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New Woman Fiction

Women Writing First-Wave Feminism

Ann Heilmann
New Woman Fiction

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Also by Ann Heilmann

THE LATE-VICTORIAN MARRIAGE QUESTION: A Collection of Key New


Woman Texts (editor)

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10.1057/9780230288355 - New Woman Fiction, Ann Heilmann


Ann Heilmann
New Woman Fiction

10.1057/9780230288355 - New Woman Fiction, Ann Heilmann


Women Writing First-Wave Feminism

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First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0–333–79416–8

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First published in the United States of America 2000 by
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, LLC,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 0–312–23627–1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heilmann, Ann.
New woman fiction : women writing first-wave feminism / Ann Heilmann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0–312–23627–1 (cloth)
1. English fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Feminism and
literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Women and literature–
–Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. English fiction—19th century–
–History and criticism. 5. Feminist fiction, English—History and criticism. 6.
Feminists in literature. 7. Feminism in literature. 8. Sex role in literature. 9.
Women in literature. I. Title.
PR878.F45 H45 2000
823'.8099287—dc21
00–042059

© Ann Heilmann 2000


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Contents

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List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements x

Abbreviations xi

Regen(d)eration 1

1 Contesting/Consuming Femininities 15

2 Keynotes and Discords 43

3 Marriage and Its Discontents 77

4 The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 117

5 The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 155

Departures 194

Notes 196

Index 214

vii

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List of Illustrations

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1 ‘Donna Quixote’, Punch, 18 April 1894, 195. 3

2 ‘Should Irascible Old Gentlemen Be Taught to Knit?’,


Phil May’s Illustrated Winter Annual (1894), 5. 17

3 (Untitled) [Two old men knitting], Phil May’s Illustrated


Winter Annual (1894), 7. 18

4 (Untitled) [New Woman leaning across bar], Phil May’s


Illustrated Winter Annual (1894), 9. 19

5 ‘The New Woman’, Phil May’s Illustrated Winter Annual


(1894), 11. 20

6 ‘The Championess’, in Trevor Lloyd, Suffragettes


International: The World-Wide Campaign for Women’s Rights
(British Commonwealth and American Heritage Press,
1971), 34–5. 21

7 ‘Speaks for Itself’, Hub, 17 October 1896, 412. 21

8 ‘Bates’ FRIZETTA Keeps the Hair in Curl’, Hub, 17 October


1896, 415. 36

9 ‘Do English Lady Cyclists Ride Gracefully? An American


Expert’s Opinion’, Hub, 17 October 1896, 429. 37

10 ‘The Love of Cynthia [A Modern Romance]’, Hub, 17


October 1896, 406. 38

11 ‘The Force of Habit’, Punch, 3 August 1895, 59. 39

12 ‘Good News for Lady Cyclists’, Hub, 17 October 1896,


415. 40

13 ‘Extremes That Meet’, Punch, 14 March 1874, 110. 47

ix

10.1057/9780230288355 - New Woman Fiction, Ann Heilmann


Acknowledgements

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The writing of this book would not have been possible without the sus-
tained support of friends, family, colleagues, students and academic
institutions. In particular I am grateful to the University of Tübingen
and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for funding the
research that forms the basis of this study. Further, I would like to thank
Manchester Metropolitan University for its generous sabbatical leave
scheme and library staff for their professional and friendly service. My
warmest thanks go to Patrick Bridgwater, Heidi Heilmann and Hans-
Werner Ludwig.
Some of the thoughts developed in this book were first outlined in
the following articles: ‘Masquerade, Sisterhood and the Dilemma of the
Feminist as Artist and Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century British
Women’s Writing’, Journal of Gender Studies, 3 (1994), 155–63; ‘Feminist
Resistance, the Artist and “A Room of One’s Own” in New Woman
Fiction’, Women’s Writing, 2 (1995), 291–308; ‘Mona Caird (1854–1932):
Wild Woman, New Woman, and Early Radical Feminist Critic of Mar-
riage and Motherhood’, Women’s History Review, 5 (1996), 67–95; ‘The
“New Woman” Fiction and Fin-de-Siècle Feminism’, Women’s Writing, 3
(1996), 197–216 (Special Issue edited by Sally Ledger); ‘Un(masking)
Desire: Cross-dressing and the Crisis of Gender in New Woman Fiction’,
Journal of Victorian Culture, 5 (2000), 83–111. I am grateful to Carfax
Publishing Company, Taylor & Francis, Triangle Journals, and Sage
Publications for granting me permission to draw on this material.

10.1057/9780230288355 - New Woman Fiction, Ann Heilmann


Abbreviations

FOOTNOTES

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In all bibliographical references the place of publication is London
unless otherwise stated. Abbreviations are used for the following
publishers:
AUP Associated University Presses
CUP Cambridge University Press
MUP Manchester University Press
OUP Oxford University Press
UP University Press
PRIMARY TEXTS
Anthologies (volumes are indicated with Roman letters)
LVMQ Heilmann, Ann (ed.), The Late-Victorian Marriage Question: A
Collection of Key New Woman Texts. 5 vols. Routledge
Thoemmes Press, 1998.
SOBF Roberts, Marie Mulvey and Tamae Mizuta (eds), Sources of
British Feminism. 6 vols. Routledge Thoemmes Press, 1995.
SSPSG Heilmann, Ann and Stephanie Forward (eds), Sex, Social
Purity and Sarah Grand. 4 vols. Routledge Thoemmes Press,
2000.
Allen, Grant
BBAR The British Barbarians. Lane, 1895.
WWD The Woman Who Did. Lane, 1895.
Angelou, Maya
CBD I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. 1969; Virago, 1984.
Barry, William Francis
TNA The New Antigone. 1887; New York: Garland, 1976.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth
LAS Lady Audley’s Secret. 1862; Oxford: OUP, 1992.
Brontë, Charlotte
JE Jane Eyre. 1847; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
V Villette. 1853; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959.

xi

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xii Abbreviations

Brooke, Emma Frances


ASW A Superfluous Woman. Heinemann, 1894.
T Transition. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1895.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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AL Aurora Leigh. 1857; Women’s Press, 1993.

Caird, Mona
DD The Daughters of Danaus. 1894; New York: Feminist Press,
1989.
MOM The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and
Destiny of Woman. George Redway, 1897. In LVMQ, I.
PG The Pathway of the Gods. Skeffington, 1898.
SOS The Stones of Sacrifice. Simpkin, Marshall, 1915.
WOA The Wing of Azrael. 3 vols. Trübner, 1889.

Carswell, Catherine
OTD! Open the Door! 1920; Virago, 1986.

Cholmondeley, Mary
RP Red Pottage. 1899; Virago, 1985.

Colmore, Gertrude
SSTW Suffragettes: A Story of Three Women. 1911; Pandora, 1984.
Original title: Suffragette Sally.

Cross(e), Victoria
‘TAF’ ‘Theodora: A Fragment’. Yellow Book, 4 (1895), 156–88.

