Constructing Female Character In 19th Century British And Romanian Fiction

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I – 19th Century Fiction and the Tradition…………………………………………………p. 5

CHAPTER II – Women’s Status in the Victorian Age………………………………..……p. 8

2.1 Women’s (non-) education……………………………………………………..……..p.8

2.2 The woman within her family………………………………………………………….p.9

2.3 Female characters in 19th century English literature…………………………………………….p.11

2.4 Female characters in 19th century Romanian literature………………………………………..p.13

CHAPTER III – Construction of the Female Character in the 19th Century British and Romanian Fiction……………………………………………………………………………………………………….p.19

3.1 George Eliot…………………………………………………………………………………………………..p.19

3.1.1 Adam Bede…………………………………………………………………………………………..p. 22

3.1.2 The two Adam Bede………………………………………………………………………………p.23

3.1.3 Feminine typologies……………………………………………………………………………….p.24

3.2 Ioan Slavici…………………………………………………………………………………………………….p.30

3.2.1 Mara- the central figure of the novel………………………………………………………..p.32

3.2.2 Mara’s identity………………………………………………………………………………………p.36

CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………………………………………………………..p.40

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………………………p.41.

FOREWORD

If the poets of the Medieval Era sung the beauty of life, the joy to live and to love, the 19th century literature comes as a punch in the face. Even literary writings with an emotional charge are shadowed by a bitter irony. Victorian’s authors do not hesitate to use their best weapon – the writing – in rendering the faults of a society on the brink of capitalization.

If the Middle Age Era seeks to build the perfect religious man, Victorianism gives birth to the industrial man. One of the aspects the two periods have in common is the women’s inferior status. However, time produced some changes and it became quite a trend for the Victorian women writers to cover under male pseudonyms. For this category stands George Eliot. Part of the Late Victorian writers, her case illustrates best Oscar Wilde’s dilemma: is it art that creates life or vice versa?

Whoever knows a little about George Eliot’s life can easily perceive in her novels several autobiographical information and remark her craftsman shift. Thus, in Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, fiction and reality pass together like the colors of a painter. The final panorama of the four novels depicts the provincial life with its narrow- minded people invaded by the overwhelming process of industrialization. Like any other change, industrial development has its victims and its time servers. A new world order is imposed by a new social class: the bankers gain supremacy over the aristocracy.

In what the women’s status regards, an improvement is out of the question. Business is exclusively a men’s privilege that consolidated his superior position. The world still belongs to them due to the belief that he is the one endowed with mind, whereas the woman is assumed to act accordingly to her heart’s weakness.

In the Romanian literature of the 19th century an important representative is Ioan Slavici with his novel “Mara”. In this novel he presents the habits and the customs of the people from Ardeal, a world characterized by important moral values, such as the good and the truth, honesty and justice. Ioan Slavici is a moralist, a psychologist, a creator of typologies. In his entire work, Slavici is pleading for a moral poise, for thrift and wisdom, for happiness; any departure from these tenets is severely punished by the author.

The first chapter of this work entitled “XIXth Century Fiction and the tradition” includes social-historical information and pictures the premises on which the Victorian society was built. These aspects play a major role for the Victorian writers, too, who find in them an awesome spring for their literary creation. The economical blooming which characterizes the 19th century provides the financial resources for several extraordinary inventions. Moreover, scientists seriously drive away, with their theories, the Christian spirit, thus marking the beginning of capitalism.

The growing of a new world based on materialism brings along a more obvious decline of the woman’s status. Further on, she is expected to behave like a spectator and never speak her mind. In this respect, Victorian literature gets rich through the novels of several women-writers such as Bronte sisters, George Eliot.

Chapter two – Women’s Status in the Victorian Age – concentrates on the important functions of a woman, and sets the limits of her existence in a men’s universe.

With George Eliot – A spokesman of Victorianism, we come closer to our main aim. Details from George Eliot’s personal life testify the realism of her novels. Our preference for George Eliot is due first of all to her importance in the history of literature. She represents the voice that announces new perspectives in the course of literature. Living in times marked by revolutionary events, she had the sense to take the pulse of the English society and to embroider on it all sorts of human typologies.

Eliot’s intellectual concerns reached Freud’s theories, and directed her preoccupations towards man’s psychological background. For this she is said to have made the transition to modernism. We might even say she is a master in creating models of mind. As much as simple the decorum might be, and no matter how common the characters might look, Eliot’s novels bring out man’s inner fight i.e. problems of consciousness that will be the basis for the modern writers.

With Ioan Slavici and his novel “Mara” we come closer to the Biedermaier society’s confrontation with an ever-expanding market-economy, which transforms the once idealized home and anchor of social stability in a way that exposes it to the dangers of the outside world and its rampant materialism.

The novel’s narrative plot situates the impoverished widow Mara and her two children, daughter Persida and son Trica, at the heart of the changing landscape of Banat, a border region of western Transylvania that was at the time of the narrative under Austrian control. Banat has traditionally evinced a hybrid Central Eastern European identity and a baroque approach to culture. Already in the 18th century, the area could boast a developed system of mining, river transportation, sewage systems and canals, trade companies. A vast panorama of mid-nineteenth century Banat, Mara is a chronicle of the region’s multiethnic- Romanian, German, Hungarian, Serbian- social context, an interface of fiction and reality woven into one dramatic story meant to highlight the area’s intersections of economic interest, as well as those of religious, sexual and ethnic identities.

Chapter three of the present work presents the two main characters of the two novels in discussion: Dinah and Hetty Sorel and Mara by debating on the struggle of a woman in the Victorian society.

Every period has its voices and its particularities. Whether Romanticism, Victorianism or Modernism, each literary current echoes the historical background. Both humanist sciences, history and literature interconnect: history adorns with the literary language, while fiction resorts to historical information. It is after this formula that George Eliot shapes her literary creation.

CHAPTER I

XIXth CENTURY FICTION AND THE TRADITION

From the historical point of view, the Victorian Age is framed between 1832 and 1901. The fact that this period is named after Queen Victoria dues to the extent of the British Empire under her reign. The events which took place under her leadership had such a major impact on the society, that when speaking about Victorianism, one speaks about a creed, about a lifestyle, about a trend. If the work of the scientists sets up the basis of the Industrial Revolution, Victorianism represents the prerequisites of Modernism. The invention of steam power, steam engine, electricity, the iron and petrol output, the railway, the telegraph contributed to nowadays-technological standards, while in the field of literature Late-Victorian writers echoed the psychological novel met in Modernism.

If the Americans and the French had the kind of revolution which regarded social and political changes, the home of William Wordsworth, Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dickens, Bronte’s sisters, George Eliot went through a very different kind of revolution: the so-called Industrial Revolution. However, the results were the same from a certain point of view: the major discrepancy between the rich and the poor continued to exist, the place of the aristocracy being held by “a newly rich group of capitalist entrepreneurs- tradesmen and factory owners, stockbrokers and professional managers.” It was this prosperous middle class that set the tone of the nineteenth-century society in England.

So, a positive aspect of industrialization would be the birth of a new social stratum; on the other hand, poor people continued to be oppressed by this new class which was similar to the great landowners who kept them in a slavery regime. Due to the industrialization England’s urban population grew in number, but the working conditions were extremely harsh:

[…] five-year-old-children and pregnant women worked like mules for fifteen-hour days, dragging loads of coal in the mines…London seamstresses toiled for eighteen hours at a time during the height of the four-month social season and starved for the rest of the year; for workers who inhaled the polluted air of badly ventilated mills and factories the death rate from tuberculosis was double the national average.

Important voices of the century spoke out their opinions regarding the negative consequences of what industrialization brought. William Blake denounced the “dark Satanic Mills which disfigure England’s green and pleasant Land.” Prime-minister Benjamin Disraeli clearly divided England into two nations: the rich and the poor. So, the Victorian society felt the yoke of capitalism which marks our era, too.

The reader of Victorian writings might as well discern the broken unity of the British which results from the main preoccupation of the people: the South kept its agricultural pattern, while the North was powerfully industrialized. It is rather difficult to say whether the living conditions were better; the countryside was characterized by simplicity and poverty, wildness, the smoothly flowing of time; peasants perceived time in terms of the four seasons; on the other hand, life in a city was much more agitated, the social aspects were much various. Nevertheless, townsfolk knew the absence of food, especially in times of rebellion. According to John Ruskin’s opinion, Victorian writers reflected in their works the spirit of their time. Such examples are E. Gaskell’s novel, North and South, Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, where the dark side of industrialization is so well represented. Strikes, tension, hatred, despair, chaos eventually are all consequences of the technological development condemned by major cultural personalities of Victorianism. Thomas Carly them in a slavery regime. Due to the industrialization England’s urban population grew in number, but the working conditions were extremely harsh:

[…] five-year-old-children and pregnant women worked like mules for fifteen-hour days, dragging loads of coal in the mines…London seamstresses toiled for eighteen hours at a time during the height of the four-month social season and starved for the rest of the year; for workers who inhaled the polluted air of badly ventilated mills and factories the death rate from tuberculosis was double the national average.

Important voices of the century spoke out their opinions regarding the negative consequences of what industrialization brought. William Blake denounced the “dark Satanic Mills which disfigure England’s green and pleasant Land.” Prime-minister Benjamin Disraeli clearly divided England into two nations: the rich and the poor. So, the Victorian society felt the yoke of capitalism which marks our era, too.

