Kate Lawson & Lynn Shakinovsky 
The Marked Body 
Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature

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

Spis treści

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 'A FRIGHTFUL OBJECT’
Romance, Obsession, and Death in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 'The Birth-Mark’

2 DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ABJECTION, AND THE COMIC NOVEL
Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers

3 VIOLENCE, CAUSALITY, AND THE 'SHOCK OF HISTORY’
George Eliot’s 'Janet’s Repentance’

4 'THE SINS OF THE FATHER’ AND 'THE FEMALE LINE’
Phantom Visitations and Cruelty in Elizabeth Gaskell’s 'The Poor Clare’

5 RAPE, TRANSGRESSION, AND THE LAW
The Body of Marian Erle in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh

6 'WILL SHE END LIKE ME?’
Violence and the Uncanny in Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife

CONCLUSION

NOTES

WORKS CITED

INDEX

O autorze

Kate Lawson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern British Columbia.
Lynn Shakinovsky is Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University.