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THE IMPURE WOMAN IN THE VICTORIAN AGE

Introduction

This research paper analyses the of the “Impure Woman “ of the Victorian society in the
novels Tess of the D`Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
...

Another subject approached in my paper is the concept of madness and how the Victorian
society punished women for “inappropriate behavior” by excluding them from society
...

From the historical point of view, the Victorian Age is framed between 1832 and 1901
...
The events which took place under her leadership had such a major impact on the
society, that when speaking about Victorianism, one speaks about a creed, about a lifestyle,
about a trend
...

Women of the mid 19th century had little choices in their lives
...
Even if
a woman of good wealth should marry, all her possessions, after the marriage, passed on to her

husband
...
She could not have children or cohabit with a man; the social penalties were simply too
high
...

The era of the Victorian women spanned 64 years and concluded several changes in attitudes
...
The stereotype of the distribution of roles
was women staying by the hearth with their needles whilst men wielded their swords
...
A gentlewoman ensured that the home
was a place of comfort for her husband and family from the stresses of Industrial Britain

Chapter I:
The Woman in the Victorian Age

The first chapter includes a presentation of the Victorian Age, emphasizing the role that
women played in society
...

[…] the most restrictive tenets of what can be called the nineteenth century’s ideology of
femininity, declaring that ‘the whole education of women ought to be relative to men
...
’ The ideal women he thus envisioned- a pure, submissive, decorous, and even
angelic creature-was only one particularly notable representative of a standard against which
every middle - and upper- class woman’s conduct was measured, and other writers, female as
well as male, elaborated on the virtues of such an ideal
...
Gilbert, Susan Gubar, 289)

From the historical point of view, the Victorian Age is framed between 1832 and 1901
...
The events which took place under her leadership had such a major impact on the
society, that when speaking about Victorianism, one speaks about a creed, about a lifestyle,
about a trend
...
unlv
...
html , retrieved 9th of September
2013 )

If the Middle Age Era seeks to build the perfect religious man, Victorianism gives birth to
the industrial man
...
Business is exclusively a men’s privilege that consolidated his superior position
...

(http://faculty
...
edu/kirschen/handouts/victorian
...
The Victorian women
were taught from an early age that they held a secondary position to their male counterparts, and
that they should not merely accept this status, but desire this subordinate rank and be willing to
put personal desires and requirements
...
There was a
real “art” to be assimilated in order to harmonize with the ideal of femininity as naturalness was
not the main feature of the Victorian women; their style coincided to the great masters of
simulation
...
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note in
one of their major studies:
Instructions as how a young girl, or even an old woman, was to manage such a task often
ranged from ridiculous to the bizarre
...
More
problematic still, many medical men and laymen believed that a ‘good’ woman was essentially
passionless: if men were beasts ruled by sexual desire, their wives and daughters knew nothing
of such matters
...
The superiority of men and
the innate inferiority of woman had been stressed by Patmore`s mentor, Swedenborg:”The man
is born intellectual, and the female is born volitional
...
The prevalent characteristics of the Victorian Angel influenced women’s sexuality and
sexual expectations
...
In order to promote the concept of chastity, women were brought up completely ignorant of
their sexuality and sexual desires
...
Sexual intercourse was a deed of darkness; sexual desire was something the wellbred man and woman should not have; anomalies and perversions were hurriedly thrust from the
mind into a nether region where they festered and broke into strange cankers
...
Cominos in “Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious Conflict”
...
What emerged from this so called “desexualization” of women was
a dichotomy between dignity and sexual desire
...
This concept led to the classifications of pure and impure woman
...

On the other hand, it was commonly believed that male sexuality was natural and that, as
a result, men‘s alliances prior to marriage were unavoidable
...
The prominent
differences were emphasized within marriage, as adultery committed by Victorian wives was an
act of grave offence while the same act by men was a superficial concern
...
According to Martha Vicinus,

Victorian society and the family spawned two kinds of women, the womanly woman and
her negation, the whorely whore, the pure and the impure […] The pure woman was
innocent, inviolate, inspirational and indulged; the impure woman (less than a woman)
was doubtful, detected and destroyed
...
(Leigh
M Gardner 33-39)
...
In order to maintain the success and survival of the Victorian patriarchal family,
particularly for those who considered themselves respectable or refined, the Angel in the House
and all of her behavioral and sexual implications were an inflexible social philosophy
...

