'Marriage had bastilled me for life': Propertied Women as Property in the Legal Fictions of Richardson, Wollstonecraft and Collins

When a woman married during the eighteenth century, according to Blackstone’s 'Commentaries on the Laws of England' (1765-69), her autonomous identity was removed and she was immediately classed as one with her husband. This consolidation into the husband’s own identity means that she is automatically classed as his property, as to incorporate and consolidate implies a taking over of ownership of the item being transferred – and thus, of course, a complete lack of self-governance over mind, body and actions on behalf of the woman. This leads to the perception that the woman has been transformed from a human into a mere thing, whilst still retaining human function. It is this mid-existence of the eighteenth and nineteenth century woman and her entrapment somewhere between human and thing that raises a key question. Is it possible for such a legal phenomenon to own property (thus, another thing) itself without repercussions – essentially, if the propertied woman was herself property? This ‘work in progress’ paper examines the extent to which this may be true, and if so, how it affected her identity as an independent human being in a patriarchal legal system over a specific time period by studying several themes of what are arguably legal fictions. The gendered inheritance of Samuel Richardson’s work and the obstacles this incurs due to the female’s lack of legal recognition in the eighteenth century are referred to, and explorations are made into the questions about inheritance, identity and what constitutes as property raised by the French Revolution of the 1790s, and the representations of this in Gothic and revolutionary literature, specifically Wollstonecraft’s 'Maria' (1798). Moreover, I consider the effects of the Gothic upon the development of sensation fiction, positing the latter as a direct descendant rather than subscribing to the notion of them being related but rigidly disparate, with sensation fiction suddenly emerging in the mid-nineteenth century (Hughes, 1980; Thomas, 1994; Herbert, 2008). Within these two genres, the entity of the married woman is well-established, but, I argue, warrants further examination of its representations of the legal entity of woman in her occupation of the domestic sphere as a wife and the social sphere as a single, propertied, legally existing woman in Wilkie Collins’s 'The Woman in White' (1860-61).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12333