The Plight of Women in 19th Century England

England

This paper is concerned with setting the theoretical underpinnings of the social, political, cultural and economic contexts of the nineteenth century that had an ascertained impact on the woman seen not only as the subjected, faithful creature, but also as a member of the societal order able to create a whirl at a political and social level. I commence by establishing the potentialities of the woman in the domain of the gender and of the genre, by determining whether she did or did not influence the historical unfolding.

A figure of the nineteenth century that is worth being mentioned is the governess as an individual who rests at the junction of two opposite, yet sometimes complementary hierarchical societies, namely the bourgeoisie and the lower class. This topic will take me to the next theme that points out the most relevant aspects of the emancipation of the nineteenth-century's woman who will be epitomized in the image of the "woman in the attic" (or the lunatic). All these sub-chapters are bound to create an inaugural ambience for what the Gothic meant and for what it exhibited in the belletristic arena.

The nineteenth-century's women, and, particularly, the women writers, were human beings subjected to moral ordeals that were predestined to position them under gawky postures; discretion and genteel manners inundated the woman's society. Needless to say, these women felt least complacent in this situation. In Shirley (1848), to provide a specific example, Charlotte Brontë described the insufficiency of the condition of the spinsters who were excluded from the outside world, their only social interactions being the tedious tea parties 'spiced' up by menial conversations; for this reason, Charlotte's character is considered unwomanly due to the vim with which she exposes her ideals and thoughts.

Clearly, the early nineteenth-century woman stepped sideways out of society only to embark upon the road that led to the bohemian world that camouflaged any tint of sexual desire, thus creating a universe where women were accepted as writers but not as ladies. Later on, in the same nineteenth century, the force of the discourses of some of the first European feminists like Barbauld and Wollstonecraft helped the emergence of a new trend in thought that promoted the idea according to which all women were capable of entering the mainstream. These women could write and behave like ladies without losing that touch of homely warmth of their spirit.

The historians assessed the nineteenth century feminist movement from three viewpoints. The first focus refers to the manifestations connected to women organized with the intent to cause the reform. The second focus records the women's endeavour for gaining persona, social, legal, political rights and liberties. The third source is found in the women's biographical or non-biographical literature. The authors believe though that these materials convey, in an explicit or an implicit manner, only particular aspects of the nineteenth century feminists and their politics, thus not being necessarily a reliable source[1].

The three Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne), for instance, are genuine creators of literary art whose works share the same fruitful sentiment of belonging to a fantasy world meant to transgress the surrounding environment that seems hostile and whimsical. Along with Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, and other authors of Gothic literature, the Brontës made a statement by settling the rightful place of the Woman who can and will express her intimacies, her desires, her pathos, her feral nature.

In her chapter devoted to the rise of gender, Elaine Showalter made a distinct cut between the masculine form of discourse and its feminine counterpart. She begins by italicizing the idea that speech, no matter its content, is by its nature marked by gender due to the fact that grammatical categories extant in all languages rely on gender. Moreover, the linguistic norm is the masculine since it is "generic, universal, or marked" while the feminine is at all times marked "by a suffix or some other variant"[2].

This is a starting point of discussion for Monique Witting who acknowledges the battle between the gender meanings in the linguistic realm. But one must bear in mind that not all men have the capacity to capture the general, while not all women are able to perceive only the particular, although "the universal has been, and is, continually at every moment, appropriated by men"[3].

Luce Irigaray in "This Sex Which is Not One" accentuates the pauperism in the representation of the female sexuality as an individual, strong enough concept because "female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters. [...] About woman and her pleasure, this view of the sexual relation has nothing to say. Her lot is that of "lack", "atrophy" (of the sexual organ), and "penis envy", the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value". The anti-Freudian, sarcastic position is evident here: "Thus she attempts by every means available to appropriate that organ for herself: through a somewhat servile love of the father-husband capable of giving her one, through her desire for a child-penis, preferably a boy, through access to the cultural values still reserved by right to males alone and therefore always masculine, and so on."[4]

