Gender Roles In Victorian American Society

The Victorian American society was divided into male and female spheres of different interests, which left men’s and women’s worlds separate of each other. Smith-Rosenberg argues that this was so because gender roles were rigidly differentiated within the society, as within the family. The public sphere of law, politics and economics was men’s arena and women acted only in the private sphere of domestic life. The division of separate spheres was due to the supposed psychological differences of the sexes: men were associated “with reason, objectivity, the law; women with emotion, subjectivity, and ritual.” '5" Victorians believed these separate spheres were determined “by the immutable laws of God and nature,” which left little option for ordinary

Men did their duty by working in the public sphere, whereas women served the society ' by providing nurturance to the family and producing good citizens. As Gerda Lerner points out, women’s ultimate purpose in life was to love, as wives and mothers, and to devote their lives to their families.lm Ideal love was committed companionship which did not include passionate feelings. Passion, as Robertj. Sternberg points out, was only directed towards God; there was no place for that emotion in the secular relationships between humans.mz Moreover, it was believed that deep emotions drained heavily on the limited bodily energies and were therefore to be avoided. m

An ideal Victorian marriage in The Awakening is pictured in the union of Alphonse and Adèle Ratígnolle. Mr. Ratignolle owns a drug store, a prosperous trade that allows a comfortable living for his family. He is highly regarded by the Creole community for his “integrity” and "goodness of heart” (pp. 105-6). Madame Rau 'gnolle is a beautiful, “feminine” and “mattonly” 58) mother of three children expecting a fourth one to be bom towards the end of the novel. She is so perfect in her role that het husband must “adore her;” if he did not1 "he was a brute, deserving a death by slow torture”

For Edna Pontellier, however, this is alien and she even despises the seeming domestic harmony of the Ratignolles: It was not a condition of life which ñtted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui. She was moved by a kind of commiserau 'on for Madame Ratignolle,-a pity for that colorless existence which never upliftecl its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life’s delirium 107).

Edna thinks there has to be something more, something better in life than sacrificing one’s whole life to the service of others-even though she only “vaguely wondered what she

neighborhood gossip” with “an animation and earnestness that gave an exaggerated importance to every syllable he uttered” (p.