflecting the many cases in which courts granted custody to adulterous men. 35 In this, the most direct reference to the novel’s legal context, Mildmay’s quick mention of custody law intimates an alignment between Victorian and Christian law. However, Mildmay oversimplifies the relationship between these two legal codes. Although the majority of legislators and Anglican bishops cited biblical passages to deny divorce and remarriage privileges for women, others appealed to Christian principles of equality in their arguments advocating gender parity in the Divorce Act. 36 Nevertheless, the novel’s reference to “court[s] in Christendom” ironically denounces the Anglican Church’s complicity in wives’ oppression. 152 Salem Chapel directly opposes Mildmay’s exploitative fathering with Rachel’s parental fitness by portraying her diligent labor to support her daughter, as well as her voluntary sacrifice of living separately from her daughter the better to protect her. In the context of Rachel’s plot, Mildmay’s assumptions regarding custody demonstrate that Parliament’s adherence to patriarchal models of family law yielded obvious transgressions of fairness and a neglect of children’s welfare. It is clear that Rachel’s moral authority counts for little in her endeavor to protect her daughter; the law interdicts what she considers a moral path for her alternative family. The novel thus reveals the moral authority Victorian society putatively afforded wives to be virtually useless when confronted with legal opposition. What’s more, it makes plain that this absence of agency had serious implications for the Victorian concept of the ideal family: despite their “feminine influence,” women lacking legal agency could not keep families intact nor prevent domestic abuses. The novel’s evocation of sympathy for Rachel’s illegal decisions thus gestures toward a moral alternative to Mildmay’s abusive paternal, legal authority. After the text openly establishes that an economic contract supersedes Arthur’s moral authority, the novel’s juxtaposition of plots transgressively implies a similar conclusion for Rachel’s case: the legal sanctioning of Mildmay’s adulteries and kidnapping, combined with Rachel’s economic dependence upon her husband and inability to obtain a divorce, subvert her purported power to oversee the morality of her domestic realm. The parallel plots thereby point to the legal disabilities enforcing Rachel’s powerlessness and eventually driving her mad. By imbricating 153 itself within this legal discourse, Salem Chapel censures what legislators strove to ignore or disguise in their debates: the impossibility under the Victorian marriage contract of a conjugal realm free from the contamination of economic transactions or of a functional moral authority for wives. Salem Chapel’s unraveling of the connections between its superficially parallel plots condemns this archaic, yet legal, model of the marriage contract. The novel’s generic hybrid highlights the gender disparities in Arthur’s and Rachel’s dilemmas; it thereby protests the inequalities perpetuated by the Divorce Act and dramatized by Rachel’s marriage with Mildmay. It is in their resolutions that these plots diverge most significantly. Conforming in part to generic convention, the novel forecasts Arthur’s favorable prospects: his journal is a success, and Oliphant hints that he may someday marry Rachel’s daughter, Alice. Conversely, it shrouds Rachel’s future in mystery: readers learn only that Chancery grants Mrs. Vincent guardianship of Rachel’s daughter and that Rachel, though sheltered by her loving sister-in-law, drifts distracted through life, suffering the loss of her daughter interminably. In a later Blackwood’s essay, Oliphant praises fiction in which “wicked people are punished and . . . good people are rewarded,” yet Salem Chapel fails to square completely with its author’s critical opinion: though the novel rewards Arthur with the autonomy he craves and the promise of a happy marriage, it does not punish Mildmay’s abuses (“Novels” 261). In fact, the novel omits many details about the legal and social repercussions of Rachel’s and Mildmay’s violence. Hence, the novel’s closure, or lack thereof, vexes its portrayal of Rachel further. In one way, Salem Chapel’s conclusion granted 154 Victorian readers the moral satisfaction of witnessing the seemingly providential punishment of an outlaw mother, first with the custodial loss of her child and then with madness. Because Mildmay never names his attacker, on the other hand, neither the law nor Rachel’s society prosecutes her for her attempted murder of her husband. Indeed, the novel never contains the threat these flawed spouses pose to the Victorian family ideal. This ambivalent ending speaks to the difficulty Oliphant must have confronted in writing about gender inequality and its familial repercussions during the Victorian era. Oliphant’s nuanced attitude toward genre helps her navigate this perilous terrain, however: to the benefit of her novel, she submits to some of the restraints of domestic realism, but her plot for Rachel resists the respectable closure characteristic of the genre. Salem Chapel thus demonstrates the ways in which sensationalism and realism were—contrary to the critics who dismissed the novel as a failure—codependent in the novel of marital conflict. Oliphant was not the only Victorian novelist to censure legal inequities indirectly by employing metaphorical substitutions for the constraints of marriage. George Eliot’s Romola is only the closest and most interesting example: Eliot’s eponymous heroine compares her marital oppression with Girolamo Savonarola’s persecution by Catholic authorities. This is an especially intriguing similarity, for Eliot serialized Romola in Cornhill Magazine from July 1862 to August 1863, immediately following—even overlapping—Oliphant’s serial publication of Salem Chapel in Blackwood’s Magazine from February 1862 to January 1863. Elizabeth Gaskell’s and Charlotte Brontë’s novels, on the other hand, enlist plots about 155 working-class men oppressed by tyrannous superiors to highlight the men’s limitations while indirectly alluding to women’s legal disadvantages. My analysis of Salem Chapel therefore invites a reconsideration of women’s novelistic participation in the discourse of family law. Though Victorian conventions hindered women from challenging the double standards ingrained in English law, this study illustrates that women could stage such a protest by deftly interweaving genres in their novels. Such a hybridization allows Salem Chapel to transfer the seat of a humane morality from England’s legal and religious institutions to two individuals: a man who achieves autonomy in the Victorian free marketplace and a woman who is trampled by the law. An examination of Salem Chapel’s legal context thus reveals that the “strange connections” linking Oliphant’s two plots are not so strange, after all. 156 Chapter 3 Endnotes 1 In their influential study, The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and the Victorian Literary Market Place, Vineta and Robert A. Colby note that Spectator (14 February 1863) recommended that the “‘Mildmay melodrama’” be “‘removed from the book by some neat surgical operation’” (49). The Colbys maintained this complaint and set the tone of most subsequent criticism by condemning the novel as an artistic failure in 1966 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966). More recently, a few scholars, including Shirley Jones (“Motherhood and Melodrama: Salem Chapel and Sensation Fiction,” Women’s Writing; the Elizabethan to Victorian Period 6.2 [1999]: 239-250) and Marlene Tromp (The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain [Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000]), have worked to rescue the novel’s reputation; this essay advances that recuperative project. 2 All citations of the Divorce Act refer to “An Act to Amend the Law Relating to Divorce and Matrimonial Causes in England, 1857” (20 & 21 Victoria, c. 85). 3 Although there is no evidence that MPs recognized the correspondences their rhetoric constructed between wives and clergymen, reading their arguments as I did, day after day without the interruptions of other bills, makes these connections conspicuous to a twenty-first-century reader. 4 I use the admittedly anachronistic term “family law” to denote succinctly nineteenth-century laws related to marriage, child-custody, and violence in families. 5 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2 nd ed. [New Haven: Yale UP, 2000]), Mary Poovey (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984]), and Susan Sniader Lanser (Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992]) are among the critics who have explored the narrative techniques with which women writers criticized Victorian culture covertly. While Oliphant’s form and content produce the cultural critiques I discuss, it is difficult to know the degree to which she intended this effect. A future study of historical texts associated with Oliphant’s life could yield some fascinating speculations about her intentions as she planned the structure of her novel, but such a study falls outside the parameters of this analysis. 6 The passage of the bill is documented at 3 Hansard 147 [1857] 2088. In these endnotes, I cite Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates as follows: the number preceding “Hansard” refers to the series number; the number following “Hansard” denotes the volume number of the series; the year is in brackets; the column number follows the year. Parenthetical citations within this essay list first the volume 157 number and then the column number (all citations in this essay are from Hansard’s Third Series). 7 Until 1857, an unhappy couple could obtain a divorce a mensa et thoro (a separation from bed and board that prohibited remarriage) or an annulment from an Ecclesiastical court. However, a couple wanting a divorce a vinculo matrimonii (an absolute divorce allowing remarriage) before 1857 had to pay Parliament to pass an act dissolving their marriage contract completely. For the remainder of this paper, I follow the convention set by the Divorce Act by substituting the terms “divorce” for “divorce a vinculo” and “separation” for “divorce a mensa et thoro.” The new Divorce Court did not lower the price of divorce enough for the majority of Britons to benefit. 8 Because I am concerned primarily with Parliament’s treatment of adultery in the dissolution clause, I often substitute the term “adultery clause” for “marital dissolution clause” throughout this study. 9 Supporters of the Lords’ clause argued that history, a human “consensus,” and society’s standards justified the double standard. Of course, property and inheritance also figured in these debates, though generally in an indirect fashion. See 20 & 21 Victoria, c. 85, clause 27 for the final clause and 3 Hansard 147 [1857] 2014-68 for the Lords’ debates about these proposed amendments. 10 For the purposes of this essay, I use the terms “second marriage” and “remarriage” interchangeably to refer to any divorced person contracting a subsequent, non-bigamous marriage, generally with someone other than the spouse they originally divorced. 11 See 20 & 21 Victoria, c. 85, clauses 57-58. 12 As Nancy Armstrong observes in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, a mutually reinforcing confluence of Evangelicalism, industrialism, and domestic ideology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constructed women as possessing an innate morality, and therefore as “natural” domestic managers and moral authorities. Armstrong explains that women were supposedly granted “authority over the household, leisure time, courtship procedures, and kinship relations, and under [their] jurisdiction the most basic qualities of human identity were supposed to develop” (3). The assumption that women were naturally self-sacrificing in the interests of their families, as Armstrong discusses, was frequently used to strip women of the very authority that domestic ideologies supposedly granted them (New York: Oxford UP, 1987). 13 While the Divorce Act granted physically abused wives separations under the ground of “cruelty,” it (combined with judicial practice) refused them complete divorces unless the abuse endangered life or limb and was accompanied by adultery, requirements which translated into abused wives’ continued economic dependence 158 upon their husbands. I use the common abbreviation for Members of Parliament, MPs, throughout this essay. 14 See Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture for a discussion of the “feminizing” effect on ministers of the converging roles of nineteenth-century American clergymen and women (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). 15 J. H. Baker surmises that priests’ legal disabilities may harken back to a time when monks were considered legally dead, whereas wives’ legal disabilities derive from the marital doctrine of coverture, which subsumed a wife’s personhood into her husbands’ and limited wives’ ability to write wills, enter contracts, sue, or own most types of property (Introduction to English Legal History, 4 th ed. [London: Butterworths LexisNexis, 2002]). 16 Owen Chadwick explains in The Victorian Church that in 1836 “twin acts of marriage and registration . . . provided that from 1 March 1837 any proprietor or trustee of a dissenting chapel might apply to the registrar to register his chapel as a place for marriages” (New York: Oxford UP, 1966-1970) 144. The law permitted these marriages to conform to the dissenting groups’ practices, rather than to standards set by the Church of England. 17 Arthur’s attitude may seem unusual given the representations of ministers’ duties in the bulk of Victorian fiction, and while Oliphant (a member of the Free Church of Scotland) often presents Arthur as snooty and overly ambitious, she sympathizes with her character in this matter, as her comedy at the parishioners’ expense and Arthur’s positive plot outcome indicate. 18 From another angle, this passage represents Arthur much like a jealous husband. Such a reading sexualizes and feminizes the church. 19 For an excellent analysis of the parish’s economic motivations, see “History and Literary ‘Value’: The Case of Adam Bede and Salem Chapel” by Peter Widdowson, Paul Stigant, and Peter Brooker (Literature and History 5 [1979]: 2- 39). 20 Oliphant adds comedy to this exhibition of outrage, perhaps to shield herself from the criticism she might have suffered for polemically entering a debate over family law. Beecher is a rather ridiculous figure, as is Phoebe, the young woman who throws herself first at Arthur, and later (successfully) at Beecher. 21 While the novel never explicitly confirms venereal disease in Rachel or Alice, the verb “blast” seems to have been used as a literary euphemism for its transmission at least since William Blake published “London” in 1791: “. . . But most thro’ midnight streets I hear/How the youthful Harlot’s curse/Blasts the new- born infant’s tear,/And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse” (The Norton 159 Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, et. al., 6 th ed., Vol. 2 [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993] 39). I am grateful to Hilary Schor for this reference. 