The Runaway Slave At Pilgrim's Point '

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Recommended: Gender roles in the Victorian era

The Victorian age was in many ways a period of contradictions. A great deal of reform occurred during the reign of Queen Victoria. Political changes included the expansion of the electoral franchise (although women were still excluded), scientific discoveries, technological advances and the second industrial revolution which increased the move to urban areas and improved opportunities for some women to take up paid employment. However, it was also a period synonymous with conservatism. Victorian society was a deeply gendered society. In much of Victorian literature, women were ideologised as angelic domestic Goddesses (Evans 2/9). Men inhabited the public sphere and women were expected to manage domestic affairs. Men were demonstrated manliness by exhibiting control over their sexual appetites while women simply were expected to perform their duty in regards to sex rather than perform any active role. It was an age where women (at least middle class and upper class women) were to be ideologised as the moral bulwark of the family and of society as a whole, and therefore were to be closeted from public life (Oh 2/15). In “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (Barrett Browning, …show more content…

Men have the power of demand and women are devalued by their over-supply. There were few employment opportunities for approximately half a million unmarried women that resulted from gender imbalance at the time (Greenblatt, The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age 1033). Eulalie had tried at one of the few occupations available, that of Governess, but, she asks, ‘where’s the profit of those prison years/ all gone to make them wise in lesson books’ (448-449), ‘when ‘what she knows and what she can and is/ is only good as it brings good to him?’ (467-468). The girl’s value is only in the value to her male

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