Wife and daughter: an ambivalent social role of a sexually precocious girl in relationships with a father figure

The article considers an ambivalent image of a Victorian girl - infantile or mature beyond her years - in relationships with her father, in which she often at an early age adopts an adult social woman’s role and replaces for the father either the mistress of the house or his wife and mother. In Victorian literary discourse, this type of relationship between father and daughter has no open sexual side, but is characterized by dependence, tenderness, affection, altruism, love. An ambivalent girl-woman’s role in the nineteenth century proceeds from the accepted social era’s norms about the idealized woman’s image.