| The middle-class separation of the private sphere and the public sphere was, in part, facilitated by theories about gender. Women were believed to be hampered by mental and emotional weaknesses that made them ill suited for work outside the home but instilled in them the ability to nurture their families. Men, on the hand, were seen to possess the intelligence and stability necessary to earn a living in the public domain. Beliefs in women's deficiencies led to their confinement to the home, their only outlet being the philanthropic causes in which they became involved. These enabled them to take their nurturing and management skills outside the private domain and, perhaps inadvertently, challenge notions about their inability to participate in the public sphere.; British female writers also called these ideas into question through their representations of English women's interaction with foreign characters. Relying on the common belief in Britons' superiority over "other," these female authors presented women characters who, in their dealings with "others" in travel narratives and novels, demonstrated traits traditionally attributed to men. In Oroonoko, Aphra Behn's narrator negotiates with the prince slave from a position of power although she has been marginalized along with the other women in the seventeenth-century colony of Surinam. In The English Governess in the Siamese Court, Anna Leonowens demonstrates her strength, intelligence, and moral fortitude as she becomes a mother figure for the foreign characters with whom she interacts. In the novel, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte shows her heroine's self-control in the contrast she draws between the calm Jane and the animalistic Bertha, the mad Creole woman.; However, despite the ways in which each writer appears to challenge patriarchal notions their desire to be seen as proper English women becomes clear in the way they often seem to comply with these views. Behn writes of her inferior skills as a writer while Leonowens portrays herself as being dependent on the help and wisdom of the men around her. Likewise, Bronte fails to explicitly challenge negative female stereotypes even as she directly calls into question the benefits of confining women to the home. |
