A Study Of The Morality Of The Middle Class Women In The Victorian Novels

The Victoria age is a splendid era in English history. England in this period witnessed the completion of industrialization, democratization and urbanization. The middle class gradually became the mainstream of the society. As their wives, the middle class women were regarded as the most perfect women. Ostensibly they spent their time all day at home and took high social position for granted, but actually they were detained in the area of the family and had no freedom at all. Based on a close reading of the Victorian novels, it can be easily found that the Industrial Revolution caused the changes on the Victorian women and that the status of middle class women changed from passively pertaining to the family to a new social part. This thesis will adopt of Marxist and of Feminist approaches to analyze different kinds of the middle class women in the Victorian novels, and expatiate the variety of the morality of English middle class women in the Victorian Age. This thesis argues that by means of the analysis on the middle class women in the Victorian novels, we can see the diversity of the morality of the middle class women in Victorian England and the thesis also argues that the characters'class status determines their moral attributes.This thesis consists of three chapters with one introduction and a conclusion. The introduction first scans the previous studies on the women characters in the Victorian novels. Based on this, it proposes the central argument of the thesis and expatiate the research method and research values.Chapter One presents the living status and the morality of the middle class women in the Victorian society.Chapter Two makes a category of middle class women which concludes four types: the decoration of the middle class family, the harbor of the middle class family, the fallen middle class women and the rebellious middle class women in Victorian novels by a close reading of the novel.Chapter Three conducts an analysis of the morality of the middle class women in the Victorian novels by the way of Marxism and Feminism, and interprets the family morality, education morality and property morality of the middle class women.The conclusion points out that those changes of the middle class women reflect the unique characteristic of the era. Through the novels in this period, the family morality, the education morality and the property morality can be clearly showed from analyzing the middle class women characters.