Evaluative Adjectives in the Portrayal of Victorian Women

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the analysis of evaluative adjectives used in the description of physical appearance, clothing, personal qualities, intelligence and manners of female characters in the English prose fiction of the 19th century. Four novels written by the Victorian writers, approximately in the same time period, served as the source material for the research, namely E. Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” (1847), W. M. Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” (1847), E. Gaskell’s “Cranford” (1851), and C. Dicken’s “Bleak House” (1852). Evaluative adjectives are regarded in this paper as the ones that carry in their use an implication of a positive or negative attitude or evaluation on the part of the writer (beautiful, awful, etc.). They give an emotive or subjective characterization of the qualities of the referent, revealing the writer’s or speaker’s peculiar attitude towards the object described. The present paper has two aims. The first is to study what evaluative adjectives were mostly employed by the authors in the portrayals of women in each of the mentioned novels and whether the authors prefer positive or negative characterisation of female characters. The second one is to examine if there are any gender specific peculiarities in the use of evaluative adjectives in the portrayal of women in the novels.