LEXICAL UNITS REPRESENTING WORKING WOMEN IN VICTORIAN NOVELS

Anna Orel

doi:10.20535/2410-8286.122279

Abstract

One of the most prevalent issues of the Victorian era was the increasing movement of women into the job market. That was the time when the traditional female roles were reinforced and reconsidered at the same time. Women who were regarded as “Angels of the house” started to seek freedom from domesticity. The article explores the lexical units representing working women in Victorian novels. It highlights the major areas in which Victorian women were involved (household service, education, industry, outwork, trade, entrepreneurship, agriculture, art). The analysis is based on a number of methods, in particular on the lexical-semantic field method and the frame analysis. The socio-cultural commentary along with the extensive illustrative material enables the author to single out the lexemes describing female professions (lady’s maid, housemaid, governess, schoolmistress , etc.) as well as the most common stereotypes concerning working women in those days. The contextual environment study of 33 female job titles offers insight into typical actions, social status, as well as the inner life of Victorian working women. However, the less typical female occupations (doctors, politicians, etc.) can be rarely found in Victorian novels. The findings of the analysis may be useful for linguistic and cultural research of the Victorian era as well as for gender and feminist studies.

Highlights

The purpose of retrospective cultural studies is to investigate the influence of the culture of a certain period in the past on the formation of the cultural values of the present
The most of the said nominations belong to the semantic field “Household Service”, proving the popularity of this occupation among Victorian women, as well as the diversity of duties performed by the maid
The work has revealed that the lexemes describing peasant women belong to the semantic field “health”, as opposed to a city dweller, which is described by means of lexemes pale, sallow

Summary

Introduction

The purpose of retrospective cultural studies is to investigate the influence of the culture of a certain period in the past on the formation of the cultural values of the present In this regard, the Victorian culture is especially valuable. Victorian woman embodied family values that were of crucial importance to Victorians Such perception of women is interpreted in feminist studies as a restriction of female freedom: “almost all nineteenth-century women were in some sense imprisoned in men’s houses” The Victorian era was a period of some changes in the sphere of legal and social protection of working women. “The working woman was not [...] a Victorian institution. [...] To the Victorians belong the discovery of the woman worker as an object of pity, and in the literature of the early nineteenth century one first finds her portrayed as a victim of long hours, unfavourable conditions, and general injustice, for whom something ought to be done” (Neff, 1966, p. 11)

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