22 In fact, Oliphant embodied these contradictions in her life. Though she contested feminist arguments in her published work through the 50s and 60s, she supported several indolent and improvident male relatives with the proceeds of her writing. In her later life, she began to write in support of feminist causes. See Vineta and Robert A. Colby’s The Equivocal Virtue for additional biographical details (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966) and D. J. Trela’s Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive for essays exploring Oliphant’s self- contradictions (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1995). 23 The Parliamentary reports, debates, and statutes concerning the 1853 Aggravated Assaults Act construct wife batterers primarily as working-class louts who return from the pub only to pocket their wives’ hard-won earnings (16 Victoria, c. 30). Salem Chapel’s narrator confides after Mildmay raises a walking stick to strike Rachel that Rachel “never knew how near . . . she was at that moment to the unseen world” (108). 24 2 & 3 Victoria, c. 54. 25 In “Motherhood and Melodrama: Salem Chapel and Sensation Fiction,” Shirley Jones observes that a comparison of Mrs. Vincent’s and Rachel Mildmay’s narratives undermines Rachel’s subversive attitude toward women’s subordinate status (Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 6.2 [1999]: 239- 250). 26 In “‘No Longer Innocent’; Sensationalism, Sexuality, and the Allegory of the Woman Writer in Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel,” Tamar Heller observes that the Salem newspapers violate Susan by commodifying her sensational story (Nineteenth-Century Studies 11 [1997]: 95-108). The novel’s preoccupation with the local newspapers’ treatment of Susan’s story suggests that this commodification of women’s stories is too powerful a force for the stoic Mrs. Vincent or the novel to stifle. 27 In A Practical Treatise of the Law of Marriage and Divorce, Leonard Shelford observes that the insolubility of the marriage contract was unique in Victorian law (Philadelphia: John S. Littell, 1841). The gendered restrictions of the 1857 Divorce Act made divorce for women very difficult. Hugh Collins explicates the variety of reasons for which parties can terminate contracts in The Law of Contract (London: Butterworths, 1993). 160 28 While there are, of course, limits to the “freedom” Arthur has in his capacity to contract his services, as a well-educated, white, middle-class Englishman, he is free to take advantage of a new opportunity if one arises. 29 The format of Arthur’s trial procedure evokes another criticism of common law. Common law rules of evidence prohibited wives from testifying in their own defense during criminal conversation proceedings, during which a husband and a man accused of adultery testified about a wife’s behavior. Similarly, Arthur discovers that his flock has called a meeting to discuss his fate as their minister, and that he is not invited (376). Unlike Rachel, however, Arthur has a pulpit—he thus organizes a second meeting the following night to defend himself (376). 30 To protect Alice from Mildmay, Rachel establishes herself and her daughter in separate residences. Although this living arrangement is unconventional, I use the term “domestic” to describe it because Rachel intends to serve a maternal purpose by living separately. 31 In “Home as Work: The First Woman’s Rights Claims Concerning Wives’ Household Labor, 1850-1880,” Reva Siegel evaluates the nineteenth-century common law “doctrine of marital status,” which “made a husband owner of his wife’s labor” (Yale Law Journal 103.5 [1994]: 1073-1217) 1076. This right extended not only to wives’ waged labor, but also to their unpaid domestic labor. See Jeanne Boydston’s Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor for an analysis of the economic value produced by domestic labor (New York: Oxford UP, 1990). 32 In The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, Lawrence Joseph Stone describes the “closed restricted nuclear” marriage, which more recent critics call “companionate” marriage. Stone argues that this family model was based “as much on expectations of lasting mutual affection as on calculations of an increase in money, status or power” (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) 656. 33 In a conversation with Rachel, Mildmay insists that he “want[s] the girl for her own good—she shall marry brilliantly” (105). 34 2 & 3 Victoria, c. 54. 35 The debates leading up to the 1839 Custody and 1857 Divorce Acts discuss such cases at length; see, for example, 3 Hansard 44 [1838] 772-791. 36 Oliphant’s devout Christianity further complicates her text’s alignment of Christian and English law. It is possible that with Mildmay’s comment, Oliphant is calling for reform in the Church or perhaps criticizing what she perceives as the misuse of the Christian Bible to support the sexual double standard in English law. 161 “Illegitimate Fathers”: Fatherhood and English Bastardy Law in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda To consider what “anybody” would say, was to be released from the difficulty of judging where everything was obscure to her when feeling had ceased to be decisive. She had only to collect her memories, which proved to her that “anybody” regarded illegitimate children as more rightfully to be looked shy on and deprived of social advantages than illegitimate fathers. The verdict of “anybody” seemed to be that she had no reason to concern herself greatly on behalf of Mrs. Glasher and her children. —George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (253) Twenty-first-century readers of Victorian novels are familiar with the term “illegitimate children,” but George Eliot’s final novel uses a less common appellation: “illegitimate father.” Unsettling the Victorian convention of labeling children illegitimate, Eliot applies the term “illegitimate” to married and unmarried fathers who exploit the fictions of England’s individualistic property and bastardy laws to the detriment of the women and children they neglect, exploit, or abuse. Beginning with the 1844 Poor Law Amendment Act and continuing through the passage of the 1872 Bastardy Act, England confirmed legal paternity outside of wedlock using only one form of “evidence”: a man’s financial support of a child. In Daniel Deronda (1876), Eliot denounces the dangerous power of this legal fiction by examining the roles of property and illegitimacy within a variety of father and child relationships. To some extent, a consonance existed between a dominant public opinion (“The verdict of ‘anybody’”) and English jurisprudence regarding illegitimate fatherhood, though as this chapter will demonstrate, the relationship 162 between these Victorian social and legal philosophies is more fluid and complex than Gwendolen’s reflections suggest. Employing narrative shifts in time and what Graham Handley terms “retrospective investigation,” Eliot elucidates the ways in which the laws sanctioning the malignant behavior of Mr. Davilow, Henleigh Grandcourt, and Lapidoth Cohen have contributed to the crises facing Deronda’s female characters (xviii). Like the other authors in this study, Eliot expands the social utility of realism, blending it in Deronda’s two plots with epic, romantic, and sensational styles and thereby acquiring diverse tools with which to represent and critique the myriad possibilities for injurious fatherhood. Moreover, the epic impulse of Daniel’s search for his origins necessitates a focus on from whom he came, while Eliot’s realistic narrative exploration of her female characters’ pasts reveals that the material circumstances—the what—of their histories has shaped them at least as much as the who. Testing each in its turn, Deronda exposes the unreliability of resemblance, the law’s word, and the descent of property as evidence of paternal obligation; the novel thus demands that readers evaluate its outlaw fathers divested of the simplistic fictions of the domestic novel and the law. Victorian Law and “Illegitimate Fathers” Historians have traditionally interpreted the 1844 Poor Law Amendment Act as offering a welcome respite from the 1834 Poor Law’s draconian treatment of bastardy, but this chapter proposes an alternative reading of this legal history. 1 As Ursula Henriques recounts in one of the few analyses dedicated entirely to the 1834 163 Poor Law’s regulation of illegitimacy, British law enacted before 1834 compelled both a mother and the man she accused of impregnating her to support an illegitimate child. If the parents failed to meet this obligation, the local justices could imprison either of them. The Royal Commissioners charged in the early 1830s with reviewing the state of the Poor Laws groused in their 1834 Report that Regency statutes allowed an unmarried, pregnant woman to charge “any person” with fathering her child, whereupon it was lawful for the justice of the division . . . to issue his warrant for the immediate apprehending such person, and he [the justice] is required to commit such person to gaol, unless he [the reputed father] shall give security to indemnify the parish, or enter into a recognizance, with sufficient surety to appear at the quarter sessions, and to perform the order to be then made. . . . These laws . . . place at the mercy of any abandoned woman, every man who is not rich enough to give security or find sureties[;] . . . they expose him to be dragged without previous summons, on a charge made in his absence, before a tribunal which has no power to examine into the merits of the case. 92-93 While the Commissioners justly decry that these statutes denied men the opportunity to defend themselves against women’s accusations, the report also exposes their grave concern with the power these laws granted a woman’s word. Plainly, property, not children’s best interest, became the central issue in the commissioners’ suggestions for Poor Law reform, and women’s words were clearly suspect in matters involving the property of men. As in the debates concerning the other reforms in Victorian family laws I examine in this project, the Commission’s report constructs women receiving money for the support of their illegitimate children as shrewd storytellers: mothers of illegitimate children craftily become pregnant and then concoct a fictional fatherhood for whomever they hope to marry in order to 164 accrue grand fortunes. Anticipating the 1980’s American political discourse censuring “welfare queens,” the commissioners called women’s supposedly intentional attempts to conceive in order to filch money from a man, a parish, or the State “‘bastardy adventures’” and complained that women could gain “‘a fortune of one or two bastards’” with such schemes. The commissioners’ distrust of women and desire to protect men’s property impelled them to advise the immediate amendment of all previous laws governing the maintenance of illegitimate children (95). Desperate to appease a public outraged over skyrocketing poor rates, Parliament followed many of the recommendations enumerated in the 1834 Royal Commission’s Report in drafting its 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Addressing a primary anxiety of the commissioners, legislators eliminated a mother’s agency in identifying the father of her child, bestowing that power instead upon the parish or workhouse overseer. In addition, Parliament addressed the commissioners’ concern with pregnant women’s supposedly easy legal access to men’s fortunes by assigning the mother exclusive financial responsibility for the child unless an overseer intervened for her in the courts. While historian Pat Thane concludes that the 1834 “Poor Law . . . had no authority to sue the putative father for maintenance,” this declaration overstates the case (32). Though clause sixty-nine of the 1834 Poor Law repeals women’s and parish overseers’ preexisting rights to charge a man with the paternity of an illegitimate child, clause seventy-two dictates new (admittedly rigid) procedures for holding fathers accountable. Clause seventy-two empowers the 165 overseers of a parish, “after diligent Inquiry as to the Father of such Child, [to] apply to the next General Quarter Sessions of the Peace . . . for an Order upon the Person whom they shall charge with being the putative Father of such Child to reimburse such Parish or Union for its Maintenance and Support.” This clause declared further that no court could make an affiliation order “unless the Evidence of the Mother of such Bastard Child . . . [could] be corroborated in some material Particular by other Testimony to the Satisfaction of such Court.” 2 British law now marked the mother’s word—her evidence in court—as unbelievable without substantiation. Though the 1834 Act clearly limited the power of women’s accusations, it did not set specific limits to the types of evidence parish or workhouse overseers could present in paternity cases; this evidence could include the mother’s testimony, though that had to be “corroborated.” On the other hand, statutes regulating illegitimacy after 1844 did specify restrictions: the 1844 Poor Law Amendment Act required either a transfer of property from father to child or the word of the law (in the form of a marriage ceremony) as evidence of paternity. While the 1844 Act returned some evidentiary authority to the mother’s word by resuscitating some of her power to identify the father, it restricted her ability to request legal intervention by requiring “Proof that the Man alleged to be the Father of . . . [her] Child has within the Twelve Months next after the Birth of such Child paid Money for its Maintenance.” 3 According to the Act’s second and third clauses, a woman could only “make Application . . . for a Summons to be served on the Man” if she possessed this specific form of evidence. In such a case, the Justices in petty session 166 would hear the mother’s evidence along with any evidence presented by the reputed father. Buttressing the 1834 Act’s skepticism regarding mothers’ accusations, the 1844 Act required “the Evidence of the Mother . . . [to] be corroborated in some material Particular by other Testimony” in order to authorize the granting of an affiliation order. Thus, although historians have interpreted the 1844 Poor Law as delivering mothers from the evils of the 1834 Act, there is a darker side to the later law. 4 While in one sense the 1844 Act returned a voice to women, in another sense it was even more restrictive than the 1834 law, under which an overseer could initiate charges against a putative father using a broader range of evidence. In 1844, then, the evidence of paternity outside of wedlock changed from the mother’s word to the descent of property: a single transfer of property marked a man legally for limited future financial responsibility for a child, but not for fatherhood, nor did it grant the child inheritance rights. This form of evidence parodies the expected descent of property in legally married families by minimizing the amount of future financial support and eliminating any requirement for the father to fulfill a domestic role. Thirty years on, the 1872 Bastardy Act reasserted the 1844 requirement that a woman prove that a man had “paid money” for a child’s support in order to assign him maintenance orders. 