Daniel Deronda, Marital Rape, and the End of Reproduction

Thierauf, Doreen

doi:10.1353/vcr.2017.0034

Victorian Review

2017

DOI: 10.1353/vcr.2017.0034

|View full text |Cite

Daniel Deronda, Marital Rape, and the End of Reproduction

Doreen Thierauf¹

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

2018

2022

Publication Types

Select...

Article3

Relationship

Self Cite1

Independent2

Authors

Journals

Cited by 3 publications

References 26 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

TENDING TO OLD STORIES:DANIEL DERONDAAND HYSTERIA, REVISITED

Thierauf

2018

Victorian Literature and Culture

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The appearance of the word ‘dynamic’ on the first page of George Eliot's novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), to describe Gwendolen's unsettled/unsettling glance famously elicited critique from her publisher John Blackwood as well as from an anonymous reviewer at the Examiner, both of whom challenged Eliot's use of scientific jargon that had not yet entered her audience's everyday vocabulary. In line with this often-cited vignette, critics usually understand Eliot to respond thoughtfully and prophetically to late-nineteenth-century scientific trends. In the words of the Examiner reviewer, Eliot's “culture is scientific” (“New Novel” 125), probably more so than any other Victorian novelist's. Studies investigating the reciprocal relationship between Eliot's fiction, particularly Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and nineteenth-century scientific writing suggest her familiarity with notable works by Henry Lewes, Alexander Bain, William Carpenter, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, James Sully, and others. Scholarship of the past three decades has largely focused on Eliot's application of Victorian theories regarding epistemology, evolution, and the relationship between mind and body. However, scholars have not yet fully examined Eliot's utilization of mid-nineteenth-century medical knowledge concerning the female body's proneness to hysteria, a connection that emerges prominently in her final novel.

show abstract

TENDING TO OLD STORIES:DANIEL DERONDAAND HYSTERIA, REVISITED

Thierauf

2018

Victorian Literature and Culture

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Rape in Public: Overlooking Child Sexual Assault in Charlotte Mary Yonge'sThe Daisy Chain

Cleere¹

2022

Victorian Literature and Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Charlotte Mary Yonge's Victorian novel The Daisy Chain (1856) is not a text that has been discussed in terms of sexual violence. A “family story” that apparently inspired Alcott's Little Women (1869), The Daisy Chain has been most often considered a novel about the conflict between female vocation and religious duty. However, in this essay I argue that The Daisy Chain is also a novel that grapples openly with the problem of child sexual assault and features violence against women and girls as an accepted custom of what Berlant and Warner call the “heterosexual life narrative” (“Sex in Public”). Our postmodern abstraction of rape and the terminology surrounding rape have made sexual assault harder to “see” in both reality and representation, but in the context of the #MeToo movement, this essay pushes for an understanding of rape in The Daisy Chain as an event that happens in plain sight. Toggling between the two meanings of the word “overlook,” I argue that rape is a normalized custom of heterosexual belonging that can only be seen in the novel by girls with bad vision. Ethel May's myopia allows her to see what the rest of her family overlooks: rape in public.

show abstract

New George Eliot Studies: From Time's Up to the Anthropocene

Carroll¹

2019

Dickens Studies Annual

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is wonderfully clear from recent work that as George Eliot rapidly approaches her bicentenary, she matters more than ever. In reading her, many of the scholars reviewed here are inclined to point out the gender inequities she experienced in life (pay inequity, for example) or the inaccuracy of gendered assumptions about her life and work which have gone unchallenged. From the ecology of Middlemarch to the character of Eliot as “Editress” of The Westminster Review, recent scholars have brought a new George Eliot into the twenty-first century, challenging old dogma (even the once sacred “death of the author”) along the way. While new attention has been paid to George Eliot's individual work as an editor, new approaches also tend to place her in the field of cultural production, often among other women, stressing the collective, social nature of women's professional experiences in, for example, the British Library's Round Reading Room, or on staff at periodicals. The now venerable field of periodical studies as well as the recent digitization of materials has facilitated a new feminist scholarship that digs deep into the collective experiences of being a professional woman writer in the Victorian period.

show abstract

scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

Contact Info

customersupport@researchsolutions.com

10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614

Henderson, NV 89052, USA

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Blog Terms and Conditions API Terms Privacy Policy Contact Cookie Preferences Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

Made with 💙 for researchers

Part of the Research Solutions Family.

Daniel Deronda, Marital Rape, and the End of Reproduction

Cited by 3 publications

References 26 publications

TENDING TO OLD STORIES:DANIEL DERONDAAND HYSTERIA, REVISITED

TENDING TO OLD STORIES:DANIEL DERONDAAND HYSTERIA, REVISITED

Rape in Public: Overlooking Child Sexual Assault in Charlotte Mary Yonge'sThe Daisy Chain

New George Eliot Studies: From Time's Up to the Anthropocene

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About