Victorian Women: Angels in the House

The non-established model of woman

In the context of Hard times and Wuthering Heights, women were conceived as “angels in the house”, they had to put their own desires aside in order to dedicate their entire self to their house and family, according to Sarah Ellis’ books, as it is said in Natalie McKnight’s work,” it was stipulated that women should always be self-sacrificing, subservient, dutiful, meek - in short, angelic [...] This role falls to women because men are too consumed with the world of work”. This last affirmation is due to the thought of Victorian Era that women and men lived in a separated atmosphere and whereas men’s duty was work, women’s obligation was in their homes, giving birth to children and taking care of the house(except

In Wuthering Heights, as J. Beauvais affirms “reflects the [Feminine gothic] genre’s concern with the fears and anxieties that women face in the reality of their everyday lives, including their ‘confinement within the domestic space’, their place within the family, the loss of their self identity and the threat of male sexual energies”
In the book, two main characters are example and antithesis of that affirmation.
Isabella Linton is the prototypical women of his society who behaves as society expects from her. She is the ideal of femininity. On the other hand, Catherine is the most clear example of the fears before mentioned. In her first years, as it is pointed in Beauvais article, “The proper education required to instil in young Catherine the desire for domesticity and femininity is absent, as a child Catherine’s true nature runs wild among the moors, [..] she learns soon that she does not ‘fit into’ the domestic space and begins to search outside the boundaries” this marks the perpetuation of her own nature, and although she tries to be ‘domesticated’ looking for a feminized men, but she as Beauvais says “finds freedom through mutability and transformation”, and when her true love, Heathcliff appears, she cannot hide her real nature. Catherine seems a feminist character in the fact