Paper Contents
Abstract
This article is concerned with reviewing marriage, sex, and gender stereotypes in the literature of victorian times, discussing the way in which the institution of marriage was a socio-sexual contract, whose terms were determined by the law, ethics, and the culture around the community. The research work builds upon a number of prominent English literary texts of the nineteenth century and seeks to establish the way in which authors of the time illustrated marriage as not only a romantic union but also as a device that allowed society to regulate womens consumption of the physical, emotional, and social worlds. The article employs a close reading of selected works and the thematic analysis method to look at the sexual duty, obedience in marriage, and emotional alienation issues that have been depicted in the domestic life of Victorian people. In fact, the marriages that exist in the fictional works of authors such as Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bront are used to extract, from literature, the norms of female sexuality and the sense of obligation towards conjugal duties prevalent in the society of the time as well as find those parts which reveal the challenge to these norms. It can be clearly seen that the narrative tension between personal desire and societal duty becomes the most significant problem, resulting in the repression of emotion or moral criticism in many cases. The paper basically points out that the showing of womens lives in marriage is one of the ways through which the ongoing moral panic over the working class, changes to the gender system, and the exercise of power in families is revealed.By putting the accounts of the characters into a wider historical context which includes the Victorian marriage laws, popular gender norms, and opinions on the morality of sexual matters, this article is a necessary source of information for those who wish to see the literature of that period as a representation of the communitys moral standards, as well as a possible counter to them. As a matter of fact, this study is at the core of understanding of the great paradoxes and love affair that the Victorian texts were involved in, law, and sexual control in patriarch society.
Copyright
Copyright © 2025 Ameer Salih Hadi. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
