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Bias and Bookish Types: Life in the Victorian Novel as Seen Through the…

Bias and Bookish Types: Life in the Victorian Novel as Seen Through the Perspectives of the Authors and Their Backgrounds

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë was a woman born into the middle class, similar to her Jane Eyre. She was unmarried and a governess when she wrote and published Jane Eyre. She eventually married, but at the time of her creation of the novel, she had the point of view of an unmarried woman.

Gender and sexuality

• Carolyn Dever, “Everywhere and Nowhere”

Women gaining the knowledge of sex makes them equate to a married woman, as seen with Lily and Crosbie. Men are not held to the same standard.

The marriage plot is presented as the “best” path in how to express sexuality.

“Sexuality in the Victorian novel is at once everywhere and nowhere.” (Dever, 157)

• “The ‘Woman Question’”

Queen Victoria supported education for women, but not at the expense of their submission to men.

Women are divinely willed to serve men but should be worshipped for it.

“Woman was to be valued, instead, for other qualities considered especially characteristic of her sex: tenderness of understanding, unworldliness and innocence, domestic affection, and, in various degrees, submissiveness,” (The Woman Question, n.p.).

• Sarah Stickney Ellis, from “The Women of England”

Women of England are superior to women of other countries.

The best of women were not intellectuals, they were domestic figures.

The education of women needs to be focused on making them make other people happy.

• John Ruskin, from “Of Queen’s Gardens”

Men’s intelligence is for conquest and invention. Women’s intelligence is for arrangement and decision. Men battle and women rule.

Men guard women’s domestic lives from the outside world.

Women are venerated, held to high character standards.

• Nancy Armstrong, from Desire and Domestic Fiction

Literature devoted to women appeared to ignore the political world of men but, in fact, the apolitical portrayal of women made them the perfect audience for sneaking in political commentary.

“Literature devoted to producing the domestic woman thus appeared to ignore the political world run by men,” (Armstrong, 467).

“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.” (Armstrong, 467).

Since women were considered to be apolitical due to their domestic sphere, the middle class ideal consumption and production of this genre was not seen as outwardly political, since it was targeted towards women who are not directly involved in the public sphere.

Race

Susan Meyer, “Indian Ink”

While addressing that racial inequality is not a good thing, Brontë continues to use language like “savage” and “heathen”.

Jane is compared to a slave in her childhood and John is compared to a slave driver.

The novel starts with a critique of the British empire, but still fails to remove itself from the biased perspective entirely.

“The insalubrious mist that suggests British contact in the empire with other races, diffused throughout the ending of the novel, betrays Brontë’s lingering anxiety about British imperialism and about her own literary treatment of other races, about the way in which, through her figurative tactics, she has tried to make the world of her novel “clean.” (Meyer, 505).

Bertha’s existence in Jane Eyre as a commentary on colonialism, race, and gender.

Despite Jane and Bertha being so similar, Jane does not identify with her because of her background. They are both women, but at least Jane isn’t a “darker skinned” woman.

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell was a woman who admired Charlotte Brontë and shared many of her views. She was married to a minister at the time she wrote North and South and was great representation of the middle class in her writings. She had the knowledge of a married woman at the time of her writing the novel.

Industrialization and Social Class

“Industrialism: Progress or Decline?”

Technological advances, population growth, agricultural efficiency, and greater mobility of capital, among other reasons.

The Industrial Revolution was the result of a complex set of cases, none of which by itself could have given rise to the phenomenon…” (Industrialism: Progress or Decline?, 1556).

Thomas Babington Macaulay, from “A Review of Southey’s Colloquies”

Southey – conservative, supporter of aristocracy, does not support social action on behalf of the working class.

Macaulay – supporter of middle class, capitalist, but industrial values, kind of supports social action on behalf of the working class

“Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property…the People will assuredly do the rest.” (Macaulay, 1562)

Friedrich Engels, from The Great Towns

Engels – communist, industrialist, supports social action on behalf of the working class

Industrialization can best be studied in “the big towns”. In these towns, there is a large wealth disparity and very little middle class representation.

“Every great town has one or more slum in which the working classes are packed.” (Engels, 1566).

James Eli Adams, “‘The boundaries of social intercourse’”

Etiquette emerged from the middle class to identify where someone stood on the social totem pole.

Industrialization led to increased social mobility

No consistent representation of the middle class in Victorian novels

“Whatever the setting, however, Victorian novels represent a world in which social class seems interwoven with virtually every facet of experience. Class so powerfully structures character and conflict in the novel that it is difficult to represent forms of desire, and thus structures of conflict and resolution, outside its reach.” (Adams, 67).

Thomas Carlyle, from Past and Present

“Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march further for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-and-demand principle; they will not…” Carlyle, n.p.).