5 Along with British law’s longstanding legalization of fathers via a marriage ceremony, then, the 1844 Act created a second type of “legal” (but in a sense fictional) fathers: those whom the law acknowledged as having conceived children but whom the law declined to hold accountable for more than subsistence 167 maintenance. Parliament’s dual categorization of legal fathers (married and unmarried) complicated the ways in which the 1834 Poor Law had defined families. Clause fifty-seven of that statute declared that a “Husband’s Family” consisted of a man, the woman he married, and any children she already had (“legitimate or illegitimate”) or would have in the future; the performative speech of a marriage ceremony created such a family. In contrast, clause seventy-one (discussing the settlement of illegitimate children) declared that an abandoned mother with an illegitimate child would “be bound to maintain such Child as a Part of her Family.” 6 In opposition to Parliament’s term “Husband’s Family,” then, I derive the term “Mother’s Family” from these clauses. A “Mother’s Family” was created by the physical act of birth outside of wedlock and a man’s total denial of responsibility for the child. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), William Blackstone writes that a “bastard” child was “looked upon as the son of nobody, and sometimes called filius nullus” (447). This perspective created a legal fiction of spontaneous generation by denying the existence of an illegitimate child’s parents. Parliament’s Poor Law discourse, on the other hand, acknowledged the mother’s existence and thereby generated a competing fiction that children born outside of marriage arose parthenogenically. With this legal fiction, Parliament sanctioned two types of evidence as criteria marking only two types of family. The first is paternal and signaled by a marriage ceremony. The second is maternal, marked positively by biology and negatively by the absence of a man’s legal avowal of paternity. 7 168 Residing in a limbo-like state between these two scenarios is the father who sets the legal machinery in motion by providing some financial assistance to the mother of an illegitimate child (the new legal evidence of paternity), but who refuses to legitimate a familial relationship with her via marriage. The 1844 Act demanded that such a man continue this monetary exchange, thus strangely legalizing his relationship with this mother and child without naming it as another type of “family” or including this legal father as part of the family. In other words, the law determined that a man could be a legal father without legitimating a male-headed family. Victorian law thus sanctioned different types of evidence for different types of “outlaw families”: biology marked only “Mothers’ Families,” the descent of property from father to illegitimate child signaled a legal father unwed to the child’s mother, and emotional bonds between individual family members were irrelevant. As we shall see, Eliot’s paradigms for fatherhood chafe against Parliament’s fictions of paternity. No responsibility for emotional care or life guidance is assumed in Parliament’s limited obligations for paternity, which Eliot would surely call “illegitimate fatherhood.” Eliot’s Victorian Context for Illegitimacy In striking contrast to these legal constructions, Eliot’s fiction offers perspectives on fatherhood and family that challenge an exclusive reliance on the evidence of the descent of property to establish extra-marital paternal obligations. In her insightful biography of George Eliot, Rosemarie Bodenheimer writes that Eliot 169 believed that her nurturing of George Lewes’s three sons by a preexisting marriage “solidified her status as ‘Mrs. Lewes.’” Bodenheimer continues: “The name of ‘Mother’ [used by Eliot in letters to her stepsons] reinforces the fiction of ‘Mrs. Lewes.’ . . . [S]he was exquisitely aware that her relationship with Charles [her stepson] would have to be invented through patient domestic work” (204). This is a key insight, as Eliot’s “invention” of a relationship identified by the name “Mother” anticipates her fictional exploration of personal and legal fictions of fatherhood obtaining between characters related and unrelated by blood. Bodenheimer writes persuasively that Eliot’s relationship with her stepsons probably “generated . . . her focus on children brought up by substitute parents, and her privileging of fostering over kinship” (230). This spotlight on untraditional relationships between caregivers and their children is especially significant in Eliot’s treatment of fatherhood in its many forms. Through the course of her novel-writing career, Eliot destabilized the oversimplifications inherent in legal, social, and novelistic constructions of fatherhood, encouraged new thinking about family relationships, and tested the social and legal evidence of “legitimate” parenting. Victorian authors built on a longstanding literary concern with vexed fatherhood. 8 Novels featuring a character’s search for or discovery of his or her origins are plentiful in the Victorian period; such novels often scrutinize Victorian “evidences” of parentage and a right to inheritance. Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837) and Bleak House (1853), for example, feature plots driven primarily by quests for parental origins that conclude with a resolution 170 of what Dickens suggests are inheritance “wrongs.” Novels like Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Dombey and Son (1848) or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) also exploit a Victorian concern with poor fathering. Although Eliot critiques the fictions of fatherhood generated by Victorian law, society, and novels, she simultaneously sustains many of the dominant models of fatherhood cast by these entities. On the other hand, Deronda’s portrayal of blended families in various configurations allows Eliot to compare diverse father figures in a single novel: Deronda features step-, married, dead, guardian, and illegitimate fathers, although critics typically have centered their analyses on Daniel’s epic search for his origins and presumed bastardy. This study adds to past scholarship by focusing on the novel’s illegitimate fathers and their effect upon the novel’s female characters. 9 Eliot certainly didn’t commence her investigation of fatherhood with her final novel. Reading Silas Marner (1861) and Felix Holt (1866) with a focus on fathers offers a touching (some might say overly sentimental) introduction to Eliot’s thoughts on alternative forms of fatherhood and the types of evidence that qualify her father figures as legitimate or less than so. For example, Gillian Beer argues convincingly that Eliot’s primary criterion for quality fathering involves “developed affinities, and not descent,” whether biological or proprietal (116). In Marner, Eliot portrays an alienated man who raises an infant girl whose abandoned mother has died in the cold. This foster father puts to shame his biological counterpart, Godfrey Cass, who refuses to own the little girl when Marner first discovers her next to his hearth. Little Eppie, of course, rewards Marner’s love by refusing to leave him 171 despite both a belated invitation to live with her wealthy biological father and her marriage to one of the town’s working class young men. In fact, the confrontation between Eppie’s two “fathers” seems calculated to highlight the differences Eliot perceives between legal and legitimate fatherhood, as Cass ominously refers to his paternal rights, while Marner and Eppie tenderly speak of love and care. 10 Felix Holt’s Reverend Lyon also raises a daughter to whom he is not biologically related. Like Marner, Lyon raises his daughter with love, guidance, and of course the material necessities of life. Though neither conceived these children nor married their unhappy mothers, both qualify as “legal” fathers under the parameters outlined by the 1844 Poor Law Act: both men provided the children with financial support. What is more important to Eliot, however, is that they do more than simply support their daughters monetarily: they love and guide them unconditionally, expecting nothing in return, something the law devalues by omission in its analysis of fatherhood. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot includes father figures representing different levels of legitimacy and illegitimacy. Although Daniel will not be the focus of this chapter, his and others’ responses to his presumed illegitimacy introduce the major themes Eliot addresses in her exploration of fatherhood. Critics have called Daniel’s search for his origins variously epic, mythic, and romantic. Daniel’s queries about the identity of his father and his physical journey to meet his mother have different implications than Eliot’s search for the origins of the crises confronting many of her female characters, however. Discovering who brought him into the world gives 172 Daniel a sense of purpose and a new plot to follow: his embracing of his newly unearthed Jewish ancestry, rather than events in his privileged life with Sir Hugo, propels him into marriage with Mirah and a quest to found a Jewish state. But his epic journey nonetheless helps us navigate the mixed attitudes toward “illegitimate fathers” in Deronda by offering a literary starting point. With the different generic forms of the novel’s two major plots, Eliot can alternate between archetypal ideas about ancestry and more materialistic ideas about parentage involving cause and effect, nature and nurture. Sir Hugo Malinger, the novel’s primary property owner, is a worthy foster father against whom we can oppose the novel’s “illegitimate fathers,” though his fatherhood is not nearly so ideal as Silas Marner’s or Reverend Lyon’s. Sir Hugo raises Daniel Deronda at the request of the boy’s mother, who provides funds for the boy’s support and future. Leonora Halm-Eberstein’s disgust with her father’s limited expectations for her as a Jewish woman motivates her to exchange her son and her motherhood for a brilliant career as a singer. Intending to prevent Daniel from experiencing the restrictive childhood she despised, Leonora requests that Mallinger raise Daniel as an English gentleman, rather than as a Jew. Out of love for Leonora, Mallinger agrees and nurtures Daniel with love and guidance, but in withholding from Daniel information about his parentage, he unintentionally causes great pain and social awkwardness for the young man. Of course, Sir Hugo’s reticence regarding Daniel’s heritage arises from his loyalty to Leonora: he cannot tell Daniel his mother’s story without revealing his Jewish heritage. To some extent, 173 this exonerates Sir Hugo for causing Daniel the pain he does, but it nonetheless stamps him as a better lover than father. Eliot obliges readers to wait until the fourth and final volume of her novel to meet Daniel’s notorious outlaw mother, the Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein. After explaining her reasons for giving him up, Leonora confesses to her estranged son that she left Sir Hugo in control of Daniel’s financial inheritance—his dead father’s fortune—but that she withheld from him his religious and ethnic heritage, which is embodied in a chest full of documents written by his father. But long before Eliot allows Leonora to unpack the story of Daniel’s origins, she allows readers some insight into the ways in which his presumed bastardy has influenced his life in his community. Eliot first allows readers a glimpse into Daniel’s past by shifting the narrative time of his plot from the present in Leubronn to Daniel’s thirteenth year. Daniel first feels the pinch of his unknown parentage while studying with his tutor, Mr. Fraser, who informs him casually that the “nephews” of popes and cardinals in the histories young Daniel adores are not biological nephews. When Daniel presses for an explanation, Mr. Fraser replies, “‘It was just for the propriety of the thing because, as you know very well, priests don’t marry, and the children were illegitimate’” (139). By employing the term “propriety” in his explanation, Mr. Fraser unites the novel’s concerns with illegitimacy and the inheritance of property. Historically, the term “propriety” denoted “a piece of land owned by or granted to someone,” or property. In addition, “propriety” denotes “the fact of being owned by some one,” and a father marks his children illegitimate by refusing to “own” them. 11 Daniel, upon presuming 174 a similarity between these historical nephews and his own status of nephew to his “uncle” Hugo Mallinger, makes a “first acquaintance with th[e] griefs” of illegitimacy (171). Daniel immediately considers the relationships and wills through which “the nephew Mallinger Grandcourt” and not “the nephew Daniel Deronda” stands to inherit all of Sir Hugo’s wealth. 12 Juxtaposing two types of “evidence” of kinship, Eliot’s narrator follows a summary of the legal documents and marriage acts confirming Sir Hugo and Grandcourt’s legal relations with a paragraph contemplating the family portraits in Mallinger’s gallery. Her narrator then admits that in “the family faces of various types,” Daniel’s countenance “finds no reflex” (141). In Daniel’s history, then, we encounter two conflicting types of “evidence” used in the law and the English novel to verify paternity: the descent of property and resemblance (respectively). Novels often make physical likeness the basis upon which a child’s inheritance can be determined. Consider, for instance, Dickens’s Oliver Twist, in which the wealthy Mr. Brownlow takes in and assists the eponymous orphaned hero to gain an inheritance because he physically resembles his biological parents, Agnes Fleming and Mr. Leeford. These likenesses line little Oliver up for an inheritance, absorption into the middle classes, and the loving care of Mr. Brownlow and Agnes’s sister, Rose. While Dickens’s novel presents physical similarity as reliable evidence of biological relatedness, Eliot’s representations of the outlaw families in her two plots tests the relationships between resemblance, fatherhood, and inheritance. 175 Daniel’s mistaken epiphany regarding his parentage alters his opinion of Sir Hugo as a father: “The uncle whom he loved very dearly took the aspect of a father who held secrets about him—who had done him a wrong—yes, a wrong” (142). In Daniel’s eyes, Sir Hugo’s initial wrong is his refusal to avow relationships with himself or Daniel’s mother. This refusal, Daniel assumes, blocks him from inheriting the entailed Mallinger estates and places him in a vexing social position. Though Daniel begins to judge Sir Hugo as an illegitimate father for these reasons, according to Victorian law Sir Hugo is an ideal unwed father, one who assures his “son’s” financial security. Regarding Daniel’s assumptions about his paternity, the narrator admits that Daniel’s grief leaves “him no immediate power for the reflection that he might be trembling at a fiction of his own” (142). Reinforcing Bodenheimer’s idea that one may invent “fictional” familial relationships, this statement hints that Daniel may be misconstruing the status of his birth, though Eliot refuses to allow readers to reach this conclusion immediately. She instead allows the novel’s characters to reinforce Daniel’s fiction as the likeliest story. Moreover, Eliot’s literary play with the mysteries of Daniel’s origins harkens back to the Royal Commission’s anxieties that avaricious women would testify to fictional fatherhoods for financial gain. Without the authority of the law, anyone could invent a parentage for profit, just as an author would in a novel. Most importantly for this analysis, the narrator’s insinuation of the possible fictionality of Daniel’s conjectures should cue us to consider the fictionality of many types of fatherhood and to ask this chapter’s primary question: What is an illegitimate father? 