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

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 Bronte, 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 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.