Throughout history, 'gender' has been considered within the vast framework of a historical, national, racial and sexual context. The factor that utterly determined the definition and the implications of the gender was culture. The scientism of the Enlightenment made a lucent distinction concerning the gender discongruity by making references to the medical notion of sensibility. It was believed that women were 'endowed' with a large amount of sensitivity that was common among children, and that these women were therefore more passionate than men due to "the great mobility of their fibres, especially those in the uterus; hence their irritability, and suffering from vapors"[5]. Consequently, the high-minded authorities in the medical domain concluded that women had a deeper perception of the surrounding things, that they are "tougher and softer, more vulnerable and more tenacious of life than men"[6]. But all these traits were a metaphor for the woman as a dependent creature, Cabanis pointed out: "This muscular feebleness inspires in women an instinctive disgust of strenuous exercise; it draws them towards amusements and sedentary occupations. One could add that the separation of their hips makes walking more painful for women...This habitual feeling of weakness inspires less confidence...and as a woman finds herself less able to exist on her own, the more she needs to attract the attention of others, to strengthen herself using those around her whom she judges most capable of protecting her."[7]

Victorian England disdained the fluctuating differences between lying and telling the utter truth due to the preoccupation for the ethical limits that chiseled the Victorian behaviour towards the social distinction of class and gender. The honesty/dishonesty blurring contrast in the Victorian times is a primal instrument used for reshaping the lines of class and gender established through moral and ethical differentiations. Women were defined in terms of solely their role of bearers of children which characterized their body and mind and established their psychological capabilities and their limited roles in the society since their "sphere of action was the private arena of home and family". Men, on the other hand, were the potent force of the social and cultural boost. In the 18^th century, the theories on gender were dominated by some sets of dichotomies that highlighted the profound abyss between the genders:

nature vs culture

woman vs man

physical vs mental

mothering vs thinking

feeling and superstition vs abstract knowledge and thought

darkness vs light

nature vs science and civilization[8]

The modernist and postmodernist feminist theories concerning gender and sex aim at bringing light in a domain that left aside "the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past" namely to envisage the impact that the "sex roles" and the "sexual symbolism" had on the development/changing of the social order[9].

By entering the world and the literary society like an intruder, the woman has sinned one more time because the universe of the woman writers extends to a horizon of endless domination. For Showalter, gender implies more than just the facet of the difference seen as the embodiment of the sexes as "separate and equal", but it is also a question of "power" as reflected by the history of the gender relations. One can easily remark the "sexual asymmetry, inequality, and male dominance in every known society"[10]. A woman's work was regarded for centuries as a blasphemy, as a sin, as an eternal damnation. These are prejudices that lasted for centuries.

Luce Irigaray, following Lacan's tradition, discusses the probability of understanding "female desire and female language" as "shards, scattered remnants of a violated sexuality", as a denied sexuality. She pinpoints the fact that "the rejection, the exclusion of a female imaginary certainly puts woman in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily, in the little-structured margins of a dominant ideology, as waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) "subject" to reflect himself, to copy himself." The woman's desire can only be testified covertly, "with anxiety and guilt'. But there still remains an unsolved issue: "But if the female imaginary were to deploy itself, if it could bring itself into play otherwise than scraps, uncollected debris, would it represent itself, even so, in the form of one universe?"[11]

On a strict literary plane, the sensibility, the vulnerability, the fragility that were once qualified as 'feminine weakness' actually become the weapons that the women bring in the 'duel of the sexes'. The finite product of these changes and a natural consequence is the feminine, conscious literature and writing. Who could explain a woman's life and her imagination better than a woman? The daily life, the physical and the emotional feelings, the personal experiences, the life of each 'anonymous' individual made a contribution so that the woman's voice could be heard. As Virginia Woolf puts it: 'The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It's only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life - the number of her children, whether she had money for of herself, whether she had a room of her own, whether she had any help in bringing her children, if she had servants, what part of the household was her task - it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life that made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or for the failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.'[12]

For some critics, gender determines the manner in which a work is perceived, or how a piece of literature is read. There have been formulated many critiques and theories (especially of feminist background) that assert that, after all, feminism has transformed the viewpoint of the beliefs that proclaim that women are sentimental, emotional readers. For a woman, reading is a form of identifying against herself since she is 'forced' to identify herself as a male while engaging in the act of reading.

Reading female writers implies therefore a type of less defensive reading and a different perspective upon the text. Feminists agreed upon the fact that women's writings are "in dialogue with both masculine and feminine traditions", that they are therefore "bi-textual". This produces the intrusion of gender relations in the textual body of the female writer who is now permanently confronted with the "dominant male discourse" through an act of re-construction of the male spirit, through acts of "revision, appropriation, and subversion"[13]. Women's texts, both literary and critical, become "inevitably and continually engaged with patrilineal sources" thus reflecting a "double-voiced discourse" that is far from being gender-free[14]. It is therefore impossible for the women writers to ignore the "inescapable plurality".

