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Sex as a Tool for Power Concentration in the Victorian Era - A Timeline of…

- - - - Sex = Power
        Heteronormativity = Continued power and predictability of stable and therefore “civil” society able to participate in the Capitalist system
        Relationship with sex = specific to a given societies sex/gender system that reveals its people’s anxieties and fears = sex is a symptom of culture
        Relationship between sex and heteronormativity = trapped men and women into specific boxes of societal function on the basis of their gender
      - “The transmission of white, male power through control of colonized women; the emergence of a new global order of cultural knowledge, and imperial command of commodity capital” Anne McClintock argues govern the Western political ideology.
        
        Susan Meyer - From “Indian Ink”: Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre
        “My own proposition is that the inter connectedness between the ideology of male domination and the ideology of racial domination, manifested in the comparisons between white women and people manifested in the comparisons between white women and people of nonwhite races in many texts in this period of European imperialist expansion, in fact resulted in a very different relation between imperialist ideology and the developing resistance of the nineteenth-century British women to the gender hierarchy” (Meyer, 489).
        
        H. Rider Haggard - She: A History of Adventure
        Depiction of non-Europeans by a white man were racist and fetishized people of color. Illustrated how the white male gaze viewed people through the ideology of the Victorian Era and the white person’s relationship with others, as well as a man’s power dominance over women.
        
        Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
        In Bronte’s work, we see a very specific ideology arrising between “progressive parties” of the time: racist anti-imperialism. That imperialism was wrong because it made the British people “worse” to engage with non-White races. This demonstrates a very important power relationship coming into the imperial world of white supremacy, fabricated for the continued concentration of power.
- - - - Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South
        Gaskell depicted a woman’s strength in Victorian society to be able to do endure any hardship. Women found their strength in silence, in compassion, and in the strength of her community.
- - - - Class Struggle
        
        Class divisions
        
        Those who owned production began to accumulate wealth from the working class.
        
        Marxism
        
        James Eli Adams - ‘The boundaries of social intercourse’: Class in the Victorian Novel
        “The distinction between ‘working class’ and ‘poor’ is especially unstable: given low wages and erratic employment, nearly all members of the working class lived in poverty” (Adams, 50). Coupled with a highly individualized perception of your relationship to the power structures that govern your life, the working class began to out-compete against one another for the benefit of those who owned their labor and dictated whether or not they were allowed to participate in their economic system. This existence for the working class was unstable, dangerous oftentimes, and introduced class based social identities that would become “the performing self.”
        
        Karl Marx - Communist Manifesto
        Marx found capitalism a system that overworks and abuses its working class. His primary dissent to it structurally was, however, the separation between human being and what they did. Not only was the working class powerless to the bourgeoise, they were disassociating with their work. They didn’t enjoy doing what they did. They worked to barely survive as their “performing self.”
        
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        Working class oppression
        
        Living conditions for the working class in the Victorian Era were dangerous and led many writers to write about the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the working class as a great mistake of humanity that only the rich stood to gain from.
        
        Thomas Babington Macaulay - From A Review of Southey’s Colloquies
        ”It is, according to him, a system more tyrannical than that of the feudal ages, a system of actual servitude, a system which destroys the bodies and degrades the minds of those who are engaged in it” (Macaulay, 1557). That system, capitalism, he viewed as one made to abuse the worker in every aspect of their life. He critiques the idea of a wealthy society whose people are all poor.
        
        Thomas Carlyle - From Past and Present
        “But the government cannot do, by all its signaling and commanding, what the Society is radically indisposed to do. In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People Like Government. The main substance of this immense Problem of Organizing Labour, and first of all of Managing the Working Classes, will, it is very clear, have to be solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it; by those who themselves work and preside over work” (Carlyle, 6).
        
        The people who have power are those who realize and believe that they do.
- - - - Chapter 5 - Porro Unum Est Necessarium
        ”Sweetness and light evidently have little to do with the bent or side in humanity which we call Hellenic… To say we wrote for sweetness and light then, is only another way of saying that we work for Hellenism. But, oh! Cry many people, sweetness and light are not enough; you must out strength or energy along with them, and make a kind of trinity of strength, sweetness and light, and then, perhaps, you may do some good. That is to say, we are to join Hebraism, strictness of the moral conscience, and manful walking by the best light we have, together with Hellenism, inculcate both, and rehearse: the praises of both” (Arnold, 1402).
        
        Havelock Ellis
        Havelock Ellis viewed sexual proclivities as a medical condition. Anything that did not fit into what Victorian ideology had deemed as “normal,” or “civilized,” meant there was something wrong with you. Once there was something wrong with you: social, political, and economic opportunities closed to you. He refrained from moral judgements, and conducted his study in a way people describe as “sympathetic.” However, we again see that progressive and conservative ideologies that held influential power over British society at the time and government their behavior and treatment of others were both rooted in a flawed ideology that guarantees a result of oppressing one group for the benefit of another —- in capitalism, the benefit is equated to dollars.
        
        Ed Cohen - Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation
        Oscar Wilde faced public humiliation, trials, blackmail, and harsh reactions from the aristocracy that once praised his work for behaving in “sexually deviant ways;” at which point, any compensation whether that be financial or social praise for the numerous works he had written were taken back by “civilized” society.