Literary Representations of the Victorian Middle-Class Domesticity

Abstract

The nineteenth century stands out for its profound progress in all domains. It caused
great changes within the Victorian society, which is known nowadays as abiding by a
list of moral values. The middle-class representatives were striving to achieve the
established standards more than anyone else, even if they did not manage to do that
completely. Within this broader context, realist writers tried to instruct readers by
means of the novels that depicted the respective society. Realist fiction was considered to
have the potential of representing things and events in one-to-one correspondence with
the real-world. However, this assumption came to be questioned, even severely
criticized, because fiction, by definition, cannot be looked upon as a singular, objective
creation, but as one possible version of reality, filtered through the writer’s subjectivity.
In this respect, the present article makes a comparison between non-literary
works (sociological and historical studies) and realist novels in order to show how
distant the latter are from the former and to prove that writers used the novel as a tool
in their attempts at shaping social facts, not at turning fiction into a mirror-image of
the real-world. For this purpose, it explains the terms “middle class” and “domesticity”,
describes the characteristics of middle-class Victorians and analyses the family life of
this social group from ideological, historical and literary points of view.