Two main proponents of this belief are Martha Vicinus and Elizabeth Langland, both
claiming that the Victorian feminine ideal is a social myth
...
(40)
Beauty, passion, sexual awareness and determination is socially dangerous as these
features serve in opposition to the Victorian expectation that women be both sexually pure and
passionless
...
In “Letters
to a Young Man About Town” (1853) Thackeray claims that
An exquisite slave is what we want for the most part; a humble, flattering, smiling, tea
making, pianoforte-playing being, who laughs at our jokes however old they may be,

coaxes us and wheedles us in humors, and”-the sitting in the tail-“fondly lies to us
through life
...
Properly trained, she learned to sing, play piano or guitar, dance and be conversant about
light literature of the day
...
Courting usually began at balls and dances where young girls
were first introduced into society during their “coming out
...
The courtship ritual was a formalized procedure that was
more applicable to lyre birds than people, not least important being the “shamelessly avaricious
bawds who palmed off their daughters on the not altogether willing, and for whom the courtship
etiquette was a handy shoehorn for sliding their daughters into matrimony” (Pearsall, 123-132 )
For young men courtship was considered more a carrier move than a romantic pursuit of
women, as all woman`s property was going to revert to his possession after marriage
...
(Pearsell, 123-132)
It is primarily important that the coming out in society emerged at the proper time,
financial or family circumstances might delay the girl’s debut in society
...
She was supposed to never leave the house without being
chaperoned by the mother or a relative entitled to guide her during this period until she marries
...
A gentleman had to take care in the
early stages of courtship
...
He had to be re-introduced by a
mutual friend
...
The
season ran from April to July
...
(http://www
...
com/article009
...
m
...
m--all under the watchful eye of her chaperone
...
It was frowned upon for a respectable
young lady to receive the visit of a gentleman, without one of her relatives being present
...
No impure conversations were held in front of single women
...
Innocence was demanded by men from girls in their class
and most especially from the future wife
...

By the end of the courtship, when the couple was cemented and had perspectives of a future
together, the serious chase and negotiation started, after all the main goal being to “seal the
deal
...
(http://www
...
com/article009
...
The financial
aspects of marriage were openly discussed; each part presented its fortune
...
When the gentleman came to the decision to propose marriage to his young lady
he first had to ask permission from her father to have her hand
...
The couple could become a bit more
intimate once they were engaged
...
A hand around the waist, a chaste kiss, a pressing of the hand were
permitted
...
But they had to be dutifully separated
by nightfall
...
literary-liaisons
...
html , retrieved 1st of September 2013)
Marriage, for every couple that ventured into it, was a special case and could be viewed
in many lights as a social contract, as a religious compact, as means of restoring health, gaining a
fortune, providing virility, getting away from uncongenial parents
...
It was the social condition under which one may have children, it was the
formula that turns copulation (socially acceptable) into fornication (socially unacceptable)
...
The fallen woman relentlessly troubled the Victorian
world
...
While the Victorian society advocated the idea
of the angel in the home, its art is overrun with images of the sexualized woman Pre-Raphaelite
paintings such as The Woodman’s Daughter by John Everett Millais and Abraham Solomon’s
Drowned! Drowned! persistently attempt to explain the fall and, in doing so, controversially
position the female as victim
...
(Richard Broad, 5-11)
The general consensus on female sexuality in the Victorian era is that there emerged a virgin/whore
dichotomy, whereby there existed a “contradiction between a sexless, moralized angel and an aggressive, carnal
Magdalen”, (Richard Broad, 7) and that the patriarchal, middle-class bourgeoisie created it
...
(Richard Broad, 5-11 )
The Frenchman Hyppolyte Taine commented on the “abject, miserable poverty” of the
prostitutes he saw in the streets
...
Prostitutes were treated
with extraordinary contempt
...
The hatred that prostitution
inspired derived from the double standard: if women were naturally pure, then 'fallen' or
'impure' women must be unnatural
...
libero
...
htm

,

retrieved

2nd

of

September 2013 )

In the Victorian Age the women did not belong to themselves, so their existence was extremely
reduced
...
Far from being “angels in the house”, women were rather slaves in the house
without having any right, not even on their own life
...
( Sandra M
...
Furthermore, her husband could, and sometimes did,
will his estate-including what had been her own inheritance-away from her
...
Gilbert,
Susan Gubar, 290)
As for a woman’s children, her husband had sole rights in their guardianship if the couple were
separated for any reason, including his moral turpitude
...
] and a woman did not even have an inalienable entitlement to her
own physical liberty; as the British suffragist Ray Strachey pointed out, in England ‘the right of a
man to imprison his wife in his own house was not questioned until 1891’
...
( Sandra M
...
From this sort of thinking, we get a sense that the
Victorians were preoccupied with a very old figure–the femme fatale: “Female sexual desire was
believed to be particularly dangerous: women were more easily overwhelmed by the power of
their sexual passion because they were closer to nature and thus more volatile and irrational than
men
...
commons
...
edu/ds443-171project/false-modern-concept-of-victoriansexuality/ , retrieved 5th of September 2013 )

The middle-class upheld a desire for feminine purity and juxtaposed the fallen woman
against, rather idealistically, a desire for a virginal feminine passivity, whose delicacy and
fragility marked them as desirable
...
The terms “prostitute” and “fallen
woman” are also class specific
...
On the other hand “the fallen woman” retained her femininity because
she remained powerless and dependant, because her fall was often not related to monetary
gratification
...
commons
...
edu/ds443-171project/false-modern-concept-of-

victorian-sexuality/ , retrieved 5th of September 2013 )

In Victorian England, prostitution through desperation was more common by far than
prostitution through choice
...

