Nineteenth-Century Morality and The Decline in the Sentiment of Sex. Henry James's The Bostonians and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

Essay from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature James Cook University (James Cook University) course: Women in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel language: English abstract: The aftermath of the traumas of the American Civil War saw an unleashing of intellectual cultural and economic forces which accelerated the rate of transformation in American society. In post-Reconstruction America after so much controversy about slavery social and political reformers climbed on the platform to agitate on behalf of the Feminist movement in an air [that] was thick with theory and controversy about women (Habegger 9). When Henry James outlined his general idea for The Bostonians (1886) in his notebook-entry of 1883 he referred to this new ideology which he perceived as being responsible for the perversion of the confused and uprooted young American society: I wished to write a very American tale a tale very characteristic of our social conditions and I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: the situation of women the decline of the sentiment of sex the agitation on their behalf. The undoing of the differences between man and woman and the blurring of the boundaries between the feminine and the masculine and in particular the subordination of the masculine hegemony by the stirrings of feminism in late nineteenth-century Boston (Lansdown x) might be the root or at least a symptom of the problem which was upsetting both public and domestic affairs. The novel is a drama between opposing dogmas: progressive Feminism versus conservative Chauvinism ultimately between the forces of progress and reaction. The analysis of the ideological conflict between these two extremes is dramatically focused in a conflict among characters who James said were evolved from his 'moral consciousness' (McMurray 339). The notebook-entry reveals that the novel represent