Letteratura inglese - Corso monografico: Women

Women writers

Women writing and the role of women in modern and post-modern literature

In the Victorian Age, the woman question started to influence society, politics, and literature. How authors are able to re-write stories which seem to be already heard and read. It’s important the re-use of literary material.

Victorian Age (1837-1901)

The Victorian Age is called so because of Queen Victoria. She herself encouraged her own identification with the qualities we associate with the Victorian Age:

• Earnestness
• Moral responsibility
• Domestic property

During this age, London, and no longer Paris, became the centre of politics, society, and culture. England became the greatest part of the world. It was the first country to be industrialised. If England becomes the word “workshop”, London becomes the word “banks”. This is because all the money was in London. By the end of the century, England colonies were one out of four of the world’s territories of the earth.

The British were very proud of the revolution but they also understood that something had changed: the passage from nature to cities, from farms to factories. There were many important and famous figures: Darwin, Marx, Disraeli, Wilde.

A double aspect characterised this time:

• The incredible power which Britain is gaining
• The incredible rise of population

There was less child mortality, and the bourgeoisie took the power. What was felt was the need for an extension of the right to vote. In 1832 and in 1867, two Reform Bills passed. They brought changes to the electoral system that were necessary because the population grew faster and faster (in 1831, the population passed from 24.1 million to 27.3 million in 1851).

In 1851, 50% of the population lived in the City, which was overpopulated (problems with houses, food, water…). This caused a complete transformation of the structure of feelings—how the City is felt. There were two kinds of literary works: those who speak of nature and those who speak of the city life.

The Victorian Age can be divided into three periods:

• Early Victorian Age (1837-1838)
• Mid Victorian Age (1838-1870)
• Late Victorian Age (1870-1890)

In the early Victorian Age, two main things happened: the first railway opened and the Reform Bill, which changed the class structure, extended the right to vote to all males owning property of at least ten pounds. Even middle classes could vote. It’s the beginning of a new era.

In 1837, there was an economic break. It was a difficult period, called “the hungry 40s”. The working class needed and asked to be heard. They claimed:

• Male universal suffrage
• Secrecy of vote
• A salary for the deputies
• An annual election of the parliament

Not all these requests were accepted, but some measures were proposed. The mid Victorian period was a time of improvement: agriculture and industry started to flourish; factories act to restrict child labour and hours of employment; the general conditions of the working class gradually improved.

In 1851, there was the Great Exhibition: an event where everyone presented new discoveries. Strong technological development. Strong religious debate.

One of the first topics to be discussed was utilitarianism (Bentham and Mill)—“human beings seek to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain”, that means that human beings want to have the best possible pleasures with the least pain, effort. This creates strong ethical and religious problems because factories give pleasures to many, but these cost human lives, children labour and women exploited. Utilitarianism was the base for political and social reforms.

Scientific debate: in 1859, the “Origin of Species” was published by Darwin. It had a strong effect on religion in general. His theories were interpreted in many ways. It was a much-debated book. For some people, this idea of evolution was a synonym of progress. For others, natural selection was in conflict with values attached to the nature of human beings (because those who are not able to fit in the new kind of life would be left behind, for example, poor people).

All these theories brought a change of attitude towards the Bible: it was read as a text of history and not seen as something dogmatic and true. It was a sort of story told. It was analyzed in a scientific way, causing many debates. Darwin's ideas expressed the Victorian establishment.

In 1857, the late Victorian period began, thanks to the second Reform Bill, which extended the right to vote to some working classes. This reform, and the development of trade unions, made the working classes a political power for the first time in history (as seen in “das Kapital” by Marx).

Women tried to get new rights. 1870 and 1882 were two important years because two Property Acts were passed: the first act allowed married women to keep their ownings (money and children) for themselves (before, it was all men possession). Women started working, having rights, and contesting the idea of the woman as “the angel of the house”.

In this period, women were considered in many aspects inferior to men: they didn’t have access to university, to many jobs and didn’t have the right to vote. But there was a field in which they could express themselves: the novel. They could write to tell their stories, hopes, and dreams. It was very important for women to express their ideas.

In the Victorian Age, novels tried to represent the largest and most comprehensive social world: they represented normal people of everyday life. Novels presented themselves as realistic, representing the world we live in. In the 17th century, novels tried to convince that they were saying the truth (even if the story was fantastic) and this is different from being realistic. In the 18th century, women talked about their realities. Every writer represents reality from his own point of view.

