Status of Women in Victorian Fiction

Description

Page: 53-55

Kajal (Independent Scholar, English, Hisar, Haryana)

The Victorian period (1837-1901) was marked by rapid industrial, social, and cultural transformation. Women were praised as moral anchors of the home, yet simultaneously confined by patriarchal expectations and restrictive laws. Fiction became a key arena for dramatizing these contradictions, often reinforcing traditional ideals while also questioning them. This paper examines the representation of women in Victorian fiction through central archetypes: the angel in the house, the fallen woman, the governess, and the proto-feminist heroine. Drawing on works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Olive Schreiner, it explores how female characters were portrayed in relation to domesticity, morality, marriage, class, and reform. While many narratives reproduced dominant ideologies, others offered space for resistance and alternative visions of gender roles. Women writers, in particular, provided authentic voices that challenged social hierarchies and laid intellectual groundwork for feminist thought. Ultimately, Victorian fiction functioned both as a mirror of its society and as a site of resistance, preserving ideals of womanhood while also imagining possibilities for autonomy, equality, and self-expression.