Lois S. Bibbings: Binding Men: Stories About Violence and Law in Late Victorian England
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00731.x |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
BINDING MEN: STORIES ABOUT VIOLENCE AND LAW IN LATE
VICTORIAN ENGLAND by LOIS S. BIBBINGS
(Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014, 220 pp., £90.00)
Binding Men is a highly accessible, well-written, and impeccably researched
book that develops what has become a distinctive and exciting research
trajectory on the part of the author in the still relatively underexplored area
of the relationship between men, law, and gender. It is a work that, whilst
focused on the particular historical period of late Victorian England, serves
at a more general level as part of a challenge to established methodologies
and assumptions about the form legal scholarly writing can take. Like her
2009 book, Telling Tales About Men, it explores the relationship between
fiction and factual writing via an exploration of the role of narrative in a
series of texts. More specifically, it constructs `stories' around five legal
cases that are read as involving, in different ways, forms of male violence: in
the cases considered here, in particular, social and legal understandings of
child abuse, prize fighting, murder and cannibalism, sexual assault, and `wife
torture'.
Like its predecessor, Binding Men does not seek to tell a single
chronological story about the interconnections between these disparate cases
and the relationship between men, violence, and law at the time. Rather, the
reading of the cases constructs the late nineteenth century as a time marked
by complex, often contradictory social concerns and anxieties about men and
masculinity in the context of the gender realignments and politics of the
period; a concern, in particular, with setting the boundaries of what was to be
considered socially and legally acceptable male behaviour, notably but not
exclusively in the context of men's violence, and a reshaping of under-
standings of what it means, at its simplest, to be `a man'. The book is
structured around five chapters, each of which focuses on a specific legal
case and explores what the author presents as examples of such `attempts to
legally limit male behaviour'. It is likely that some, if not all, of the cases
will already be familiar to many readers, in particular those with a knowl-
edge of criminal law. Nonetheless, no prior knowledge is assumed and a real
strength of the work is how it takes the general reader into the cases, drawing
out details and facts often missing from standard textbook discussions. What
is distinctive, in particular, about the work is the author's attempt to pull
together seemingly disparate cases and areas into an `overarching tale'; that
in responding to these social anxieties about the behaviour of men, there can
be found in the law concerted judicial efforts ± certainly, not all by any
means successful ± to in effect `rein men in' by `creating precedents as to the
parameters of unlawful violence'.
Four of the cases considered concern men who were charged with
five, concerned an attempt to free via the courts a wife who, having refused
to cohabit with her husband, had been seized by him. This was to become
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ß2015 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2015 Cardiff University Law School
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