176 Regardless of whether young Daniel’s construction of his paternity is correct, the boy senses a “wrong” done by Sir Hugo, and this perceived injury stings him repeatedly throughout the novel. For example, when Daniel considers that Gwendolen may be conscious of having wronged Mrs. Glasher and her children, the narrator speculates that Daniel’s “own acute experience made him alive to the form of injury which might affect the unavowed children and their mother” (372). Despite the admittedly enormous differences between Daniel’s and Lydia’s social positions (society accepts Daniel but ostracizes Lydia and her children), Daniel is not imagining the social injuries he confronts. His community appears to agree that the mysteries of Daniel’s birth harm his social status. When Gwendolen Harleth asks her future husband, Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, about Daniel’s identity, for instance, Grandcourt drawls that he is “‘A sort of ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger’s. Nothing of any consequence,’” thus reinforcing the confusion about Daniel’s station (278). Grandcourt’s answer first denies that Daniel is a proper ward (“sort of”), and then implies that his unknowability makes him “nothing of any consequence.” Grandcourt’s words strip Daniel of personhood; as “nothing,” he is a thing, a “bastard.” As Blackstone remarks, the bastard is “of kin to nobody, and has no ancestor from whom any inheritable blood can be derived”; Grandcourt thus assumes correctly (yet using faulty data) that Daniel cannot obstruct Grandcourt’s inheritance of the Mallinger estates or titles (447). 13 In fact, Daniel’s cryptic origins make him a sign of illegitimacy itself, though Eliot eventually reveals that this signification is a 177 false one. As Daniel’s plot reveals his legitimacy, then, it exposes the arbitrary and unrealistic nature of Parliamentary fictions of fatherhood. Gwendolen’s mother, Mrs. Davilow, reinforces Grandcourt’s judgment of Daniel’s birth and explains the social repercussions of his unknowability, though she does so in a more sympathetic vein. Mrs. Davilow answers Gwendolen’s questions about Daniel by explaining that “‘everyone says he is the son of Sir Hugo Mallinger, who brought him up, though he passes for a ward’” (281). When Gwendolen (freshly aware that her future husband has four illegitimate children) presses her mother for more information about how “everyone” perceives such children, Mrs. Davilow replies thoughtfully, “of course [Daniel] is under some disadvantage: it is not as if he were Lady Mallinger’s son. He does not inherit the property, and he is not of any consequence in the world. But people are not obliged to know anything about his birth; you see, he is very well received’” (281-2). Mrs. Davilow’s assertion that Daniel’s supposed illegitimacy means he will be of no “consequence” emphasizes the social disadvantages under which such children labor. On the other hand, Mrs. Davilow’s reply also verifies the different implications of illegitimacy for a young man raised by a wealthy benefactor and for an adulterous woman and her children—Daniel is “well received” in society despite assumptions about his parentage, while Lydia and her children are shunned. Gwendolen’s angry retort that Daniel would have a right to be bitter about his unavowed relationship with Sir Hugo because children cannot “‘help their parents marrying or not marrying,’” reflects not only her uncommon assignation of blame to the father (though this blame is softened 178 with the blanket term “parents”), but also her anger at her own situation, in which her family’s financial woes have pressured her into accepting Grandcourt’s marriage proposal and thereby inflicting the same form of injury upon Mrs. Glasher’s children that she assumes Daniel has suffered (282). By expressing their opinions about Daniels’s birth and consequent social status, these characters begin to suggest what “anybody”—Eliot’s amalgamation of various characters that represent society and public opinion—thinks about illegitimate children (at least the rich ones). The opinions and prejudices of Eliot’s “anybody” help us to construct more fully a contemporary context with which to contrast Eliot’s unorthodox construction of “illegitimate fathers” and their impact upon women. For instance, Eliot’s omniscient narrator first introduces Lydia Glasher as a nameless abandoned mother through gossip recollected by Mr. Gascoigne. Many characters in Deronda have heard the gossip about Lydia Glasher and her children before Grandcourt marries Gwendolen, but none of them believes that his siring of these children merits efforts to impede the marriage or to censure Grandcourt. Mr. Gascoigne, the uncle who stands in as a father figure for Gwendolen, reasons that Grandcourt’s wealth and lineage excuse his past indiscretions. Eliot’s narrator explains that Gascoigne holds it futile . . . to show any curiosity as to the past of a young man whose birth, wealth, and consequent leisure made many habits venial which under other circumstances would have been inexcusable. Whatever Grandcourt had done, he had not ruined himself; and it is well known that in gambling, for example, . . . a man who has the strength of mind to leave off when he has only ruined others, is a reformed character. 77 179 In case the phrase “it is well known” is not a clear enough marker of the prevalence of Gascoigne’s position, the narrator adds that “we can hardly pronounce him singular in feeling that a landed proprietor with a mixture of noble blood in his veins was not to be an object of suspicious inquiry” (77). Eliot’s use of the first person plural pronoun assumes readers’ complicity with this attitude. At the same time, her tone is ironic and encourages readers to reexamine their predisposed notions. Adding to this irony, the narrator later caps off Gascoigne’s judgment that, despite the gossip he has heard, Gwendolen should consider Grandcourt’s proposal “a match to be accepted on broad general grounds national and ecclesiastical” this way: “This was the view of practical wisdom; with reference to higher views, repentance had a supreme moral and religious value” (118). Of course, Grandcourt neither “reforms” nor “repents,” yet most in his community continue to accept and respect him merely because of his wealth and ancestry. Sir Hugo and his friend, Mr. Vandernoodt, add to the voices constructing Eliot’s “anybody” regarding the outlaw relations between Lydia Glasher and Grandcourt. Sir Hugo considers the gossip of Grandcourt’s past and similar talk “a little good-humored scandal,” but he keeps “such communications from hearers who might take them too seriously,” indicating his awareness of an alternate moral perspective on this issue (237). Hugo’s jovial judgment of Grandcourt’s offenses relates, of course, to his failure to open up to Daniel and thereby prevent or relieve some of the young man’s distress. But Sir Hugo’s secretiveness cannot keep the story from Daniel, who learns reluctantly about Mrs. Glasher and her family from 180 Mr. Vandernoodt at the Grandcourt’s nuptial celebration. After sketching the scandalous history of Mrs. Glasher’s Mother’s Family, Vandernoodt concludes that “People have forgotten all about it; . . . such stories get packed away like old letters” (371). And while Mr. Vandernoodt insists that Mrs. Glasher’s tragedy has been packed away, her community’s judgment of it and its effects upon her children persist. But Eliot’s narration of past events unpacks such stories to encourage a readerly consideration of the circumstances under which Mothers’ Families are created. By including an omniscient voice that resonates with Mr. Gascoigne’s and Sir Hugo’s thoughts, Eliot prevents readers from mistakenly considering these men unusual individuals rewarded by or looking to gain from the existing British proprietary system and laws. When Eliot’s narrator relates Lydia’s history, she paints a portrait of a woman who aspired to escape an unhappy marriage, only to find her new lover’s passion cooling once her first husband died. As she does when she represents Mr. Gascoigne’s thoughts, in this history the narrator implicitly speaks for “anybody” when she remarks that it “seemed only natural and desirable” that Grandcourt “should have disentangled himself” from his connection with Lydia once he wanted to marry (287). Confirming Mr. Vandernoodt’s assertion about buried stories, Eliot’s narrator writes, “No one talked of Mrs. Glasher now, any more than they talked of the victim in a trial for manslaughter ten years before: she was a lost vessel after whom nobody would sound out an expedition of search; but Grandcourt was seen in harbour with his colours flying, registered as seaworthy as ever” (287). 181 Exposing the sexual double standard involved in affairs and childbearing outside of wedlock, Eliot’s narrator demonstrates that this standard seems “natural” to the gossiping public and insists that “No one” disputes this judgment. Eliot may also be playing upon the connection between the words “natural” and “illegitimate” here, which adds further irony to her treatment of “anybody’s” opinions. In the main, Eliot’s characters agree that Grandcourt should not be punished for his extra-marital sexuality and procreation; instead, he should be encouraged to proceed according to the pattern of his station, marrying someone with a flawless reputation and starting a new family with which to ensure the lawful descent of property. As Mr. Gascoigne’s comments suggest, this double standard is related to property inextricably: In Mr. Gascoigne’s symbolic calculations, Grandcourt’s prospective inheritance compensates for his abuses of Lydia, while Lydia’s lack of station and wealth affords her no chip with which to bargain. At times, however, Eliot’s novel condemns this standard by expressing sympathy for this abandoned woman and scorn for Grandcourt. Moreover, the narrator notes that while Lydia is lost to society, Grandcourt is still “registered,” welcome to circulate in respectable social circles. Of course, the opinions espoused by Lydia, Daniel, and Gwendolen regarding Lydia’s unhappy situation indicate that a few people disagree with “anybody,” though each for different reasons. Eliot consistently reminds us, however, that the general public sides with Grandcourt. This public opinion coincides with the Poor Laws that punished abandoned mothers and allowed illegitimate fathers to shirk their parental obligations. While Eliot’s narrator seems a 182 detached communicator of “anybody’s” and “no one’s” thoughts on illegitimate fathers, her nay-saying characters, Gwendolen’s and Lydia’s plots, and her exposure of the sexual double standard implicitly condemn these social and legal conventions. Illegitimate Fathers and Mothers’ Families in Daniel Deronda Critics have long debated the consequences of Eliot’s generic blending in Deronda; I agree with those who, like Leon Gottfried and Sarah Gates, argue that Eliot’s generic combination enables her to expand the utility of realism. Unlike the epic and mythic structures loosely shaping Daniel’s plot, the realistic mode is the primary force molding Gwendolen’s plot. Leon Gottfried observes that this narrative decision produces notable distinctions in the two plots, especially with regard to character development. Gottfried asserts that “[i]n truly mythic fashion, Daniel is, he never really becomes. His selfhood is more a matter of discovery than of achievement” (172). Just as Daniel’s characteristics remain relatively stable throughout Eliot’s narrative shifts in time and reflections upon his childhood, Mirah Cohen begins and ends her role in the novel as inherently feminine and good. Conversely, Eliot’s narrative exploration of Gwendolen’s and Lydia’s pasts allows her to trace their realistic evolution from proud and confident to broken and nearly hysterical women. In Gwendolen’s case, we see the character prepared at the novel’s end to commence a life modeled after Daniel’s principles. Before Gwendolen makes the most damaging decision of her lifetime, we discover that her mother, Mrs. Davilow, committed her own blunders in the marriage 183 market. In the novel’s quick allusions to Mr. Davilow and his relationship with his wife and her children, Eliot suggests what might qualify as illegitimate fathering; this failed marriage also illustrates that corrupt husbands often become illegitimate fathers. In a motif that Eliot initiated with Gwendolen’s pawning of her father’s turquoises in Leubronn, we learn that Mr. Davilow, Gwendolen’s stepfather, “had carried off his wife’s jewellery and disposed of it” (233). 14 Of course, upon marrying Mrs. Davilow, Mr. Davilow acquired the rights to all but the most trivial of his wife’s property, and thus his acquisition and sale of this jewelry are perfectly legal. 15 However, that Mrs. Davilow “colour[s]” at this recollection reveals a schism between Victorian law and a common-sense morality: Gwendolen’s mother finds Mr. Davilow’s “disposal” of her “best ornaments” shameful (233). In this brief allusion to a perceived misappropriation of property, a father figure disrupts the expected descent of property: the stepfather liquefies the jewelry that Mrs. Davilow would probably have bequeathed to her daughters, including Gwendolen. 