Dix, Gertrude
GFF The Girl from the Farm. Lane, 1895.
IB The Image Breakers. Heinemann, 1900.

Dixie, Lady Florence


GL Gloriana; or the Revolution of 1900. 1890; New York: Standard
Publishing Company, 1892.
IS Isola, or, The Disinherited: A Revolt for Women and all the Dis-
inherited. 1877; Leadenhall Press, 1902.
TF Towards Freedom: An Appeal to Thoughtful Men and Women.
Watts, 1904.

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Abbreviations xiii

Dixon, Ella Hepworth


AIKT ‘As I Knew Them’: Sketches of People I Have Met on the Way.
Hutchinson, 1930.
SMW The Story of a Modern Woman. Heinemann, 1894.

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Dowie, Ménie Muriel
G Gallia. Methuen, 1895.

Egerton, George
‘ACL’ ‘A Cross Line’. K, 1–36; LVMQ, IV.
‘AKTK’ ‘A Keynote to Keynotes’. In John Gawsworth (ed.), Ten Con-
temporaries: Notes Towards Their Definitive Bibliography.
Ernest Benn, 1932, 58–60. LVMQ, V.
D Discords. 1894; Virago, 1983.
‘GU’ ‘Gone Under’. D, 82–114.
‘HOA’ ‘At the Heart of the Apple’. Symphonies. Lane, The Bodley
Head, 1897, 160–218; LVMQ, III.
K Keynotes. 1893; Virago, 1983.
RA Rosa Amorosa. Grant Richards, 1901.
‘VS’ ‘Virgin Soil’. D, 145–62; LVMQ, III.
‘WL’ ‘Wedlock’. D, 115–44.
WOG The Wheel of God. Grant Richards, 1898.
‘WOT’ ‘The Well of Truth’. Fantasias. Lane, The Bodley Head, 1898,
121–56.

Ellis, Edith (Lees)


NFM A Noviciate for Marriage. Haslemere: n.p., 1894. LVMQ, II.
SW Seaweed. The UP, 1898.
TMS Mrs Havelock Ellis. Three Modern Seers. Stanley Paul [1920].

Fairbairns, Zoë
SWAL Stand We at Last. Virago, 1988.

Ford, Isabella O.
OTT On the Threshold. Arnold, 1895.
W&S Women and Socialism. 1907. SOBF, IV.

Galsworthy, John
IC In Chancery. 1920. In The Forsyte Saga. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1974, I, 365–652.

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xiv Abbreviations

MOP The Man of Property. 1906. In The Forsyte Saga. Har-


mondsworth: Penguin, 1974, I, 11–364.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins


CPGUN Minna Doskow (ed.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian

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Novels. AUP, 1999.
HL Herland. 1915; Women’s Press, 1979.
LCPG The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography.
1935; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
MMW The Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture. 1911; New
York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1971.
MTM Moving the Mountain. 1911. In CPGUN, 37–149.
TC The Crux. 1910/11. Extract in Ann J. Lane (ed.), The Char-
lotte Perkins Gilman Reader. Women’s Press, 1981, 116–22.
WHIO With Her in Ourland. 1916. In CPGUN, 270–387.
‘YW’ The Yellow Wallpaper. 1892; Virago, 1987.

Gissing, George
OW The Odd Women. 1893; Virago, 1987.

Grand, Sarah
BB The Beth Book. 1897; Bristol: Thoemmes, 1994.
BTI Babs the Impossible. Hutchinson, 1900.
‘CC’ ‘The Condemned Cell’. EM, 87–112.
DE A Domestic Experiment. Blackwoods, 1891.
EM Emotional Moments. Hurst and Blackett, 1908.
‘FHT’ ‘Foreword, 1893–1923’. The Heavenly Twins. Heinemann,
1923, v–xvi. SSPSG, I.
HT The Heavenly Twins. 1893; Heinemann, 1908.
ID Ideala: A Study from Life. 1888; Richard Bentley, 1889.
MMM The Modern Man and Maid. London: Horace Marshall & Son,
1898. LVMQ, II.
‘TU’ ‘The Undefinable: A Fantasia’. Emotional Moments. 1908. In
Elaine Showalter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence. Virago, 1993,
262–87.

Grove, Lady (Agnes)


TSF The Social Fetich. Smith, Elder, 1907.
‘UW’ ‘Ubiquitous Woman: A Drawing-room Episode’. Lady’s
Realm, 25 (1909), 441–4, 576–80.

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Abbreviations xv

Hall, Radclyffe
TUL The Unlit Lamp. Jonathan Cape, 1926.
WOL The Well of Loneliness. 1928; Virago, 1992.

Hardy, Thomas

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JTO Jude the Obscure. 1895; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

Holdsworth, Annie
JT Joanna Traill, Spinster. Heinemann, 1894.

Ibsen, Henrik
ADH A Doll’s House. 1879; Everyman, 1993.
GH Ghosts. 1882; Penguin, 1964.

Iota
YA A Yellow Aster. Hutchinson, 1894.

James, Henry
TB The Bostonians. 1886; Penguin, 1986.

Johnstone, Edith
ASH A Sunless Heart. 2 vols. Ward, Lock & Bowden, 1894.

Kenealy, Arabella
DRJ Dr Janet of Harley Street. Digby, Long, 1893.
F&SE Feminism and Sex-Extinction. Unwin, 1920.

Linton, Eliza Lynn


ACK The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, 3 vols. Bentley,
1885.
ROF The Rebel of the Family. 1880; Chatto & Windus, 1888.
TOTM The One Too Many. Chatto & Windus, 1894.

Lytton, (Lady) Constance


PAP Prisons and Prisoners: Experiences of a Suffragette. 1914; East
Ardsley: E.P. Publishing, 1976.

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xvi Abbreviations

Moore, George
‘AN’ ‘Albert Nobbs’. Celibate Lives. Heinemann, 1927, 44–96.
EW Esther Waters. 1894; Dent, 1976.
MF Mike Fletcher. 1889; Ward & Downey, 1899.

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Peck, Winifred
SOT The Skirts of Time. Faber & Faber, 1935.

Pinero, Arthur Wing


TNME The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith. 1895; Oxford: OUP, 1998,
61–134.

Robins, Elizabeth
ADL A Dark Lantern. New York: Macmillan, 1905.
GMH Raimond, C. E. George Mandeville’s Husband. Heinemann,
1894.
TC The Convert. 1907; Women’s Press, 1980.
VFW Votes for Women!. 1907. In Dale Spender and Carole Hayman
(eds), How the Vote Was Won And Other Suffragette Plays.
Methuen, 1985, 35–87.
WAYGT Where Are You Going To . . . ? Heinemann, 1913.
WS Way Stations. Hodder & Stoughton, 1913.

Rossetti, Christina
‘GM’ ‘Goblin Market’. 1859. In Jan Marsh (ed.), Christina Rossetti:
Poems and Prose. Everyman, 1994, 162–76.

