Masters Thesis

Victorian women and the piano: domesticity and transgression

This paper aims to explore the contradictory role of the piano in the lives of Victorian, middle-class women. The piano was both a potent symbol of middle- class prosperity and separate spheres ideology, and a dangerous object that enabled Victorian women to transgress prescribed gender boundaries and gain access to the forbidden worlds of art and sexual desire. The first objective of the paper is to examine the history of the piano, and the various sociopolitical factors which contributed to the rising demand for the instrument in the nineteenth century. The piano was closely linked to ideals surrounding middle-class identity in both England and America in the nineteenth-century, and piano-playing was central to the proper moral education of young women of the middle class. However, the piano also had a disruptive potential because it allowed women to access transcendent realms, which were outside of their socially-ordained duties. I then wish to further expose and explore the contradictory nature of the piano in the lives of Victorian women, and the harsh reality of the imposition of separate spheres and the Cult of Domesticity, by engaging in a close reading of visual and literary texts of the nineteenth century that feature women and pianos, specifically Thomas Eakins' Elizabeth at the Piano and Home Scene, William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience, and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. By exposing the role of the piano as an instrument of contradictory associations, this paper ultimately reveals the frustrations felt by Victorian women at the oppressive constraints imposed on them by nineteenth-century society.

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