Throughout this course, as a class we’ve read various poems
and novels that center around women. These contexts can range from adoration,
to love, to frustration and the need for dominance. In most cases, the context
of the work is seen through a predominantly heterosexual male gaze. Taking
these works and their perceived male gaze into account, I plan to conceive an
understanding as to how each shaped the concept of female sexuality. I will
direct most of my attention to The Bloody
Chamber, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Goblin Market and how each author
treats sexuality in regard to women. I will also reference The Lady of Shalott, My Last Duchess, Romance of the Forest, and La Belle Dame sans merci and their treatment
of female subjugation and the use of “feminine wiles.”
Carter’s
The Bloody Chamber treats the
protagonist of the story as virginal and naïve in the first few pages. She is
newly married to a thrice widowed nobleman who wooed her with extravagant gifts
and overtures. The reader joins her as she learns her way about her husband’s
household and discovers his morbid fascination with pornographic art,
literature, and life style. His language toward his new bride centers upon his
domination of her person, referring to her as “little love,” “little nun,” and
“baby.” His pet names obviously demean his wife (who should be his equal in a
modern context) into the role of a child, and a petulant one at that. Her
casual perusal of his library and various works of art represent her ongoing
corruption and eventual loss of innocence (i.e. her “maidenhood”). Using the 50 Shades of Bloody Chamber post as a starting point, I concluded that
Carter’s tactic of using fairy tales to prove her point simply enhanced the territorial
nature of the Marquis by portraying him with lupine features, harkening to the
domineering Big Bad Wolf. The unnamed narrator’s eventual discovery of the
bloody chamber represents the perils of being a passive victim in sexual
relationships. This is mirrored and foreshadowed by “the girl with tears
hanging on her cheeks like stick pearls,” depicted in her husband’s copy of the
Robs illustrations.
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| Robs 'The Greatest Love of Don Juan' |
Rossetti’s
Goblin Market deals with the
companionship of women and overt homoerotic themes. Laura chooses to eat the
goblin’s fruits and suffers greatly for it, whereas her sister Lizzie vows to
cure Laura. She accomplishes this by returning to the market and goading the
goblins into pelting her with their wares; she returns to Laura with the juices
dripping from her skin which her sister greedily sucks and lick off her skin.
This can be read in various ways: purity versus fallen-ness and sin being
atoned for by repentance and achieving a new “virtue.” I contrast Rossetti’s
themes with those of Stevenson’s in The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this work there is not one
major female character, and the key players remain bachelors. The scene I will
focus on is Hyde’s trampling of the young girl. He pays off the family and in
doing so creates a strange gender shift by seemingly prostituting himself.
Considered a lowly profession in Victorian times, women were typically
prostitutes and suffered from a slew of sexually transmitted diseases. With the
lack of wives in the novel, it appears that Jekyll represses his desire for
female company and intimacy whereas Hyde, being his polar opposite, would not.
Hyde is the absence of morality and therefore has the freedom and canonical
backing to pursue sexual pleasure with his dominant nature.
Radcliffe
takes a different approach in Romance of the Forest by choosing the slowly build her heroine’s character. Adeline at
first glance comes off as more of a wet noodle than a true heroine and it is
only through further reading that the audience discovers her sly wit and
calculating mind; which has been cleverly concealed behind her ‘damsel in
distress’ façade. Adeline, and women and general, are expected to claim their
identity, according the Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s essay The Radcliffean Gothic Novel: A Form for Feminine Sexuality. Wolff
elaborates saying that a woman’s agency hinges upon choosing one of two loves: the
“chaste” non-aggressive love, or the “demon” love which is meant to be a
reflection upon her own sexual aggression and fantasies (103). Her own
“entrance into society” and reputation urges the heroine to choose the chaste
love, and in turn repress her own sexual urges deemed “unfit” by society.
Adeline does this in the novel by choosing Theodore, her only viable option for
escape; in turn making him the “chaste” option and furthermore Mr. Right.
