"Victorian Body
Politics, Neo-Victorian Body Poetics:
The Contested Body of the Wife in
Mid-Victorian Divorce Trials"
This lecture focuses on the
transgressive body of the Victorian wife and investigates this material body’s
textual inflections in Victorian law and contemporary literature. The main body
of the lecture is concerned with three scandalous court cases at a crucial
moment of mid-Victorian social transformation: the passing in 1857 of the
Matrimonial Causes Act that introduced civil divorce proceedings into English
law. The Talbot divorce of 1855-56 was one of the last cases to go through the
old system, while the Robinson trial of 1858-59 coincided with the opening of
the Divorce Court and the Codrington case of 1864-66 fell in the first decade
of its operation. Prior to 1857, divorce could only be obtained through the
ecclesiastical courts (which did not permit remarriage) followed by ‘criminal
conversation’ proceedings (the husband’s claim for damages for the despoiled
body of his wife, his ‘property’); if successful, this could then culminate in
a House of Lords divorce decree. The three cases are noteworthy for their
spectacular conjectures about women’s bodily transgressions in a period that
saw the emergence of sensation fiction: an Anglo-Irish wife’s alleged sexual
obsession, during the Irish Famine, with her husband’s illiterate Irish groom
(Marianne Talbot); erotic encounters recorded - or fantasised - in a textual
body, the private diary (Isabella Robinson); speculations about an English
wife’s tropically-induced bodily misdemeanours on gondolas, accompanied by
counter-charges of attempted rape and irregular female intimacy implicating a
prominent campaigner for women’s rights (Helen Codrington and Emily Faithfull).
In all three cases the wife’s sexual agency was associated with irreparable
damage to the body politic of the Victorian family. At the same time public
appetite for sensational divorce narratives fed contemporary anxieties about
married women’s desire to infringe the boundaries of gender, class and
race/ethnicity, criminalising their desire for erotic authorship as a portent
of ‘unnatural’, queer inclinations. What is of interest here is both how the
transgressive body of the wife was constructed in Victorian legal discourse and
newspaper reporting and how the historical material has been appropriated by
contemporary (neo-Victorian) authors intent on exploring the subversive
potential and agency of Victorian women. As the case of Isabella Robinson’s
diary suggests, this agency combines bodily with textual, sexual with authorial
transgression. What role do writing, reading, and the reading of written
‘evidence’ play in the actual cases and in their modern rewritings? The three
contemporary texts I shall reference are Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of
You (2001), Kate Summerscale’s biographical account of Mrs
Robinson’s Disgrace (2012) and Emma Donoghue’s
lesbian-feminist novel The Sealed Letter (2009) about the
Codrington case. Who is ultimately credited with textual authority and bodily
agency – the Victorian transgressive wife who gains control over her material
body; the neo-Victorian text (the textual/narrative body); the neo-Victorian
author (who reimagines/poeticises the Victorian wife’s bodily experience)? To
what extent do these texts problematize contemporary body poetics, its
arrogation of the past and of Victorian women’s bodies? These are some of the
questions this lecture aims to address.
