By Brenda Maritza Lozano 

The woman’s body in modern history, seems to be always be in constant struggle to be free from control. Although much has been done to move away women being viewed as property of the father or the husband, the patriarchy has much to still grow. It is therefore interesting to analyze how this notion of control over the bodies of women came about and their purpose in the not-so-distant past of the Victorian era. In the second episode of the documentary The Victorians: Home Sweet Home of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) the gender roles of both men and women in the home during the Victorian era are explored. This BBC documentary not only explores the role of men as providers and women as angels in the house, but delves into why these roles were imposed on both men and women, the socioeconomic factors that led to the evolution of said roles, and the importance that artist had in representing Victorian life as well as influencing public discourse by bringing taboo topics into the light through their works.   

The host Jeremy Paxman uses a series of topics found in Victorian portraiture to (no pun intended) paint a picture for the audience of life at that time. The first of those topics is the regard of the Victorian home as a haven, the first home in the film is Osbourne House in The Isle of White, the retreat of Queen Victoria, which according to the host was a shrine to motherhood and family life. It is therefore appropriate that this era bears the monarch’s name as it not only represents her reign but the ideals that were deemed important in her personal life. In the home we are shown how the walls are plastered with family portraits that show a little less importance to the rank and more importance to the joy of being a mother and a wife, a life that the Queen experienced within those walls. The audience is shown the loving marriage she had by the locks installed both inside and outside the door on her bedchamber to afford her and her consort Albert privacy. The furniture at the foot of her bead had flowers embroidered on it with vines that made out the profiles of Queen Victoria and her Consort Albert staring lovingly at each other. Another example to demonstrate the importance the queen placed on family life would be herself as symbol of motherhood in her kingdom, as she bore nine children and for a span of 17 years where she was either mother of a new born or pregnant. The portraits within Osbourne house portrayed Queen Victoria as a symbol of dutiful wife and mother and there for it is no surprise her way of life influenced the society and an era.  

According to this documentary artist from this time liked to portray idyllic home life in their art, the host called them “comfort food for the home.” Within these cozy depictions of the home, we see the representation of the man as the father as the provider for wife and children. The woman as the angel in the house who not only had to act as mother and wife but had to maintain the home and staff in a respectable manner; often using books like Mrs Beeton’s Book of Houshold Management to make sure that they maintained the home in the accepted manner by Victorian society. This meaning of course that morality seeped into the upkeep of a respectable home, a few examples given to the audience in the documentary would be the separation of the sexes not only for the family in the home but also its staff. There were different hallway entries and staircases to enter where the women should be in the home and where the men should be in the home. The Men would have a study or cigar room to retire to after dinner while women would retire to sitting rooms or a parlor. Another crucial part of having a home that is considered a “respectable” and prosperous Victorian home was to have a great number of possessions, the greater the number and kind of possessions in the home (such as furniture, paintings, photographs, etc.) the greater your respectability was. Paxman gives the viewer Lynlee and Miriam Sandbourn’s Victorian home as the perfect example of how items were used as status symbols (the home is almost untouched since Victorian) since it houses 144 chairs all over the home and more than 900 pictures on the wall. 

The documentary made clear that artists of the time were commissioned mostly by wealthy families to capture their families at their best. The middle and lower class could not afford paintings but they could go to their local photographers and get the next best thing which would be photographs. As much as we could use both the portraits, paintings, and photographs as a historical record of the customs and attitudes of the time, Paxman does well to remind us that these same images were used by people to also deceive. The middle and lower classes could appear to have more wealth than they actually did by telling the photographer to put a background of a grand staircase in the picture. On the other side of the social ladder (the upper class) was known to have idyllic and morally respectable paintings hanging on their walls, however how truthful were these images? For instance, the painting Many Happy Returns of the Day by William Powell Frith captured the celebration his daughter Alice’s 5th birthday with him at the head of the table and his respectable wife at the other end; many reproductions of this “idyllic” celebration were hung in homes all over Britain all the while its author had a second family a few blocks away from where his legitimate family lived.  

The Victorian era also brought about the creation of the notion of childhood as a time for children to be loved, cherished and to be indulged. Among the many paintings of the idyllic Victorian life are the images of children at play, children with their governess, children playing with toys. Which was the reality for some children however another reality was that the children of the time were the usual victims when epidemics hit (which were rampant at the time) and the mortality rate for children was extremely high, in fact according to the documentary one child in five died before their 5th birthday. The artist in the film that portrayed this the best was Frank Holl with his paintings Hush! And Hushed, the first shows a mother pleading with her toddler to keep quiet so that her sick baby could sleep in the cradle and the second painting shows the same mother crying over the cradle (whose headboard looks like a tombstone) while the toddler quietly gazes at her.  

Many artists recognized that this perfect representation of life was not serving the public since it was hiding the truth and although the critics were not happy when more sobering representations of real life started being produced by painters, the conversations about reality were know out in the open. The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt depicts a man sitting in the apartment he has rented for his mistress who sitting on his lap. Adultery was not an uncommon act at the time, according to the documentary during the time there was 25 prostitutes for every one man, and many of these ladies’ clients were married, however no one talked about said adultery until works like this brought the topic to light. Not only was the infidelity towards the wife the problem but both these illicit relationships led to a rampant transmission of syphilis where not only the adulterer was infected but the wives and children of the cheating men. These cases of sexual transmitted diseases led to the creation of exhibitions such as the Museums of Anatomy whose purpose was to use guilt and morality to warn and correct the actions of wayward gentlemen.  

One of the most poignant taboo paintings were depictions of the fate of women in society who made mistakes in under the rules of Victorian morality. Images of the bodies of women being pulled dead out of the river for example were inspired when one artist read that in one day in August the corpses of five different women were pulled out of the Thames. The painting that resonated with me the most was the 3-piece work titled Past and Present of Augustus Leopold Egg which showed the fate of a woman whose husband had intercepted a letter from her lover. He is sitting at the head of the table while his wife prostrated on the floor is begging for forgiveness as she clutches the letter from her lover; at the same time their two young daughters are at the other end of the table one is blissfully playing while the other is witnessing the discussion between her parents, the second piece shows the future of daughters now grown up and spinsters with no dowry struggling to make ends meet, the third and final piece shows the fallen woman who has been cast out and is sleeping under a bridge with the child born out of her indiscretion. Once again, the critics were horrified because these images held up the mirror of truth to Victorian society regardless the artists did attain a societal discussion on this taboo topic, so much so that in fact the host mentions that Queen Victoria herself commented in one of her diaries (something along the lines) that women were punished cruelly for indiscretions that men get away with. It was because of art such as this that in the late Victorian era women began to push towards social reform to better their plight, women fought back by forcing the passing of more just divorce laws, just social conventions, dress reform, access to education, etc. This documentary shows us that society had used morality to keep “safe” from epidemics and disease, however what this flawed belief system really created was the restrictive gender roles that served as jail cells mostly for women and the lower classes. Like in many other instances in history when there are injustices in the world this is when artist go to work, and artists in the Victorian era were no exception. Although there were some artists that just produced images that people wanted that showed life through rose colored glass, there were also many artists that saw through the social injustice and represented the reality even when the images were not idyllic.