Lawrence Stone on Desertion and Bigamy

Hi everyone,

Further to our discussion about laws surrounding desertion and bigamy in the 19th century, I thought I'd share a few quotations from Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800.

First, on laws regarding spousal desertion:

"A man or woman whose spouse had left home and had not been heard of for a period of seven years was also free to remarry, on the assumption that the missing spouse was dead. If he or she returned, however, either the first marriage took priority over the second or the woman was permitted to choose which husband she preferred." (37-38; given Stone's notoriously iffy use of evidence, I feel I should add that his source here is R. H. Helmholz's Marriage Litigation in Medieval England)

Second, regarding the practice of bigamy:

"In the eighteenth century, more or less permanent desertion was also regarded as morally dissolving the marriage. Thus when in the 1790s the husband of Francis Place's sister was transported for life for a robbery, she soon remarried an old suitor, apparently without any qualms or objections on the grounds that she already had a husband who was presumably still alive. In 1807 a Somerset rector agreed to put up the banns for a second marriage of a woman whose husband had gone off as a soldier to the East Indies seven years before and had not been heard of since. But the man unexpectedly turned up and reclaimed his wife, only to desert her again when he found her consorting with her second husband. He was said soon after to have remarried, despite the existence of this first wife." (40; Stone cites memoirs by Francis Place and the aforementioned Somerset rector)

As far as the first quotation goes, I think it may allow us to assume that the 7-years-absent=legally dead rule has been pretty longstanding, and was probably in effect when Lady Audley's Secret is set. I don't know how widely-known this rule would have been, though, so while legally she may have jumped the gun, we probably can't conclude that she knowingly did so. The second quotation I thought was interesting in light of what Prof. Reitz was saying about transportation to the colonies being tantamount to early death.

Stone also observes that the 19th century probably saw the longest marriages on average throughout human history, because improved medical treatment and sanitary conditions lengthened the average lifespan but divorce remained nearly impossible to obtain. I realize that this is a serious stretch, but I'm wondering if we can read that as influencing the development of detective fiction, or at least as playing into anxieties about families that we see playing out in detective fiction: if we accept Stone's conclusion here, people in unhappy marriages were trapped for much longer than they would have been historically - can we read the frequent spousal murders in early detective novels responding to the increased longevity of a potentially disastrous bond?

Update: also, if anyone is interested, the woman doing work on the bigamy plot in the Victorian novel is Maia McAleavey - she has a few articles already out on the subject, I think, although not one about Lady Audley.

The Chain of Evidence

First off, I want to return to a point that Alyssa raised in her one-pager, a point I don't think we discussed enough in class on Friday. Alyssa notes that, "From a narrative perspective, Lady Audley’s Secret is difficult to read as a detective story because the reader and the detective are never seriously in doubt as to who committed the crime. Rather than solving a puzzle, Robert seems to putting together what amounts to a case for the prosecution, although one that he never plans to carry out." 

Indeed, Braddon never puts any other real suspects on the stage. Unlike Holmes, who starts from a crime committed by an individuated body and untangles a thread of clues that ultimately leads to his identification of the criminal, Robert Audley starts with both end-points already known: the crime (George's disappearance) and the criminal/embodied person (Lady Audley). His detective work focuses on discovering the connection between them, going backward and forward at once, rather than following the bread-crumbs wherever they may lead.

As Alyssa notes earlier in her paper, an Armstrong-ian reading might interpret Robert's quantitative, methodological investigation as working to "tame" the sensational elements of the novel. But how does this influence our assessment of detective work, if Robert can be certain of Lady Audley's guilt long before his "chain of evidence" is complete? He senses her culpability in so many intangible ways: her smile in a painting, a tiny, momentary flicker of expression across her face. And the text leaves so little room for any other criminal--we're never in any real doubt that Lady Audley is behind whatever happened to George. So does this deemphasize the importance of Robert's cold, calculating, logical detective work (as Lady Audley describes it?) These clues don't assist with the identification of the "individuated body" that committed the crime--they just validate what Robert Audley already knows. 

Another bizarre thing about this story is that the moment of the criminal's confession is not the same moment in which the "method" of the crime is revealed. In the climactic scene in which Lady Audley finally admits to the murder of George Talboys (page 294 in the Oxford edition), she identifies herself as a madwoman to Robert and then says, "When you say that I killed George Talboys, you say the truth." But it's not until Robert Audley has taken Lady Audley to the madhouse in Villebrumeuse (and another forty pages have passed) that the now-Mme. Taylor reveals the specifics of what she did to George, admitting that she pushed him into the well (335). In most detective stories, the criminal cannot just admit to the crime--his or her confession must include a specific, detailed account of how everything transpired, less, presumably, for the sake of the detective (who has already deduced it all independently), than for the benefit of the reader, who is still waiting to learn what has happened. Except here, Robert Audley doesn't know that Talboys was shoved into the well until Lady Audley tells him, and she tells him quite at her leisure, days after admitting to the murder vaguely. Is this another way this narrative de-emphasizes the quantitative aspects of Robert's investigation?