Schreiner, Olive
AF The Story of an African Farm. 1883; Virago, 1989.
FMTM From Man to Man. 1926; Virago, 1982.
‘PFP’ ‘The Policy in Favour of Protection-’. Dream Life and Real
Life. Unwin, 1893, 51–72.
‘TD’ ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’. Dreams. Unwin, 1890, 67–85.
LVMQ, IV.
W&L Woman and Labour. 1911; Virago, 1988.
U Undine. Ernest Benn, 1929.

Sharp, Evelyn
MOAP The Making of a Prig. Lane, The Bodley Head, 1897.
RW Rebel Women. Fifield, 1910.

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Abbreviations xvii

UA Unfinished Adventure: Some Reminiscences from an English-


woman’s Life. Lane, The Bodley Head, 1933.

Shaw, G. B.
TUS The Unsocial Socialist. 1884; Virago 1988.

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Stoker, Bram
DR Dracula. 1897; Oxford: OUP, 1983.

Syrett, Netta
NF Nobody’s Fault. Lane, 1896.
PR Portrait of a Rebel. Geoffrey Bles, 1929.
RCM Rose Cottingham Married. Unwin, 1916.
ST The Sheltering Tree. Geoffrey Bles, 1939.
TV The Victorians. Unwin, 1915.
TW Three Women. Chatto & Windus, 1912.

Thurston, Katherine Cecil


M Max. Hutchinson, 1910.

Todd, Margaret
MM Travers, Graham. Mona Maclean, Medical Student. Black-
wood, 1892.

Ward, Mrs Humphry


DB Delia Blanchflower. Ward, Lock & Co, 1915.
MC Marcella. 1894; Virago, 1984.

Wells, H. G.
AV Ann Veronica. 1909; Virago, 1987.
TNM The New Macchiavelli. Lane, The Bodley Head, 1911.

Wilde, Oscar
AIH An Ideal Husband. 1895. In CWOW, 515–82.
CWOW The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Glasgow: HarperCollins,
1994.
DG The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1890. In CWOW, 17–159.

Winterson, Jeanette
ONOF Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Vintage, 1991.

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xviii Abbreviations

Woolf, Virginia
O Orlando. 1928; Penguin, 1993.
‘PFW’ ‘Professions for Women’. 1931. In Michèle Barrett (ed.), Vir-
ginia Woolf on Women & Writing. Women’s Press, 1979,
57–63.

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ROO A Room of One’s Own. 1929; Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1945.
TG Three Guineas. 1938; Hogarth Press, 1986.

Wotton, Mabel E.
‘FE’ ‘The Fifth Edition’. Day-books. Lane, 1896. In Elaine Showal-
ter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence. Virago, 1993, 139–64.

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Regen(d)eration

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The close of the nineteenth century marks an epoch of social
revolutions . . . The remnant of the old order stand aghast,
clinging affrightedly to their traditions; meanwhile the new
order hastens forth eagerly, heralding and welcoming the fuller
entrance of the New Era. That very word ‘new’, strikes as it were
the dominant note in the trend of present-day thought . . . The
new art, the new literature, the new fiction, the new journal-
ism, the new humour, the new criticism, the new hedonism,
the new morality . . . Of all these new facts and entities, the
new woman appears . . . to be immeasurably the first in impor-
tance, the most abounding in potentialities and in common
interest.
Mrs Morgan-Dockrell, ‘Is the New Woman a Myth?’ (1896)1

What is the New Woman? She is the product of the social evo-
lution which is going on around us. . . . What are the basic
characteristics of the New Woman? . . . Above all she is striving
for equality of opportunity with man to enjoy full life, and she
seeks the right to make decisions for herself, the right to deter-
mine her own destiny.
Ainslie Meares, The New Woman (1974)2

The harbinger of cultural, social and political transformations, the New


Woman epitomized the spirit of the fin de siècle. Her political demands
reflected the crisis of the ancien régime beleaguered by issues of class and
race, authority and ideology, while her ‘sexual anarchy’3 exacerbated
deep-seated anxieties about the shifting concepts of gender and sexual-
ity. Her increasing cultural impact and international4 resonance accen-
tuated concerns about the feminization of literature and the demise of
virile Englishness.5 Yet with her call for the restoration of moral stand-
ards and her exaltation of women’s maternalistic ethic she proclaimed
herself an agent of the ‘purification’ of the nation,6 countering con-
servative images of decay with her vision of renovation and ‘racial’
advancement. A vibrant metaphor of transition, the New Woman stood
at once for the degeneration of society and for that society’s moral
regeneration. The intense and prolonged critical debate she engendered

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2 New Woman Fiction

shaped central aspects of British literature and culture from the late-
Victorian age through the Edwardian period and beyond.

Towards a genealogy of the New Woman

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Who or what was the New Woman? A literary construct, a press fabri-
cation and discursive marker of rebellion, or a ‘real’ woman? A writer,
social reformer, or feminist activist? A middle-class daughter eager to
study for a career, a married woman chafing against legal inequality, a
woman-loving spinster, a reluctant mother, a sexual libertarian? Even
the factual writers who defined and were defined as New Women were
apt to shift and contest the parameters of the category; of the two most
prominent, one (Sarah Grand) distanced herself from the ‘vulgar crea-
ture’ the New Woman had become since she had conceived her, while
the other (George Egerton) rejected the concept altogether.7 The seman-
tic instability of the term ‘New Woman’ derives in part from the mul-
tiplicity of agents who had an ideological stake in constructing her. That
the New Woman constitutes a complex historical phenomenon which
operated at both cultural (textual and visual) and socio-political levels
is exemplified by the Punch cartoon reproduced on the cover of this
book.
‘Donna Quixote’ represents the New Woman in her dual role as reader
and writer. Suggestive of the biological sign for the male, the key
above her head symbolizes the pen and its phallic thrust, the book in
her hand pointing to the ‘keynotes’ of her revolt. Books evidently play
a prominent part in her quixotic affliction. The tenor of the caption (‘A
world of disorderly notions picked out of books’) is replicated in the
parodic verse (Figure 1): ‘Morbid conceptions born of books ferment in
brains a-burn with febrile discontent!’ If male thinkers and writers of
the realist, naturalist and aesthetic schools (Tolstoi and Ibsen in the
cartoon, J. S. Mill and The Yellow Book in the text) are the source of her
forbidding knowledge, its fruits are superabundantly female: cartoon
and verse alike picture or allude to George Egerton’s Keynotes, Mona
Caird’s articles on marriage, Iota’s A Yellow Aster (placed at the feet of
the female soldier), Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (mentioned
in the text) and, cryptically, Lady Florence Dixie’s Gloriana (whose
protagonist sets up an all-female ‘Volunteer’ force in preparation for
feminist revolution).
References to E. F. Benson’s bestselling Dodo (the second in the series)
and particularly ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’ (a reader debate on
the rights of the middle-class daughter conducted in a number of

10.1057/9780230288355 - New Woman Fiction, Ann Heilmann


1: ‘Donna Quixote’

