ABSTRACT
The term used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the control of horses was the word "manage," which, as Donna Landry has shown, came into English through equestrian schools. In the nostalgic rural or provincial novels the authors represent such social disruption through men who display a potential to dominate in their relation to sexually magnetic women and their ability to ride and control high-spirited horses. The horse is a particularly interesting figure in Victorian iconography because it stands at the juncture of a set of complex and resonant attributes that are both social and sexual. Elevation is literalized in Elizabeth Gaskell's, George Eliot's, and Thomas Hardy's novels in the scenes that most emphasize sexual and social dominance, where a man on horseback confronts the woman he desires when she is on foot.
