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Book Review
| Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi + 296. $70.00 (ISBN 0-521-83198-9).
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| This important book seeks to complicate our understanding of the ways in which Victorian criminal justice was gendered. The book is organized around a compelling thesis: the Victorian emphasis on protecting women actually reduced male brutality and led to tougher penalties for violent men. Women paid a price for this protection in that they were increasingly viewed as requiring it because they were weak and vulnerable. In Wiener's view, however, attention to the costs of this protection has overshadowed the significance of the protection itself as well as the considerable costs that men also paid in the form of higher rates of prosecution, conviction, and execution. Wiener wants us to see the Victorians as engineers of social change. In order to showcase their innovations, he positions them "more in relation to their predecessors than to their successors" (xii, 76). However patronizing their motivation, he argues, Victorian legal reforms really did value women's suffering, shelter them from harm, and punish their attackers. |
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Wiener boldly sketches out enormous changes: a shift in emphasis from crimes against property to those against the person, the legal isolation of and emphasis on murder as the only crime punished by execution, higher rates of prosecution and conviction for men who attacked or killed women, tougher penalties. Even when I query assumptions or quibble with assertions in the book, I love Wiener's thought-provoking argument about the occurrence, causes, and consequences of these changes. |
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Wiener supports his case with two kinds of evidence: a searchable database of newspaper and other published accounts of several thousand Victorian criminal cases and "discussions between Home Secretaries, their civil servants, and judges, together with appeals from condemned prisoners and others for mercy" (xiii, xi). Relying on these two archives, Wiener forgoes the detailed, local approach typical of studies of crime in order to divine patterns across the nation and across a century. |
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In Chapter 2, Wiener shows the narrowing acceptance of male violence, even when it was directed at other men in duels, prizefights, fistfights, and military discipline (such as floggings). Wiener then turns his attention for the rest of the book to male violence against women. Chapter 3 argues that sexual assaults began to be taken more seriously in this period and that emphasis shifted away from the victim's character and sexual history and toward outrage at the sexual violation of any woman. This chapter enables Wiener to underscore his point that later feminist legal reforms are often indebted to Victorian criminal justice. |
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Chapter 4 lays the foundation for the study of wife killing in the rest of the book. While murderous women dominated the cultural imagination in earlier periods—despite the fact that their numbers were steady and small—they ceded the stage to the murderous man and his pitiable female victim in courtrooms, newspapers, novels, and plays in the Victorian period. By the second half of the century, fewer women were prosecuted or convicted for serious crimes, and women's prison sentences were declining in length. Few women were executed; more women charged with violent crimes were acquitted on the grounds of insanity. The statistical evidence presented in this chapter forms the centerpiece of Wiener's case. Between 1841 and 1900 in England and Wales, "while the absolute number of wives on trial for murder fell by about forty-five per cent, that of husbands rose by three-quarters, causing the ratio of officially recorded murderous husbands to wives to almost triple between the two periods, from five to one to fourteen to one. Even more remarkably, the ratio between them rose from less than 4:1 in the 1840s ... to more than 22:1 in the 1890s" (147–48). Given that violent women would later return to a cultural visibility in excess of their statistical significance, it is especially interesting that they were so eclipsed by brutal men as figures of threat in Victorian culture. Did men start killing their wives in greater numbers? Wiener acknowledges that it is impossible to know for sure but that the surviving evidence suggests that changes in perception and "prosecutorial discretion" shifted the focus toward the brutal husband as a threat to social order and English superiority. |
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The book's final three chapters explore how newspapers described husbands' motives for murder and how judges and juries addressed various provocations. As Wiener shows, the growing sense that even a wife's adultery could not justify her husband's killing her—even if he found her in the act—formed part of a strategy to define Englishness as self restraint and protection of women. Thus "wife-killing discourse" was a crucial site in the redefinition of English manhood. According to Wiener, as accused men lost access to traditional defenses such as provocation or lack of intent (because of drunkenness or chastisement in excess), juries sought new ways to protect them from execution. As a consequence, insanity determinations increased. This loophole accompanied and facilitated the rising rate of convictions, providing an alternative to death sentences. For men as for women, then, the cost of one's life was the surrender of the claim to agency and intention. Such high stakes cases raise fascinating questions: what are the costs of protection? What are the costs of being assigned agency and power? |
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Many recent histories of women's relation to the law emphasize that women achieved agency in practice despite ideological constraints. Wiener offers a different twist, showing that an ideological emphasis on women's weakness protected them in practice. Recent debates in feminist legal theory, especially with regard to so-called battered woman syndrome defenses, also focus on the problem of agency. Casting women as victims can protect them in court. Yet such strategies have far-reaching ramifications. As Wiener's method illuminates, representations and experience intertwine. That's precisely why we need both the scrupulously detailed discussion he offers of how particular stories protected women in the Victorian period and inquiries into the implications of these stories. |
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| Frances E. Dolan
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| University of California, Davis |
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