This post may not belong in the “General Questions” category, but oh well.
I was wondering if British Literature, especially 18th and 19th centuries, was really written for women.
I’m in 12th grade senior AP English class, and I have just started E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View after completing Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. My classmates and I have started to notice that the themes of the books we are reading seem to all have feminist themes to them. The teacher is a single woman who graduated two years ago from grad school. She, in addition to constantly making remarks about men being pigs, claims that British novels were made for women. My class just finds it odd that every book we read has underlying feminazi themes.
So, is my teacher right? Are there really not any British books that aren’t feminist?
Well, those are two different questions, aren’t they? I mean, whether Victorian literature was primarily aimed at women and whether Victorian literature can be described as “feminist”?
I think that you could argue that much Victorian (and pre-Victorian) literature was aimed at women – after all, they initially were the primary audience of the novel, including the Gothic thriller (precursor to Jane Eyre), the romance, and the morality play. But not all literature of that period was aimed at women or written by women – in fact, only a small fraction was written by women. Examples of books neither written by women nor (IMO) especially aimed at women would include the works of Charles Dickens, Thakeray’s Vanity Fair, and Tom Jones.
And I don’t think there is much overt feminism in Victorian literature, but that’s just IMO.
Since this is GQ, I will try to avoid getting into a fight and just say that the fact most of your english lit books have feminist themes might have more to do with the politics of the the national curiculum than a general tendancy in Victorian Writting towards feminism.
In the early 18th century most novels were read by women, because educated men wouldn’t stoop so low. As such, I can see that feminists would take this form as their own. A woman who wrote and published under her own name was already a social outcast; adding feminist views wouldn’t harm her much more.
In the Victorian era women were far more repressed (so were men, BTW) than in earlier times, so the outlet became more important.
The Austen and Eyre books you mention aren’t indicative of feminist work of that era, though. They were creative outlets for the women, little more. I think you’re instructor is reading her own views into them. Read The Meridian Anthology of Early Women Writers for more information.
As for what Jodi said, Vanity Fair was written as a morality lesson for women.
Vitorian writing too. Also curriculum. You may want to insert a couple punctuation marks somewhere my post as well.(stupid phone calls while I’m typing).
Eh. That’s your take on it. Mine is that VF was written primarily to entertain, in direct competition to the serialized works of Charles Dickens. That appears to be clear from Thackeray’s own correspondence and from the fact that VF was itself first published as a serial. In fact, IIRC, it only reached its rather voluminous length due to its wild popularity, which encouranged Thackeray to spin it out for several more serialized “episodes” than were initially contemplated.
In any event, the character Becky Sharp IMO can only be considered a “morality lesson for women” if you take her at absolute face-value. Since its first publication, people have noted that Becky is by far the most vibrant and interesting character in the book – an anti-heroine, if you will, especially when contrasted to the other insipid female characters. I think we can agree that taking the “bad girl” and making her the most fun (and most independent) character in the book is not a really effective way to administer a morality lesson. Ironically, Vanity Fair IMO is one Victorian book where it can be legitimately argued that the precursors to feminism do appear.
First off, I’m not sure I understand why your teacher’s marital status is relevant.
If she has told you that these authors believed all men were pigs, she is certainly doing you and them a disservice. I doubt that Charlotte Bronte felt that way about her husband, or Austen about her brothers, or Forster about himself. They certainly don’t portray all men as pigs in their novels (at least two of 'em don’t – my recollections of Forster are a bit dim).
If she claims that nineteenth-century novels were written ONLY for women or that they ALL have feminist themes, she’s just plain wrong, as several posters to this thread have pointed out.
However, she’s quite within her rights to claim that many nineteenth-century novels do have overt (and deliberate) feminist themes. Charlotte Bronte’s are certainly among them; she has some fairly pointed things to say about the condition of women, both in her novels and her correspondence. (Her sister Anne was even more outspoken; check out The Tenant of Wildfell Hall if you really want to read a sweeping indictment of the marriage market and the belief that girls should be sheltered rather than educated.) She would have been quite aware of the contemporary movement to grant women more legal rights; she visited and corresponded with Harriet Martineau, one of the most prominent feminists of the day. Austen, on the other hand, probably wasn’t a feminist in any political sense, but she certainly protests certain sexist social institutions in her work – look at Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, who marries a complete dipstick because it’s the only way she can get some independence and respect. I don’t know enough about Forster to speak about his politics, but I’m sure somebody else can fill in the gaps.
BTW, many nineteenth-century women writers did publish under their own names; this didn’t make them social outcasts (as another poster has claimed) but it could make critics inclined to take them less seriously. The Brontes and George Eliot wrote under masculine pseudonyms in order to avoid being stereotyped as “silly lady novelists,” not because it would have caused a scandal. (Ms. Eliot was far from shy about scandal in any case, as her personal life evinces.)
Now there is a sterling example of 19th century feminism at its finest.
Cleland’s Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure (aka Fanny Hill was written for women?
I think the instructor in the OP is pushing a personal agenda. I don’t go along with wolfman’s conjecture that it is a matter of the “national curriculum” being overtly PC, but I would certainly guess that the selections made by the instructor could be.
As several other posters have mentioned, the nineteenth century did see the emergence of themes directed toward the “liberation” of women, usually, but not exclusively, from women authors. (It was not limited to a British phenomenon either, as a perusal of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Ibsen’s A Doll House illustrate.)
However, the giants of 19th century British literature were not, specifically, feminist in outlook or theme. Elizabeth Barret Browning gave voice to a woman’s perspective, but she never pushed for “emancipation.” Robert Browning seems to have been quite willing to support his wife in any effort she made, but his works do not push a “feminist agenda” in any way. Tennyson certainly did nothing to promote a notion of a “liberated” female. (Ever read either of his poems regarding The Lady of Shallott?)
Dickens wrote of the tragedies (and failures of society) that oppressed all people, but never dwelled specifically on the oppression of women. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has no feminist perspectives of which I am aware.
Byron? Keats? Percy Shelley? Wordsworth? Coleridge? Scott? Trollope? Hardy? The essayists, Lamb, Acton, Arnold, Mills, Carlysle? (Although Mills did write a single essay on the subject of Women’s Suffrage and appears to have admired his own wife’s intellect and strength of character). While traces of an egalitarian spirit emerge in places among one or another of these authors, nothing resembling a “feminist” ideology can be attributed to any of them.
And this is why I can’t get anywhere in my Ph.D. I don’t like politicization of the novel: political novels, IMO (not humble at all) are crap. The attempt to create feminist/racial/sexuality themes within them undermines the art. I have gotten my cookies crumbled more than a few times for refusing to believe that Kate Chopin is a better writer than Ernest Hemingway (related to a change in a textbook I teach with) merely because she owned a vagina.
If the novel is good, if it is art, the politics are at best tertiary to other aspects contained within, and again in my not-at-all humble opinion, those who force their politics on their students are doing them a disservice.
On the other hand, I recognize the existence of political subtexts in a novel–Invisible Man is one of my dissertation topics–but I feel that they should be taught as secondary to the art of a good novel. An example: on my campus there is a strong Green movement. We are encouraged (through weekly fliers–how many trees does this kill?) to aim all of our classes, writing topics, and reading assignments toward making our students “Greenies.” But am I doing them a better service by assigning them Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang or Hemingway? When politics gets in the way of education, we’re advocating, not educating. It sounds like the teacher in the OP is a product of the system as it stands (and seems to be, hopefully, crumbling) now, a system in which politicization stands above art.
To quote Nabokov, please pardon the Proustian parentheses.