Content Category
Literary Criticism
Abstract/Description
The Victorian era is marked by many socio-economic reforms, leading the way to greater female freedom in—and from—the home, culminating in the form of the New Woman. The struggles of women under a system which repressed any desire to be anything outside the dictated mold of femininity before, reform by reform, they were given more freedom such way is recorded in Victorian Literature through the trope of masculine female characters. Authors female and male used “masculine” traits on their female characters to emphasize her humanity—and her struggles under a system which denied it— as a tool to promote reform. Wuthering Heights, Daniel Deronda, and Jude the Obscure are examples taken from early, middle, and late Victorian periods, respectively, and represent a broad scope of themes and issues. However, connecting them all is that figure of the masculine woman, who embodied the masculine desire to act. In Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw and Cathy Linton, serve to show how education can help a woman escape the limits of marriage. Daniel Deronda’s Gwendolyn shows how the idea that women cannot inherit forces women into subservience to their husband, pushing for reform on that front. Finally, Jude the Obscure and its heroine Sue Bridehead takes the issue of marriage and pushes it to the point that the problems posed by marriage cannot be overcome through any means other than a rejection of the institution itself, thus marking the arrival of the New Woman in literature. Thus, the struggles, triumphs, and failures of these masculine women of Victorian novels echoes the actual journey of women throughout the Victorian period fighting for the liberation of their gender that would culminate in the birth of the New Women near the end of the period.
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Origin of Submission
as part of a class
Faculty Involvement
Lorraine Wood
The New Woman in embryo: Masculine women in Victorian Novels
The Victorian era is marked by many socio-economic reforms, leading the way to greater female freedom in—and from—the home, culminating in the form of the New Woman. The struggles of women under a system which repressed any desire to be anything outside the dictated mold of femininity before, reform by reform, they were given more freedom such way is recorded in Victorian Literature through the trope of masculine female characters. Authors female and male used “masculine” traits on their female characters to emphasize her humanity—and her struggles under a system which denied it— as a tool to promote reform. Wuthering Heights, Daniel Deronda, and Jude the Obscure are examples taken from early, middle, and late Victorian periods, respectively, and represent a broad scope of themes and issues. However, connecting them all is that figure of the masculine woman, who embodied the masculine desire to act. In Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw and Cathy Linton, serve to show how education can help a woman escape the limits of marriage. Daniel Deronda’s Gwendolyn shows how the idea that women cannot inherit forces women into subservience to their husband, pushing for reform on that front. Finally, Jude the Obscure and its heroine Sue Bridehead takes the issue of marriage and pushes it to the point that the problems posed by marriage cannot be overcome through any means other than a rejection of the institution itself, thus marking the arrival of the New Woman in literature. Thus, the struggles, triumphs, and failures of these masculine women of Victorian novels echoes the actual journey of women throughout the Victorian period fighting for the liberation of their gender that would culminate in the birth of the New Women near the end of the period.