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Regen(d)eration 3

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4 New Woman Fiction

magazines) indicate the impact of the emerging mass market. Popular


and periodical literature was, indeed, central to the diffusion of images
and ideas which kept the New Woman ever present in the minds of the
reading public.
Literature and writing are not the whole story, however. In the

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cartoon considerable space is taken up by female warriors whose pur-
suits reflect some of the concerns of Victorian feminist reformers and
political activists: dress reform (the divided skirt), marital reform, moral
reform. Traditional notions of femininity (the monster of decorum),
upheld by a triumvirate of Old Women (Mrs Grundy, Mamma and the
Chaperon), are under attack, and so is ‘Tyrant Man’, his severed bust
manifestly a casualty of the sex war.
The primary significance of the Punch cartoon resides in the close con-
nection it establishes between the literary (self-)representation of the
New Woman, turn-of-the-century popular culture, and first-wave femi-
nism. The dialectical relationship between these three determinants of
New Woman fiction underlies the conception of this book. My aim is
to examine the literary, cultural, social and political history of the New
Woman in its complex affinity to feminist activism and mass culture,
and to locate New Woman fiction as a gynocentric feminist discourse
on women, gender relations, and the reshaping of literature and
(popular) culture for specifically political purposes. The primary empha-
sis of this study is on the first generation of New Women: writers born
around the mid-century whose main work falls in the 30-year period
between 1880 and 1910.
As I will argue, New Woman fiction was more than a literary response
to the social changes brought about by the Victorian women’s move-
ment: it constituted, and conceived itself as, an agent of social and
political transformation. This was underpinned by the active part many
writers took in the turn-of-the-century women’s movement and related
political causes such as social purity (Sarah Grand), socialism (Isabella
Ford), the Humanitarian League (Lady Florence Dixie), the Personal
Rights Association and anti-vivisection (Mona Caird), anti-imperialism
(Olive Schreiner), and the peace movement (Evelyn Sharp). As com-
mitted suffragists, many writers were attached to Millicent Garrett
Fawcett’s constitutional National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies
and the Women Writers’ Suffrage League; some like Sharp and Elizabeth
Robins were involved with the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Politi-
cal Union, the most prominent of the militant suffragette organisations.
It can hardly be a coincidence that the term ‘feminism’, coined in the

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Regen(d)eration 5

early nineteenth century by Charles Fourier, entered the English lan-


guage at the same time as that of the ‘New Woman’ (1894/95), and was
then applied to suffragists.8
In their dual commitment to political and cultural forms of feminist
agitation, New Woman writers turned to journalism and popular

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narrative writing to carry into practice their project of social renova-
tion. It was ‘largely in the hands of women’, the journalist M. E. Haweis
impressed on fellow professionals in 1900, to regenerate (‘clean’) society
by determining ‘what [women] write, what they read, what they
want’ (as in the Punch cartoon, female readers and writers are here
conflated): ‘Let us go on with our tongues of fire, consecrated to an
entirely holy work,’ she urged, implying that there was a direct corre-
lation between writing and fighting for women’s rights.9 ‘The Function
of the Novel is now recognized as fully equal to those of the Pulpit and
the Professorial Chair,’ Mary Hartley had remarked some years earlier;
‘it is the sole recognized means – at present – for a woman to make her
voice and power felt outside the narrow limits of her personal sur-
rounding.’10 The tremendous appeal of Olive Schreiner’s Story of an
African Farm (1883) to the widest spectrum of readers (‘[f]rom ‘the
Queen to the servant girl and Smith and Sons news boys everyone reads
the novel and is touched by it,’ she noted with satisfaction);11 the flood
of responses unleashed by Mona Caird’s 1888 article on ‘Marriage’ (some
27,000 letters in the Daily Telegraph, with an equally fierce debate
unfolding in the American Cosmopolitan);12 the sensational éclat pro-
duced by The Heavenly Twins (1893) on both sides of the Atlantic and
for which Grand continued to be remembered into the 1930s:13 these
are just some examples of the impact New Woman writers had on the
formation and transformation of public opinion. The enthusiasm with
which feminist ideas were taken up by young middle-class women and
modified into claims for personal liberty and equality of opportunity
testifies to the success of the social project on which New Woman
writers were engaged.
To what extent can New Woman fiction be considered a woman-
centred and woman-authored genre which gave cultural resonance to
the political concerns of the Victorian and Edwardian women’s move-
ments while also enabling the writers to problematize and recreate, in
their heroines, aspects of their personal experience as women, feminists,
and artists? Elaine Showalter’s positioning of New Woman fiction
within feminist parameters has received renewed attention in recent
years from Rita Kranidis, Carolyn Christensen Nelson and Sally Ledger.14

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6 New Woman Fiction

Yet male as well as female writers, anti-feminists as well as feminists


used New Woman fiction as a political tool in the dissemination of ide-
ology – and it is canonical male writers like George Gissing, Thomas
Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, George Meredith, George Moore,
G. B. Shaw and Oscar Wilde who tend to be perceived as the most impor-

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tant because technically most innovative and aesthetically sound pro-
ducers of New Woman subjectivities.
From its inception, New Woman fiction was adapted and reshaped by
male writers keen to explore new female identities (Ibsen and Hardy),
and by anti-feminists eager to mobilize New Woman stereotypes to
discredit the women’s movement (Eliza Lynn Linton and Grant Allen).
As a result, its gynocentric, autobiographically informed and feminist
origins became submerged in a complex process in which gendered
and political homogeneity, articulated structurally through a diversity
of forms, made way for gendered and ideological heterogeneity. While
the genre itself remained outside the mainstream canon and therefore
fell into oblivion once its heyday was past, the male writers, because
they formed part of the academic mainstream, did not suffer the same
fate.
Consequently, when the New Woman was rediscovered in the late
1960s and early 1970s, critics focused their attention on these male
writers even while providing ground-breaking insights into the feminist
roots of the genre.15 When the emphasis was on women, authorial
depreciation of the ‘didactic’ outlook of the female writers cast doubt
upon their literary credentials.16 This juxtaposition of ‘art’ (‘proper’
adherence to aesthetic and formal criteria) and ‘purpose’ (an ‘improper’
emphasis on message and content) reflected the very dichotomy which
pitted New Woman writers against (male) decadents at the turn of the
century. Conceptualized as degenerates by their conservative contem-
poraries, the New Woman and the decadent are today often seen as anal-
ogous figures of fin-de-siècle dissent.17 As I show in Chapter 2, they were,
however, engaged in very different kinds of oppositional cultural
politics. This also applies to male realist and naturalist writers who
addressed the New Woman question from a necessarily different autho-
rial perspective. Rita Kranidis suggests that the realists’ interest in the
New Woman was primarily driven by literary and aesthetic considera-
tions.18 By mobilizing the realist social-problem novel for its feminist
project of social renewal, New Woman fiction adopted an oppositional
stance both to the established tradition of realism and to the new lit-
erature of aestheticism.
‘The Novel of the Modern Woman’, the journalist W. T. Stead

