Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Victorian gender roles'

This essay argues that Little Women does not promote breaking stereotypical gender norms and nineteenth century gender roles, contrary to what several critics say. This paper will be using feminist criticism and analyzing two of the novel’s main characters, Meg and Jo, and examining their behavior towards stereotypical gender norms and rules. This essay concludes that while Jo challenges certain gender norms and roles, such as having “manly” emotions (anger) and taking on male-dominated jobs (author), within the narration she is punished for these and forced to become a conventional woman of the nineteenth century in order to live a happy life. On the other hand, Meg follows the rules of societal gender expectations and is rewarded for her behavior. By examining these two characters, this essay establishes that Little Women, because it is a didactic novel, delivers the moral that women can only be truly happy if they fit into stereotypical gender norms and roles.

This essay analyses and compares gender construction in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The focus is on the construction of the female and male gender of selected female and male characters. Using the knowledge that gender is highly dependent on the social and cultural environment and that family relations often impact gender, the aim of the essay is to examine if the two authors use similar methods to construct gender. Additionally, the aim is to analyse if the novels are critical towards Victorian gender norms. As feminist criticism specializes in gender analysis, this literary critical approach is used. Furthermore, additional information about the historical context was used to analyse and compare the novels. The comparison demonstrates that Emily Brontë and Charlotte Brontë mainly use the same methods to construct the female and male gender in their novels. It also illustrates that both novels are critical towards Victorian gender norms.

This essay argues that Elizabeth Gaskell challenges the limiting gender roles of the Victorian era through giving her heroine, Margaret Hale in North and South, both the traditionally female qualities of virtue and selflessness and the traditionally masculine qualities of independence and action. The essay also argues that Gaskell’s heroine balances between the feminine and the masculine world as to not appear “unwomanly”, but rather subtly influencing the readers and calls for changing gender norms. Concrete examples of the heroine’s gender transgressions are put forward, but also her compliance to the traditional gender roles summed up in three roles or themes: the angel in the house, the female visitor and the refined lady. This essay also provides a didactic approach on working with North and South and the topic of Victorian gender norms in the upper secondary school. The relevance of and reasons for reading literature in school are also presented. The didactic chapter offers a concrete lesson plan on how to work with the theme of Victorian gender norms, which may develop students’ emphatic skills and also make them aware of ties between themselves and people that lived a long time ago.

Englishwomen who traveled to the "Orient" in the Victorian era constructed an identity that was British in its bravery, middle-class in its refinement, feminine in appearance and speech and Christian in its intolerance of Oriental heathenism. Studying Victorian female travel narratives that described journeys to the Orient provides an excellent opportunity to reexamine the diaphanous nature of the boundaries of the public/private sphere dichotomy; the relationship between travel, overt nationalism, and gendered constructions of identity, the link between geographic location and self-definition; the power dynamics inherent in information gathering, organization and production. Englishwomen projected gendered identities in their writings, which were both "imperially" masculine and "domestically" feminine, depending on the needs of a particular location and space. The travel narrative itself was also a gendered product that served as both a medium of cultural expression for Victorian women and a tool of restraint, encouraging them to conform to societal expectations to gain limited authority and recognition for their travels even while they embraced the freedom of movement. The terms "imperial masculinity" and "domestic femininity" are employed throughout this analysis to categorize the transient manipulation of character traits associated in Victorian society with middle- and upper-class men abroad in the empire and middle- and upper-class women who remained within their homes in Great Britain. Also stressed is the decision by female travelers to co-assert feminine identities that legitimated their imperial freedom by alluding to equally important components of their transported domestic constructions of self. Contrary to scholarship solely viewing Victorian projections of the feminine ideal as negative, the powers underlining social determinants of gender norms will be treated as "both regulatory and productive." Englishwomen chose to amplify elements of their domestic femininity or newly obtained imperial masculinity depending on the situation encountered during their travels or the message they wished to communicate in their travel narratives. The travel narrative is a valuable tool not only for deconstructing transient constructions of gender, but also for discovering the foundations of race and class ideologies in which the Oriental and the Orient are subjugated to enhance Englishwomen's Orientalist imperial status and position. This thesis is modeled on the structure of the traveling experience. In reviewing first the intellectual expectations preceding travel, the events of travel and finally the emotional reaction to the first two, a metaphoric attempt to better understand meaning through mimicry has been made. Over twenty travel narratives published by Englishwomen of varying social backgrounds, economic classes and motivations for travel between 1830 and World War I were analyzed in conjunction with letters, diaries, fictional works, newspaper articles, advice manuals, travel guides and religious texts in an effort to study the uniquely gendered nature of the Preface in female travel narratives; definitions of "travelers" and "traveling;" the manner in which "new" forms of metaphysical identification formulated what Victorian lady travelers "pre-knew" the "East" to be; the gendered nature in which female travelers portrayed their encounters with the "realities" of travel; and the concept of "disconnect," or the "distance" between a female traveler's expectation and the portrayed "reality" of what she experienced in the Orient.
M.A.
Department of History
Arts and Humanities
History

Building on previous feminist literary criticism of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854-55), this essay analyses the portrayal of wives and mothers in the novel from an intersectional feminist perspective. It examines how the narrative shows that gender and economic status or class intersect to create varied representations of Victorian women's marginalisation. The analysis argues that the novel, on the one hand, depicts wives and mothers as united by their status at "the other" in patriarchal Victorian society. On the other hand, the novel juxtaposes economically privileged and poor wives and mothers to show that they are not equally isolated, powerless, or willing to comply with Victorian gender roles. The result is a complex and empathetic portrayal of wives and mothers' privilege and poverty under patriarchy, which challenges the Victorian ideal of wives and mothers as "angels in the house".

