ideal of domesticity.
The Victorians’ regulation of domestic violence partook of their “progressive construction of men’s conjugal behaviour … as a problem to be regulated” (Hammerton, Cruelty, 6–7) and in turn signals the period’s shifting definitions of masculinity. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall document in Family Fortunes, the early nineteenth century witnessed the construction of a new subject position—that of the bourgeois man for whom manliness was inextricably linked to domesticity: “[M]iddle-class men who sought to be ‘someone,’ to count as individuals because of their wealth, their power to command or their capacity to influence people, were, in fact, embedded in networks of familial and female support which underpinned their rise to public prominence” (Davidoff and Hall, 13). For the Victorian middle-class male, Davidoff and Hall argue, domestic harmony thus represented the “crown of the enterprise as well as the basis of public virtue” (Davidoff and Hall, 18). This bourgeois script equated British manliness with self-control over both sexual and violent urges.1 Violence in the home thus destroyed the two central facets of Victorian manliness: it shattered the connection between manliness and domesticity and it showed a man unable to exercise self-control. Hence Dillwyn could characterize wife assault as “much more a man’s question” than a woman’s (142 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 169).
As I will show, Dombey and Son forms part of this discourse that constructed family violence as a threat to masculinity. It represents Dombey’s injury to his daughter as a symbolic assault—a blow, a murder—on his own manliness. And, paradoxically, the text closes with Dombey’s manhood restored by means of, rather then despite, his daughter’s injury. As I will argue, this renders the novel closed to the implications of its own central narrative event. As Anna Clark observes, marital violence threatened Victorian patriarchy because it disrupted the idea that men protected women in the home (A. Clark, “Humanity,” 187). Domestic violence was thus a kind of oxymoron, explosive in its implications for Victorian middle-class values. This threat to the patriarchal home underlies the central section of Dombey and Son, when Edith and Florence, Dombey’s wife and child, leave the Dombey home, and the house itself becomes a symbolic ruin, permeable to the gaze of all onlookers. Yet finally the text allays rather than confronts this threat. By restoring Mr. Dombey to domestic harmony at its conclusion, the text focuses on recreating protective manliness rather than critiquing the unequal gender relations underlying spousal assault. This closure, however, is unstable: in order to reconstitute the home, the text excludes and vilifies Edith, its most powerful female figure, just as The Old Curiosity Shop dismisses the combative Mrs. Jiniwin. Hence both Dombey and Son and The Old Curiosity Shop reveal an uneasiness about female independence and protest, specters fast becoming reality when Dombey and Son was serialized between 1846 and 1848.
Constructing Manliness: The “Good Wives’ Rod” and the Cochrane Decision
Before analyzing Dombey and Son, I want to look at the parliamentary debates on the 1853 Bill for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children to illustrate that members of Parliament described family violence as an assault on manliness. On 10 March 1853, Mr. Fitzroy, Undersecretary of the Home Department, rose in the House of Commons to propose a bill to “enlarge magistrates’ powers to inflict summary penalties for brutal assaults on women and children” (Doggett, 106). This bill, dubbed the “Good Wives’ Rod,” became the first piece of legislation to perceive assaults on women and children as a distinct category (May 1978, 144, 136); it thus formally inaugurated the very category of “family violence” as opposed to assault in general. It increased the maximum penalties under the 1828 Offenses Against the Person Act to £20 or six months in prison (with or without hard labor) and made it possible for a third party witnessing an assault to bring a complaint to a magistrate (Doggett, 106–7). As he introduced his bill, Fitzroy argued that assaults on women and children constituted “a blot” on the “national character” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1414). Addressing the all-male House of Commons, Fitzroy constructed a manly middle-class Englishman revolted by press accounts of wife assault: “No one could read the public journals without being constantly struck with horror and amazement at the numerous reports of cases of cruel and brutal assaults perpetrated upon the weaker sex by men who one blushed to think were Englishmen, and yet were capable of such atrocious acts. One’s mind actually recoiled when he thought of the dastardly and cowardly assaults which were being constantly perpetrated upon defenceless women by brutes who called themselves men” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1414). Fitzroy repeatedly emphasized the inadequacy of the justice system as he read out cases from 1852 and 1853. (Interestingly, although the proposed bill was to cover women and children, it was the wife beater, that “brute in the form of a man” [124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1414] who drew Fitzroy’s attention, as not one of these cases involved abused children.) His speech contrasted manliness, courage, and humanity with the brutal, cowardly, and inhuman qualities of the wife beater. Moreover, the speech used horror at marital violence as a marker of true Englishness, and crimes against women as a betrayal of nationhood. Fitzroy’s point was that a true Englishman could neither beat his wife, nor bear to read in the newspapers about others doing so. Genuine British manliness, he suggested, was incompatible with committing or countenancing marital violence.
In the late 1840s and early 1850s, a period of growing journalistic and political activity on the subject of domestic assault, Victorians who sought to solve the problem of wife assault approached the issue from two distinct ideological positions. The first, exemplified by Fitzroy, represented men as women’s natural protectors. Advocates of this position embraced a manly ideal combining authority with self-control, and sought greater punishments for men who violated standards of masculinity by using violence against the “weaker sex” (124 Parl. Deb 3s., col. 1414). One can distinguish from this the emergent feminist position that held that wife beating was a symptom of women’s legal nonexistence. This view was put forward by John Stuart Mill, Helen Taylor, and Barbara Leigh Smith, all of whom tried to change laws governing marital coverture and married women’s property. But these positions were by no means mutually exclusive. Mill, for example, one of the most passionate advocates for corporal punishment, at times characterized women as weak and in need of protection. In “Protection of Women” (Sunday Times, 24 August 1851), he described assault victims as “helpless, virtuous, unoffending creatures,” and their assailants as “bipedal monsters” and “brute beasts” (PW, 2b). It is characteristic of the complexity of gender relations and feminism in the 1850s that Caroline Norton (one of the most forceful advocates for feminist legal reform) both deplored the legal nonexistence of married women and asserted her inferiority to men: “The natural position of woman is inferiority to man,” she wrote. “Amen! .… I am Mr Norton’s inferior; I am the clouded moon of that sun.… Put me under some law of protection” (LQ, 98–99). In this moment of ideological contest, debate on the 1853 “Good Wives’ Rod” very largely represented the former position: most MPs perceived wife and child assault as a symptom of men’s failure to act as guardians or protectors of the weak. MPs thus defended male superiority while seeking to ensure the correct use of male power. Parliament, then, became one of many forums in which the ideal of manly self-control was defined and enforced.
The 1853 bill was relatively uncontentious, indicating the widespread perception that something needed to be done about wife assault, a problem that feminists and nonfeminists alike perceived as being on the increase (Doggett, 115).2 The Times supported the measure (12 March 1853, 6d), and Punch wrote, “Mr. Fitzroy deserves eternal honour for having taken up the cause of the ill-used Women” (19 March 1853, 119). The only substantial issues of debate were whether flogging should be added as a punishment for assaults against women and children, and whether a magistrate should have the summary power to inflict as substantial a penalty as a £20 fine or a six-month prison sentence. The flogging amendment was proposed by Mr. Phinn, who argued that corporal punishment was appropriate “where men were already reduced below the level of the brute” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1419). It was supported by the Times (12 March 1853), which argued that “there can be no question of ‘degrading’ a man who