From a cultural viewpoint, we are dealing with an "immasculation of women by men" since "as readers and teachers, women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny".[15] This process of immasculation is far from imbibing the woman reader with virility or force. It actually enhances her oppression because she is confronting not only "the powerlessness which derives from not seeing one's experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art" through the male-dominated discourse but "the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self, the consequence of the invocation to identify as male while being reminded that to be male...is to be not female". From this standpoint, the power of the male texts resides in the witty manipulation of the "false consciousness into which women as well as men have been socialized". [16]

Feminism comes as a reaction against this manifestation and "no matter if feminism is a critical and a subversive movement, or a creative one, it represents a struggle against the very existence of power, a struggle for a mode of organization and life which would no longer be maintained by the distinctions of sex, class, and race."[17]

The research performed on the Victorian mode of veiling deeds and values reveal the moral paradoxes of the post-romantic subjectivity by emphasizing the mentally ample possibilities of self-incongruity, id est the moral tracings in Victorian age can equally affirm "deviation and evasion" and honesty. This is proved by the psychoanalytic model included in the Victorian perspective on the psyche that refers to a "lying function" as the nexus between unconsciousness and consciousness.[18] Also a form of elusion and displacement, lying as a "passionate repression" can be perceived as an index of the energies potent in a surface/depth mental mould that authorizes the superiority of the depth. The strategies of romantic creations are in fact based on the formation of psychic depth through repression or veiling.

In Victorian culture, what dominates is the "arbitrary overcoding" of the sexual relations, of a prohibited facet of experience endowed with psychic traits, instead of a revealing of the repressed value. For this reason, there existed a much exaggerated investment of lying in Victorian writing because, Kucich argued, the "centrality of honesty" in what was considered "official" in the Victorian culture was the cause of the incapability of the writers to destroy the link between desire and dishonesty. Moreover, any discourse that was capable of mastering the force of lies and of including them within "official standards of moral uprightness", thus of becoming a discourse of "symbolic transgression", grew into a potential social transformer.[19]

In the novels that were published after 1840, we encounter certain patterns, themes, problems and images that can be attributed to a sort of 'feminist subculture' which created a discrepancy between the woman's mode of writing and feeling and the man's perception of reality. ElaineShowalter reaches the conclusion that the value of the woman writer is not even important, because "the feminist writers [of the 19th century] were not important artists", but without offering a definition of what she considers to be 'important' or 'artist'. The solidarity that haunts the relationship between women is the natural consequence of the "entire female sexual life cycle", a ritual and a secretive physical experience that women share. The writings of the women are bound to perpetrate this "feminine awareness and commonality" that brought them together as a valid social force[20].

But in the 19^th century, the enlightened minds overturned the 'natural order' and set the bases of the feminine emancipation. Writers like Elizabeth Barett Browning, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, George Eliot fleshed out a variety of female protagonists who, although engaged in the same specter of the daily, menial life, offered the proof of the same moral strength as the male protagonists that preceded them. From Jane Eyre to Elizabeth Benett, the heroines of the 19^th century are voluntary women, capable of leading a dynamic and independent existence by living outside the limited frame of a domestic life. They reached an exploitation of the self, an escape of the spirit and a new orientation, a new sense given to their existence. This way, a singular space is being offered a contour, a space in which, beyond all the prejudices, beyond any inhibition, the women begin their literary odyssey as writers. This is the product of unrest, of centuries of silence and interior turmoil. In the context of the social and political transformations in the entire Europe, the women begin to see writing as a profession. That's the manner in which 'the other half of the humanity' makes its presence perceived after centuries of imposed silence.

This wave of 19^th century women writers didn't bring just a new female prototype but they also tried to impose the Woman. As some critics say, the lives of half of the humanity are not omitted anymore by the fault and the will of the other half. The "gynocritics" is, today, the prevalent mode of feminist critique, and it is about the woman as a writer, about the study of "history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women; the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or collective female career; and the evolution of laws of a female literary tradition"[21]. This feminist posture stems from the acknowledgement of the androcentric literary canon that has an almost irreversible effect on women readers.

Women step ahead, they look as if they will bury men in weakness, sexuality, sentiments, delicacy, the need for affection and care and other essentials of the human development that were left unsolved.

In the 19^th century, the women demanded rights and liberties that attested the fact that they were not mere natural accessories for men. The 19^th century woman claims the right to belong to herself, to live in accordance with the living standards that she finds suitable for herself. She wants her voice to be a heard.

