Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T11:00:32.896Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

HIS AND HERS: GENDERED OWNERSHIP AND MARRIAGE IN DOMBEY AND SON AND LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2017

Katherine Dunagan Osborne
Katherine Dunagan Osborne*
Affiliation:
Davis & Elkins College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the nineteenth century, middle-class marriage was built on women's unique relationship with and authority over the domestic space, including its pin cushions, diaries, tea sets, mirrors, and boudoir furniture. What would a husband do with his wife's hair brushes? What claim could he have to her workbasket? Though the common law of coverture gave nearly all legal rights of ownership to husbands, leaving married women a mere smattering of ambiguous claims to pin money and paraphernalia, married women were nonetheless encouraged to cultivate ownership of objects through access, proximity, use, and emotional connection. Such unofficial ownership of household objects did not pose a threat to men's legal ownership or economic power, but was instead a necessary component of marriage since it allowed women to participate properly – according to domestic ideology – in the union of “one flesh.” Historians and literary critics of the last twenty-five years have explored the power Victorian middle-class women gain from their gendered relationship to the domestic space. My interest in this topic, however, is less about the agency women gain from their unique ownership of domestic things and more about what this mechanism of heteronormativity reveals about Victorian culture when it breaks down.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 361 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Ablow, Rachel. The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Badowska, Eva. “On the Track of Things: Sensation and Modernity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret .” Victorian Literature and Culture 37.1 (2009): 157–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” Illuminations. Ed. Arendt, Hannah. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 59–67.Google Scholar
Berry, Laura C. The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1999. 63–92.Google Scholar
Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith. A Brief Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women. London: Chapman, 1854. Victorian Women Writers Project. Web. 23 March 2016.Google Scholar
Brace, Laura. The Politics of Property: Labour, Freedom and Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.Google Scholar
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. London: Penguin, 1998.Google Scholar
Briggs, Asa. Victorian Things. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Things. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2004. 1–16.Google Scholar
Clark, Robert. “Riddling the Family Firm: The Sexual Economy of Dombey and Son .” ELH 51.1 (1984): 69–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Deborah. Household Gods: The British and their Possessions. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Cohen, Monica. Professional Domesticity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. New York: Modern Library, 2003.Google Scholar
Elfenbein, Andrew. “Managing the House in Dombey and Son: Dickens and the Uses of Analogy.” Studies in Philology 92.3 (1995): 361–82.Google Scholar
Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Garson, Marjorie. Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and Social Power in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Ginsburg, Michal Peled. “House and Home in Dombey and Son .” Dickens Studies Annual 36 (2005): 57–73.Google Scholar
Goodin, George. “Competitive Conversation in the Dialogue of Dickens.” Dickens Quarterly 18.1 (2001): 3–20.Google Scholar
Goodin, George. “Margins of conversation in the dialogue of Dickens.” Dickens Quarterly 21.3 (2004): 170–82.Google Scholar
Henkle, Roger B. “The Crisis of Representation in Dombey and Son .” Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life. Ed. Polhemus, Robert M. and Henkle, Roger B.. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. 90–110.Google Scholar
Holcombe, Lee. Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1983.Google Scholar
John, Juliet. Dickens's Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Stallybrass, Peter. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Langland, Elizabeth. “Enclosure Acts: Framing Women's Bodies in Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret .” Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context. Ed. Tromp, Marlene, Gilbert, Pamela K., and Haynie, Aeron. Albany: SUNY UP, 2000. 3–16.Google Scholar
Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.Google Scholar
London Journal : And Weekly Record of Literature, Science, and Art 37 (1863).Google Scholar
Marcus, Steven. Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. 293–357.Google Scholar
Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Sebastian. “ Dombey and Son: Families and Commerce.” The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Realisms. Ed. Correa, Delia da Sousa. New York: Routledge, 2000. 136–58.Google Scholar
Moglen, Helene. “Theorizing Fiction/Fictionalizing Theory: The Case of Dombey and Son .”Victorian Studies 35.2 (1992): 159–84.Google Scholar
Montaut, Mary. “The Second Mrs. Dombey.” Dickens Quarterly 4.3 (1987): 141–52.Google Scholar
Morris, R. J. Men, Women and Property in England, 1780-1870: A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies amongst the Leeds Middle Classes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Moynahan, Julian. “Dealings with the Firm of Dombey & Son: Firmness versus Wetness.” Dickens and the Twentieth Century. Ed. Gross, John and Pearson, Gabriel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.Google Scholar
Plotz, John. “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory.” Criticism 47.1 (2005): 109–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Pykett, Lyn. The “Improper” Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writer. London: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Nicole. “Boudoir Stories: A Novel History of a Room and its Occupants.” Literature Interpretation Theory 15 (2004): 103–30.Google Scholar
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Staves, Susan. Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Surridge, Lisa. Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction. Athens: Ohio UP, 2005.Google Scholar