The reader of Victorian writings might as well discern the broken unity of the British which results from the main preoccupation of the people: the South kept its agricultural pattern, while the North was powerfully industrialized. It is rather difficult to say whether the living conditions were better; the countryside was characterized by simplicity and poverty, wildness, the smoothly flowing of time; peasants perceived time in terms of the four seasons; on the other hand, life in a city was much more agitated, the social aspects were much various. Nevertheless, townsfolk knew the absence of food, especially in times of rebellion. According to John Ruskin’s opinion, Victorian writers reflected in their works the spirit of their time. Such examples are E. Gaskell’s novel, North and South, Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, where the dark side of industrialization is so well represented. Strikes, tension, hatred, despair, chaos eventually are all consequences of the technological development condemned by major cultural personalities of Victorianism. Thomas Carlyle “attacked science and technology for having killed the feeling of wonder.” John Ruskin joins this perspective and concluded that “workers had become slaves to their machines.”

Urbanization led to the increasing number of people concentrated in the industrial cities and resulted into overpopulation. So, the living conditions of the poor were far from being decent. As Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist shows, the situation was outrageous, inhumanly. No wander cholera broke out. A sever critic of Victorian society, John Fowles, appeals to footnotes in order to describe more of the misery which characterized the world greatest power. Members of the family had to live practically crushed, and the sanitary conditions were inexistent. The pictures are breath taking and disgusting.

The word “revolutionary” seems to characterize the Victorian Age. In the field of religion we notice that in 1851 there were thirty varieties of Nonconformists opposing to the Established Church. The Evangelicals began substituting the Puritan tradition and became a powerful tradition. Baptists, Methodists and other Protestant sects colored the religious life. The inner fights between the different religious traditions puzzled people and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species had its contribution, too.

In an era dominated by social, economical, political, scientific changes the Christian belief was seriously affected. The so-called Mechanical Age missed the soul’s warmth, emptied humans of sensitivity transforming them into a kind of robots subjected to the power of money. In this point we can easily drew a parallel with the nowadays society: capitalism runs the world and it is unstoppable. The Victorians felt the capitalism effects, submitted to it up to the point when Nietzsche considered that man has killed God. It was obviously a world where skepticism was at home, and what is more gravely, many nineteenth-century citizens were proud of the industrial progress.

Hundreds of books of the Victorian Age describe scenes from the lives both of the rich and of the poor, scenes that sometimes are close to horror, abhorrence, without any trace of glory.

CHAPTER II

WOMEN’S STATUS IN THE VICTORIAN AGE

2.1 Women’s (non-) education

In order to approach the matter of women’s status in Victorianism, it is necessary to clarify first the way in which women were perceived by the Enlightenment thinkers whose opinions marked the “involution” of women on the social scale. In times when all the fuss was around the Rights of Man, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau set

[…] the most restrictive tenets of what can be called the nineteenth century’s ideology of femininity, declaring that ‘the whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, and to make life sweet and agreeable to them-these are the duties of women at all times, and what should be taught them from their infancy.’ The ideal women he thus envisioned- a pure, submissive, decorous, and even angelic creature-was only one particularly notable representative of a standard against which every middle- and upper- class woman’s conduct was measured, and other writers, female as well as male, elaborated on the virtues of such an ideal.’

So, we can see the image of the typical Victorian woman – obedient, delicate, frail, ethereal- regarded as the embodiment of a fragile creature. There was a real “art” to be assimilated in order to harmonize with the ideal of femininity as naturalness was not the main feature of the Victorian women; their style coincided to the great masters of simulation. This is available for the upper-class ladies. The great observers of women’s strategies and their status within the society, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note in one of their major studies:

Instructions as how a young girl, or even an old woman, was to manage such a task often ranged from ridiculous to the bizarre. Marriageable maidens drank vinegar to cultivate an interesting pallor, tight-laced themselves into narrow corsets so as to achieve an uncannily slender waist and practiced the ‘art’ of fainting to remind beaux of their delicacy. More problematic still, many medical men and laymen believed that a ‘good’ woman was essentially passionless: if men were beasts ruled by sexual desire, their wives and daughters knew nothing of such matters.

The type of education which women were allowed to attain was provided in boarding schools. Here wealthy families brought their daughters who were subjected to an extremely severe regime. Usually parents had “great expectations” from them, the value of their offspring substantially increased, so the young lady had higher chances to get a rich husband. Marriage was like a business and an educated lady meant higher pretensions. On the other hand, there was another category of women which boarding schools provided: the teachers and the governesses. In this respect, the lives and works of the Bronte sisters are the most relevant. Male writers were also preoccupied by the harsh destiny of a governess: Thackeray in his Vanity Fair created the ambitious and cunning type of governess. The best-known governess remains Jane Eyre who still touches the public especially due to the film version. Writers managed to surprise different aspects of everyday life with all its good and bad sides. As for women’s status, there is another aspect which cannot be left out, namely the opposite of the lady: the working-class woman. In the same study Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert wrote:

Were she single, her situation was far more perilous, for whether she worked on a farm or in a factory, as a kitchen helper or a parlormaid, moralists feared that she was constantly in danger of becoming a fallen woman, a prostitute.

2.2 The woman within her family

In the Victorian Age the women did not belong to themselves, so their existence was extremely reduced. Reality was completely falsified by the painters who began portraying them as “angels in the house”. Far from being “angels in the house”, women were rather slaves in the house without having any right, not even on their own life. A more realistic opinion is that belonging to the eighteenth-century English jurist Sir William Blackstone who uses the term “femme covert”, meaning a covered women:

[…] the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended, or at least it is incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover she performs everything.

In a society which lacked the Christian faith, men imposed themselves as gods over women, overprotective but oppressive; it was not even the case of superiority as women’s existence was completely annihilated as

[…] a married woman could not own property, even what she herself might have brought to the marriage or inherited after she was wed. Furthermore, her husband could, and sometimes did, will his estate-including what had been her own inheritance-away from her.

One of the literary works which renders impressively the bad treatment of the husband over the totally submissive wife is Anne Bronte’s novel, The Tenant of the Wildfell Hall. Helen’s situation mirrors perfectly the oppressive regime which women had to endure. In theory, Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert express the state of things in Victorianism:

As for a woman’s children, her husband had sole rights in their guardianship if the couple were separated for any reason, including his moral turpitude. Nor it was easy for wives to escape even the worst husbands: until past the middle of the nineteenth century, divorce was virtually unobtainable in England, [….] and a woman did not even have an inalienable entitlement to her own physical liberty; as the British suffragist Ray Strachey pointed out, in England ‘the right of a man to imprison his wife in his own house was not questioned until 1891’. The married woman’s moral as well as legal obliteration was signaled by the fact that until fairly late in the nineteenth century she could neither sue nor be sued: her husband was held responsible for all her acts as if she were minor, defective, or mentally ill.

Victorians guided themselves after hundreds of tenants that had to be taken into consideration. There were rules for everything and the most oppressed were the women, mainly those belonging to the middle-and upper-class:

[…] a lady could not go out alone, especially not in the city and certainly not at night; her days were to be spent supervising her servants, doing needlework, and making or receiving visits; her mind was to be occupied largely with fashion and society and perhaps to some small extend with charitable projects.

In conclusion women’s status in Victorianism was not at all to be envied; wether rich or poor, they meant nothing of value.

2.3 Female characters in 19th century English literature

In the Romantic period, poetry was the most important literary form. In the Victorian period, the novel became the most important and popular form, in Britain and all over the world.

This is the first fact about the novel, that it is the introduction of a new and rather curious kind of art; and it has been found to be peculiarly feminine, from the first good novel by Fanny Burney to the last good novel by Miss May Sinclair.

Elisabeth Gaskell lived in Manchester and had close knowledge of the lives of the working people there- the same lives as Engels has studied. Her novels are possibly the closest to the reality of the times: „Mary Barton” (1848) and „North and South” (1855) are particlularly clear in their social concerns. Mrs. Gaskell was also the biographer of Charlotte Bronte, one of the three sisters who all wrote novels.

„Jane Eyre” (1847) by Charlotte Bronte was immediatelly successful, and it still is one of the most famous novels about a woman. Jane starts as a poor child with no parents, and goes through many sufferings, until she meets Mr. Rochester, who has locked his wife in a room because she is mad. The novel examines many sides of the circumstances of women, and at the end Jane’s words „Reader, I married him” show a new move towards freedom and equality. Jane controls her own life, and through all her difficulties and problems, becomes more independent. This is a great difference from the role given to women such as Pamela or Clarissa in the novels of Samuel Richardson a century before.

„Wuthering Heights” (1847) by Emily Bronte is quite different- it is a novel of passion, an early psychological novel. The central characters, Cathy and Heathcliff, live out their passion on the windy, rough countryside of Yorkshire, and the landscape is as wild as their relationship. The novel is very original in the way it is written, moving back and forth in time, and in and out of the minds of the characters. Again it presents a new view of women and their emotions. Here Cathy is telling her housekeeper Nellie Dean of hr feelings for Heatcliff compared to her feelings for Edgar Linton whom she marries: „ My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath- a source of little visible delight, but necessary.Nellie, I am Heathcliff- he’s always, always in my mind…as my own being…”

The oldest Bronte sister, Anne, wrote „The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”(1848) also with an unusual central female character and involving complex relationships and problems. All three Bronte sisters faced these kinds of problems in the novel with unusual courage and directness, and together they changed the way the novel could present women characters; after the Brontes, female characters were more realistic, less idealized, and their struggles became the subject of a great many novels later in the 19th century.

Even from her first novel, Adam Bede, George Eliot appeals to the sense of reality. Romantic love – stories do not at all characterize her literary work, where nothing is conquered without sacrifice. Life is harsh and love is bitter. Life is wonderful and love is sweet. Within these two limits the human kind gravitates. The character of Adam Bede suits perfectly this situation and stands for the old principles: Truth, Beauty and Goodness. The feminine characters met in Adam Bede form a wide palette of typologies: from the young dreaming girl to the old wise woman, the woman’s mind and her heart are out under George Eliot’s minute observation.

