Activate Javascript or update your browser for the full Digital Library experience.
Previous Page
–
Next Page
OCR
Re-reading Cornelian Myths 243
... Served as a convenient shorthand for a type generally celebrated in tracts
and novels, the selfless, virtuous, pure, and spiritualised deity, who presided
over hearth and home and whose presence was a refuge from the storms of
commercial strife.°
According to the poem, the “natural” order of things dictated that
women were subordinate, subservient, obedient. Yet at the same time they
exerted a high moral influence within the family. These two facets of
women’s life, taken together, rendered their economic independence, their
education and enfranchisement not only unnecessary, but even
undesirable.’
The unrealistic, idealistic views of Patmore and Ruskin reflected and
influenced the prevailing climate of opinion. But practice did not entirely
coincide with theory. Though an upper-middle-class woman had to appear
angelic, in practice, within the private sphere, she exerted a great deal of
power and authority, financial as well as moral, if she were responsible for a
household of any size. And, gradually, even the theory was eroded: by 1866
John Stuart Mill was petitioning parliament on the subject of women’s
suffrage. However, a surprising number of influential women opposed any
disturbance of the status quo. Beatrice Webb, Octavia Hill, Florence
Nightingale, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronté and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning all resisted the extension of the franchise to women.* Even the
free-thinking Frances Power Cobbe castigated the exercise of authority by
women as “almost by definition ‘irresponsible’.”’ And Cornelia, in spite of
the extraordinary events of her life, was fundamentally conventional,
accepting rather than challenging the current /ores.
The unexamined assumption of Victorians generally, and to a
considerable degree of Cornelia herself, was that women should not assert
° Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca and
London: Cornell UP, 1995), 69.
"Tt need hardly be remarked that a whole class system underlay this gender stereotyping; Ruskin and Patmore
were speaking of upper middle class women only. For a woman to become an Angel in the House an
infrastructure supported by servants had to be in place. Working class women at this time were employed in
dangerous occupations in newly developing industries.
8 David Newsome, The Victorian World Picture (London: John Murray, 1997), 253. Edward Burne-Jones’ wife,
Georgiana, who was a committed socialist, found Mill’s work “too exaggerated on the unpopular side of the
subject.” (Flanders, A Circle of Sisters, 124.)
Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers, 195.
a SR DA SPRAIN |