My research concerns legal and social concerns across history. I have written on domestic violence in the 19th century and today, Victorian sensation fiction, freak shows, seances and Victorian Spiritualism, economic history, the emergence of xenophobia in the nineteenth century, and the Titanic disaster.
At present, my work primarily focuses on the investigative practices in murder cases and unsolved murder in the 19th century and the cultural responses to murderous violence. Phone: 831-459-3885 Address: Office of the Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor UC Santa Cruz 1156 High St. Santa Cruz, CA 95064
In this groundbreaking collection, scholars explore Victorian xenophobia as a rhetorical strategy... more In this groundbreaking collection, scholars explore Victorian xenophobia as a rhetorical strategy that transforms “foreign” people, bodies, and objects into perceived invaders with the dangerous power to alter the social fabric of the nation and the identity of the English. Essays in the collected edition look across the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century to trace the myriad tensions that gave rise to fear and loathing of immigrants, aliens, and ethnic/racial/religious others. This volume introduces new ways of reading the fear and loathing of all that was foreign in nineteenth-century British culture, and, in doing so, it captures nuances that often fall beyond the scope of current theoretical models. “Xenophobia” not only offers a distinctive theoretical lens through which to read the nineteenth century; it also advances and enriches our understanding of other critical approaches to the study of difference. Bringing together scholarship from art history, history, literary studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, Jewish studies, and postcolonial studies, Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia seeks to open a rich and provocative dialogue on the global dimensions of xenophobia during the nineteenth century.
In this groundbreaking collection, scholars explore Victorian xenophobia as a rhetorical strategy... more In this groundbreaking collection, scholars explore Victorian xenophobia as a rhetorical strategy that transforms “foreign” people, bodies, and objects into perceived invaders with the dangerous power to alter the social fabric of the nation and the identity of the English. Essays in the collected edition look across the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century to trace the myriad tensions that gave rise to fear and loathing of immigrants, aliens, and ethnic/racial/religious others. This volume introduces new ways of reading the fear and loathing of all that was foreign in nineteenth-century British culture, and, in doing so, it captures nuances that often fall beyond the scope of current theoretical models. “Xenophobia” not only offers a distinctive theoretical lens through which to read the nineteenth century; it also advances and enriches our understanding of other critical approaches to the study of difference. Bringing together scholarship from art history, history, literary studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, Jewish studies, and postcolonial studies, Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia seeks to open a rich and provocative dialogue on the global dimensions of xenophobia during the nineteenth century.
Altered States examines the rise of Spiritualism—the religion of séances, mediums, and ghostly en... more Altered States examines the rise of Spiritualism—the religion of séances, mediums, and ghostly encounters—in the Victorian period and the role it played in undermining both traditional female roles and the rhetoric of imperialism. Focusing on a particular kind of séance event—the full-form materialization—and the bodies of the young, female mediums who performed it, Marlene Tromp argues that in the altered state of the séance new ways of understanding identity and relationships became possible. This not only demonstrably shaped the thinking of the Spiritualists, but also the popular consciousness of the period. In diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, scientific reports, and popular fiction, Tromp uncovers evidence that the radical views presented in the faith permeated and influenced mainstream Victorian thought.
Sensation novels, a genre characterized by scandalous narratives and emotionally and socially pro... more Sensation novels, a genre characterized by scandalous narratives and emotionally and socially provocative dialogue and plots, had their heyday in England in the 1860s and 1870s, in the midst of growing concern about codes of behavior in marriage. Largely excluded from the academic canon of the late twentieth century, sensation novels had an impact on Victorian culture that we have only recently begun to evaluate.
Exploring the central metaphor of marital violence in these novels, Marlene Tromp uncovers the relationship between the representations of such violence in fiction and in the law. Her investigation demonstrates that sensational constructions of gender, marriage, "brutal" relationships, and even murder, were gradually incorporated into legal debates and realist fiction as the Victorian understanding of what was "real" changed. Sensation fiction's reconfiguration of literary and social norms, evident in works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is also explicitly evoked in the "realist" representations of domestic violence in novels by Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot.
