ABSTRACT
The third chapter extends discussion of the relationship between Victorian literature and idolatrous love. In The Doctor’s Wife, Mary Elizabeth Braddon offers an equivocal response to the widespread notion that romantic novels and poetry encourage young women to worship love and abandon domestic duty. Although the novel chides its heroine for allowing her mind to bow down before ideal visions, it also provides sympathetic insight into her idolatrous imagination. A mind hemmed in by a jealous patriarchal system, Braddon suggests, will find delight and moral agency through the images it makes for itself.
