Bleak Houses - Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction
“Professor Surridge exhibits a clear and persuasive historical sense as well as sensitivity to the novels and stories. I believe this study will have lasting value because of its careful historical research and corresponding interpretation of the texts,” says Naomi Wood, Kansas State University The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 was a piece of legislation that opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat the phenomenon of “private” family violence?
The Gift is Steel to perfection. A small work, it tells the tale of two 16-year-olds whose meeting restores life to both. The death of Tommy's little sister wrecks a family's happiness. The unwanted pregnancy of Maribeth threatens to ruin her attempt to lift herself out of an anti-intellectual and sexist environment. But when the two meet, love, support, sensitivity, and some much-needed wisdom redeem the bleak circumstances of their lives and bring the story to its satisfying conclusion. Clich{‚}ed, sentimental?
Considered the most important work of modern Iranian literature, The Blind Owl is a haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation. Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpiece details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover. And as the narrator gradually drifts into frenzy and madness, the reader becomes caught in the sandstorm of Hedayat's bleak vision of the human condition. The Blind Owl, which has been translated into many foreign languages, has often been compared to the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.
Fifteen years after the notorious War at Cat Lake, Missy Parker, the child who stood in the center of the demonic war, now lives in Texas with her husband, Pat. But Satan's minions remain at Cat Lake, waiting. On a bleak night in April, 1960, evil is aroused. An innocent black woman is attacked by a mob of white men. Old Mose Washington confronts the men with a twelve-gauge shotgun, and people die.
Bleak HouseA complex plot of love and inheritance is set against the English legal system of the mid-19th century, with all its tortuous avenues and disguised resolutions. Here is the firm, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the young orphan and ward of court Ester Summerson (who tells much of the story). As always, it is the skilled pen of Dickens himself that creates the momentum with his acute eye for both individual characters and their traits, and the backdrop of Victorian London.