The Mill on the Floss gathers autobiographical information which mould on the Victorian structure. Among the four members of the Tullivers we distinguish several human typologies. In fact, the gap between generations is filled by the central events of the 19th century, the process of industrialization. The elder embody the old fashioned mill – owner, respectively the old fashion woman totally under man’s will. Maggie and Tom Tulliver overturn the old creeds: Maggie tries her best to affirm her intelligence, while Tom disregards the study of the classics in the favor of a mercantile occupation. This reveals the pragmatism of the new world order.

The second novel entitled after a male character, Silas Marner dwells upon the consequences of the process of industrialization, which comes strongly in opposition with the feeling of love. George Eliot reveals her sensitive side when resorting to the accents of a fairy – tell: the appearance of little Eppie puts a spell on Silas Marner’s emptied heart and replace his “unborn children” – money – with a living soul. Despite its title, a great part of the novel depicts social aspects of the provincials.

The last and definitely not the least of George Eliot’s novels – Middlemarch – illustrate the typical provincial life in the 19th century. George Eliot outruns herself in rendering the actions and the thoughts of the two inimical genders: the masculine and the feminine. This novel shows that there is a continuous war between the two and the woman’s heart can play tricks on the man’s heart.

As the century proceeded, there were many problems , in society, in religion, and in politics.The publication of Charles Darwin’s „On the Origin of Species” in 1859 caused a great crisis of faith.This was reflected in many writings of the time. Perhaps Thomas Hardy is the novelist who best reflects the problems of the last years of the 19th century. The tone of Hardy’s novels is tragic. His novels show a part of the movement of the century: from the light comic tone of early Dickens, through the sadness and anger of his later novels; through the social concern of Gaskell, Eliot and Trollope; to the tragis vision of Hardy’s own writings. His characters are often victims of destiny, who cannot save themsevles from their tragic end. Hadry’s novels are all concerned with characters who try to go beyond their own limits. Tess, „a pure woman” according to the subtitle of the novel, is punished by society after her baby dies. The father of the child, Alec, leaves her, and her new husband, Angel Clare, also leaves her when he hears about her past. Eventually she kills Alec, and is punished for her crime.

2.4 Female characters in 19th century Romanian literature

In Romania, the 19th century marks the transition from simple capitalist cooperation to industrial machine use, with a delay of over 100 years when compared to Switzerland, England, USA. European civilization, especially the French, takes the place of the oriental, semi-Asiatic one. This is an “imitated” urban civilization.

The economic structure in the Principalities was largely the same as in the 18th century. Agriculture was still the main activity, but was backward and poorly endowed technologically. Important increases of population occurred, but up to the World War I the peasants were the largest population. Cuza’s reforms and the abolishment of the compulsory statute labor brought about a relative improvement. Romanian industry makes the passage from handcraft to the “great industry” until the beginning of the 20th century. Compared to Europe, the lagging behind is still significant.

As far as the Romanian culture is concerned, it managed to synchronize with western movements in a very short period of time and soon became an avant-garde European culture. Modern Romanian culture was born from the convergence between the autochthonous illuminist culture, the adaptation of western culture to the Romanian soul and the creation of 19th century authors. Literature played the most important role in the culture of this period. The introduction by Cuza of the first education act, the increase in book and newspaper circulation, the development of theatres are just a few of the elements that contributed to the Europeanization of Romanian culture.

The great mechanized industry that took the place of the traditional home economy meant that human energies were immensely needed, not only in terms of material production but also in social life. Women were employed in the process and began to fight for equal economic, political, and legal rights. On the other hand, the principles of equality and justice of the 1789 French Revolution reverberated among the most important representatives of Romanian society. Discussing the first half of the 19th century Calypso Corneliu Botez states: “for women, Vasile Lupu and Matei Basarab’s Code, whereby the man was the master of his family remained applicable”. He had the right to beat and even imprison his woman. Calimachi and Caragea’s law of 1817 maintain the subordinate status of women, but mention that she has the right of ownership to her paraphernalia. Ștefania Mihăilescu reveals that “the Romanian Civil Code of 1866, under the influence of Napoleon’s code, took a backwards step by stating the incapacity of the married woman to sign public acts. She had no right to sign any administrative documents, unless so agreed by the husband or by a court; marriage with a foreigner implied loss of citizenship; she had no right over her dowry and income. She had no legal right as guardian and was required to abide by her husband’s domicile; searching of the paternity was forbidden etc.

This status of women – equivalent to that of an underage person will be maintained with insignificant amendments (such as the possibility to legal recourse for alimony in case of illegitimate children, or the possibility to sue the husband that refused to authorize the woman to sign contracts etc.) until 1932, when under pressure from women’s organizations several improvements will occur”. She will lose her citizenship if she marries a foreigner, cannot dispose of her dowry as she wishes, cannot sue without her husband’s permission, be he a murder convict, and cannot trade without his approval. Until 1932 there will be no improvement.

Political activity was generally associated with male activities and achievement. Politics appeared to be their exclusive realm. Political institutions took decisions influencing the lives of all people. Many supported the idea that women preferred being confined to the home, wished to spend their lives caring for their families and children, and were happy to leave politics to men. Numerous women believed this idea and did everything in their power to reinforce it. Along history women had been systematically excluded from political life. Participation in politics was forbidden and they were denied numerous rights. Electoral laws in several countries prevented women from voting, although their right to vote had already been granted. In addition to legal restrictions, the exclusion of women from public life was achieved through a variety of means.

Analyzing the studies published in the volume “Patriarchate and emancipation in Romanian political thinking, coordinated by Maria Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu, we note that in our country until the 20th century, the image of the female character is constructed either in a positive or in a negative form, but always in a one-dimensional approach. These two forms are to be found in the speeches of representatives of all political parties. Thus, liberals (Nicolae Bălcescu, Al. Rosetti, Cezar Bolliac) pay homage to the woman seen as a Madonna, a goddess. Nationalists display either indifference for the situation of women or a misogynistic attitude denigrating the feminine, since femininity is considered to pervert the masculine genius. Eminescu unleashes an attack against a feminine superposed stratum characterized by “feline instincts” in the articles published in “Timpul”.

Courtesans are considered to be the representatives of the evil. Literary writers depict them as sinful: their beauty is fake, owing to their make-up, they are shrewd, liars, evil, greedy. An eloquent example is to be found in chera Duduca in Ciocoii vechi si noi by Nicolae Filimon. The courtesan has no psychological motivation. She represents a warning for the bourgeois forever defending their morality not to give in to the temptation. Autochthonous, angelic, empty of any substance virgins such as Maria, the exemplary daughter of an exemplary C. boyar should be preferred to foreign women. “Luckily for Romanian literature and its readers, later writers did not conform. True, they didn’t dare transform the courtesan into a first-rank character as in other countries, especially France”.

For the naive, plump Zoe, Negruzzi shows more sympathy, since she is to a certain degree a victim of society, but she will also be condemned by the writer to suicide. Andrei Miroiu reveals that in the volume of parliamentary speeches the Conservative leader Petre Carp places prostitutes “on the same level with assassins”.

Writers and politicians of the time, just as literati, agree that the woman should not work outside the home. The only respectable professions, says Carp, are sewing and being midwives. Women are economically dependent on men. We understand why marriage played a vital role in the life of young women. If they remained unmarried they could be received in the house of a relative where they played the role of servants or governesses. A more honourable alternative was entering a nunnery, which many a time happened without the consent of the woman in question. The first situation is exemplified by Bolintineanu through the ridiculous Duduca, while the second by Grigore Alexandrescu in the short-story “Călugărița” [The Nun], included in “Jurnal de călătorie” [Travel Log], where Elena Corbeanu is forcibly sent to a nunnery. The reasons are not merely religious, but also economic: the non-alienation of the girl’s dowry. Although the action takes place in 17th century, Călinescu in “Viața și opera lui Ion Creangă” [The Life and Work of Ion Creangă], tells us that things are the same in the 19th century. At Văratec nuns, most of whom have no religious calling, own silverware and porcelain crockery, but should they run from the nunnery, they no longer have to endure the censure of society, as was the case two centuries ago: „Nuns were at the time girls with no religious calling, thrown into monastery as a result of family calculations. When visiting Văratec, Kotzebue remained astonished by what he saw. Nuns lived in their own houses surrounding a courtyard, the richest of them living in flats with fashionable furniture, silverware, and porcelain crockery”.

Ramona Caramelea, analysing the way the education of women was described in the second half of the 19th century demonstrates that for defining the identity of the Romanian woman historical characters serve as models; some of them are also resurrected by Romantic authors: Bălașa, the daughter of Constantin Brâncoveanu, Ruxandra, the wife of Alexandru Lăpușneanul. “The identity of the Romanian woman is built not only on a set of values, but also on the use of historical characters as role models. The range of characters includes Bălașa, the daughter of Constantin Brâncoveanu, Ruxandra, the wife of Alexandru Lăpușneanul, the mother of Ștefan cel Mare and the wife of Mihai Viteazul”. Whether active in developing cultural activities (Bălașa – founder of churches), or simply characters resurrected by Romantic writers, these wives and daughters of princes and voivods are the role models of the young generations of Romanian women. But in the case of historic characters the emphasis is placed once again on family-related values. They serve as models not only through what they do, but especially through their standing as mothers and wives of heroes. Thus, “the mother of Ștefan cel Mare did not contribute to the preservation of Romanianness by fighting the Turks side by side with her son, but she nonetheless contributed to the liberation of this country by giving birth to and raising this son”.

Literature also contains negative models such as Odobescu’s Doamna Chiajna; however, they are not many, since literary writers tried to choose role models for the Romanian woman. The way characters are grouped is very interesting; each example brings together a personality from Moldova and one from Muntenia, no difference in this sense being made (Ruxandra-Bălașa, the mother of Ștefan cel Mare, the wife of Mihai Viteazul).

