The belief that a woman’s place was in the home developed primarily in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the body versus mind distinctions that underwrite this assumption appeared much earlier. Cartesian Dualism dates to the sixteen hundreds when René Descartes proposed that the mind is separate from the body, and that the mind is simply a “ghost” that inhabits a body that is more-or-less a “machine.” This duality of human existence allowed other thinkers to map gender beliefs thereto: the mind, associated with truth and rational thought, was considered male, and the body, the seat of the senses and associated therefore with the passions, female. In this way, women were understood not just to live in their physical bodies, but to exist entirely as physical, sensing beings (Cregan 9, 49). Later, concurrent with the pseudo-scientific theories of the eighteenth century, the work of French social thinker Jean- Jacques Rousseau helped to give life to the doctrine of the separation of spheres (Gallagher 67). Because women are not, according to Rousseau and these theories, abstract thinkers, since they are animal-like, natural bodies taking concrete action, their physicality is especially important given that it constitutes them almost entirely. Pseudo-scientific medical studies of the eighteenth century modeling male and female as opposite and complimentary (Gallagher viii, 2, 43) (rather than similar but hierarchically understood) beings strengthened such theories.4 By the Victorian
4 Indeed, Ruskin, in his Letters and Advice to Young Girls and Young Ladies, claims that “we are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the ‘superiority’ of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes the other, is completed by the other: that are in nothing alike” (33). And in 1858 Dinah Mulock Craik, in speaking of the sexes, claims “equality of the sexes is not in the nature of things. Man and woman were made for, and not like one another” (6).
era, it therefore appeared entirely sensible that the logical male should rule the political and commercial realms, while the emotional female, because of her inherent nature, should remain in the home, where the physical, concrete body would order the home, birth and nurture the
children, and enact and perform those intimate connections with other individuals that produce the web of social life.5 The ideal of the domestic woman was born.6
The daily life of the physically bound, emotional female would therefore include regular and frequent use of the bodily senses. It is important also to note that although the senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and most centrally here, touch – in being intrinsically linked with the corporeal, are read by Victorians as feminine in comparison to the masculine mind, they could be individually gendered as male or female when considered alone. According to Constance
Classen, while the “higher” senses of sight and sound were connected with the male, “touch, taste and smell were generally held to be the lower senses and thus were readily linked to the lower sex – women” (Deepest 75). Historian of the senses Robert Jütte reaffirms this conviction,
5 These theories are echoed in the period by writers who claimed, like Sarah Stickney Ellis, the author of conduct books for women, that woman is “inferior in mental power” (Daughters 6) and “more quick to feel than to understand” (Daughters 10); above all, Ellis asserts, “to love, is woman’s nature” (Daughters 11). Reading Ellis and many other contemporary authors writing about women, modern critics declare that “Throughout much of the nineteenth century….Men tried to claim exclusively for themselves the capacity of action and thought, and relegated women to the realm of sensibility alone” (Faderman 157).
6 Various authors propound this theory, such as John Sandford in his 1833 book, Woman in her
Social and Domestic Character, who claims “Domestic life is the chief sphere of her influence; and domestic comfort is the greatest benefit she confers upon society” (2).
stating that “The five senses are commonly ranked in descending order of merit, beginning with the highest, which is almost always sight, and ending with the lowest, which is usually
sensation” (63). To touch, then, is doubly feminine, and should thus bear close scrutiny in studies of Victorian age texts. It is no surprise that Victorian women’s work was mostly physical in nature and often the work of the hand, such as sewing to clothe the children, embroidering to embellish the home, or preserving food to nourish the family. It should also come as no surprise that women’s relationships with others in the nineteenth century would be often constituted through physical touch.
That woman belonged in the home, enacting those handiworks necessary to physical life in the form of food and shelter and the bearing and caretaking of children, was clearly accepted by the English in the nineteenth century.7 A difficulty with the prescription that women’s nature destined them to be wives and mothers arose, however, due to the problem of “the excess
woman.”8 The corollary to the fact that many women would not marry is that, considering the excess “supply,” competition for the available positions of “wife” would soar. By virtue of considerable wealth, title, or beauty, some women could afford the luxury of rising above such struggles, but the greater majority of middle class women could not. Even those who, due to the above claims, were fairly secure in their prospects of marriage would face the ever-present
7 Indeed, according to Dinah Mulock Craik writing in 1858, “the first, highest, and in earlier times almost universal lot” of women is ‘'’in sorrow to bring forth’ – and bring up – ‘children’” (6–7). She also states that, “respect for Grandfather Adam and Grandmother Eve must compel us to admit [that the single state in women] is an unnatural condition of being” (2).
