Unfixing Identity and Resisting Violence in Caroline Norton’s Pamphlets and Fiction

Abstract

I have been arguing so far that explicit representations of intimate violence gesture beyond individual cases of abuse to implicate the middle classes in what was often understood to be a uniquely working-class form of brutality. The image of the battered woman thus became an avenue for renegotiating social and moral hierarchies. Since, however, as Nancy Armstrong points out, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel was a major vehicle for constructing and promoting the morality of the middle classes (8), most novels of this period that thematize intimate violence limit serious abuse to the working class, as in Oliver Twist, and those that do deal with middle-class abuse rarely portray it in the kind of detail we see in Bill and Nancy’s relationship. This reluctance to represent affluent intimate violence seems like a good strategy for protecting the concept of middle-class piety; middle-class homes are more peaceful, quarrels less serious, and bodies less on display. But in the chapters that follow, I explore how many Victorian novels do indict the prosperous classes in the problem of intimate violence, and that they typically do so, paradoxically, through the very evasions and displacements of intimate abuse that appear to protect that same group. Not only did explicit and implicit accounts of intimate violence emerge simultaneously, then, but they were also part of the same processes of questioning the distinctions presumed to validate the social status quo.