If the poets of the Medieval Era sung the beauty of life, the joy to live and to love, the 19th century literature comes as a punch in the face. Even literary writings with an emotional charge are shadowed by a bitter irony. Victorian s authors do not hesitate to use their best weapon the writing in rendering the faults of a society on the bring of capitalization. If the Middle Age Era seeks to build the perfect religious man, Victorianism gives birth to the industrial man.
One of the aspects the two periods have in common, is the women s inferior status. However, time produced some changes and it became quite a trend for the Victorian women writers to cover under male pseudonyms. For this category stands George Eliot. Part of the Late Victorian writers, her case illustrates best Oscar Wilde s dilemma: is it art that creates life or vice versa? Whoever knows a little about George Eliot s life can easily perceive in her novels several autobiographical information and remark her craftsman shift. Thus, in Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, fiction and reality pass together like the colors of a painter. The final panorama of the four novels depicts the provincial life with its narrow- minded people invaded by the overwhelming process of industrialization. Like any other change, industrial development has its victims and its time servers. A new world order is imposed by a new social class: the bankers gain supremacy over the aristocracy. In what the women s status regards, an improvement is out of the question. Business is exclusively a men s privilege that consolidated his superior position. The world still belong to them due to the belief that he is the one endowed with mind, whereas the woman is assumed to act accordingly to her heart s weakness.
The first chapter includes social-historical information and pictures the premises on which the Victorian society was built. These aspects play a major role for the Victorian writers, too, who find in them an awesome spring for their literary creation. The economical blooming which characterizes the 19th century provides the financial resources for several extraordinary inventions. Moreover, scientists seriously drive away, with their theories, the Christian spirit, thus marking the beginning of capitalism.
The growing of a new world based on materialism brings along a more obvious decline of the woman s status. Further on, she is expected to behave like a spectator and never speak her mind. In this respect, Victorian literature gets rich through the novels of several women-writers such as Bronte sisters, George Eliot. Chapter two -Women status in Victorian Age concentrates on the important functions of a woman, and sets the limits of her existence in a men s universe. The experience of the boarding schools and the stupefied education provided for the angel in the house are remarkably rendered by the literary feminine representatives. With George Eliot A spokesman of ...
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