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Regen(d)eration 7

observed in 1894, ‘is not merely a novel written by a woman, or a novel


written about women, but it is a novel written by a woman about
women from the standpoint of Woman.’19 My reading of New Woman
fiction is predicated on the narrative tension between two determinants
adapted from Stead’s definition: ‘fiction on New Women’ (the protago-

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nists) and ‘fiction by New Women’ (the authors). This unstable balance
between the persona of the writer and her fictional character(s) mani-
fests itself in and through a variety of narrative techniques, in par-
ticular the fictional re/presentation of autobiographical experiences
and the adoption of structures which continually disrupt the narrative
flow.
Since its rediscovery in the 1970s, New Woman fiction has increas-
ingly gained in academic currency and now forms a constituent part of
the ‘femalestream’ of turn-of-the-century studies. Recent years have
seen a proliferation of critical studies, scholarly collections and doctoral
theses that have shifted the emphasis away from earlier models of clas-
sification, which highlighted differences between writers (programmatic
versus social protest approaches; purity versus sexuality plots),20 to place
the New Woman in the context of fin-de-siècle culture,21 feminism,22
girls’ and women’s culture,23 women’s writing,24 turn-of-the-century
science and eugenics,25 and modernism.26
The modernism debate is important because it raises more general
questions about how feminist traditions relate to mainstream catego-
rization. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for example, have suggested
that we should avoid trying to fit women’s writing into male-centred
categories of art and literature.27 In what sense are traditional binary
oppositions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ premised on gendered hierarchies
which privilege the supposedly ‘masculine’ (serious, aesthetic, form-
oriented, important art) over the ‘feminine’ (popular, polemical,
content-oriented, inessential)? French feminism, which validates ‘femi-
nine’ writing at the expense of women’s writing, fails to question the
dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’. Lyn Pykett argues that it is time
to challenge the orthodoxies that inform the concept of high mod-
ernism, in terms of canon formation, but also with regard to the
assumption that (post)modernism radicalized literary criticism and rev-
olutionized character (de)construction. Did the modernist transforma-
tion of literature really take place between 1910 and 1925, as Henry
James, Virginia Woolf, Frank Kermode and Malcolm Bradbury have
claimed,28 or does the fin de siècle provide a more accurate starting point?
In what sense can fin-de-siècle women’s writing offer new insights into
mainstream period formation?

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8 New Woman Fiction

The novel of the modernist woman?

Ann Ardis, Jane Eldridge Miller and Lyn Pykett have advanced a number
of arguments for the proto-modernist nature of New Woman fiction. In
its ‘ideological self-consciousness, its intertextuality, and its disruption

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of the conventional distinction between popular culture and high art’,
Ardis writes, the genre ‘def[ies] formalist assumptions about the “unity”
of a literary work’, and is thus at odds with ‘the reality principle gov-
erning the tradition of literary realism’.29 Miller distinguishes between
‘modernism of content’ and ‘modernism of form’, arguing that, since
New Woman fiction challenged ‘the most basic certainties which
provide the foundation for social organization, morality, and concepts
of self’, it can be regarded as modernist even though it lacked the
‘explicit formal experimentation privileged by critics and theorists as
the primary indication of modernism’.30 Pykett extends these arguments
by suggesting that the gender debate generated by the new feminist
writing was ‘central to the production of modernist, as indeed of all
forms of early twentieth-century fiction in England’.31 Drawing on
Gilbert and Gubar’s conceptualization of high modernism as a war of
the sexes, she makes a case for a radical redefinition of modernism,
arguing that it grew out of the diverse responses to the ‘developing aes-
thetic of the novel of the modern woman’.32 Although influenced by
female writers, men suffered the same anxieties about the perceived
feminization of culture as their late-Victorian predecessors, adopting the
‘high culture novel’ at least partly to distinguish themselves from ‘low’
(female) forms of writing.33
Pykett draws attention to a number of analogies between modernism
and New Woman fiction. Thus the contemporary press constructed the
New Woman and the feminist writer by means of a ‘modernist discourse
of rupture’; like the modernist, the New Woman saw herself engaged in
a ‘revolt against established literary conventions and modes of repre-
sentation’. By defining ‘woman-as-outsider’ or constructing alternative
versions of reality shaped by female desire, New Woman fiction ‘broke
with or modified the representational conventions of realism’; in par-
ticular it problematized the notion of a singular, unified self, and
exploded narrative conventions by adopting ‘polyphonic forms’ and a
‘decentred narrative’ structure.34
No doubt the genre constituted a radical departure from Victorian
orthodoxy, yet I am sceptical about applying a label compromised
by elitist, conservative and firmly masculinist cultural politics to the
socially inclusive, iconoclastic and fervently feminist framework within

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Regen(d)eration 9

which these writers located themselves. While considering themselves


artists and reflecting on their writing and the social construction of art
and women artists in their work, New Woman writers seem to me to
have been primarily concerned with getting their feminist politics
across. As I argue in Chapter 2, the fragmentation, dissonance and mul-

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tiplicity of forms and styles are a reflection, not so much of any abstract
desire to generate radically new forms of writing, as of the particular
conditions under which these writers were labouring. They are indica-
tive of the contradictions they grappled with as women, as writers and
as feminists, not of their wish to invite complex techniques of inter-
pretation and deconstruction. If anything, New Woman fiction consti-
tutes a direct, immediate and unequivocal appeal: for empathy with
women, for gender solidarity, for political activism – for feminism. This
is an appeal addressed, primarily, to women; as Kate Flint notes, ‘these
fictions served . . . as confirmation of the fact that independently-
minded women readers were not without others who thought and felt
along the same lines’.35
If New Woman fiction was to achieve its aim of reaching the widest
possible audience of women, it had to hold popular appeal, and this
positions the genre at the opposite end of the spectrum to high
modernism with its self-conscious adoption of abstract and exclusion-
ary literary practices. While moving into allegorical, utopian and
non-realist, sensationalist, mythical, even dream-like and surrealist
sequences of writing, New Woman fiction retained its links with realism
in that it always located the conditions of women’s oppression in
contemporary social reality. In its doubling of women protagonists
and its reflection of multiple female subjectivities, the texts may chal-
lenge modern readers to engage in a diversity of perspectives; but
by making women characters the focus of the narrative voice, writers
first and foremost appealed to their contemporary readers to adopt
a (multiplicity of) female viewpoint(s) as opposed to the conventional
male vantage point which shapes so much even of oppositional
Victorian literature.
Rita Felski sees the New Woman as a movement parallel to, but not
identical with, modernism; both ‘sought to disrupt taken-for-granted
assumptions and dogmatic complacencies’, but ‘in rather different ways’
and with different political objectives.36 On the basis of this distinction,
my study argues that the modernity, not modernism, of the New
Woman resides in her feminist reconceptualization of literature, her
de/reconstruction of gender and sexual relations and, crucially, her
emerging feminist theory. It is the combination of these aspects which

