The Victorian Legacy

Paper Summary:

The paper discusses how D.H. Lawrence's novel "Rainbow", Vera Brittain's memoir the "Testament of Youth" and Francois Truffault's film "Two English Girls", all deal with the issue of how women in the twentieth century deal with their inheritance of Victorian morality and how they shape their own lives both in response to and in defiance of those virtues. It examines how in Victorian society, women had an extremely well-defined, repressive and limited role in society with strict taboos surrounding female sexuality, which was not a subject available for polite discussion. It looks at how in all the three works, several different young female characters raised in the shadow of the Victorian Era are coming to grips with their identity especially as it relates to the typical idea of women that people held in the Victorian Era.

From the Paper:

"Vera Brittain on the other hand, displays an example of the new femininity that began to emerge in the twentieth century after the end of the Victorian era and the repression that that era caused people to entertain, particularly as regards their gender roles. Brittain, unlike Ursula, however, seems to have a sense of how she can achieve a difference between her and her forbearers in action as well as in thought. She realizes what she learns by working outside of the house as a nurse and what this information enable her to accomplish in the world. Further, she realizes how having access to information about the realities of both life and of sexuality enable her to have a more privileged and enlightened position in the world than many of her female contemporaries."

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