Marriage, Morality and the Model Woman

Abstract

Marriage is the mainstay of Victorian fiction. Even in novels where the normal preliminaries of courtship, heartbreak and reconciliation do not form the basis of the plot, a wedding can provide a convenient conclusion. The novel ends, but the characters are directed forwards into an assured future of household concerns, children, domestic harmony. It is a comforting picture, and could be painted innumerable times. That it was not drawn accurately from the life, however, was sufficiently apparent to make many novelists vary the pattern, either by retouching the central figures, as Thackeray does in Vanity Fair, or by introducing contrasting tones. Prostitutes hover menacingly or pathetically on the fringes of novels by Dickens, Trollope and Mrs Gaskell. Seduction and betrayal, adultery and shameful pregnancies are accepted plot devices in fiction throughout the period. With such an emphasis on sexual relationships, it may seem remarkable that the Victorian novel maintained its circumspection and moral conformity for so long. In fact, sexual transgressions, unhappy marriages and even acute perceptions about the position of women in society, could be assimilated with reasonable ease into an entirely acceptable moral scheme. All the data of the New Woman novel were present in earlier fiction: it was the interpretation which so radically differed.