Many “good girls” were induced to leave home by offers of jobs as governesses and ladies of
companions
...
As the
proportion of single women in the population increased, many young girls chose that path, one of
the few jobs in this category that one could choose without losing face
...
In the deep sense you
must either wave men`s fortunes, and embroider hem; or feed upon ,and bring them o
decay
...
Here wealthy families brought their daughters who were subjected to an extremely
severe regime
...
Marriage
was like a business and an educated lady meant higher pretensions
...

In this respect, the lives and works of the Bronte sisters are the most relevant
...
The best-known governess remains Jane Eyre who still
touches the public especially due to the film version
...
As for women’s status, there is another
aspect which cannot be left out, namely the opposite of the lady: the working-class woman
...
(Pearsall, 78)
This idea that a sexually aggressive woman can act as a scapegoat, a slayer of distinctions
that threatens the very fabric of hierarchical culture and can thus be subsequently eliminated on
the behalf of the restoration of harmony—is particularly helpful in the examination of why
female protagonists often perish at the close of Victorian narratives
...
(Leigh M Gardener, 7)
In the Victorian period one can clearly see that women were terribly discriminated:
within a family they were totally undesirable, their birth is regarded as a misfortune, a burden
...
All their education is reduced to sewing, playing, singing, especially
serving the husband’s will
...

In the next chapter I`m going to talk about a representative figure of the fallen woman in
the Victorian literature, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles
...
Female
wrongdoing was not only judged according to the law, but also according to the idealized
conception of womanhood
...
In this thesis I intend to argue that during the nineteenth century
morality helped to define what constituted a 'criminal act
...
This chapter focuses on
emphasizing Hardy`s point of view regarding the concept of pure and impure in the Victorian
Era
...
It is noteworthy that Hardy employs the word 'pure,' thereby reinforcing
the fact that although Tess is a fallen woman, she is still virtuous
The woman of the nineteenth century occupied a position of duality within Victorian culture
...
Within this cultural
construct, the criminal woman was defined largely by her departure from the ideal Victorian
woman who was passionless, chaste, innocent, submissive and self-sacrificing
...
She represented an unsettling anomaly that both repelled and
fascinated the Victorians
...
Hardy
uses the privileges offered by the omniscient author throughout his novel to display the
innocence of Tess
...
When a woman
deviated from the Victorian construction of the ideal woman, she was stigmatized and labeled
...
He is trying
to emphasize that there is something unnatural and wrong about the Victorian moral conduit
...
Throughout the novel she never does anything unnatural, anything
that doesn`t obey the laws of nature
...
Tess’ intentions during the entire course of the novel are pure
...
Each of her so-called sins arises
from honorable intentions
...

According to Irvin Howe, Tess represents a spiritualized transcendence of chastity
...
She
embodies a feeling for the inviolability of the person and reaches purity of spirit even as she fails
to satisfy the standards of the world
...
The author consistently sympathizes with her, and her moral outlook is continually shown
to be the best one
...
The ideal Victorian
woman or the 'angel of the house' was defined by her role within the home because the family
served as a sanctuary for the "preservation of traditional moral and religious values" (cited in
Zedner 12)
...
The
middle-class Victorian woman was to have no ambition other than to please others and care for
her family (Zedner 15)
...

The Victorians regarded the fallen woman as a moral menace
...
The Victorian view was that the fallen woman lacked
shame and modesty; however, while society viewed these women as 'fallen' and as morally and
socially repugnant, they were, in fact, Tess`s physical appearance is likewise an important
marker of her personality and identity
...
( Gretchen M
Barnhill 15)
From a technical point of view we can analyze Hardy`s novel as he uses Chapters to divide
the book in seven phases, each representing stages in Tess`s life
...
The blank page symbolizes a curtain of silence, a hesitation of the Victorians in
dealing with such topics, an art employed by the Classicist writers and also Hardy`s sensitive
treatment of the subject
...
It is a novel

that

questions

the

foundation

and

moral

beliefs

of

the

culture
...
about
...
htm,

Victorian
retrieved

life
9th

and
of

September 2014 )
The novelistic depictions of the fallen woman show her being judged by society on the basis
of her sexual behavior, regardless of her character and values
...
Not surprisingly, Tess`s exceptional
good looks bring her un wanted attention from men, but what proves to be the most important for
her is her mature sexual appearance
...
Both
describe her in sensual, physical terms (Pearce 33)
...
Later
in the text, when his sexual desire for her has been fully aroused, his thoughts of Tess are
blended with animal imagery:
[Angel] saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake's
...
The brim-fullness [sic] of her nature breathed from her
...
Not only does it underscore Tess's association
with animal imagery, evoking the notion of the dangerous woman, but also the description of her
mouth is juxtaposed with the color red, which serves as an implicit link to sexuality
...
The fallen woman's image as outcast, coupled with her
exciting blend of innocence and experience, "came to embody everything in womanhood that
was dangerously, tragically, and triumphantly beyond social boundaries" (Auerbach 150)
...
As she walked along to-day, for all her
bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her
ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and
then" (Tess of the D`urbervilles 21)
It is not hard to understand that this kind of description of a full developed voluptuous woman
is the kind that will mark Alec`s perception of her “She had an attribute which amounted to a
disadvantage just now; and it was this that caused Alec D'Urberville's eyes to rivet themselves
upon her
...
Tess bears a proper name as a unique
person, while she is universalized as a pure woman
...

