Violence Against Women in Jane Eyre

A new Brontë-related book published this December, the first one that we present in 2006.

"Explaining the Depiction of Violence Against Women in Victorian Literature: Applying Julia Kristeva's Theory of Abjection to Dickens, Bronte, and Braddom"
Karen E. Tatum
Edwin Mellen Press

The hidden underside of Victorian society was its hatred of women: pornography, prostitution, and physical violence. This book explains this phenomenon through Julia Kristeva's post-modernist theory of abjection. The author shows how using a different methodology can lead a reader to a better understanding of traditional texts. (...)

This book examines the causes of the abject response in canonical novels such as Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva outlines her theory of abjection as a simultaneous fascination and horror stemming from sensorial reminders of the subject’s primal, psychological relation to the mother. The author suggests that these psychological perspectives can potentially result in acts of physical violence, which are called “abject response”. By developing Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection as a model for reading physical acts of violence against women, the book yields specific answers to its overriding questions: Why was a female body so threatening in nineteenth-century fiction? The answer lies in social constructions of women as powers of horror, which the male subject imbibes and which lead to domestic violence if improperly balanced. In addition, the book examines critical interpretations, including those of feminists, which also inadvertently abject the female body. By examining parallel abjections in nineteenth-century novels and twentieth-century criticism, this books reveals the more insidious remnants of Victorian ideology in our present culture, as well as the ways in which these remnants inadvertently perpetuate domestic violence. Thus this book should engage scholars and students of the Victorian period, Women’s Studies, and feminist theory.

"The Domestication of Violence in Jane Eyre" is the title of the third chapter of the book.

Categories: Books, Scholar, Jane_Eyre, Charlotte_Brontë