In contempt: Women, law and the Victorian novel

"In Contempt: Women, Law, and the Victorian Novel" explores the practice of feminist jurisprudence in certain nineteenth-century novels by women, as well as in the lives and politics of Victorian women who fought for legal reform. While feminist jurisprudence, which legal scholar Patricia Smith broadly defines as the "analysis and critique of law as a patriarchal institution," is a twentieth-century term, nineteenth-century women advocates for legal change firmly grasped this concept. Melding feminist thinking in the fields of law and literature, I analyze the ways in which women's narratives worked to dismantle the law's self-authorized claim to "truth," a claim that discounts and silences women's stories and experiences.; This study presents the interrelationships between legal and literary narratives in the contexts of specific chapters in nineteenth-century British women's legal history. Analyzing texts ranging from legislative reports, trial transcripts, and judicial opinions to Gothic, social-problem, utopian, and New Woman novels, I explore a wide array of legal topics, including coverture, infanticide, birth control, women in the legal profession, lunacy law, and the Contagious Diseases Acts. A central premise of this dissertation is that novels by writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Trollope, Jane Clapperton, Florence Dixie, George Paston, and Sarah Grand actually participated in bringing about legal reform by providing a space where women's legal stories could be told and read, by calling into question the law's claim to "truth," and by creating new knowledge through the shared tellings of women's lived experiences. An examination of the narrative advocacy of these women novelists and other reformers such as Annie Besant, Georgina Weldon, and Josephine Butler illuminates the important (but much overlooked) role that women have played in legal history. Focusing on how nineteenth-century women represented themselves (in real-life courtrooms, in the court of public opinion, and in the legal forum provided by the novel form), this dissertation submits to the court of critical opinion and for the historical record a range of heretofore suppressed evidence of nineteenth-century women's feminist jurisprudence.