CHARACTERISATION OF WOMEN IN CHARLES DICKENS’ NOVEL “GREAT EXPECTATIONS A MARXIST FEMINIST PERCEPTIVE
Keywords:
Patriarchy, Male dominancy, Class-differences, Industrial Revolution, Gender discrimination.Abstract
The aim of on-going paper is to explore the miserable living conditions of
women in the patriarchal Victorian social formation in England as
depicted in Charles Dickens’ most famous novel “Great Expectations”
from a Marxist Feminist perceptive. The gender issues, concerning
subjugation of women, social oppression, negligence, deprivation and
humiliation can clearly be viewed in Charles Dickens’ novels and even in
the enforcement of social Reforms in the mid nineteenth-century
Victorian England. Unfortunately, the lot of women was not improved in
the era of Industrial Revolution. Charles Dickens was one the greatest
masters of the art of typification and characterisation. He produced many
immortal universal male and female types and characters that we meet in
our everyday life everywhere and every era in the world. He produced the
typical female characters in his fiction, relating the plights and
predicaments of the oppressed female characters to class-differences
because women played a vital role in his personal life and his fiction.
Drawing upon his personal feelings, observations and experiences of the
miseries and hardships of these oppressed female figures, he realistically
challenged the patriarchal values and traditions of the bourgeois
patriarchal Victorian social formation, raising the status of them in his
novels.
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