scholarly journals WOMEN AND MARRIAGE IN MIDDLEMARCH AND THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-144
Author(s):  
Najia Asrar Zaidi ◽  
Fouzia Rehman Khan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Good Time ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Right

Women in the nineteenth century were the worst victims of patriarchy, socio-cultural norms and class difference. It was not a good time for women. In the Victorian era, women did not have the right to vote, own property or come out of the violent marriage. This picture has been painted by many writers of the time. Of all the Victorian novelists, Eliot and Hardy have the gifted ability to chart the women situation from all angles. Both writers show that women had few rights and privileges. The socio-cultural and economic factors further contributed to women’s oppression. Women were expected to remain attached to the domestic sphere. Marriage is one such institution, which during the Victorian period became a tool for women’s exploitation and subjugation. The heroines and protagonists suffer due to social and moral taboos. Mismatch in marriage leads to several problems for the couple and their respective families. George Eliot in her novel Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy in his work The Return of the Native, portray the heroines who decide to step into life that is just contrary to their expectations and later regret their decisions. This paper would attempt to analyze the repercussions of their choices and compare their nature and the line of action these heroines take to deal with the situation they are placed into.

Actresses and Prostitutes in Victorian London

1988 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy C. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Dual Identity ◽  
Commercial Exchange ◽  
Class Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
To Receive

Despite the tendency for Victorian performers to be credited with increasing respectability and middle-class status and for actors to receive the highest official commendations, the popular association between actresses and prostitutes and belief in actresses' inappropriate sexual conduct endured throughout the nineteenth century. In the United States, religious fundamentalism accounts for much of the prejudice, but in Great Britain, where puritanical influences were not as influential on the theatre, other factors helped to preserve the derogatory view of actresses. In certain times and places actresses did have real links with the oldest of all ‘women's professions’, but the notion that the dual identity of Roman dancers or the exploits of some Restoration performers justify the popular association between actresses and prostitutes in the Victorian era is patently insufficient. The notion persisted throughout the nineteenth century because Victorians recognized that acting and whoring were the occupations of self-sufficient women who plied their trades in public places, and because Victorians believed that actresses' male colleagues and patrons inevitably complicated transient lifestyles, economic insecurity, and night hours with sexual activity. In the spirit of Gilbert and Gubar's axiom that experience generates metaphor and metaphor creates experience, the actress and the prostitute were both objects of desire whose company was purchased through commercial exchange. While patrons bought the right to see them, to project their fantasies on them, and to denigrate and misrepresent their sexuality, both groups of women found it necessary constantly to sue for men's attention and tolerate the false imagery. Their similarities were reinforced by coexistence in neighbourhoods and work places where they excited and placated the playgoer's lust in an eternal loop, twisted like a Mobius strip into the appearance of a single surface.

scholarly journals The Gentleman as a Hero? (Mis)representations of Heroic Masculinity in W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 372
Author(s):  
Katri Sirkel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Implicit Assumption ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Controversial Nature

The aim of the article is to analyse the concept of gentlemanliness with regard to heroic masculinity in W.M. Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair. Set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and written in the 1840s, the novel casts light on the controversial nature of the notion of gentleman. In the Victorian period, gentlemanliness came to be modelled on the principles of chivalry but there was nevertheless an implicit assumption originating from the Regency era that being a gentleman meant yielding to leisurely elegance rather than performing heroic deeds. Thackeray, whose formative years had passed in the Regency-tinted 1820s and early 1830s but who as a novelist gained maturity in the mid-nineteenth century, was acutely aware of the contradiction between the Regency and Victorian perceptions of gentlemanliness and the unease resulting therefrom. Thus, the paper argues that although the Regency standards of gentlemanliness were discarded as incompatible with Victorian heroic masculinity, they had a considerable influence on how heroism as a component of gentlemanliness was perceived in the Victorian era. The analysis of gentlemanliness focuses on the four principal male characters in the novel – Jos Sedley, Rawdon Crawley, George Osborne, and William Dobbin, of whom each represents aspects of gentlemanliness not entirely compatible with the Victorian heroic ideal. The article suggests that the characters take heroism as an asset for creating a heroic image rather than as a manifestation of heroic deeds, thus presenting vividly the contradiction within the concept of Victorian heroic masculinity.

