The Reign of Queen Victoria - Literature review Example

The Victorians The Victorian age is at once identified generally as a time of nostalgic perfection and rigid oppression. It is the age of change and social advances as well as the age of strict social structure and a severe regard for the customs of the past. Under the reign of Queen Victoria, the Industrial Revolution came of age, blossomed and brought sweeping change across the country and the world. Life switched from being primarily dictated by the land one owned to a social structure based on commerce and manufacturing (Greenblatt, 2005). In this switch, there was a great deal of social upheaval as people living in these changing times began to question the status quo. Social class structures were beginning to break down as common men were able to make fortunes in industry and landowners found it more and more difficult to keep the idyllic life they’d constructed alive. Women, too, were beginning to question their allotted place in society as more and more opportunities opened for them in the urban centers of the country, providing them with a means of supporting themselves and freeing themselves from the yoke of male domination. However, at the same time, these positions were not the equal rights positions of modern times, so it was often difficult to determine whether one wanted to sacrifice freedom for comfort or comfort for freedom. Rarely was it possible to attain both. All of these social and economical concerns can be found in the novels written during this time period. “The Victorian novel, with its emphasis on the realistic portrayal of social life, represented many Victorian issues in the stories of its characters” (Greenblatt, 2005). Two of these novels, The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles and Dracula by Bram Stoker, portray similar tales of women, Sarah and Lucy, who deviate from the expected behavior as they compare to Ernestine and Mina, who have upheld the social norms, yet each finds drastically different conclusions partially as a result of the different perspectives offered by the authors, one having lived in the Victorian period itself and the other writing within a historical framework from a more modern world. In both novels, the reader is introduced to a similar figure in Victorian society, that of the unmarried, young, educated yet penniless woman who fits into no specific social class. Sarah Woodruff in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is quickly understood to be an ex-governess who has no independent income and depends upon others for her well-being while Mina Murray in Dracula is introduced as a school teacher’s assistant. Although women who worked were disparaged as belonging to a lower class simply in the need for them to provide some of their own support, the degree to which this condition disgraced them varied depending upon the work they performed. It was therefore very important that they choose work that would not degrade them beyond the point of retaining sufficient status to keep marriage, the ultimate goal of the Victorian woman, a viable option. The role of the governess in Victorian society was ambiguous because of the very function she performed. While she was highly educated in all the fine arts and manners of high society by necessity as her function was to teach these things to her young charges, the governess remained a servant in the household and was dependent upon the family to see to her welfare (Roth, 2002). Therefore, she did not fit in with the upper classes because she was a servant, yet did not fit in with the servants because of her advanced training. Regardless of her history, Sarah is forced into taking a position as companion to Mrs. Poultney, further highlighting her fallen social status simply on the basis of being forced to work for a living rather than having a father or husband willing to support her in proper upper class style. Mrs. Poultney never fails to remind Sarah of her lowered social position either as she continuously makes reference to Sarah’s nearly servant position. Mina Murray of Dracula fame is in a similar social position to Sarah in that she works as an assistant school mistress because she must support herself. As a school mistress, she is a working woman, but retains a degree of respectability that is also similar to Sarah. However, Mina’s position is portrayed to a dramatically different effect than the disgraced status attributed to Sarah. In Dracula, Mina is seen as a fine, upstanding young woman because she is in a somewhat respectable position, properly meek (she is only an assistant, not the replacement), properly engaged and loyally useful for a husband increasingly busy with affairs of the world. In chapter 5 she writes to Lucy: “I have been working very hard lately, because I want to keep up with Jonathan’s studies, and I have been practicing shorthand very assiduously. When we are married I shall be able to be useful to Jonathan, and if I can stenograph well enough I can take down what he wants to say in this way and write it out for him on the typewriter.” In this gushing chronicle of her current activities, there is no sense of what she might want for herself, only what is right and good for Jonathan’s benefit. Although it is necessary for her to work for a living, she is properly engaged at the opening of the story at a proper age and is properly working not for herself and her own desires, but for the benefit of her husband, so that she might be of greater value to him in the same way a