16 Although Mr. Davilow’s shady commerce with his wife’s jewels is contrary to one of the criteria marking legal fatherhood (the father must give the child financial support, not take it away), Mr. Davilow retains his rights as father and husband until his early demise. Mrs. Davilow’s disapproval of his behavior thus helps Eliot’s novel admonish the law’s assumptions about fatherhood: Mr. Davilow’s sale of the jewels may have been legal, but the vexation of this respectable Victorian widow suggests the illegitimacy of his actions and thus his fatherhood. Compounding Eliot’s “evidence” of poor fathering in the case of Mr. 184 Davilow, we learn late in the novel that Gwendolen dreaded the homecoming of this stepfather, though she omits the source of her apprehension (596). Perhaps she disliked her stepfather because he supplanted her as the head of her mother’s household with his homecomings, but as Gwendolen offers no explanation for her dread, it is possible that Mr. Davilow may have abused Gwendolen or her mother. Eliot’s reserve in this instance implicitly supplements the outline of illegitimate fathering that she has sketched thus far in Deronda. Mr. Davilow’s long absences and abuses (and eventually his death) create an alternative type of “Mother’s Family,” one that Eliot implies is disordered. Gwendolen and her mother seem to have formed a strange bond in response to this illegitimate father’s mistreatment: the women confuse the roles of mother and daughter, and Gwendolen consequently lacks moral guidance. Unfortunately, Gwendolen fails to learn a lasting lesson from what she perceives as her mother’s mismanagement of her second marriage: while she rejects Grandcourt’s early flirtations, she accepts his renewed proposals when she is faced with poverty and work. Gwendolen’s role reversal with her mother make it unsurprising that she is sorely unprepared to handle the decision about whether to marry a man who has an existing, illegitimate family. Before economic stresses influence her decision, Gwendolen promises Lydia that she will not interfere with that unwed mother’s wishes. However, Gwendolen later succumbs to the emotional manipulation of her family and her distaste for unglamorous labor as a governess: she accepts Grandcourt’s proposal. In the absence of strong ethical guidance, Gwendolen resorts 185 to literature and the opinions of “anybody” to justify her engagement. Eliot implicates Victorian literature as a failed educator for Gwendolen by noting that Gwendolen’s uncontrolled reading, though consisting chiefly in what are called pictures of life, had somehow not prepared her for this encounter with reality. Is that surprising? . . . Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! . . . Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience. 130- 1 Eliot implies that what many call “pictures of life” include family griefs such as illegitimacy, but she chides that an artists’ “distance[d]” “perspective” of such “realit[ies]” can misguide a young, inexperienced woman. In the epigraph to my chapter, Gwendolen, who would shy from seeking advice regarding Grandcourt’s proposal from her mother or uncle “even if she had not felt bound to silence,” instead considers what “anybody” would say about her unenviable options (253). While Gwendolen’s promise to Lydia instigates this silence, her uncle’s authoritative advice and her mother’s financial ruin have also consistently stifled her misgivings. As Eliot’s narrator acknowledges, however, to rely on public opinion as an adjudicator “was to be released from the difficulty of judging where everything was obscure to her” (253). Eventually, Gwendolen infers from the judgment of her peers and superiors that “anybody” would surely forgive her for excluding Lydia and her children from the possibility of inheritance and legitimization. In part, Gwendolen justifies her marriage by promising herself that she will wield the feminine influence Victorian society supposedly would grant her as a wife to “urge him [Grandcourt] to the most liberal conduct towards Mrs. Glasher’s 186 children” (264). Her conviction that she will possess this unhampered influential power demonstrates that Gwendolyn simply does not understand the details of Victorian marriage. One might wish that Mrs. Davilow had spoken more openly about her marital problems, as Gwendolen seems unfamiliar with the psychological type of abuse that Grandcourt practices, and with her powerlessness against it within the bonds of marriage. Mirroring society’s and the law’s punishment of abandoned mothers, Gwendolen’s resolution would benefit only the children of Grandcourt’s previous union and would exclude Lydia from its liberality. Gwendolen thus convinces herself that she will do “no wrong” to Lydia’s children (and apparently that Lydia doesn’t even deserve to be factored into her calculations) (265). In this, Gwendolen also confirms the law’s stance that doing right by one’s outlaw children means giving them money and ignores the emotional and social “wrongs” such a father inflicts upon his children. Gwendolen’s rationale reinforces women’s insignificance in discussions of how to resolve the problems of illegitimacy: the law offers little support for outlaw mothers, and Gwendolen quickly discovers her lack of wifely influence. Supporting the law’s exclusion of the abandoned mother, Gwendolen vacillates between a sympathetic view of outlaw motherhood and the opinions of “anybody,” as she occasionally justifies her choice by wondering if perhaps Lydia “is to blame” for the fact that Grandcourt never married her (264). Once she is married, the internal contradictions which cause her to feel a “red heat near a burn” when Grandcourt travels to Gadsmere (the property in which Grandcourt has established the Mother’s Family he had a part in creating) devastate 187 her (473). Though Gwendolen jealously cringes under the heat of this burn, the conclusion of her plot reveals a Gwendolen relieved to find that Grandcourt has left the vast majority of his property to Lydia’s eldest son. This chastened Gwendolen reassures her sympathetic mother that the terms of Grandcourt’s will are “‘all perfectly right’” (650). Using a modified marriage plot form, then, Eliot can trace the realistic changes in her character as she explores the circumstances shaping her past and present life. Although Grandcourt’s pre-marital relationship harms Gwendolen, his treatment of his first lover and their children exemplifies more directly and disturbingly how illegitimate fatherhood afflicts women and children. Immediately preceding Lydia’s final rejection by Grandcourt, Eliot tarnishes Lydia’s image by describing her abandonment of not only her first husband, but also their three-year- old son, when she ran off to live with Grandcourt (288). That Lydia’s first son died two years after her departure further sullies her character, even though the narrator admits that in deserting Colonel Glasher, Lydia “escaped a disagreeable husband” and “five years of marital rudeness” (288). Eliot’s narrator informs us that early in the affair Grandcourt would “willingly have paid for the freedom to be won by a divorce; but . . . [Lydia’s] husband would not oblige him, not wanting to be married himself, and not wishing to have his domestic habits printed in evidence” (287). Given Deronda’s contemporary setting, Lydia’s departure from her first husband’s home nine years before the novel’s events transpire would have been governed by the 1839 Custody of Infants Act, which merely granted women the right to petition 188 for custody of their children. Given that a wife’s infidelity negated this right, however, Lydia could not have benefited from this law, even if the “domestic habits” Colonel Glasher prefers to keep out of print would have qualified as cruelty. 17 By exploring the dark circumstances of Lydia’s past—both her abandonment of her first family and her abandonment by her second lover—immediately before narrating this outlaw mother’s moment of crisis, Eliot shows readers from what Lydia has come, thus complicating the unfettered sympathy we might have felt for her without the retrospection. Even if Grandcourt is, as Graham Handley asserts in his introduction to the novel, “Eliot’s most repulsive character,” Eliot’s interwoven narrations of the past and present demonstrate that the law and his society supports his abuses (xxii). During the years that Grandcourt’s love for his mistress, Lydia, cooled, his first abuse was his increasing emotional neglect of their family. Like Mr. Davilow, Grandcourt manifests his apathy for this family by reducing the frequency of his visits. From their tense meeting at Gadsmere, we find that Lydia does not consider the mere transfer of money or the tenancy of a large house evidence of adequate fathering. Instead, Lydia has begun to suffer a pain like that under which Daniel mistakenly cringes—the pain of legal, and thus social, exclusion caused by a father’s refusal to “own” his children and their mother: “The equivocal position which she had not minded about for herself was now telling upon her through her children . . . . If Grandcourt married her, the children would be none the worse off for what had passed: they would see their mother in a dignified position, and they would be at no 189 disadvantage with the world: her son could be made his father’s heir” (288). Lydia’s abandonment of her first child marks her as an “illegitimate mother;” nonetheless, her protective impulses over her children by Grandcourt demonstrate her realistic reform: she cares for these children and their futures. Eliot’s own outlaw relationship with George Henry Lewes must have familiarized her with Lydia’s “equivocal position.” From her unusual vantage point, Eliot could understand that a childless woman might disregard the potential indignities of an affair outside of wedlock, but for the sake of any children born under these circumstances, the same formerly defiant woman might indeed suffer. In this passage, the verb “telling” most obviously means to have an effect, but because “telling” also refers to counting a monetary value, Eliot has once again flawlessly connected family relations and property issues. With such precise diction, Eliot gestures toward the psychological toll taken on Lydia by her anxiety about property and her children’s futures. Grandcourt’s visits to his family have become so sporadic that his four illegitimate children are unaware of their true relationship to him. He has done little, in fact, to cultivate love or tenderness for him in his own children, with the result that the children “had none of them any particular liking for this friend of mamma’s” (291). Instead of love or guidance, Grandcourt has granted his children attention only in the form of property—the only form of evidence of legal, but illegitimate, fatherhood sanctioned by law. He occasionally brings gifts, and the money with which he voluntarily supports them is found each month in a bank account of 190 Lydia’s. 18 Eliot’s narrator informs readers that Grandcourt “liked to be lordly” with his property, and this squares with his smug satisfaction regarding his financial arrangement with Lydia (294). Repeatedly during their tense meeting, Grandcourt answers Lydia’s expressions of torment by dryly remarking that she has “‘found the money paid into the bank’” and that she and “‘the children will be provided for as usual,’” indicating that for Grandcourt, assuring this family’s financial security is his only responsibility as a father (291-2). When Grandcourt insists that Lydia’s fears of economic abandonment are unfounded because “‘[he doesn’t] care a curse about the money,’” he reveals a key distinction between his philosophy of fatherhood and those espoused by the novel’s other illegitimate fathers, Mr. Davilow and Lapidoth Cohen (293). Because he stands to inherit so grandly, money and property are relatively meaningless to him, and he can promise and distribute it in a lordly fashion typical of the aristocracy from which he descends. For Eliot, Grandcourt’s emotional neglect of this family marks his fatherhood and his relationship with Lydia as fictitious: Grandcourt’s philosophy dovetails neatly with the law’s, but clashes with Lydia’s and Eliot’s ideas of the obligations of paternity. But Grandcourt’s emotional and social neglect are not the only characteristics stamping him in Eliot’s world as an illegitimate father—Eliot doesn’t merely dwell on what Grandcourt fails to do as a father; she also concentrates on his misdeeds as a father and husband. This further distinguishes Eliot’s ideas of legitimate fatherhood from nineteenth-century concepts of legal paternity. Victorian law bestowed nearly monarchical rights over a wife and her children to a man married to a child’s mother, 191 regardless of the potential presence of egregious abuses. One might consider Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield as a fictional example: once Mr. Murdstone marries David’s mother, he has the right to discipline David and send him to a boarding school despite his mother’s contrary wishes. Grandcourt is by no means this sensationally malignant a father, but this is one of Eliot’s strengths: she is a master of representing the legally and socially acceptable—but morally reprehensible— behavior of individuals while eschewing literary sensationalism. Consistent with her decision to represent this family without resorting to sensation, Eliot depicts a relationship in which Lydia is fearful not for her physical well-being, but rather for the social standing of herself and her children: Grandcourt’s final decision about their familial status has the power to thrust Lydia into a permanent state of social exile. Lydia lives day to day uncertain of when Grandcourt will appear; she even fears that requesting a visit will further estrange him. Grandcourt is fully cognizant that he has ruined the life of this woman, whom he prods maliciously when she finally loses her self-control and attacks him verbally: “‘What friend have you besides me?’” (293). Lydia’s answer, “Quite true,’” delivered “like a low moan” communicates just what this lonely woman will lose when Grandcourt marries: not only an inheritance for her son, but also reentry into the society which, though it has ostracized her for fleeing her first marriage, would likely have reabsorbed her if she married Grandcourt for precisely the reasons with which Mr. Gascoigne excuses Grandcourt’s previous indiscretions (i.e., his wealth and station) (293). In her final play to exact revenge for her abandonment, Lydia 192 demands that Grandcourt allow her to send Gwendolen the diamonds he formerly allowed Lydia to wear, arguing that she deserves this freedom because “[e]verything is to be taken from [her]” (297). For the breached exchange she has expected for the greater part of nine years (her pre-marital sexuality for eventual marriage), Lydia grudgingly trades the right to humiliate and threaten her rival. She is painfully aware that Grandcourt’s marriage not only legitimizes his relations with Gwendolen and any children she might bear, but simultaneously and permanently negates the preexisting relationship he has with Lydia and their children. Eliot’s repeated use of torture metaphors in the dissolution scene between Grandcourt and his abandoned mistress illustrates the malignancy of his treatment of Lydia. Visiting merely to inform Lydia of his impending marriage to Gwendolen and to retrieve his mother’s diamonds, Grandcourt’s painfully slow delivery of his announcement makes Lydia feel “as if the thumbscrew and the iron-boot were being placed by creeping hands within sight of the expectant victim,” compressing the already tightly coiled spring of her defiant spirit (292). The narrator can afford to use the passive voice here, as the reader cannot escape that it is Grandcourt— unperturbed and slightly inconvenienced—“creeping” up to his victim. Moreover, these torture metaphors encourage sympathy for Lydia, as does the narrator’s figure of an “expectant victim.” Conversely, the novel compounds the tarnishing it effected with its retrospection into Lydia’s abandonment of her first family by elsewhere presenting Lydia with violent language and disapproval. While at this moment, the narrator portrays her as a victim of a heartless figure whose morality ironically melds 193 with that espoused by the law and by “anybody,” at many others the novel depicts her as a viper bursting with repressed venom, a Medea-like figure. In its exaggeration, Mr. Vandernoodt’s comparison of Lydia to a “Medea” leans toward the sensational. However, his comment just moments later that society packs away “such stories” suggests the reality and commonness of her situation (371). 