Feminine Readership Influence on the Mentality Shift in the Victorian Age

Abstract

Since the literacy of British society was improved in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this implied also a boost in literacy rates of women. The fondness for reading of women made them take part substantially in the literary market. Therefore, the image of women as the audience became common at that time. Nevertheless, the patriarchal society in Victorian Britain attempted to limit women’s reading by advertising the danger of reading some literary works that were not appropriate for women, making prohibition and developing a standard about what women were supposed to read. Gender mattered in the 19th-century patriarchal society that believed women must be protected from reading specific texts as they could, might corrupt women’s innocent mind and minimize their value as women. This paper aims to investigate to what extent the female authorship succeeded in changing the patriarchal society canons and shifting women’s mentality in the 19th century as a consequence of their increasingly developed frustration due to their obvious isolation from the social life and academic preparation as well. Therefore, the frustration represents the core emotion triggering such avalanche of feminist-oriented literature in the Victorian era. The numerous social reform movements led by 19th-century women, such as religious revivalism, abolitionism, temperance, and suffrage, provided women writers a context, an audience, and a community towards which they could express their opinions. Throughout the Victorian era, the “woman question” with regards to the woman's real place in art and society was a hotly debated subject, stimulated mainly by the rapid advancement in literature by and for women. Many of the century's foremost novelists including Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen expressed their individualism and demanded equal partnerships in marriage, public life, law, and politics with men.