| This dissertation investigates how the law restricted the married, middle-class Victorian woman's existence and how novelists of the period explore and challenge the meanings, implications, and potential social and moral effects of these laws. Specifically, laws addressing marriage settlements, coverture and inheritance are examined in order to study how these laws deprived a woman of access to property, money, or inheritances the moment a she wed. The reasons for denying women access to financial independence rested largely on how the middle-class defined themselves as separate from those above and below them in the social hierarchy. To achieve this separation, they used the law to restrict the scope of a woman's role by legislating her financial dependence on her husband and limiting her to the domestic realm. The middle-class woman was exalted as the loving monarch of the home, which, in turn, was viewed as a haven from capitalistic endeavors. Had English law allowed women to earn an income, inherit money or property, or retain control of the goods she brought to the marriage, the capitalistic world would intrude into the home, thereby blurring the social and class boundaries the Victorians had worked to establish.; In addition to examining the position of the married middle-class woman, this dissertation also explores the position of women who were not bound by the law. Femes soles, or single women, were outside the boundaries of England's laws. Since there was no legislation governing their existences, they had implicitly larger legal freedoms but often did not know how to access the law since they were primarily educated to take on the roles of wife and mother.; Texts used in this dissertation include Bleak House (1853), Wuthering Heights (1847), Middlemarch (1871–72), The Moonstone (1868), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Cranford (1853), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895) and Oliver Twist (1837). |
