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Scott Tarbox

Ms. Winter

British Literature, Period 1

10 May 2017

Victorian Era Women and Their Hardships

The victorian era was not a good time for women back then because they were

disregarded as human beings and almost thought to be slaves of man. In the Victorian age novel,

Tess of the Durbervilles(1892) by Thomas Hardy, A young girl by the name of Tess is looked at

as a pure and kind-hearted woman whose family has fallen on a hard time financially and needs

some extra money. Tesss father discovers that they are actually part of the D'urbervilles name

and that Tess needs to go live with them so that she can make some money. She then meets a

man named Alec who is charming at first but begins to be really pushy. Later in the story this

man rapes her and she becomes pregnant but no one bats an eye because she is a woman. This

event begins the downwards spiral to inevitable death throughout the rest of the book. The

oppression of women in the victorian era was accurately portrayed through the text of Tess of the

D'urbervilles. Not only were women oppressed but they were seen as the property of man and

that they could do whatever they wanted to do to them without anyone caring at all because it

was such a normal occurrence back then; especially if they were born into a low status.

Back in the 1800s it was a completely normal thing for women to be disregarded and

made basically slaves for men if they had a lower status than them because no one cared unless

they were of royal descent or were married into a higher power family. Some women were
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forcefully married off to men they had never met before just so the families could join together

and have more money or a higher class status:

Consider the social and historical norms present in The Piano. Ada, a mute woman with

a child born out of wedlock, is an outsider on those two counts. Furthermore, her father

forces her into an arranged marriage. The film takes place in the Victorian era, about

1850; not only can Ada not own property, she is property. She leaves Scotland on a boat

to New Zealand to wed a man she has never met.(Dalton)

The father in Tess forces Tess to go out to the DUrbervilles house to become part of their family

so that the father could have more money and so they all could have the DUrberville name. Just

like in the text mentioned above Tess had a child while not married due to Alecs wrongdoings.

This happened quite often back then.

Being born into a higher status family had a significant bearing on how well off you

would be in life, especially for women. Within the Victorian society it was extremely difficult for

someone of a lower class to go up in classes without be married off or work very very hard. It is

impossible for a low-status woman to have a decent life or a good marriage. The social structure

determines the social position of a person. Women are discriminated in the patriarchal society.

If you were born into a lower class as a man there were many ways for you to be able to succeed

in life and aim for a better future for your family but for women it was the opposite:

In addition, women were denied entrance into most universities and were barred from

most professions, excluding teaching, acting as a governess, and nursing, all of which

essentially were extensions of their domestic duties. Because they were not expected (or

allowed in many cases) to earn wages outside of the home and frequently did not have

any direct claim to property, the large majority of middle- to upper-class women were
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entirely dependent upon men both for economic support and for intellectual stimulus, a

social reality that has prompted many students of the period to claim that white middle-

class women were little more than chattel.(Herrera)

Women in the victorian era were essentially screwed if they were born into a lower class because

men thought that they should just stay at home to do everyday chores around the house while he

goes to get an education or is working. Women back then were very dependent on men and were

not allowed to do many things that they are today such as getting jobs, owning property, and

obtaining an education that could better them in life and lead to more success. The small majority

or lower class women that got out of that social status were ones that had been married off into a

higher one or ran off to a better place.

Women back in victorian times were getting taken advantage of quite often and they

could not do much about it because they were the minority group, Hardy shows just how easily

women in Tess's position--poor and alone--can be taken advantage of. The concept of insidious

trauma explains the impact of one's position in society: a minority group is already at a

disadvantage because of the absence of safety and this manifests itself in the violence committed

upon a certain group. How Hardy had shown this in the text is when Tess was financially

unstable and by herself at the DUrbervilles estate Alec was able to fully take advantage of her

and raped her. After this traumatic event Tess just got up and left the next day without telling

anyone of what happened because she believed no one would do anything about it, and she was

right. The only one that it seemed to have an impact on other than Tess in the book was Angel

because he believed she was a pure and innocent girl.

The only true escape women get from men in the victorian era was when they are dead,

It is as it should be, she murmured. Angel, I am almost glad -yes, glad! This happiness could
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not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough, and now i shall not live for you to despise

me!(Tess 414). Tess is actually happy to be getting executed so that she may finally be rid of

all anguish and sorrow that she has obtained throughout her life such as being raped, disregarded

as a person, and the loss of her child. These things have built up on top of each other so much

that they have impacted Tesss life to the point that she is happy to die. Men in the victorian era

have created a society for women in which the best way to deal with life is to end it.

https://contemporaryartandfeminism.com/2014/01/27/project-the-f-word/--graphic

This graphic shows how harshly woman's emotions were treated back in the victorian era.