All these women writers were self-educated, they extracted the pith for their works from their own remarks, observations, and felt discrimination, from their unguided readings, only to write with a jocund sensibility and spontaneity works of art that knew nothing of the literary canon. But, 'the intellectual and social significance of the bulk of their novels is negligible'[22] due to the fact that the consolidation of the society they were a part of was based on principles long-before rooted in the citizens' mind.

The description of these 19^th century women writers is synthesized in the phrase 'the woman in the attic' in the context of a patriarchal type of cultural culture, as I shall later develop.

Our wishful thinking about the Victorian sexuality or, more precisely, on the Victorian avoidance of sexuality, is criticized by the French historian Michel Foucault who questions the tradition on Victorian sexuality. He argues that the Victorians were not at all constrained to be silent about sex, but they were encouraged to talk about it in discourses of "knowledge and power".[23]

Foucault argues that the concept of "sexuality" was constructed in the 19^th century when the religious moral discourses were transformed by the more scientific discourses of medicine, biology, psychology, economy, criminology, and law. Hence the reticences of the Victorians were merely a "tactical diversion in the great process of transforming sex into discourse", and sexuality produced sexualities, sexual identities that were "reinforced by hosts of perversions".[24] This alludes to the fact that we are to look at the "unusual" forms of sexuality as means of understanding the human identity in general which is expressed in the discursive configuration that creates the "awareness of sexuality" as a historical phenomenon that responds to social and political forces.

Foucault creates a perfect distinction between sexuality and constraint by completely refusing the mere idea of a connection between the two. For Foucault, the paradigm of oppression is replaced with a theory that employs new concepts used in the capitalist environment, namely knowledge and strength. The French historian fights against the Freudian standpoint by suggesting that repression is far from being characteristic of sexuality in general and especially of the Victorian one, in particular. The Freudian and the Marxist theories used the term "repression" to emphasize the fact that, with the ascent of the bourgeoisie in the early 19^th century, sex practically vanished, that it was removed from one's conscience and from one's practice.

Foucault not only led a powerful criticism against the theories that claimed the inexistence of sexuality in the Victorian England, but he also proved the very contrary. He showed that, in fact, sexuality blossomed like never before during the late 18^th century and throughout the 19^th century. Attention must be drawn to the fact that sexuality does not refer necessarily to sexual physical satisfaction, but to the development of the discourse on sexuality.

Foucault's theory is based on the logical conclusion that discourses on sexuality could not have met such an expansion while being repressed or constrained to silence, and he wants to dismantle the false relationship that has been attributed to power and sex, a relation seen as constraining for sexuality. Foucault dismantles this theory by showing that power actually is the seed out of which sexuality grows, and his project, aiming at capturing the history of sexuality both diachronically and anachonically, should be based on power seen as a generator of sexuality, not on the constraints that lie at the basis of the social sexual phenomenon.

The discourses on sexuality are not only the reflexions of an ideological viewpoint, but also strongly related to power since they offer a contour to the majority of the members of the society to which these discourses are directed. From this standpoint, the history of sexuality has the purpose of interpreting the discourses on sexuality in order to reveal the forms given to sexual matters. If we look closer at the Victorian discourses of the British bourgeoisie, we are to uncover the nature of sex and of sexuality only by reading between the lines. But the author emphasizes the fact that not only the written discourse is viable for the purpose of inventorying the history of sexuality, but also the spoken discourse. For such reasons, the books on sex and about sex are not necessarily a reliable source and index for the sexual trend existent in a certain time, in a certain society.

What Foucault is looking for are the genuine discourses, meaning that he is reading beyond the surface structure of the concepts because the discourses are "loci of power" that imply the approaching of a text not from the point of view of the author, nor from that of the audience to which the discourse was directed, but from the standpoint of the existent or non-existent relationship between power and sex. His work relies on the writings of the doctors who treat sexual "abnormalities", on the correspondence of the priest, the psychotherapists' dossiers, and so on.

The centre of the sexual discourse is related to two stages in the Christian tradition, namely the period up to the 17^th century and another one that comes next after the Reformation. In the first phase, the priest was interested in the sexual activities of the parishioners and sexuality referred exclusively to the body which allowed a primitive and brutal discourse on sexuality.

