Victorian Context: Gender Roles and Society 

Gender Roles

During the Victorian era, men and women’s roles became more sharply defined

• In earlier centuries it had been usual for women to work alongside husbands and brothers in the family business
• Living ‘over the shop’ –  easy for women to help out while also attending to their domestic duties
• As the 19th century progressed, men increasingly commuted to their place of work – Wives, daughters and sisters were left at home to oversee the domestic duties 
• From the 1830s: women started to adopt the crinoline, a huge bell-shaped skirt that made it virtually impossible to clean a grate or sweep the stairs without tumbling over.

Separate Spheres

• The two sexes inhabited ‘separate spheres’, only coming together at breakfast and dinner.
• The ideology of  separate spheres rested on a definition of ‘natural’ characteristics of women and men.
• Women = physically weaker yet morally superior to men so best suited to the domestic sphere.

• Women’s job = to counterbalance moral taint of the public sphere in which their husbands laboured all day
• preparing the next generation to carry on this way of life. 
• The fact that women had such great influence at home was used as an argument against giving them the vote.

Education 

Pride and Prejudice 

• In Pride & Prejudice: snobbish Caroline Bingley lists the skills required by any young lady who considers herself accomplished:

A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages … ; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions … (ch. 8)

• It was important for a well-educated girl to soften her erudition with a graceful and feminine manner. 
• No-one wanted to be called a ‘blue-stocking’: women who had devoted themselves too enthusiastically to intellectual pursuits 

• It was considered unfeminine and off-putting – they attempted to usurp men’s ‘natural’ intellectual superiority. 
• Some doctors reported too much study had damaging effect on ovaries, turning attractive young women into dried-up prunes. 
• When Oxford and Cambridge opened to women, many families refused to let their daughters attend for fear that they would make themselves unmarriageable.

The Angel in the House – Coventry Patmore 

• “the Angel in the House’ depicts the ideal image of a Victorian woman 
• They were expected to be devoted and submissive to their husband, passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all- pure. 

• “Angel in the House” comes from the title of an immensely popular poem by Coventry Patmore, in which he holds his angel-wife up as a model for all women.
• ‘Man must be pleased’ = first line 
• Links to Rosetti 

• Twice: man judging the women – ‘expecting hi remorse/ With pardon in her pitying eyes’
• In The Round Tower: ‘think the sin was hers;’ + ‘Bear the pang alone’

Virginia Woolf

• She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors 
• She was a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
• For Woolf, the repressive ideal of women represented by the Angel in the House was still so potent that she wrote, in 1931, “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte 

• Shows that men are either predator and hero 
• Helen = damsel in distress who needs a man to save hr from other men – saviour complex likened to Skene (In The Round Tower)
• She is always obliged to always be kind to men despite Mr Wilmot’s disgusting actions (similar to John’s persistence in NTYJ)

Social Status/Rank

• George Cruikshank’s British Bee Hive: depicts a vast range of Britain’s professionals within a strictly divided pyramid based on social hierarchy
• Samuel Smith’s book ‘self help’ promoted education and perseverance as the route to social mobility –  people who didn’t are assumed to be at fault and titled lazy, extravagant and prude. But poor law introduction of workhouses did not help with social mobility in the way they should