The official discourse of the second half of the 19th century quotes the wives of the ruling class, Elena Cuza and Elisabeta, in their positions as “mother and wife, but of the whole Romanian nation” as examples for “future wives and mothers”.

Another duty of the young girl is to read good books at home, and not to waste her time at meaningless performances and scandalous small talk which “fill the head with barren, useless, and harming ideas for your soul and mind. This is the wretched fruit of comedies, balls and scandalous theatre plays that license spreads around the world”.

Ioana Pârvulescu: “From Bolintineanu to Filimon, from Kogălniceanu to Hasdeu, the girl experiencing the first wings of goblin is pushed under the reader’s eye, while the woman is left in the background, sometimes as a mere element of contrast. The admissible age cannot exceed 20. At this threshold the novel closes to an end, the heroine takes her farewell from the reader, and will be placed in a secondary role in a future book, as a wife, sometimes advising, protecting or even being jealous of the new innocent heroine. Clearly, this aesthetic option is a translation of the existential situation of the time, where 13-14 was the age when the girl’s marriage had to at least be discussed, if not fulfilled. It is only in the 20th century that the age of the heroine starts to increase, shyly in the beginning. (…) the passing to another age of the central heroine in Romanian literature takes place gradually. (…)”.

Mara, the character of the novel bearing the same name, written by Ioan Slavici, is a complex and representative character for the artistic vision of Slavici. A fine psychologist, a careful observer of the human soul, Slavici creates a realistic and vigorous character.

Beyond this idyllic world, Mara presents female protagonists, Mara and her daughter Persida, who are crucial in framing contradictions central to the tensions between traditional societies and the need to address female subjectivity as a subject at once immersed in the world and securely enclosed in its domestic interiority. The centrality of the feminine subject in “Mara” may well reflect the natural consequences of Slavici’s awareness of the reevaluation of domesticity in the 1880’s. Slavici must have been familiar with the New Woman Movement of the 1890’s that swept through the literary scene of Western Europe with a rendition of female subjectivity as mobile consciousnesses and defiant of conventional categories like property and domesticity. Mara and Persida are two figures caught between the drive to destabilize conventions limiting women and their cultural roles as bearers of a tradition that reflects their New Woman status in the familial position they inhabit. Both Mara and Persida live in a time of fluid identity that allows them to add new dimensions to their socio-political subjectivity. Mapping new laws and expectations, the mother and the daughter give themselves new roles to assume and act out in the social economy of identities.

CHAPTER III

CONSTRUCTION OF THE FEMALE CHARACTER

IN THE 19th CENTURY BRITISH AND ROMANIAN FICTION

3.1 George Eliot

Ironically, Victorianism coincides with the period when the misogynist side of men manifests the most. In a man’s world it was quite impossible for the female writers to affirm themselves. Shackled by an oppressive society they resort to male pseudonyms. Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, is one of the female figures who wrote under male pseudonym. She begins to publish fiction at the age of thirty-eight. By this age she experiences a lot and is ready to write about the cause of her heartache. The biographical information and her literary work depend on each other. Her political and religious formation put its mark on everything she wrote. She was a radical Tory with preoccupations in the spheres of theology and ethics. Born in the Establish Church, she had become a Calvinistic Methodist as a girl. As the Christian belief gets pale in Victorian society, she does not make an exception: “[…] essentially religious, she was brought by her intellectual honesty to a reluctant agnosticism, an agnosticism that laid as remorseless a stress on morals, on right behavior, as had the dissent of her youth”. No wonder she resorts to the ways of science when she misses affection and love from her family and craves for communication. If God is love, than she cannot share the Christian belief anymore, or like Basil Willey puts it: “Heaven will not help us, so we must help one another”. The loss of faith throws her in a great turmoil causing her crisis of identity. There was the first crisis of identity and continuity when, in 1848, she stopped going to church, in an almost sacramental disclosure of her loss of Christian faith. There followed a deeply troubling sense of dislocation, up rootedness, and subsequently an attempt to restore good relations with her father, in the realization that there was emotional continuity even if belief had been sharply broken. The second crisis, about which we know rather little, in terms of the chronicle of inner life, comes in 1854, when she went to Europe with George Henry Lewes. In her letters to some friends, to whom she can admit the truth about their unmarried “marriage”, and in a letter to her brother Isaac, in which she cannot tell the truth, the attempt to hang on the past, and to the personal tradition of family unity, is plain. It is this need for a temporal and personal unity which explains her gratification when, on her marriage to John Cross, Isaac wrote to break the long silence and to forgive.

By tackling issues as girlhood, marriage, maternity, George Eliot joins the process of “[…] a mid- Victorian evolutionary myth, itself an illusion persuasively grounded on an awareness of the psychological processes of deception, dream and drug”.Part of the Late Victorian writers, George Eliot’s perspective on the English society may be regarded as a complex one. Her entire creation stands for several personal principles; with each novel she comes closer to the psychological novel.

More than any of her contemporaries, George Eliot tried to increase the possibilities of the novel as a literary form, and her ability to penetrate deeply into the minds of her characters sets her apart from others writers of her day. In her novels she deals with a wide range of issues: gender, justice, love, religion and relationships. Many of her stories are set in the pre-industrial English countryside of her childhood, which she describes with great nostalgia. Her characters are mainly country people, whom she depicts in all their dignity and deep humanity. Her novels are strongly moralistic in tone and the narrative is often interrupted to underline the moral of the story. In her study Novelists on the novel, Miriam Allott gathers slices of correspondences from different writers. Eliot states that “[…] man or woman who publishes writings inevitably assumes the office of teacher or influencer of the public mind”.

For her writings Eliot dedicates her own experience which makes her characters, mainly the feminine ones to breathe so much humanity that it stirs the reader’s compassion, leads to revolt. Her importance in the epoch is major as she is like a witness who testifies through her literary work the reality of the events which established a new world order. George Eliot’s moral beliefs chimed with what appeared to be the findings of contemporary science, particularly heredity, which appeared as a scientific-and scientifically proved-determinism. This gave her fiction great authority in its day; her work reflects how much of her strength is derived from the very intransigence of her view of human beings. It was a view too mechanistic to allow her to write tragedy. But, by placing the responsibility for a man’s life and fate firmly on the individual and his moral choices, she changed the nature of the English novel. If it is the individual’s choice of actions that shape his life, then plot in the old sense of something external to character and often working unknown to it, is irrelevant and unnecessary. Character, in fact, itself becomes plot.

Eliot endows her characters with such distinguished features that she practically creates a world within a world: she substitutes the lack of welfare with the profound feeling of love. George Eliot’s toryism is evident in her traditionalism, her delight in an ordered, hierarchical way of life in which everyone has his prescribed place and duties. In her youth she had been a great reader of Scott, and Scott is probably the greatest single influence on her fiction. She wrote for the most part of a society and a way of life over and done with; it was indeed the society and way of life she knew in her childhood, that of midland England before the first Reform Bill. The values that informed the mid-century, however, were already operating in the world she described. Yet, like Scott, she gained from the fact that the world she described was a finished one. Since it was finished, it was static. It could therefore be described completely; and in the solidity and comprehensiveness with which she created her fictional world she has no peer in English except Scott. George Eliot fructifies the horrors and the errors of a narrow-minded society of which she takes part, too. An eye-witness, a victim, a fin observer, a player, a human – all these in one person, George Eliot. Sincerity is at home in her novels and does not need a code access to get to the meaning of it. In this respect we have her testimony:

“The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures[…] My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgement, pity and sympathy”.

Through her writing, George Eliot burst’s out the child’s cry, the teenager’s restlessness, the woman’s captivity, the citizen’s point of view. For this reason, she can be considered a spokesman of Victorianism.

3.1.1 Adam Bede

George Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, was published in 1859. The plot was suggested by a story told to George Eliot by her Methodist aunt Elizabeth Evans about a confession of child –murder made to her by a girl in prison. Despite its title, the plot concentrates mostly on two major feminine characters, Dinah and Hetty Sorel. The two embody two different natures: the former stands for high spiritual values, is a very dedicated Methodist preacher, while the later dreams at glamour, longs to become a lady. Adam Bede is the hard-working young man in love with the unworthy Hetty.

“What George Eliot swiftly moves on to do is to depict the social and personal dramas whose protagonist has considerable stature. Adam Bede, she says, is not an ordinary man. His rationality, his intelligence, and his creative competence make him the first of her line of extraordinary heroes and heroines. They are always embedded in a “world” of Silas Marner, and Hetty Sorrels, but their mind always provides a complex and articulate stage for inner action. George Eliot’s characters have a capacity for moral action and development which seems, pretty clearly, to derive from her own experience, transformed, varied, and inventively recreated though it was.”

The title misleads the reader as it implies that the protagonist will be a man. The author’s name is masculine, too, but it was the sure way to overcome in a man’s world. In fact critics have made several observations; for example, Dorothy Van Ghent points out that “it is the community that is the protagonist of this novel, the community as the repository of certain shared and knowledgeable values that have been developed out of ages of work and care and common kindness”.

3.1.2 The two Adam Bede

We grow up mainly by going through some experiences and the unpleasant ones temper us more powerfully. When that happens, it means we are in the process of maturity. Everything we have lived up to this point comes as naivety, and any sort of feelings are simpleton. Youth goes hand in hand with this naivety and its opponent, the old age, is achieved through time and different events that makes out the maturity.

The reason why we insist so much on this term is that our main male character, Adam Bede, represents a case of this kind of process. People change because of the problems they confront with, they become wiser or, on the contrary, decline; it is in their spiritual force whether to succeed or not in life, to have a sunny existence or a miserable one.

The character of Adam Bede might be seen as a realistic one. Not seldom do unworthy women possess decent, hard-working men, and mock them.

