**** A safe,
comfortable and righteous home became the most important and desirable
expression of British Victorian morality and middle-class respectability.
1)
Ruskin:
·
Ruskin set out
his idea of the
proper duties of men and women inside the home.
·
For Ruskin, the
role of women was to be homemakers and helpmates to their husbands,
who would return from work to be comforted
within a loving domestic environment.
·
The 'true nature of home',
Ruskin asserted, was as a 'place of Peace;
the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division' (1865, p. 148). Women should devote themselves to the domestic sphere and make it their sacred duty, he declared, arguing
that their social role was inseparable from
their sex: 'wherever a true wife comes, this home is always around her' (p. 149).
2)
Coventry Patmore:
·
He crystallised Victorian ideas about domesticity in his poem The Angel in the House (1863), in
which he created a potent archetype of Victorian
womanhood: pure, chaste, devoted
to her husband, and sympathetic.
3)
Isabella Beeton
·
Her book taught generations
of women to run their homes efficiently: 'there is no more fruitful
source of family discontent than a housewife's badly cooked dinners and untidy
ways'
-
Like many Victorians, Ruskin, Patmore and Beeton
celebrated the cultivation of the home as
morally
good, and argued for the central role of women as its custodians.
-
While the Victorians conceived of home as a refuge from the rigour,
uncertainty, anxiety and potential violence of the outside world, it could not be an absolutely secure environment.
-
Despite the
strong sense of social and sexual propriety, not everything was
as it seemed within the Victorian home, especially in London, where high ideals about the perfect home often clashed with
the new realities of urban life: violence, prostitution, drug addiction and rampant crime,
to name a few. Often these
threats could not be kept out of the family home; as Doyle's detective fiction demonstrates, domestic space
could also double as the scene of the crime.
The Victorians
and abroad
For all their love of domestic comfort, and their sentimental idealisation of
the perfect home, the
Victorians lived in a rapidly changing industrial world. The prosperity
that paid for middle-class comfort was the result of an expanding and
profitable overseas trading empire, with India at its centre. While the
'business of the Empire', as the critic Patrick Brantlinger observes, 'seemed
to be everyone's business ... tea, sugar, spices, cotton, opium, wool, gold,
rubber and many other commodities arrived at British ports on a daily basis'
(2009, p. 3).
The Victorian period was one of imperial expansion
abroad and social upheaval at home. Millions left Britain's
shores to trade, fight in wars, administer a new empire or setde in other
countries. With industrialisation forcing
down the cost of labour, many emigrated from economic necessity.
While the majority of Britain's emigrants intended
to return, many never did and, for them, the gap
between their new location and their old emotional home became unbridgeable.
Overseas commerce meant that the majority of Britons at home in this period
(despite imperial expansion most Britons did stay at home) would have
had some awareness of the relevance of British imperialism to their lives.
Sometimes the effects
of abroad upon home were plainly visible, for example through the presence of
people from the colonies visiting or residing in Britain. As the world's largest city in the
nineteenth century, and capital of the biggest overseas trading empire, London
"was a cosmopolitan, multiracial city. Freed
African slaves, itinerant Indian peddlers, traders and students, Chinese dock
workers — all could be
seen on London's streets and are described in vivid detail by writers
such as Doyle.
Reading about abroad at home
*** The Victorian age saw
a great rise in reading, and Britain
became a literate society by the end of the nineteenth century. Many Britons
never travelled abroad, but after the
Education Act of 1870 almost all could read with some proficiency.
Britain's most important imperial possession,
India, was often romanticised for readers at home.
The empire
was a mirror in which the British saw themselves as they wanted to be seen:
powerful, resourceful, enterprising, hard-working, virtuous, Christian,
bringers of progress, civilization and emancipation.
-
{The
Sign of Four and 'The Beach of Falesa'}
YOU will
explore: how
some of these certainties about home and abroad changed during the Victorian period.
Reading was the most important
cultural activity for the Victorians and, more than anything else, the act of
reading shaped views about home and abroad in this period.
The activity of reading is an important
context for Victorian fiction. Readers bring their
own experiences, values and expectations to any literary text they encounter;
it makes sense, then, that as values and assumptions change, so, too, do
responses to works of literature.
In the chapters on Wuthering Heights: we will explore the critical reception
of the novel both by Bronte's contemporaries and by more recent literary
critics with a view to revealing die changing ways in which a literary text is
interpreted over time.
In the
chapters that follow, we will examine the ways in
which different
genres — as well as different forms of
publication — of prose fiction create certain
expectations in readers which are
sometimes fulfilled and sometimes frustrated.
لم أسجل المادة. ووفر المادة العلمية لي الاخ برنارد شو فلا تنسوه من الدعاء
