Intimate Violence and Victorian Print Culture ─ Representational Tensions

Intimate Violence and Victorian Print Culture identifies an important contradiction in Victorian representations of abuse: the simultaneous compulsion to expose and to obscure brutality towards women in intimate relationships. Exploring representations of abuse in a variety of contexts not limited to marriage, Suzanne Rintoul illustrates how intimate violence became both spectacular and unspeakable in the Victorian period, and how the discernible tension between exposure and concealment across multiple texts as well as within individual ones signals more than confusion about the 'correct' way to deal with the problem of abuse. Rintoul argues that in diverse material consumed by a broad cross-section of Victorian society this tension positions the vulnerable female body as a space through which to explore more general cultural uncertainties regarding gender and class-based hierarchies, and that it often renders the battered woman a cite of social and political oppositionality.

Suzanne Rintoul is Professor in the School of Language and Communications Studies at Conestoga College, Canada.