Abstract
Starting from Linda Brannon’s “the Doctrine of Two Spheres” (Brannon 2004) and Barbara Welter’s “the Cult of True Womanhood” (Welter 2000), the contribution aims at analyzing how the “Doctrine of Two Spheres” is clearly visible in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), where the main protagonists’ personalities and behaviors reveal both the preservation and subversion of the separate spheres ideology. The novel is shaped around the dichotomy between two half-sisters, that embody two contrasting forms of femininity. Laura epitomizes the Angel in the House, Marian, by contrast is a liminal figure, characterized by gender ambiguity. She is masculine in her physical appearance and in her behaviors. She constantly moves between gender roles and between the public and domestic space. Similarly, the two male protagonists of the novel, Walter and Count Fosco, are at the antipodes of each other. Walter, after a ‘bildung journey’ towards masculinity, acquires the typical masculine attributes of a Victorian man. Count Fosco, like Marian, is characterized by gender ambiguity. He moves between gender roles, disclosing feminine features and cherishing ladylike habits. In the end, Fosco and Marian’s gender ambiguity is punished with death: death by assassination for the villain, symbolic and social death for Marian the spinster, thus re-establishing Victorian gender roles.
Highlights
Starting from Linda Brannon’s “the Doctrine of Two Spheres” (Brannon 2004) and Barbara Welter’s “the Cult of
Linda Brannon calls this separation “the Doctrine of Two Spheres” [1] that she associates to the historian Barbara Welter’s “the Cult of True Womanhood”, an ideal of femininity prevalent among the upper and middle classes, that came into existence between 1820 and 1860 [2]
Spending time at home with the children, managing the economy of the house were honors that kept middle class women away from the man-oriented labor market that clashed with the attributes of domesticity
Summary
The increasing effects of industrialism and the consequent growing urbanism changed the Victorian perception of spaces. Boardman recollects two magazines, The Ladies’ Treasury and The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine that explicitly celebrated the domestic life and the middle-class femininity, providing advice of how to properly run the home economy [3]. Magazines praised those skills necessary for running middle-class households and at the same time consolidated the cult of domesticity. Marriage and motherhood were their fulfilments and highest achievements and believed to be their only source of happiness [4] Brannon, in this regard, defines Victorian middle-class women as “passive, dependent, pure, refined, and delicate” [1]. This gender-based division of spaces reinforced the belief, so common during the Victorian era, of the patriarchal family as the most important social unit, and, as the most convenient one for the growth of the nation
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