The Victorian Compromise

THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE (the particular situation, which saw prosperity and progress on the one hand, and poverty, ugliness and injustice on the other)

The meaning of word “Victorian” refers in general to all what the puritan values considered important: included all the set of moral and sexual values. The Victorian age is contradictory and full of paradoxes. It was a period of progress and prosperity and at the same time of great social evils (poverty, prostitution, exploitation of children), but the Victorian made a compromise between these two aspects, they hide themselves behind optimism and hypocrisy and they don't want to see problems, they have only an idealized vision of their society and age. The Victorians were great moraliser, probably because they faced numerous problems that they felt obliged to defend certain values which offered solution or escape. The Victorians promoted a code of values based on personal duty, hard work, respectability and charity. In this period was very important to work hard for improve the society. The idea of respectability distinguished the middle from lower class. Respectability was a mixture of both morality and hipocrisy, severety and conformity to social standards. It implied the possesion of good manners, the possession of comfortable house with servants and a carriage, regular attendance at church, and charity activity. Philanthropy was a wide phenomenon: the rich middle class expolited the poor and at the same time managed to help “stay children, fallen woman and drunk men”. Family was still considered patriarchal. Man was considered as a leader and he was responsable for food and all the family, while woman was still in condition of subjection, in the sense that she had the duty to take care of children and the house in general. This was because “bourgeois idea” was based on the convinction that the role of leader of man had been imposed to him by divine providence. Sexuality was generally repressed in its public and private forms, and prudery in its most extreme manifestations led to denunciation of nudity in art, and the rejection of words with sexual connotation from everyday vocabulary. Young women weren’t free to live publically their sexuality not even in the domestic walls because there was an intense fear for the opinion of the society. When a girl was considered a “fallen woman”, a prostitute, automatically she lost the respect of the other and of her family. She will not find a husband and she was considered as an outcast. The ideal woman was a pure, chaste and sexless figure that must repress every instinct. Moreover, the age was also characterized by a kind of patriotism and this was influenced by the ideas of racial superiority so the British considered themselves as a superior race, that's why they tried to develop colonisation because they considered colonising people as a duty. (Jingoism).