In My Last Duchess, clearly “demon” won out
and ended in the eventual death of the girl in the portrait. She has been
reduced to an object of beauty, as opposed to a living and breathing human
being, which unfortunately has been prevalent throughout the ages. This poem
sparked my curiosity into investigating the perception of women in the eyes of
the artist. The concept of beauty shifted throughout the Victorian era and
those changes can be seen through several works of art; the imitation of
sunlight upon the neck or collarbone, heightened color in the cheeks, fabrics
being depicted in swelling and swaying forms, etc. “women are reduced to an
aesthetic arrangement of sexual parts, for male fantasies." This
objectifying women and dismantling them for parts can be readily seen in our
own modern advertising; it’s considered rare to see an ad of a whole woman in
an advert directed to sell men on a product. In the poem, the dismantling of
the last duchess doesn’t do this far but there are hints of it. The Duke has
his favorite parts of his late wife, but they were not aspects that of her
personality that gave her character. Instead he despised her inquisitive
nature, her quick to laugh kindness, and deemed the things she adored
“childish.”
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| Dante Rossetti's 'Venus Verticordia' |
How
does this aid comprehension of female sexuality? Aside from the fact that very
few authors were women, men barely acknowledged female sexual desires; and when
they did it was generally in regard to a fallen woman, prostitute, or
voluptuary. That doesn’t exactly allow women to take the reins in their own
sexuality, which encompasses their consent, fantasies, wants, and needs. The
Victorian era was a very confusing time to be a woman; how and when were they
to know their value? Was it when they chose the chaste love, or when their
clothes were hitting the floor to pose for a painting? The dichotomy of the era
kills me, which I believe is due in part to women’s shifting place in society.
With the industrialization of England, middle class women were now able to work
in factories for a salary. This differed from more home-spun ways of making a
living, in which a woman would sit at a loom and weave, or sew. The Lady of Shalott describes the shift
well, the Lady herself has no impetus to do anything other than sit at a loom
and weave tapestries all day. That is until she sees Lancelot riding toward
Camelot, in that moment her curse is thrust upon her. In a feminist view, the
Lady’s curse concerns women’s issues with their place in society and their
sexuality.
Obviously,
women’s subjugation played a huge role in their institutionalization and the
advent of “widow’s disease” or hysteria. Hysteria bloomed and was considered by
medical professionals to be strictly a feminine issue (etymologically speaking,
the Greek hysteria literally means
her illness deriving from the word for uterus). Treatment for hysteria ranged
from the invention of the vibrator to high powered “water massages” aimed at
the vagina. It was first thought of as “wandering womb syndrome” and resulted
in “female semen” needing to be expelled from the womb with regular climax and
intercourse. But at the same time, women were supposed to be the “angel of the
house” and in charge of the hearth, home and rearing of children. Clearly, the
Victorian era is a far cry from our enlightened age of, “I want a lady in the
street, but a freak in the sheets.”
There
is no resolution to be found within Victorian literature, no defined women’s
lib movement empowering vaginas and sexual appetites everywhere. The same
problem these women were facing still persists today, although in differing
ways. Looking at it in black and white, sexuality is a fluid and ever changing
force and most people fail to comprehend the affect it has on their person. It
is in my belief that to truly understand our own sexuality (whoa there, I’m
speaking as a fellow lady now) men must first attempt to understand their own.
Which clearly they were not ready to do in the Victorian era! There was far too
much riding on social propriety and reputation for them to even consider the
prospect that their wives might have sexual desires of their own or that
marrying someone does not make them your property. In closing, the various
works, paintings, and essays discussed helped me to analyze and synthesize the
greater theme of women’s sexuality in varying types of media.
Bibliography:
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “The Radcliffean Gothic Novel: A Form
for Feminine Sexuality.”Eighteenth Century Literature. 9:3 (1979):
98-113. Online: Proquest. May 1 2013.
Lee, Elizabeth. "The Femme Fatale As Object." The Victorian Web. (1997). Online. Victorianweb. May 3 2013.
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