After the Reformation and the Counter Reformation the priests become more interested in the intensions of the sexual activities, thus defining sexuality as related to both the mind and the body. The discourse on sex and on sexuality is now interspersed with fantasies and daring thoughts. Everything is skimmed through in minute detail. Foucault claims that Christianity, through its imperatives towards confession, was a manner of increasing the interest in sexuality and in intimate practices. The period, marked by the Christian thoughts and practice, is only the prelude to the important transformation of the discourse on sexuality that takes place in capitalism.

Foucault argues that this event had nothing to do with the mercantile society and thought but with the "scientification" of the discourse on sex. He claims that the religious confessional that implied the intimate interrogation about sex set both the silence and the mystery upon the sexual activities, and it also became the symbol of the interest of the societal institutions in the portraying and especially in the codifying of the sexual practices. For Foucault, the discourse on sexuality is one that masters and influences through "the tactics of power" within this structure.[25] This means that sex in itself is not such an important part in a human being's life because, in the early bourgeois period, it was "only" a discourse around which there were being maneuvered the "tactics of power". What Foucault claims is that sexuality is merely a political tool of the bourgeoisie.[26] Sexuality is not a means of revealing our inner Ego, but it is a matter of subject of the discourses that we create in our aim at reaching power. Reality is therefore what we construct for ourselves, as members of a community, in a permanent struggle for power.

Sexuality is, in Foucault's view, a historical construct, and he proves that all the constraints related to sex in the classical period were mere inventions of the ruling classes: "the exclusive promotion of adult marital sexuality, the imperatives of decency, the obligatory concealment of the body, the reduction to silence and mandatory reticences of language".[27]

If some still believe that language is illimitable, Foucault claims that language as a discourse is constrained by the limit of what can be uttered or not: "In every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its power and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality".[28] Discourse thus becomes restricted by what can be spoken of, by how one can speak, and by who can speak, all these due to the "rules of exclusion" of what is forbidden.

As readers, we have to be able to surpass our fear concerning the encounter with what is dangerous and shocking in one's discourse, a fear concerning "everything that could possibly be violent, discontinuous, querulous, disordered even and perilous in the discourse". And this fear can be outrun by our "restoring to discourse its character as an event" and by destroying "the sovereignty of the signifier".[29]

By referring to the example of the homosexuals in the Victorian age, Foucault argued that until then there were only homosexual behaviours, not homosexuals. This is connected to the power of the discourse not only to describe but also to build up social constructs. In those times, there emerged the creation of a clear-cut distinction between normal psychological behaviour and the alien behaviour attributed to the homosexuals' different psychological structure. The homosexual was now perceived as being gender-confused, and this separated him from the rest of the society.[30]

In the nineteenth century, it has been observed a trend in the feminist writings that questioned the aim of science to create "real selves", that encouraged any androgynous tendencies, and that tried to emphasize the superiority of women over men.

In his study, Foucault centred his attention on four variables that are interdependent as applied to the Victorian era: sexuality, constraint, power, and knowledge. The relationship between sexuality and power resides in the defying of the imposed social order that finds resources to repress the womanhood within the female. By describing the unconceivable, the sexuality that stands above the accepted mores, an insurgent voice is being created, a voice that faces and provokes the established order. Foucault is not completely adherent to this theory. He rather argues that the subversive discourse on sex is rather a revelator of truth, a means of misdirecting the traditional laws, a celebration of future accomplishment and happiness.

Moreover, Foucault is discovering a society that is casting blame on itself, a society that engages itself in a discourse that speaks of its own bashfulness, that describes in minute detail the things that it really is allowed to pronounce, a community that wants to see itself freed from its constraining rules. Foucault's discourse is not at all one that wants to depict the repressed sexuality but rather a discourse that envisages the sedition against that precise repression.

Foucault's theory completely overturns all the points of view that seen Victorianism as a period of repressed sexuality. He views this "repression" as merely a "deployment of sexuality", an artifact of the bourgeois discourse that in fact expressed more than anytime before the need and the will to uncover the true essence on the sex and the sexuality of the time. This can only prove of the high consciousness of the people of that time concerning the intimate space. The timidity in speaking and in writing did not automatically presume the repression or the inexistence of sexuality but merely a more inner, self-reflexive approach to the matter.