George Eliot’s novels are catching and pleasant to read as their central preoccupation is the always fascinating human nature, an inexhaustible subject in itself. Due to her amazing craftsmanship, Eliot catches her characters in their most important moments, better said she approaches the readers and the subjects, to live once with them all the key-moments. It is in this way the connection reader-characters is being settled: to pity them, to feel the burning desire to go further and see what happens to them, these are some of the important effects of Eliot’s talent.

The soft-hearted carpenter is being put under observation in a moment when he thinks he is in love with Hetty Sorrel, the best-looking girl from the region. We might consider this a cliché, but the author will go deeper, up to tragedy as life is a bitter-sweet symphony. The mellow taste of the supposed love which Adam felt for Hetty will stand stock-still when he finally realizes that all the time he adored her she was just putting on an act.

There are two Adam Bede: on the one hand, at the beginning of the novel we meet the hard-working young man who nourishes his strength from the desire to get a situation in order to satisfy Hetty’s needs. Under the spell of love, he behaves lovingly with people around him. On the other hand, like Shakespeare’s most memorable character, Hamlet, said: “Hamlet is no longer Hamlet”, we can use the same words in Adam’s case, too. Adam is no longer Adam once his plans to have Hetty as wife are shattered by the cruel reality: the sweet little face has been all the time pretending to care about him, about his feelings. In his naivety he has trusted Hetty’s good-faith, has considered her a poor victim in the hand of a young spoiled future heir.

Adam will suffer tremendously because of Hetty, but will come out a winner. His situation certifies the old-saying: When God closes the door, he opens a window. Only after much torment is he ready to love in the deepest way, namely forever. The relationship between him and Dinah clearly demonstrates that there cannot be a pure friendship between a man and a woman, as one of James Joyce’s characters stated in Dubliners: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse”.

With Adam Bede Eliot sets examples of people governed by sagacious principles, and reminds the reader that in the conflict between Good and Evil, the first comes out triumphant. Both Adam and Dinah are good people who ensure us that happiness is possible and we ought to keep our trust in God. We cannot help ourselves remarking the resemblance between these two words: Good and God.

The moral aspect of this novel would be that if we are kind and remain constantly under God’s protection, our lives might be a piece of Heaven just as the couple Adam-Dinah shows us.

3.1.3 Feminine typologies

Despite being a woman, Eliot does not favor her feminine characters at all. She depicts them according to their beliefs, feelings and judgment and, when the case, she rewards or punishes them. In order to exemplify this idea, the two women in Adam Bede’s, Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris, are representative.

Hetty was declared the protagonist of Adam Bede, but far from being a heroine, she is rather an anti-heroine. She harms herself, poisons the life of those coming in contact with her, but she is the spice needed in the novel. Like dynamite set by the author, she underlines the importance of goodness and true love irrespective of the social position or the epoch in which one lives.

We have showed that youth is characterized by naivety, but when conceitedness and vanity are added the results can be disastrous.

By the time the novel starts, Hetty Sorrel will have been seventeen-years old and will be working at her uncle’s mill. Nothing predicts a glamorous future for her, but she has a lot of imagination. In fact, she lives a double life: during the day she behaves irreproachably just as she should (modest and kind), but at night, in her private fancies that she were a lady, she puts on the earrings and the necklace secretly received from the future heir of the domain, young Arthur Donnithorne.

The reader might consider Hetty a victim, but it is not the case as the novel later shows. We might feel compassion for the beautiful girl who is doomed to work all of her life in a village, but the way she tries to escape this horror (from her perspective) is unforgivable. She does not really love young Arthur but sees him as her ticket to the long-expected social position i.e. that of a lady.

Hetty is not alone in this situation. Many other feminine characters strive for a higher social status, for example Thackeray’s Rebecca Sharp.

Hetty, too, masters the art of simulation and fools everyone after Arthur’s departure. She hides her sorrow and cries only in her room. If only walls had eyes so that people that worried about her see, how hypocritical she was! She lets Adam think she accepts him, but she secretly longs to be with the father of her unborn child. She gets pregnant and in her fantasy world, she thinks that under the new circumstances, Arthur marries her; so, she lays everybody telling she is going to visit Dinah, but after ten days, there is no trace of sweet Hetty. Already alarmed, Adam starts searching her; the thought that she has never loved him germinates in his soul. Even at this moment he does not blame her, on the contrary, pities her and desperately feels the need to protect her. But Hetty is far away from anybody’s protection; even God turns His back on her as she does the cruelest thing a woman can do: she abandons her newly-born child. The locals find the dead body and retain Hetty.

Let us stop a moment on the following picture: right at the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to the most beautiful girl in the region: Hetty Sorrel, charming, chaste. And what happens to her? How could this “angel in the house” end up imprisoned for infanticide?

The explanation is very simple. Hetty’s case illustrates the old saying: “If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas.” which brings us back to George Eliot’s intention: to lecture, to stand for the moral aspects of the society. She reminds us of the great classics and their concepts: Beauty, Truth, and Justice.

We do not assume that Eliot militates through her fiction for a perfect society, but for a better one she surely does. Obviously, she condemns the Victorians for their snobbery, selfishness, hypocrisy and vanity.

Hetty is like those characters who simply cannot submit to the state of things, always eager for more but destroys by that “more”. Of course, it is in our nature to be ambitious, tenacious, but there is a great difference between earning whatever “more” signifies and getting to it in an honestly manner. Happiness cannot live out of the others’ sufferance.

That it is precisely what Hetty does: in her way to fulfill her dreams of becoming a lady, she breaks every single decent principle. A soul emptied by the Christian faith (another major feature of Victorianism) is severely punished. Although Hetty does not get the capital punishment, the fact that she will be kept apart from the society is worse than death. She is rather the victim of her natural impulses than of the circumstances, and because of the unreasonable demands of her vanity she may be regarded, as Ileana Galea suggests “as the embodiment of an archetypal instinctual woman set in contrast to the elevated, intelligent and sensitive Dinah Morris”.

While imprisoned, the only person Hetty accepts to visit her is Dinah. This Methodist girl has something of George Eliot; she is a peacemaker, symbolizing the great virtues of human kind in general. Her presence in the novel comes to maintain the balance between Good and Evil. She is like a medicine for those around her. She appears sporadically just like a rainbow. Once the arrow of Cupidon touches her, she loses her soul peace and goes through a troublesome inner fight; she feels caught between the Christian duty (to preach God’s Word) and the calling of the earthy love. As for Dinah’s character, the stress is on the spiritual side, it is her soul that is more depicted by the author. If we are told several times how beautiful Hetty is, in Dinah’s case we are permitted to see more of the inner life, of the inner struggle.

Through her main female character, George Eliot underlines human’s instability, the superficiality in handling their problems. The inexperienced Adam has the impression that he is in loved and does not perceive Hetty’s duplicity; she is just a pretty face, rotten on the inside as a beautiful apple can be from the outside. Eliot awakens the reader’s sense of judgment and gets him/her to meditate. Of course, love is blind, but it can never last too long. If the physical beauty charms Adam, his brother, Seth, situates at the opposite pole. His mind and soul are invaded by Dinah’s teachings and he proves to love her so much that he gives up on her. This kind of love reminds us about what Apostle Paul says about true love. Indeed, true love waits patiently the suitable moment when Adam and Dinah receives God’s blessing.

Although in her personal life Eliot is not quite an example of morality, her novels breathe religious aspects.

There is another type of female character in Adam Bede, remarkable, Mrs. Poyser, who gains everybody’s sympathy, including the reader’s. Due to her explosive nature, she is among the few women who dare to speak their mind no matter where or to whom. She is highly appreciated by the local priest who admires her inventive skill; she is like a spring of proverbs. She embodies the experienced woman, full of wisdom and feminine malice.

“The novel was immediately acclaimed for its realism, for its picturesque portrayal of rural life, and for its humor; Mrs. Poyser was greeted as a comic creation on the level of Dickens’s Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. Some critics objected to its insistence on the “startling horrors of rustic reality” and its “obstetric” details. Henry James in 1866 found Hetty Sorrel “the most successful” of George Eliot’s female figures.”

We perceive George Eliot’s novels as lectures going from simple to complex: Adam Bede reminds us of stories where Good prevails; she exposes herself, namely her childhood and illustrates the typical provincial life in the nineteenth century in The Mill on the Floss, and dwells upon the issue of money in Silas Marner.

In every novel mentioned above we meet the issue of marriage as it represents one of the most events in the course of our life. We rise and fall. Between these two moments lies the act of marriage, where the case. Before the 21st century, people got married at an early age and each partner knew his or her status. In Eliot’s fiction, namely in Adam Bede, the image of the perfect family is exaggerated, contrasting with the real place of the women. Eliot creates in her novel a world where life remains in the end a sweet symphony.

Although part of the Victorian times, George Eliot dares to give life to role-models and makes wonders out from the mud. She totally leaves aside the prejudices and the rules of the Victorian society. Through her fiction she breaks any kind of hindrance. This is in fact her merit: to watch and write about the mentality of her contemporaries, thus getting close to the psychological novel. For this, too, she is considered to make the transition from Victorianism to Modernism. It is well known how much Henry James appreciates her.

In his study, The Victorians, Arthur Pollard unravels Eliot’s literary work declaring that “she began by wanting to show ordinary life to over-stimulated palates and sensational expectations, but very soon moved from homely realism to what was truly her métier, the drama of intellect and sensibility in strong and unusual characters[…]she genuinely succeed in showing the lower-class sensibility and suffering, after the manner of Dutch painting- as she says in Adam Bede[…] George Eliot is much more confident of the rightness of Adam’s attitude to his more frivolous fellow-workers, and of the wrongness of the mob-violence…seldom goes into the psychology of the ‘wrong’ action[…] George Eliot is close to the very unmodern Shavian character who is certain of the difference between right and wrong, both in political and personal morality. She is in control of her moral system.” The same critic observes that:

“What George Eliot swiftly moves on to do is to depict the social and personal dramas whose protagonist has considerable stature. Adam Bede, she says is not an ordinary man. His rationality, his intelligence, and his creative competence make him the first of her line of extraordinary heroes and heroines.”

