Gender Relations and Female Sexuality in Victorian Fiction

Abstract

The Victorian Age was often a contradiction unto itself. An age of industrial and technological progress, it was also the age of strict moral codes. While most Victorian morality impinged on women’s life, the woman’s question became a pervading subject of much Victorian fiction. This paper is an overview of, or an introduction to, the way gender relations were dealt with in Victorian classical fiction, as well as how that treatment was almost always, inevitably, informed by the portrayal of female sexuality. The three novels in the scope of this paper deal with these very questions, albeit differently. Published quite close to each other, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, as well as Vanity Fair, have strong female heroines – all of whom find themselves at the margins of the conventional Victorian society in one way or the other. This paper explores the relationships of these individual heroines with the society they inhabit in general, and with themselves in particular.