ABSTRACT
These configurations of space and identity should be grasped in terms of precise historical and cultural contexts. Conventional histories of Victorian society have accounted for bourgeois femininity through the figure of the ‘angel in the house’. Social historians have traced the gradual separation of the public and private spheres within bourgeois class formation. Whereas in the eighteenth century, it is claimed, the home tended to be above the workplace in the city and women might be involved in both the commercial and the domestic realms, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the bourgeois home tended to be geographically separated from the workplace, with the paterfamilias travelling between the home and work in the city and the woman carrying out her roles of wife/mother/home-maker in the domestic sphere. The ideology of respectable domesticity is thus identified as a central component within the formation of bourgeois identity. The implications for the gendering of identity would also seem clear. Whereas men could move between the public and private spheres, female respect-ability was exclusively defined in terms of its identification with the private domestic sphere. This account produces a somewhat sensational image of the Victorian city: one peopled by men and unrespectable women. Unaccompanied women in the
city are classified as street-walkers, in the sense that they are prostitutes. According to the ideology of separate spheres, women lose their respectability when they leave the private sphere and enter the public and commercial spaces of the city. In the spaces of commercial exchange, they themselves become commodities and go on sale.
