Jane Eyre context

Divorce and Matrimonial causes act

• 1857

• made adultery of the wife sufficient grounds for divorce, but not of the husband

• double standard of chastity for women & licence for men

Domestic violence in the Victorian period

• no sympathy for women who were victims of domestic violence - they were even blamed for ‘making’ their husbands to act in such a way

The Angel in the House

• 1854

• Coventry Patmore

• popular in 19th and 20th centuries

• woman who embodied Victorian feminine ideal - wife and mother, selflessly devoted to children, submissive to husband

Dowries

• money/property given to husband upon marriage to wife

• incentivise marriage

• shows commodification of women & transactional process of marriage

Married Women’s Property Act

• 1870

• gave women more rights to their own earnings

• previously husbands gained all their wife’s property upon marriage

Mrs Beeton’s book of Household Management

• 1861

• role of women in Victorian times - ‘she looketh well to the ways of her household; and eateth not the bread of idleness’

Coverture

• abolished late 1800s

• wives didn’t have a legal existence outside of their husband

• considered the legal property of their husband

• children owned by husband

• institutionalised r*pe within marriage

Age of Consent

• raised in 1875 from 12 to 13

• then to 16 in 1885 only reluctantly

Christina Rosseti’s Goblin Market

• 1862

• interpreted to be about dangers of sexuality and lust for innocent & inexperienced young girls

Positive general changes?

• starting to be able to say no to sex with husband at end of 19th cent

• ‘The Woman Question’ - movement - challenged traditional patriarchal structures - issues like suffrage, education, property rights - particularly for middle-class women

Dr William Acton

• 1865

• ‘the majority of women are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’

education for girls?

• for working class girls - mostly Sunday schools - rudimentary reading skills, religious instruction

• no sex education

• middle & upper class - focussed on obtaining ‘accomplishments’ - speaking French, playing piano, drawing, sewing etc

Governesses

• Bonnie G Smith - 'she was neither a servant nor a member of family'

• 1844 publication ‘Hints on the Modern Governess System’ - detailed how governesses accounted for largest proportion of women in asylums

• Governesses’ Benevolent Institution 1841

Chartism

• mass movement for widened electorate driven by the working classes, followed failure of the 1832 Reform Act to extend the vote beyond those who owned property

• After the Chartists’ petition was presented to the house of Commons and rejected, unrests followed but were crushed by authorities

• leading Chartists eg Fergus O’Connor - connections with radical groups that approved violence as a way of achieving their goal - mass meeting on Kennington Common in 1848

Gothic trope, Orphan

• Gothic & Byronic hero - mysterious past, morally ambiguous

• orphans traditionally represented a bad omen or the illegitimacy and shattering of the ideal Victorian family structure. had no rights - no clear position in society

Moral instruction books for young girls - give examples + date

• ‘The Naughty Girl Reclaimed’ 1811

• aimed at young girls teaching supposed importance of delicacy and submission

• Mary Elliott’s ‘Flowers of Instruction’ which sought to mend children of their ‘sinful’ behaviour

Victorian psuedoscientific concept of essentialism

Society enforced separate spheres based on the idea that men and women had intrinsic psychological and physical essences; men were naturally rational and public, while women were domestic and nurturing.

How does Bronte use form in a subversive way

• uses the traditionally masculine form of an autobiography

• slash bildungsroman

Southey and Bronte?

• Southey told Bronte ‘literature should not be the business of a woman’s life’

Psuedoscientific racist theories

• Bryan Edward’s widely read ‘History of the British Colonies in the West Indies’ (1793)

• argued that white Creole people were biologically ‘different’

• often stereotyped in England as ‘lazy’ and less disciplined than white Europeans

• Colonial otherness, as represented through Wide Sargasso Sea. The description of her mother as a 'drunkard' and a 'mad woman' - stereotypes of Creole women

  • Depiction in Wide Sargasso Sea

John Stuart Mill & Harriet Taylor Mill

• The Subjection of Women (1869)

• very progressive

• Believed that "the legal subordination of one sex to the other…is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement"

• Compares the subjugation of women with the enslavement of Africans - in the sense that the empowered class (men, or slaveowners) never see that the power disparity is unnatural: "slaveowners of the Southern United States maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men cling to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate their personal interests…the feebler and more unwarlike races should submit to the braver and manlier…unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural"