Essay on Victorian Short

These three brides represent the femme fatale, the fatal woman. The over sexualised women whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. These women serve as monstrous reminders of what happens if the boundaries of proper behaviour and traditional gender roles are crossed. These women, although beautiful, possess the wrong type of beauty, one of which brands them as evil, openly sexual and seductive women. Who, in addition lack the chaste passivity and fragility of the ideal Victorian lady, thus making them deserving of some form of punishment in order for them to be returned to their pure, innocent, albeit dead, human form.

A woman in the Victorian era was good for few things – marriage being of the upmost importance. When married, a woman needed to pure of sexual experiences and desires, for only men had sexual needs to be fulfilled. If a woman were “ruined,” or not a virgin, she was unmarriageable. Few outlets were available unmarried women to survive, and many of them turned to prostitution. We shall see the image of a ruined woman presented by Christina Rossetti in “The Goblin Market,” and find the conflicting images of a prostitute in D. G. Rossetti’s “Jenny” and Thomas Hardy’s “The Ruined Maid.”

In Gardner’s “The Dinner Party”, the story resolves when Mrs. Wynnes states the truth that perfectly closes the discussion on gender roles, showing women’s capability for dealing with any possible crisis: “ ‘Because it was crawling across my foot’”(Gardner 1). Correspondingly, the resolution takes place in Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” where Mrs. Maloney tricks the police officers flawlessly by urging them to eat her murder weapon. Moreover, in Kishor’s “Appointment with Love”, the story comes with a twisted ending that reveals Hollis Meynell’s ingenious way to seek Blandford’s true feelings for her. Overall, the resolutions of these short stories also play an important role in establishing a stronger female figure against social

The actions of Victorians upon a death is a intricate web of rituals and etiquette. In Vanity Fair, William Thackeray gives modern readers a brief glimpse into deep mourning through Amelia Sedley-Osborne.

During the 19th century many writers began to publish works with sentimental plots. Generally the sentimental plot is written to make the reader feel an excess of unnecessary emotions, by overemphasizing every work. In every sentimental plot there will always be the typical sentimental hereon that fits the stereotype of a young orphan, unmarried women with moral obstacles. In this plot there are only two types of women the ones that are considered good and the ones that are bad. In the sentimental plot the good will get rewarded by marrying a decent man and the bad will always die. Even though this plot was very popular among writers many women were not happy with how the women were being portrayed among men writers so they decided to go

For the most part, society’s conception of women in the 19th century influenced the portrayal of female characters in writing generated during that time. The Cult of Domesticity claimed that true womanhood was marked by a natural inclination to domesticity and submissiveness. All women were thought to be weak, and writers often wrote off their female characters succumbing to their “natural” weakness by death or suicide, a result of their inability to handle life’s trials and tribulations.

The Lady of Shalott is a well-known story dating back to medieval times, but its popularity grew exponentially during the Victorian era. Victorian women were particularly fond of this poem because of how well they were able to relate to The Lady of Shalott’s situations, seeing similarities in their own domestic lifestyles. Like The Lady of Shalott,

The Victorian melodrama has a specific style and tone that gets the audience emotionally involved. It typically favors exaggerated discourse and heightened emotion to extreme measures. They also follow along with the “drama of good and evil, whereby virtue is relentlessly invaded and persecuted prior to a resolved ending” (Kapurch, 2015, p.439). This is evident in both Tangled and Brave with the “good guys” Rapunzel and Merida versus the “bad guys” Mother Gothel and Mor’du. For female-point-of-view melodramas, they involve the “downfall of a woman whose ambitions and desires are thwarted by social conventions that inevitably result in her death or loss” (Kapurch, 2015, p.439). The most important part of the melodramatic genre of the films is the family aspect. When family melodramas are viewed with a sensitivity to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) representation, they can often resemble a coming-out narrative (Kapurch, 2015,

There are many similarities found between 19th Century Victorian fairy tales and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In Jen Cadwallader’s study,” ‘Formed for labour, not for love’: Plain Jane and the Limits of Female Beauty,” she argues that Charlotte Bronte believed a woman could be formed for both love and labor. In this article, Cadwallader draws many parallels between Bronte’s Jane Eyre and fairy tales such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. However, at the same time eradicates any resemblance of miss Jane Eyre to the fairy tale heroine. Cadwallader further discusses the emphasis that upper-class societies placed on the value of feminine beauty and how class education played a role in this molding. Making feminine beauty a societal priority

Freaks of Nature: The unique acts of Victorian entertainment. When imagining the Victorian Age, it’s typical to picture a fancy opera house with gold chandeliers, lush gardens with big fountains, and women dancing around in big beautiful gowns drinking tea. As common as these were, it is astonishing to find how many unique and unusual forms of entertainment also took place in this era. From ghost shows and bull baiting, to illusion booths and freak exhibitions, the Victorian era was a very enticing, and what some might call - extreme time period when it came to what they considered leisure.

This lack of educated women and powerful men lead to women being depicted badly throughout literature. Since the origin of the Little Red Riding Hood story occurred before the woman’s equality movement there are many indicators of old stereotypes built into the main characters. This story can help readers understand how women were perceived during this time period as a type of time capsule. Both of these stories’ societies at the time of being written effected the story which caused the stories to be pulled in different directions. These differences in plot help form different morals and lessons that children will learn while reading.

Furthermore, in the novel, while listening to the story of “The Robber Bridegroom,” Liz’s twin daughters insisted to turn all male roles to female roles, which corresponds to the whole theme of the novel. Grimm’s The Robber Bridegroom as a traditional European fairy tale written in 1812, more or less, inevitably, complies with what the higher class demand in morals “in keeping with the Protestant ethic and a patriarchal notion of sex roles” in attempt to educate children and “appeal to the morals and virtues of middle-class readers” (Jack Zipes,ⅹⅹⅵ). Though it appears a hero such as the Miller’s daughter defeating the vicious man in its ending, which seems to reverse the sex role of that time, however, in fact, female characters cannot escape their presupposed images at all—women are delineated either as victim or as behaving goodness like an angle such as Miller’s daughter. By adapting this fairy tale, Atwood has completely reversed the sex roles of men and women, subverting those virtues and morals of female imposed by the patriarchal

expected to take care of their families and the home as if it were the only

Some of the things that one can learn about the society that read these fictional or real events is that the readers took reading these stories seriously because it kept them entertained and also reading was seen as something part of the society during this period. According to Oscar Wilde, “Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”(Wilde 22).Women in the Victorian Society mainly thought fiction novels where more interesting, because it was engaging and more entertaining than the nonfiction novels. Women in the Victorian Era had limited

"I'm no lunatic man, I'm a sane man fighting for his soul" this quote from Bram Stoker’s- Dracula, illustrates and foreshadows that in the Victorian era, a quest for meaning was seen by the majority of society as ‘lunacy’, however the characters that Stoker uses, are represented ‘sane’, suggesting Stoker’s encouragement of a quest for meaning and purpose in the Victorian era of increasing uncertainty. Along with Stoker, Charles Dickens and Lord Alfred Tennyson also address the individual’s pursuit for meaning and purpose, linking this idea specifically with themes of capitalism, class and gender inequality, corruption, freedom and oppression; which I will be using to comparing and contrasting the writers, closely analysing the driving