Angel is also mesmerized by her looks but in a different way
...
Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real
vitality, real warmth, real incarnation
...
Eyes almost
as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and
throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth
...
(Tess of the D`Urbervilles 24)
At the beginning of the novel, Hardy describes The May Day dance, where young women
“all dressed in white gowns” and holding “a bunch of white flowers”
...
The white color of
women`s dresses and the white flowers represent an unpolluted nature of sexual innocence
...
The color of Tess`s ribbon foreshows the dangerous sexuality and foretells her faith and
warns about the violence sexual acts to which Tess falls victim (Leigh M
...
Tess was a pure virgin but with a powerful sexual magnetism that

the author states in his description of young Tess
...
Gardner 24)
In terms of symbolic color imagery, Hardy associates Tess with images and descriptions of
white in particular, though the presence of red hunts her increasingly
...
Not only does it underscore Tess's association with animal imagery,
evoking the notion of the dangerous woman, but also the description of her mouth is juxtaposed
with the color red, which serves as an implicit link to sexuality
...
( Leigh M
...
Having been lying down in her clothes she was warm as
a sunned cat [
...

(Tess of the D`Urbervilles 199)
Here again, the narrator juxtaposes animal imagery with the color of red
...
However, making Tess a representation of Eve also implicitly links her to the fall of
mankind, and, more specifically, suggests her sexual ruination
Sarah Nicholson suggests that Tess is doomed to lose her virginity, arguing that in many of
Hardy`s novels are marked with the presence of “divine and supernatural forces in destroying a
great number of his female characters: forces over which they have no control” (Tess of the
D`urbervilles32)
...
(Tess of the D`Urbervilles 32)
It is her beauty, delicately combined with her innocence, however, that both Alec and Angel find
so utterly irresistible
...
] you have been the means—the innocent means—of my backsliding [
...
It is interesting that on the one hand Alec
acknowledges that Tess is innocent, yet on the other, he invokes the image of a sorceress,
blaming her for his lack of self-restraint
...
] it
is better that I should not look too often on you
...

Tess is victimized, not only in her death, but in her life as well
...
Because of Tess's assumption of familial
responsibility for her drunken father and overbearing mother, Tess moves from her home to
work for the D'Urberville family
...
It is unclear whether Tess is raped or seduced
...
Tess
stands the role of a sacrificial victim and savior of social harmony and this marks her and does
not allow her to escape the tragic events in her life
...
Gardner, page 24)
Tess is both described as a conventional Victorian woman while simultaneously she
differentiates herself from the community, and the actual element that makes this separation is
her unwillingness to marry some man just to fulfill her expected role as a wife
...
When she is presented to what
her family considers a good catch Alec D`Urberville, he does not hold her affections so she
rejects him and his sexual advances
...
The noble gentleman, Alec D`Urberville offers Tess precisely what

Victorian woman are expected to desire: the potential for a marriage that would better her and
her family‘s situation
...
Gardner 25)
Tess shares none of the negative traits evident in other women criminals in Victorian
literature
...
But
because she is working-class and can be labeled as promiscuous, she pays with her life for
breaking the law (Morris 128)
...
The story of Tess
typifies the plight of physically and psychologically battered women who turn to violence as a
last resort (Morris 128)
...
Tess's purity and
nobility of heart flow from the fact that she spends her entire, short life fighting her way through
conventional comforts, hopes and dogmas (Watt 164)
...
( Leigh M
...
Alec represents, in Hardy`s
accurate description, the classic illustration of the villain
...

Tess creates a clash between her and Alec, by denying him the authoritative position as
middle to upper class man
...
This sexual violence enacted against
Tess serves as a reaffirmation of Victorian gender and social hierarchies as Tess is forced to
submit to male power
...
Gardner 26)
By rejecting Alec, she does not only reject a man, she consciously rejects her family`s desires
and de society`s expectations for a young lady of lower rang like Tess
...
She is supposed to rise up to the occasion to marry Alec for material reasons and by
refusing to do so, she rejects everything that he stands for and represents in the Victorian society,
a person superior to her by gender, wealth and rang to whom she must be submissive
...

Gardner 26)

He is a serpent the rejected one and is the representative of that unconscious deep(so deep that
the bottom cannot be seen) wherein are hoarded all of the rejected, un admitted, unrecognized,
unknown, or undeveloped factors, laws, and elements of existence(Campbell 52)
An observation must be made; Hardy does not provide the details of her violation by Alec
...
The same thing happens
during Tess`s living with Alec, there are no details regarding that period, forcing the reader to
reconstruct events and then challenging this reconstruction
...


