The Fallacies of English Society

After marriage, the husband was considered lord and master of the family. But not all the women were meek and submissive. By the 1700's, the woman’s status had rapidly improved in colonial America. A wife and child made as much as a man did. Although women did not have equality with men, their status greatly improved from their status in Europe. A woman’s station in life was determined by the position of their husbands or fathers. The women of the poorest families, compiled to work in the fields, stood at the bottom of the social ladder. One of the surest signs of the accomplishments a family had made, was the exemption of their women from the fields. Before 1740, girls were trained in household crafts and the practical arts of family management. But afterwards they began to study subjects that required reading and studying such subjects as grammer and arithmetic. The women of the upper classes occupied themselves mainly with planning the work of the home and with supervising the domestic servants. Along with these tasks the women also baked, nursed, and sewed. But there were many social restrictions placed on the women of that time. One such restriction was that a wife, in absence of her husband, was not allowed to lodge men even if they were close relatives. For

In the sixteenth century the role of women in society was very limited. Women were generally stereotyped as housewives and mothers. They were to be married, living their life providing for her husband and children. The patriarchal values of the Elizabethan times regarded women as the weaker sex.’ Men were considered the dominant gender and were treated with the utmost respect by females. Women were mainly restricted within the confines of their homes and were not allowed to go school or to university, but they could be educated at home by private tutors. Men were said to be the ones to provide for their families financially. Women were often seen as not intelligent. Property could not be titled in the name of a female within the family. Legally everything the female had belonged to her husband. Poor and middle class wives were kept very busy but rich women were not idle either. In a big house they had to organize and supervise the servants.

Class, gender, and race are just a few of the classifications that have directly impacted one’s financial, legal, and personal freedoms throughout history. There are several examples in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth that will shed light to the many situations in which the characters find themselves that display the sort of inequality that was quite common in the 20th century.

Class divisions in Marshall’s Pretty Woman and its context of contemporary American society are largely attributed to wealth. The motif of wealth, established by the opening lines of the voiceover “...it’s all about the money...” emphasises the importance of money in the setting of an American capitalist society and the essential role of money in determining class and social hierarchy, as opposed to the

Throughout history civilizations have been governed by patriarchal societies dependent on the status and respectability of men. Men held all the power while women were subservient and even sometimes owned by men. This notion is only emphasized the moment we go back in time in the Victorian Era. Women were subject to men’s oppression, held no actual roles besides motherhood and were reliant on their chastity to project an agreeable image of themselves and their spouse. The status of a Victorian woman is depicted in “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Lord Tennyson and in a more feminist approach in “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti as being dependent on their chastity, servitude to men, and ability to present themselves.

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her” (Austen 3). The opening words of Jane Austen’s Emma served to highlight the rest of the novel’s themes concerning social class rankings. As the heroine of the story, Emma Woodhouse represented all the benefits that came with her high social standing. In nineteenth-century England, the issue of social status and rank pervaded everyday life and determined almost everything about a person. Social status in regards to marriage greatly affected one’s options, and society only deemed marriages within one’s social class as “suitable.” In her novel Emma, Jane Austen illustrated the nature of nineteenth-century social classes by introducing diverse characters and used Emma’s errors in judgement to satirize preoccupation with social class.

Class and social structures changed frequently throughout the medieval period, the renaissance, and the eighteenth century, and this change caused much anxiety in preserving the noble class. During the medieval period, the three classes were challenged by the emergence of the merchant class which rose to the same level as the nobles during the renaissance. Finally, in the eighteenth century, this noble class was pushed out of power and then returned, throwing the class into turmoil. These changes caused anxiety not only within and between the classes, but also within the realm of courtship and gender roles. Although these changes seem unrelated, the intersectionality of class and gender and the anxiety about the rules of courtship appear often in the literature from these time periods and reflect the social changes occurring.

