Victorian Women

Victorian Women
"The Household General"
- They secure happiness
- Host parties
- Keep kitchen full
- Sick nurse
- Ensure well-being of brother

Education
- Necessities for children raising
- No cosmetics
- No jewelry
- No skin showing
- Maintaining a pure body

Prostitution
1857
- 1 in 16 London Women
     - divorced
     - orphans
     - women accepted husbands acts of prostitutions

Reformation Acts
1839
- Custody of Infants Acts
     - 1842
     - 1857
     - 1870
     - 1878
     - 1884
     - 1886

Common Themes
- Death
- Mourning
- The After Life
- Gender Roles

Bronte
- Pastor had 6 children
- Pamphlets and rural poems

Bronte Sisters
- Charlotte, Emily, Anne
     - Creation of Fictional Kingdoms
- Cowan Bridge School
     - 4 Sisters (Minus Anne) attended
          - Emily and Charlotte survived, other two died of TB
- Roe Academy
     - Charlotte attended and got a job there
          - Used her income to get Emily and Anne in
- Writing
     - Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
          - Male pen names they used
     - All three got published

Jane Eyre
- Curate, she married
- Got pregnant and died
- School similar to Cowan Bridge

Byronic Heroes
- Rochester - Eyre
- Heathcliff - Heights
- Anne's poems had some

Emily Bronte
1818 - 1848
- Middle Sister
- Thorton, Bradford Yorkshire - Hometown
- Wuthering Heights
     - Only novel, Ellis Bell
     - Mixed reviews
     - Elements; violence, passion, supernatural
Themes
- Victorian Family
- Social Class
- Portrait of Difficult Lives
- Unique

Poetry
- Explores power of imagination

Anne Bronte
1820
- Close to Emily
- Became Governess
- Published poetry with sisters

Agnes Gray
- Tenet of Wildfell Hall
     - Challenged norms

1848
- Anne and Charlotte went to London to claim their novels
     - They had published under male pen names
- Emily's death greatly affected her
- Yorkshire = Cold, dreary, rainy, gloomy
     - Very isolated as children

Elizabeth Glaskell
- Plight of working poor
- Charlotte Bronte crossed paths with her
     - Wrote Bronte's biography

Bronte, Browning Views on Women Sexuality
- "Purity"
     - Save til marriage
     - No enjoyment in sex (or anything else)
          - Sex is a burden to bear
- Women to marry are ones who won't enjoy sex
- Too flirty
     - created suspicion for impurity
- Liking your spouse was a bonus
- Man should feel the need to be better for wife

The Church of England
- Secular power
- Prominent Church

The Angel in the House
- Satiring that Patmore is pushing women on pedestal
- Emphasizes the difference of women and men

Women
- Meek
- Sweet
- Docile
- Simple
- These characteristics appeal to other men as well
     - Thus thurning it to be culturally significant
- Speaking as a sort of ideal in women
    - Not merely an individual woman

Ideal
- Generic
- Simple/ Meek
- Sweet
- Limited roles
     - Worth
- Maid and Wife

The work was dedicated to his wife
- implies that it could be written on an individual level
     - Though still likely it is not

Authorial Intention
- Maybe only speaking of his wife
     - And a reader took it and ran with it to be an ideal
- Does it seem like it could be a real person?
     - Cultural discourse is to blame for genericness.
- Does Authorial Intention account for anything?
- Social interpretation
     - Impossible to think of what everyone will take from a work
     - It will never mean to us, what it means to them