ABSTRACT
Victorian culture witnessed a total social reconfiguration as a result of a new class-based social structure, wrought at the hands of industrial innovation and technology. One facet of this social revolution lay in gender relations throughout the nineteenth century. Wholly given over to the ideological doctrine of separate spheres, Victorians upheld the codes, rituals, and behaviors associated with gendered ideologies and identities. This chapter is a survey of the history of gendered identities; it is a theoretical and anthropological examination of how gender has been constructed, historically, and how gender relations have been a perpetual power struggle for dominance, oppression, and submission. As women in the nineteenth century emerged from their domestic hearthsides, they entered the public sphere, demanding emancipation from abusive husbands, overbearing fathers, and social ideology. Figures such as Nightingale, Norton, Mill, and Ellis spoke out for women’s freedom from their confined hearths. This chapter is an examination of what happened to women who shirked the gendered ideology of the nineteenth century, and through a reading of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, this chapter looks at how depictions of toxic masculinity and feminist barbarity were a means of confronting society at the precipice of transition.
