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Behind all of the progress that so characterized Victorian England "was the backing of rigid notions about the right ordering of society and individual behavior," W. J. Reader writes in Life in Victorian England (6). In recent times, Victorian standards have often been decried as unnecessarily oppressive or even inhumane; yet, "the fact that unquestionable standards of right and wrong were generally held to exist, backed by the force of established authority, was an immense support to many people" (Reader 6). This phenomenon of finding immense support in rigid notions was not unique to the Victorians, but it seems to have served a much more central role in their identity and culture than it has with other generations. Indeed, its effects permeate many of the hallmark novels of Victorian England - shaping the lives of fictional characters even as they provide elements for their authors to react against.
This paradoxical blend of rigidity and support is perhaps nowhere more clearly seen than in the lives of Louisa Gradgrind and Jane Eyre, protagonists in Charles Dickens's Hard Times and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, respectively. In both texts, these women's coming-of-age is closely tied to their growing discernment of social standards - their ability to gauge which restraints are worth enforcing and which would prove unnecessary, or even harmful, if embraced. Coming from a culture that links virtue with self-regulation, Louisa and Jane must learn to distinguish legalism from true righteousness, service from unnecessary self-sacrifice (Oulton 52; Searle 37). The similarities between these characters' insights are striking, together promoting an almost biblical understanding of restraint - one in which anger without vindictiveness is modeled and rewarded.
While modern readers' contexts may differ from those surrounding Dickens and Brontë - especially in terms of the cultural value prescribed to intangibles like restraint and indulgence, conformity and individuality - the need to learn how rightly to express human passions is largely universal. It is generally understood that Victorian England tended towards the suppressive side of the pendulum, urging constriction in everything from the moral to the intellectual, the sexual to the emotional. It could also be argued that modern Western culture errs toward the opposite extreme: individual autonomy and indulgence. In both contexts, the need to discern cultural values...