Resumen de Victorian angels of the house vs. fallen angels, the American new woman vs. the decadent: young females coming of age through transatlantic self-development in W.M.Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" and Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the wind"
Transatlantic nineteenth-century conceptions of women gave birth to a dichotomy of female characters. In Victorian England, women were considered embodiments of socially-sanctioned values such as piety, purity, prudery and morality, playing the role of the Angel of the house. If Victorian damsels usurped any unappertaining roles, they became Fallen Angels; rebellious characters defying the submission patriarchal society imposed on them. On the other shore of the Atlantic, in mid-nineteenth-century America, women had undergone a Civil War, thus, due to historical reasons, American women developed some sense of independence and, through their daily chores and struggle, they personified the role of the New Woman. In contrast, American heroines displaying languor and invalidism were termed as decadent. Both Fallen Angels and New Women disrupted the coy nature attached to young females, but their interpretation differed in England and America. Similarly, both the Angels of the house and the Decadent women shared many qualities, although they were not held in the same light on both shores of the Atlantic. This article aims at analysing how these transatlantic female archetypes are developed in W.M.Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847-8) and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936).