19 Alternately comparing Lydia both to an “expectant victim” and to legendary violent women effectively presents her in the oscillating terms in which Gwendolen thinks of her: is she a passive victim of a cruel torturer, or is she a powerful, vengeful woman? This double-sided representation resonates with her history as both an abandoning mother and a loving one. While Gwendolen may soothe her anxieties with a virago story about Lydia, the outcome of the latter woman’s plot reveals more accurately her social position. Though Gwendolen does not immediately recognize the connections between her situation and her rival’s, Eliot associates the psychological abuses suffered by these women by revising and repeating in Gwendolen’s mind the tortures that Lydia imagines suffering at Grandcourt’s hands: Gwendolen envisions Grandcourt’s hands “clinging round her neck and threatening to throttle her” and squirms under the torment of the very “thumbscrews” that tortured Lydia (366, 582). Lydia’s point of view regarding fatherhood differs significantly from Grandcourt’s. She allies biological and legal fatherhood in a way that contradicts the realities of family law and social mores regarding illegitimacy. When Grandcourt decides to marry another woman, however, Lydia quickly discovers that her 194 biologically-based fathering philosophy is founded only on powerless “oughts.” Confronting Gwendolen at the Whispering Stones, Lydia unveils her unhappy history and then bluntly declares, “‘Mr. Grandcourt ought not to marry anyone but me. I left my husband and child for him nine years ago. Those two children are his, and we have two others . . . . My husband is dead now, and Mr. Grandcourt ought to marry me. He ought to make that boy his heir’” (128). Clearly, Lydia believes that biological connections should compel legal action, and she gambles that Gwendolen will share this view. The problem she underestimates in her reasoning is that Gwendolen must consult not only her morality, but also the economic realities that governed Victorian women’s lives—including her own. Unfortunately for Lydia, Mrs. Davilow’s recent financial disaster has caused Gwendolen to view marriage to an uninspiring, and even threatening, partner as a necessity to her own and her mother’s happiness. But Grandcourt understands the power of this wordly economics better than his jilted mistress. When, for example, Lush tells Grandcourt that he “would take odds against” Gwendolen’s accepting Grandcourt’s proposal because she has heard Lydia’s “whole story,” Grandcourt challenges such a supposition, querying nonchalantly, “‘What follows?’” (243). Instead of supposing that his past will jeopardize his marital prospects, Grandcourt here implies that the logic of Gwendolen’s decision will be economic and social, rather than moral. Grandcourt, like Mr. Gascoigne and others, reckons that his wealth and station will trounce the moral logic driving Lush’s and Lydia’s plot to derail the marriage by unpacking 195 Lydia’s history for Gwendolen. Lydia’s eager participation in this plot suggests her confidence that, in addition to the evidence of biological affiliation, a moral logic may trump “anyone’s” social and economic logic. Indeed, her vitriolic letter to Gwendolen invokes God’s, rather than any social or legal, justice. Following this invocation, she threatens Gwendolen that the “‘willing wrong’” Gwendolen has perpetrated against Lydia will be the younger woman’s “‘curse’” (303). By echoing the language employed by Daniel and the narrator regarding “wrongs” done to children by their unmarried parents, Lydia’s letter reinforces her moral logic forcefully enough to challenge—at least momentarily—the dominant perspective of Eliot’s “anybody.” Lydia’s pain clarifies that her unabated love for Grandcourt, her social standing, and her family’s security are at least as important to her as the size of her monthly allotment. Grandcourt pretends not to understand that although her lack of legal access to his property for her children’s sake vexes Lydia, she seems at least equally distressed by her family’s outlaw social status. In addition, that Grandcourt’s liberality with his money is voluntary rather than compulsory engendering in Lydia a continual dread that he could one day abandon her and the children altogether, thereby compounding his emotional abandonment with a financial one (288). While Grandcourt denies this possibility, surely Lydia’s fear is justified, as she would be helpless to do much of anything about such a desertion: the 1844 Bastardy Act would require Grandcourt to reimburse a parish for the 196 maintenance of Lydia’s children based on the evidence of his generosity over the years, but this would be an astonishing fall from their accustomed standard of living. The threat of disinheritance and abandonment by Grandcourt cuts to the heart of Eliot’s concern with legal fictions of fatherhood. Property and inheritance are related to—in fact they engender—Lydia’s perpetual state of fear. Lydia’s philosophy regarding father and son resemblances and inheritance complicates the narrator’s earlier contemplation of Daniel’s place in the Mallinger clan. Echoing a convention of many Victorian novels, Lydia suggests that little Henleigh’s resemblance to Grandcourt is “evidence” of a right to inherit, yet the novel simultaneously demonstrates how complicated issues of inheritance, paternity, and resemblance are. Though imperfect and simplistic, Lydia’s novelistic view of physical likeness criticizes the law’s reliance on marriage and the transfer of property as the sole markers of inheritance rights and paternity. Lydia has attempted to wait out Grandcourt’s reluctance to marry her, calculating mentally that he “might never have a son who would have a legitimate claim on him, and the end might be that her son would be made heir to the best part of his estates. No son at that early age could promise to have more of his father’s physique” (288). Channeled through Eliot’s narrator, Lydia’s ideas about inheritance distinguish between “a legitimate claim” and Grandcourt’s ability to “make” someone his heir, implying that the “made” heir would be an illegitimate one. This distinction resonates with the legal entailment on Sir Hugo’s property: a biological but unavowed son is not an acceptable heir when a legitimate son exists. That Lydia immediately follows the 197 possibility of “making” someone one’s heir with the observation that young Henleigh resembles his father suggests that physical likenesses justify a right to inheritance. Nonetheless, British bastardy laws accepted biological evidence as proof of only “Mothers’ Families,” which excluded fathers altogether, and thus Lydia’s logic is legally flawed. In a surprising turn of events, however, the novel’s conclusion validates Lydia’s speculations about the possibilities for Grandcourt’s property: Grandcourt may indeed “make” anyone the heir of his property in the absence of a legitimate male heir. Grandcourt’s final proprietal generosity complicates his characterization by Eliot—here he seems to “do right” by the family he has neglected for years; his generosity is, however, merely financial and does little to restore Lydia’s reputation. Lydia, Eliot, and the Victorian novel may hold ideas of proper fatherly behavior contrary to those exercised by Grandcourt and generally approved by Eliot’s “anybody,” but his philosophy and practice of fatherhood exist in more tension with Victorian society than a cursory examination would suggest, as his peers’ responses to his will attest. Grandcourt’s relationships with his children are nearly nonexistent—manifested only with money—but this behavior flouts only companionate domestic ideologies, not law. Victorians expected aristocratic fathers to bequeath their property to their legitimate children, and in particular to the eldest male in the family. The clergyman Mr. Gascoigne, for example, upon learning about the surprising terms of Grandcourt’s will, remembers dismissing the inconvenient fact that Grandcourt already had a family before he proposed to Gwendolen, and he 198 regrets that he “had not foreseen that the pleasure which had probably, so to speak, been swept into private rubbish heaps, would ever present itself as an array of live caterpillars, disastrous to the green meat of respectable people” (647). Mr. Gascoigne’s ruminations depend upon common Victorian assumptions: his characterization of Lydia and her children as Grandcourt’s “private rubbish heaps” reduces these individuals and their distress to a disposable problem of Grandcourt’s, rather than an issue for the public to address through its legal machinery. Mr. Vandernoodt reinforces the idea that Grandcourt’s family troubles are an individual, rather than public, financial matter by insisting that Grandcourt’s continued visits to Lydia are “‘nobody’s business but his own’” (371). Furthermore, Mr. Gascoigne’s cannibalistic imagery represents Lydia’s “Mother’s Family” as pests consuming the property of “respectable people.” From his perspective, Grandcourt’s will not only allows Lydia and her children to consume the property of a “respectable” family, it also erodes the tradition of protecting legitimate family lines and the descent of their property. In other words, Mr. Gascoigne interprets Grandcourt’s final act of benevolence to his illegitimate family (an act of which Eliot might well approve as proper fathering) as an act dangerous to and defiant of standard social expectations for aristocratic families. Sir Hugo, on the other hand, expresses mixed feelings about his nephew’s will. As he expounds to Mr. Gascoigne, in point of fact, . . . since the boy is there, this was really the best alternative for the disposal of the estates. Grandcourt had nobody nearer than his cousin. . . . I forgive Grandcourt for that part of his will. But, between ourselves, what I don’t forgive him for, is the 199 shabby way he has provided for your niece—our niece, I will say—no better a position than if she had been a doctor’s widow. 648 Although Sir Hugo denounces his nephew’s treatment of Gwendolen, he also approves of the disposition of the estates to little Henleigh, perhaps because a single biological son will inherit the majority of Grandcourt’s property, thus preserving the descent of a consolidated block of property within his family line. 20 In a telling analysis of English inheritance law, Alan Macfarlane points out that England allowed men to bequeath unentailed property to whomever they chose much earlier than other European countries. Hugo’s property is entailed—he has only a life- interest in his estates—but because Grandcourt has propagated no legitimate male heir, he can devise the property to his illegitimate son. This legal freedom does not prevent some characters from expecting Grandcourt to respect what they see as a chivalrous aristocratic tradition: in the absence of a legitimate male heir, bequeathing one’s property to one’s legal, even if childless, wife. Conversely, others applaud what they interpret as his decision to follow the custom of leaving it all to a single son, whether legitimate or not. In fact, however, Grandcourt respects neither of these coexisting and contradictory traditions; his will simply manifests his pleasure in doing whatever he pleases and exerting his power over others, as his pleasure in having Lush inform Gwendolen of the will’s dictates demonstrates. Most importantly, his will makes plain that the women in Grandcourt’s life are superfluous. They are, as Leonora Halm-Elberstein complains about her own father’s perception of her personhood, just “makeshift link[s]” in the course of inheritance; only the existence of a son is relevant (541). Through his very 200 individualistic will, Grandcourt flexes his power over others from beyond the grave, punishing Gwendolen for her lack of submission and her failure to bear a son. At the same time, his will takes the radical step of renaming his illegitimate son—little Henleigh becomes a Mallinger Grandcourt, in effect abrogating the power of the marriage ceremony to legitimize children. 21 Grandcourt’s disposal of his mother’s diamonds further demonstrates his disrespect for tradition as well as his belief in his power to do as he wishes with all of his property, regardless of its symbolic significance. Building the novel’s dynamic jewelry motif, Grandcourt transfers his mother’s diamonds from woman to woman without regard to social or civil law. Grandcourt has “confided” these diamonds to Lydia not because he loves her, but because her beauty when she dons them helps to quantify his wealth in public: she “made them look as if they were worth some of the money given for them” (289). Paralleling the implications of Mr. Davilow’s alienation of Mrs. Davilow’s jewels, Grandcourt’s treatment of these diamonds illustrates the poor job he has done as a partner to Lydia. Lydia’s response to Grandcourt’s demand that she return his diamonds reveals just how jewelry symbolizes a link between property and family for Eliot. Lydia becomes nearly hysterical in her insistence that she, not Grandcourt, give the new bride the diamonds; she has forced an interpretation upon the diamonds that Grandcourt rejects. Years earlier, Lydia convinced Grandcourt to let her keep the diamonds by insisting that if he “‘ever marr[ied] another woman [she would] give them up to her’” (289). Lydia thereby transformed what Grandcourt constructs 201 as a loan of these “mere peas and haricots for the ears, neck, and hair” into a symbolic pledge between the lovers (289). In fact, Lydia’s declaration implies that Grandcourt has, in some extra-legal way, married her (if he ever marries “another woman”). Eliot’s choice of the verb “confide” in her discussion of the gems supports Lydia’s misconception of this proprietal transfer, but does so ambivalently: when “confiding,” one “entrusts” (rather than gives) an object with an expectation of trust or fidelity. 22 Sadly for Lydia, this fidelity is one sided and unrelated to her relationship with Grandcourt. Victorian wives often wore the jewels of their husbands’ families. Without the sanctioning of the marriage ceremony, however, the exchange between Grandcourt and Lydia is legally ambiguous, just as his role of “husband” to Lydia is illegitimate and “fictional.” 