Writing About the Unspeakable: Gender Violence in the Nineteenth Century

Gender violence is one of the multiple issues nineteenth-century women writers portrayed in their fictions. Early feminists understood that the ideal of domesticity had an objectionable side that had to be addressed to improve the situation of women. In this essay, Ortiz-Loyola examines the way in which Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo’s “Marido y mujer” (1893) and Ana Roqué’s Sara la obrera (1895) approach the question of violence. She argues that, for both authors, gender violence disrupts the discourse of love that portrays the home as a safe place. She further contends that narratives of violence expose sexual and domestic aggressions as an evil reproduced not only by social and legal structures but also by the members of the privileged classes.