by Diana Hurlburt

Created on: October 24, 2008   Last Updated: November 03, 2010

The Woman Question: Women's Roles in Victorian Literature

The Victorians produced in their women a sort of "white woman's burden" the ideal Victorian woman was the "angel in the house," a model of domesticity whose main charge is caring for her menfolks, who are exhausted from saving the world from savagery. Women's status in the Victorian age may be viewed as a microcosm of what many scholars today feel was an inexcusable social condition within a powerful and wealthy empire.

Florence Nightingale's "Cassandra" especially invokes this sense of domestic obligation and, in turn, domestic oppression. John Stuart Mill's writings in "The Subjection of Women" align nearly exactly with Nightingale's views. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "Aurora Leigh" also depicts the struggles of a woman to rise above the expectations for her sex, while Alfred, Lord Tennyson appears to have a strangely feminist take on things in his poem "The Woman's Cause is the Man's."

Florence Nightingale, perhaps the most iconic of nineteenth-century women after Queen Victoria herself, was a famed nurse and the creator of the Red Cross. Extremely well-educated for a woman of the time, Nightingale's views on the repression of women are clearly evident in her essay "Cassandra." The piece is classic protofeminism, trumpeting the injustice of keeping intelligent, active women caged in their homes to slave for their husbands.

Nightingale argues that if women were given the chance they would create great things for the world (the author herself is proof of this), and makes the statement that women's bodies, intellects, and souls are warped out of their proper shape when women are kept in domestic subjugation. She likens the ideal of the "angel in the house" to Chinese foot-binding: unnatural. Nightingale believes that women, like men, possess passion, intelligence, and a sense of action and purpose and that all of these instincts have been denied and repressed, resulting in an aimless, fluttering, empty-headed female populace, an insult to true womanhood.

John Stuart Mill, likewise, considers that the "legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself, and one of the chief hindrances to human improvement" (1176). He argues for "perfect equality" and in doing so admits that the age-old domination of men over women is, in a word, immoral. Unusual for the time, Mill's ideas, as much as Nightingale's or Wollstonecraft's, are the basis of modern feminism. He argues that the suppression of

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>