List as many nineteenth-century Romantic stereotypes of the female as you can remember

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Many stereotypes for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women can be found in the Romantic literature of the time. Writers either glorified the female as chaste, passive, and submissive, or characterized her as dangerous and threatening. Romantic writers inherited the dual view of womankind that had prevailed since the Middle Ages: like Eve, woman was the femme fatale, the seducer and destroyer of mankind; like Mary, however, woman was the source of salvation and the symbol of all that was pure and true.
Many women writers during the time tended to perpetuate the Romantic stereotype of the chaste and clinging female. Jane Austen, something of an exception, wittily attacks sentimental love and Romantic rapture in her novels. Her heroines, intelligent and generous in spirit, are concerned with reconciling economic security with proper social and moral behavior. Austen's keen eye for the details of family life, and for the comic contradictions between human actions and values, show her to be the first Realist in the English novel-writing tradition.