Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen

The ways in which both men and women were expected to behave are explored in several of the readings from this section. As far as men are concerned, John Henry Cardinal Newman in his [Definition of a Gentleman] from The Idea of a University seems to believe that a good gentleman is just that: a gentle man. He doesn’t raise his fist in anger, and his goal during any event or occasion is to keep everyone happy and satisfied, we see this when Newman says, “his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home” (563). “He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles” implies that a good gentleman of the time was expected to be somewhat of a push over (564). Yes, there are times for patience and being accepting of other’s philosophies and views, but there are also times to stand up for your own with conviction and with certainty that that’s how you feel and Newman makes no reference to the importance of these types of qualities in a man- at least not in a gentleman.

Sarah Stickney Ellis feels that women are on Earth for the purpose of being man’s “second conscience” (557). It is up to the woman to be the solace that a man needs when returning home from a world that is conflicting and may be confusing to him. In order for the woman to be able to serve as a comforter, she must be shielded from the outside world that her male counterparts need to be taken away from every night. This separation of worlds, an inside world for the female and an outside one for the male, is necessary, in Ellis’s opinion, for the success of the family and therefore, of the society in which they live. I cannot say I agree with this philosophy, especially being a somewhat liberal American, but I do understand it in the context of the times. What I don’t agree with from her writing is found on page 558 when she says:

“Look at all the heroines, whether of romance or reality-at all the female characters that are held up to universal admiration-at all who have gone down to honoured graves, amongst the tears and lamentations of their survivors. Have these been the learned, the accomplished women; the women who could speak many languages, who could solve problems, and elucidate systems of philosophy? No…” (558).

Maybe I have been in school too long to agree with this statement, but I feel that many of the women, dead or alive, that I look up to have had a significant education in some way or another. They have accomplished things worth being remembered for, and if they didn’t accomplish anything of significance, what is the purpose in honoring them? Considering the times, there probably weren’t many women who received educations so many of the women that people admired were queens and women of high stature, so my opinion on the statement could also be a reflection of the ways in which society has changed.

John Stuart Mills

It was interesting reading John Stuart Mill’s “Statement Repudiating the Rights of Husbands,” especially when reading it after Robert Browning’s selections about the control men exhibited over their wives. After reading the caption that went along with the statement, I learned that husbands literally had rights to their wives, and once married, women were not able to sign legal contracts or own any property (527). Women were subjected to the status of slaves or children, and I’m sure in some manner or instances they were treated as such, as we may be able to assume after reading Robert Browning.

So with this background in mind, of male dominance over woman, it makes sense that men of that time lost sight of what the institution of marriage was meant to be. Call me old-fashioned, but marriage is the union of two people, not the dominance and control of one over the other. Mills himself understands and acknowledges these virtues of marriage and wants it to be known that he thinks it’s important the woman he intends to marry “retains in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action, and freedom of disposal of herself and of all that does or may at any time belong to her, as if no such marriage had taken place” (527). He emphasizes that her own personal rights are much more important than him having any more control over her than he would normally have over any woman he wasn’t married to. The society’s general attempt to control their women is almost absurd after having live in America during this time period for all of my life.

Considering that Mills was a utilitarian and his growing up was heavily influenced by his utilitarian father, I wonder whether or not it is generally expected for him to feel this way about the relationships between men and women. After checking the dictionary, I saw that utilitarianism is about making sure that one’s conduct in society should maximize happiness of the majority of people. Also, from the introduction, I read that Mills was passionate and radical about promoting the ideas of “sexual equality, the right to divorce, universal suffrage, free speech, and proportional representation” (513). So it does make sense that he would want his own wife to have freedoms that weren’t accepted for married women at that time in England.

What do I take of John Stuart Mills? I think that he was probably a revolutionary, especially at that time in England because he was associated with being a radical. I do however, think that he wasn’t the only one who felt the way he felt. I’ve already read Robert Browning and, assuming his poems were more satirical than reflections of his actual views, he also felt that men’s control over women had become too extreme. I respect Mills for writing what he wrote about the rights of women and such and for being so adamant about things changing, if it weren’t for him and other revolutionaries throughout time, things may have never changed.

Robert Browning

Browning, at least from two of his selections, Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess, seems to be interested in exploring the relationship of love, beauty, power and violence.

The Duke in “My Last Duchess,” as Dr. Glance said on his podcast, reveals more about himself than he probably intended. It was interesting how his monologue went from talking about the painting, to the beauty of the woman, to her personal life, to his involvement in her personal life. He may unintentionally allude to the controlling behavior of how he treated her and the reader must use their imagination to decide what really happened to his duchess. She smiled too much, and probably to the wrong people but because of his controlling manliness, he doesn’t argue, but rather takes action, doing what he has to do to stop her smiles. Even in her death he has a curtain around the painting so he can further control who sees her inviting smile and who doesn’t. Even by having the painting made in the first place shows that he wanted to immortalize her in some way, whether this is because of his love for her or some obsession or admiration of her beauty we can’t really say. But either way, it does show that he still needed to control the aspects of their marriage that he could.

