The Company of Wolves: Sexuality and Gender roles in the 19th Century.

The 19th century was all about changes. While in previous centuries women were meant to work with their fathers, husbands or brothers in the family business – which was usually underneath the household in order to allow women to help in the “shops” while they were carrying on with their domestic duties – in this century men began working at factories or offices, leaving women with the only burden of taking care of the house and children.

This lead to what was called “separate spheres” which meant society was separated between men and women according to their abilities; women were considered to be physically weaker and yet morally superior than men, which implied that they were keen to counterbalance the social sphere where their husband worked all day, but also that it was their responsibility to prepare the future generations to carry on with life and its obligations. This social influence women had was the principal argument men had back then for preventing them from voting.

Education was another change in this century; previously, women were not supposed to receive any education but then society came up with the idea that women actually needed it, but not a traditional kind of education; women needed to learn about arts: music, singing, drawing, dancing, and to my surprise, modern languages. But besides this, women should also possess certain manners of walking, speaking and expressions.

There was a kind of women who were too enthusiastic about their intellectual development and not so much about this “how to become the perfect wife” issue. They were called “Blue-stockings” and they were considered as unsuitable for marriage for being ant feminine and for usurping men’s natural “intellectual superiority.”

There were some doctors who even reported that too much study had a real negative effect on the ovaries, turning attractive women into dried-up prunes. Parents would not let their daughters attend Oxford or Cambridge when they opened their doors to women because they were afraid their beautiful daughters would make themselves “unmarriageable”.

For what marriage and sexuality concerns, a young lady was thought to have the desire to marry only for the desire of becoming mothers as well, but not because she had any sexual anxiety. Doctor William Acton even declared: “The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’.

So, girls usually married when they reached their 20’s and the groom would commonly be five years older. This reinforced the natural hierarchy between sexes and also made financial sense. A young man needed to be able to demonstrate that he earned enough money to support his wife and their future children before the lady’s father approved the marriage.

In the 19th century it was considered pious if a man stayed chaste until he married. The reason is that many respectable men resorted to using prostitutes. Every major city had districts where was easy to find this “sexual workers”. The only problem with this practice is that syphilis and other sexual diseases began to spread, and young men passed the infections on to their wives. This caused painful and lingering deaths which usually occurred in the mid 40’s.

On the contrary, women had no choice but to stay chaste until they got married. They were not allowed to speak to men unless there was a married woman present, playing the role of the chaperone.

This is clearly expressed in Angela Carter’s “Company of Wolves”. The protagonist is a girl who has been educated to fear men in some way. She has been told that men are like wolves are now that she’s facing puberty, she is very cautious with what sexuality concerns.

And this education has to do with the ideology of the time. Since women were meant to remain as virgins until they married, they had to be quite cautious and mothers had certain obligation too of preventing them about sexuality.

As I’ve written before, men were educated in a different way. They were not meant to stay virgin until marriage; that was a personal decision which was not common.

But what I certainly find cute in this story is that, not mattering all the stories about men and the ideology with which girls grew in the 19th century, there came a time when they became women and noticed, as the protagonist does, that those “wolves” are only men, with feelings, not heartless beast who only thought about harming girls.

This ideology has certainly changed. Nowadays, girls are free to have male friends, and some of them even have some “affairs” with them, no mattering if they’re in a relationship.

We’re not in the 19th century anymore, and stories such as “The Company of Wolves” are good as examples of how girls were educated in those days. Fairytales may not be effective to make awareness about modern dangers, since they are meant for children and fortunately we have no need of preventing them at such a young age.

I am convinced about the need our society has of creating some kind of means of prevention for teenagers due to the amazing quantity of teen pregnancies and social media which may endanger youths in the same way “wolves” and going alone into the forest did in previous centuries.

REFERENCES

Carter, A. (1979). The Company of Wolves . In A. Carter, The Bloody Chamber (p. Unknwon). UK : Goliancz .

Hughes, K. (Unknown , Unknown Unknown). Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians . Retrieved from Gender roles in the 19th century: http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gender-roles-in-the-19th-century