Seminar 3. Female characters in the Victorian novel

Seminar 3. Female characters in the Victorian novel

"Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation."

from Robert Southey's letter to twenty-year old Charlotte Bronte on her request to assess her work.

Texts for analysis

Pride and Prejudice by J.Austen

Jane Eyreby Ch. Bronte

аny novel Ch. Dickens (e.g. Great Expectations, Domby and Son, David Copperfield)

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by T. Hardy

Sister Carrie by T. Dreiser

The Age of Innocence by E. Wharton

Information on the position of women in Victorian era

Victorian Era: Women’s Rights. https://schoolworkhelper.net/victorian-era-womens-rights/
McBeath, V.L. Women's Rights in the Victorian Era. https://valmcbeath.com/victorian-era-womens-rights/#.XmqBEdQkkr8
Women as “the Sex” During the Victorian Era. http://webpage.pace.edu/nreagin/tempmotherhood/fall2003/3/HisPage.html

Key terms:

bildungsroman, novel of formation, the psychological novel, the Gothic novel, the domestic novel

Issues for discussion

1. Give definitions for the key terms.

2. Consider the epigraph for the seminar and the additional information on women and the law in Victorian England and give a brief characteristic of the social position of a woman in the 19^th century. Dwell on

Practice

Analyse each work considering the following aspects:

1. What role does she play in the novel? Is she the main or a secondary character?

2. Speak on the appearance of the heroine. Can we call it traditional? In what way does it influence her life?

3. Characterise her social background, family situation. How do they affect her character and her relationships with the people around her?

4. Is religion significant in the life of the heroine? In what way?

5. What points does the novel make about the treatment and position of women in Victorian society concerning family and relationships?

6. What traits (if any!) make the character a New Woman for the 19^th century literature? Or is she merely a victim to the existing system? Who acts as her antagonist expressing polar views and opinions?

7. What’s your opinion of the end of the novel in relation to the heroine? Is it logical or just a tribute to convention? What is the author’s message?

8. What do you think is the author’s attitude towards the heroine?

Women and the Law in Victorian England

Introduction

'By marriage', according to Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1765-69, 'the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during her marriage, or at least is incorporated or consolidated into that of her husband, under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.'

This system of coverture underpinned the laws of Victorian England so far as they related to married women. In effect, a woman surrendered her legal existence on marriage.

Property

On marriage, the control of and income from a woman's real property, that is, property held in the form of freehold land, passed under the common law to her husband, though he could not dispose of it without her consent. Her personal property, that is, money from earnings or investments, and personal belongings such as jewellery, passed absolutely into his control, and she could part with them only with his consent; he could, for example, overrule any bequests she made of her personal property.

The property laws before 1882 had further significant consequences, related to the fiction of the legal identity of husband and wife; a married woman could not sue or be sued -- if, for example, she felt herself to be libelled, her husband could sue and claim for damages, because he was the only injured party, but she could not. Correspondingly, he became liable for her debts and contracts, and for any breaches of the law committed by her before or during their marriage since it was held that she acted only under her husband's direction (it was this provision that made Dickens' Mr Bumble declare that the law is as an ass). Married women held the same legal status as criminals, minors and the insane.

Children

These 'little ambassadors of the familiar and the expected', as one feminist called them late in the century, were also the property of the husband. An Act of 1839 allowed an innocent wife custody of her children under the age of seven years (raised to sixteen years in 1873). The Infants Custody Act of 1886 made the welfare of the children the determining factor in deciding questions of custody, but even then the father remained during his lifetime the sole legal guardian.

Consistently with these provisions, a woman's body was also held to belong to her husband. It was not until 1891 that a High Court ruling denied the husband the right to imprison his wife in pursuit of his conjugal rights (it was not until 1991 that a similar ruling denied him the right to rape her).

Divorce

Before the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 divorces could only be obtained in England through a cumbersome process involving a suit by the husband against another man for 'criminal conversation' (i.e., for compromising his wife, and therefore diminishing her value, so that he could claim damages), then an ecclesiastical divorce which did not allow the right of re-marriage, and finally a private Act of Parliament which separated the parties ex vinculis matrimonii (from the chains of marriage) and did allow re-marriage.

The 1857 Act was designed (in effect) to allow moderately wealthy men to divorce their wives. A woman could be divorced on the simple grounds of her adultery (her adultery threatened his ability to pass his property to his male heirs), whereas a woman had to prove adultery aggravated by desertion (for two years), or by cruelty, rape, sodomy, incest or bigamy. The husband could claim damages against the adulterous third party, the wife could not. This was the law until 1923, when the grounds of divorce were made the same for both sexes.

Education

Campaigns to improve women's education continued throughout the century, strengthened by the imbalance of numbers between men and women (there were roughly half a million more women than men). Queen's and Bedford Colleges at London University offered women education at the end of the 1840s, colleges for women at Oxford and Cambridge began in the 1860s and 1870s, while the Girls' Public Day School Trust, Cheltenham's Ladies College and other new institutions sought to improve the intellectual training offered to girls in their teens. Resistance to these developments came especially from the medical profession, who argued that the physical demands of menstruation and the intellectual demands of study were incompatible, and that educated women would become necessarily the mothers of a 'puny, enfeebled, and sickly race'.

Difference between men and women experiencing their relation to past and contemporary writers(Ellen Moers Literary Women (1976))

"Male writers have always been able to study their craft in university or coffeehouse, group themselves into movements or coteries, search out predecessors for guidance or patronage, collaborate or fight with their contemporaries. But women through most of the nineteenth century were barred from the universities, isolated in their own homes, chaperoned intravel, painfully restricted in friendship. The personal give-and-take of the literary life. was closed to them Without it, they studied with a special closeness the works written by their own sex, and developed a sense of easy, almost rude familiarity with the women who wrote them. . . . Take Jane Austen on the one hand, and her contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey on the other. Wordsworth went to Bristol to meet Coleridge; both were Cambridge men, and they had university friends in common. At Bristol, Wordsworth found Coleridge rooming with an Oxford undergraduate named Southey: they were planning to emigrate to America. Instead Wordworth and Coleridge drew close to together, settled near each other in the lake district, and collaborated on a volume which made history, called Lyrical Ballads . Meanwhile Jane Austen, almost exactly the same age and from a similar social milieu (had she been a man, she would probably have gone to university), stayed home with mother at Steventon, Bath, and Chawton. She visited a brother's family now and then, wrote letters to sisters and nieces, and read Sarah Harriet Burney, Mrs. Jane West, Anna Maria Porter, Mrs. Anne Grant, Elisabeth Hamilton, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Helen Maria Williams, and the rest of the women writers of her day"

Conventional wisdom held that men and women had separate "spheres" and duties, with woman's sphere being the house, family, and self-sacrifice. The popular image for the ideal woman was "the Angel in the House," who was expected to be devoted and submissive to her husband. The Angel was passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all--pure. The phrase "Angel in the House" comes from the title of an immensely popular poem by Coventry Patmore (1854), in which he holds his angel-wife up as a model for all women.

⇐ Предыдущая 12