We might say that some of the nineteenth century writers allied to give solutions to the problems of the society they took part by the means of their writings, like Boris Ford appreciates:

“The Victorian novel helped to people to imagination, to exercise the moral sympathies and strengthen the feeling of human solidarity at a time of disruptive social change. The growth of a considerate, unhysterical, liberal, and responsible humanism in the course of the century was certainly helped by the work of the novelists. At its best the novel presented, with wonderful inwardness, different kinds of moral possibility and the actuality of choice; it formed an extension of consciousness, and gave life to life.”

Every single scene in Eliot’s novels reveals aspects of the Victorian society, a society situated at crossroads. Exploring the field of imagination, Barbara Hardy’s conviction is that George Eliot approaches the psychologically realistic novel. The mixture of reality and fiction sets the limits within which Eliot introduces her characters. The novels offer Eliot the chance to create worlds within worlds, meaning she renders human’s exact nature: man lives an external existence reflected in his exterior movements, but the hidden part, namely the psychological factor pushes people to act. So, George Eliot “creates and investigates models of minds, her art enquires and analyses.”

To exemplify the situation, we stop over a few characters presented in Adam Bede. In her study over Victorianism, Ileana Galea expresses her opinion about the character of Hetty Sorrel:

“Hetty lives and work at her uncle’s mill but in her mind she truly believes in her becoming a lady, feeling superior to the other girls of her social rank; vain, she builds up a world of her own in which she reigns beautifully dressed, possessing splendid jewels.”

Unfortunately, she nails much too high so, by the end of the novel we see her knocked down by herself.

Adam too, lets himself carried by the wave and imagines his life beside Hetty, works with great enthusiasm of this thought, but ends up marrying another woman. The author justifies the idea that life is full of surprises.

Dinah Morris strongly believes in her call to preach God’s Word, but no matter how much she fights, the feeling of love she cannot smother it; instead of marrying God, she marries Adam.

A brilliant future seems to expect young-military Arthur Donnithorne, but again reality proves to the individual the contrary: he even finds himself in the situation to leave his much adored future domain. The whole community is in fact disillusioned by the twist of fate: their hope of having a better existence under Arthur’s protection is forever shattered.

3.2 Ioan Slavici

Ioan Slavici was a Romanian writer and journalist. He made his debut in Convorbiri literare ("Literary Conversations") (1871), with the comedy Fata de birău ("The Mayor's Daughter"). Alongside Eminescu he founded the Young Romania Social and Literary Academic Society and organized, in 1871, the Putna Celebration of the Romanian Students from Romania and from abroad. Alongside I. L. Caragiale and G. Coșbuc, he edited the Vatra ("The Heath") review. During the first World War, he collaborated at the newspapers Ziua ("Daytime") and Gazeta Bucureștilor ("The Bucharest Gazette").

The novel “Mara” written by Ioan Slavici was published in 1894 in the “Vatra” journal. Ioan Slavici’s work presents the habits and the customs of the people from Ardeal, a world characterized by important moral values, such as the good and the truth, honesty and justice. Ioan Slavici is a moralist, a psychologist, a creator of typologies. In his entire work, Slavici is pleading for a moral poise, for thrift and wisdom, for happiness; any departure from these tenets is severely punished by the author.

The novel “Mara” is “our best novel before “Ion”, (Șerban Cioculescu) and “almost a masterpiece” (George Cãlinescu), because the destiny of the characters and the social environment are remarkably presented in detail.

The title of the novel is suggestive, as this novel is first of all “Mara’s novel”, whose destiny is the main point of the novel, Mara also being “the first capitalist woman in our literature” (Nicolae Manolescu).

The process of family formation is one of the favorite themes of Slavici’s prose. It is the moment when the female character shows adaptability and full vitality. And all this as the female character is suddenly thrown in the arena. What happens to Slavici’s heroines never stays unseen, uncommented, unjudged. Family is more important as in Slavici’s writings the interweaving of directions and feeling is obvious, with a stress on experience and sensation, especially since the woman’s romantic pattern is not made in an ironic way. The writer is a master of presenting the complex process by which feminity passes from one existential status to the other.

The novel follows two important lines: the destiny of the heroine, and the destiny of the erotic couple Persida-Națl.

Mara is a complex and representative character for the artistic vision of Slavici. A fine psychologist, a careful observer of the human soul, Slavici creates a realistic and vigorous character. Slavici portrays in Mara the Biedermaier society’s confrontation with an ever-expanding market-economy, which transforms the once idealized home and anchor of social stability in a way that exposes it to the dangers of the outside world and its rampant materialism.

The novel’s narrative plot situates the impoverished widow Mara and her two children, daughter Persida and son Tricã, at the heart of the changing landscape of Banat, a border region of western Transylvania that was at the time of the narrative under Austrian control. Banat has traditionally evinced a hybrid Central Eastern European identity and a baroque approach to culture. Already in the 18th century, the area could boast a developed system of mining, river transportation, sewage systems and canals, trade companies. A vast panorama of mid-nineteenth century Banat, Mara is a chronicle of the region’s multiethnic- Romanian, German, Hungarian, Serbian- social context, an interface of fiction and reality woven into one dramatic story meant to highlight the area’s intersections of economic interest, as well as those of religious, sexual and ethnic identities.

Beyond this idyllic world, “Mara” presents female protagonists, Mara and her daughter Persida, who are crucial in framing contradictions central to the tensions between traditional societies and the need to address female subjectivity as a subject at once immersed in the world and securely enclosed in its domestic interiority.

The centrality of the feminine subject in “Mara” may well reflect the natural consequences of Slavici’s awareness of the reevaluation of domesticity in the 1880’s. Slavici must have been familiar with the New Woman Movement of the 1890’s that swept through the literary scene of Western Europe with a rendition of female subjectivity as mobile consciousnesses and defiant of conventional categories like property and domesticity.

3.2.1 Mara- the central figure of the novel

Mara and Persida are two figures caught between the drive to destabilize conventions limiting women and their cultural roles as bearers of a tradition that reflects their New Woman status in the familial position they inhabit. Both Mara and Persida live in a time of fluid identity that allows them to add new dimensions to their socio-political subjectivity. Mapping new laws and expectations, the mother and the daughter give themselves new roles to assume and act out in the social economy of identities.

This was not only the area of the “self-made man”; it was also the time of the “self-made woman” whose values where shifting from domestic self-sacrifice and familial emotion to marketplace competitiveness and business-like rationality. The specter of material acquisitiveness and thus less concern with parental responsibility than with higher profits, involved women like Mara in a particularly complex way. Bent on making money, she spends long hours at the market selling products for a profit, while her children run around filthy and unsupervised.

„Mara’s” ample narrative scope is evident in the novel’s two strains involving Mara and her children. The first is the „public” plot, which corresponds to social conventions and chronicles significant moments punctuating the social context that is skillfully interwoven with accounts of interactions between Mara and her children, on the one hand, and the rest of the community, on the other. The second narrative strain focuses on the „private” plot, which corresponds to Mara’s love for her children and her business transactions, her struggle to save money and her ambition to rise to prominence in the comunity, and her relationships with Tricã and especially with Persida, who is romantically involved with Națl, but also often likened to her mother when conducting her own business transactions.

The overall narrative action of „Mara” witnesses the gradual emergence of the private plot into the public sphere, and the overall conflict involves, beyond the clashes of the characters’ personal needs and wants, an avalanche of ethnic tensions and turbulent contradictions caused by the progressive and more conservative strains of Biedermaier culture and its society. And at the intersection of private and public spheres it becomes evident that, beyond catching Mara’s and Persida’s essence as the story’s protagonists, the novel foregrounds realistic social and psychological details corresponding to the most pressing contradictions emerged from ethnic, religious and national conflicts, on the one hand, and from the challenges posed to a conventional society by the values and practices associated with a rising progressive bourgeois individualism and the emergence of new feminine values, on the other.

Mara’s character advances the argument that money can be a moral force within society, finally triumphing over class pride, ethnic divisions, and institutional barriers. Her love of money and increasing greed make Mara’s heart “laugh with delight” when on holy days worshippers come to the local church, St. Maria Radna, to pray to a miracle-working icon. It was not that Mara, a Romanian Orthodox, felt any divine grace, “For she did not believe that the icon could work wonders; she knew very well that a German Holy Mother was not a true Holy Mother”. What really makes Mara’s heart leap with joy is the knowledge that the gathered crowds were good for business: “So it was all right that people should come to Maria Radna to worship, and Mara’s heart would laugh with delight when, on Saint Mary’s Day, The fine weather would bring people from far and wide, from as far as a week’s walk, in large crowds, their crosses adorned with flowers, carrying banners that waved in the wind, all singing psalms and litanies. When the hundreds and thousands gathered on the vast plain in front of the monastery, that day was Mara’s harvest day; in the mornings she’d go out with full baskets and return in the evenings with empty ones. This is why Mara would pray in front of the icon, then take her little ones, whom she always kept by her, push them a little ahead and say: “You pray too mother’s poor little ones!”

Her unwillingness to part with her money is nowhere in the novel more poignant than when she refuses to pay the ransom that would exempt her son Tricã from military service.

Mara’s attachment to material gain and worldly ambition supplants traditional domestic values and establishes the basis for a different claim that transcends moral authority. More importantly , Mara believes in a kind of inevitability, combined woth a degree of free will, that prompts her to encourage Persida and Tricã to cultivate self-assertion instead of self-denial, individual autonomy instead of the moral ambiguities of propriety, and an unbound confidence in their own ability, talents, and rights.