While “freaks” have captivated our imagination since well before the nineteenth century, the Vict... more While “freaks” have captivated our imagination since well before the nineteenth century, the Victorians flocked to shows featuring dancing dwarves, bearded ladies, “missing links,” and six-legged sheep. Indeed, this period has been described by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as the epoch of “consolidation” for freakery: an era of social change, enormously popular freak shows, and taxonomic frenzy. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp, turns to that rich nexus, examining the struggle over definitions of “freakery” and the unstable and sometimes conflicting ways in which freakery was understood and deployed. As the first study centralizing British culture, this collection discusses figures as varied as Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man”; Daniel Lambert, “King of the Fat Men”; Julia Pastrana, “The Bear Woman”; and Laloo “The Marvellous Indian Boy” and his embedded, parasitic twin. The Victorian Freaks contributors examine Victorian culture through the lens of freakery, reading the production of the freak against the landscape of capitalist consumption, the medical community, and the politics of empire, sexuality, and art. Collectively, these essays ask how freakery engaged with notions of normalcy and with its Victorian cultural context.
This is the first book to address the entire career of this key Victorian author.
Mary Elizabeth... more This is the first book to address the entire career of this key Victorian author.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, journal editor and bestselling author of more than eighty novels during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a key figure in the Victorian literary scene. This volume brings together new essays from a variety of perspectives that illuminate both the richness of Braddon's oeuvre and the variety of critical approaches to it.
Best known as the author of Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, Braddon also wrote penny dreadfuls, realist novels, plays, short stories, reviews, and articles. The contributors move beyond her two most famous works and reflect a range of current issues and approaches, including gender, genre, imperialism, colonial reception, commodity culture, and publishing history.
Page 1. EATING, FEEDING, AND FLESH: FOOD IN VICTORIAN SPIRITUALISM MarleneTromp Communing and Spi... more Page 1. EATING, FEEDING, AND FLESH: FOOD IN VICTORIAN SPIRITUALISM MarleneTromp Communing and Spiritualism Victorian Spiritualism--the religion of tipping tables, spirit rappings, automatic writing, and spirit materializations ...
Seven The Dangerous Woman: ME Braddon's Sensational (En) gendering of Domestic Law Marlene T... more Seven The Dangerous Woman: ME Braddon's Sensational (En) gendering of Domestic Law Marlene Tromp Aurora Floyd's first words in the novel that bears her name are:" He is [dead]." By the novel's climax, the police, her servants, her friends, and even her jovial, ...
Lisa Surridge’s Bleak Houses is a fine study of nineteenth-century marital violence that signific... more Lisa Surridge’s Bleak Houses is a fine study of nineteenth-century marital violence that significantly expands the range of cultural and literary materials in this growing body of criticism. She achieves this expansion in three central ways. First, Surridge’s admirably detailed exploration of primary materials—legislation, legal cases, and debates in the Houses of Parliament, the courts, and the public press—brings together nearly a century’s worth of legal and social history of marital violence. Second, her study draws on a wide range of contemporary literary and historical scholarship regarding marital violence. Finally, the literary scope is quite impressive; the book touches on fiction from the s through the fin de siecle. It is this breadth, her careful attention to detail at every level, and some fine readings that are the book’s greatest strengths. Surridge investigates the social dialogue regarding marital violence, the presumed privacy of the home, and notions of manliness. Her argument usefully charts the evolution of feminist rhetoric against marital violence alongside the positions that tended to conserve traditional gender roles. roughout, she finds much of the raw material for her study in the newspaper and literature, and this emphasis—which allows her to specify historical context very carefully—will make the book valuable to scholars of gender, law, and literature in the period. Marrying the newspaper and literature to the issue of domestic violence makes Charles Dickens an apt starting point. Surridge takes on Dickens’s early writings as well as Dombey and Son. In a careful and highly readable style, she argues that Dickens, like many of his contemporaries, idealized the passivity of the wife—a move that put abused women in an impossible position. If one must submit to her husband and nurture the privacy of her home to be a woman deserving of legal and social support, how could she ever accuse her spouse of marital violence? For Dickens, the “good” woman’s body spoke post mortem. Indeed, according to Surridge, the working-class women represented in Dickens (like Nancy in Oliver Twist) reflected middle-class values of privacy—an intriguing analysis. When Dickens turned his eyes to violence in the middle class, as Surridge argues in her chapter on Dombey and Son, he linked manliness to personal and sexual self control. e middle-class home, though exposed to the intrusion of the public eye through domestic violence, is restored (and reprivatized) through feminine submission (represented in the Christ-
Grandcourt threw himself into a chair and said, with undertoned peremptoriness, “Sit down.” She, ... more Grandcourt threw himself into a chair and said, with undertoned peremptoriness, “Sit down.” She, already in the expectation of something unpleasant, had thrown off her burnous with nervous unconsciousness, and immediately obeyed . . . “Oblige me in future by not showing whims like a mad woman in a play.” (502; ch. 36; emphasis added)NOVELISTIC HEROINES, like Gwendolen in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, become trapped in a complex network of social contradictions when they face the threat of marital violence in a world where such violence was thought not to exist — the middle and upper classes. Though increasing attention was paid to violence in the Victorian home as the century progressed, pamphlets, studies, and legislative inquiry significantly ommited sustained or systematic scrutiny of violence in the home that existed beyond the bounds of the working classes. Frances Power Cobbe’s important essay, “Wife Torture in England,” sought to raise public awareness about marital violence and to stimulate interest in protective legislation for the victims. Yet, in spite of Cobbe’s willingness to consider the possibility that some “gentlemen” might be guilty of abuse, she presents the phenomenon of wife abuse as safely distant from the comfortable quarters of the middle and upper classes, asserting that “the dangerous wife-beater belongs almost exclusively to the artisan and labouring classes” (55). In the debates surrounding the passage of the Divorce Act of 1857, Parliament repeatedly made apparent their belief that middle- and upper-class men could not be a danger to their wives by focusing exclusively on marital violence as a working-class issue. Only in “the humbler ranks of life [was] some prompt remedy” necessary; only “poor women” were conceived of as sufferers of violence at the hands of their husbands (Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., 145 [25 May 1857], col. 801–02).