This paper analyses the characters Mina and Lucy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, showing how they are juxtaposed in terms of femininity. By using feminist criticism and the concepts of the angel in the house, monstrous femininity, and the virgin/whore dichotomy, this paper explores how Mina represents the self-sacrificing, supportive, and wifely angel in the house, while Lucy represents the sexual, disobedient, and powerful monstrous female. This is analyzed through Mina’s interactions with the men, as well as through her view on femininity, and through Lucy’s interactions with the men and with Mina. This paper then explores how these differing gender roles lead to different outcomes for the two women. Mina is excluded but is able to be purified from vampirism while still alive. In contrast, Lucy, being a threat to British Victorian femininity, has to be killed and mutilated before her memory can be purified. How well the women fit into the male community’s view of the Victorian female ideal, with Mina fitting it the best, is found to be the reason for why Lucy suffers a worse fate than Mina.

Thesis (M.A,)--George Mason University, 2008.
Vita: p. 101. Thesis director: Amelia Rutledge. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Aug. 27, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-100). Also issued in print.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa
From this richness of descriptions in the novel, this analysis ventures to, first, report how the hegemonic Victorian discourse on marriage is presented in the novel and, second, describe the characters’ relation to this discourse, in other words, how they interact and conflict with it. The last stage in the analysis, from a gender-role perspective, will be an attempt to glimpse Woolf’s modern conception on the nature of human relation through her character’s interaction, and how the discourse on marriage and its gender-role expectations shapes and effects the connection among the characters in the novel.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--Conservatory of Music. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2007.
"A dissertation in performance." Typescript. Advisor: William A. Everett. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed Feb. 08, 2008 Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-136). Online version of the print edition.

This thesis examines the popular Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louisa Ramé) in the context of women’s authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first of its two intentions is to recuperate some of the historical and literary significance of this critically neglected writer by considering on her own terms her desire to be recognised as a serious artist. More broadly, it begins to fill in the gap that exists in scholarship on women’s authorship as it pertains to those writers who come between George Eliot, the last of the ‘great’ mid-Victorian women novelists, and the New Woman novelists of the fin de siècle. Four of Ouida’s novels have been chosen for critical analysis, each of which was written at an important moment in the history of the nineteenth century novel. Her early novel Strathmore (1865) is shaped by the rebelliousness towards gendered models of authorship characteristic of women writers who began their careers in the 1860s. In this novel, Ouida undermines the binary oppositions of gender that were in large part constructed and maintained by the domestic novel and which controlled the representation and reception of women’s authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tricotrin (1869) was written at the end of the sensation fiction craze, a phenomenon that resulted in the incipient splitting of the high art novel from the popular novel. In Tricotrin, Ouida responds to the gendered ideology of occupational professionalism that was being deployed to distinguish between masculinised serious and feminised popular fiction, an ideology that rendered her particularly vulnerable as a popular writer. Ouida’s autobiographical novel Friendship (1878) is also written at an critical period in the novel’s ascent to high art. Registering the way in which the morally weighted realism favoured by novelists and critics at the mid-century was being overtaken by a desire for more formally oriented, serious fiction, Ouida takes the opportunity both to defend her novels against the realist critique of her fiction and to attempt to shape the new literary aesthetic in a way that positively incorporated femininity and the feminine. Finally, Princess Napraxine (1884) is arguably the first British novel seriously to incorporate the imagery and theories of aestheticism. In this novel, Ouida resists male aesthetes’ exploitative attempts to obscure their relationship to the developing consumer culture while confidently finding a place for the woman artist within British aestheticism and signalling a new acceptance of her own involvement in the marketplace. Together, these novels track Ouida’s self-conscious response to a changing literary marketplace that consistently marginalised women writers at the same time that they enable us to begin to uncover the complexity of female authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century.