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10 New Woman Fiction

makes New Woman fiction such an exciting first-wave genre, one that,
as Ledger notes, has an ‘extraordinary resonance with the concerns of
the late twentieth-century women’s movement’.37

Feminist cross-currents

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The most contentious issue I want to explore in this book is the idea
that first-wave cultural feminism (New Woman fiction) prefigured
aspects of second-wave feminist theory. This immediately raises the
spectre of ahistoricism, opening up the embattled issue of how to
deal with historical texts and whether it is useful to establish direct
conceptual links between writers from different periods. To cast late-
Victorian feminists as precursors of late twentieth-century feminist
theorists, or pre-Freudian writers as in some way related to feminist
critics of Freudian theory will by many be regarded as an unaccept-
ably teleological view of history. The reverse angle is clearly less prob-
lematic: that the 1890s and the 1990s share crucial experiences of
ideological instability and have generated similar myths and metaphors
has become something of a truism in recent cultural and critical
debates.38 If the fin de siècle defined itself by its innovatory spirit and
novelty character (modernity), our own time privileges the concept
of posterity (postmodernity). Perhaps it is by their very antithetical
nature that these two sets of discursive markers connote parallel
concerns with identity and subjectivity in a changing framework of
references. Marked by social, political and cultural crises on a national
and international scale, both fins de siècles have contested old, and
generated new, ideologies, art forms and aesthetics. My argument
draws on the idea that it is in the arena of cultural production that
the prevailing ideologies and dichotomies of each era come to the fore:
political activism versus aestheticism, social criticism versus decadence,
human rights universalism versus postmodern relativism. While in late-
Victorian culture this conflict was reflected on the literary level (l’art
pour l’art versus ‘purposeful’ art), in the late twentieth century it is tran-
scribed into the clash of theories (traditional aesthetic versus politically
oriented approaches). Today’s debates between postmodern semiotics
and second or, indeed, third-wave feminist theories, between the com-
peting and opposing discourses of pleasure and oppression, can be
placed in direct correlation to the collision between aesthetic decadence
and feminist social criticism at the close of the nineteenth century.
Elaine Showalter has recently drawn analogies between 1890s and
1990s women’s writing, pointing out that current anxieties about the

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Regen(d)eration 11

feminization of literature and falling standards echo the cultural climate


of the fin de siècle:

a perpetual bias against feminine subject-matter and female subjec-


tivity . . . tends to belittle stories about women’s lives . . . In the

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1890s, the heroines of British women’s novels . . . were likely to be
tragic feminist intellectuals and artists, thwarted by biology and
destiny in their efforts to fulfill their genius. Today the heroine of a
women’s novel is more likely to be a feminist literary critic . . . learn-
ing from the fiction of the past how to combine a variety of roles.39

Exploring the links between the two eras, Showalter draws on Margaret
Drabble’s remark that the New Woman was ‘mother and grandmother
to us all’: ‘Now, with hindsight, we can look back at these extraordinary
predecessors and find in them connections and continuities that
wouldn’t earlier have been apparent.’40 Some of these connections and
continuities, presented in narrative form in Joan Smith’s collection of
’90s short stories,41 are examined by Ralf Schneider, who argues that
late-Victorian feminist periodicals fostered the emergence of an early
form of feminist literary criticism, which was developed more fully into
a sophisticated theoretical discourse after the turn of the century by
writer-critics like Virginia Woolf. As women reviewers assessed writers’
responses to the woman question and evaluated their fictional con-
structions of New Woman characters, they guided their readers’ aes-
thetic judgment towards feminist considerations about the political
nature and valence of these works, revising traditional aesthetic criteria
by adding ‘truthfulness to the purpose’ to the realist agenda of ‘truth-
fulness to life’.42 By featuring interviews with notable female writers of
the day, and by running portrait series of acclaimed women writers and
artists across the centuries, these periodicals at the same contributed to
feminist writers’ efforts to recover and celebrate a specifically female lit-
erary tradition. Natascha Würzbach’s related point that similarities in
the ideological frameworks of the early and later twentieth-century
women’s movements furthered the development of analogous theoreti-
cal conceptualisations of literature,43 can be applied more generally to
the relationship between Victorian and modern feminisms: the space
offered for the cultural articulation of feminist theory in the periodical
and fiction markets of the turn of the century is today provided by aca-
demic publishers.
I want to extend these points by suggesting that some of the concepts
underpinning second-wave theory were first developed, if only in

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12 New Woman Fiction

embryonic form, by first-wave fiction writers. The term ‘second wave’,


which in a broader sense refers to the European and North American
women’s liberation movements of the late 1960s and 1970s,44 is here
used with particular reference to the diverse theories, standpoints45 and
criticism generated by these movements. In my examination of possible

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points of contact between first-wave fiction and second-wave theory I
concentrate on the theories generated in the 1970s and 1980s because
these capture the pioneering mood of the earlier period of feminist ges-
tation. With its emphasis on textuality and its uneasy relationship with
the socio-political ‘reality’ of women’s lives, and indeed with the cate-
gory ‘woman’,46 postmodern feminism is one step removed from the
dynamic fusion of textual and political activism which distinguishes
both first and second-wave feminisms.
As a white, Western, middle-class, humanist, predominantly hetero-
sexual genre which, to varying degrees and depending on individual
writers’ shifting positions, articulated the belief in women’s difference
from or essential equality with men, thematizing the expediency and/or
the problems of separatism, and arguing for women’s social and politi-
cal emancipation, New Woman fiction reflects the diversity and also the
shortcomings of much of second-wave feminism: its class, race and sex
biases, its internal contradictions, its ideological instability – but also its
enthusiasm, its political energy, its belief that it is possible to make the
world a better place.
In response to the question of what it was that impelled her to take
up writing, Sarah Grand invoked the Zeitgeist: ‘Certain ideas are in the
air . . . I happened to be the medium on whom the ideas in the air laid
hold’ (‘FHT’, viii–ix). In the 1970s ideas once again were in the air. That
they were at times expressed in conceptually similar terms is exempli-
fied by the second motto to this introduction. It comes from a 1974
book on The New Woman. This is not one of the early critical studies on
the subject, but, rather, it is a kind of beginner’s guide to the 1970s ‘new’
woman, written by an Australian popular psychiatrist. The (twentieth-
century) New Woman’s aspirations, her inconsistencies and soul-
searching, her educational and professional endeavours, her sexual
revisionism/radicalism, her reformist zeal, her disapproval of the
‘Woman of Tradition’, her relationship with the ‘New Man’, and her
‘new’ vision of parenting are all strikingly reminiscent of the late-
Victorian discourse of the New Woman, as is the author’s invokation of
biological arguments which return the New Woman to a body economy
that revolves around the ‘continuance of the race’.47 The book is not on
the critical edge of 1970s feminism; in fact, it reads more like a parody

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Regen(d)eration 13

than a serious attempt at doing justice to feminist thought. The modern


equivalent to Grant Allen’s and H. G. Wells’s feminist masquerades, it
serves to illustrate that ideas and their articulation are not limited to a
particular period in time; that historically, culturally and politically
different landscapes can share discursive formations of thought and