8 The Census of 1851 revealed that there existed in England nearly a half million more
struggle for the choicest husbands. For example, in The Way We Live Now, Georgiana Longstaffe, daughter of a petit-aristocrat family, expects a husband in the Upper House of Parliament. As she ages, “she moved her castle in the air from the Upper to the Lower House” but is thankful that she “had not as yet come down among the rural Whitstables” (Trollope 264). Therefore, for those whose portion of the above qualities was negligible, and even for those who were more assured, presenting themselves as ideal wives and mothers would be vital. In her book, Manners, Morals and Class in England, Marjorie Morgan speaks of the “puffing” that was often done to draw consumer’s attention to products. She writes,
Artful presentation that concealed the faults and heightened the appeal of “stuffs or trinkets” was, in a highly commercial society, not only a matter of fashion, but an economic necessity as well. As the market became more intensely competitive in the early industrial period, material goods had to be rendered increasingly conspicuous and seductive in order to attract people’s attention and pocket-books. (Morgan 111)
Though she is speaking of “stuffs or trinkets,” Morgan might just as successfully, I contend, have substituted “marriageable women.” After all, the ratios involved in the marriage market in England in the nineteenth century resulted in the same increasing competition for women that existed for goods.
Given, then, that the Victorian social order overwhelmingly agreed that a woman’s success lay in marriage, it was incumbent on any woman who wished to marry to “artfully present” herself, just as merchants “artfully presented” their goods. Presenting themselves as anything, however, would be a difficult issue for Victorian women. As Beth Newman’s Subjects on Display makes clear, “feminine display . . . was socially devalued” (5) and Nancy Armstrong
asserts that the ideal Victorian woman “is not a woman who attracts the gaze as she did in an earlier culture” (80). Indeed, conduct writers of the period like the popular Ellis refer to a woman’s “desire to be an object of attention” as not just ill-advised, but as “the besetting sin of woman” (Daughters of England 110). In her words, the desire to display is not just an ethical matter, but a moral one of considerable consequence.
There is little question that displaying wealth or beauty, i.e., external characteristics, was denigrated; however, displaying one’s interior characteristics rather than outer acquirement would be absolutely expected.9 Victorian conduct book writer Mrs. John Sandford, for example, writes that “the romantic passion, which once almost deified [woman], is on the decline: and it is
9 Joining the censure of external characteristics is Thomas Gisborne, who, in 1806, wrote “it was unquestionably the design of both [biblical authorities quoted], . . . to censure those who, instead of resting their claim to approbation solely on the tempers of the soul, in any degree should ambitiously seek to be noticed and praised for exterior embellishments. . . . These observations may . . . be extended from the subject of dress to solicitude respecting equipage, and all other circumstances in domestic oeconomy, with which the idea of shewy appearance may be
connected. They may be extended also to a thirst for fashionable talents and dispositions . . . and for modish accomplishments, gestures, phrases, reading, and employments” (141). Regarding the importance of attending to interior versus exterior, Etiquette: Social Ethics and the
Courtesies of Society, claims that “In the present day, when . . . ladies have laid aside that distinctiveness of dress in which courtly fames of old times especially delighted, it is all
important that every gentlewoman should scrupulously attend to manners and general conduct” (27).
by intrinsic qualities that she must now inspire respect” (1).10 Contemporary critic Beth Newman picks up on this mandate in Subjects on Display and echoes, “It is necessary . . . to consider [women] within a moral economy that exhorted women to abjure their propensities for display” but also to keep in mind that “social ranking . . . depended on some kinds of feminine display in order to signal status” (Newman 21). Displaying internal characteristics rather than exterior wealth works hand-in-hand (so to speak) with this new “moral economy.”