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Victorian Literature, Culture, and Power - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The creation of the spheres dictates what role each gender has in the relationship.
      - The men venture outside into industrialism and capitalism while the women stay and create a home for the husband to come home to.
    - - “From the beginning, domestic fiction actively sought to disentangle the language of sexual relations from the language of politics and, in so doing, to introduce a new form of political power. This power emerged with the rise of the domestic woman and established its hold over British culture through her dominance over all those objects and practices we associate with private life” (467).
      - By differentiating the language used to describe sexual relationships and the language used for politics, a new form of political power” emerged.
    - - Michel Foucault, from The History of Sexuality, Volume One: Foucault defined how a Victorian "homosexual/sexual invert" and "sodomite"
        
        “Sodomite” was behavioral so it meant what you did or the sin you committed. There was religious authority.
        
        Homosexuality was a social identity, who you are, and it was biological. There was medical authority.
    - - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The relationship between Henry and Dorian calls back to the ideas behind paiderastia (even though they are not explicitly written as having a sexual relationship).
- - - - Macaulay argues that statistics show that life is better for the working class
      - Manufacturing is better and agricultural labor
      - Macaulay’s opinion on English industrialization and the middle class
    - - “Here can be seen most clearly the degradation into which the worker sinks owing to the introduction
        of steam power, machinery, and division of labor” (1567)
      - “This division is due partly to deliberate policy and partly to instinctive and tacit agreement between the two social groups. In those areas where the two social groups happen to come into contact with each other the middle classes santimoniously ignore the existence of their less fortunate neighbors ”
        (1568)
    - - Novelists try to represent individual experiences in the framework of social class
      - By situating characters in a social class, novelists can facilitate social commentary
    - - The aristocracy has been “swollen and darken” by imperialism
      - This connects to the English society because it provides insight into how some Victorians viewed
        imperialism and race.
      - Parallels between the aristocracy and the enslaved/opressed
    - - The Wilde trials were about forming boundaries between normal and abnormal sexuality
      - The trials told straight men how they weren’t supposed to act
      - This connects to the greater them of English society because the trial dictated how men were supposed
        to act.
    - - Domestic Fiction played a role in expressing English society because it was away to discuss middle-class values as well as a way to express women’s “apolitical” identity. In domestic fiction, what happens in the home becomes a metaphor for things happening in the public and political world .
      - The social power of the middle class depended on domestic fiction and other cultural products