Victorian Age and Women

Elizabeth Browning's Changed Role Of Women In The Victorian Age Using Poetry

During the course of the nineteenth century including the Victorian Age, the rights and roles of women were widely controversial and debated. The controversy and debates relating to the Victorian roles for women were particularly centered on middle-class women. There were concerns on whether these women should be educated, allowed to work in other settings other than the home, and have a political voice. As these debates continued, many Victorian women such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning made significant contributions to the roles and rights of women through their literary works. As one of the most prominent writers during this period, Browning made powerful and engaging contributions based on her belief that educational training was a crucial factor towards the success of women in the society. Through poetry, Elizabeth Browning explored and challenged the conventional rights and roles for women using spirituality and religion.

Britain's social and political agendas in the nineteenth century were dominated by the Woman Question, which basically focused on the roles and rights of women in the Victorian Age. Through her works, Browning sought to address this social and political issue as shown in the challenging and combative poems she wrote regarding the need for gender equality. Browning's poems are largely viewed as an expression of her heart and soul to important individuals in her life. Most of her poems have a religious theme because one of the early influences to her works was spirituality and religion. She used spirituality and religion to speak against male chauvinism, which set the agenda of much poetry by Victorian women across several successive decades (Farhana p.69).

Browning's exploration of the social roles prescribed for Victorian women was evident in her series of poems between 1930 and 1940. She criticized the secondary role of women in the society and how marriage oppresses women in poems like The Romaunt of Margret, A Romance of the Ganges, The Romaunt of the Page, and The Romance of the Swan's Nest (Avery par, 4). The dominant themes in these works included loss, betrayal, and duplicity because of brutal and problematic power games in love and sexual relations. Browning's major poem Aurora Leigh (1856) highlighted the different aspects of her concerns and interests in the Woman Question. This poem has been considered as a feminist work because of the bold and dominant feminine theme. However, feminism is not the focus of this Aurora Leigh as depicted in contemporary understandings of this poem. Through this, she demonstrated her awareness of the challenges faced by economically and sexually vulnerable women during this period. Aurora Leigh is not geared towards creating independence through isolation from men but to close the gap between men and women in the society based on their roles and rights (Leonardo p.6).

The works of Elizabeth Browning, especially Aurora Leigh, are relevant for understanding how she used poetry based on spirituality and religion to challenge and examine the conventional roles for women during the Victorian Age. This dissertation will examine how Browning used poetry to explore and challenge the Woman Question, which was a widely controversial political and social agenda in the Victorian Age.

The proposal develops research questions to enhance a greater understanding of the issue under investigation. These research questions include...

1. What are the connections between Browning's works and the role of Victorian women?

2. How did Browning use poetry to explore and challenge the traditional roles and rights of Victorian women?

3. How did spirituality and religion influence Browning's poetry towards exploration of the societal roles of Victorian women?

Chapter Descriptions

The dissertation will be structured and organized in different chapters as follows:

Chapter One will consist of an overview of the thesis, the research questions, and a short description of how the study will answer the research questions. This chapter will explore the contributions of Elizabeth Browning on the roles and rights of women in the Victorian Age. This exploration will also entail an overview of how spirituality and religion influenced Browning's poetry as well as other influences that made her to challenge the societal roles of women during this period.

Chapter Two will focus on evaluating the question of women's roles and rights throughout the course of the nineteenth century. The focus of this chapter will be to explore how male chauvinism dominated the society in this century. In this case, the place of women in the society, educational training of women, and position of women in the society will be examined. This evaluation will also focus on exploring the power dynamics and games that dominated heterosexual relationships during the nineteenth century.