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Socially Acceptable Gender Roles

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In many ways, fiction of each era reflects the insecurities, concerns, and ideals of its generation. Through fiction, authors are able to construct entire universes of their own fantasy, with characters that both reject and adhere to traditional conceptions of what is considered to be socially acceptable. The same holds true for works of the fin-de-siècle (end-of-century). Authors of the late 19th and early 20th century question traditional Victorian notions of the boundaries of socially acceptable gendered behavior and sexual roles. Writers, such as Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, and Robert Louis Stevenson, prove that figures that breach social conceptions of a gendered binary are liminal because the boundaries that they transgress are mutable, rather than the characters themselves. These boundaries and their mutability, however, must be considered in relation to the author’s biases because the constructions of these universes are not perfect renditions of reality. …show more content…

Jeykll and Mr. Hyde, and Frankenstein’s creature, lay evidence to the claim that presupposed gendered institutions from the fin-de-siècle are not inherent qualities, but are behaviors intentionally accepted or transgressed in order to achieve means to an

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