Victorian Women.docx

English Victorian era was a period of a series of values and codes of social strict behavior that regulated in every detail the life and the social ranks. By its organization, its architecture, its administration, its role and its purpose, the Victorian house is a clear and complex example of Victorian mentality. On top, Victorian wives or so-called «Angels of the House» are sharp crests of the status of women in the 19th century England, their existence and their daily responsibilities on life, religion, family, sexuality and distinction of classes. The approach of this book is, therefore, to the portrait of the Victorian middle-class woman, first by the description of her house, then by the analysis of its significant economic and political role and responsibilities, not only at home, in her relationship with her husband, her children and staff, but also on the social scene in industrial cities and changing out of his private domain.

The Victorian Period ushered in 1837 and ended in 1901. It is the period when Queen Victoria ascended the thrown of England. The Poets and the novelist of this period started thinking freely. The Novelist like Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens wrote a number of novels highlighting the problems happening with women in the society. They also focused the pitiable Condition of women. Hardy's novels express women's struggle for emancipation from social constraints. It is so that on marriage the control of women's property and income from women's real property, that is, property held in the form of freehold land passed under the common law to her husband. Marriage and divorce were existed in the society. Re-marriage was also the system in the Victorian society. A woman could be divorced on the simple grounds of her adultery or by cruelty, rape, sodomy incest or by gaming. There is another vice which was prevailed in the society was the rigid read views on marriage and the role...

This paper examines the concept of the “New-Woman” in Victorian literature in all genres written by men and women.The “New-Woman” was also referred to at this time as the “Woman Question”.In this paper the “New- Woman”, the “ Woman Question” and feminism are interchangeable. This write-up handles four issues: the problem faced by the Victorian woman, events, legislation and publications crucial to Victorian feminism, Queen Victorian and feminism and lastly the Victorian writer and the “Woman Question”.The Victorian writer wrote essays, novels, plays and poems.Using the feminist critical theory, the paper argues that the predominant theme in Victorian literature was the presentation of the “New- Woman”.The paper reveals that the “Woman Question” was so preoccupying that no writer could avoid it during the Victorian period and that feminism really or essentially started during the Victorian period when women were given or got remarkable improvements in their lives.

2003

This thesis explores representations of women working in artistic professions in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Applying an interdisciplinary method that draws on fiction, prose, painting and the periodical press from the years 1848-1888, this thesis aims to expand our understanding of women's relationships to paid work in the Victorian period. Paid work, I argue, was not always represented as a degrading activity for women. Throughout the thesis, I trace the process through which the concept of work for middle-class women was made increasingly acceptable through an association with artistry. One of my central purposes is to show how the supposedly degrading activity of paid work could be transformed into refining experience for women. Looking specifically at sewing, art, writing and acting, I demonstrate how these professions came to be represented as suitable remunerative work for middle-class women. In chapters one and two, I examine the way in which th...

In response to Lytton Strachey’s remark that the history of the Victorian Age would never be written because we know too much about it (9), one can argue that the greater our temporal distance to the Victorians is, the more we appear to be interested in them. As Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich have noted about this persistent preoccupation, “the Victorian age [is] historically central to late-century postmodern consciousness” (Kucich and Sadoff xi). The continuous reiterations of the Victorian in popular neo-Victorian cultural artefacts have contributed to the establishment of the area of neo-Victorian studies, with the publication, in recent decades, of several books focused on millennial and post-millennial literary engagements with the Victorians. Also growing out of this awareness that matrixes of modernity and postmodernity can be found in the Victorian period, an increasing interest in the sphere of domesticity has resulted in the uncovering of neglected archives. From novels to government reports, the Victorians attached unprecedented significance to domesticity. The household was a pivotal institution, and their occupants performed their different roles according to custom and circumstance. Within its sphere, gender, class, economic and political conflicts were played out as the household provided the background for significant social practices ranging from the kitchen to the parlour, from the street to the Houses of Parliament, from the colonial metropole to the British colonial outposts in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific. The discourses of Victorian domesticity have been the subject of quite a few publications over the last decades. These approaches stress the interdisciplinary potential for interpretation of the characteristics of the period and often underline the strands of radical thought which encouraged aspirations for upward social mobility. The inquiry into the performance of domesticity and the management of privacy by, for instance, some of the leading figures of the Victorian period remains still rather an unexplored territory with untapped critical potential. Bringing domesticity into the big picture and foregrounding paradoxes of historical continuity and disruption, the articles in this issue uncover archives hitherto neglected for various circumstances. Either these were until now within the restrictive purview of private collections, or the texts under analysis here had yet to receive significant critical attention (such as the article on the social novel Under the Arch of Life penned by Lady Henry Somerset, regarded by critics as a minor fictional work and hence so far overlooked). Contributors have painstakingly collected, from private archives, images which so far remained inaccessible to the general public, such as pictures of the Collingwood family magazines. Furthermore, the collection reclaims texts that have been interpreted earlier readings structured around the public/private and virtue/vice antinomies or focusing on the “cult of domesticity” in the Victorian period. The collection also brings the Victorians to the present by examining post-Victorian revisitations of earlier texts.

Woman's Art Journal, 1984

2020

THE SOURCES OF FEMINIS M IN THE WORKS OF VICTORIAN WRITERS Verovkina O. Ye., Nesteruk S. M. 1. Women's fight for independence and new tendencies in Victorian literature To begin with, it should be pointed out, that before studying the subject of our research, it is necessary to make an investigation of the period and society, in which its people lived, their way of life, traditions and laws in order to pave the way for a study of the Victorian writers' works. So, in this chapter the historical, social and economic backgrounds of the Victorian age will be reviewed, so that to analyze the ways in which these might have influenced the content of literary works of this time. According to Blackwell the reign of Queen Victoria, after whom the period between 1837 to 1901 has been referred to the Victorian Era, was a landmark period in the history of Great Britain 1. This era was marked by country's acquiring new social functions, which were caused by new industrial conditions and rapid population growth. As for personal development, it was built on self-discipline and self-confidence, supported by Wesleyan and Evangelical movements 2 .

2018