ABSTRACT |
Transatlantic nineteenth-century conceptions of women gave birth to a
prevalent dichotomy of roles on both sides of the Atlantic. In Victorian
England, women were considered embodiments of socially-sanctioned
values, personifications of piety, purity, prudery and morality. Young
females were presumed to keep and enact these qualities within their
inherent domestic space, the blissful residence of the Victorian family,
a safe refuge untouched by worldly dangers. As preservers of moral
values and presumably willing inculcators of proper standards of
behaviour, young women were expected to play the role of the angel of
the house. In case, Victorian damsels usurped other roles unappertaining
to them, they became fallen angels, rebellious characters defying the
submission patriarchal society demanded from them. On the other shore of
the Atlantic, in mid-nineteenth-century America, women had undergone a
Civil War alone, while their fathers, husbands, and brothers fought on
the battleground. Due to historical reasons, American women had begun to
develop a sense of independent existence making a living of their own.
Through their daily chores and struggle, they embodied the female
fulfilment of the American Dream, personifying the role of the New
Woman. By contrast, American heroines displaying languor and invalidism
were termed as Decadent. Both Fallen Angels and New Women disrupted the
coy nature attached to young females, but their interpretation differed
in England and America. Similarly, both the angels of the house and the
decadent women shared many qualities, although they were not held in the
same light on both shores of the Atlantic. This article aims at
analysing transatlantic female roles in Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind
and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
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