Benchmark #1 Notes: Faculty Meeting 10/9

  • The project → written essay – revision of my essay from ENG 216: The Legal Ideal and its Irrefutable Detriments: In Conversation with Brontë and Bodichon 
  • How to make this project a smaller scale than the honors project
    • Thinking more about this idea of how literature can come into play when the law no longer feels secure in protecting one’s needs/rights → maybe that can be the entry point where we look to that Victorian literature before women had legal personalities and that was there way to showcase justice/empathy for those outside of the law → NOW we are entering a period where certain legal safeguards are slipping backwards → is it time now to turn back to literature in order to not repeat those same patterns → That precedent can be a major agent of change as it was when those laws started to come about in the Victorian era regarding women yet now they seem to have become a source of confinement and grounds to continue patriarchal norms 
    • Catalyze change
      • Embodiment of implications of the law 
      • Child custody → caroline norton (1839 act) – Bradshaw 
      • OR gaskell (1853) Ruth and mercy and justice → In the novel versus in the case law
      • Cobbe, Bodichon → J.S Mill the subjection of women → examining the subjection of women → very logical approach → what explains the condition of women at the time – justice, expediency, reasons for marriage – men don’t make marriage attractive enough – reason its required is no one wants to do it (domesticity) *(1869)
        • Have we ever tried any other way ?
        • Comparison between different mode of constituting society → between the two sections – look to chapter one
          • Equality argument and supposed to effect a general progress → Bodichon looks at other parts of Europe and family 
          • Where men get their ideas of women (mother and wives)
            • Look to literary women → how do literary women express and write about – George elliot and Bodichon come in as the context of what Mills is exposed to 
          • What men fear → how that translates into funneling women into marriage (middle class option) 
        • Gaskell not meant to be historical fiction like Brontë’s novel was (mid victorian century) (1847-1869) middle point where this legislation comes into play
          • Married women’s property acts
          • Child custody 
          • Divorce and matrimonial → probate and not religious 
        • Looking for a way to bring sources together so that a snapshot of this moment of actual reform 
      • Primary materials
        • parliamentary debates (transcripts through Millbank – Houses of Parliament records database – Hansards entity that published those reports) 
        • Non-fiction prose Mills, Bodichon, Cobbe 
        • Fictional novels Brontë/Gaskell 
      • Why am I going back to this period? → this is the precedent (common precedent reference – precedential idea of conservatism)
        •  Looking at this middle period of change in the courts and started with Bodichon and then Bronte 
      • Look at Mill and grab that part about literary women and what are they doing and why did people HATE the Tenant of Wildfell Hall
        • That archival version was one source and one novel and now they are exemplary but opened up those bigger questions
          • Bring in Mills 
  • Mills offer a point of expansion where we ask what where those examples of the literary women