The same point of view is shared by Peter Gay in "The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud" (1984) where he scrutinized Victorian sexuality and he reached the conclusion that, beyond that fright regarding sexual self-gratification and beyond their urge in defining the imperative of sexual activity within the limits of the marital home, the Victorians actually enjoyed a lot sexual practices and they were really interested in exploring it. Peter Gay stresses the importance of knowing exactly how love was seen in the nineteenth century. He claims that people got married not to comply with the societal requirements but to satisfy their reciprocal interest and attraction. Marriage in Victorian England was, as Freud puts it, the combination of "the tender and the sensual", the union of two complementary natures. Surely, class and financial status were important to some extent but they were founded on the emotional relationship between the man and the young woman.

Peter Gay's work argues that the Victorian marriages inside the bourgeois class were far from being marked by oppression or dissatisfaction; on the contrary, they were quite eventful and satisfactory because they allowed the spouses to experience mental steadiness and physical satisfaction. Gay's work is based, as in Foucault's case to a certain extent, on the writings on the bourgeois marriage as they appear in journals, diaries, autobiographies, and letters.

But, without any doubt, the sexuality-related negative vibe that the Victorian society transmitted to the people could only have as a consequence a discourse marked by constraint and by shyness. And this creates frustration and the necessity to hide one's sexuality from the public eye. But this frustration can be expressed subversively in discourses where sexuality is either named in a different way or it is avoided, thus drawing even more attention on it.

The Victorian image of self-control was undoubtedly the woman who, above all, demanded lack of excess as concerns her private matters, including sex. The prevalent cultural ideology of the nineteenth century was characterized by sexual abstinence or limited sexual activity within the marital "sheets" and for reproductive purposes. A woman had the role to attemper men's sexual desire that was seen as savage and improper for a cultured being. Women thus became advocates of sexual restraint which made them forceful pawns in the Victorian society.

In her essay "The Anathematized Race: The Governess and Jane Eyre" (1989), Mary Poovey wishes to demonstrate that the figure who stood for the archetype of the Victorian domestic ideal, the governess, constituted also the persona who menaced it. For these considerations, the governess is considered a possible peril for the stability of the middle-class family stability and this ambivalent perspective stems from the image of the governess as both a provider of morality and education within the home, and a person who is also sexually available and single. For this reason, the governess was associated with social outcasts like the lunatic or the prostitute.

In the economic and the political turmoil of the "hungry forties", the governess and the women in general represented a bulwark that stood against the erosion of the "middle-class assumptions and values". The situation of the governess was marked by social stress because she was placed at the junction of two worlds: on the one hand, she represented the middle-class mother, and, on the other hand, she behaved like a working-class woman and man through the wages she received for her services.[31]

In the first half of the 19^th century, the essayists acknowledged the important role played by the governess in the reproduction of the domestic ideal. She was supposed to "inculcate domestic virtues" but, more importantly, the governess was charged with teaching the young girls of the family the "accomplishments that would attract a good husband without allowing the sexual component of these accomplishments to get the upper hand".[32] In other words, the governess "was meant to police the emergence of undue assertiveness or sexuality in her maturing charges and she was expected not to display willfulness or desires herself".[33]

The interest that I have in this epitomized figure of the Victorian middle-class woman was determined by her unique posture in the societal order that also established her private, intimate behaviour. She was "half a woman", she did not present any appeal for men because to gentlemen she was "the tabooed woman" and the male servants saw her as "any other middle-class lady". The governess is therefore the bond between the "well-bred, well-educated and perfect gentlewomen" and the "low-born, ignorant, and vulgar" women of the working class.[34]

But her contemporaries had reasons to worry whether the governess represented indeed the "bulwark against immorality and class erosion" since the governesses stemmed out of the working class, thus "heralding the degradation of a body so important to the moral interest of the community". Another source of this anxiety was the capability of the governess to control herself emotionally and, moreover, to express her sexual neutrality. This worriment was expressed especially in the fictional creations as, for instance, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.

A figure to which the governess was constantly linked was the lunatic, and Mary Poovey proves that the relationship between the two was utterly causal since the governess is supposed to suppress her "craving for pleasures" which results in "frustration and denial of her position demands". The governess becomes a "vitality stunted, silenced, driven mad" woman who was forced by her social status to denials and restraints.[35]

The governess was therefore meant to mirror the "middle-class ideal", but she also had to defend herself against "the sexualized and often working-class women" thus revealing the reasons why the mid-Victorians worried for the governess's capacity to protect the middle-class values since she was not completely able to repress her own sexuality.

For this reason, there are few remarks as concerns the relationships between the governess and a man because she was not the gentleman's equal from a social viewpoint, thus leaving no room for gallantry, attraction, or romance. The inequality between the governess and the gentleman resided solely in the fact that her financial status was inferior to his, thus creating the social discrepancy. As a natural consequence, the governess was, sometimes, quite an easy "prey" for the "master" and a threat for the lady of the house.