Most of the novels focus on the hero/heroine who is trying to find his place in society. Idea of struggle between social conditions and the aspirations of the hero. Women struggle for self-realisation. Women became the main authors in the 18th time. They wrote both with male (George Elliott) and female (Bronte sisters) names. They told stories in which women were the main characters, and this happened for the first time.

Characteristics of Victorian Age novels

• Non-conformist attitude: the hero/heroine creates controversies, problems, debates to promote his values. He/she fights to achieve his/her goals.
• Writers look with suspicion to these new types of novels because they have a strong relation with the public—they speak with the public, they suggest to the public how to read them, and they invite the public to sit and read. In this way, the writer has a pedagogical purpose: he can teach something to the reader.
• Sir Learly Stephen was one of the most important critics. He was aware of this aspect of literature, which has to teach masses something moral.
• An omniscient narrator: he allows the writer to say that what he is writing is true and can be used as an example for moral improvement. The narrator guides the characters and gives a moral judgment of their actions. He gives his own ideas of politics, history and moral. He is almost a god and refers to the reader as a friend. He asks the reader to be more friendly.
• Novels were published in three volumes—the so-called “triple-decker”. When the public has finished the first volume, the author could see the reaction of the public and decide how to continue the story.
• Novels started to be issued inside reviews and periodicals. It is an important phenomenon which gave people the possibility to write to the newspaper and to the periodical to suggest how the story could go on. Everyone can interact with the author, and he can listen to the public and write what people expect to read. This brought about complicated plots. Novels were multi-plots.
• At the end of each chapter, you can’t wait to read the following one. There’s suspense that brought people to buy the following volume of the novel.

By 1890, a consumer literature developed (para-literature). It is characterized by religion, reform, and romance. “Romance” means that we not only have normal events but also something wonderful, some uncommon, strange accidents. It can’t be considered as a genre but only an aspect of the novel. These novels have to be read by the greatest number of people. They have to attract the attention of people. People want to escape from reality but at the same time they also want to read about religion and reform. This led to a great amount of literature of no quality. But some writers used these aspects to write good literature, as the Bronte sisters (considered as the best female examples of Victorian Age. There’s a heroine struggling for her ideals; domestic realities; autobiography; sensorial and gothic elements).

The condition of women

Upper- and middle-class women had nothing important and interesting to do: they had servants, nurses, they just stayed with their children to play, and for them, it was normal to be bored. To be bored was a privilege for these upper and middle class women. For them, idleness was a treasure and it was a status symbol. On the other hand, the industrial revolution put pressure on poor women. Low-class women instead worked from 10 to 16 hours a day in factories and mines; they had no servants at home and they had to look after their children.

In the Victorian period, a series of factory acts, laws, regulated the conditions of labor for women: the working hours for women were reduced from 16 to 12 hours a day; women were also banned from mines work. Nevertheless, they kept on working in bad conditions and many of them lost their jobs and became prostitutes. Prostitution became professionalized, it became a kind of institution.

At that time, when 2,600,000 people lived in London, there were 8,600 prostitutes known to the police (1867), but according to a journalist called Mayhew, the real number might have been around 80,000 (more than 3% of the total population of London were prostitutes, that means that 6% of women in London were prostitutes).

Women could be bought for one or two pennies, or for a piece of stale bread. They were not beautiful, they were desperate and had all with them. The most fortunate prostitutes were those who found someone who paid for them a room. Most prostitutes lived in streets and many of them had escaped from violent husbands or fathers.

In the Victorian Age, this situation couldn’t be accepted, it was considered aberrant for women, but men considered prostitution as a “necessity evil”: men could learn how to go with women only with prostitutes. Evangelicals opposed the existence of these sex workers because they said that these women had no choice and they were not willing to sell their bodies. They have been enslaved. This was the first attempt to regulate prostitution. One of the other attempts emphasized the ideas of the harm that prostitutes did to the society: the problem of contagious venereal diseases, particularly to men. Many contagious diseases acts passed in 1864, 1866, 1869. They should help prostitution; they allowed examination of women in order to see if they were ill. “Examination” means abuse, and so the conditions of prostitutes grew worse with these acts.

The Parliament passed in 1855 the “Criminal Law Amendment Act”: a law that forbade brothels, pimping, and homosexuality. These three aspects were very strong in Victorian life. It showed the hypocrisy of the Victorian morality (this idea is very clear in The French Lieutenant’s Woman).

Prostitution was considered the solution only for low classes. Upper and middle class women couldn’t become prostitutes. Problem of the redundant middle-class women who remained unmarried, because there was no balance between men and women (1851: 8,155,000 women vs. 7,600,000 men). One of the solutions to this problem was that some women emigrate and many others became governesses (but their salaries were low and their status was ambiguous: they were in the middle between servants and members of the family).

