A woman's work: feminist tensions in the Victorian novel

Abstract

This study examines a particular duality in certain female characters in the fiction of four novelists: Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot. On the one hand, their women characters express an ideology of feminine independence. Each one struggles against the constrictions imposed by convention. The best example of the rebellions that occur by women in these works is the self-assertion of each character. They are not necessarily the usual women portrayed in Victorian literature; rather than be quiet and unassuming, they insist on making their voices heard. Since Victorian gender ideology holds that a woman's place in society does not include being heard--since a woman is meant to be restricted to the domestic sphere with her identity entirely a product of her roles as wife and mother--the self-assertion of these women characters is extraordinary. Simply by speaking their minds--whether on public issues or on their place in the home--these women violate convention and thus perform two functions: expand the range of what a woman can do and enlarge the ways in which the world sees women. On the other hand, each of these female characters is contained by the end of her story. Despite the talk of independence, each woman believes that love and/or marriage are the keys to her happiness. They are the only agents that can truly fulfill her. Consequently, the end of each novel reaffirms Victorian gender ideology by showing its heroine abandon her transgression of convention to please the man she loves, which in most cases means marrying him. This study examines the dichotomy in this situation. These women characters may believe that their limited roles in society are inadequate--that they are capable of much more--but even more strongly, they believe that their place is in the home as wife and mother.