Victorianism's view on sex is indeed related to constraint and to hypocrisy since it treats sexual practice as being imperatively connected solely to reproduction and to lack of sensuality. All the practices that do not comply with this type of sexual behaviour are doomed to be taken care of in mental care institutions where all these "alienated" people were believed to belong to. These mad people, usually madwomen, had a unique "right" to be silent, this being the quintessence of the oppressed Victorian woman who had no other choice but to reduce herself to non-being in a world that she was obliged to create for herself, her own form of reality.

'The mad woman in the attic" is the symbol of the Victorian literary productions that asserted the female characters' feeling of entrapment and enclosure. 'Madness' was, for many, the only escape, the only freedom that the Victorian middle-class woman could enjoy. The female madness was a form of defiance against the patriarchal society, a sort of rebellion manifested through an exuberated sexuality and a refusal to remain silent. The "mad woman in the attic" becomes, in the Victorian times, a sort of syndrome that strives to reassert the active female sexuality that fights against the imposed apparent asexual society of the women.

The twentieth-century male physicians and feminist theorists observed that the syndromes of neurasthenia and hysteria were indeed an overemphasis of conventional feminine features. The Victorian "lady" was immortalized for her daintiness and indifference, sexual unconcern, and a delightful whimsical sensibility. For this matter, "the dissociations of hysteria, the drifting and fogging of perception, the nervous tremors and faints, the anaesthesias, and the extreme mutability of symptomatology" supposedly characteristic of the nineteenth-century female illnesses can be interpreted as being materializations of the "feminine mystique" of the Victorian time. The femininity/"hysterical personality" of that period was characterized as being "impressionable, suggestible, and narcissistic; highly labile, their moods changing suddenly, dramatically, and for seemingly inconsequential reasons...egocentric in the extreme...essentially asexual and not uncommonly frigid".[36]

The image of the mad woman envisages the myth of the woman seen as demonic, hedonic, polymorphous, and dangerous. The mad woman is the symbol of the Victorian escapist view that envisages the freedom in portraying a vital, magic woman who defies the Victorian sacred institutions, namely the family, the society governed by men, and God.

The woman in the attic becomes the mirror-image of the lovemad woman used as an outlet for the "immuration" that comes from being present in a male-dominated society. Madness in the nineteenth-century literature is no longer perceived as vulnerability but rather as a form of revolt. The mad woman is, for the female writers, a means of expressing their own rebellions, just as critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar observed: "By projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women, female authors dramatize their own self-division."[37] To put it differently, the mad woman becomes a scapegoat in the sense that all the defiant feelings are gathered in her, not in the respectable woman who, this way, has the opportunity not to abase herself.

In Julia Kristeva's view, the lives of the neurotic, such as the mad woman in the attic, are nurtured by "negation and its modalities, transgression, denial, and repudiation", clearly distinguishable fromthe theory of the unconscious that is indicative of a "repression of contents (affects and presentations)" that provoke "subject modifications, either of speech (parapraxes, etc.), or of the body (symptoms), or both (hallucinations, etc)". Correlated to the concept of "repression", Freud's established the notions of denial to better forge into the neurotic forms and of rejection/repudiation as correlative to psychosis.[38]

Of course, who's a better example of the dual figure if not Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre? Bertha Mason and Jane are both the embodiment of Charlotte's inner structure, they are the two opposites that meet in the complete nature of Charlotte. Bertha represents the rebellious nature, the one no one speaks of, the outcast, the one who refuses to comply with the requirements of the society of her time. Jane, on the other side, is the passionate, the woman in love, the tutor, the woman who tries to observe the rules. But both characters have one thing in common: their insanity. Jane's begins during her childhood when she is confined in the red room, when she is in confusion, in insurrection from the dreadful despotism. Her anger is later carried on by Bertha, her mirror-image in a sort of way.

Throughout the novel, Jane uses such words as "restraint", "stagnation", or "suffering" to depict the oppression of women in general. Bertha's sardonic laughter is the creed for rebellion that Jane refrains from. Brontë uses Jane and Bertha as voices to express her feelings towards the society she lived in. Jane, the weak, dependent woman from the beginning is transformed into an object of revolt, into an independent woman who chooses whether she will or will not stay with Rochester.

