The Rebelled "Angel At Home"

The sensation novel, emerged in1850s, created a new female image which runs counter to traditional values and common moral standards. Under these circumstances, both domestic and international scholars have paid much attention to the study on female images in Victorian times. With the theoretical analysis of the anti-traditional Victorian female image through three sensation novels, The Woman in White, The Moonstone, and Lady Audley’s Secret, this thesis aims to discuss female social status in Victorian period and the awareness of feminist consciousness reflected in sensation novels within Foucault’s theoretical framework. This thesis has mainly used textual analysis, literature summarization, comparative analysis, exemplification, and induction to analyse the three sensation novels.Traditional Victorian women possess the image as "angel in the house". However, in the sensation novel, there are many anti-traditional women characters, from the woman with moustache in The Woman in White, the thief woman in The Moonstone, to the criminal woman in Lady Audley’s Secret. Are these anti-traditional women just created to excite people’s mind and get some feeling of overwrought interest by the means of some terrible passion or crime? It is safe to say that sensation novelists’ careful construction of these women characters is no accident, but rather a device utilized by the authors to demonstrate the social and sexual relations changes in mid-Victorian period. Foucault’s power and discourse theories analyze social structure and movement in active power networks, which is very helpful for the understanding of the women characters in the sensation novel.By analyzing the anti-tradition women characters in the sensation novel in Foucault’s complex power and sexual relations, this paper attempts to demonstrate that these particular women characters are both the resistant forces to deconstruct the traditional ideology of the Victorian women and the products of the power struggle between the female rebelled force and masculine oppressed force in the patriarchal society. These women represent the awareness of feminist consciousness in Victoria era. However, there are some limitations of research on the sensation novel in Foucault’s theory, so the further studies in this field are still needed.