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

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.’ 6 Mary
Poovey places this narrative shift earlier, with Thomas Hardy’s 1890s fiction, taking ‘as its subject
marital unhappiness as well as bliss.’ This paper, however, will argue for its appearance earlier still, in
the 1860s.
In The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy makes a shockingly frank contribution to debates about marriage
based on servitude and mastery. Yet more controversially, Galsworthy exposes the tragedy of madness
fuelled by sexual desire with ‘a man enslaved by his own possessive instinct, who couldn't see the sky
for it, or even enter fully into what another person felt!’ 7 By 1906 Galsworthy could portray marital
rape: an act which I argue underlies concerns about marriage and a wife’s independence in earlier
fiction. 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. Despite its early
date, Trollope’s novel also subverts normative treatments of marriage in Victorian fiction, presenting
monomania fuelled rather than cured by marriage.
Following the feminist tradition, the failed-marriage plot is widely understood as concerned
‘primarily with the matter of female agency: it tends to revolve around a wife leaving her husband.’ 8
However, this view is predicated on the assumption that only female agency is restricted and
problematized by nineteenth-century marriage laws. I suggest that Trollope frames the failed-marriage
plot primarily as a man’s plot. James Eli Adams has explained the critical shying away from
masculinity studies, writing that it ‘has been resisted by those concerned that dwelling on the
complexities and burdens of masculine identity would serve to obscure, and thereby to reinforce, the
brute realities of male domination against which feminist analyses were and are in the first place
directed.’ 9 Such studies also risk falling into what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms a ‘vast national wash