tool might gain greater value by increasing its functions. While Sarah feels her degradation keenly, Mina views it as a stepping stone to her future happiness. These concerns of self-support do not occur to two other women and therefore can be presumed to provide a glimpse as to what a woman was supposed to be if raised properly and properly looked after. These women are Ernestina Freeman in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Lucy Westenra in Dracula. Neither of these women are seen to work for a living (although Ernestina is the daughter of a rising middle class merchant rather than the child of a great house) and both are presented as having been raised with proper Victorian manners. Women in the Victorian Age were not allowed to own property, make decisions for themselves or do anything that the rest of society deemed inappropriate, like expressing too much emotion. Excessive emotion is normally considered in bad form in many of the world’s societies even today, but in Victorian England, this was carried to such an extreme that women were not expected to even experience joy in sex. “Sexual enjoyment was a taboo not easily broken … Respectable women would never dream of indulging themselves in so profane a pastime as sexual pleasure. Ernestine is a prude, but a product of the age as well” (Pope, 2000). As a result of her upbringing, Ernestine is unable to relax her stiff code of manners enough to engage in honest heartfelt discourse with Charles nor is Charles able to circumvent these same barriers to truly get to know Ernestine. The resulting relationship is shallow, forced and emotionally stale for both characters. Lucy Westenra is also couched in terms of the proper young lady. In her first letter to Mina, she describes her activities in town as being within the fashionable range of daily rounds – attending picture galleries, walking in the park and going for rides. She is properly thrilled to have three proposals of marriage in a day, but, even this early in the story, she is already demonstrating a dangerous deviance from the strict Victorian values of the day. Throughout both novels, the true issue regarding whether a lady can retain her social status rests not on her noble birth or in her ability and method of supporting herself, but rather in whether or not she conforms to the accepted expectations. Even at the beginning of Dracula, Lucy struggles to break out of the bounds of her strict Victorian definition in order to find her own voice and character. Through her correspondence to Mina, there is early evidence of Lucy’s independence and need for emotional involvement, a dangerous wish to fulfill desire that flaunts the strict female definitions of her day, as she struggles within the bounds of propriety. As she writes to Mina, she reveals that she has seen three different men in un-chaperoned privacy within a single day, itself a concerning prospect in the age of high social standards. Knowing she is in love with Arthur, she is able to refuse both the first and second proposals of marriage she receives even though she has not yet received any indication from Arthur that she could expect the same from him. This goes against custom in that Lucy is making the decision regarding who she should marry, this decision is based upon emotion rather than practicality and, in her refusal of two earnest requests, Lucy does not present the properly subservient female she is supposed to be. Rather than considering herself scandalized by the suggestion of Mr. Morris that he would like a kiss to remember her by, Lucy happily agrees to the simple consolation prize. By chapter 8, Lucy is sneaking out at night and meeting with the Count, as is described in Mina’s journal, in terms that evoke sexual imagery and activity. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sarah’s performance of much of the care required by the shipwrecked Mr. Varguennes, the French Lieutenant of the title, leads many in the village to automatically assume she had had sex with him, but no one had ever actually bothered to find out for sure. “Note that she has not as far as we know, had an affair with the Frenchman … but has acted without respectability in following him to Weymouth on a promise of marriage. She lodged with a female cousin. … The fact that she had not slept with Varguennes is immaterial, her reputation is in ruins because she behaved without propriety in leaving her job and running after a man” (Pope, 2000). She is rumored to be a fallen woman, having loved the lieutenant without a marriage license and is treated harshly by the villagers as a result. More than anything, she wishes to find a place where she can be free to find her own feelings regarding love and life and emotionally removes herself from the people of the village who torment her. This behavior is seen as unconventional, which further drives a wedge between the townspeople and Sarah. Her strangeness in this setting intrigues the scientific young nobleman Charles, but she rebuffs his early attempts to know her as she realizes what she wants most is the freedom to make her own decisions without the strictures of man or society weighing against her. After he sends her to Exeter, a nearby manufacturing city, Charles finds himself so intrigued by her that he must follow. Once in Exeter, though, Sarah at last finds the setting in which she is able to lose herself and her identity among the crowd, which provides her with the freedom she needs to truly be herself. After she accepts Charles’ sexual advances, she is able to