5 Breaking Gender Roles: Aurora Leigh and Bathsheba Everdene – Rilen Bell

Breaking Gender Roles: Aurora Leigh and Bathsheba Everdene

Women in Victorian society had very specific standards to which they were held. They were expected to be perfect wives, happily married and subservient to their husbands. However, some literature from this time was breaking out of the confines of what it meant to be a woman in Victorian society. Such examples include Aurora Leigh and Bathsheba Everdene, which this paper will closely examine. I will also be exploring the relationship between Victorian societal standards and women’s place in literature. Aurora and Bathsheba are perfect examples of women in the Victorian era breaking gender roles.

First, it is important to explore the attitude towards women in the nineteenth century to fully understand where they were thought to belong. A popular term was coined by Coventry Patmore which was the title of his poem “The Angel in the House.” Patmore idealizes wives in this poem, calling them “simply, subtly sweet” (line 35). This shows that wives were meant to be meek and sweet, and they were not to have independence. Elizabeth Langland explores women’s roles in depth in her article “Nobody’s Angels: Domestic Ideology and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel.” Women, especially those of the middle class, were expected to become angels of the domestic sphere. The novels from this time period reveal that this sphere is meant to be separate from economic and political issues, and thus the home becomes a safe haven for men because this is upheld by their wives (Langland 291). However, not all Victorian writers wrote their women characters this way. It was common of the eighteenth century to see love stories centered around a serving girl earning the love of her master, but this plot was seen to disappear in the next century (Langland 290). While there is the idea of women being the “angel” of their home, a new idea arose of “nobody’s angel.” Langland explains this “nobody’s angel” to be a woman “far less constrained, imprisoned, and passive than the victim discerned in conventional gender-inflected interpretations” (303). This paper will explore this idea with in-depth examples to show that two specific women characters from the Victorian era were “nobody’s angels.”

The first example of a woman not imprisoned by her gender is our main character from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Aurora is orphaned and sent to live with her bitter aunt in the beginning of the first book. While her aunt hates Aurora for resembling her mother, she still provides a base education for Aurora. She controls Aurora pretty tightly in the beginning, but – with the limited education provided to her – Aurora begins to write poetry. She reveals that she feels constricted by the expectations placed on her as a woman, saying that “The works of women are symbolical” (line 456). She goes on to say that women harm themselves to produce measly slippers, a stool, or a cushion that nobody truly appreciates (lines 457-462). Women are only “paid / The worth of [their] work,” which is to say they are not paid at all because men do not value their work as women (lines 463-464).

Whenever Aurora begins to write poetry, this is a major development in her character being “nobody’s angel.” When this is revealed to readers, the scene is set by her escaping into nature on her birthday. She is enjoying her surroundings with a wreath of ivy upon her brow when her cousin, Romney, appears and startles her. He has found her poetry book and immediately criticizes her work and her Greek language. He then goes on to say, “I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in’t, / Whereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits: / I rather bring it to the witch” (lines 77-79). Upon introducing his character, Barrett Browning reveals his true feelings on poetry – especially that of women. He goes on to say that “men, and still less women, happily, / Scarce need be poets” because poetry does nothing but cause headaches (lines 93-94). Aurora defines her character by not passively taking his criticism once she has overcome her shock of him finding her book. She tells him why she loves poetry – typically a man’s art – and that she chooses headaches for the beauty in them, ending her monologue with “and to-day’s / My birthday” to show that she will enjoy herself as she pleases on her special day (lines 108-109). Romney still does not accept her reply, and she realizes that he believes “The headache is too noble for [her] sex” (line 111). This meaning that he believes women to be this ideal angel of the home that would not stoop to aching for poetry, but in addressing this Aurora reveals that is far from the character she is.

Romney’s proposal to Aurora and her reaction further prove that she is not restrained by the expectations of her gender. He asks for her hand in marriage and help with his cause, but she does not agree to this. She addresses first his asking of her help by asking, “I proved too weak / To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear / Such leaners on my shoulder?” (lines 359-361). Then, goes on to mention his reservations about her writing, asking if she was “poor to think, / Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?” (lines 361-362). Her refusal of this proposal shows that she is a woman taking her life into her own hands. She is choosing a career over a husband. He pleads with her that her “sex is weak for art” but that “it is strong / For life and duty” (lines 372-375). However, Aurora sees that he does not love her; he loves his cause. While Aurora does wish to help others, she wishes to do so on an individual level with her poetry while Romney is trying to do so with a social cause. He would not support her writing, as evident by his previous words. They do not have the same goals, and for Aurora to realize this and turn him down proves her strength beyond the roles of her gender.

Aurora goes on to pursue her writing career despite the criticism of her being a woman poet. This is important to the development of her character as “nobody’s angel” because she is living independently the life that she wishes to, and she is not living in a husband’s shadow. While in the end she and Romney do marry, this is much later in life after his initial proposal and her life as a successful poet. This becomes further proof of Aurora being independent because she did not marry upon for financial reasons as was expected of women in the Victorian era and instead pursued a male-dominated career to earn her own money.

