Burova I. I., Vasilieva E. V. Emma Bovari’s sisters: doctors’ wives in the Victorian female prose. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Language and Literature. 2019, 16 (4): 653–672.

Abstract

The purpose of the essay is to analyze the images of doctors’ wives in the works of British women writers during the second half of the 19th century and to consider the main trends in their evolution. The brilliant study by T. Sparks devoted to doctors in British Victorian novels imparts the need for considering the images of doctors’ wives in Victorian female fiction. The materials for our study included works by E. Gaskell, D. M. Mulock Craik, Mrs. Henry Wood, A. I. Thackeray, M. E. Braddon and G. Eliot published between 1851 and 1872. The study shows that the image of a doctor’s wife as her husband’s victim, that had dominated in earlier works, was quite suddenly replaced by the image of a doctor’s wife destroying her spouse. The transition can be explained by the weakening of the positions of Romanticism, decrease of public interest in Gothic horrors, and a departure from the glorification of a criminal typical of the Newgate novel. At the same time, this change may be explained by the publication of G. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. However, its influence should not be exaggerated, even if an authoress (Braddon) overtly recognized the secondariness of her work to it. The rise of the so-called ‘First wave’ of feminism should also be taken into consideration as a significant factor influencing the evolution of the image of a doctor’s wife in the Victorian novels by women writers. Concurrently, their sympathy towards men and their tendency to blame the wives for family tragedies are quite unexpected for feminist fiction.