Gender Roles & Female Appearance in Victorian Lit: Study of North & South - Prof. Chivite, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

¡Descarga Gender Roles & Female Appearance in Victorian Lit: Study of North & South - Prof. Chivite y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! NORTH AND SOUTH There is rarely a way to discuss Victorian literature without focusing on the question of gender. The societal structure of gender roles was all pervasive; women and men had very distinct and very rigidly adhered-to roles in their public and private lives. The expectations upon women in terms of following these pervasive norms were particularly intense. One relevant critical article on North and South and gender roles is Barbara Leah Harman's work on female public appearance in the novel. She begins by discussing how women were not supposed to appear in public alone, as it was akin to making a spectacle of oneself. As women sought access to the public sphere in terms of voting, education, and professions as the eighteen hundreds progress, the anxiety over their presence in that sphere escalated. North and South"explores the significance of female public appearance, and it examines at the same time the meanings associated with female privacy, secrecy, and concealment...[and] reflects a sense both of its new and its potentially explosive possibilities." The prevailing Victorian notion was that a woman's sphere must be separated from a man's for fear it would be corrupted. A woman participating in public life is compromising her role as a neutral analyst and observer and the person to whom a man can turn when he needs moral guidance. Harman looks at the legal writing of William Blackstone –the coverture laws in particular –and sees that women are not neutral but are actually nonexistent, and have no self-definition in the legal bonds of marriage. When a husband marries his wife he incorporates her and essentially eliminates his wife, "improving his own self-representation at the cost of hers." He is truly "covering" her. These laws also bled into social, cultural, and psychological realism as well: women could not move about freely, appear unincorporated, or conduct their own intercourse with the public world. Liberated women were dangerous because they would bring the public world into the private realm. This had implications of dangerous, wanton sexuality. In terms of Gaskell's novel, it was written in a time when female reformers were seeking to "redefine female identity and to gain for women access to the public sphere, while opponents continued to define public life as a realm prohibited to women, inevitably associated with indecorous self-display and frequently with illicit sexuality and infidelity." In North and South it is clear that it is not actually possible to completely separate public and private meanings in the Victorian era. Harman mentions another critic who said the novel took a public problem and turned it into a private one by taking the industrial chaos and fashioning it into a love story. Harman agrees that her novel diverts attention from the class conflict but turns it into a gender conflict instead. When Gaskell introduces Margaret she is a figure on which to model shawls. She is also, however, "acutely conscious and thus more appropriately an agent than a mere body emptied of power." She is positioned between Edith, the paragon of Victorian femininity, and Mr. Henry Lennox, the avatar of the public sphere. Margaret is not Edith and not a proxy for her, but she has no business of her own. In her time spent in Helstone, which is rendered almost a Garden of Eden, Margaret defines home as a place of harmonious relations. All "social relations are personal" and she wants no part of the industrial world of men, or what Friedrich Engels called "public industry." Helstone is, as Harman points out, "also, and most crucially, bound up with Margaret's maiden innocence." Her home has no class strife, no physical suffering, no chaos, no commercialism, and no sexuality. Margaret's entry into the Milton world brings her face-to-face with her sexuality.