Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists
- 2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
- 3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
- 4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children's literature
- 5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question
- 6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire
- 7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
- 8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
- 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
- 10 Ouida and the other New Woman
- 11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suffrage feminism
- 12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
- 13 E. Nesbit and the woman question
- 14 “An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
3 - Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists
- 2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
- 3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
- 4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children's literature
- 5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question
- 6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire
- 7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
- 8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
- 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
- 10 Ouida and the other New Woman
- 11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suffrage feminism
- 12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
- 13 E. Nesbit and the woman question
- 14 “An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
In 1881 Emile Zola complained that legalized divorce would be the ruin of literature because it would make marital misery solvable and thus rob the novelist of his subject matter. But despite Zola's anxieties, when expanded access to divorce came to France and England, literature was not ruined, but instead new subjects and new structures developed to integrate marital breakdown and remarriage into the plot. In fact, the introduction of divorce into the conventional marriage plot resulted in a disruption of form that made the novel more multi-voiced, more diffuse, more open-ended – divorce, in other words, is a factor in the development of the modernist and postmodernist experiments in narrative form.
Naturally, since divorce was practically impossible before the mid nineteenth century, only a handful of novels talked about it in the first half of the century. But the debates about divorce reform in the decade leading up to the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 (known popularly as the Divorce Reform Act) were coupled with a small flurry of narratives which were at least partially about divorce, the most well known though not necessarily the most interesting being Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens.
After the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857, there was a slow but steady increase in the number of novels that featured divorce – as an action thought about, or sometimes attempted, or less frequently, achieved. Not until the 1880s, however, did divorced characters figure in significant ways in the novel.
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- Information
- Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question , pp. 42 - 59Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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