Comparing the Victorian era to the Middle Ages (very common, Medieval times were the good old days)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Bourgeois socialism - bourgeoisie’s desire to help the proletariat, simply to maintain their own socioeconomic standing. Their ideal is the continued existence of the bourgeoisie and their domination over the proletariat but for the proletariat to stop hating the bourgeoise. They embrace worker reform not out of the reverence for the working class, but out of self-preservation.

Terry Eagleton, from Marxism and Literary Criticism

Commentary and critique of Engels and Marx

“Ideology is not in the first place a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men live out 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, 8).

Ideologies interacting in literature. Ideology is free floating ideas in their raw form, literature is those ideas taking form in a plot and creating something.

She by H. Rider Haggard

H. Rider Haggard was a man born to wealthy landowners and got to travel and receive an excellent education. He had the privilege and experience of a white man that had traveled to Africa.

Colonialism and Imperialism

Nathan Hensley, “Empire”

The British Empire did not extend across every country, but its influence and reach was not to be taken lightly.

Wide variety of British colonies, including Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, and Jamaica.

British people see the colonies as “frozen in time”.

As modern-day critics of such progressive ideologies have noted, Victorian anthropology, political theory, and even novelistic discourse imagined nonwhite races as somehow out of time, locked in what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the “waiting room of history.” (Hensley, 6).

Cannon Schmitt, “‘The sun and moon were made to give them light’”

Many Victorian novels has the mindset that England was entitled to colonize other countries due to their self-perceived superiority.

“Moreover, because of the far-reaching influence of the Victorian novel as an instrument of instruction as well as entertainment, texts… have disseminated and naturalized the correctness, desirability, and inevitability of British imperial rule.” (Schmitt, 5).

“Empire and National Identity”

Britain had overall mixed feelings about its imperialism.

A combination of contributing factors, including elitism and economically motivated pursuits.

“Only if we appreciate just how many Britons believed that they and their country were performing a noble duty can we begin to make sense of the feelings of outraged surprise and betrayal (often accompanied by virulent racism and vicious reprisals) that erupted when subjugated peoples periodically rose up against British control.” (Empire and National Identity, 1638).

Gender Roles

Greg Buzwell, “Daughters of Decadence: the New Woman at the Victorian fin de siècle”

“The New Woman” was a threat to the previous portrayals of a domestic and modest woman. They were independent and uninterested in marriage. Dabbling in homosexuality and education, the trouser wearing New Woman was a force to be reckoned with.

With the end of the century came an evolution in society, including the role of a woman.

“…whether viewed as a free-spirited, independent, bicycling, intelligent career-minded ideal or as a sexually degenerate, abnormal, mannish, chain-smoking, child-hating bore, the New Woman was here to stay and, admired or despised, she remained a force for change throughout the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods.” (Buzwell, n.p.).

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was a queer man living in the upper class as a renowned playwright. He was married to a woman when he published his novel but, engaged in an affair with a man a year after its release. He was put on trial for his homosexuality a few years later.

Sexuality

Havelock Ellis – Sexual Inversion

Deep shame: I have not committed a wrong, but I am wrong by nature. Homosexuality is harmful to himself more than anything else, “There isn’t anything you can say to me that I haven’t said to myself.”

We shouldn’t punish you too much because you can contribute to society since you are not reproducing. Gay people don’t have children, so they have time to pursue art and other things that make life more beautiful.

“If we… seek to destroy the invert himself before he has sinned against society, we exceed the warrant of reason, and in so doing we may, perhaps, destroy also those children of the spirit which possess sometimes a greater worth than the children of the flesh.” (Ellis, 336).

Charles Kains-Jackson – The New Chivalry

New Chivalry: intergenerational spiritual love between men (old men and young men). Old Chivalry: love between men and women.

No longer have a need to reproduction, heterosexual marriages are not as encouraged as much since population is stable.

Men have brains, so when they get together, they are able to connect on a level that women cannot meet. Women’s bodies are desired, but new chivalry will “bring society forward.”

Misogynistic justification for relationships between men

Look back to Ancient Greece (argument from Matthew Arnold)

“They arrived—though failing, as has been said, to give adequate practical satisfaction to the claims of man's moral side—at the idea of a comprehensive adjustment of the claims of both the sides in man, the moral as well as the intellectual, of a full estimate of both, and of a reconciliation of both; an idea which is philosophically of the greatest value, and the best of lessons for us moderns.” (Arnold, 1403).

Ed Cohen, “Writing Gone Wilde”

The trial of Oscar Wilde was a dramatic one.

“In analyzing the textual strategies through which these two novels put male desire for other men into a discourse, we begin to understand some of the historical forms that such relations between men took and thereby begin to suggest others that they can take.” (Cohen, 811).

A book exploring social class and sexuality in the Victorian era.

Gender roles are not as prevalent, but the role of a man in society is remarked upon frequently.

Social status is a large part of this novel, especially between the protagonists.