Dodgy Victorian Novels

Last night I was tired. So, I ditched my current bedtime reading (a biography of Oliver Cromwell) for something less dense, and randomly selected one of my old trashy Victorian novels. My memories of them are of their sentimental, predictable storyline, with a line up of stereotyped characters.

It was all so much worse than I'd remembered!

I'd forgotten that the scenery descriptions are often simply hilarious, with the banal detail and desperate attempt to anthropomorphise everything in a sentimental way. Seriously, it's enough to put you off trees for life. You almost start expecting them to giggle when you walk past.

But the thing that really got to me last night was this pathological insistence that men have no moral backbone. In my story the Physically Magnificent Man is in love with the Righteous Woman, beautiful, elegant and so full of morality that one expects her to suddenly collapse under the weight of it all. We are told that she is independent, but still totally feminine (because there is such an obvious contradiction here). Her fiancee (the Physically Magnificent Man) is slightly scared of her but admires her moral fortitude. Into the story the tempetuous, delicate woman walks daintily. Her eyelashes are slightly damp (and therefore alluring) from her latest need to sob at her own imperfections. She had rescued a puppy from some mean boys, got stuck on a post for two hours because she can't climb a fence (hello?) and had to be undressed (down to her petticoat which was ripped! gasp!). She meets Magnificent Man and Righteous Woman when she comes to reclaim her puppy which is actually his and which at the behest of Righteous Woman, he gives to Delicate Girl.

So, it's fairly easy to see where the story is going to go. Righteous Woman will be left high and dry by Magnificent Man for Delicate Girl, who will smile bountifully and sob in turns until we are thoroughly sick of them all and sit down to watch Home and Away just to get some sense of reality.

What got to me this time was the ineptitude of the men in the story. They really are impoverished creatures. They only make good moral decisions because of women. They either have no capacity or no inclination to make such decisions apart from the women around them. Take away the women in their life and they would live immoral and wretched lives without any conscience. I realised that this is actually reasonably common in Victorian novels, and even in more serious novels, like Dicken's novels, you get the same dynamic. Not only does it undersell men, but it imposes too much responsibility on women.

I'm glad the Bible doesn't endorse this nonsense, and in fact flatly contradicts it. Often.