Some Random Things

First, I wanted to share some photos of Eastern State - as discussed in class, I definitely recommend a visit. (www.easternstate.org)  The facility was used as a prison until the 1970's when it was abandoned. It was the first "penitentiary" in the United States, in the sense that it was ostensibly geared to rehabilitation.  Prisoners were isolated, and true to the Quaker roots of the place, left with a bible to contemplate their choices.  Even when they were taken for exercise, isolation was maintained, with individual yards instead of a common one.  For those who lacked yards, sacks were placed over their heads to keep them from interacting with others.  This "humane" system didn't work so well - prisoners started to go crazy and eventually the approach was discontinued.  The prison housed famous inmates, including (briefly) Al Capone, and today you can visit his cell.  There are several other common spaces that can be visited including he chapel, synagogue and baseball diamond.  By the 1970's, the number of prisoners was down to a handful and Eastern State ceased operations.  At that point it languished for several years, deserted and slowly reclaimed by nature.  It was going to be demolished in the 1980s and become the sight of luxury apartments but the plan fell through.  Instead, restoration began in the late 80s and by the early 90s portions were open for tours.  Today restoration continues, funded in no small part by the massive "Terror Behind the Walls" haunted house that operates for over a month every fall (and at which my good friend Jenny has played a Zombie for about a decade now).  The prison itself, of course, is far scarier than anyone jumping out from behind a corner with fake blood running down their face.  The experience of visiting is unlike anything I have done - the tours are largely self-guided.  The structure of the prison is like an insect- there is a center with several legs shooting out around it.  You can wander the halls and see the empty cells, most with trees that have grown into the architecture, and small human details that stay in the mind.  Shoes thrown over a rafter, names scrawled on walls, a broom deserted in the corner of a hall, furniture long unused. 

Second, although I am only a little over halfway through Lady Audley, it has me thinking about motive.  Not of the criminal, but of the detective.  Robert Audley spends a lot of time agonizing over what he is doing.  At times he nearly convinces himself that he would be better off letting the mystery go, but he can't.  It seems to me that Robert has many motives - love, of course, but also something closer to compulsion.  He just can't *not* know what happened.  When I think about contemporary detectives - in novels but also television and movies - their motives are as important as the criminals.  And they are often a strange mix of something anecdotal from their lives and something deeper and less conscious - a drive that doesn't have a reason. 

Charles Darwin, Detective?

In Friday’s class we got in to a good debate about whether or not we can read Charles Darwin as a detective.  Lawrence Frank’s writing explores not only how authors like Dickens and Conan Doyle took up Darwin’s scientific ideas and incorporated them in to their detective fiction but also looks at how Darwin engaged with literary scholarship, taking up ideas from philology and linguistic history.  Like a mystery writer, Darwin splits his narration – Alyssa put this well, noting that sometimes Darwin is Watson, sometimes he is Holmes. We took up the important question of how we can (and can’t) read Darwin as literature. 

One way that this question interested me was in thinking about narrative time versus evolutionary time, their many oppositions and also potential affinities.  Darwin is reconstructing a history from an incomplete record, and he uses this to create drama in the telling of his story.  Someone made the very good point that evolutionary time doesn’t happen evenly – there are moments when it moves faster and slower.  That is why it is so difficult to find missing links – the big dramatic changes sometimes happen in fast time.  The work of the scientist in reconstructing this epic history is similarly and unevenly fast and slow.  The gathering of information is painstaking, and in the case of Darwin’s theories, they emerged over time rather than in a heart-stopping moment of intellectual breakthrough.  At other moments, though, a piece of information emerges that galvanizes the work and jolts what he is doing.  This got me thinking again about the way time moves in a narrative, particularly a mystery.  When we discussed the qualities of a good detective, something that Prof. Reitz stressed was the ability of the detective to be a patient listener.  Information gathering in both these forms – as a dedicated scientist and an investigator - requires slow time.  We don’t sit for hours in the couch with Inspector Wield – he reconstructs the story so that we know this has happened, but the dramatic events are given to us in real time.  These two things – the speed of actual events and the re-construction and re-telling of them – have parts that are both fast and slow.  How do the two re-arrange and inform each other?      