Like all the other writers who used madness, Charlotte Brontë used it to show that women are human beings endowed with feelings that are worth being taken into consideration. The manifestation of the "anxiety of the authorship" was, after all, a manner of keeping oneself silent and, in a way, voluntarily oppressed. "The masquerading women", the allegory of this "anxiety of authorship", is making evident the literature as a veil through which we try to perceive, to skim the female soul. The Gothic Victorian literature becomes the emblem of this type of literary manifesto that seeks to obscure the readers' vision in order to make clear a pale outlook that envisages the sexual ambiguity. The power of the women writers resides in their capacity of mimicking the male standpoint, thus reaching to the subversion of the male authority that is rather created than innate.

Mary Wollstonecraft concentrated on describing the state of ignorance and servility to which women were condemned by social custom and training, which made them exponents of the "mad woman in the attic": "If...[women] be really capable of acting like rational creatures, let them not be treated like slaves; or. Like the brutes who are dependent on the reason of man, when they associate with him; but cultivate their minds, give them the salutary, sublime curb of principle, and let them attain conscious dignity by feeling themselves only dependent on God. Teach them, in common with man, to submit to necessity, instead of giving, to render them more pleasing, a sex to morals..."[39]

Wollstonecraft's creed is in the name of freedom because "liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature..."[40]

In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss argues that marriage is nothing but an indicator of men's control over women and that "the total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, where each owes and receives something, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners between whom the exchange takes place."[41]

After all, there is no need of the Victorian corset since the nineteenth-century woman, the "Iron Maiden", in Naomi Woolf's words, fully experienced a suppressed, concealed, psychological corset.[42]

[1] Mendus, Susan and Rendall, Jane, Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the 19^th Century, p. 17-21

[2] Showalter,Elaine, Speaking of Gender, p. 1

[3]Witting, Monique, "The Mark of Gender" in Speaking of Gender, edited by Elaine Showalter, p. 1

[4] Irigaray, Luce, "This Sex Which is not One" (1977) in Feminisms - An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 363

[5] Macquart, L.C.H., "Dictionnaire de la Conservation de l'homme" in Feminist Theory and the Body, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrich, p. 161

[6] Jordanova, Ludmila, "Natural Facts: A Historical Perspective on Science and Sexuality" in Feminist Theory and the Body, p. 161

[7] Cabanis, P.J.G., 'Oeuvres philosophiques', p. 166

[8]Jordanova, Ludmila, op.cit., p. 163

[9]Davis, Natalie Z., "Women's History in Transition : The European Case", p. 90

[10] Ibidem, p. 4

[11] Irigaray, Luce, op. cit., p. 367

[12] Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own, p. 9

[13] Abel, Elizabeth, "Introduction, Writing and Sexual Difference" in Speaking of Gender, edited by Elaine Showalter, p. 4

[14] Ibidem, p.5

[15] Fetterly, Judith, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, p.xx

[16] Ibidem

[17] Brown, Janet, Feminist Drama, p. 22

[18] Kucich, John, The Power of Lies. Transgression in the Victorian Fiction, p. 34

[19] Ibidem, p. 46

[20] Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, p. 36

[21] Ibidem, p. 23

[22] Poate Stebbins, Lucy, A Victorian Album: Some Lady Novelists of the Period, p. 196

[23] Adams, James Eli, "Victorian Sexualities" in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, p. 126

[24] Ibidem

[25] Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction., p. 69-70

[26] Ibidem, p. 120-124

[27] Ibidem, p. 105

[28] Ibidem, p. 216

[29] Ibidem, p. 228-229

[30] Diamond, I. and,L Quinby, Feminism & Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, pp.xi-xix.

[31] Poovey, Mary, "The Anathematized Race: The Governess and Jane Eyre" in The Nineteenth-Century Novel. A Critical Reader, edited by Stephen Regan, p. 195

[32] Ibidem, p. 196

[33] Idem

[34] Idem

[35] Poovey, Mary, op. cit. , p. 198

[36] Bordo, Susan R., "The Body and the Reproduction of Feminity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault" in Gender/Body/Knowledge, p. 16

[37] Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, p. 78

[38] Kristeva, Julia, "Approaching Abjection" in The Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, pp. 10-11

[39] Wollstonecraft, Mary, "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" (1792) in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, edited by Miriam Schneir, p. 12

[40] Ibidem, p. 13

[41] Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Elementary Structure of Kinship, p 115

[42] Carson, Fiona, "Feminism and the Body"in The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism, edited by Sarah Gamble, p. 117