Naming the violence: Women's domestic violence narratives.

Abstract

Long before our twentieth-century, psycho-socio-political understanding of domestic violence, women wrote about this form of oppression in their letters, diaries, journals, essays, novels, poetry, and tracts. These highly personal, yet culturally revealing documents, outline patterns of human aggression, dominance, and violence which have been observed in the case histories of domestic violence survivors today. I have begun to call these works domestic violence narratives. An integral part of women's literary tradition, the domestic violence narrative recounts violations of patriarchal privilege and undue abuses of power which men have exercised over women authors.

This dissertation examines the works of Ann Wall (N.D.), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), and Caroline Norton (1808-1877), three women from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to illuminate the historical as well as the modern representation of domestic violence. I argue that these three women used their experiences as survivors of domestic violence to empower themselves and the public. In addition to providing an income, the domestic violence narrative may have three purposes. First, the narrative has therapeutic merit; the author has an opportunity to tell her own story, in her own words, so that she can control the direction and the message which the narrative/her life takes. The second purpose may be pedagogical; the teller of the narrative uses the story to warn other women away from abusive situations. Third, the narrative fosters social change; some women writers use these degrading and humiliating experiences to effect transformation of the social and legal systems.