Greed for Respectability: The Cult of Ideal Woman in the Victorian Middle-Class = Greed for Respectability: The Cult of Ideal Woman in the Victorian Middle-Class

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper aims to examine what the Victorian middle-class ethos was and how it had developed around the middle-class conception of ideal woman. Actuated by a desire to prove to the world that their new status had been achieved as much by means of moral earnestness as by sharp business practice, the middle class became more rigidly and self-denyingly obedient to social and civic codes of behavior than any other segment of Victorian society. The idealization of home and the cult of domesticity were, among other codes of respectability, central to the Victorian middle-class. The role of woman as moral guardian of her husband and children--and indeed of the whole society--was set at the ideological center of the Victorian middle class to ensure its spiritual superiority. To enhance its claim to moral and hence social supremacy, the Victorian middle class attempted to regulate and control female sexuality, even the functions of maternity. The middle-class conception of the ideal woman, with its restrictive codes of morality, vindicated the middle class`s claims to social leadership through spiritual superiority. And the values and mores of the middle class constituted the dominant ideology of the Victorian age.