What is a Woman? Victorian Constructions of Femininity

Abstract

While both these quotations emphasise the difference between women and men, they appear to offer contrasting views of women, the first conveying a far more flattering view of women in general than the second. And yet the first, from the Swiss pastor John Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, is much closer in attitude to the second, taken from Tennyson’s Arthurian epic, Idylls of the King, than at first appears. Lavater’s essays on the science of physiognomy, of judging character by appearance, first appeared in 1789, but remained, according to Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, the most influential text in its field throughout the nineteenth century. The ninth edition was published in 1855, only a year before Tennyson wrote ‘Merlin and Vivien’. The essay ‘Male and Female’ includes ‘A Word on the Physiognomical Relation of the Sexes’, which describes male and female appearance in a series of binary oppositions of the kind which Hélène Cixous sees as characteristic of Western thought about the sexes.³ Many of these opposed physiological attributes lend themselves to interpretation in moral terms, generally implying female weakness, as in the opening lines, ‘Man is the most firm - woman the most flexible.

In general (for I neither can nor will state any thing but what is most known,) how much more pure, tender, delicate, irritable, affectionate, flexible, and patient, is woman than man.

— John Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy¹

For men at most differ as Heaven and earth, But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Merlin and Vivien’²