Another important question that came out of Friday’s discussion returned us to Nancy Armstrong.  If Armstrong argues that elements like the gothic lurk on the edges of realist fiction, what lurks on the edges of Darwin’s writing?  What is the “the spooky stuff”?  And what ideas have to be excluded from Darwin’s story to anchor it?            

On Murder As One Of The Horticultural Arts.

I just wanted to share a strange thing I encountered this past weekend that made me think of our class.  On Saturday I attended the massive annual "flower show" in Philadelphia.  This year the show focused on the gardens of Britain, and everything at the convention center had an English theme.  Mixed in with massive displays depicting scenes from Beatrice Potter and tea settings made out of flower petals was a series of large pieces florally representing the crimes of Jack the Ripper.  I thought, of course, about DeQuincey and our ongoing discussion of the aesthetics of crime.  I'm posting a link below from Organic Gardening's Pintrest Page.  If you look, the first couple rows show photos of the various scenes intended to "evoke the mood of London during the time of Jack the Ripper." 

http://pinterest.com/ogmag/philadelphia-flower-show/

The Charismatic Detective and the Decline of the Individual

Goodlad cautions against reading Bleak House as an unequivocal endorsement of institutionalized paternalism, stating that the novel “testifies to the diminished power of modern individuals, without clearly seeking… collective alternatives to the individual’s limited capabilities” (526).  Our consensus in class—if we arrived at one at all—seemed to be that the sentiments Goodlad attributes to the Dickens of Bleak House are not applicable to his detective journalism, wherein he expresses frank admiration for the institutional paternalism of the police force. These works appear to be kinda (if not completely) hegemonic, and not particularly subversive. But I wonder whether we might reconsider our reading of “The Metropolitan Protectives” through the lens of Goodlad’s analysis.

Clearly this piece exemplifies what she calls “Dickens’s growing skepticism to the myth of English self-reliance” in its mocking treatment of a populace that worries of police corruption, “the overthrow of the British Constitution” and “gangs of burglars” (97), yet enlists the police force in the recovery of its misplaced dogs and pats of butter. However I wonder whether Dickens’s convictions as to the decline of the English individual necessarily imply an endorsement of the police as a mechanism of the positive state. Is there not also some mockery in the wordplay of his title? If we view London through the metaphor of the household, the police force here occupies the role of governess to the teeming hordes of incompetent children that are the city’s residents. Read in concert with the self-satisfied self-reporting of “A Detective Police Party” and “Three Detectives’ Anecdotes,” this mundane and trivial “protective” work casts the police force in a less than heroic, if not necessarily wholly unflattering light. There is not, as in the other pieces, a single charismatic detective figure here—perhaps because citizenry so incompetent doesn’t demand one.

It must of course be observed that this piece is co-authored and cannot, as such, be read as a clear step in the evolution of Dickens’s thought on the issue of state-sanctioned paternalism. We might nonetheless use it to test our understanding of the detective figure. Does a satisfying detective novel depend on the complement of worthy adversaries in the form of self-reliant and self-interested citizens? Do we admire Holmes more when his faculties are challenged by Irene Adler or Moriarty? Or is the genre itself indicative of a desire for order in a decayed and incompetent society? 

A Tipping Point

In our discussion on Friday, it struck me again and again how strongly transitional Confessions is. The moral rigidity of the late Victorians is only intermittently apparent, and the general tone is more reminiscent of an eighteenth-century picaresque than a “standard” Victorian novel. The British presence in India, unmistakable in later novels like Kim, is glimpsed only rarely. Taylor's agenda is also highly ambiguous, resting somewhere between an orientalist critique of the East India Company and a wholesale justification for an expansion of British rule on the subcontinent.

It could be that my tendency to read early eighteenth-century and late nineteenth-century novels leads me to imagine Confessions as straddling a great divide. However, it strikes me that Taylor's struggle with these interlocking ambiguities echoes a shift in England's national character in the same period. This transitional moment is captured in the image of a young Queen Victoria reading galley proofs of Confessions late into the night. Victorians were stepping fully into their role as colonizers and imperialists, but the rhetorical frameworks that allowed them to unselfconsciously assume the mantle of empire had not yet fully developed. In the years to come, the ambiguities present in Taylor's fictionalized account would harden into the jingoism of Kipling. However, in 1839 this transformation was still underway.

How do you read the ambiguity in Confessions? ILaura brought up the peculiar melding of formalism and historicism remarked on by Poovey. To what extent does the Thug Archive shed light on Confessions? How does the novel reflect other Victorian anxieties, such as the rise of a commercial middle class and the emergence of professional criminals? What does the novel suggest about Victorian punishments such as transportation and imprisonment? Does the novel reflect concerns about British power at home? And lastly, is the novel a veiled criticism of the British presence in India or a ready justification for expansion?