In each case, marriage for the woman has less freedom than for the man. After all, the woman cannot even properly (as Elinor evidences) express her deep-seated affection or attachment to a man, unless he has first approached her. A woman cannot initiate love, and this in itself debases her freedom of choice. This omnipresent element of Victorian culture is present in Wuthering Heights as well, when one sees that Cathy considers marrying Linton partly because "if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars...And he [Linton] will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighbourhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband." (Bronte) of course, she also expresses love for him, but the sort of love that is far inferior to her feelings for Heathcliffe.
This issue of inequality in marriage leads naturally to a very serious issue in all of these books, which is the inequality of men and women in the area of sex. It is a fact of nature that men are (generally) able to physically overpower women, and that the male sex organs lend themselves to penetration and dominance in a way that a woman's more internal anatomy does not. However, it is considered by many today (and through-out history) to be a mark of moral rightness that a woman maintain integrity of her body and be allowed equal choice in lovemaking and sexuality. However, two out of these three books deal with some form of rape-like activity against one of the female characters. In Tess of the D'urbervilles, Alec forces himself on the heroine in her sleep, as she "had dreaded him, winced before him..."
In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliffe forces himself violently on his young wife so that she immediately learns to dread him, crying out "a tiger or a venomous serpent could not rouse terror in me equal to that which he wakens," though his actual physical torments of her are left to the imagination, one gathers that he is a sadistic lover and husband.
Yet rape is not the only inequality in sexual matters between the genders. Just as serious is the inequality in what is expected of the genders in terms of chastity. This is very clearly evidenced in the story of Tess. When Angel admits that he has had an affair with an older woman in the past, he is merely making a casual confession. When Tess,...
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