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conceptualize ideological frameworks in remarkably similar ways.
My argument, then, is that a connection, however tentative and cere-
bral, can be made between the theory and fiction of the two eras, even
though second-wave feminists, at least to begin with, did not know
about the New Woman movement and could therefore not have been
influenced by it. Its Edwardian relative, the suffragette movement, on
the other hand, provided an important source of inspiration to second-
wave feminism from its very inception.48 Surely it is no coincidence that
the search for predecessor movements coincided with the rediscovery
of New Woman fiction. While suffragette militancy offered second-wave
activists a direct model for political resistance,49 the links between
second-wave theory and the New Woman writing are conceptual rather
than historical or inspirational.
To address these issues, I shall therefore follow a dual strategy of locat-
ing New Woman fiction both historically (through an exploration of the
cultural and socio-political context of the fin de siècle and of first-wave
feminism) and conceptually (as a genre whose political discourse prefig-
ures significant aspects of twentieth-century feminist theory). The first
half of the book (Chapters 1 and 2) concentrates on the historical and
cultural context, while the second half (Chapters 3–5) is more specifi-
cally concerned with close readings of texts and their theoretical under-
pinnings. I begin with the variety of meanings that the fin de siècle and
its different agents attached to the concept of the New Woman. What
impact, if any, did the New Woman have on the formation of turn-of-
the-century popular thought? Chapter 2 defines the parameters of New
Woman fiction in its literary and socio-cultural context (decadence,
realism, naturalism, socialism). I also take a closer look at the structural
specificities of the genre, for example the interrelationship between the
authors’ (sexual) politics and the formal characteristics of their works.
To test my hypothesis of the conceptual link between first-wave fic-
tional and second-wave theoretical discourses, I draw on a range of
modern feminist theories. Chapter 2 probes into the relationship
between socialist feminist fiction and theory, and Chapter 3 applies
lesbian concepts to late-Victorian and Edwardian feminist texts, while
more generally examining the way in which writers deconstructed the
marriage plot and explored possible alternatives. The discussion of cross-

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14 New Woman Fiction

dressing and of the various conceptualisations of motherhood in


Chapter 4 highlights the diversity of New Woman approaches by offer-
ing radical and psychoanalytic readings as well as readings based on
French feminist theory. The last chapter examines the way in which the
theme of female artistic production is couched in mothering and cre-

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ating metaphors. In what sense did writers revise the Bildungsroman and
Künstlerroman tradition in order to (re)construct the problems and con-
flicts inherent in their own position as women artists? What metaphors
did they mobilize in their exploration of female identity and fragmen-
tation, social conformity and feminist rebellion, and their protagonists’
journey from the heart of darkness to artistic selfhood? Ultimately, then,
if this book begins with the cultural contestation of the concept of the
New Woman, it ends with the New Woman writer’s literary and politi-
cal self-affirmation.

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1
Contesting/Consuming
Femininities

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[T]he modern man-hater cannot forgive the woman . . . who
still believes in old-fashioned distinctions . . .
Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘Modern Man-Haters’ (1871)1

It is the Old Woman who shrieks. Her most prominent char-


acteristic is disloyalty to her own sex.
Sarah Grand, ‘The New Woman and the Old’ (1898)2

[A] truer type of woman is springing up in our midst, combin-


ing the ‘sweet, domestic graces’ of the bygone days with a wide-
minded interest in things outside her own immediate circle,
extending her womanly influence to the world that so sadly
needs the true women’s touch to keep it all that true woman
would have it. The woman comes forth for the world’s need.
Austin May, ‘Womanly Women’ (1893)3

I want to speak in the name of the average more or less unem-


ployed, tea-drinking, lawn-tennis playing, ball-going damsel,
whose desire for greater emancipation does not run in the same
lines as those of the independent shop-girl, or of the young
woman with a mission. . . . The so-called revolting maiden only
asks for a small amount of liberty.
Kathleen Cuffe, ‘A Reply from The Daughters’ (1894)4

‘Is the New Woman a Myth?’ asked the Humanitarian in 1896, some
three years after the term had become a password on the British cul-
tural scene.5 The proliferation of articles, books, pamphlets, satirical
verse and cartoons in the 1890s indicates that, in the media at least, the

15

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16 New Woman Fiction

New Woman was ever-present. The many terms with which the fin de
siècle sought to capture the phenomenon of the New Woman are an
indication of how firmly forty years of feminist activism had established
the notion of the ‘Modern Woman’6 in the public consciousness. Some
terms – ‘Novissima’,7 ‘the advanced woman of to-day’8 and ‘the Woman
of the Period’9 – stressed her avant-gardist and trend-setting effect, and

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could connote praise or censure. Those sympathetic to the New Woman
saw her as a positive force for social change. Her opponents stressed her
superficiality and love of sensation; the term ‘Woman of the Period’ was
a belated attempt to revive the one-time furore over the ‘Girl of the
Period’, whom in 1868 Eliza Lynn Linton had berated as selfish, fun-
loving, ‘fast’, and immoral.10
Associated with the social and political problems of the day, the New
Woman conjured up an army of unmarried ‘Odd Women’, or married
but unoccupied ‘Superfluous Wom[e]n’,11 her synonyms reflecting the
anxieties aroused by her political demands (the ‘Wild Woman’)12 and
her strictures on male sexual conduct (the ‘Modern Man-Hater’). By her
very ‘oddness’ she raised the spectre of sexual deviance, her difference
from other (‘normal’) women, her ‘odd’ rejection of men, her own rejec-
tion by men (hence her redundancy) all pointing to her transgressive
potential.
To defuse this threat, conservatives often mobilized the cliché of the
mannish virago. Cartoon images of unsightly harridans served to des-
tabilize more positive textual explorations of the New Woman. An
example of this can be found in Sarah Grand’s short story, ‘Should
Irascible Old Gentlemen Be Taught to Knit?’ (1894). A parody on the
New Woman’s sophisticated use of feminine wiles to convert a grumpy
grandfather to the pleasures of knitting, the story ends with the uncon-
ditional victory of femininity over patriarchy.13 Phil May, the editor of
the journal (who was soon to join Punch),14 provided four illustrations,
of which only two (Figures 2 and 3) were directly related to the story
itself (featuring the grandfather ‘before’ and ‘after’ his feminization).
The other two illustrations show the fearful repercussions of such role
reversal. In Figure 4 an aggressively virile New Woman in a bowler hat,
cigarette in her hand and knickerbockered legs wide apart, is leaning
against the counter of a bar, eyeing the effeminate barkeeper through
her monocle. The page facing the story’s conclusion pictures a ‘mon-
strous regiment’ of three New Women in various stages of masculine
degeneration (Figure 5), from androgyny (the straight-shaped figure on
the right) through hermaphroditism (a provocatively curved body with
a boyish face and sternly clipped hair) to full-blown machismo (the

