The 'green-eyed monster': jealousy and erotic monomania in He ...

1 Shakespeare, Othello, III.iii. l. 165-7.
2 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970), 154.
3 D. A. Miller has argued that novels ending in happy marriages, like Jane Austen’s, ‘inhibit narrative
productivity.’ Emma and Mr Knightley’s marriage, for instance, ‘must end the novel…otherwise, it
would not be a “perfect” union.’
Narrative and Its Discontents (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), 4.
4 Kelly Hager, Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition
(Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010).
5 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1993), 174.
6 For example, Emily Blair argues for a different area of continuity from Victorian novelists to Woolf,
and writes that ‘Woolf’s depiction of femininity resonates with the depictions of Gaskell and Oliphant
as she simultaneously reinvents the novel and revises the marriage plot.’ Virginia Woolf and the
Nineteenth-century Domestic Novel (Albany: State of New York Press, 1997), 9.
7 John Galsworthy, In Chancery, The Forsyte Saga (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 514.
8 Just fifteen years before the publication of this section of the saga, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles
scandalised readers with its portrayal of the raped woman as a morally pure victim. Galsworthy’s Irene
is similarly innocent of all blame for the violence she experiences.
9 Hager, Dickens and the Rise of Divorce, 8.