23 As Bodenheimer notes, Eliot validated the power of verbal signifiers, such as her use of the name “Mother,” to construct an intimate relationship between biologically unrelated family members. The story of Grandcourt’s diamonds illustrates conversely that for Eliot, the transfer of property alone is incapable of forging such relationships. The socially transgressive nature of Grandcourt’s relationship to his property and children continues in his disposition of his estates. This disposition also reinforces what Catherine Gallagher sees as a transfer of prostitution status from Lydia to Gwendolen when Lydia sends the diamonds to Gwendolen with her vitriolic letter. First Grandcourt bestows upon Gwendolen the diamonds his mistress has worn for years, and then he leaves her Gadsmere, the property that Lydia and her children have inhabited for three years. At the same time that Grandcourt’s bestowal 202 of Gadsmere brands Gwendolen with the mark of the isolated, excluded mistress, it elevates Lydia to the status of wife by bequeathing to her son the valuable estates. In a way, individualistic British property and inheritance laws enable Grandcourt to “marry” Lydia and “divorce” Gwendolen posthumously without kowtowing to marriage and divorce laws. This again indicates Grandcourt’s disrespect for social forms and his complicated relationship with the law: he exploits the freedom the law affords by willing his property as he wishes, yet he first conforms to and later reverses the law’s expectations for fatherhood, inheritance, and property: bastardy laws only compelled legal fathers in Grandcourt’s position to support their illegitimate children and mistresses minimally, but after years of legally sanctioned neglect and abuse, Grandcourt chooses to treat Lydia’s Mother’s Family as his legitimate one. In contrast to the realistic mode in which the novel presents Grandcourt’s story, Deronda strays into hyperbole, caricature, and sensationalism in its depiction of Lapidoth Cohen and his family. Eliot’s deployment of the sensational mode helps readers understand the ways in which laws governing paternal rights and obligations leave children unprotected from unscrupulous fathers. In her sub-plot for the Cohen family, Eliot begins with another narrative shift to the past, to about two months before Daniel locks eyes with Gwendolen over a roulette table in Leubronn. It is at this time that our hero Daniel rescues Mirah from a suicide attempt—her answer to the crisis to which her relationship with her father has brought her. Eliot immediately grants Mirah a first-person monologue in which she explains the 203 circumstances that resulted in her dismal situation. In other words, Mirah tells her story of the distant past within Eliot’s narration of Daniel’s recent past; the complication of this structure parallels the convolution of the events bringing Daniel and the Cohens together. Mirah’s narrative of her childhood highlights the various ways in which Lapidoth breaches English moral, social, and legal standards for fathering. Summarizing her history, Mirah tells the kindly Mrs. Meyrick that when she was seven years old, her father abandoned her mother and brother, abducting her in the process. In their travels through America and Europe, Lapidoth compelled the reluctant Mirah to sing publicly for money, which he used in part to support them, and in part to gamble. Eventually, Mirah speculates that Lapidoth brokered a deal with a rich count: in exchange for cash with which to procure his release from prison, Lapidoth agreed to give the Count his daughter, Mirah. Suspecting her father’s plans, Mirah escaped, inherently convinced that her feminine duty to conserve her chastity trumped her filial obligations to her father. By expressing sympathy with Mirah’s choices, Daniel and the Meyricks confirm Mirah’s conviction that paternal exploitation negates the social contract between fathers and children as well as the laws protecting Lapidoth’s rights to do almost anything he pleases with his daughter; their condemnation therefore indicates another conflict between the social and legal standards governing fatherhood. 24 When Lapidoth returns to England expecting to wheedle financial help from his children, Mirah’s long-lost brother, Modecai, deals his father a withering tongue- lashing that builds Mirah’s portrait of Lapidoth as a monstrous father. Lapidoth had 204 deceived Mirah into believing that her mother and brother died after he whisked her away from their English home, a lie which stains all his future words with doubt. Informing his father that he is under no false impressions about his covert departure from home, Mordecai declares: “‘You absconded with money, leaving your debts unpaid; you forsook my mother; you robbed her of her little child and broke her heart; you have become a gambler, . . . ; you were ready to sell my sister—you had sold her, but the price was denied you’” (665). Mordecai begins this paternal excoriation by proclaiming that although Lapidoth has “‘broken [his] bond’” with his children, he and his sister will continue to respect their ties to him (665). Her renewed relationship with her brother revises Mirah’s earlier decision that her father’s abuses voided their social contract: with her brother’s male authority and protection, Mirah can now fulfill the obligations of this bond in a proper emotional fashion, rather than in the commercial way Lapidoth perceived as fit. Lapidoth successfully hunts Mirah down and emotionally manipulates his way back into the home she has established with her brother. Now that Eliot has mined Mirah’s past, she can return to the present, providing temporally immediate evidence of Lapidoth’s injurious paternal care. At this point, Mirah is singing at private parties and teaching the children of the well-to-do, using her wages to support herself and her ailing brother. Employing dialogue between the family members as well as narratorial input, Eliot portrays a father whose ideas about property breach Victorian social mores and yet often square with nineteenth-century legal codes. In his first encounter with the escaped Mirah, Lapidoth’s words 205 explicate his criteria for good fathering. Lapidoth actually boasts of his fathering prowess, asking, “‘What father devoted himself to his daughter like I did?’” (631). But Eliot never allows Lapidoth’s interpretation of his scheming self-pity to gain much traction. Unlike Eliot’s version of ideal fathering, in which property and guidance descend unconditionally and unidirectionally from parent to child, Lapidoth views the parent-child relationship as a two-way street. Whining that he “‘had given up everything for the sake of getting [Mirah] an education which was to be a fortune’” to her, Lapidoth queries, “‘Who else was it you owed everything to, if not to me?’” (631). Though Mirah thinks, but does not say, “‘I don’t believe one word of what you say,’” Lapidoth did pay for singing lessons for Mirah, which did indeed secure her a career (632). Though Lapidoth’s inducement for training Mirah to sing (economic gain) may stray from the typical Victorian motivation behind a woman’s “ornamental education,” this part of his story rings true. A primary difference between Eliot’s good fathers and Lapidoth, then, is that the latter expects something (financial support or gain) in return for his paternal ventures; he believes that Mirah’s education was an investment, and he assumes that she now “owes” him “everything.” According to Blackstone’s Commentaries, English law agrees with Lapidoth in expecting children to support their parents. In fact, he writes that a child is “equally compellable . . . to maintain and provide for a wicked and unnatural progenitor, as for one who has shewn the greatest tenderness and parental piety (sic)” (441-42). While a tender domestic ideology might interpret this policy as acceptable when accompanied by respect and love, Eliot twists the exchange into impropriety 206 by characterizing Lapidoth as an unrepentant gambler, one who squanders whatever money he and his daughter earn. Once Mirah is educated, Lapidoth seems to expect property to transfer from daughter to father indefinitely. Directly reversing Grandcourt’s generosity with his property, Lapidoth, once established in his children’s home, spends most of his time hunting desperately for Mirah’s money and keys. In contrast to Grandcourt’s “lordly” distribution of property, then, Lapidoth practices a tyrant’s acquisition: he behaves as though his daughter and her property are his for the taking, exploiting, or selling. Filling in the details of Lapidoth’s philosophy of paternal property, Eliot’s narrator explains in a Dickensian moment that [t]o have opened a desk or drawer of Mirah’s, and pocketed any bank- notes found there, would have been to his mind a sort of domestic appropriation which had no disgrace in it; the degrees of liberty a man allows himself with other people’s property being often delicately drawn, even beyond the boundary where the law begins to lay its hold. . . . Lapidoth really felt himself injuriously treated by his daughter, and thought that he ought to have had what he wanted of her other earnings as he had of her apple-tart. 675-76 In fact, the narrator assures readers, Lapidoth “appeared to himself to have a claim on any property his children might possess” (662). Eliot’s irony intimates that only Lapidoth recognizes such a “claim,” yet English law validates Lapidoth’s supposition. Moreover, Eliot is careful to eliminate the possibility of a cultural relativism which might justify such differences in paternal philosophies by expanding the reach of Lapidoth’s “domestic appropriation” of family property to the much broader, “other people’s property.” She thereby spreads Lapidoth’s expectation of shared property from the limits of his family circle to people with 207 whom he has not made a former exchange. This rhetorical move on Eliot’s part prepares us for Lapidoth’s theft of Daniel’s ring, which reintroduces Eliot’s literary associations between jewelry, property, inheritance, and family. Lapidoth’s relationship with his daughter indicates that his philosophy of family property is inextricably intertwined with women’s sexuality, as well. First, he abducts his daughter from her mother’s care, abrogating all custodial rights to himself for his daughter, but not for his son. Perhaps he suspected that Mirah possessed talent and beauty from which he could profit, or in other words, that she was the more valuable of his human property. Throughout Mirah’s childhood, Lapidoth secures singing instructors and jobs for her, investing in her talent at the same time that he profits from it. From the beginning of their life abroad, he manages her earnings, assuming proprietorship over any income generated by what he considers his property (Mirah). Eventually, he attempts to exploit the ultimate right of ownership—alienation—by plotting to sell Mirah into a sexual relationship. At this point, of course, Mirah asserts her own self-ownership and flees. When they reunite in England, one of Lapidoth’s first moves is to beg money from his daughter. When Mirah timidly extends her small purse, Lapidoth happily clutches the entire bag and slinks off, promising to return the next day a new man (635). Eliot’s treatment of this purse cements Lapidoth’s association between sexuality and property. The novel’s passages about Mirah’s purse play with a traditional literary connection between purses and women’s genitalia, a connection that complements Lapidoth’s earlier attempts to sell his daughter’s sexuality. Eliot’s narrator confides 208 that “Mirah’s purse was a handsome one— . . . and Lapidoth presently found himself . . . considering what the purse would fetch in addition to the sum it contained, and what prospect there was of his being able to get more from his daughter without submitting to adopt a penitential form of life under the eyes of . . . [his] formidable son,” who has recently assumed paternal and proprietal control over Mirah and her earnings (635). Lapidoth eschews this potential exchange of his submission to his son for financial support, however, and he thus weighs his options carefully. His potential exchanges with Mirah, on the other hand, involve the trade of his latest coin, guilt, for money from this dutiful daughter. Lapidoth must choose, then, between trading the purse for a fixed sum or returning the purse as promised in trade for the right to further exchanges with Mirah. In his deliberations, Lapidoth eventually decides to give “himself a good countenance by restoring the purse” (662). Lapidoth understands the importance of his superficially changeable “countenance”; if he makes the moral choice to return the purse, he may more closely resemble his self-righteous son, whom Mirah so clearly admires. Lapidoth’s opportunism allows him to benefit unusually from Mirah’s virginity. Normally, a Victorian father or family could exchange a daughter’s virginity just once, but Lapidoth counts on earning from it twice: he has already profited from the breached agreement he contracted with the Count, and he will soon justify his theft of Daniel’s property by assuming it is a proper exchange for Daniel’s marriage of his daughter. In what is presumably Lapidoth’s final proprietal exchange involving his daughter’s sexuality, Lapidoth steals Daniel’s ring. This theft enriches Eliot’s 209 fascination with jewelry as a symbol of inheritance. This ring belonged to Daniel’s unknown biological, legitimate father, as Daniel learns when he finally meets his mother. Consequently, Lapidoth’s “domestic appropriation” of his future son-in- law’s ring symbolically reverses the traditional descent of property. Lapidoth’s mental calculations regarding the ring, as well as his notions about Mirah’s property, reveal that Daniel’s paternal inheritance, embodied in part by the ring, becomes a sort of twisted dowry. Once again, Eliot’s narrator communicates Lapidoth’s reasoning, which layers his ideas of proper fatherhood: “any property of Deronda’s (available without his formal consent) was all one with his children’s property, since their father would never be prosecuted for taking it” (677). Lapidoth clearly equates non-prosecution with his own system of legality—a self-generated domestic code. Thus, Lapidoth, like Grandcourt, exploits the leeway of England’s individualistic legal system, which grants men dominance in matters of family property, though of course Lapidoth oversteps the boundaries of legality. In addition, Eliot’s parenthetical allusion to consent echoes Lapidoth’s earlier attempts to sell Mirah: in Lapidoth’s world, such exchanges do not require contractual consent on the part of the subordinate family member; instead they are understood as unilateral aspects of his domestic code governing property. Lapidoth simply insures that he will gain from Mirah’s consensual granting of her sexuality to Daniel by stealing his ring. When considered in concert with Grandcourt’s and Mr. Davilow’s questionable jewelry transactions, this final episode of illegitimate transfers of jewelry sharpens her critique of the law’s focus on property in paternity cases: not all fathers practice 210 a generous disposal of property to children, as the law assumes they do. Though she criticizes the law’s concern with property, her own text depends upon the symbol of jewelry to categorize fathers: those who take property from their children are unequivocally corrupt. The relationship between Lapidoth and Mordecai also allows Eliot to explore further the connections between resemblance and inheritance. Rather than affecting the pathways of family fortunes, the similarities pondered in the Cohens’ father-son relationship influence the inheritance of morality and character. 