reject him with full autonomy from the surrounding populace. While each novel describes the destruction that is brought down upon a woman who dares to deviate from the accepted social norms, there is a vast difference in how they treat their subjects. Bram Stoker, writing within this period in history and having been raised within this ideology, couldn’t help but see the changes that were occurring within his own time period. The noble thoughts he places in Mina’s head as she contemplates the possibilities of the New Woman who might someday make her own proposals to the man of her choice and her eagerness to become educated suggest that he was not against changing some of the concepts regarding the role of women within his society. However, he also finds a means of ensuring that women remain in their place. Too much freedom to express emotion and pleasure, as found in the highly sexualized Lucy Westenra, forces men to act to quell that spirit, to bring it into submission before it has a chance to subvert their activities and coerce them into doing things not for themselves as it has been done, but for the woman in question. This concept is further emphasized as Mina consistently holds to the view that all her efforts, education and intelligence are rightly placed within the context of attempting to provide her fiancée with the most effective and useful tool for his advancement that she can possibly contrive. In contrast, the hindsight perspective continuously interjected into The French Lieutenant’s Woman by the author as narrator, continues to keep the reader mindful of the way in which this author’s 20th century ideas have influenced the developments of his characters. While Sarah is depicted as the dependent woman of the Victorian age that she must have been, she is also given more worldly ideas that might or might not have occurred to her at the time. She struggles against the class systems of Lyme Regis, constantly seeking a means of escaping the narrow definition of self that her position within the town allows her. This is symbolized by her habit of staring out to sea anytime she has a moment to herself. Far from seeking the sailor that should have married her and taken her away from all this, she is instead longing just to be away. This is evidenced in the way she rejects Charles and the life she finds for herself within Exetor. Far from feeling the disgraced and shamed woman of the Victorian era that had been born and bred to be the proper lady, Sarah is happy and independent within the city. While her twin could have and possibly did exist in Victorian England, the sympathy of the author remains with the deviant character rather than agreeing with the ‘moral correctness’ of the status quo, an attitude that has already been shown to have been false for the age in that all deviant behavior was seen to be a sign of madness. The only true hint the reader gets of this is through the character of Dr. Grogan, who feels Sarah is suffering not from oppression of spirit but from a condition he terms melancholia. The only correct treatment for this, of course, is institutionalization. Charles’ ability to see the true cause is a reflection of the modern perspective and Sarah’s survival is brought about because of this understanding. Through these stories, it is possible to determine that the life of a Victorian woman was rigidly defined within complicated rules of manners and propriety all designed to preserve the value, in terms of reputation and purity, of a future wife. It is also possible to see how these definitions were being challenged by women of various types and social classes. As the female characters in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Dracula indicate, the changing culture of the nation in the 1800s began to define women more by their adherence to social norms than by birth status or monetary wealth. Women who adhered to the social constraints, such as Mina and Ernestine, were deemed acceptable regardless of whether they were rich or poor, educated or silly. Women who challenged these ideals, such as Lucy and Sarah, were ostracized and tormented, shunned until they were either brought back into submission or completely destroyed. The differing perspectives of the authors, though, provide differing conclusions for these women of deviance. The Victorian writer causes Lucy to be brutally murdered with a stake through the heart as a means of ensuring that her soul returned to her body and thus found its way to heaven. Only through this action can she be brought back into submission to the forces of the male. The modern writer allows for several possibilities for Sarah, including the possibility that she is sent away to Exeter and never heard from again. Another possibility is that she finds happiness and freedom there, regardless of whether or not she finally accepts Charles. Such a comparison highlights the changing values of a society as it is reflected within our literature. Works Cited Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. New York: Little, Brown and Company, (1969). Greenblatt, Stephen (Ed.). “Introduction: The Victorian Age.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 8. New York: W.W. Norton, (2005). Pope, Val. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Lit Notes. (2000). July 8, 2007 Roth, Christine. “The Victorian Governess.” Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin, Department of English, (2002). July 8, 2007 Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Penguin Popular Classics, (2007). Read More