(http://www
...
info/textguide/Tess-of-the-d'Urbervilles/11/1251# retrieved 9th of September 2013)
Through the novel, Hardy creates a number of dramatic situations that symbolically bring
back Tess`s innocence
...
Born into
an agrarian working-class family with aristocratic ancestral roots, Tess is encouraged by her
mother to cement ties with the Stoke-D'Urberville family
...
While in their employ, the unscrupulous Alec
D'Urberville affects her sexual ruin
...
What is clear,
however, is the fact that the sexual encounter results in the birth of an illegitimate child who later
dies
...
( Leigh M
...
Tess bears a proper name as a unique
person, while she is universalized as a pure woman”
...

Tess is both described as a conventional Victorian woman while simultaneously she
differentiates herself from the community, and the actual element that makes this separation is
her unwillingness to marry some man just to fulfill her expected role as a wife
...
When she is presented to what
her family considers a good catch Alec D`Urberville, he does not hold her affections so she
rejects him and his sexual advances
...
The noble gentleman, Alec D`Urberville offers Tess precisely what
Victorian woman are expected to desire: the potential for a marriage that would better her and
her family‘s situation
...
Gardner 25)
Tess shares none of the negative traits evident in other women criminals in Victorian
literature
...
But
because she is working-class and can be labeled as promiscuous, she pays with her life for
breaking the law (Morris 128)
...
The story of Tess
typifies the plight of physically and psychologically battered women who turn to violence as a
last resort (Morris 128)
...
Tess's purity and
nobility of heart flow from the fact that she spends her entire, short life fighting her way through
conventional comforts, hopes and dogmas(Watt 164)
...
( Leigh M
...
Her innocent mind cannot
conceive the implications that honest truth really has on society
...
She is very direct in rejecting
Alec`s sexual advances, this leading him to a violent response, taking possession of her body
without permission, succumbing her dignity under his male domination
...
Doing so, Angel at first, refuses to acknowledge the horrible truth that stains the
immaculate image his wife is supposed to rise up to, and ends up by leaving her crushed by the
unbearable awareness that Tess is not the person he thought her to be
...

Tess`s confession is seen by Angel as demonic, for him it`s Tess`s essence that changed
...
Although Tess forgives Angel for his sexual encounter with
a woman he claimed to have had an affair with, he cannot do the same for her
...
You were one person: now you are another
...
(Tess of the D`Urbervilles 179)
It is unfortunate that Angel cannot bring himself to acknowledge Tess's virtuous nobility before
he deserts her, putting in motion the chain of events that end in her act of murder
...
Even during a visit
with his parents, before he leaves for South America, when Angel's vicar father reads Psalm 31,
the chapter in Proverbs in praise of a virtuous wife (Tess of the D`Urbervilles 291) Angel is
blind to Tess's noble qualities, linking only her sexuality to her virtue:
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies
...
She girded her loins with strength and strengthened her
arms
...
She looked
well to the ways of her household, and eaten not the bread of idleness
...
Many daughters have done virtuously,
but thou excelled them all
...
While he was sleepwalking, reveals the great psychological torment that he
feels inside his soul
...
Hardy is trying to emphasize the degree to which Tess will sacrifice herself
for her husband
...
She remains open to the possibility that he may murder
her or cause their mutual death, but remains still rather than disturb Angel
...
(Leigh M
...
]
changes after she kills Alec (Morris 136)
...
It is, however, her
final act of murder that "consummates her identity as an outcast (Auerbach 172)
...
Tess is
symbolically linked with the pagan world as she declares to Angel: '"And you used to say at

Talbothays that I was a heathen
...
(Tess of the D`Urbervilles 420)
...

Thomas Hardy clearly establishes Tess a woman differentiated and marked, as one whose
experiences and consciousness are essentially different from the faith of other young women her
age and social status
...
(Stave 101)
Shirley Stave affirms that by Tess`s death at the end of the novel “the goddess herself is lost
to the world and with her goes the possibility of renewal” (Shirley Stave106)
...
In essence, Tess by her own transformation has come under the protection of
the Cosmic Mother or Mother Goddess (with whom she shares the trace) “and cannot be
harmed” (Campbell 71)
Tess's story is tragic, not only because she is victimized by the society that judges her both in
the moral and the legal sense, but also because she pays with her life for responding to that
victimization with violence (Morris 139)
Even aside from her act of murder, however, Tess's moral taint all but obliterates her inner
morality and virtue in the eyes of respectable Victorian society
...
Tess succumbs to the fate of the fallen
woman
...
In the mind of
the Victorians, the nobility of her character is blighted, and therefore she cannot be restored to

respectable society
...

