Gender Roles And Sexuality In Victorian Literature
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Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature by Christopher Parker Pdf
Whilst recognizing and building upon the enormous importance of both Victorian and twentieth-century perceptions of women's roles and the way these relate to assumptions about women's sexuality, this book is also concerned with more recently developed interests in the creation of male gender roles and different concepts of masculinity, and consequently with relations between, and within, the sexes. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a mounting attack upon the middle class family ideal which had been painstakingly developed in the preceding era; but the radicals did not have it all their own way.
Victorian Gender Ideology and Literature by Aşkın Haluk Yildirim Pdf
The origins of discrimination against women date back to ancient times. Throughout history, women have been exploited sexually, physically, economically, and socially under the shadow of patriarchal doctrines. Religion, tradition and the codes of morality have been misused to ensure the slavery of women. Although today the social and economic status of women is better than it was in the past, they are still the primary victims of abuse, humiliation, violence, and oppression. The Victorian era is one of the most debated periods in history of womanly struggle against discrimination. While it was considered an age of progress and prosperity, it was a time of misery and poverty as well. Victorian England was one of the hottest spots of the Woman Question. At the time, women were forced to lead a passive existence dictated by the norms of Victorian gender ideology. Transformations in science and technology during this period were contradictory to social beliefs and values. Despite the astonishing progress experienced during this period, the rigidly defined roles of men and women in Victorian society remained almost the same until the beginning of twentieth century. Victorian literature on gender flourished in such a tense atmosphere. Female rebellion against the injustices of this developing world often found its voices among the ones who were able to feel the deep sorrow experienced either by themselves or by the members of their gender. This book explores Victorian gender issues and the role of Victorian literature on the womanly journey towards emancipation through their evolutionary path. The key concepts and movements that shaped the historical, social, and political background of women's cry for their rights are examined along with the accompanying gender literature mainly through a feminist reading of female writers as regards to the Woman Question.
Author : Christopher Lane Publisher : University of Chicago Press Page : 348 pages File Size : 55,7 Mb Release : 1999 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines ISBN : 0226468607
Why does passion bewilder and torment so many Victorian protagonists? And why do so many literary characters experience moments of ecstasy before their deaths? In this original study, Christopher Lane shows why Victorian fiction conveys both the pleasure and anguish of intimacy. Examining works by Bulwer-Lytton, Swinburne, Schreiner, Hardy, James, Santayana, and Forster, he argues that these writers struggled with aspects of psychology that were undermining the utilitarian ethos of the Victorian age. Lane discredits the conservative notion that Victorian literature expresses only a demand for repression and moral restraint. But he also refutes historicist and Foucauldian approaches, arguing that they dismiss the very idea of repression and end up denouncing psychoanalysis as complicit in various kinds of oppression. These approaches, Lane argues, reduce Victorian literature to a drama about politics, power, and the ego. Striving instead to reinvigorate discussions of fantasy and the unconscious, Lane offers a clear, often startling account of writers who grapple with the genuine complexities of love, desire, and friendship.
Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels looks at the influence of Victorian definitions of gender on the cultural processes of reading and canon formation in nineteenth-century England, examining the reception of several mid-century works in over 100 Victorian book reviews. This study investigates four canonical and popular novelists (Emily Bronte, Anthony Trollope, Charles Reade, Charlotte Yonge), all of whom caused high cultural commotions by epitomizing or subverting contemporary definitions of 'masculine' or 'feminine' writing.
Bodies and Lives in Victorian England by Pamela K. Stone,Lise Shapiro Sanders Pdf
This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times. With a temporal focus on women’s life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women’s lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.
The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel by Tara MacDonald Pdf
By tracing the rise of the New Man alongside novelistic changes in the representations of marriage, MacDonald shows how this figure encouraged Victorian writers to reassess masculine behaviour and to re-imagine the marriage plot in light of wider social changes. She finds examples in novels by Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and George Gissing.
Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 by Lesley A. Hall Pdf
Lesley Hall examines a range of specific areas in the context of the Victorian era, which saw major developments in issues of sex and gender. A major focus is the ambiguous and syncopated relationship between progressive and reactionary tendencies.
