The Upper Crust of Tea Time: Polite Society and The Victorian Institution of Marriage

The British Victorians indeed lived in a highly gendered time, in which women and men were expected to exist in “separate spheres”. The sphere of men encompassed all avenues of British public life, and a given man was within his bounds to exhaust all opportunities of education, commerce, and business that his status in society made available to him. By workday’s end, when he had grown tired of muck of the English streets and scenes of unseemly capitalistic realities, he could find refuge at his well-kept home. That glorious light of wholesomeness, purity and Christian value kept a light on for him until he crossed the threshold to remove his boots. Only behind closed doors was the private domain of women, busy in the business of bringing up children, tending to household cares, and with the diligence of a maid,  the wife scrubs away both the grime of living and that unseemly “moral decay” of the English streets that the boots of husbands may track in from time to time. As Kabeer quotes Nash and Safa in Reversed Realities, “the family was portrayed as a refuge from the hostile world outside, and women were socialized to believe they were privileged by their husbands to remain within its sheltered confines” (48). 

         The world outside the home was far from as safe as the interiors of the home young women left behind at the threshold of married life. Victorian society was structured in such a way as to heavily attribute much of its weight to the institution of lawful marriage and while moral in supposition, presented an ugly reality even for those globally deemed privileged as residing under the rule of the world’s most eminent Imperial power. Well-to-do women were brought up cultivating bourgeois pass-times to please groups of polite society. Upon coming of marriageable age, drawing rooms filled with acquaintances of mixed company, and quickly transformed for young women into arenas where eligible bachelors may be won by charm, beauty, accomplishment, poise, and of course, the ampleness of  Daddy’s bank account. Talented, charming young ladies were auctioned off to the highest bidder as nineteenth-century marriages struggled to be made for love over familial and financial politics. Take for example, early feminist Victorian author Mary Anne Evans’ (otherwise known by her pseudonym George Eliot) sassy and self-absorbed heroine, Gwendolen Harleth from her 1876 novel Daniel Deronda. Full of spright, Gwendolen attracted the attention of all onlookers at a gentile archery tournament of well-to do English society. Gwendolen rejected the Victorian notion of marriage but liked the freedom a climb in social status could award her and reluctantly, she consented to be wed. Needless to say, bad things ensued for Gwendolen and she was left repenting of her “wicked” ways by the novel’s demise.

Just as the pomp and circumstance for the courting ritual was heavily entrenched with cultural expectations (as it was for Gwendolen), so were the expectations for the wife for whom the wedding bell tolls. Handbooks like The Wife and mother; Or, Hints to Married Daughters, by a Mother (1841) were heavily circulated during the nineteenth century among women of marriageable age. Handbooks such as these reinforced the idea of separate spheres philosophy as well as confining women to reproductive rather than productive roles. As we see even before the courtship ritual, even the product of women’s artwork (such as needlepoint, painting, singing, piano playing etc.) was all done for the pleasure of polite woman expresses herself, she is solely contributing to reproduction and has no place in society as a vital individual in her own right. Further, handbooks such as Hints to Married Daughters urge women to plead with 

“such idle tyrants in our age and country, who, so as they can live in indolence, and gratify their appetites, care not how they oppress their wives? Wretches who do little or nothing for the support of their family? How utterly lost to every noble and generous sentiment must that man be, whose heart cannot be moved by the entreaties or the tears of an interesting woman, and who in vain cannot hear her pleadings for his child at her breast, and his child by her side, and who by such appeals cannot be induced to give up his daily visits to the tavern, or his habits of sundering idleness, to attend to his neglected business and stay the approaching tide of poverty and ruin” (74). 

By the above passage, women are helpless pawns in the moral persuasion of their husbands to Christian morality. They, and their children, fully dependent on the husband, the breadwinner, and the head of the household. This leaves women in a frightful position even more ferocious of the undercurrent in the drawing room of courting ritual. Separate spheres philosophy and the marriage contract placed women in a state of indentured servitude and sexual slavery. As discussed in class, the West (or the Global North if you will) influenced the oppression of women in the developing world. We can see from centuries such as the nineteenth, when Imperialism was at its height as Queen Victoria tremendously expanded the British empire, separate spheres philosophy was a cultural import from the global North that steeped like a strong tea, into the global south, with as little validity save “that’s the way it’s always been done”.

References: 

Defining Gender Database- Hints to Married Daughters https://www-gender-amdigital-co-uk.proxy.library.ohio.edu/Documents/Images/The%20Wife%20and%20Mother%20or%20Hints%20to%20Married%20Daughters%20by%20a%20Mother/0

 Kabeer- class reading Chapter 3 from Reversed Realities - https://learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.s3.amazonaws.com/5c1270dbb5a74/8504958?response-cache-control=private%2C%20max-age%3D21600&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27kabeer%2520ch%25203.PDF&response-content-type=application%2Fpdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20200921T000000Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21600&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAZH6WM4PL5SJBSTP6%2F20200921%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=07e54c74f5f2b51c133637cd6b3782ca92b1146b8a0225868b2ec7b105c2db32