25 After acknowledging a resemblance between Lapidoth and his son, Eliot’s narrator muses that “The likeness was that of outline, which is always most striking at the first moment; the expression had been wrought into the strongest contrast by such hidden or inconspicuous differences as can make the genius of a Cromwell within the outward type of a father who was no more than a respectable parishioner” (663). As Irene Tucker explicates in A Probable State (2000), Eliot’s description of the portraits in the Mallinger estate caution that resemblances might mark biological inheritance, but they might also deceive. Tucker notes that each of the famous portrait artists listed by Eliot has, in effect, fictionalized the degree and kind of likenesses in their representations of family members. Eliot’s narrator suggests that, like a portrait artist, the life lived by an individual also has the power to alter his or her resemblance to a relative. Lapidoth’s resemblance to his son, however, is only “that of outline,” a superficial likeness which, thanks to the “hidden or inconspicuous differences” to which Eliot alludes, is instantly recognizable as such. Lapidoth’s 211 experiences and choices have “wrought” the changes distinguishing him from his son and transforming whatever is in surplus beyond the “outline” shared by the two. With this passage, Eliot alerts readers that Mordecai has inherited only his father’s physiognomy, not his moral code—a distinction apparently observable by even the untrained eye. Interestingly, Eliot uses the analogy of a father—a mere “respectable parishioner”—who, through unarticulated experiences, has developed the “genius” of a Cromwell. In this comparison, Eliot reflects upon a historical figure driven by his political convictions to overthrow a king—in fact with the intention of overthrowing the monarchical system of government in England. A cursory reading of this analogy may leave us confused, as it refers to a man historians often remember as one ennobled by the pursuit of his convictions: this is perhaps not a comparison we would initially draw with the scheming, ignoble Lapidoth. Consider, however, that Cromwell ousted the father-figure to a nation, arguing for an altogether new type of national parenting. In a related fashion, Lapidoth overthrows British notions of “good” fathering, and attempts with verbal and emotional rhetoric to change his children’s minds about the nature of such fathering. Furthermore, this passage refers to “the expression” without naming whose expression is considered— is it Lapidoth or Mordecai whose life has visibly altered his expression? This ambiguity creates the possibility of a flipside to this analogy—the son as visibly changed—that complicates the analogy considerably. Mordecai too, has had “hidden” differences in his experiences which have shaped his appearance. 212 Although Mordecai is not technically a father, he aims to father a nation and acts as a spiritual father to Daniel. Mordecai, like Cromwell, overthrows the paternal powers of his father (figure), assuming a control over his father and sister which involves an exchange—Lapidoth’s good behavior for financial support. This backwards paternity parallels the reversal practiced by Lapidoth in which he expects property to ascend, rather than descend, generationally. Surprisingly, Mordecai’s proclamations seem to indicate that he sees relationships between parents and their children as bidirectional as well, but that the absence of love and respect perverts this exchange system. In fact, in Mordecai’s speech declaring that he will continue to honor his bond with his father, Mordecai mirrors some of the “lordly” attitude exhibited by Grandcourt in relation to the distribution of property, but with an ironic twist: out of feelings of duty and moral superiority, Mordecai will support his father, but he will do so with money earned by his sister and granted by his friends. Though Mirah earns her money, Mordecai treats it proprietally and distributes it as though he earned it—behavior that echoes his outlaw father’s. Because in many ways the text exalts Mordecai, it implicitly validates his sentimental—yet patriarchal—philosophy of family property, and thereby validates one aspect of his father’s similar ideas. Meshing with the hyperbolic nature of her representation of Lapidoth, this father’s unpalatable behavior, unlike Grandcourt’s, alternately conforms to and exceeds his legal rights. Lapidoth is a thief, but English law did not encode his treatment of Mirah as criminal. Though the 1839 Custody Act allowed mothers to petition for visitation rights and even custody of their children under the age of 213 seven, fathers still had the primary right to custody of children. Moreover, as many nineteenth-century women complained, there was no law obligating fathers to support their families financially. Fathers could only be compelled to reimburse a parish or workhouse for their family’s support after the family had been reduced to public sustenance by their father’s neglect. 26 On the other hand, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels are replete with female characters bullied by their families into unhappy marriages that are presented as economic or social exchanges—the daughter for the money or social station of the husband—so we might perceive Mirah’s dilemma as no singular fictional event. However, Lapidoth’s intentions are unclear: we cannot know whether he hoped to sell Mirah to the Count as a wife or as a mistress. Even supposing that the Count wanted to marry Mirah, most fictional families use “respectable” means to pressure their daughters into consenting to what they present as a “duty.” Lapidoth, conversely, sensing that Mirah will reject this “duty,” seems to plot a covert exchange in which he will deliver Mirah to the Count without her consent. Consequently, Lapidoth’s abandonment of his family and treatment of Mirah seem to straddle legal and social borders. That other characters perceive his treatment of his family as outrageous, though, suggests that positive law is inconsistent with social codes. Most importantly, Deronda illustrates that although Grandcourt remains firmly within the law’s bounds and Lapidoth occasionally exceeds them, both men exploit misogynistic elements of British law to their own individual benefit or pleasure. 214 As a Victorian woman enmeshed in an illicit relationship with a married man, George Eliot wrote of illegitimate fathers from a privileged perspective. Perhaps her exploration of illegitimate fathers in Daniel Deronda helped Eliot to defend the legitimacy of the intimate relationships she strove to construct between herself and George Henry Lewes’s sons. Regardless of whether her portrayal of fathers in her late novels comforted her in her own parental efforts, they surely encouraged her fellow Victorians to reconsider not only their own assumptions about fatherly behavior, but also the fictions of paternity constructed by England’s Poor and Bastardy Laws. By demonstrating the imperfections of the legal system’s reliance upon financial support as the sole evidence of fatherhood outside of wedlock, Eliot’s novel calls for greater realism in the courts regulating familial relationships. Defying legal and social standards, Eliot’s Daniel Deronda insists that emotional affinities, nurturance, and unconditional love and support—rather than proprietal gifts—confer legitimacy upon paternal relationships. 215 Chapter 4 Endnotes 1 Very few historians have written intensively on the effects of the bastardy clauses in the Poor Laws. See Ursula Henriques’s “Bastardy and the New Poor Law” (Past and Present 37 [June 1967]: 103-129) and Pat Thane’s “Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England” (History Workshop Journal 6 [1978]: 29-51) for in depth analyses of these clauses. 2 4 & 5 Gulielmi IV, c. 76. 3 7 & 8 Victoria., c. 101. 4 Both Ursula Henriques and Pat Thane perceive the 1844 Act as relieving deserted mothers from the wrongs of the 1834 Act. 5 The 1872 Bastardy Act offered women some additional help by mandating not just the physical support of illegitimate children, but also financial assistance for their education (if the court determined a man was the child’s father, of course). 6 Clause fifty-seven of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act makes a man financially responsible for the “legitimate or illegitimate” children of the woman he marries, creating a “Husband’s Family” (4 & 5 Gulielmi IV, c. 76). If a mother was unable to shoulder the cost of supporting her illegitimate children, her parents (if still living) were next in line for responsibility of the children. 7 The Royal Commissioners’ assertion that “Only one of the parents of an illegitimate child can be ascertained,” when compared to the legal doctrine of “presumption of paternity,” implies that Parliament empowered only the legal word (via marriage ceremony or maintenance order) with the ability to “ascertain” both parents (195). Blackstone’s Commentaries agree: “The main end and design of marriage . . . [is] to ascertain and fix upon some certain person, to whom the care, the protection, the maintenance, and the education of the children should belong” (443). 8 Eighteenth-century novels like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48) provide prototypes for the search for origins and malignant parenting (respectively), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) offers a Romantic example of the theme. 9 Some excellent analyses of the novel’s concern with Daniel’s presumed illegitimacy and kinship issues include Gillian Beer’s George Eliot (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), Irene Tucker’s A Probable State: The Novel, the Contract, and the Jews (U of Chicago P, 2000), and Catherine Gallagher’s “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question” (Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986] 39-60). 216 10 The conversation between Cass and Marner occurs in Chapter nineteen of Silas Marner. 11 Oxford English Dictionary Online. Ed. John Simpson. June 2007. Oxford UP, 2007. 29 June 2007 <http://dictionary.oed.com>. 12 Sir Hugo’s property is entailed; he possesses only a life interest in his estates. These must descend to a legitimate male heir, if one exists (134). 13 Eliot’s narrator informs us that Grandcourt stands to become a baronet or peer through his father’s line (75-6). 14 The transfer of jewelry was a common symbol for soured family relations in the second half of the nineteenth-century. Eliot’s Romola (1863), too, uses jewels to symbolize the connections between family relations and property. Consider, for example, that Tito begins his social climbing with money he gains by selling his adoptive father’s ring and gems. Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873) bases its plot on the ambiguity of laws governing transfers of family jewels and heirlooms, while Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) stretches a detective story around the frame of a bequeathed, but stolen, jewel. 15 Upon marriage, men gained proprietal rights over all of their wives’ property except minor items such as pin money. Paraphernalia, or women’s personal clothing and jewels, could be reclaimed by a widow, but only if her husband’s creditors did not claim it. Of course, a settlement could protect property set aside for a woman by her family, but such a legal document had to be drawn up by the woman’s former male protector (father, uncle, brother, etc.) before the marriage took place. For a thorough analysis of the laws governing marriage and property in nineteenth-century England, see Mary Shanley’s Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989). 16 Assuming that she remains a widow, and thus a feme sole, Mrs. Davilow could write a will. 17 In the endnotes to his introduction to Daniel Deronda, Graham Handley sets the novel in the 1860s (698). The 1873 Custody of Infants Act would not have changed this situation for Lydia; its main change was to raise the age until which a woman could petition for custody of a child to sixteen (36 Victoria, c. 12). 18 In this way, Eliot links the illegitimate father, Grandcourt, to Leonora Halm-Elberstein, who likewise provides only money to the son she has relinquished. 19 Lydia, like Medea, is left by her lover for another woman. Unlike Medea, however, Lydia neither kills her rival nor her own children. 217 20 Grandcourt does split Gadsmere and two thousand pounds a year from the larger estate in order to bequeath these to Gwendolen; however, the text has emphasized the undesirability of this real property (648). 21 As Sir Hugo celebrates, little Henleigh will not benefit from the name Mallinger, but he will from the name Grandcourt (613). 22 Oxford English Dictionary Online. Ed. John Simpson. 2 nd ed., 1989. Oxford UP, 2007. 29 June 2007 <http://dictionary.oed.com>. 23 In The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Anthony Trollope creates a plot around the complicated inheritance laws governing jewelry. Through his lawyer character, “Mr. Dove,” Trollope writes that jewelry could be devised by will, or be considered paraphernalia if not terribly valuable, but that it could not be considered an “heirloom” (London: Penguin Books, 2004. 262-64). The diamonds in question in Trollope’s novel do not fit any of these descriptions definitively. Eliot, on the other hand, leaves the bequeathing of the diamonds out of Grandcourt’s will, though we can safely assume that Gwendolen’s terror of the gems would incite her to return them happily to Lydia. 24 Mirah tells her story in Chapter twenty. 25 Eliot omits any discussion of resemblance regarding Mirah, thereby gendering England’s already gendered inheritance system. 26 See Barbara Bodichon’s A Brief Summary in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women; Together with a Few Observations Thereon (London: J. Chapman, 1854) and Caroline Norton’s English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (London: Printed for private circulation, 1854) for two contemporary women’s perspectives on Victorian laws for women. 218 Bibliography Acland, Alice. Caroline Norton. London: Constable, 1948. Baker, J. H. An Introduction to English Legal History, 4 th ed. 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Creator Bruce, Leslie Jeanine (author)

Core Title Outlaw mothers: marital conflict, family law, and women's novels in Victorian England

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 11/27/2007

Defense Date 09/10/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Domestic,Marriage,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,parliament,sensation,Violence

Place Name United Kingdom (countries)

Language English

Advisor Schor, Hilary M. (committee chair), Boone, Joseph Allen (committee member), Kincaid, Jamesb R. (committee member), Levine, Philippa (committee member)

Creator Email LJBruce@verizon.net

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m944

Unique identifier UC1328053

Identifier etd-Bruce-20071127 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-488255 (legacy record id),usctheses-m944 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Bruce-20071127.pdf

Dmrecord 488255

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Bruce, Leslie Jeanine

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu