ABSTRACT
The domestic sphere appears contested as Laschinger argues that in her detective novel, Fuller Victor’s “sentimental narrator mediates, under the command of a strategic author, the concern with the systematic abuse of women and children in America’s genteel class.” In the mode of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Metta Fuller Victor, then, uses a popular literary genre to call for reform politics by drawing the readers’ attention to patterns of exploitation including incest and child sexual abuse that went unacknowledged in the period’s society, in this way raising proto-progressivist awareness of children’s rights. (keywords: domestic detective fiction, sentimental novel, child abuse, reform politics, narratological reading, New York, 1867)