In this groundbreaking collection, scholars explore Victorian xenophobia as a rhetorical strategy... more In this groundbreaking collection, scholars explore Victorian xenophobia as a rhetorical strategy that transforms “foreign” people, bodies, and objects into perceived invaders with the dangerous power to alter the social fabric of the nation and the identity of the English. Essays in the collected edition look across the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century to trace the myriad tensions that gave rise to fear and loathing of immigrants, aliens, and ethnic/racial/religious others. This volume introduces new ways of reading the fear and loathing of all that was foreign in nineteenth-century British culture, and, in doing so, it captures nuances that often fall beyond the scope of current theoretical models. “Xenophobia” not only offers a distinctive theoretical lens through which to read the nineteenth century; it also advances and enriches our understanding of other critical approaches to the study of difference. Bringing together scholarship from art history, history, literary studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, Jewish studies, and postcolonial studies, Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia seeks to open a rich and provocative dialogue on the global dimensions of xenophobia during the nineteenth century.
In this groundbreaking collection, scholars explore Victorian xenophobia as a rhetorical strategy... more In this groundbreaking collection, scholars explore Victorian xenophobia as a rhetorical strategy that transforms “foreign” people, bodies, and objects into perceived invaders with the dangerous power to alter the social fabric of the nation and the identity of the English. Essays in the collected edition look across the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century to trace the myriad tensions that gave rise to fear and loathing of immigrants, aliens, and ethnic/racial/religious others. This volume introduces new ways of reading the fear and loathing of all that was foreign in nineteenth-century British culture, and, in doing so, it captures nuances that often fall beyond the scope of current theoretical models. “Xenophobia” not only offers a distinctive theoretical lens through which to read the nineteenth century; it also advances and enriches our understanding of other critical approaches to the study of difference. Bringing together scholarship from art history, history, literary studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, Jewish studies, and postcolonial studies, Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia seeks to open a rich and provocative dialogue on the global dimensions of xenophobia during the nineteenth century.
Altered States examines the rise of Spiritualism—the religion of séances, mediums, and ghostly en... more Altered States examines the rise of Spiritualism—the religion of séances, mediums, and ghostly encounters—in the Victorian period and the role it played in undermining both traditional female roles and the rhetoric of imperialism. Focusing on a particular kind of séance event—the full-form materialization—and the bodies of the young, female mediums who performed it, Marlene Tromp argues that in the altered state of the séance new ways of understanding identity and relationships became possible. This not only demonstrably shaped the thinking of the Spiritualists, but also the popular consciousness of the period. In diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, scientific reports, and popular fiction, Tromp uncovers evidence that the radical views presented in the faith permeated and influenced mainstream Victorian thought.
Sensation novels, a genre characterized by scandalous narratives and emotionally and socially pro... more Sensation novels, a genre characterized by scandalous narratives and emotionally and socially provocative dialogue and plots, had their heyday in England in the 1860s and 1870s, in the midst of growing concern about codes of behavior in marriage. Largely excluded from the academic canon of the late twentieth century, sensation novels had an impact on Victorian culture that we have only recently begun to evaluate.
Exploring the central metaphor of marital violence in these novels, Marlene Tromp uncovers the relationship between the representations of such violence in fiction and in the law. Her investigation demonstrates that sensational constructions of gender, marriage, "brutal" relationships, and even murder, were gradually incorporated into legal debates and realist fiction as the Victorian understanding of what was "real" changed. Sensation fiction's reconfiguration of literary and social norms, evident in works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is also explicitly evoked in the "realist" representations of domestic violence in novels by Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot.
