The primary goal of this project is to take a previous paper from my English course ENG 216 titled “The Legal Ideal and its Irrefutable Detriments: In Conversation with Brontë and Bodichon” and provide an extension into the political theories and legal discourse that underlie what the literature and progressive thinkers of mid-Victorian England were grappling with. My previous paper was a response to how the realities of marriage as dictated by the law proved to be an immense misalignment. What can be understood when different branches of Victorian writing are employed? What through-lines emerge when the implicit connections of the law within Brontë’s novel are actualized by case law? In what ways were the political theorists and social reformers’ thinking informed by literature?

Through my in-depth examination of the various branches of writing and discourse of women’s rights and the confines of precedent within this period of mid-Victorian England, I will have highlighted that by identifying what was missing within my original paper, the political and legal sources, and thus incorporating them into this project, makes for a meaningful extension of my interests and subject knowledge within political science and legal analysis. For instance, this extension will draw from prominent political philosopher John Stewart Mill and his piece On the Subjection of Women and writer and social-reformer Frances Power Cobbe and her essay “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors: is the Classification Sound? A Discussion on the Laws Concerning the Property of Married Women.” In addressing a few poignant primary documents such as examples of case law from the period 1850s-1860s and excerpts of parliamentary debates on the reform bills of marriage a divorce, I can illustrate the powerful lived experiences that parallel both the literary sources and theoretical.

Furthermore, it will provide a foundational framework for my additional research to draw upon this progressive moment of the mid-19th century regarding women’s legal status and challenging the operation of legal precedent as an essential historical context. In arguing that works of literature such as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë can be read to provide a tangible reality of the result of oppressive laws, it offers connections to both the social and political activists of its era and that questions of equality are always evolving. This project also opens up incredible avenues for contemporary engagement in the law and proves that we must look to the same opportunities today to draw from the empathetic and humanistic nature of literature along with an array of contemporary political, feminist, and legal theorists to question and force the uncomfortable realities of the law’s shortcomings to be reconciled.