The Cochrane case points to a number of unspoken anxieties underlying early Victorian male authority. As Anna Clark notes, in the ideal of the Victorian middle-class home the wife was “sheltered, safe and submissive” (A. Clark, “Humanity,” 192). In theory, no interference should have been required if the wife observed the marriage contract. But what if, like Cecelia Cochrane, a wife refused to acknowledge the husband’s authority? What powers did husbands such as Alexander Cochrane have to enforce their “natural” authority? How far should the state intervene in the domestic sphere?
The Cochrane decision reveals that for Victorian wives, there was force behind the idea that the husband ruled the household. In this precedentsetting case, the judge supported Alexander Cochrane’s rights to confine his wife and hold her to the provisions of the marriage contract. The judge gave Cecelia Maria two options: to stay in the marriage willingly, or by constraint: “[I]f there be any thing painful to Mrs. Cochrane in the present state of things, she cannot properly complain of it; for it arises from her own breach of duty, and she may end it when she pleases by cheerfully and frankly performing the contract into which she has entered. The moment that she makes restraint of her person to be unnecessary for keeping in the path of duty, the restraint will become illegal” (Times, 12 June 1840, 7e). The Cochrane decision clearly articulates the assumptions about male authority in marriage that underlay the more idealizing rhetoric of the 1853 debates in the British Parliament. It shows the extent to which the state delegated its authority to the husband, recognizing him as the center of authority in the home and supporting his powers there. (Feminist Caroline Frances Cornwallis summarized the implications of the Cochrane case for women in the pages of the radical Westminster Review: “[T]he common law views the relation of husband and wife as that of master and bondswoman. A hired servant could not be so treated” [PMW, 187n].) The decision also reveals how deeply reluctant the courts were to intervene in the domestic sphere. The issue of wife assault, then, pitted the new scrutiny of male marital conduct against the state’s reluctance to interfere in the middle-class private realm.
Dombey and Son: The Failure of Middle-Class Manliness
Charles Dickens’s novels focus repeatedly on cruelty to women and children. In particular, Bleak House, serialized from March 1852 to September 1853, coincided with and reflected the concerns of the parliamentary debates on the 1853 act. Dickens’s intensely sympathetic portrayal of Allan Woodcourt aiding Jenny, the abused brick maker’s wife (chapter 46, part 14), was published in April 1853, the month after Fitzroy proposed his act in the House of Commons. Moreover, Bleak House was perceived as an intervention in the wife-assault debates of the early 1850s, as is evident from J. M. Kaye’s 1856 article “Outrages on Women,” which references the brick makers’ episode (OW, 251–53). However, Bleak House, like Oliver Twist and Sketches by Boz, located violence in the lower-or lower-middle-class home and family, as did the 1853 parliamentary debates. For this reason, this chapter focuses on Dombey and Son, which takes the far less conventional step of portraying violence in the middle-class home. Unlike Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, or even the aspiring office boy of “Meditations in Monmouth Street,” Dombey belongs to the middle class, the class to which Dickens’s readers largely belonged. There is a crucial distinction between Dickens’s portrayal of Sikes and Nancy’s violent relationship and his portrayal of violence in the Dombey home. As Tromp notes, Oliver Twist insulates the middle class from violence (Tromp, 24). Dombey and Son refuses the reader any such distance. Dickens’s portrayal of violence in the Dombey home is highly significant. While lacking the gruesome physicality of Nancy’s murder, Dombey’s assault on his daughter and wife constitutes an assault on contemporary ideals of middle-class manliness, an assault that hit very close to home for many readers of the novel. Far from buttressing middle-class status by portraying the lower classes or the gentry as violent, Dombey and Son worked to expose domestic violence in the middle-class home. Dickens’s text, however, simultaneously reveals a deep ambivalence concerning state intervention there. Even as it portrays the Dombey home as subject to the same male violence found in the police courts and the newspapers, and even as it invites the reader to participate in the public scrutiny of the middle-class home, the text recoils from prying eyes and attempts to reconstitute the middle-class home as a private space. Endorsing the Cochrane decision’s construction of the middle-class home as a space in which interference should be minimized, the novel thus attempts to resolve the issue of domestic assault within the home itself.
In Dombey and Son, the narrator pleads for “a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon [Asmodeus] in the tale” (DS, 620).5 To a large extent, the novel realizes this Asmodean ambition. Serialized between 1846 and 1848, roughly six years after the Cochrane decision and five years before the 1853 act, the novel showed middle-class readers a home of their own social stratum torn by family violence. And such violence is not merely incidental to the text. The novel’s structural fulcrum is chapter 47 (“The Thunderbolt”), in which Dombey strikes his daughter, Florence. More complex still, the narrative establishes through setting, symbol, and parallelism that Dombey’s assault on Florence substitutes for his desire to beat his wife Edith, whom he suspects of adultery. Thematically and structurally, this assault lies at the center of the text.
The anatomy of Mr. Dombey’s failed manliness begins in the novel’s first chapters. These depict the relationships between men, women, and two houses—the commercial House of Dombey and Son and the domestic house of the Dombey family. These early chapters invoke the key Victorian assumption (elucidated by Davidoff and Hall in Family Fortunes) that the House of Dombey and the house of the Dombeys are inseparable enterprises, and will succeed or fail together. As Gail Turley Houston argues, Dombey and Son thus “foregrounds the way the Victorian economic system was founded on family relations, more particularly, those between men and their mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters.”6 The text strongly suggests that feminine nature—which the narrator describes as “a nature that is ever, in the mass, better, truer, higher, nobler, quicker to feel, and much more constant to retain, all tenderness and pity, self-denial and devotion, than the nature of men” (DS, 29)—has the potential to redeem “the rapacious nature of capitalist England” (Houston, 91). Mary Poovey notes that in the nineteenth century, femininity was thus seen as capable of “mitigat[ing] the effects of the alienation of market relations”; by representing female work as selfless—and thereby distinguishing it from paid labor—Victorians were able to construct the home as a space of “(apparent) non-alienation.”7 Dombey, however, fails to mitigate his capitalist alienation through associating himself with redemptive femininity in the domestic sphere. He neglects his first wife as well as his daughter in favor of his capitalist enterprise (ironically named the “House of Dombey”). In his second marriage, Dombey misconstrues the relations between the private and public spheres when he chooses his bride, Edith Granger—“very handsome, very haughty, very wilful”(DS, 280)—based on her ability to represent his commercial persona in public. Finally, Dombey confuses the private and the public when he delegates his business manager, Carker, to exercise his authority over his wife. These errors, according to the text’s logic, constitute a failure of manhood, a failure that is conveyed symbolically through a number of discreet allusions to impotence.8 The House of Dombey will fail because Dombey, the “Head of the Home Department,” is neither the father nor the man that contemporary bourgeois expectations demand.
While the novel’s opening thus foretells Dombey’s failure to understand women’s ability, under the Victorian gender system of separate spheres, to redeem the competitive and aggressive lives of men, the text represents this failure in a key central trope—that of domestic assault. The specter of marital violence appears early in the text, immediately after Mrs. Dombey’s funeral.