During the Victorian age, the governess novel became very popular. In these novels, the authors explored the women’s role in society: how women felt in the role of governess, how they interact with men and society, there’s not only the description of their lives but also a general description of the society around them, (see Jane Eyre: at the end she gains a higher level). These novels also dealt with women’s very nature. For the Victorians, women have a special nature which was fit for domestic roles. Women were perfect in the house.

This idea is stressed also in “Angel in the House” by Coventry Patmore: idea of the woman purity and selflessness (=she does everything for the others). Women lived in the house and they have to create there a place of peace. Men, who came back home from work, could find refuge in the wife and in the home in which everything was perfect.

This idea obliged women at home and put pressure on women who must be “enduringly good and instinctively wise” (typical of Victorian age and of the poem too) = women didn’t have to think for themselves and for their self-development, but they had to think of self-renunciation. They only have to give. This domestic ideology, which considered the woman only as the angel of the house, lasted many centuries. It was a term used even by feminists at the beginning in order to justify the importance of women, because without them men couldn’t have the power they have and wouldn’t be so important.

The basic problem of the woman question also was how women regarded themselves and how they were regarded as members of the society (The French Lieutenant’s Woman is all about the role of women in the society). In the Victorian Age, there was the idea that the women’s role was divinely willed = Queen Victoria herself said that it was God who wanted women to be devoted to the husband and to the children, to cultivate woman’s intelligence meant to go against God’s will.

Women were mostly valued for their tenderness, understanding, innocence, purity, domestic affection, submissiveness, and not because they were intelligent and creative. For this reason, they became perfect objects that had to be worshipped like an idol and couldn’t even be touched, they were so perfect that you couldn’t get near them and they could not bathe naked.

The Angel in the House – Coventry Patmore

This poem best shows the situation of a woman put on a pedestrian and worshipped as idols of the house. It is a very long poem. It is about courtship and marriage. It was originally published between 1854 and 1862 (two editions. In 1854 the first volume, the most common part, divided into two books, and the second in 1862, commonly called “the victories of love”, and it is divided into two volumes). It was a bestseller first in the USA and then in Great Britain.

The poem is dedicated to the artist’s first wife and it celebrated their XV anniversary of marriage. The first part of the poem focuses on the story of Felix and Honoria told by Felix, a very young poet very similar to Patmore himself. This part is structured as a Kunstlerroman/Bildungsroman in verses: it is a long narrative poem that shows the moral and psychological developments of Felix. The poem follows the typical story with Felix's courtship with Honoria and ends with the union of the two through marriage.

The second part is composed of many letters between various different characters. There are also two relationships: Felix and Honoria, Jane and Friedrich. This poem was a centrepiece for the 20th-century feminist criticism and it perfectly describes the Victorian woman. Although some positive criticism, it was criticized because of the theme, the marriage: woman was idealised as a domestic goddess. It also represents Victorian England’s limitation of women to the domestic sphere. It was because of poems such as this that the idea of the domestic goddess was so widespread in that period.

Usually, love poems were about seduction and marriage was only at the end of the story. Here there is marriage (Patmore explores a new territory); it is the center of the poem and Patmore examines the way in which marriage transforms society and identity. Throughout the poem, there’s a progression of Felix's attitudes toward women. He changes attitude.

Norton p. 1599

There are quatrains with alternated rhyme. The poet is like the singer who plays the lyre. The images are quite rhetorical, banal. In the second part, there’s a hymn to the woman (line 16). Classical poetry images. Line 37: woman’s task. She is considered as a maid (=domestic idea) and wife. For the poet, his wife is a “laureate”. He is worshipping his woman. She is an idol. “The Angel in the house” is not considered a good poem because of the banal ideas. It is remembered only because of the argument it arouses.

Virginia Woolf’s lecture: Profession for women

Strong influence of the idea of the Angel in the house in Victorian mind. She is speaking to some young women who have just finished their apprenticeship and are going to start their first profession (they’re not married yet). She tells them about her personal experience as a worker. She was a “journalist”; she tells them about her first article and her first experiences. She starts the essay narrating her personal experience (typical of Virginia Woolf, who sometimes invented episodes as an excuse to speak to the public). She tells about the first article she was paid for.

She says that it could be easier than to write articles and get money. But is it really easy. Paragraph “What would be easier…”. She says the “phantom of the Angel in the house” came between her and her paper and tormented her.