The degradation of the married woman in the Victorian era existed not only in that she was stripped of all her legal rights but also that no obligations were placed in her realm. Upon marriage, Victorian brides relinquished all rights to property and personal wealth to their husbands. The sexual conventions of the Victorian era left a legacy that haunts women to this day. While we have spousal rape laws in all states, obstacles remain for women who charge their husbands with forced sex. Some states place time constraints on the complainant. For example, in Illinois, "prosecution of a spouse . . . is barred unless the victim report[s] such offense . . . within 30 days.?Other states impose exceptions to their spousal rape provisions. In Tennessee rape or sexual battery of a spouse can be claimed only in cases where the offender is armed with a deadly weapon. In some states the prosecution of sexual acts, other than penetration, are precluded for spouses. For example, in Kansas, sexual battery is defined as "the intentional touching of the person of another . . . who is not the spouse of the offender?(National Center).The most common approach to implementing spousal rape laws was to simply eliminate the spousal exemption clause in states?existing rape laws. Legislators?greatest error was in failing to add language that would allow the prosecution of sexual battery in marriage.
Jane Eyre is a classic romance novel by Charlotte Brontë which was published in 1847 by Smith, Elder & Company, London, and is one of the most famous British novels. Charlotte Brontë first published the book as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography under the pseudonym Currer Bell, and it was an instant success, earning the praise of many reviewers, including William Makepeace Thackeray, to whom Charlotte Brontë dedicated her second edition.
Charlotte Brontë
Biography of Charlotte Bronte
English writer noted for her novel Jane Eyre (1847), sister of Anne Brontë and Emily Brontë. The three sisters are almost as famous for their short, tragic lives as for their novels. In their works they described love more truthfully that was common in Victorian age England. In the past 40 years Charlotte Brontë's reputation has risen rapidly, and feminist criticism has done much to show that she was speaking up for oppressed women of every age.
'A little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid', is how George Lewes described Charlotte Brontë to George Eliot. She was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Charlotte was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman who had moved with his family to Haworth amid the Yorkshire moors in 1820. After their mother and two eldest children died, Chalotte was left with her sisters Emily and Anne and brother Branwell to the care of their father, and their strict, religious aunt, Elisabeth Branwell. To escape their unhappy surroundings, the children listened stories about the often violent behavior of the countryfolk. When other children enjoyed to play outdoors, they created imaginary kingdoms, which were built around Branwell's toy soldiers, and which inspired them to create continuing stories of fantasylands of Angria and Gondal.
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Angel in the House
The popular Victorian image of the ideal wife/woman came to be "the Angel in the House," who was expected to be devoted and submissive to her husband. The Angel was passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all--pure. The phrase "Angel in the House" comes from the title of an immensely popular poem by Coventry Patmore, in which he holds his angel-wife up as a model for all women.
Believing that his wife Emily was the perfect Victorian wife, he wrote "The Angel in the House" about her (originally published in 1854, revised through 1862). Though it did not receive much attention when it was first published in 1854, it became increasingly popular through the rest of the nineteenth century and continued to be influential into the twentieth century. For Virginia Woolf, the repressive ideal of women represented by the Angel in the House was still so potent that she wrote, in 1931, "Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer."
The following excerpt will give you a sense of the ideal woman and the male-female relationship presented by Patmore's poem:
Man must be pleased; but him to pleaseIs woman's pleasure; down the gulfOf his condoled necessitiesShe casts her best, she flings herself.How often flings for nought, and yokesHer heart to an icicle or whim,Whose each impatient word provokesAnother, not from her, but him;While she, too gentle even to forceHis penitence by kind replies,Waits by, expecting his remorse,With pardon in her pitying eyes;And if he once, by shame oppress'd,A comfortable word confers,She leans and weeps against his breast,And seems to think the sin was hers;Or any eye to see her charms,At any time, she's still his wife,Dearly devoted to his arms;She loves with love that cannot tire;And when, ah woe, she loves alone,Through passionate duty love springs higher,As grass grows taller round a stone. Initially this ideal primarily expressed the values of the middle classes. However, with Queen Victoria's devoting herself to her husband Prince Albert and to a domestic life, the ideal spread throughout nineteenth century society.
The Angel in the House
Emily
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