Concepts of Womanhood and Masculinity and the Representation of Gender Relation in Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover“ by Regina Männle Pdf
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), course: Proseminar I, language: English, abstract: Without a doubt, the Victorian age can be considered as a very vibrant era, an age of change and development, a time of expansion, reforms and of technological and scientific advance. It was only natural that these changes would affect the traditional religious and social beliefs and conventions, as well. The conventional gender system with its strict hierarchy and role expectations was mostly still intact and sexuality and corporeality were considered to be taboo subjects. Nevertheless, it was exactly this attempt to avoid sexuality and gender topics which led to sometimes excessive discussions about these issues, for example the so called “Great Evil” of prostitution and related to that the enforcement of the Contagious Disease Acts in the 1860s. These discussions, however, made many Victorians – for example the “New Women” that formed the basis for the later on emerging feminism – aware of the injustice of the status quo and led to a questioning of the traditional separate spheres ideology. The ideas of womanhood and masculinity had to be discussed and to be adapted to a new age. Although the stereotype of the “uptight Victorian” lives on until today, the literature of this time – since literature always mirrors the cultural climate of the society in which it came into being – demonstrates the Victorian’s interest in gender questions. In this paper Robert Browning will serve as an example for a poet highly aware of these ongoing changes. In his dramatic monologue “Porphyria’s Lover” he takes up the gender issue and deals with femininity, manliness and sexuality. The first chapter of this paper will give some information about the form of the dramatic monologue as a special means to present a person’s inner life and furthermore, will deal with the conventional idea of gender in the Victorian age. On the basis of this more general infor-mation, the second chapter will have a closer look at the poem itself and will compare the concept of gender roles and the construction of gender relationship designed by Browning with the traditional gender ideology. Browning’s way of dealing with this issue will be taken as one example for the Victorian’s awareness of the complexity of the gender question.
Victorian Gender Roles and Dickens's Image of Women As Represented in the Female Characters in Great Expectations by Anja Dinter Pdf
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Great Expectations and Hard Times by Charles Dickens, 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Introduction The following work is an analysis of the female characters in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations especially with regard to Victorian gender constructions and Dickens's image of women. Dickens's biography and the depiction of very diverse female characters in his novels stimulated the idea of a closer analysis. First of all, a short summary of Great Expectations is provided. Then, the Victorian construction of gender will be discussed. As will be shown, a very strict ideology regarding gender roles existed during the Victorian age. Obviously, Dickens must have been influenced by the ideas of his contemporaries which should then be presented in the novel. Another focus will be on how his relationships to women influenced his image of women and also, consequently, the depiction of his female characters in Great Expectations. Finally the female characters, with reference to Victorian gender roles and Dickens's image of women, will be analyzed in greater detail. The focus is on four women who I believe to be the most important female characters in the novel and powerful representatives of the author's image of women and Victorian gender construction.
Victorian gender roles and Dickens’s image of women as represented in the female characters in "Great Expectations" by Anja Dinter Pdf
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Great Expectations and Hard Times by Charles Dickens, language: English, abstract: Introduction The following work is an analysis of the female characters in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations especially with regard to Victorian gender constructions and Dickens’s image of women. Dickens’s biography and the depiction of very diverse female characters in his novels stimulated the idea of a closer analysis. First of all, a short summary of Great Expectations is provided. Then, the Victorian construction of gender will be discussed. As will be shown, a very strict ideology regarding gender roles existed during the Victorian age. Obviously, Dickens must have been influenced by the ideas of his contemporaries which should then be presented in the novel. Another focus will be on how his relationships to women influenced his image of women and also, consequently, the depiction of his female characters in Great Expectations. Finally the female characters, with reference to Victorian gender roles and Dickens’s image of women, will be analyzed in greater detail. The focus is on four women who I believe to be the most important female characters in the novel and powerful representatives of the author’s image of women and Victorian gender construction.
What is the problem of sexual love? Neither inclusive of all aspects of sexuality nor fully synonomous with the idealized mythos of romantic love, sexual love as desire is marked by the highly charged intersection of sexuality and romantic love; it is a space where gender is imagined and enacted. In A Craving Vacancy, Susan Ostrov Weisser examines sexuality in the context of changing ideas of romantic love and feminity in Victorian Britain. Focusing her analysis on the works of Samuel Richardson, George Eliot, and Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Weisser reveals the complex relationship between conceptions of romantic passion and ideologies of sexuality. She illuminates the Victorian period as a time when these conceptions were shifting according to changing ideas of gender. With close attention to textual details, she introduces the concept of Moral Femininity, placing it in useful opposition to the competing Victorian ideal of the Lady. By forging a direct link between sexuality and romantic love ideology in the 19th century, and by highlighting the way in which the literary preoccupation with these subjects arises from anxieties about the construction of gender, A Craving Vacancy breaks important new ground.
Love in the Time of Victoria by Françoise Barret-Ducrocq Pdf
There has been a great deal written on the secret longings and sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian era's upper crust, but almost nothing has chronicled the erotic desires and sexuality of London's working class. Now, in this painstakingly researched book, their touching and emotional stories can be told.
Precocious Children and Childish Adults by Claudia Nelson Pdf
Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms “child-woman,” “child-man,” and “old-fashioned child” appear often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post-Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser-known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, Precocious Children and Childish Adults illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children’s literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.
Author : Andrew H. Miller Publisher : Indiana University Press Page : 258 pages File Size : 53,5 Mb Release : 1996-12-22 Category : History ISBN : 0253330661
Sexualities in Victorian Britain by Andrew H. Miller Pdf
Presents an introduction to Victorian sexualities. This book contains essays that will energize reflection on the complexity of human sexuality and on the many different arrays of meaning that it has generated.
