Empowered Women: Paradoxical Dynamics of Self-denying Submission in Victorian Female Characters
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In spite of its central role in our understanding of the nineteenth-century’s cultural values, self-denial in women is a difficult topic to take up freshly today, charged as it is with a-century-long discussions spilt on the nineteenth-century gender ideologies, immediately evoking in us the cultural and literary stereotype of “the angel in the house.” By focusing their discussions on indisputably homologous working between dominant gender ideologies and (gendered) moral virtues in Victorian culture, however, previous studies tend to overlook what those female characters actually aspire and achieve in the novels through their adopting of self-denying submission as a moral principle. In order to look afresh into the nature of self-denial in Victorian female characters and its meaningful potentials, this study re-opens the topic with a question of why and how self-denying female characters in Victorian novels are portrayed as submissive and powerful at once, a question moving forward to the exploration of those female characters' sense of the self that is built upon a model of affiliation rather than that of individual achievement. This paper argues that self-denying submission is the very way through which Victorian female characters, such as Esther Summerson, Dorothea Brooke, Amy Dorrit, Emily Wharton, and Grace Crawley in the works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, actively change their lives and, in many cases, others’ lives as well and find a more enlarged and communal sense of the self. Sublating the cultural value of Victorian female virtues into the cultural capital that empowers them, these female characters actively and inventively refashion the female economy of the self that is grounded in the communal relationships they create.
Abstract
In spite of its central role in our understanding of the nineteenth-century’s cultural values, self-denial in women is a difficult topic to take up freshly today, charged as it is with a-century-long discussions spilt on the nineteenth-century gender ideologies, immediately evoking in us the cultural and literary stereotype of “the angel in the house.” By focusing their discussions on indisputably homologous working between dominant gender ideologies and (gendered) moral virtues in Victorian culture, however, previous studies tend to overlook what those female characters actually aspire and achieve in the novels through their adopting of self-denying submission as a moral principle. In order to look afresh into the nature of self-denial in Victorian female characters and its meaningful potentials, this study re-opens the topic with a question of why and how self-denying female characters in Victorian novels are portrayed as submissive and powerful at once, a question moving forward to the exploration of those female characters' sense of the self that is built upon a model of affiliation rather than that of individual achievement. This paper argues that self-denying submission is the very way through which Victorian female characters, such as Esther Summerson, Dorothea Brooke, Amy Dorrit, Emily Wharton, and Grace Crawley in the works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, actively change their lives and, in many cases, others’ lives as well and find a more enlarged and communal sense of the self. Sublating the cultural value of Victorian female virtues into the cultural capital that empowers them, these female characters actively and inventively refashion the female economy of the self that is grounded in the communal relationships they create.
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