The following chapter is dedicated to the theme of madness, and is centered around a famous
representation of the female insanity, Bertha Mason
...
As the Victorians embraced the emerging discipline of psychology, the diagnosis
of insanity evolved not only into a medical explanation for bizarre behavior, but also a suitable
legal explanation for criminal behavior
...
' She could now be judged as mad
...
The woman labeled as mad was
excluded as well, despite the fact that in some cases she may have elicited more sympathy than
her fallen or foreign sisters
...
In the nineteenth

century a shift occurred, and the mad were looked upon with pity as "sick human beings" in need
of help
...
While Bertha in Jane Eyre is depicted as mad before she is portrayed as a
arsonist, she represents a prototype against which the depiction of mad women in Victorian
novels may be measured
...
I will
describe the pressure of the Victorian society and how sexually repressed instinct and obedience
had on a young girl`s state of mind
...
The purpose of this chapter is to depict the symbol of the character Bertha Manson and the
role she has in the novel Jane Eyre
...
However, with Bertha Mason she had a more
difficult time to establish the monster side and the angel side
...
gradesaver
...
Bertha is the embodiment of Victorian madwoman whose unleashed passion
represents a deadly threat to respectable British society ( http://www
...
com/janeeyre/study-guide/section8/ , retrieved 9th of September 2013)

Sandra M
...

In other words women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been
“killed” into art
...
For us feminist
critics, however, the Woolfian act of killing both angels and monsters must here begin with an
understanding of the nature and origin of these images” (Gilbert, Gubar 17 )

Eyre possesses many of the qualities of the so-called angel: she is pure, moral, and
controlled in her behavior
...
Bertha, on the other hand is introduced to the readers only when she is in the depths
of madness, prisoner in the attic of Thornfield for nearly fifteen years, and there is not enough
interaction between her and the other characters to demonstrate any “angelic” behavior
...
gradesaver
...
Bertha was
the scorn of her family who conspired to marry her to mister Rochester in order to get rid of her
...
After the wedding, when the truth
about her illness revealed itself, the Masons refused to help Rochester , abandoning Bertha to his
mercy
...
Her crimes of arson, like her personality are associated with
heat and passion
...
According to Judith Lee Wells in Madness and
Women, the madwoman in 19th-century and early 20th-century fiction is often characterized as
“enraged, sometimes to the point of violence” because “she suffocates in a patriarchal world
where she is bound to the traditional female role
...
” (Judith Lee Wells, 25)
Yet, Bertha’s position as the obstacle to Jane’s happiness with Mr
...

Rochester
...
gradesaver
...
Though constantly devastating the household, Bertha is so completely
hidden away, practically invisible to Jane who is only aware of the eerie laugh and mischievous

deeds attributed to Grace Poole
...
shmoop
...
html , retrieved
29th of August 2013)

In Victorian publishing world it`s easy to establish that the character of Bertha in Jane Eyre
is a symbolic one, the skeleton in Rochester’s closet, the mad wife kept prisoner, and making her
discomforting existence a secret like dust hidden under the carpet
...
Madness as represented in Jane
Eyre can therefore be understood not as reflecting a physical or mental reality, but a social
construction and means of control
...
shmoop
...
html ,
retrieved 29th of August 2013)

In Victorian England, those who were considered insane could be legally locked up in a
home like a prisoner without any documentation attesting their state of mind and insanity
...
A woman's emotional fluctuations associated with her lifecycles came to be linked to mental instability and provided a satisfactory explanation for
wrongdoing, especially for the middle and upper class female criminal
...
(

http://heatherwellington8
...
com/papers-ive-written/understanding-the-madwoman-in-janeeyre-a-reading-of-wide-sargasso-sea/ , retrieved 4th of September 2013)

Because women were viewed as physically and emotionally weak creatures, they were
more likely exposed to madness and often considered medically abnormal as well as morally
abnormal
...
This labeling effectively removed her agency and made her a helpless victim of
her own biology
...
(Leigh M
...
To Victorian men, puberty, menstruation, pregnancy and
menopause were proof that women weren`t fit to live a normal life and that they were victims of
their condition, prisoners of hysteria and lunatic behavior
...
( 75)
Bertha`s madness is linked to her heredity, the fact of her being a Creole, reinforced the fear
of blight through miscegenation
...
She
embodies the opposite of what the Victorians conceive of as the ideal woman
...
Rochester`s description of Bertha
matches that of the Victorian madwoman who is characterized as uncivilized
...
It`s not surprising at all that her crime is arson
...
Fire connotes heat, passion and destruction
...
Bertha`s image as a clearly insane
woman is implemented in the minds of readers
...

In the 19th Century women were often considered to be suffering from psychological
problems simply by nature of their own gender
...