Literature and the Expansion of the Press

2014 ◽  
pp. 506-521
Author(s):  
Joanne Shattock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Margaret Oliphant ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Press

This chapter traces the growth of the periodical press from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Victorian period, emphasizing the explosion in the number of weekly and monthly publications that serialized fiction. It demonstrates the interconnections between the professionalization of authorship in the Victorian period and the buoyant periodical press. The editorship of a weekly or monthly magazine was a role undertaken by a number of writers, providing a regular income in addition to fees earned from individual works. Poets too profited from publication in magazines, but it was mainly novelists, whose works often first appeared in weeklies and monthlies and who combined reviewing the work of others with creative writing at some point in their careers, who benefited most from the press. Writers discussed include Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Tennyson.

Moral Sensitivity and the Mind: Tired and Emotional Victorians

The Hangover ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 139-170
Author(s):  
Jonathon Shears
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Anne Bronte ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Important Means ◽  
The Mind

The Victorian period is often remembered as a morally severe one, associated with rectitude, propriety, temperance and self-help. This chapter argues that hangover literature provides an important means to understand the social and cultural values that drinkers were perceived to have transgressed. Nevertheless, the tendency in Victorian literature was to humanise the figure of the drunkard and hangovers were a part of this. Through analysis of depictions of hangovers in works by Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the chapter argues that Victorian novelists demonstrated many reasons why drinkers felt shame but also – drawing on better medical understanding of the nerves and the mind – their emotional complexity. It shows that they reversed some of the more straightforward condemnation of inebriates commonly found in temperance literature.

Victorian Aesthetics

2015 ◽  
pp. 560-579
Author(s):  
Jonah Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Fundamental Characteristic ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Although the field of aesthetics was consolidated in the nineteenth century, its study has been shaped by two contradictory tendencies: (1) the insistence that the aesthetic realm needs to be autonomous, independent of the world of common experience; (2) the ethical or political insistence that autonomy is impossible. Starting from this characteristic antinomy, and tracing it back to early theoretical formulations in Kant and Schiller, this chapter illuminates the ways in which the constant pull between form and reality, or between art and experience, was a fundamental characteristic of aesthetics in the Victorian period. The writings of Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Walter Pater, William Morris, John Ruskin, and others show the challenges of negotiating a concept that at times seems the only thing reconciling one to the world and at other times seems to be pulling one away to an impossible realm outside human existence.

Bunyan and the Victorians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Newey
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Direct Connection ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Victorian Period

This chapter considers the reception, influence, and adaptation of Bunyan in the Victorian period, especially The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684) and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). Though Bunyan’s allegory remained for many a doctrinal work, it developed varied significance and appeal within an increasingly secular culture. Attention is paid to responses in non-fictional prose and to such relevant contexts as the rise of working-class radicalism, but the focus rests on novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Hale White (‘Mark Rutherford’), and Thomas Hardy, which have a direct connection with Bunyan as well as using the motif of the pilgrimage or soul journey. Paradoxically, Bunyan played an important role in the imagination and techniques of writers who lost their faith or turned predominantly to humanist beliefs. For these, as for others, he endured as a major presence, a compelling point of attraction, and a source of creative stimulus.

scholarly journals From pathology to invisibility: age identity as a cultural construct in vampire fiction

2014 ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Marta Miquel-Baldellou
Keyword(s):  
Young Adulthood ◽  
Chronological Age ◽  
Age Identity ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Significant Process ◽  
Cultural Construct ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

A diachronic analysis of the way the literary vampire has been characterised from the Victorian era up to the contemporary period underlines a clear evolution that seems particularly relevant from the perspective of ageing studies. One of the permanent features characterising the fictional vampire from its origins to its current manifestations in literature is precisely the vampire’s disaffection with the effects of ageing in spite of its old chronological age. Nonetheless, even though the vampire’s appearance does not age, the way it has been presented in literature has significantly evolved from a remarkable aged look during the Victorian period in John Polidori’s “The Vampyre: A Tale” (1819), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) to young adulthood in Anne Rice’s An Interview with the Vampire (1976) and Charlaine Harris’ Dead Until Dark (2001), adolescence in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005-2008), and even childhood in John Ajvide Lindquist’s Let the Right One In (2004), thus underlining a significant process of rejuvenation through time despite the vampire’s apparent disaffection with the effects of ageing. This article shows how the representations of the vampire in literature reflect a shift from the embodiment of pathology to the invisibility, or the denial, of old age and how this, in turn, reflects cultural conceptualisations and perceptions of ageing.

