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Mona Caird's the Daughters of Danaus (1894) As A UNIVERSITE D’ ANTANANARIVO ECOLE NORMALE SUPERIEURE DEPARTEMENT DE FORMATION INITIALE LITTERAIRE CENTRE D’ETUDE ET DE RECHERCHE EN LANGUE ET LETTRE ANGLAISES MEMOIRE DE CERTIFICAT D’ APTITUDE PEDAGOGIQUE DE L’ ECOLE NORMALE (C.A.P.E.N ) MONA CAIRD’S THE DAUGHTERS OF DANAUS (1894) AS A REFLECTION OF THE EARLY ASPECTS OF FEMINISM IN BRITAIN PRESENTED BY : RAHARIJHON Mbolasoa Nadine DISSERTATION ADVISOR Mrs RABENORO Mireille Date de soutenance : 22 Décembre 2006 ACADEMIC YEAR : 2005-2006 When you accuse me of not being * When you accuse me of not being Like a woman I wonder what like is And how one becomes it I think woman is what Women are And as I am one So must that be included In what woman is So, there fore, I am like by Pat Van Twest. ___________________________________________________________________________ * HEALY, Maura, Women , England, 1984, Longman p. 28 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We address our deep gratitude to : - Mrs RABENORO Mireille, our dissertation advisor, for her precious contribution to the elaboration of this dissertation - Mrs RAZAIARIVELO A. for her advice which were so useful for the achievement of this work. - Mr RAZAFINDRATSIMA E. for he is the one who inspired us the very topic of this dissertation. - Mr Manoro Regis, our teacher and the head of English Department at E.N.S. for his kindness, his patience, and above all his helpful advice. - All our teachers at the English Department of E.N.S. for their support and follow-up while through on the five years’ training. - Our dearest parents and our sister for the kind support they brought to us during all this time. - We also address our special thanks to everyone who in a way or another helped us reach the result of this work. Our best regards to you all. RAHARIJHON Mbolasoa Nadine -i- INTRODUCTION Women play a very important role within the family, the society and the whole Nation. They bring to men a very precious help by contributing to the fulfilment of some tasks. For that reason and also for their personal satisfaction, women should be free to carry out all activities they feel capable to undertake and to obtain things they desire. As a matter of fact however, women were deprived from this freedom of action, of choice in most societies of the world. They were oppressed by a male-dominated position since men had all power and decided for them (women) what to think, what to do, how to behave. This happened in the past, and though improvement was brought about by feminist groups and individuals the problem linked with women’s fate seems to persist till nowadays. Thus, we think it worthy to deal with feminism in that not only will the study show the way how women’s position might be before, how it came to the stage where it is now in the present but also it will contribute to carry on with the battle. Fight for the advancement of women’s rights, liberty and equality with men took place then in the world for centuries now. However, the nineteenth century, a period of various changes in many Countries (European Countries like France, the USA, Britain,…) in different kinds of field including women’s status, can be considered as a very important time of the British women’s history for various forms of movement (strikes, petitions, literature,…) arose among the female sympathizers. The New Women movement was one of the feminist movements implemented in Britain in the late nineteenth century. It consisted of a literary movement through which the writers of novels, of pamphlets, and magazine articles attacked the low position granted to women and openly claimed for revolution. As far as Mona Caird was concerned, she was among those New Women novelists who introduced a new image of women as more independent, more active and more blossoming in their works. Though maybe unknown to general readers, Mona Caird is well-known to many -ii- feminist individuals and organizations in Britain and in other Countries. When we made our research in books, on internet, about which novelists might be fervent towards the cause at this time, who did not fear to display their feminist ideas, Caird proved to be admired by many other writers and readers who shared warmly her views. She is especially remembered for her defying arguments against the old conventions. She wrote many novels related to women but one of her most famous works was The Daughters of Danaus (1894), a novel based on the Greek Myth of the Danaides. Actually, the Danaides were the fifty daughters of Danaus. This latter was forced by his own brother Aegyptus to marry his girls to his own fifty sons. Danaus unhappily consented to the mass wedding but entreated secretly his daughters to murder their cousins in the wedding bed. All but one followed what their father told them. The exception was Hypermnstra who spared his husband (Lynceus)’s life for he left her virginity untouched. She loved him and spent her life with him. The forty nine others who were guilty of their deeds were punished in hell after they had died. They were to eternally fetch water, but as the sieves were full of holes, no sooner they had filled them the water would leak out. In Caird’s novel, the story deals with the fate of Hadria Fullerton, a particularly talented woman, who found herself oppressed by the Society, with its conventional ideas of women’s duties and roles. For the conservative family, friends and neighbours decided that women’s life should be restricted to the home circle, Hadria’s dream of a musical career seemed a real struggle. As indicated by its title the goal of this dissertation is to show then how this novel reflects the early aspects of the fight for the improvement of women’s status in Britain. Before dealing with this very goal in the second part however, it is necessary to study in the first part women’s subservience against which Caird went to oppose in her novel. To achieve this dissertation, we used the novel itself to bring in some quotations so that our arguments could -iii- be truthful. We used as well other kinds of books (encyclopaedias, books of civilization, of literature, magazines) to extract useful quotations, photos and she takes to illustrate ideas. We did not hesitate as well to use internet which we consider as an important additional source of information. Finally, as this dissertation is part of the pedagogical training offered to future teachers of English, it would be shown in the third part how The Daughters of Danaus could be adapted to the teaching of the language in the classroom. For that, we particularly used some linguistic and didactic books to give us hints on the kinds of activity to be exploited. -iv- PART - I WOMEN’S POSITION DURING THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN BRITAIN In Victorian Britain, women were still kept in a lower position within the Society and the family in that their rights and roles remained limited by long-established conventions. Actually, this state of restriction was reflected by written laws, making it constitutional, by the kind of tasks women were bound to fulfil everyday and by the type of education attributed to them. 1 - THE LEGAL STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN BRITAIN In 1890, Florence Fenwick Miller (1854-1935), one of the first women who qualified in medicine, described women’s position as follows : “Under exclusively man-made laws women have been reduced to the most abject condition of legal slavery in which it is possible for human beings to be held…under the arbitrary domination of another’s will, and dependent for decent treatment exclusively on the goodness of heart of the individual master ”1. Actually, social conventions restricted women’s position to their gender roles and thus submitted them to a male-centered authority. As a matter of fact the laws emphasized this actual lower status as opposed to men’s. 1-1 WOMEN’S LEGAL STATUS IN MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE The marriage system showed the legal domination of men over women since it put the wives’ properties and bodies under their husbands’ entire possession. First of all, resulting from the 1753 Marriage Act which made husbands administrating their wives’ resources a legal right, if the marriage took place before a priest, husbands legally owned all the wealth in 1 http : // en wikipedia. org/wiki/ National_Liberal_Club -1- the early and mid-century. Of course, in well-to-do families, family wealth was inherited in large part by the male descendants : daughters were given just a small percentage according to the father’s will. When still single, they could administrate their wealth independently (some of them used some parts of their wealth as a fund in charity works for example before marriage). Once married, however, what was left to them was made their partners’ possession. Then, for the working-women, all their earnings would directly belong to their husbands as well. Secondly, through the system, husbands had legal access to their wives’ bodies. This was written in a law and verbally consented by women through the vows during the ceremony. In fact, husbands were attributed the right to force their wives to do things, even to have sexual intercourse and to get pregnant, and to forbid them to do other things like going out to work for instance (for the upper-class women). In addition to that, they were not legally protected from their husbands’ violence. The Judge William Blackstone even claimed that husbands could inflict correction to disobedient wives.
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