Acting the Part

       It was surprising to find that in Victorian literature there are unattainable ideals for both men and women. In general people tend to focus on the ideals imposed on women, but the men experienced pressures from society as well. These expectations were a double-edged sword for both men and women. The bar is set high for them, which can be good, but when expectations are unreachable it engenders a sense of anxiety and a need to put on a show, to appear ideal, even if that was not the case in reality.

      For men the expectations were contradictory to many of the morals they had previously been taught to uphold, “…the privileged male’s victimhood….indicates an emerging crisis in which middle-class male subjects are expected to participate in an increasingly aggressive and competitive capitalist economy, even as long-established standards of private, moral rectitude remain in force” (636, Guest). Men were expected to go outside of the home and be successful in the world of business which made it increasingly difficult for them to hold to ideals like self-sacrifice. How were they supposed to fulfill both of these expectations?

Work - Brown

      In the business world how were they going to handle being the underling in any profession? An article in the Westminster Review described one of these situations using a comparison of husband and wife and Joshi points out that “The gendered and marital metaphor, on the one hand, sympathetically underscores the emasculated situation of a clerk. But on the other, the metaphor's displacement of class antagonisms onto gender relations simultaneously serves to naturalize the hierarchical and unequal relations between peers and their subordinates” (354). In other words, men who were in the workforce, fulfilling their roles as men, were referred to as the “wife” in the situation (meaning they have only the power to influence). Gender norms were being used to normalize the workforce and the tiers of power. "...Victorians themselves generally refer to masculinity as "manhood" or "manliness" and often used the term "masculinity" to refer specifically to male sexuality and power" (2, Machann). This makes power important for a Victorian male just in terms of how others will see him. His identity for himself and appearance for everyone else depends heavily on his perceived power.

      In the real world men felt the need to make their profession as heroic as possible because that was a part of the expectation for them as men, “...members of the medical profession invoked and elaborated visions of masculinity framed by war, heroism, and self‐sacrifice” (594, Brown). The idea of heroism as an important aspect of manhood is one which is also important in literature. Ulysses is an excellent example of this, discussing old age in a world in which heroism is idealized.

Lady Lilith by: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

      While some Victorian literature consistently questions the ideals that society places on both men and women other pieces of literature reflect those ideals. In the Victorian version of Cinderella for instance, we can see that reflection “Chapbooks insert new phrases emphasizing her marital state. Wording in The History of Cinderella and the Little Glass Slipper (c. 1850) is typical: ‘Cinderella made a most excellent wife. . . universally loved and respected for her sweet temper and charming disposition.’” (66, Cullen). The goal for women is emphasized and described in this passage. And in case girls needs convincing to aspire for those characteristics, a bribe is thrown out there with the mention of being “universally loved and respected” for embodying those ideals.

Meanwhile in Lady Audley’s Secret, Lady Audley displays an ability to appear as the “perfect” wife whilst hiding a terrible secret, or really, several terrible secrets. She is meant to exemplify this ideal of the “Angel in the House” but by the end of the novel she pushed to the point of premeditated murder.  She could be upholding those ideals in some ways, but she is demonstrating that appearance is not everything. But she feels like she needs to appear like the ideal in order to get what she wants out of life. And the only option for raising her situation in life is to get married. That is what society has told her to do when she needs something, and so she does it.

She is smart and a good actress and she takes advantage of situations when they are available, going so far as to fake her own death so that she can hide her crime. She also demonstrates the kind of situations that women were sometimes left in. She was left by her husband with nothing but a note, half the money, and a baby. Three years later he does come back but until then she does not even know if he is alive or not. Marriage is one of the only good options open to her but since she is technically married already it really isn’t actually open to her. And so she has to act her part to get what she wants.

                    

                   …Rae was only one of several who vehemently objected to Lady Audley's falseness, to what     

                   he saw as her unnatural embodiment of femininity: calling Lady Audley a ‘female 

                   Mephistopheles,’ he faulted Braddon for not knowing that ‘a woman cannot fill such a part’ … 

                   Such comments bespeak complex, almost paradoxical, understandings of feminine roles that 

                   require women to behave ‘naturally’ even as they're playing parts. Implicit in Rae's remarks is 

                   the awareness that, like actresses, real women assume roles” (614-15, Voskuil).

And so this idea of “acting a part” is not something that the Victorians were unaware of. It is almost encouraged by some of the time. For instance, according to Ruskin women are expected to take care of home and be perfect in the sphere they are assigned but they are not supposed to outshine their husbands.

And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her… But do you not see that, to fulfill this, she must—as far as one can use such terms of a human creature—be incapable of error? So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise—wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side… (Ruskin)

Circa Art - Victorian Art 

Those expectations are impossible. A human cannot be “incapable of error” and so those   expectations, if they are all to be fulfilled, must be in appearance only. Even keeping up the appearance of perfection would contradict his belief that she must not “set herself above her husband” unless her husband is also trying his best to appear perfect within his own separate sphere.

Like women, men are also called to play their own part in society. But they are judged based on their profession more than their demeanor and appearance. Robert is a great example of someone who is not taken seriously because he lacks the motivation to take his own profession seriously. He is going against what society has deemed his role. He is only pushed into taking things more seriously by Lady Audley, a woman who appears to be following society’s expectations but is really acting a part, and Clara, who is also hiding her true feelings from her father.

     Historically men are expected to fight in wars and yet they are punished for violence more harshly than the female convict. "...men were more often convicted of assault than women, and, when they were, received heavier penalties" (699, Farrall). And so men who have been encouraged to be violent in certain situations must also learn to suppress that violence in others. These contradictory expectations from men seems to encourage them to play roles, when they are a soldier then they need to be violent, but when they are back and no longer in the role of a soldier they need to hide that aspect of their character which had previously been cultivated.

It is difficult to separate any of the movements of the time from the concept of gender. Industrialism is intermingled in the ideals of having a woman at home not at work, some of the poor needed to send those who were typically expected to be at home off to work in factories and the like in order to support the family. Women and children could find jobs but they were poorly paid for very difficult and dangerous work. And so necessity was a good excuse to break from the ideals of the time and also accentuated class status.  It is worth noting that women, even in the exact same position as men earned a lot less than men did, “…hired four women and four men as Visitors; the former were paid £50 per annum, the latter, £80” (65, Auerbach). This reinforced gender norms in the sense that there was less of a reward for women to work. Therefore women have less motivation to decide to go into the workforce.

Having the expectation that women would not be working limited options for those who needed to work (single women or the poor women). This makes it a lot more difficult for a woman to get to a higher class level without marrying a man. Thus she is again defined in relation to men. And the men are defined in relation to what they do in society. You can also see those norms reflected in the literature of the time, as with Lady Audley’s Secret. But those single women were in a worse position than just being defined in relation to men. Deborah Anna Logan notes in her book that "As the phrase 'marry, stitch, die, or do worse' implies, death seems to be the only viable alternative to prostitution for unmarried working-class women" (51). Women were stuck in a lot of ways. And there were a lot of single women in that time period because men would die at war.

It seems that while there were many ideals spouted from prominent sources and expectations did play a major role in people’s lives, there was also a good amount of deviation from those ideals. And even changes in the ideals themselves. What people held to be important was in flux along with everything else. A lot of this change was because of things like industrialism changing the way things were made and Darwinism changing the way they see the world. And these things influenced their concept of self as well. People were no longer all working together in the home or on farms, men went out of the home for work and thus came about the concept of separate spheres for men and women. It certainly seemed natural.