The definition of insanity meant deviation from accepted behavior
...
As the Victorian era was dominated
by unnatural repression of normal sexual instincts, it was easy to declare a woman mentally
disturbed, only because she succumbed to normal human behavior by following her sexual
instincts or for acting to passionate about expressing her feelings
...
If women developed an intellect and started to
question their condition, this would threaten male domination and the Victorian way of life so
women were denied to read and socially interact due to a fear of becoming hysteric
...
The
term comes from the Greek hysterikos which means “of the womb” and was originally defined as

a neurotic condition specific to women
...
The idea of the
“wandering womb” originated in the teachings of Hippocrates, and later Plato promoted that
women are more susceptible to irrationality and hysterical conditions
...
( Woods 3)
According to the Victorians point of view, and to Rochester’s effort to justify his marriage,
Bertha can be seen as suffering from hysteria
...
Through the Novel, every
information about Bertha is depicted by mister Rochester`s perspective, we learn through
Rochester as he’s telling the story about her to other people around him
...

Rochester finds Bertha the personification of passionate foreigner
...
Rochester tells Jane he was rushed into marriage by her
relatives
...
(Leigh M Gardener, 89)
While Rochester`s only explication of his marriage is centered in the fact that he was “cheated
into espousing” Bertha Mason (Jane Eyre , 249), it is noteworthy that what appears to have
disgusted him the most is not his wife`s madness but the blemish on his name that her madness
represents
...

Women suffering from this disease were experiencing symptoms like an irresistible desire for
sexual intercourse, loss of sanity
[…]illness of sexual energy levels gone awry, as well as the loss of control of the mind over
the body” (Goldberg 86) and included women who allowed their bodies to become subject to
uncontrollable movement as nymphomaniacs “threw themselves to the floor, laughed, danced,

jumped, lashed out, smashed objects, tore their clothes, grabbed at any man who came before
her” (Goldberg 89)
...
Such women were forced into asylums to keep others in line;
they were sacrificed to show that those who spoke up would be punished
...

By invoking the lunatic descriptions of Bertha`s actions and depicting her as a savage
animal, the readers immediately associate her with a mentally disturbed person
...
( Woods 6)
The periodicity of Bertha`s attacks suggest a connection to the menstrual cycle, which many
Victorians physicians understood as a system for the control of female sexuality
...
(Showalter, 99)
Jane Eyre created a precedent very actively present in critical writing about 19 th century
female madness
...
(Marta Miquel-Baldellou , 1)
Bertha has been seen as a Victorian version of Ophelia, a madwoman as a result of unrequited
love and patriarchy
...
The Creole Bertha has been read as a Caliban, imprisoned as a
slave subjugated to her master’s will
...

A Freudian analysis would imply that the hysterical symptoms are actually sexually
repressed feelings that threaten to transform women into the opposite of their prim and proper
selves
...
All these facts are spoken through Rochester`s description of his wife and
her relatives
...
(Gretchen Huey Barnhill, 149)
Another aspect analyzed by critics is the fact that Jane and Bertha share various attributes in
their characters, some consider the two women mirrored each other as they are passionate,
restless and willing to follow their nature
...
Jane and Bertha
serve as doubles for one another how are described with passion and fire, how their moods are
reflected through nature, alike Jane, Bertha has a passionate personality too
...
Through Jane`s eyes, when she first sees her, she appears like “the
fiery eye glared upon me-she thrust up her candle close to my face…I was aware of her lurid
visage flamed over mine…”(Jane Eyre, 425)
Rochester describes Bertha: “on all fours, it snatched and growled like some strange wild
animal…”(Jane Eyre, 425), “a fanatic with burning eternity” (461)
On the surface, Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason are the most opposite female characters an
author could conceive
...
In
Jane`s eyes Bertha is described as
“a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back” who
possessed a “fearful and ghastly … discolored face,” “red eyes and…fearful blacked inflation of
the lineaments,” also “lips
...
” She looks to Jane like “the foul German
specter, the vampire” (Jane Eyre , 326)
...
They are both prisoners in some way, Bertha is literally trapped in the mansion,
guarded by Grace Poole while Jane is figuratively trapped in her red room
...
A direct consequence of the male-dominated society they both live
in is the automatic reliance on men
...
Eventually this proves to severely oppressive and neither of the two female
characters manage to create a situation that would provide them a framework from independence
and freedom of expression
...
wordpress
...
Bertha is literally a slave, a prisoner in Rochester’s attic, abandoned by
her family when she married and totally at her husband’s mercy
...

Intolerable oppression and injustice brought upon them bring significant female rebellion
through the novel
...
Example of Bertha`s rebellion are present all through the
novel every time she escapes from the attic and does a lot of damage at Thornfield
...
wordpress
...
In the Victorian
society men are the judges and establish punishment upon women
...
Jane never acts out on her anger
or fear but Bertha does, so, from one point of view we can consider Bertha a metaphor for Jane`s
subconscious feelings of rage
...
wordpress
...
What it
was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled, seemingly, on
all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with
clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a man, hid its head and face”
...

This is Bronte`s description of Bertha, trying to emphasize her vulgar and wild behavior and
disheveled appearance
...


