Social Roles and Treatment of Women in the Victorian Novels: Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.

Abstract

The Victorian novels are encapsulations of human activities in the Victorian era characterized by, among other things, the social roles of women and the manner in which they were perceived by the men of the era. Women were seen and treated as second class citizens. They were meant to play the role of a second fiddle in the affairs of the society. They were seen as being disposable and their fates attached to the whims and caprices of men. This study appraises the demeaning social roles of women as captured in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and Charles Dickens’Great Expectations. It illuminates the pejorative and contemptuous dispositions of men towards their women counterparts in the aforementioned works of the Victorians. In doing that, it attempts to uncover for us, the negative perception of women by men of the era as mere tools for men’s happiness and satisfaction. The study ends not only with the advocacy that these obnoxious notions be banished. It contends equally, that women should be emancipated from the private world of domesticity and be given equal rights and recognition in the public world dominated by men.