"Queer Things" takes the connections between homosexuality and materiality, and those between literary texts and cultural objects, as major repositories of queer history. It scrutinizes the objects that circulate within the works of Oscar Wilde as well as in the output of high fashion designers and the critics and consumers who engaged with them, in order to ask how gay identities and affiliations are formed and expressed through things. Bringing recent critical interest in the subtleties of nineteenth-century "thing culture" into contact with queer theory, I argue that the crowded Victorian object-world was a crucial location not only for the formation of social attitudes about homosexuality, but also for the cultivation of homosexuality's distinctive aesthetics and affective styles. In attending to the queer pleasures activated by material attachments that have otherwise been deployed or disavowed as stereotypes, my project reconsiders some of the most celebrated works of the gay canon, and inserts into it some compelling new ones. Furthermore, in illuminating the Victorian origins of modern gay style and the incipiently modern gayness of Victorian style, it adds nuance and new substance to our understanding of the elaborate material landscapes inhabited by Victorian bodies and represented in Victorian texts. The first part of the dissertation uses extensive archival research to excavate a history of queer men's involvement in women's fashion in the mid-nineteenth century. In the first chapter, juxtaposing accounts of the famous Boulton and Park drag scandal with a simultaneously emerging genre of overwrought fashion criticism, I argue that an (over)investment in fashionable objects and a detailed knowledge of fashionability became important sites for the develop of gay-effeminate social styles. The second chapter positions Charles Worth, founder of the modern system of haute couture, as the progenitor of a queer species of cross-gendered, non-heterosexual relations between male high-fashion designers and female clients. Though they are not based on same-sex eroticism, I argue that these relations deserve consideration as queer. The second part of the dissertation considers the representational functions of objects in several works across the career of Oscar Wilde. The third chapter presents a reading of De Profundis, Wilde's infamously hard-to-read prison letter, which focuses on how the text interweaves anxieties about the transmission of material objects into its complex affective structure. The fourth chapter considers the effects of the risky but irresistible attractions of that letter's addressee, the widely-loathed Bosie Douglas, on Wilde's aesthetic practice. Juxtaposing Bosie's charms with those of Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest, and then moving to the little-read letters which document the final post-prison years of Wilde's life, I suggest that the frustrating states of intemperance and indolence become sites, for Wilde, of erotic excitement, artistic innovation, and political resistance.

The commencement of the Victorian period in the 1830s coincided with the abolition of chattel slavery in the British colonies. Consequently, modern readers have tended to focus on how the Victorians identified themselves with slavery’s abolition and either denied their past involvement with slavery or imagined that slave past as insurmountably distant. “Willing Slaves: The Victorian Novel and the Afterlife of British Slavery” argues, however, that colonial slavery survived in the Victorian novel in a paradoxical form that I term “willing slavery.” A wide range of Victorian novelists grappled with memories of Britain’s slave past in ways difficult for modern readers to recognize because their fiction represented slaves as figures whose bondage might seem, counterintuitively, self-willed. Nineteenth-century Britons produced fictions of “willing slavery” to work through the contradictions inherent to nineteenth-century individualism. As a fictional subject imagined to take pleasure in her own subjection, the willing slave represented a paradoxical figure whose most willful act was to give up her individuality in order to maintain cherished emotional bonds. This figure should strike modern readers as a contradiction in terms, at odds with the violence and dehumanization of chattel slavery. But for many significant Victorian writers, willing slavery was a way of bypassing contradictions still familiar to us today: the Victorian individualist was meant to be atomistic yet sympathetic, possessive yet sheltered from market exchange, a monad most at home within the collective unit of the family. By contrast, writers as diverse as John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot located willing slavery in a pre-Victorian history where social life revolved, they imagined, around obligation and familial attachments rather than individual freedom. Rooted in this fictive past, the willing slave had no individual autonomy or self-possession, but was defined instead by a different set of contradictions: a radical dependency and helpless emotional bondage that could nonetheless appear willing and willful, turning this fictional enslavement itself into an expression of the will. For Dickens, willing slavery provided an image of social interdependency that might heal the ills of the modern world by offering what one All the Year Round author described as “a better slavery than loveless freedom.” For novelists such as Brontë and Eliot who were no less critical of Victorian individualism, however, fantasies of willing slavery became the very fiction that their work aimed to dissolve. Chapter One argues that Frances Trollope’s groundbreaking antislavery fiction mirrors West Indian slave narratives in describing the slave plantation as coldly mechanical, and then extends this vision to portray early industrial England as an emotionally deprived social world similarly in need of repair. In the second chapter, I argue that Dickens responds to that emotional deprivation, and the replacement of traditional family bonds with what he describes as the “social contract of matrimony,” by producing a nostalgic account of willing slavery’s dependencies that draws on discourses of slavery found in British case law, where attorneys could exhort the slaveholder to “attach [slaves] to himself by the ties of affection.” The last two chapters argue that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda ironize this earlier nostalgia through female characters who grapple with the archetype of the willing slave. As their characters adopt and then discard the theatrical pose of willing subjection embodied by melodramatic heroines such as Dion Boucicault’s “octoroon” Zoe, Brontë and Eliot draw attention to the contradictions inherent to willing slavery, reframing it as a fantasy enjoyed exclusively by white Britons intent on shoring up the familial intimacies that helped preserve their social and economic dominance. These ironic reframings reveal a final paradox: though willing slavery helped create an analogy between African chattel slaves and British family members in fiction, this trope ultimately highlights the differences between the chattel slavery of Africans abroad, where the disruption of kinship bonds was a crucial method for exploitation and domination, and the imagined household subjection of English characters, rooted in the putatively binding qualities of family feeling.