The renaissance and medieval period brought a light into the female world, a world that was filled with male domination and prejudice towards women. Social class and the amount of wealth were the compass of a woman’s life during the renaissance period, what I mean is that women were viewed as trophies for wealthy men in order to provide worldly pleasure and guarantee the future of her man’s household. On the other side of the spectrum were women who are not among the wealthy and are considered among the bottom barrel of the social class status. Such women faced bleak prospects and their lives was a consent battle of survival. Women who married into rich families unsurprisingly gained a few advantages in that they had more leisure time and

It is a universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. This first line of Pride and Prejudice, written by Jane Austen, shows that women were thought as a property to show off to others. In British literature, the quite opposite was also depicted as true; women, who were not as privileged, wanted to marry rich men. Just by this example, it is easy to see how there was a difference in the way genders were depicted. Through the works of Shakespeare, Austen, Woolf, and Browning, the difference will be compared and contrasted more thoroughly to show that there indeed is a visible division.

Dressing appropriately to one’s station was, of course, an idea more than familiar to the premodern world and the subject of numerous sumptuary laws; indeed, throughout history, clothing has carried implicit messages about the wearer, from their gender and personality to their wealth or poverty. Sumptuary laws produced in medieval and early modern Britain, more specifically, ‘typically assigned women social rank on the basis of a male relative’. In light of this, it is unsurprising that when the marquis, Walter, selects the peasant Griselda for his bride when his people implore him to marry (ll. 92-140) that one of his first concerns is making her apparel appropriate to her new, superior position in the social hierarchy. Though his insistence that ‘Bountee comth al of God, nat of the streen / Of which they been engendred and ybore’ (ll. 157-8) – that a person’s goodness or ‘gentillesse’ is not inherited but divinely bestowed – suggests an ability to critique social expectations and divisions, Walter nonetheless succumbs to social convention in reclothing Griselda. Regardless of the strength of her inner qualities and character, the wife of the marquis could not be poorly arrayed: her new rank must be sartorially declared, and must reflect her husband’s rich status than her father’s poor status. Further, it is politically expedient to make Griselda’s

One of Hogarth’s bitterest satires, Marriage à la Mode, showed the disastrous results of a marriage of convenience concluded between the son of a poverty-stricken nobleman and the daughter of an aspiring merchant (Jarrett 88). Yet this background information is not necessary to appreciate each painting independently. From the first painting, in which the ambitious fathers of the couple exchange money and titles, to the final two prints that show the husband and wife’s melodramatic deaths, each of the six prints tells both a episode in the story of this doomed arranged marriage and a story in and of itself. The first two Marriage à la Mode prints, The Marriage Settlement and Shortly

With society embedding far fetched expectations for women based solely on patriarchy standards, it establishes partial perceptions that result in gender power imbalance. In the text, A Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth, it displays a series of events that is a symbolism of __________. Through a detailed analysis, the English artist tells a story of a young man who inherits a fortune on the death of his father. He squanders money on gambling, prostitutes and clothes. Consequently, he experiences debt and becomes

The Regency time period was an era of great wealth. Both men and women worked vigorously to become part of the upper class. Marrying for upper class women was the only way to gain a source of income (Hall). Women would even change their way of life to be able to marry into wealth. A truth universally acknowledged, that a single main possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife, said Mrs. Bennett (Hall). In the Regency time period, wealth played a huge role in both men and women’s lives

Over the centuries, women’s duties or roles in the home and in the work force have arguably changed for the better. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen teaches the reader about reputation and loves in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries by showing how Elizabeth shows up in a muddy dress, declines a marriage proposal and how women have changed over time. Anything a woman does is reflected on her future and how other people look at her. When Elizabeth shows up to the Bingley’s in a muddy dress they categorize her as being low class and unfashionable. Charles Bingley, a rich attractive man, and his sister had a reputation to protect by not letting their brother marry a ‘low class girl’. Reputation even today and back in the nineteenth

In Victorian England, “the bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (Engels). This upper middle class, the bourgeois, was divided into separate spheres determined by their “natural characteristics” such as being male or female (Gender 1). The bourgeois society’s main concern was their outward appearance and materialism while gaining respectability among their social class. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, criticizes Victorian bourgeois society and their strict adherence to gender roles. As Nora Helmer walked away from her family, she generated a “door slam heard around the world” (“A Doll’s House” 1).