The same Mara who sees fit to put her daughter in a Catholic convent for economic advancement strongly objects to her marriage into a prosperous German family since marriage would codify her identity as a Catholic through the subordinating institution of marriage. Thus Slavici makes clear that the domestic sphere is the most impervious to social change, ethnic amalgamation, and cultural integration. Social climbing calls for putting aside religious and ethnic differences for material advancement, yet these differences are not always put aside, and it is in comparing the resilience of prejudice that we find those aspects of society that are most opaque to cultural integration.

The fatal confrontation shows Slavici’s energetic intentionality is rich and engaging in Mara’s and Persida’s depiction as New Women, whose claims to their new identity are solified by the novel’s male counterparts, Anton Hubãr and Natl. For even though the still-prosperous guilds and a patriarchal structure seem to preserve a vanishing type of the old culture, the rise of a modern competitor like Mara, and also Persida, the new mother and businesswoman, show the robustness of modernization. Altering the domestic sphere’s definition by challenging its distance from a compromised public world, Mara’s and Persida’s stories are consonant with a modern, woman-centered culture. Their shrewd ability to attain financial success and to manipulate an obsolete social structure attracts the admiration of such pillars of the old community as the town treasurer and master-butcher Anton Hubar. When Mara offers more money than he does as a gift for Persida’s and Natl’s newborn son, Hubar looks at her in amazement, “as she was just a helpless woman”. He also feels “like crying very time he looked at Mara’s serene face” during the great feast celebrating Trica’s and Natl’s acceptance as masters into the furriers’ guild. Defiant and victorious, she is the reigning spirit of the large gathering which seems to encapsulate a modified domestic sphere: “With the conviction that it had been she who’d brought them together and that her own children represented the knot that kept them tight, she walked around proudly and lightly, as if she had wings, and spoke slowly and emphatically like an empress.”

“Mara” represents an interface of fiction and reality woven into one dramatic story meant to highlight the area’s intersections of economic interests, as well as those of religious, sexual and ethnic identities.

Beyond the diversity of the social aspects detailed in the novel, Slavici presents the feminist behavior and psychology, and also the effects of the passions on the novel’s two main characters, Mara and Persida, who by the end of the novel prove to be two facets of the same prototype: mother and daughter, Mara-mature, Mara-young. “Mara is a character, Persida, a destiny; the former means stability and force, the latter significant transformation”.

Hovering pleasantly between the urban and the rural, the novel’s characters are motivated by Biedermaier values such as respectability, tradition, familial and social stability, morality, labor, tranquility, and learning. Mara dominates the entire novel through her force, psychological characteristic and complexity. She is tireless, optimistic, self-confident, and able to face any new situation. Her physical appearance gives us a clue about her character: “a big, broad-shouldered woman, with weather-beaten cheeks”. The centrality of the feminine character in “Mara” may well reflect the natural consequences of Slavici’s awareness of the reevaluation of domesticity in 1880s. She is dominated by two passions: her children and money. She knows the power of money, and all her actions show her making transactions in the town market in order to save money for her children. Mara is a petty trader and the toll bridge collector. She wants her children to be respected by the other members of the community, and she knows that money bring respect. Her love for children is gradually replaced by the greed for money. She doesn’t give her children money when they need them.

When Codreanu proposes to Persida, Mara refuses to give her daughter her part of money; as a consequence Codreanu’s family cancels the wedding. This results in Persida’s further miserable character. She comes back to Lipova, falls in love with Natl, Huber’s son. Their marriage is not accepted by the two families because of the social, ethnic, and religious differences between the two. Națl is a German Protestant, and is rich. Persida is Romanian, Orthodox and poor. Tricã also needs his mother’s money to be exempted of army. Mara doesn’t offer her son any money either.

Persida’s marriage to Națl is the site of familial tensions and reflective of the rhythms of a woman’s initiatives, a situation calculated to show that Slavici does not idealize Biedermaier society and finds the power of the New Woman’s intervention to be a driving force underlining a different, more sex-balanced social stability.

3.2.2 Mara’s identity

In the second half of the 19th century the Banat region witnessed the rise of individualism that rapidly began to transform society and labor. In the increasingly competitive industry of the area, individual effort became the means of material success. Mara becomes more interested in making money and less concerned with parental responsibility. While her children are dirty and not supervised, Mara is in the town market selling and buying products for a profit. Mara’s preoccupation with money, her love for her children and her pride are also visible when she exclaims “Nobody has children like mine!” Mara’s character advances the argument the argument that money can be a moral force within society, finally triumphing over class pride, ethnic divisions, and institutional barriers.

One has to note that in the mentality of the 19th century, in the Romanian society the woman is associated with private sphere, being assigned the role of mother, wife, or daughter. If in the case of boys education was structured in such a way as to prepare them to become worthy citizens of the homeland, articles and speeches of various politicians – targeting the adult woman as a devoted wife and mother – advise women to educate their children to love their country and fellow countrymen, and to respect the law and the monarchy. Ioan Zalomit’s speech mentions the moral and behavioural values that make up the portrait of the Romanian woman: „virtuous, educated, modest, and housewife; selfless and devoted to everything that suffers and is miserable”. The Romanian woman is virtuous, modest, and temperate; her main responsibility is the family.

Beyond this idyllic world, “Mara” by Ioan Slavici, presents female protagonists, Mara and her daughter Persida, who are crucial in framing contradictions central to the tensions between traditional societies and the need to address female subjectivity as a subject at once immersed in the world and securely enclosed in its domestic interiority. The centrality of the feminine subject in “Mara” may well reflect the natural consequences of Slavici’s awareness of the reevaluation of domesticity in the 1880’s. Slavici must have been familiar with the New Woman Movement of the 1890’s that swept through the literary scene of Western Europe with a rendition of female subjectivity as mobile consciousnesses and defiant of conventional categories like property and domesticity.

The specter of material acquisitiveness and thus less concern with parental responsibility than with higher profits, involved women like Mara in a particularly complex way. In the second half of the 19th century, scientists looked for proof that women were biologically inclined to household activities, rather than social ones. Juliet Mitchell [6] states that „women are offered their own universe: the family. Both are – ironically – upheld as ideals. In reality things were not like this all the time”.

In the chapter on “Feminism and Femininity at the Turn of the Century”, the author finds that according to Aristotle’s philosophy, the woman is but a “powerless man”, she is a woman because of a certain “incapacity”. Juliet Mitchell notes an increase in the propensity of the cult of the “true femininity”. Piety, purity, obedience, and domesticity are but a few of its features. Marriage was the only way for a woman to improve her social and material condition.

Femininity, says the same author after analyzing various philosophical conceptions from Aristotle to the socialist thinkers of the 19th century, could be defined as “fragility, passivity, and dependence – both economic and emotional”.

Economic and emotional, Mara is not dependent on anyone. She is a widow with two children. She has learnt the power of money. She knows that without money, her children won’t be respected in the community. Bent on making money, she spends long hours at the market selling products for a profit, while her children run around filthy and unsupervised. Clever and shrewd, she peddles goods from one town to another and never comes back home before selling all her merchandise: “She’d sell whatever she could and buy whatever she could find. From Radna she’d take what you couldn’t find in Lipova or in Arad; from Arad she’d bring back what you couldn’t find in Radna or in Lipova. What mattered most for her was not to bring back what she had taken to market, and she’d rather sell with little gain than let her merchandise get moldy”.

Determined to succeed financially in spite of obvious hardships, Mara puts money aside every night in the three stockings she keeps-one for Persida, one for Tricã, and one for her own funeral. Her toughness and relisience recommend her as an early Mother Courage, Bertold Brecht’s heroine with whom Mara seems to share more than a passing similarity. As in Brecht’s play, the image of a preeminently courageous mother who tries to do best for her young hovers over Slavici’s novel. Like Mother Courage, the itinerant trader who pulls her wagon of ashes containing her children, always preoccupied with her business of boots and brandy, Mara starts out as a petty trader and fierce single parent who soon becomes engaged in endless business transactions, from the selling of fish and vegetables at the town market, to taking on lease the bridge over the Mureș River to collect the toll, and to selling lumber loaded unto rafts to the merchants in Arad.

As for Mother Courage, business for Mara is but one of life’s schemes by which she hopes to do well in spite of being an impoverished widow with two small children. The business transactions and her economical way of life are necessary, for they allow Mara to be in control of a life ultimately meant to ensure public respectability and social advancement for her children.

Willing to put her financial gain above religious and ethnic xenophobia, Mara negotiates an advantageous arrangement with Sister Aegidia, the convent’s treasurer, and sends Persida to the Catholic convent to be raised by the nuns (even though, like most Romanians, she is Orthodox). When Tricã is expelled from school, Mara gives him as an apprentice to Steva Claici, a prosperous Serbian furrier from Arad. Mara’s actions, which leave no doubt about her role as a transmitter of conventional values, impose control on her children’s lives and reflect her attempt to fit the proper image of what she conceives her children should be and do. In moments of crisis, such as when Tricã is expelled from school, Mara’s ambitious plans for her children also reflect the Biedermaier values of her community: the belief in social opportunity for self-betterment, and the unwavering confidence that learning and knowledge are supreme values:

“Never mind, dear,” she said to her son, steeling herself. “I’ll find you a better school! I’ll make you a man, a scholar, someone top-rank, so you won’t be like your father or your mother, but will compel these peasants and their children to stand still in front of you, the way we have to now! I can. I have the means,” she went on impetuously. “The Lord has given me and will continue doing so. He makes no distinctions between people.”

