Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Victorian Literature, Culture, and Power, Pro-Industrialization vs Anti…

- - - - Through Jane, we learn that Charlotte Brontë is a racist anti-imperialist. Essentially, Brontë believes British men learn their oppression of women from the groups colonized by the British. Imperialism is a stain on British society because it makes British men learn how to be oppressive towards women (Indian Ink). Imperialism let men exercise their strength. They perfect it abroad and then implement it at home.
        
        "In this sense Empire was arguably the most important social fact of the Victorian era, with "social fact" referring to an aspect of daily life whose origins are collective and institutional, but that exerts shaping power over the experiences of individual people" (Hensley 2). The Empire as such a normal part of daily life that people couldn't see the influence it had.
- - - - Men have ~needs~: "The time has arrived when the eternal desire for Love which nature has implanted in the breast of men requires to be satisfied without such an increase in population as has characterized the past" (Kains-Jackson 155).
      - Paiderastia: a homoerotic relationship between an older man and a younger man in which the older mentors/teaches/encourages the intellect of the younger in exchange for sex.
        
        Hellenism: screw middle-class family values, let's go back to the way of the ancient greeks (freedom, appreciation of beauty, intellectual pursuits) (Arnold).
        
        Oscar Wilde: YES HELLENSIM!!!
  - - - According to Michel Foucault, during the Victorian era, the language around same-sex behavior moved away from words like "sodomite" to "homosexual" with Foucault describing sodomy as a "temporary aberration" and homosexuality as a "species".
        
        During the trials of Oscar Wilde, it wasn't just Wilde that was on trial; homosexuality and homoerotic desire were on trial. It was understanding homosexuality in relation to the typical bourgeois male that was on trial (Cohen). The Picture of Dorian Gray represented this tension in Victorian England at the time.
- - - - In Jane Eyre, Jane (the governess from a poor background) keeps herself and Mr. Rochester (an aristocrat) morally pure by refusing to marry him after she finds out he has been keeping his wife Bertha in the attic of Thornfield Hall for years and by also refusing to be his mistress.
    - - Margaret's aristocratic upbringing informs her relationships with Thornton, the capitalistic, mill owner in Milton. Margaret believes in the "bonds of reciprocal obligation" while Thornton, in true capitalist fashion, believes in individualism and the constant pursuit of economic gain. James Eli Adams describes this phenomenon well. "In the pre-industrial economic order, social hierarchy was presumed to be harmonized by reciprocal bonds of moral obligation. Under capitalism, those bonds seemed increasingly subsumed by contractual arrangements and economic transactions, within which every individual competed to maximize his own self-interest" (48).
      - Ideology: "is not in the first place a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men live their roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images, which tie them to their social functions and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole" (Eagleton). Margaret and Thornton's relationship and lives can be seen through an ideological lens. North and South demonstrates the way their individual lives are affected by larger societal class structures.