While “freaks” have captivated our imagination since well before the nineteenth century, the Vict... more While “freaks” have captivated our imagination since well before the nineteenth century, the Victorians flocked to shows featuring dancing dwarves, bearded ladies, “missing links,” and six-legged sheep. Indeed, this period has been described by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as the epoch of “consolidation” for freakery: an era of social change, enormously popular freak shows, and taxonomic frenzy. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp, turns to that rich nexus, examining the struggle over definitions of “freakery” and the unstable and sometimes conflicting ways in which freakery was understood and deployed. As the first study centralizing British culture, this collection discusses figures as varied as Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man”; Daniel Lambert, “King of the Fat Men”; Julia Pastrana, “The Bear Woman”; and Laloo “The Marvellous Indian Boy” and his embedded, parasitic twin. The Victorian Freaks contributors examine Victorian culture through the lens of freakery, reading the production of the freak against the landscape of capitalist consumption, the medical community, and the politics of empire, sexuality, and art. Collectively, these essays ask how freakery engaged with notions of normalcy and with its Victorian cultural context.
This is the first book to address the entire career of this key Victorian author.
Mary Elizabeth... more This is the first book to address the entire career of this key Victorian author.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, journal editor and bestselling author of more than eighty novels during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a key figure in the Victorian literary scene. This volume brings together new essays from a variety of perspectives that illuminate both the richness of Braddon's oeuvre and the variety of critical approaches to it.
Best known as the author of Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, Braddon also wrote penny dreadfuls, realist novels, plays, short stories, reviews, and articles. The contributors move beyond her two most famous works and reflect a range of current issues and approaches, including gender, genre, imperialism, colonial reception, commodity culture, and publishing history.
Page 1. EATING, FEEDING, AND FLESH: FOOD IN VICTORIAN SPIRITUALISM MarleneTromp Communing and Spi... more Page 1. EATING, FEEDING, AND FLESH: FOOD IN VICTORIAN SPIRITUALISM MarleneTromp Communing and Spiritualism Victorian Spiritualism--the religion of tipping tables, spirit rappings, automatic writing, and spirit materializations ...
Seven The Dangerous Woman: ME Braddon's Sensational (En) gendering of Domestic Law Marlene T... more Seven The Dangerous Woman: ME Braddon's Sensational (En) gendering of Domestic Law Marlene Tromp Aurora Floyd's first words in the novel that bears her name are:" He is [dead]." By the novel's climax, the police, her servants, her friends, and even her jovial, ...
Lisa Surridge’s Bleak Houses is a fine study of nineteenth-century marital violence that signific... more Lisa Surridge’s Bleak Houses is a fine study of nineteenth-century marital violence that significantly expands the range of cultural and literary materials in this growing body of criticism. She achieves this expansion in three central ways. First, Surridge’s admirably detailed exploration of primary materials—legislation, legal cases, and debates in the Houses of Parliament, the courts, and the public press—brings together nearly a century’s worth of legal and social history of marital violence. Second, her study draws on a wide range of contemporary literary and historical scholarship regarding marital violence. Finally, the literary scope is quite impressive; the book touches on fiction from the s through the fin de siecle. It is this breadth, her careful attention to detail at every level, and some fine readings that are the book’s greatest strengths. Surridge investigates the social dialogue regarding marital violence, the presumed privacy of the home, and notions of manliness. Her argument usefully charts the evolution of feminist rhetoric against marital violence alongside the positions that tended to conserve traditional gender roles. roughout, she finds much of the raw material for her study in the newspaper and literature, and this emphasis—which allows her to specify historical context very carefully—will make the book valuable to scholars of gender, law, and literature in the period. Marrying the newspaper and literature to the issue of domestic violence makes Charles Dickens an apt starting point. Surridge takes on Dickens’s early writings as well as Dombey and Son. In a careful and highly readable style, she argues that Dickens, like many of his contemporaries, idealized the passivity of the wife—a move that put abused women in an impossible position. If one must submit to her husband and nurture the privacy of her home to be a woman deserving of legal and social support, how could she ever accuse her spouse of marital violence? For Dickens, the “good” woman’s body spoke post mortem. Indeed, according to Surridge, the working-class women represented in Dickens (like Nancy in Oliver Twist) reflected middle-class values of privacy—an intriguing analysis. When Dickens turned his eyes to violence in the middle class, as Surridge argues in her chapter on Dombey and Son, he linked manliness to personal and sexual self control. e middle-class home, though exposed to the intrusion of the public eye through domestic violence, is restored (and reprivatized) through feminine submission (represented in the Christ-
Grandcourt threw himself into a chair and said, with undertoned peremptoriness, “Sit down.” She, ... more Grandcourt threw himself into a chair and said, with undertoned peremptoriness, “Sit down.” She, already in the expectation of something unpleasant, had thrown off her burnous with nervous unconsciousness, and immediately obeyed . . . “Oblige me in future by not showing whims like a mad woman in a play.” (502; ch. 36; emphasis added)NOVELISTIC HEROINES, like Gwendolen in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, become trapped in a complex network of social contradictions when they face the threat of marital violence in a world where such violence was thought not to exist — the middle and upper classes. Though increasing attention was paid to violence in the Victorian home as the century progressed, pamphlets, studies, and legislative inquiry significantly ommited sustained or systematic scrutiny of violence in the home that existed beyond the bounds of the working classes. Frances Power Cobbe’s important essay, “Wife Torture in England,” sought to raise public awareness about marital violence and to stimulate interest in protective legislation for the victims. Yet, in spite of Cobbe’s willingness to consider the possibility that some “gentlemen” might be guilty of abuse, she presents the phenomenon of wife abuse as safely distant from the comfortable quarters of the middle and upper classes, asserting that “the dangerous wife-beater belongs almost exclusively to the artisan and labouring classes” (55). In the debates surrounding the passage of the Divorce Act of 1857, Parliament repeatedly made apparent their belief that middle- and upper-class men could not be a danger to their wives by focusing exclusively on marital violence as a working-class issue. Only in “the humbler ranks of life [was] some prompt remedy” necessary; only “poor women” were conceived of as sufferers of violence at the hands of their husbands (Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., 145 [25 May 1857], col. 801–02).
SPIRITUALISM WAS SEXY. The Victorian faith of sittings, mediums, and spirit contact thrilled its ... more SPIRITUALISM WAS SEXY. The Victorian faith of sittings, mediums, and spirit contact thrilled its practitioners and detractors alike and broke all rules of decency and decorum in spite of the fact that it was nurtured and developed in the drawing rooms of the proprietous middle ...
Murder has horrified and fascinated us for centuries. Victorian murder not only marked the period... more Murder has horrified and fascinated us for centuries. Victorian murder not only marked the period but also has been the subject of countless contemporary movies, books, and plays, as well as a focus of academic study across a range of subfields, including gender studies, urban studies, genre studies, historical studies, and criminological studies. In some cases, particular murderers or their methodologies have been the focus. While some scholarship has crossed disciplinary lines, few studies have done so in a robust way. Scholarship on murder would have greater intellectual complexity, nuance, and efficacy if it traversed disciplinary boundaries and drew on the work in a greater variety of subfields.
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Exploring the central metaphor of marital violence in these novels, Marlene Tromp uncovers the relationship between the representations of such violence in fiction and in the law. Her investigation demonstrates that sensational constructions of gender, marriage, "brutal" relationships, and even murder, were gradually incorporated into legal debates and realist fiction as the Victorian understanding of what was "real" changed. Sensation fiction's reconfiguration of literary and social norms, evident in works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is also explicitly evoked in the "realist" representations of domestic violence in novels by Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, journal editor and bestselling author of more than eighty novels during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a key figure in the Victorian literary scene. This volume brings together new essays from a variety of perspectives that illuminate both the richness of Braddon's oeuvre and the variety of critical approaches to it.
Best known as the author of Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, Braddon also wrote penny dreadfuls, realist novels, plays, short stories, reviews, and articles. The contributors move beyond her two most famous works and reflect a range of current issues and approaches, including gender, genre, imperialism, colonial reception, commodity culture, and publishing history.
Exploring the central metaphor of marital violence in these novels, Marlene Tromp uncovers the relationship between the representations of such violence in fiction and in the law. Her investigation demonstrates that sensational constructions of gender, marriage, "brutal" relationships, and even murder, were gradually incorporated into legal debates and realist fiction as the Victorian understanding of what was "real" changed. Sensation fiction's reconfiguration of literary and social norms, evident in works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is also explicitly evoked in the "realist" representations of domestic violence in novels by Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, journal editor and bestselling author of more than eighty novels during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a key figure in the Victorian literary scene. This volume brings together new essays from a variety of perspectives that illuminate both the richness of Braddon's oeuvre and the variety of critical approaches to it.
Best known as the author of Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, Braddon also wrote penny dreadfuls, realist novels, plays, short stories, reviews, and articles. The contributors move beyond her two most famous works and reflect a range of current issues and approaches, including gender, genre, imperialism, colonial reception, commodity culture, and publishing history.