Sex as a Tool for Power Concentration in the Victorian Era

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

Where does power come from? By who? For who? Who gets to be “human?” Why? Where does the origin of power begin?

Sex in Society.

Restrictions on women

Institutionalized Heterosexuality in the Victorian Era

Carolyn Dever - Everywhere and nowhere: Sexuality in Victorian Fiction

Sex and sexual relationships represented in Victorian literature were “obsessed” with the marriage plot between man and woman. The organizational power of an obligatory heterosexual relationship plays into the economic system and “social order.”

Foucault-TheHistoryofSexuality

Foucault argued that the Victorian Era made sex, sexuality, and sexual relationships a matter of power. “All these social controls, cropping up at the end of the 19th century, which screened the sexuality of couples, parents and children, dangerous and endangered adolescents — undertaking to protect, seperate, and forewarn, signaling perils everywhere, awakening people’s attention, calling for diagnoses, piling up reports, organizing therapies. These sites radiated discourses aimed at sex, intensifying people’s awareness of it as a constant danger, and this in turn created a further incentive to talk about it” (1990: 30-1).

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

Unequal access to financial opportunity meant groups of people had less influence on the system. They suffered some of the worst and most unstable work conditions because the belief that they did not have power inherently, meant they could not get power practically. However, the belief that you could potentially aquire more power by working harder fed into the male relationship with power that incentivized workers to work, and for those who owned their labor to make society reflect whatever ideology benefits them.

“Angel of the household” stereotype that was predicated on whiteness created a power imbalance between men, women, and their ability to participate equally in the governing structure their ideology is socialized under: capitalism.

How does ideological power translate to practical power?

Male Relationship with Power

Nancy Armstrong - Theory of the Novel

It was believed that psychologically, men were better adapted towards politics and women towards domesticity. Political structure based on the ideology of woman’s place restricted to submissivity fed into the gendering of “masculine” and “feminine” qualities that left women institutionally powerless to men. Male domination, aggression, and strength were deemed necessary and a man’s “purpose.” This relationship with gender contributed to the ideology from which England conquered the a quarter of the world in the Victorian Era.

Economic system as a tool for power

Capitalism

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.”

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.

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.”

Empire

Nathan K. Hensley - Empire

England became the great Empire of the world; Queen Victoria ruled over 450 million people at its peak. England had concentrated global power onto its island’s territory and forced its ideologies onto those it conquered.

Cannon Schmitt - ‘The sun and moon were made to give them light’: Empire in the Victorian Novel

Through the fictions of Victorian authors, we see the oppressive ideology did not exclude progressive thinkers from falling victim as well. Oftentimes in the fiction of the time, we see an ideology of apologetic imperialists. They still operate under the assumption, however, that the British are a dominant society. That the British were “destined” to conquer. Justification for imperialism stretched into progressive and conservative ideology, premised on the idea of a possible superiority between one group of people to another.

Kipling - Empire and National Identity

“The British Empire had an incalculable physical and psychological impact on the individuals and cultures it colonized but it also significantly changed the colonizers themselves, both at home and abroad. The need to concentrate on the imperial mission affected in theoretical and practical ways the consolidation of a specifically British identity: the conflicted relations and characteristic differences between people from the various parts of the British Isles” (Kipling, 1638).

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

In Dorian Gray, we see examples of this toxic, imperial masculinity. Male characters are successful in benefiting from the heteronormative gender hierarchies and can control others behaviors through their strength of being a man. Being a man gave them power. That power was used to degrade traditionally “feminine” characteristics and the anxiety that comes with it was seen through the hyper awareness of the male pride in their external appearence and perception of strength (youth, fitness).

Woman’s Relationship With Power

Restriction on structural rights

Women barred from participation in the economy equally to men. Their labor was worth less in terms of wages, and the jobs they did were worth less by Victorian society’s standards. Men were able to accumulate power economically

Ellis Ruskin - The “Woman in Question”: The Victorian Debate about Gender

The domestic and submissive-to-a-man role women played was obligatory in the Victorian Era. At the same time, women became an object to worship. “Woman” was meant to be enjoyed by the man, and “woman” was meant to serve the man’s interest at the expense of her character. The obligation of such a marriage left women largely unfulfilled, with no alternate method of existing until the late Victorian Era when financial oppurtunity gave women space to become the “New Woman”—- independent and self serving, rather than serving the needs of a man

“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.

Charles Kains-Jackson - ‘The New Chivalry,’ The Artist and Journal of Home Culture

The New ideal, in which women were people who “didn’t want to work. Every girl of the least personal attractiveness nourishes the hope of being kept in idleness… The ideal partnership indeed will more frequently than not be accomplished, the elder having the greater power of physical endurance under due direction” would be carried out through the idea of New Chivalery. This is another example of progressive and conservative ideologies building off of the premise that fundamental inequalities between men and women are fact, and the people are un-equal to the rich, white man

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre

Bronte herself clawed her way into the literary world as a “New Woman.” Jane Eyre illustrates just what that struggle could look like through the experience of our protagonist, Jane Eyre, who defect the status quo of womanhood through her outspoken, independent, and confident nature.

In Jane Eyre, Jane was powerless, weak, and poor until a man was able to save her condition with wealth. The difference between the ability to live comfortably or not, was how much wealth you had. Those with the most wealth, owned the labor of other people. Those who’s labor was owned, remained relatively poor and suffered horrible work conditions with no ability to control their work environment.

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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.

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.

Terry Eagleton - Marxism and Literary Criticism

Art is much more connected to political expression that given credit for when compared to its policial and economic counterparts. Its ability to engage in ideology through its experience rather than its rules gives room for an unobstructed view of what it meant to live through an era (such as the Victorian). Ideology fundamentally looks at how people live through their societal roles, and a set of doctronines will never opine on that perfectly. For this reason, it is important to look at what the first hand documentation of life under the Victorian Era was like by those who lived it, and not ruled it.

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).

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.

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.

The people who have power are those who realize and believe that they do.