THE IDEA OF «COMMUNITY» IN THE GOVERNMENT CONCEPTS OF GALICIA OF THE XIX – BEGINNING OF THE XX CENTURY

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-21
Author(s):  
Liubomyr Ilyn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Legal Principle ◽  
General Scientific ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
The 19Th Century

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to analyze and systematize the views of social and political thinkers of Galicia in the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. on the right and manner of organizing a nation-state as a cathedral. Method. The methodology includes a set of general scientific, special legal, special historical and philosophical methods of scientific knowledge, as well as the principles of objectivity, historicism, systematic and comprehensive. The problem-chronological approach made it possible to identify the main stages of the evolution of the content of the idea of catholicity in Galicia's legal thought of the 19th century. Results. It is established that the idea of catholicity, which was borrowed from church terminology, during the nineteenth century. acquired clear legal and philosophical features that turned it into an effective principle of achieving state unity and integrity. For the Ukrainian statesmen of the 19th century. the idea of catholicity became fundamental in view of the separation of Ukrainians between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. The idea of unity of Ukrainians of Galicia and the Dnieper region, formulated for the first time by the members of the Russian Trinity, underwent a long evolution and received theoretical reflection in the work of Bachynsky's «Ukraine irredenta». It is established that catholicity should be understood as a legal principle, according to which decisions are made in dialogue, by consensus, and thus able to satisfy the absolute majority of citizens of the state. For Galician Ukrainians, the principle of unity in the nineteenth century. implemented through the prism of «state» and «international» approaches. Scientific novelty. The main stages of formation and development of the idea of catholicity in the views of social and political figures of Halychyna of the XIX – beginning of the XX centuries are highlighted in the work. and highlighting the distinctive features of «national statehood» that they promoted and understood as possible in the process of unification of Ukrainian lands into one state. Practical significance. The results of the study can be used in further historical and legal studies, preparation of special courses.

Clothing in Context — Nineteenth-Century Dress and Textiles in the Thomas Hardy Archive

Costume ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Famous People ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Textiles And Clothing ◽  
Insight Into

This article will consider how dress, textiles, manuscripts and images in the Thomas Hardy Archive illuminate his writing and reveal the accuracy of his descriptions of clothing in novels including Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Rural clothing, fashionable styles, drawings and illustrations will shed new light on his writing through providing an insight into the people's dress he described so eloquently in his writing. The textiles and clothing in the Archive are also significant as nineteenth-century working-class dress is relatively rare. Everyday rural clothing does not tend to survive, so a collection belonging to Hardy's family of country stonemasons provides new opportunities for research in this area. Even more unusual is clothing reliably provenanced to famous people or writers, and such garments that do exist tend to be from the middle or upper classes. This article will show how the combination of surviving dress, biographical context and literary framework enriches understanding of Hardy's words and informs research into nineteenth-century rural dress.

A Christmas Carol: Disability Conceptualised through Empathy and the Philosophy of ‘Technologically Useful Bodies’

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-191
Author(s):  
Ester Vidović
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Models ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Image Schemas ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Linguistic Approach

The article explores how two cultural models which were dominant in Great Britain during the Victorian era – the model based on the philosophy of ‘technologically useful bodies’ and the Christian model of empathy – were connected with the understanding of disability. Both cultural models are metaphorically constituted and based on the ‘container’ and ‘up and down’ image schemas respectively. 1 The intersubjective character of cultural models is foregrounded, in particular, in the context of conceiving of abstract concepts such as emotions and attitudes. The issue of disability is addressed from a cognitive linguistic approach to literary analysis while studying the reflections of the two cultural models on the portrayal of the main characters of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The studied cultural models appeared to be relatively stable, while their evaluative aspects proved to be subject to historical change. The article provides incentives for further study which could include research on the connectedness between, on one hand, empathy with fictional characters roused by reading Dickens's works and influenced by cultural models dominant during the Victorian period in Britain and, on the other hand, the contemporaries’ actual actions taken to ameliorate the social position of the disabled in Victorian Britain.

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