Female Oppression and Aspiration in a Capitalistic Patriarchal Context

The present dissertation offers a critical analysis of the nineteenth-century patriarchal oppression of women in selected novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bront, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. It also analyzes the intricate correlation of patriarchy and capitalism that achieve their desire of capital accumulation by taking advantage of female oppression. This will be seen in relation to religion, sexual division of labor, and class. In each chapter, I unveil the strategies, ideologies, and stereotypes patriarchy applies to women as well as to other oppressed groups such as slaves and the working classes in order to manipulate power, dominance, and capital for themselves, thereby objectifying and instrumentalizing the other oppressed groups in the process.