„ What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age where a woman was sacred and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds, a few shillings ,if you wanted her for only an hour or two.” Indeed, the Victorian Woman is fixed in our minds in a series of strikingly different, often mutually exclusive, images. On the one hand, we are confronted with a picture of a woman as the lady-like „angel in the house”, an ideal female preoccupied with her natural, as it was then believed, duties of a wife and a mother.On the other hand, there is an image of „ the fallen woman”, a desperate prostitute and yet sexually passive being. In between these two opposing, the highest and the lowest, places on the social „feminine” ladder,we find a lonely spinster, an early feminist struggling for women’s rights or a commonly despised governess.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman, though „exactly mid-Victorian in setting and subject matter” is not regarded by critics as a historical novel and yet the images of its heroines presented appear to b

But it must be noted that not all women married and those who did not necessarily had children. Spinsterhood, in fact, became a national problem in Victorian England due to the so-called „surplus of women” which gradually increased from 1871 to 1911.The phenomenon was caused partly by the changing mortality patterns and the higher emigration rates of men, later by their loss of lives in the first world war. Thus finding a husband for one’s daughter was in many cases physically impossible and so often turned into a desperate”man-hunt.”

Miss Freeman appears to be embodying a definition of a pure „angel in the house” in other respects as well. She is a pretty and a charming girl whose only worries evolve around her looks, a future husband and domestic matters such as a choice of furniture to her new,future, house. The Victorian wives were naturally supposed to master the management of the household. It was women who were in charge of managing expenses and dealing with servants so they performed quite a responsible and, when we consider the minimal assistance of domestic technology,a difficult role at home. Yet, paradoxically, at the same time a female was expected to show innocence,”ignorance of the world, meekness, lack of opinions,general helplessness and weakness-her principal charm” No wonder then, that a Victorian girl, though most often very skillful as far as acquiring a husband is concerned was less so in practical skills a perfect wife should be endowed with. Considering the lifestyle of Ernestina, a daughter mollycoddled by her affluent parents throughout her entire life, and her typically female, according to the Victorian standards, character, she probably wouldn’t succeed in performing these duties, which we unfortunately never learn because of her engagement being broken. „ My parents, my friends-what am I to tell them? That Mr Charles Smithson has decided after all that his mistress is more important than his honour, his promise, his...” -she exclaims to her, now, ex-fiance and knows that the only way to take revenge on Charles is to deprive him of a gentleman status,the possible „remedy” for abandoned fiancees. The girl’s shock to her fiance’s breaking engagement is nothing more but another confirmation how important it was back in Victorian times for a woman to be married as marriage was practically the only means for her to gain some social status, be socially accepted amd useful.

There rose a question of what all these „ surplus women” were to do with themselves. In the light of a dominant „domestic ideology” which relegated women to homemaking and made it impossible for them to take up any paid work, the situation was indeed tragic for the majority of spinsters.Therefore the unmarried women were encouraged to emigrate to colonies. There, they would find men to marry with whom ”they could (...) perpetuate the hegemony of British values while civilizing the men through their womanly inspiration.” However As for the middle-class women the proposed solution was not successful. In fact, the higher on social ladder women were, the less possibilities as far as being able to live by themselves is concerned, they had.

In the nineteenth century England marriage and the subsequent motherhood were the expected female goals. ”The Victorian heroine was an almost standardized product, and her functions were courtship and marriage” In the Fowles’s novel particularly two characters conform to this stereotype, namely: Ernestina, fiancee of the novel’s protagonist Charles, and, to a lesser extent ( because of her being little depicted by the author), her mother.While the latter is obviously past her days of courtship, being a happy (house)wife and a mother to her only and beloved child,the former,Tina, is presently looking forward to ma

Some topics in this essay:
Sarah Woodruff, Sarah English, Victorian Age, Mary Can’t, Victorian Woman, Victorian England, Miss Freeman, Diseases Acts, Charles Smithson, Lieutenant’s Woman, lieutenant’s woman, french lieutenant’s, french lieutenant’s woman, victorian woman, nineteenth century, victorian women, sarah woodruff, woman nineteenth century, education paid, rights education, „angel house”, „surplus women”, so-called „surplus women”, lieutenant’s woman john, image victorian woman,