Domesticity In The Victorian Age

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Domesticity, as defined by The Merriam Webster, is “the state of being domestic; domestic or home life.” When someone mentions domesticity, an immediate association may be drawn to domesticated cats, dogs, or even simply animals people bring into our homes and domesticize. The household trains to be accustomed to home life, rather than life on the streets. We as people, generally, spend half our time in the home and half outside. Thanks to this we are often seen as domesticated creatures. However, as demonstrated clearly by through Dicken’s writing, as well as Cullwick’s, people can also become domesticized. During the Victorian Era, women left home rarely and were not seen as working people. Despite the limited exceptions most working women constrained to work inside homes other than their own. Hannah Cullwick’s relationship to domesticity is a complex one. Despite the fact that she was a working-class woman, who was employed by various different homes, she did not work in each of them for more than a limited amount of time.
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Separate sphere ideology can very much be connected to this; what separate spheres are is that they are the domestic spheres that separate men and women. Men inhabit the public sphere, whereas women inhabit the private sphere, or sometimes referred to as the “proper sphere.” Hannah falls under a third sphere, I will refer to it as “Hannah’s Sphere.” Hannah’s Sphere, is different, whereas like the public sphere it is masculine, has conflict, and physical work; but like the “proper sphere” it is also feminine, consists of housework, and compassion. It is to say that in a binary society, such as Victorian England and even today, everyone placed themselves in one of the two, but Hannah did not care for that, she did as she pleased for her own self and was viewed as

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