Women were not allowed to show emotion as it would be taken as a sign of weakness and that

they were considered less of a woman because of it, In effect, Lucy struggles with an ideology

which suggests that emotional capacity and desire in a woman are signs of weakness or

inferiority, an ideology which functioned as a means of maintaining control over female

sexuality and ambition, for it "kept" women in their "places." The reason they held these sort of
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ideas was because men thought that they were better than women and that women should be

more like men emotionally.

Hardy clearly wrote this book to bring light on the subject of victorian era social status

regarding women, Hardy refers to the social chasm that separates Tess from her maidenhood.

The chasm is real thought merely social. Angel Clare is responsible only for not ignoring this

social fact.(Tess 420) Hardy explains throughout the novel that the social system had a massive

impact on who you were in life back then. For example, Angels family is so entwined in this

belief system that he tries to break apart from it for Tesss sake. Because of her low social

standing his family does not think to highly of her, in fact they thought she was a beggar when

they first met.

In conclusion there is a lot of evidence to prove that the average victorian women had an

exceedingly difficult time climbing the social ladder in their time. The main challenge that they

faced was actually men in that time period because they did not believe women should do

anything else but stay home and do chores. This made it really hard for a women to get into

college to better their education because their man would either stop them from doing so or just

not help pay for it at all because women back there were almost never able to get a job. Not

being able to get into either of things things had a lot to do with them being stuck in their social

class because they are very much so needed to succeed in life back then. If the man let the

women get a job and go to college they would most likely end up in a much better social class

but for the most part this rarely happened.

Scott Tarbox

Ms.Winter

British Literature, Period 1

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10 May 2017

My Works Cited

1. Dalton, Mary M., and Kirsten James Fatzinger. "Choosing Silence: Defiance and

Resistance without Voice in Jane Campion's The Piano." Contemporary Literary

Criticism Select, Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?

p=GLS&sw=w&u=eldorado&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE

%7CH1100074775&asid=faabfc6445f2dea316ab5c1f8f918a29. Accessed 27 Apr. 2017.

Originally published in Women & Language, vol. 26, no. 2, Fall 2003, pp. 34-39.
2. Gao, Haiyan. "Reflection on feminism in Jane Eyre." Theory and Practice in

Language Studies, vol. 3, no. 6, 2013, p. 926+. Literature Resource Center,

go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GLS&sw=w&u=eldorado&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE

%7CA350978063&asid=f8073a4245c5080be50eab9763517c89. Accessed 27 Apr. 2017.

3. Herrera, Andrea O'Reilly. "Herself Beheld': Marriage, Motherhood, and

Oppression in Bront's Villette and Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."

Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Russel Whitaker and Kathy D.

Darrow, vol. 176, Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?

p=GLS&sw=w&u=eldorado&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE

%7CH1420074992&asid=18c18704a8026c128841f7fe38a5e5cd. Accessed 27 Apr. 2017.

Originally published in Family Matters in the British and American Novel, edited by

Andrea O'Reilly Herrera, et al., Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997, pp.

55-77.
4. Herrera, Andrea O'Reilly. "Herself Beheld': Marriage, Motherhood, and

Oppression in Bront's Villette and Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."

Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Russel Whitaker and Kathy D.

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Darrow, vol. 176, Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?

p=GLS&sw=w&u=eldorado&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE

%7CH1420074992&asid=18c18704a8026c128841f7fe38a5e5cd. Accessed 27 Apr. 2017.

Originally published in Family Matters in the British and American Novel, edited by

Andrea O'Reilly Herrera, et al., Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997, pp.

55-77.
5. Proodian, Sareene M.A. "'Once victim, always victim--that's the law!': insidious

trauma and the problem of identity in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles." Diesis:

Footnotes on Literary Identities, vol. 1, no. 2, 2012, p. 30+. Literature Resource Center,

go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GLS&sw=w&u=eldorado&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE

%7CA349722980&asid=080388f8decbd6321d23615f6e7cecea. Accessed 28 Apr. 2017.

6. Proodian, Sareene M.A. "'Once victim, always victim--that's the law!': insidious

trauma and the problem of identity in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles." Diesis:

Footnotes on Literary Identities, vol. 1, no. 2, 2012, p. 30+. Literature Resource Center,

go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GLS&sw=w&u=eldorado&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE

%7CA349722980&asid=080388f8decbd6321d23615f6e7cecea. Accessed 28 Apr. 2017

7. Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the DUrbervilles. New York: Signet Classics, 2006.

Print(414).
8. Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the DUrbervilles. New York: Signet Classics, 2006.

Print(420).
9. Picture Citation :

https://contemporaryartandfeminism.com/2014/01/27/project-the-f-word/--graphic
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https://contemporaryartandfeminism.com/2014/01/27/project-the-f-word/--graphic