My Talk on Sexual Violence in Victorian Novels

I had the wonderful opportunity late last year to present at a conference in Belfast, Ireland. The Seamus Heaney Centre hosted a conference with the bold title of Creating a World without Violence against Women and Girls: The Role of the Arts. I say “bold” because that is indeed a bold vision: a world without violence against women and girls. I was invited to join a panel at the conference because of an article I wrote with a student that was published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies on scenes of sexual violence in Victorian literature. In my talk for the Belfast conference, I built upon what I had written earlier in light of Perul Sehgal’s thought-provoking New Yorker article, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot.” The guiding question of my talk is, “Could it be that the marriage plots of nineteenth-century novel (as conventional or archaic as they may seem) actually expose readers to more realistic survivor narratives than many contemporary texts that on the surface seem more ‘woke’ or attuned to today’s gender politics?” If you’re intrigued by that question, I hope you’ll take a listen to my presentation, which was put on YouTube by the Seamus Heaney Centre last week on International Women’s Day. Most of the conference, in fact, can be viewed on the Centre’s website, which is just fantastic. I’m very grateful to the folks at Queen’s University–especially Hilary McCollum–who worked so hard to make the conference accessible and successful.