Mara’s love for her children and the pride she takes in them when she exclaims every so often that “Nobody has children like mine” are matched by Mara’s preoccupation with money. Convinced in an almost Calvinist fashion that money is evidence of a self-worth that “will raise you in your soul as much as in the eyes of others”, Mara tells Persida that “money is a great power, it opens all doors and breaks all laws”

CONCLUSIONS

Every historical period shapes its own characteristic society; the English one had its financial support due to the 19th century conquests; a major cause for the birth of the Victorian mentality (which is definitely one of the strongest and most persistent – like plague) is the bloom of industrialization. This era of a mercantile society begins with the taste for a faster, more qualitative life in general; the leaning for a more comfortable life nourishes the earthly needs but empties the spirit. Industrialization gives birth to a richer man with a poor heart. Capitalism generally turns human kind attention to earthly life and its basic needs, but estranges humans from spirituality.

Victorianism is the last pulse of stupidity in a modern world at a height of changing; industrialization finally succeeds in transforming mentalities, after a century in which they have strived to maintain. Victorianism represents an era of transition from a slow-motion lifestyle to a faster one; like all the transitory periods, the Victorian Age proves to be harsh.

The great victim of Victorianism is, doubtless, the woman, this tragic actress struggling in her own drama i.e. the household one. Even the development of industry, the era of machines, shadows her importance; a machine, a servant or a governess who takes over her tasks replaces the insignificant work she does. Living in a house she does not own, raising children, she does not educate, having a life she does live, the woman loses her meaning and utility. She becomes futile in man’s acceptance, and this status correlated with her poor education gives her a plant attitude.

The new social order generates also new strata: there are the great opportunists who become rich overnight, and the miserable poor. In what the rich concerns, the ascension of man on the social hierarchy implicitly shadows his matrimonial half, who declines to an inferior level than she has been before. The wealthy Victorian families are the nest of a domestic drama: a god – the man and a slave – the woman. Middle class and the poor stratum do not disconsider the woman the way the rich one does.

Humankind betrays its weakness whenever one finds himself/herself in a desperate situation. The good part is that the unfortunate experiences steel us, and when there is faith, the future cannot be but promising. Modesty seems to characterize the simple, poor people.

In the two novels discussed in this work the main characters Maggie Tulliver and Mara are both characters that break with the established rules regarding women of the 19th century. We can now formulate several ideas related to the 19th century society and the way in which it regarded the woman. Two centuries before, the universe of the woman regardless of her belonging to a certain social class was that of the home and family. Scientists of the time tried to prove that nature endowed her with the attributes necessary to care for the home and children, and that she was physically and intellectually inferior to the man. From official discourses of the time one can discern the image of a mature, woman, virtuous mother and wife, who is supposed to follow the example of mythological characters or exemplary historical personalities.

Both characters try to prove that a woman is more than what the 19th century society thinks she is. They are both endowed with physical and moral qualities that could help them in their attempt.

But, Hetty harms herself, poisons the life of those coming in contact with her, but she is the spice needed in the novel. Like dynamite set by the author, she underlines the importance of goodness and true love irrespective of the social position or the epoch in which one lives.

Mara, on the other hand, wants to keep to the traditions, but she realizes which the power of money is. Money brings respect. But her being too much involved in the transactions with products in the town market results in the replacement of her love for children with the love and greed for money. Both are strong, complex and representative characters for their author’s artistic vision.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arthur Pollard, The Victorians, volume 6 of the Penguin History of Literature, Middlesex, 1993

Basil Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies, London, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1980

Boris Ford, From Dickens to Hardy, volume 6 of the New Pelican Guide to English Literature, Penguin Books, 1990

Botez, Calypso, Corneliu, Problema drepturilor femeii române, Bucharest, Atelierele grafice Socec & co., Societate anonimă, 1919

Bucur, Maria and Miroiu, Mihaela, Patriarhat și emancipare în istoria gândirii politice românești, chapter “Conservatorii români: între patriarhalism și construcția statului modern” by Miroiu, Andrei, Iași, “Polirom” Publishing House, 2002

Călinescu, G., Ion Creangă (Viața și opera), Bucharest, Eminescu Publishing House, 1987

Lucrările Consilielor generale de instrucțiune din sesiunile anilor 1876-1884, Bucharest, Stabilimentul Grafic Socecu și Teclu, 1884, p. 313. Apud Caramelea, Ramona, cit.ed.; http://referat.ro

Caramelea, Ramona, Mamă, soție și româncă. Discursul oficial privind educația femeii în a doua jumătate a secolului al XIX-lea, University of Bucharest, Engineering Faculty, http://referat.ro

Craia, Sultana, Îngeri, demoni și muieri, Bucharest, “Univers Enciclopedic”, 1999

Georgescu, Vlad, Istoria românilor, Bucharest, “Humanitas” Publishing House, 1982.

Tătar, Octavian, Cultură și civilizație la români. Sibiu, Academia Trupelor de Uscat Printing House, p. 1999

Ileana Galea, Victorianism and Literature, Ediție revăzută și adăugită, Cluj-Napoca, Editura Dacia, 2000

Ioan Slavici, Mara, Editura Steaua Nordului, Bucuresti,2007

James Joyce, Dubliners. A Painful Case, London, Penguin Books, 1996

Lovinescu, Eugen, Istoria civilizației române moderne, Bucharest, “Minerva” Publishing House, 1972

Magdalena Popescu, Ioan Slavici, Ed. Cartea Romaneasca, Bucuresti, 1977

Margaret Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, fifth edition, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 5.

Mihăilescu, Ștefania, Din istoria feminismului românesc, Iași, “Polirom” Publishing House, 2000

Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel, New York, Perennial Library, Harper and Row Publishers, 1953

Miroiu, Mihaela, “Ce ne spun studiile din acest volum”, preface to Patriarhat și emancipare în istoria gândirii politice românești by Bucur, Maria and Miroiu, Mihaela, Iași, “Polirom” Publishing House, 2002

Pârvulescu, Ioana, De la doamna B. la doamna T. “Alfabetul doamnelor”. In: “România Literară”, nr. 26 of 1 July 1998, p. 7

Ronald Carter, John McRae, The Penguin Guide to English Literature: Britain and Ireland, Penguin Books, 1995

Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, The Traditions in English, second edition, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1987, p. 285.

Walter Allen, The English Novel. A Short Critical History, Harmondswoth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1967, p. 220.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 49.

Zalomit, I., Discursu pronunciatu la distribuțiunea premiilor din anulu școlaru 1869/1870, Bucharest, The State Printing House, 1870, p. 3. Apud Caramelea, Ramona, Mamă, soție și româncă. Discursul oficial privind educația femeii în a doua jumătate a secolului al XIX-lea, University of Bucharest, Faculty of History, http://referat.ro

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arthur Pollard, The Victorians, volume 6 of the Penguin History of Literature, Middlesex, 1993

Basil Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies, London, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1980

Boris Ford, From Dickens to Hardy, volume 6 of the New Pelican Guide to English Literature, Penguin Books, 1990

Botez, Calypso, Corneliu, Problema drepturilor femeii române, Bucharest, Atelierele grafice Socec & co., Societate anonimă, 1919

Bucur, Maria and Miroiu, Mihaela, Patriarhat și emancipare în istoria gândirii politice românești, chapter “Conservatorii români: între patriarhalism și construcția statului modern” by Miroiu, Andrei, Iași, “Polirom” Publishing House, 2002

Călinescu, G., Ion Creangă (Viața și opera), Bucharest, Eminescu Publishing House, 1987

Lucrările Consilielor generale de instrucțiune din sesiunile anilor 1876-1884, Bucharest, Stabilimentul Grafic Socecu și Teclu, 1884, p. 313. Apud Caramelea, Ramona, cit.ed.; http://referat.ro

Caramelea, Ramona, Mamă, soție și româncă. Discursul oficial privind educația femeii în a doua jumătate a secolului al XIX-lea, University of Bucharest, Engineering Faculty, http://referat.ro

Craia, Sultana, Îngeri, demoni și muieri, Bucharest, “Univers Enciclopedic”, 1999

Georgescu, Vlad, Istoria românilor, Bucharest, “Humanitas” Publishing House, 1982.

Tătar, Octavian, Cultură și civilizație la români. Sibiu, Academia Trupelor de Uscat Printing House, p. 1999

Ileana Galea, Victorianism and Literature, Ediție revăzută și adăugită, Cluj-Napoca, Editura Dacia, 2000

Ioan Slavici, Mara, Editura Steaua Nordului, Bucuresti,2007

James Joyce, Dubliners. A Painful Case, London, Penguin Books, 1996

Lovinescu, Eugen, Istoria civilizației române moderne, Bucharest, “Minerva” Publishing House, 1972

Magdalena Popescu, Ioan Slavici, Ed. Cartea Romaneasca, Bucuresti, 1977

Margaret Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, fifth edition, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 5.

Mihăilescu, Ștefania, Din istoria feminismului românesc, Iași, “Polirom” Publishing House, 2000

Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel, New York, Perennial Library, Harper and Row Publishers, 1953

Miroiu, Mihaela, “Ce ne spun studiile din acest volum”, preface to Patriarhat și emancipare în istoria gândirii politice românești by Bucur, Maria and Miroiu, Mihaela, Iași, “Polirom” Publishing House, 2002

Pârvulescu, Ioana, De la doamna B. la doamna T. “Alfabetul doamnelor”. In: “România Literară”, nr. 26 of 1 July 1998, p. 7

Ronald Carter, John McRae, The Penguin Guide to English Literature: Britain and Ireland, Penguin Books, 1995

Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, The Traditions in English, second edition, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1987, p. 285.

Walter Allen, The English Novel. A Short Critical History, Harmondswoth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1967, p. 220.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 49.

Zalomit, I., Discursu pronunciatu la distribuțiunea premiilor din anulu școlaru 1869/1870, Bucharest, The State Printing House, 1870, p. 3. Apud Caramelea, Ramona, Mamă, soție și româncă. Discursul oficial privind educația femeii în a doua jumătate a secolului al XIX-lea, University of Bucharest, Faculty of History, http://referat.ro