The Great Social Evil: Victorian Society's Creation of Prostitutes

Scholars today widely agree that the Victorian age, from 1830-1901, was not the best time for English women.  As the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature write, "political and legal reforms in the course of the Victorian period had given citizens many rights...but women did not share in these freedoms" (990).  Given few educational opportunities; lacking the right to participate in the political process, either through voting or holding political office; and unable, until the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 to 1908, even to "own or handle their own property" ("Introduction" 990), women--particularly women of the upper and middle classes--were relegated to home and hearth, and "feminine idleness was treasured as a status symbol" ("Woman Question" 1582).  In an age of great social change, however, women's subservient position did not go unnoticed; many writers of the time addressed the "Woman Question."  An examination of the career of Becky Sharp, one of the two women at the center of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, reveals the oppressive paradox at the heart of genteel Victorian womanhood:  a woman's financial and social security depended on her use of her sexuality to attract a mate, and yet a virtuous woman could never use that sexuality knowingly to further the cause of her own survival.  According to Victorian mores, only wicked women dared try to take control of their own fates.  Unfortunately for many women, the unlucky accident of poverty or low social class could turn an intelligent and ambitious woman "wicked."

Mad Plunges Against Fate: Marriage and Divorce in the Fiction of Edith Wharton

"The great argument," Edith Wharton declared in The Writing of Fiction, "requires space" (76).  She was writing of the importance of fitting one's theme to its appropriate fictional form, whether short story or novel.  If one considers her argument in relation to her fiction, it becomes easy to pick out some of her particular "great arguments."  Marriage and divorce play significant roles in her body of work, from The House of Mirth to The Age of Innocence.  This thematic concern becomes understandable in light of Wharton's history:  according to the editors of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, she was married for twenty-eight unhappy years before seeking a divorce "on grounds of her husband's adultery" (829).  Also understandable in light of her history is her particular treatment of marriage and divorce.  Consistently throughout her novels, Wharton presents marriage as oppression, and divorce as liberation.

Class, Money, and Women in The Great Gatsby

In the decades leading up to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, American social mores underwent momentous changes.  A new ruling class emerged, one whose status and power derived not from respectable ancestry, but from enormous wealth and its display.  Conspicuous consumption, the accumulation of goods to flaunt the fortunes of the purchasers, was born.  So was a new American dream, which promised that anyone, from any background, could achieve status and wealth, either through industry or marriage.  By Fitzgerald's time, this new American dream had produced Astors, Carnegies, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and a host of pampered, bejeweled wives and mistresses.  The new American dream, however, had a brutal dark side.  Fitzgerald explores that dark side in his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, in which he exposes the ugly truth beneath the gilded surface of society:  the desire for money and social status has the power to destroy personal authenticity, particularly the personal authenticity of women.