Introduction

24
Vanessa Mangione
sphere (paid work, politics, etc.) she “ceases to be a lady” (qtd. in Davidoff and
Hall 3). In other words, the separate spheres concept imposed bondage on
women that permeated every aspect of their being. Rights and independence were
denied to them, desires and passions had to be suppressed and the justification of
there existence was connected entirely to their roles as mothers and wives. 14
Until recently, feminism has represented Victorian sexuality in terms of opposites:
Angel and fallen woman. This conception summarised the discourse of
sexuality in the Victorian age, and it continues to direct the modern view of the
correlation between women and sexuality in the nineteenth century. Reynolds and
Humble note that:
(T)he sense of being torn between two incompatible positions typifies
much twentieth century feminist criticism … Stimulated in particular by the
work of Michel Foucault, feminists have made many fruitful readings of a
wide range of Victorian images which explore the relationship between
femininity and sexuality. Time and again the contradictory nature of this relationship
has been brought to the fore. The complexity and prolificacy of
the discourses surrounding female sexuality amply support Foucault’s thesis
that traditional images of Victorian Britain as refusing to acknowledge
sexuality have been mistaken. (1-2)
Reynolds and Humble proceed by arguing that the public discourses concerning
sexuality, which state that a woman is either the angel in the house, submissive
and sexually passive, or a “sexually charged and demonic mad-woman-in-theattic”
(2) cannot be seen as private reality. They judge the common understanding
of Victorian sexuality as a dyadic model as out-dated, since “common sense suggests
that the Victorians’ angelic feminine ideal is entirely suspect” (3). They allude
to the fact that for women the Victorian was not a static epoch but ever changing.
It started with the invention of the separate spheres notion and the creation of the
angel of the house and ended with the fragile females in “bloomers, in offices, in
higher education, and driving motorcars” (4-5). Still, the word “Victorian” is still
associated with “prudery, repression, hypocrisy, smug confidence, and uncompromising
patriarchy” (5).
Nevertheless, a tendency to set up boundaries and establish certainties through
classification and categorising was commonplace during the Victorian period. This
tendency is particularly evident in its application to sexuality, which led to an oppressive
ideology, a division of female and male experiences 15 and the categorisation
of women as “pure” or “impure”. However, in the approach of female sexuality
within the Victorian period, tensions and contradictions were seen that easily
14 It must be mentioned that contemporary discussions result in the realization that the reality
differed immensely from the idea of the separate spheres. The Angel in the House was not to be
found, the concept, however, brought along restrictive conventions for women.
15 For a detailed presentation of the public sphere read Jürgen Habermas 1989.