While Aurora Leigh is an excellent example of “nobody’s angel,” she is not the only one that was written about in the mid-Victorian era. There was also Bathsheba Everdene of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. It is important to note that throughout this novel, Bathsheba remains an equally main character to the men of the novel. She is just as, if not more, influential than her male companions. She is also career-minded and independent like the men in the novel. After we are first introduced to her, Gabriel Oak goes to Bathsheba’s aunt to ask for her hand in marriage. She tells him that Bathsheba has many young men after her, which discourages Gabriel from proposing. Then, Bathsheba runs to him to dispute the claims her aunt has made. She tells Gabriel, “I haven’t a sweetheart at all – and I never had one” (Hardy 33). He takes her agency as a sign to propose to her, and he is shocked when she turns him down. She simply wanted him to know she was not “men’s property” (Hardy 33). This is the first display of how Bathsheba does not wish to be anyone’s “angel of the house” because she does not wish to become merely property of a man.

The next display of Bathsheba being “nobody’s angel” is when she inherits her uncle’s farm. Instead of selling the farm to a man, she takes it upon herself to run it. After a meeting with her workers, she gives a rather feminist speech. Bathsheba reminds them that they “have a mistress instead of a master” and that just because she is a woman does not mean she cannot tell the difference between “bad going-ons and good” (Hardy 84). This is a clear display of her power, regardless of her gender. Having Bathsheba give such a speech in such a position of power over men is startling for Hardy to do in the Victorian era and is directly combatting stereotypes in literature.

Bathsheba’s next two proposals show her independent and confident demeanor that solidifies her as “nobody’s angel.” With the encouragement of Liddy, Bathsheba sends a Valentine to Boldwood. When he later becomes obsessed and proposes to her, she rejects him because she did not mean for him to take the Valentine seriously nor does she need his money or farm. Boldwood offers her a life of luxury without responsibility as his wife. He tells her, “You shall have no cares – be worried by no household affairs, and live quite at ease” (Hardy 128-129). However, Bathsheba is uninterested in such a thing. In her consideration of the proposal, she thinks on how most women would accept the offer proudly, but she simply did not want him (Hardy 130). This displays her sense of independence. She has a farm that she is proud of, and she doesn’t need a man to support her fully. Then Sergeant Troy comes along and captures her heart, but in the end, it is her decision to follow him and accept his proposal that leads to their marriage. This is key: it was Bathsheba’s decision to marry Troy. She is not accepting any proposal that comes her way as she is expected to do, but only the one she wants to.

After Bathsheba’s marriage to Troy, he attempts to force her into the role of an “angel” by taking away her power over her workers. During the storm at their wedding party, she tries to get men to help Gabriel cover their supplies. However, Troy commands them to stay and drink with him. Therefore, Bathsheba takes it upon herself to go and help Gabriel. She might have momentarily lost her control over her workers, but she has not lost her independence to do what she believes it right and necessary. Later in the novel when Fanny Robin’s casket arrives after Bathsheba’s suspicions about Troy, she takes it upon herself to open the casket. This reveals Fanny with her baby and confirms Bathsheba’s fears about Troy following how he has treated her in marriage. She then confronts him on the matter after he refuses to kiss her. He admits to being a “bad, black-hearted man” to which she claims that Fanny and Bathsheba were equally his victims (Hardy 293). She does not passively accept her husband’s past and refusal to show her love. Bathsheba, after deciding she’d heard enough, then leaves Troy.

Even after the “death” of her husband, Bathsheba does not readily agree to marry Boldwood. He asks her, “Don’t you want to be the wife of any other man?” to which she replies, “No indeed!” (Hardy 343). Bathsheba does not love Boldwood as he loves her, and she is against marrying him for the sake of being a wife again. She has other duties that are more important to her than being a wife. Even when Troy returns, she does not go back to him because of the way he treated her before. She wishes to be “nobody’s angel” and Troy wants an angel as evident by his earlier refusal to listen to her. Following Boldwood shooting Troy, Bathsheba decides to marry Gabriel. This is because he was always by her side regardless of their feelings toward one another. He never forced marriage on Bathsheba, unlike Boldwood, which leads to her marrying him instead. She wants to have agency; she wants to have a choice.

In the Victorian era, the idea of women being symbols of domestic perfection was rampant. However, we start to see a shift in the narrative around women in the literature of the mid-nineteenth century. The first example is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. She chooses her writing career over being a wife, which was impactful for the nineteenth century. Our second example is Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene. She rejects multiple proposals over the course of the novel and only marries the men she wants to. Both of these Victorian women are wonderful examples of characters breaking gender roles in literature and being “nobody’s angel,” a term from Langland’s analysis that inverts Patmore’s idea of the angel of the house.

Works Cited

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. “Aurora Leigh.” The Norton Anthology: English Literature: The Victorian Age, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2018, pp. 124-138.

Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd. 1874. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Langland, Elizabeth. “Nobody’s Angels: Domestic Ideology and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel.” PMLA, vol. 107, no. 2, Mar. 1992, pp. 290-304. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/462641.

Patmore, Coventry. “The Angel of the House.” The Norton Anthology: English Literature: The Victorian Age, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2018, pp. 659-660.