Patriarchal Nuclear Family

Woolf describes the changed purpose of the home and the creation of the patriarchal nuclear family, yet again fails to assert the cause and purpose of these changes. In connection to the new role of the home, Woolf also writes about the changed role of the family. Orlando is surprised by the fact that there are couples everywhere she looks. She says that “couples trudged and plodded in the middle of the road indissolubly linked together. The woman’s right hand was invariably passed through the man’s left and her fingers were firmly gripped by his.” (Woolf 242) She also emphasises the newly constructed social importance of marriage between a man and a woman. She says that “it now seemed to her that the whole world was ringed with gold. She

Production moved from the family to capitalist enterprises, and male domestic labourers became workers. The wage labourer now stands as a civil equal with his employer in the public realm of the capitalist market. A (house)wife remains in the private domestic sphere, but the unequal relations of domestic life are 'naturally so' and thus do not detract from the universal equality of the public world.

(117)

This way, the woman is again placed in a submissive position to the man, so as to serve as a servant taking care of the private sphere, which is owned by the man of the house and not her. (Jamoussi 14) According to Blair, “this ideology creates a gendered separation of spheres and positions the woman inside the house as the spiritual and moral center of society; her indirect influence from within the house becomes her power outside the house. In this conception that indirect, private influence could substitute for direct, public agency inheres a basic contradiction that dominates nineteenth-century discussions of women’s identity.” (32) Yet Blair’s reasoning does not seem to fully comprehend the submissive role the woman has in a household. As Pateman explains, “private domestic relations

In particular, the issues discussed in this essay - socially constructed gender roles, restriction of female sexuality, and the patriarchal nuclear family in the 19th century are described as natural developments within a changing society and are not placed into the context of capitalist England after the Industrial Revolution. This way, Woolf does not explain that these developments are not merely coincidental but are part of the mechanism by which the capitalist system functions. Placing these notions into the context of the political power system at the time is essential in order to fully understand why and how they work. Only then can they be questioned, challenged, and subverted. By failing to do that, Woolf’s novel simply reiterates these constructs and as such reinforces their perception as something that is innate in human nature and cannot be challenged or