In “Porphyria’s Lover” we see a man who may very well have loved the woman he was with, because we at least see that she loved him, calling to him when she came in from the rain and “murmuring how she loved [him],” showing her affection and her love (663). When he says, “That moment she was mine, mine fair,/ Perfectly pure and good,” he feels that he must do something to keep this feeling, of being loved by her, of being worshipped by her, as he says, and decides that the best way to keep this feeling alive forever, is to stop it right then and there (663). Stopping her from saying or doing anything else will help him believe forever that she loved him indefinitely.

The women in these two selections are made out to be the victims of a sort of blind love, being killed by men who need to control them, in the highest form of control- taking their lives. This can be related to the need of men to control behavior and such, especially someone who came from high rank and had power, like the Duke from “My Last Duchess.” I do wonder what Browning’s purpose was in writing these poems in this manner. Possibly he was using these stories as extreme examples of how men can take their power too far and was condemning this type of behavior.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I want to focus on “The Lady of Shalott” for this blog because there seems to be a lot involved in it. After looking over it a few times, and listening to Dr. Glance’s podcast, I realized that every stanza ends in the word Shalott, and line 5 of every stanza ends in Camelot, but there are two exceptions to this trend. Line 77 of Part 3 reads “Of bold Sir Lancelot” (591). This is our first time knowing about Lancelot, why he is in Shalott we do not know, but we do see that, assuming Part 3 is written in Lady Shalott’s point of view, Lady Shalott thinks highly of him in her description that follows- highly enough to leave her station in order to find him.

The second exception is line 108 at the end of the stanza when Lady Shalott hears him singing, it reads: “Sang Sir Lancelot” (591). The very next line reads: “She left the web, she left the loom,” symbolizing her sudden entrancement and fixation on finding this beautiful man (591). What I found conflicting about the piece is that at the end of the stanza, she says “The curse is come upon me,” locking in her fate, knowing what is going to happen next (591). But the reason it’s so conflicting is that if she knows what is in store for her, it bothers me that she can’t simply stop herself. Perhaps the point is to say that people will weave these webs entangling themselves to their own tragic fate, and once fate is involved, what else is there that could control our lives more than that?

Every single remaining stanza of Part 4 ends with the line “The Lady of Shalott,” showing that she is perhaps leaving her mark as she progresses toward, and finally arrives at, Camelot (592). It seems that if Tennyson was more concerned with Lady Shalott leaving her mark on the world he would have kept the original ending, with her having the last word. In changing the ending, I think he felt a need to be sure that the reader didn’t think that Lancelot was inhumane or didn’t have the ability to show any remorse. I don’t think that Lancelot should be mistaken for someone who doesn’t care about the lady because it isn’t his fault that he was the outlet for the fulfillment of her curse.

On a side note: it seems that Tennyson had a certain tendency to write about death. From the introduction, we see that his first paid poem was an ode on the death of his grandmother, but we also see that the first several writings in his section of the anthology involve death, including the death of the giant beast in "The Kraken," the woman who cries out wishing she were dead in "Mariana," and "The Lady of Shalott", whose entrancement causes her own death. I’m not sure of what this could mean, perhaps Tennyson simply wanted to maintain that death is inevitable, even in some of his mildly fantastic and unrealistic pieces.

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle felt, and possibly rightfully so, that people in society were moving to a state of mind that was less concerned with helping others and making the world a better place and more concerned with their own personal gratification. Now I will say that I am someone who believes that you should always try to do better for yourself, always improving yourself and not becoming complacent. However, improving yourself is about a lot more than just making more money, being successful is about a lot more than just longing for gold as Carlyle’s reference to Midas described (480). Carlyle used his sarcasm to show that a perpetual longing for money and wealth may very well get you just that- but money doesn’t buy happiness, and it didn’t for Midas either.

Something that I really liked about Carlyle is that he used current events, things that were actually going on, that had actually happened, to help prove his point. From Gospel of Mammonism, he talks about an Irish widow that likely had no means of getting food and maintaining shelter for her children who goes in search of finding someone who might be willing to help her in this desperate situation and no one does. The “Charitable Establishments” that Carlyle refers to all turn her away, and eventually she becomes ill with typhus fever (480). Not only does she become ill and dies, but so do 17 other people around her. It’s interesting here how Carlyle shows a lack of humanity of the people around her, meaning that they refuse to help her. But then we see just how much of a human she and the others were, becoming sick the way that they did, showing their mortality.

