While certain rights and freedoms were granted to women throughout the nineteenth century, they still faced many oppressions, both legally and socially. For example, the law made it exceedingly difficult for women to get divorced from their husbands (“The Victorian Age” 992). Additionally, a woman’s role in life was to ensure the happiness of her husband. As stated in The Victorian Age section of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, “Protected and enshrined within the home, her [a woman’s] role was to create a place of peace where man could take refuge from the difficulties of modern life (992). Essentially, as expected by society, a woman’s – particularly a middle-class woman’s – purpose in life was to attend to the needs and desires of men.
The burdens of these expectations on women are explicitly depicted in Wilkie Collins’, The Woman in White. While these depictions are scattered throughout the entire novel, there is one paragraph that explicitly describes the struggles that these expectations have caused. Upset about her sister’s marriage to Sir Percival Glyde, Marian complains about a woman’s duty to men, stating that “they [men] take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return” (Collins 181)? Marian is not only expressing her frustration at Laura’s marriage to a man she does not want to marry but also expressing her frustration with the role of women in general. She hates that women have to give so much while they get nothing in return. It is interesting for Marian to be showing frustration about this, particularly because her character always seems to agree with belittling stereotypes about women. Perhaps it was Laura’s marriage to Sir Percival that opened her eyes to the burdens of a woman’s role in society. It is also interesting that Wilkie Collins recognized and spoke so openly about this topic. Overall, The Woman in White provides insight into what the life and struggles of a woman may have been like in the Victorian era, a time when women were expected to put men before themselves.
I think your analysis of what changed Marian’s mind about women’s societal burdens is really interesting, and I wonder if class could play a role in it as well. Marian tells Walter at the beginning of the novel that her father was poor and she has nothing while Laura’s father was rich and she has a fortune (Collins 37). Upper class women like Laura could afford to have ‘flighty minds’ or whatever the stereotypes were, while lower class women like Marian had to work (we mentioned in class how Marian is working the entire novel), so I’m wondering if her gender biases were based on class divides.
I think the points that you make are interesting and they also make me think about the relationship between Count Fosco and Madame Fosco. With their relationship, too, Collins shows how these unequal power dynamics in marriages can affect women. Count Fosco literally becomes Madame Fosco’s “master” as he tries to “tame her by feeding her the bon bons. Additionally, he exerts his control over her when he dictates what she can and cannot say as he claims that they have one mind, and therefore, anything that he says will be what Madame Fosco ultimately agrees with.