Bigamy, the French Invasion, and the Triumph of British Nationhood In
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SENSATION FICTION AND THE LAW: DANGEROUS ALTERNATIVE SOCIAL TEXTS AND CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Elizabeth Godke Koonce August 2006 This dissertation entitled SENSATION FICTION AND THE LAW: DANGEROUS ALTERNATIVE SOCIAL TEXTS AND CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN by ELIZABETH GODKE KOONCE has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Joseph P. McLaughlin Associate Professor of English Benjamin M. Ogles Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Abstract KOONCE, ELIZABETH GODKE. Ph.D. August 2006. English SENSATION FICTION AND THE LAW: DANGEROUS ALTERNATIVE SOCIAL TEXTS AND CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN (238 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Joseph P. McLaughlin This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century sensation fiction evoked a cultural revolution that threatened to challenge accepted norms for personal behavior and increase possibilities for scripting one’s life outside of established norms for respectable behavior. Because of the ways that it threatened to represent new scripts for personal behavior, sensation, which I term a “dangerous alternative social text,” disrupted hegemony and provided new ways of thinking amongst its Victorian British readership; it became a vehicle through which the law and government (public discourses) ended up colliding with domesticity and the very private texts surrounding it. Using an expanded definition of sensation, this project analyzes four “sensational” novels from the mid- to late Victorian period – Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel, Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – and connects it chapter-by-chapter to concerns about cultural revolution evoked by the passage of the Infant Custody Acts, the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act, the Married Women’s Property Acts and the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. It also argues that the laws these novels engage additionally served as dangerous alternative social texts for personal behavior to the Establishment which attempted to bar their passing. It short, the project reads both the laws and listed novels as versions of sensation. Both sensation fiction and sensational laws legitimized new “dangerous” patterns for behavior and threatened possible changes in the “social text” of England. Approved: Joseph P. McLaughlin Associate Professor of English Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to thank Candace Stewart and the members of my dissertation writing group for giving me extensive writing assistance and moral support during the three years it took me to complete this project: Jennifer Pauley-Gose, Anna Dzirkalis and Hayley Haugen. I love all of you and have enjoyed growing as writers and friends together. I would also like to thank my committee chair Joseph McLaughlin for all the astute reading and critical advice he’s given me on my drafts over the years, and for his kindness and encouragement during my times of frustration. Thanks also to the other members of my committee: Jeremy Webster, Nicole Reynolds, and Patricia Gunn. All of you have been both friends and colleagues in every sense of the word, supportive and interested in my academic progress. In the Ohio University English Department, I would also like to thank Josie Bloomfield for helping behind the scenes as Graduate Chair and Betty Pytlik for always being on my side and believing that I would finish. I would also like to thank Elsie Michie, my Victorian literature professor from LSU, for jumpstarting my interests in Victorian literature and Women’s Studies. Though it’s been years since I attended that campus, your impact on my educational life has been very significant. On the homefront, I’d like to thank both David and Bozeman, without whose patience this last year I could not have completed the project. Additional thanks go to David for taking on almost all childcare and housekeeping duties as I entered the “homestretch;” I know all of that work has been time-consuming and hard, especially with your own workload. I also want to thank my mother and grandmother, who have always believed in my being able to finish, but also taught me that my reasons for finishing the dissertation had to be my own. Their getting me to see that internal characteristics of a person far outweigh my external awards and accomplishments has made me a happier person. I love you dearly and am proud to be your daughter and granddaughter. To David and Bozeman 8 Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgements............................................................................................................. 5 Table of Contents................................................................................................................ 8 List of Figures ................................................................................................................... 10 Introduction: The Skeleton is out of the Victorian Closet of Respectability: Sensation Novels, the Gothic Tradition and Impending Fears of Cultural Revolution ................................................................................................................... 11 Margaret Oliphant, Sensation, and the Attack on Victorian Decency and Domesticity............................................................................................... 11 Sensation Novels and the Revolutionary Tradition .................................. 20 Sensation Fiction, the Law, and Alternative Social Texts........................ 24 Domesticity as the Primary Site of and for Cultural Revolution.............. 29 The Mutual Infiltration of the Public and Private Spheres as a Sign of Social Revolution...................................................................................... 35 Alternative Social Texts in Action............................................................ 41 Chapter One: The Revolution from Within: Domestic Deviance in Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.......................................................................................... 47 Bigamy, Divorce and the Patriarchal Family Structure............................ 58 The Dangers of Fiction Making: Lady Audley’s Mask............................ 62 Masking and Unmasking in Lady Audley’s Private/Public Boudoir........ 68 Reading Social Texts: Robert’s Unraveling of Lady Audley’s Fictions . 77 The Battle of the Texts: Robert Audley as Legal Enforcer ..................... 80 Chapter Two: Sensation and Conversation in Salem Chapel, Margaret Oliphant’s own Sensation Novel ........................................................................................ 86 Sensational Disruptions and Mr. Vincent’s Re-reading of Private Life ... 91 9 Newspapers as an Invasive Sensational Force........................................ 112 Containing “Sensationalism”.................................................................. 118 Conclusions............................................................................................. 126 Chapter Three: Rumor, Sensational Invasion and the Rewriting of Legal History in Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds........................................... 131 Lizzie Eustace and the Married Women’s Property Act ........................ 132 Lizzie’s Sensational “Text”: Fiction-Making and Her Early Manipulation of the Law ............................................................................................... 138 Revolution in the Drawing Room: Rumor, the Diamonds and Public Discourse................................................................................................. 142 Sensational Infiltration into Government Social Space.......................... 152 The Role of Newpapers in the Reconstruction of Truth......................... 160 The Second Robbery and Lizzie’s Further Manipulation of the Law .... 165 Lizzie’s One Weakness: Her Desire for a “Corsair” ............................. 167 Bigamous Marriages: The Heroine Trumped? ...................................... 169 Chapter Four: Sensation Within the Nation: The Wild(e) Story of The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Legal Text............................................................................... 176 Dangerous Poses, Dorian Gray and the Labouchere Amendment......... 187 The Courtroom as a Locus for Social Change and the Intersection between the Public and Private Spheres................................................................ 195 Oscar Wilde on Trial: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Court Transcript as Legal Artifact.......................................................................................... 203 Poisonous Books and their Effects ......................................................... 211 Dorian Gray as a Dangerous Dandy ....................................................... 216 Sensational Closure................................................................................. 222 Conclusion: Mrs. Grundy, Sensational Fiction and the “Confused Moral World” of Fin de Siècle England.................................................................................... 225 Bibliography ................................................................................................................