Bertha ripping Jane's wedding veil symbolizes a secret feeling of Jane’s that the marriage should
not go on
...
While
she is away, Bertha burns down Thornfield, expressing what Jane could only feel and not carry
out
...
Despite her dark skin and wild
behavior, she reflects Jane`s internal turmoil in living color, warns Jane of the consequences of
giving into the patriarchal pressure
...
wordpress
...
In trying to persuade her to become his
mistress, Rochester argues that Jane is a special case: “if you were mad, he asks, do you think I
should hate you? “I do indeed,sir, Jane replies; and she is surely correct” (Jane Eyre, 49)
Thus it becomes inevitable that Bertha`s death, the purging of the lusts of the flesh, must precede
any successful union between Rochester and Jane
...
I have
described the Victorian society and it`s rigid moral code, and I have emphasized the role that
women were expected to fulfill, in order to be accepted by the Victorians
...

My thesis is divided into 3 chapters
...
In order to approach the
matter of women’s status in Victorianism, I have focused on clarifying the way in which women
were perceived by the Victorians and establish the premises on which the Victorian society was
built
...
The prevalent
characteristics of the Victorian Angel influenced women’s sexuality and sexual expectations
...

I have established that a woman`s role in the Victorian society was determined by her marital
status
...

I have described the woman in the Victorian society as she was, passionless and ignorant; by
keeping young ladies unaware of their instinctive sexuality, they were raised to believe that
erotic desire was both shameful and unnatural
...

Victorian society and the family spawned two kinds of women, the womanly woman and
her negation, the whorely whore, the pure and the impure […] The pure woman was
innocent, inviolate, inspirational and indulged; the impure woman (less than a woman)
was doubtful, detected and destroyed
...
From this sort of thinking, we get a sense that the
Victorians were preoccupied with a very old figure–the femme fatale
In the second chapter, called “Tess of the D`Urbervilles: A pure woman?” , I have focused on
the character of Tess and I have presented Hardy`s point of view regarding his heroine, starting
with his intent to defend her honor expressed in the title “ A pure Woman “
...

The second chapter focuses on emphasizing Hardy`s point of view regarding the concept of
pure and impure in the Victorian Era
...

The author is trying to emphasize that there is something unnatural and wrong about the
Victorian moral conduit and sees Tess as a part of nature, and not a part of the Victorian society;
in consequence she should only be judged only by the rules of nature
...
Tess represents a spiritualized transcendence of chastity and an
absolute victim of her wretched circumstances; she is ultimately beyond their stain
...
Tess is not just the protagonist, but the moral center of the
novel
...
Therefore, I have observed that
the narrator left a blank page between “Phase the First: The Maiden” and” Phase the Second:
Maiden no more”
...
The novel it`s not just about the story of a woman`s life
...

The third chapter is called “Bertha Mason: Mad Woman in the Attic? “and is centered around
the character of Bertha from the novel Jane Eyre
...

My main objective has been to observe the thin line that separated a woman`s statute in
society, from the attractive and luscious young girl to encaged animal, threatening the patriarchal
era
...
Women were viewed as physically and emotionally
weak creatures, they were more likely exposed to madness and often considered medically
abnormal as well as morally abnormal
...
This labeling effectively removed her agency
and made her a helpless victim of her own biology
...

Charlotte Bronte is one of the authors who did not limit her character’s classification to the
strict dichotomy between monster and angel
...
Bertha can also be interpreted as

the heroine’s double in a dual sense: as Jane’s suppressed desire, thus acknowledging Jane’s
capacity to feel sexual arousal, or as Jane’s dark side, thus implying Jane’s conscious efforts to
negate her sexuality
...
Jane
and Bertha serve as doubles for one another how are described with passion and fire, how their
moods are reflected through nature, alike Jane, Bertha has a passionate personality too
...
I have noted the similarities in their positions and the
plots that engage them at Thornfield Hall
...
But the most important aspect is that they both are trapped, in spirit, in a rigid society,
oppressed by the system of British patriarchy
...

In conclusion, all the aspects that I have presented in my graduation represent the concept of
Impure Woman in the Victorian age
...


Bibliography

Cited Works:

Showalter, Elaine A Literature of their own 2009, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and
English Culture, 2009
Gardner, Leigh The Expandable Victorian: A Girardian Approach to Female Sacrifice in the !9th
Century British Novel, 2011
Vicinus, Martha Suffer and be still: Women in the Victorian Age ,1972
Hardy, Thomas Tess of the D`Urbervilles, 1981
Helsinger The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America ,1993
Perkin,Joan Victorian Women, 1993
Watts, Cedric Hardy`s Sue Bridehead and the New Woman , 1993
Girard, Rene Violence and the Sacred, 1979
Pearsall, Ronald The Worm in the Bud, The world of Victorian Sexuality, 2003
Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre, 1992
Gilbert, Sandra & Gubar, Susan The Madwoman in the Attic, The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2000
Marta Miquel-Baldellou Words of Madness / Female Worlds: Hysteria as Inter-textual Discourse
of Women’s Deviance in Jane Eyre,2001



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