Weathering Challenges to the Separate Sphere Ideology: The Persistence of Convention in Victorian Novels, 1850-1901

Abstract

The separate sphere ideology, dominant but never hegemonic in Victorian Britain, dictated that women’s natural vocation was to be wives and mothers. Between the years 1850 to 1901, the surplus woman problem and a nascent feminist movement challenged the separate sphere ideology. It was also reinforced by imperialist ideologies that held the British family as a sign of Britain’s superiority, and eugenics which placed great importance on heterosexual marriage and reproduction. How did novelists, especially women novelists, respond to the challenges against the separate sphere ideology? How did they depict unconventional women such as surplus women, women who behaved in transgressive ways, feminist women, lesbians, and women who were in interracial relationships? The conventional narrative stressed the importance of marriage, and unconventional characters either reformed themselves or met tragic fates. This remained consistent throughout the second half of the 19th century. At mid-century, unconventional women were the ones who rejected marriage, had an affair, etc. As women began to gain rights in education, work, and civic rights, the temptations that drew middle class women away from conventional life shifted to wanting to work or becoming feminists. Novels also depicted alien others, such as lesbians and non-white people, as menaces and threats to conventional marriage. Acceptable unconventionalities were limited: it was acceptable for women to be unconventional if they were exceptional or they broke one convention but upheld another, such as motherhood. At the end of the century, New Women novelists and other novelists that sympathetically depicted unconventional women critiqued the separate sphere ideology, but were overwhelmingly pessimistic about the possibility that women could escape convention.