Carlyle warns that if England continues in this manner, we will see the wrath of God: “Our England, our world cannot live as it is. It will connect itself with God again, or go down with nameless throes and fire-consummation to the Devils” (484). Attempting to foreshadow the coming of God, Carlyle is making a point that humans can either rise like gods or fall like devils. On page 485 he says, “Let God’s justice, let pity, nobleness and manly valour, … testify themselves in this your Life-transit to all Eternities, Gods and Silences,” reminding us that this thing we call Life is only a portion of the Eternity that we are here for (485). We are here to work, but we are also responsible for each other.

Industrialism: Beginning of the Victorian Age

The ironic thing about the writings in this section that lead to the Victorian Age is that their theme is awfully reminiscent to the writings from the French Revolution, which brought in the Romantics. The bulk of these writings reflect either the pros or the cons to what is going on with the new advancements in technology of the time. So for some positive takes on the new use of science, we turn to the account of Fanny Kemble who was the first woman to ride on the steam locomotive, despite all of the opposition that came along with it being built. She loves it, with the new feeling of being able to cut through the air unlike before and to feel like flying as she described it was amazing (491). Also, on that very same page, we start to read about Macaulay who simply described these new advances as the "natural progress of society"(491).

People like Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engles and Henry Mayhew were not so optimistic about the new changes in society. In his account of an industrialized city he calls "Coketown," Dickens gives a very negative description of everything that is going on, going so far as to describe the new factories and machinery as giant prisons. He is upset that there is no longer a need for working with the seasons or with daylight, because of the new technology, people don't need to rely on the sun or warm weather for work. In his last sentence of his passage, he talks about gentlemen "that lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter, and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable," saying that if these are the kind of people that an industrialized society produces, people who are wasteful and ungrateful of what they are given, then it is not a very good society (498).

Mayhew takes a turn similar to that of Blake's depictions of the Chimney Sweepers in his poems with the Watercress Girl. He, like Dickens, is unsure that society can properly function with people who are so detached from one another's lives. In particular, he speaks of this one 8 year old girl who's only purpose is to labor over watercress, who is already familiar with the "bitterest struggles of life" but has yet to ever play in a park or with toys (508). He also tells a similar heart-wrenching story of A Boy Crossing-Sweeper.

Luckily, at least from what I can see, living in America, industrialism has progressed to a stage where child labor is no longer needed, nor tolerated for that matter. But we must ask ourselves whether or not the forewarnings from writers like Dickens, Mayhew, and Engels had any substance value. If you think about, because of technology, we aren't even sitting in a class room having a personal discussion about these readings, we're writing blogs, does that mean that we're not personal with each other. Or for instance, when walking across campus and you see a familiar face you don't recognize, do you just look away or at your phone instead of saying "Hi"? I think that Engels said it best when he said that Industrialism will do nothing more than create an "isolation of the individual- this narrow-minded egotism" (502).

Felicia Hemans

The hardest aspect about Felicia Hemans is trying to understand exactly what kind of writer she was - at least as far as her views on a woman's place are concerned. The women in some of her poems from the selected reading can be taken as very traditional and docile, while others can be seen as very heroic and passionate. After considering Hemans own life, one would probably think that she is less on the traditional side, seeing as how her own father left her family while she was a teenager and even her own husband ended up leaving her family. So while raising her children, their was no male dominant image in the picture for her, so it's easy to see how her writings may have reflected a woman scorned or may have even been "making fun" of the traditional housewife.

The woman depicted as the Wife of Asdrubal may seem rather demented and extremely intense. I had to reread certain parts of the poem just to be sure that I was understanding that she was actually burning herself and her children alive. But this may be a very romantic idea, that the woman would rather die than live to be the wife of a coward and have the children of a coward. Dr. Glance in his podcast asks is this woman a heroic female, a spurned lover, or a homicidal mother? I would like to say that more than anything she is a reflection of Felicia Hemans herself.

Hemans probably related the story of this woman to her own life, with her husband leaving her to go to Italy for "ill health" as the introduction reads in the book (405). Regardless, Asdrubal left his family in order to save his own life, and in some way, perhaps Hemans felt the same way about her own Captain. So she took her children and did the best thing she could think to do. Luckily, Hemans wasn't as extreme and vindictive as the wife of Asdrubal, because Hemans simply went back to live with her mother while the martyr of our story killed herself and the children, hoping that the "avenging spirits" of the children haunt Asdrubal "Till vain remorse thy wither'd heart consume, Scourged by relentless shadows of the tomb!" (408). She obviously wants her husband to pay for the shame that he put upon himself and his family in order to avert death, and perhaps the same is true for Hemans.

It is intersting to note, however, that the wife's name is never given, perhaps this is simply because there is no historical account of what her name was. But as far as the significance that it has to this poem, Hemans herself probably felt that women are too often not given credit for their own actions. Instead of history writing her down as this strong prideful woman who would rather die than be shamed, all her actions are based off of this cowardly man. History doesn't even recognize her as being her own person, the only way she will ever be known is as the wife of Asdrubal.