The ideology of domesticity
As a reaction to the rackety private lives of some of their predecessors, the queen and Prince Albert set out to create a monarchy rooted in the idea of a happy marriage and domestic values that would give an example to the rest of the country. Walter Bagehot wrote ‘A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life’. |
| Victoria and Albert's Christmas tree Wikimedia Commons |
The ideology of domesticity was set out in the novels and paintings of the period. Home was regarded as a place of calm happiness away from the turmoil of the world of work, and the wife was the guardian of the home. Although women were denied a say in politics, they were nevertheless thought to play a vital part in the ordering of society. It is often said that the Victorian period saw a rigid ideology of separate spheres: the man’s role was public and outward-looking, the woman’s was private and domestic. Women were denied a direct political role, but because the home was a site of national importance, their domestic role was seen as politically important. If a woman went wrong, therefore, this prefigured national disaster.
For Isabella Beeton (a journalist pretending to be a housewife!), the role of the mistress of the house was equivalent to that of an army general. Like him, she had to be efficient, well-organised, and in control of the situation.
AS WITH THE COMMANDER OF AN ARMY, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path. Of all those acquirements, which more particularly belong to the feminine character, there are none which take a higher rank, in our estimation, than such as enter into a knowledge of household duties; for on these are perpetually dependent the happiness, comfort, and well-being of a family. Book of Household Management.
The angel in the house
Between 1854 and 1862 Coventry Patmore published a long and constantly revised poem, The Angel in the House, which more than any other work set out the ideology of domesticity. You can read the full text here. |
| John Everett Millais, 'Mrs Coventry Patmore' Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Public domain |
John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies (1865) set out a rather complex message: women were equal to men and both had a role in the public sphere.
Generally, we are under an impression that a man’s duties are public, and a woman’s private. But this is not altogether so. A man has a personal work or duty relating to his own home, and a public work or duty, which is the expansion of the other, relating to the state. So a woman has a personal work or duty, relating to her own home, and a public work or duty, which is also the expansion of that.
But at the same time, their characters and roles were different. The woman was the guardian of the home.
And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless.
In 1863 George Elgar Hicks' Woman's Mission: Companion of Manhood, set out the wifely ideal. It was part of a series of three paintings, showing women's duties, the other two being Guide of Childhood and Comfort of Old Age.
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| George Elgar Hicks, 'Woman's Mission: Companion of Manhood' Tate Britain Public domain |
The fallen woman
The angel in the house had her counterpart on the fallen woman, an object of constant fascination to the Victorians.The statistics of Victorian prostitution are contested and hard to come by. Not all prostitutes worked full-time. Some were poorly paid women, who eked out their meagre earnings with prostitution on the side, others were single mothers supporting their families in the only way they knew how.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti depicted his mistress, Fanny Cornforth, in the unfinished painting, Found, in which a young man up from the country discovers his girlfriend, now a fallen woman.
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti 'Found' Tate Britain Public domain |
William Holman's The Awakening Conscience, (1853) goes up the social scale. A kept woman, living in leafy St John's Wood (a notorious place where wealthy men kept their mistresses), rises up from her seat, having discovered the error of her ways.
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| William Holman Hunt 'The Awakening Conscience' Tate Britain Public domain |
The Victorians were profoundly shocked by Augustus Egg's trilogy, exhibited in 1858, wrongly labelled Past and Present, which depicts the break-up of the home following the discovery of the wife's adultery.
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| Augustus Egg, 'Past and Present Number 1: Misfortune' Tate Britain Public domain |
Social anxiety?
It may be that Egg's paintings were a reflection of concern over the previous year's Matrimonial Causes Act, which for the first time allowed a wife to divorce her husband, though under restricted circumstances. Women were gaining greater freedoms and the institution of marriage seemed to be weakening. Was this necessarily a bad thing? In Dickens's novels (until his more sombre later ones) the heroines are young and innocent, their concerns are purely domestic, and their marriages are ideally happy. On the other hand, a series of novels of the 1860s undermined this rose-coloured view of marriage. Dickens' friend, Wilkie Collins, explored the darker side of marriage in The Woman in White - a novel as well in which the heroine is plain rather than beautiful, and active and energetic rather than passively waiting for the right man. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, was a sensational best-seller, featuring murder and bigamy. The demure Victorian wife was not all she might seem to be!
Conclusion
- The ideology of domesticity set out a view of the home as a place of calm, a refuge from the world, and woman's true sphere.
- The converse was a fascination with the subject of the fallen woman, who was constantly portrayed, though seldom realistically, in the paintings and novels of the period.
- Some of the novels of the 1860s might be seen to mark a reaction against this binary Madonna/whore division of women and were preoccupied with the secrets that might be hidden within the respectable walls of the Victorian home.
