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What does the process of completing this project show you about the range of coursework and other humanities-oriented experiences you’ve had at UNE?

Why did you choose this project?

What changes in your knowledge, skills, approaches, interests and/or processes does your project suggest to you?

Which particular aspects of the project best illustrate those changes?

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch: Why this unsettling, bleak, and daring novel should take its place as the Booker Prize winner.

Slideshow:

Outline:

• Check-in on project status
  • Have worked on revision plan, gathered sources, read all books and scholarly articles I needed to and have notes organized
  • Writing outline for essay (final around 10-15pgs)
  • Started to fill in outline and draft intro and pull quotes
• Question about a few primary source materials
  • Case law: As of now, getting those primary documents from ENG 216 eportfolio as pdf but need to cite them eventually with full details
  • Hansards for Parliamentary Debates and where to cite from
  • The one I can’t seem to find is any debate on the divorce acts
• Next week for peer review
  • I have 8 pages as of week 12 of a mix of an outline / draft
  • Looking for insight on how long final essay should be … the original essay that I am extending was 4 pages
  • Where to make some cuts

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h5wL34SV53vNAPZEXOXL9zqXiRTrDjOI0cfgVSGv_lk/edit?usp=sharing

Introduction

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’s aim was to place two Victorian writers of fiction and prose, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Barbra Leigh Smith Bodichon’s persuasive essay, in context with one another to formulate a response to how the realities of marriage as dictated by the law proved to be an immense misalignment. After surveying this past work, what emerged as points of intriguing new lines of questioning: 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? How 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, through my extension of this past project, I 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. 

Brontë and the novel as a form of activism 

• To begin, it is essential to first lay out the significance of the novel as a form of activism and resistance to the societal conditions that hindered women’s ability to seek legal action during this period of Victorian England from the early 19th century to the dawn of the 20th century.
  • From “The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction” by Rosemarie Bodenheimer (1988)
    •  → “While any Victorian novel could be profitably subjected to such questions, my scope is limited to the subgenre that has come to be known as the industrial or social-problem novel: work distinguished by its focus on specific social problems raised during the process of industrialization. These novels set themselves in a dramatic way to the task of giving fictional shape to social questions that were experienced as new, unpredictable, without closure.”(Bodenheimer, 4). 
    • “The narratives I consider are full of descriptions and dialogues about the factory system, industrial and rural poverty, working class politics, and the plight of women; they link themselves directly with the conditions-of-England debates that preoccupied so many public minded Victorians during that cultural period”(Bodenheimer 4). 
  • Chapter From “Matrimony, Property, and the “Woman Question” in Anne Brontë and Mary Elizabeth Braddon” by Amy J. Robinson within Book “Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature” (2016)
    • “Though Cobbe’s point is that wives should not be classed with criminals in terms of the law, ironically, female characters in victorian fiction, because there were so few laws to protect them, are often forced to keep secrets, adopt aliases, and even commit criminal acts in order to circumvent bad marriages. Victorians referred to the many questions and issues concerning women’s political rights, education, and economic independence as the “Woman Question”(Robinson 111). 
• Secondary criticism on how women authors like Brontë inserted their opinions through the more subversive, implicit critique of the laws to put forth their own ideas on the era of social change that mid-19th century England contended with. 

Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall continues to be a foundational within my extension project as when branching out to include works of political philosophers and reformers, the fictional narrative that Brontë crafts showcases that when literature is taken seriously, the social mood greatly benefits from the ability to take abstract intangible theories and force themselves as readers to imagine them as reality. The novel sets the groundwork for the public as well as governmental figures to then hear the calls for reform in a new light. Brontë’s novel encourages her Victorian readers to confront the ideal of the law and through her story, offers what women cannot say in public into a glimpse into the private domestic scenes of martial misalliance. 

• Within her preface to the second edition, after fairly harsh reviews by literary critics, she asserts, “I may have gone too far, in which case I shall be careful not to trouble myself or my readers in the same way again; but when we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain that it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light, is doubtless, the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? O Reader! If there were less of this dellicate concealment of facts – this whispering ‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace, there would be less sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience”(Brontë 4). → Connection with how the novel and female authors can make arguments that directly correlate to the social questions of issues such as marriage, women’s rights, etc. that we will see Mill contend with. 
• From the novel itself →
  • On women’s role as mother:
    • “…’but you would not judge of a boy by yourself – and my dear Mrs. Graham, let me warn you in good time against the error – the fatal error, I may call it – of taking that boy’s education upon yourself. – Because you are clever, in some things, and well informed, you may fancy yourself equal to the task; but indeed you are not…”(Brontë 28). 
  • On marriage:
    • “And I don’t and won’t complain. I do and will love him still; and I do not and will not regret that I have linked my fate with his”(Brontë 176).
    • “But how can I believe that you love me, if you continue to act in this way? Just imagine yourself in my place: would you think I loved you, if I did so? Would you believe my protestations, and honour and trust me under such circumstances? ‘The cases are different,’ he replied. ‘It is a woman’s nature to be constant – to love one and only one, blindly, tenderly, and for ever – bless them, dear creatures! and you above them all – but you must have some commiseration for us, Helen; you must give us a little more license…”(Brontë 200). 
    • “This is the third anniversary of our felicitous union. It is now two months since our guests have left us to the enjoyment of each other’s society; and I have had nine weeks’ experience of this new phase of conjugal life – two persons living together as master and mistress of the house, and father and mother of a winsome, merry little child, with mutual understanding that there is no love, friendship, or sympathy between them”(Brontë 272). 
    • “The fifth anniversary of my wedding day, and I trust, the last I shall spend under this roof”(Brontë 287). 
  • On property:
    • “ ‘It seems very interesting love,’ said he, lifting his head and turning to where I stood wringing my hands in silent rage and anguish; ‘but it’s rather long; I’ll look at it some other time; – meanwhile, I’ll trouble you for your keys, my dear.’ ‘What keys?’ ‘The keys of your cabinet, desk, drawers, and whatever else you possess,’ he said, rising and holding out his hand…’Now then, sneered he, ‘we must have a confiscation of property…”(Brontë 309-10). 
• On child custody:
  • “I know that day after day such feeling will return upon me: I am a slave, a prisoner – but that is nothing; if it were myself alone, I would not complain, but I am forbidden to rescue my son from ruin, and what was once y only consolation, is become the crowning source of my despair”(Brontë 312). 

Political context: Mill & Cobbe

• JS Mill → 

Whereas Brontë subversively explored the detrimental conditions of the law’s ideals surrounding marriage and women’s rights in her fictional reality, if we turn to political philosopher and reformer John Stuart Mill, we can understand the explicit political context and discourse of women’s rights under the law that circulated during this defining era of social reform. As Mill himself was member of parliament, the linkage between how the literary world’s societal influence coupled real reform in English government can be aided with the works of prose such as The Subjection of Women. This example of Mill’s political essay takes seriously what conditions were in place that made marriage in Victorian England so oppressive and offers several moments of deep reflection. For instance, the foremost argument Mill makes at the open of this essay says, “That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes – the legal subordination of one sex to the other – is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other”(Mill 133). 

• What makes England’s common law regarding marriage so oppressive to women? → “The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural.

• Frances Power Cobbe → essay: prose enhances literature 

Conclusion

• Call back briefly to that original paper and the gap I hoped to address through this paper
• Look forward to what future research can stem from this piece.