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 17

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2: ‘Should Irascible Old Gentlemen Be Taught to Knit?’

shapeless, moustachioed and cigarette-smoking ‘chap’ on the left). In


the brave new world of phallic New Women, there is evidently no longer
a place for men.
Not all visual representations of the New Woman were uncompli-
mentary. As the printed medium became the site of contestation over
the multiple meanings of New Womanhood, illustrators contributed
their part to the controversy. ‘The Championess’ (Figure 6) foregrounds
a female cyclist in Rational Dress, but instead of lambasting her as a

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18 New Woman Fiction

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3: (Untitled) [Two old men Knitting]

figure of fun (Figure 7) or as an overbearing virago, the picture couples


female self-assurance (a confident posture) with health (a trim figure in
comfortable and yet becoming clothes), femininity (a pretty face with
an inviting smile) and fashion consciousness (a stylish hat, the flower
in her hair). Throwing into relief the natural curves of her body, the
buckle of her belt is at once a marker of her sex and, by its keyhole
shape, a metonymy for the entire illustration: the key to the Modern

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 19

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4: (Untitled) [New Woman leaning across bar]

Age is the New Woman. The elegantly dressed and unambiguously gen-
dered figures in the background serve as a further reminder that her pur-
suits and interests do not unsex the New Woman; nor, judging by the
harmonious line of female and male cylists, do they pit the sexes against
each other.
An emblem of the shifting and conflicting conceptualisations of
gender and sexuality at the fin de siècle, the New Woman was thus con-

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20 New Woman Fiction

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5: ‘The New Woman’

structed ‘as simultaneously non-female, unfeminine and ultra-feminine’.15


Three different agents were involved in creating and contesting these
contradictory meanings. As the Phil May cartoons illustrate, the
anti-feminist malestream was apt to decry the unsexing effect of New
Womanhood. Female anti-feminists, on the other hand, exalted the
‘womanly’ qualities of the Old Woman in order to call into question

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 21

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6: ‘The Championess’

7: ‘Speaks for Itself’

modern woman’s claim to femininity. Feminist journalists and writers


countered by arguing that only the New Woman reflected ‘true’
womanhood. The ‘Championess’ suggests that the New Woman’s par-
ticular appeal resided in her successful synthesis of ‘old’ and ‘new’ qual-
ities (femininity and self-confidence, a sense of dress and the desire for
physical exercise, a healthy body and mind).
As the war of words and images developed from within the periodi-

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22 New Woman Fiction

cal press and fiction markets, the resonance these concepts carried with
the female middle-class consumer targeted by the new print media16
began to influence the terms of the debate. The popularity enjoyed by
feminist writers had the effect of turning the New Woman into a symbol
of fashionable modernity. At a time when feminist ideas were taking

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root in mainstream thought, conservatives started calling any woman
holding even slightly unconventional views a ‘New Woman’. This in
turn led to a deflation of the feminist concept with a resultant shift in
meaning. While many feminist activists, particularly those who were
also writers and journalists, defined themselves as New Women, not
every turn-of-the-century ‘New Woman’ would have thought of herself
as a feminist.
This chapter explores the complex processes at work in the formation
and transformation of the concept of the New Woman, paying particu-
lar attention to the decisive role played by women (as feminists, anti-
feminists, and consumers) in the debate about the meanings of New
Womanhood. Three generations of women were directly involved in
this debate, with differences in age often signalling ideological divisions:
if the ‘mothers’ of the New Woman were born around the mid-century,
some of the self-defined ‘Old’ Women were, in the 1890s, of the ‘grand-
mother’ generation, while the female consumer group most receptive
to the ‘fashionable’ aspects of New Womanhood represented the
‘daughters’ of the movement. Elaine Showalter notes that the fin de siècle
marked a ‘battle within the sexes’ as well as a ‘battle between the sexes’;17
to what extent did the New Woman debate pinpoint this battle between
women? What strategies did feminist writers employ to ‘market’ the
New Woman, and what impact did they have on the middle-class
‘daughter’ keen to extend her range of opportunities? When, indeed,
did the New Woman debates begin?

Naming the New Woman

The term ‘New Woman’ was used in its capitalized form as early as 1865,
when the Westminster Review branded the subversive heroine of the new
sensation novels as the ‘New Woman . . . no longer the Angel, but the
Devil in the House’.18 As Lyn Pykett has shown, the female sensation
novel and New Woman fiction provoked the same moral panic; sexu-
ally and politically disruptive, both genres figured unruly heroines
whose activities unsettled male authority in the institutions of marriage
and the family.19 All the more ironic, then, that a quarter century later
the New Woman should become the bone of contention between the

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 23

older sensationalist and the younger feminist women writers: the battle
of words between Sarah Grand and Ouida, conducted in the North
American Review in 1894, is often seen as a defining moment of the New
Woman controversy.20
As Michelle Elizabeth Tusan has recently argued, the New Woman was

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invented by feminist periodicals which, aiming to mobilize widespread
female support for a ‘new female political identity’, encouraged woman-
to-woman interchange and feminist debate. She cites the August 1893
issue of the Woman’s Herald as the site of the first discussion of the fin-
de-siècle New Woman.21 It was in order to counter the cultural dissemi-
nation of feminist visions of social and political transformation that the
conservative press adopted the New Woman in 1894, turning her into
a dystopian figure of degeneration. 1895 constituted the third stage of
the debate as the New Woman became a battleground for contesting
viewpoints. As a result of the anti-feminist onslaught, feminists began
to stress the New Woman’s femininity, her domestic qualities and tra-
ditional values. From 1897 onwards, Tusan argues, the terms of the
debate shifted yet again. As the New Woman ceased to signify the British
feminist and became a term of reference for Continental women’s
movements, she began to disappear from the pages of feminist periodi-
cals; in 1898 the mainstream press followed suit. It was only after the
turn of the century, in the wake of suffragette activism, that the concept
underwent a revival.
Tusan’s revised chronology is useful in that it draws attention to the
important (and neglected) role the new feminist press played in the con-
struction of the New Woman. However, in view of the sheer number of
articles – and novels – published in and after 1897 I am sceptical about
the idea that the New Woman was ‘passé’ in the closing years of the
century – if anything, this time constituted a second peak of the move-
ment. It would be more appropriate to say that, while feminist jour-
nalists and writers were consolidating their success with the mainstream
public, it was the anti-feminists who were coming to a dead end.

The ‘gynecian war’22

Initially, conservative women had a significant impact on the forma-


tion of public opinion. The most intriguing thing about female anti-
feminism was its ideological instability. Eliza Lynn Linton, who in 1871
had coined the notorious invective of the ‘shrieking sisterhood’,23 is
a case in point. Her early sympathies for the women’s movement
notwithstanding, she was relentless in her attack on feminists, whom

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24 New Woman Fiction

she targeted in a spate of articles published in the last three decades of


the nineteenth century. Yet even while engaged in denigrating the New
Woman, she was susceptible to her positive attributes. The portrait she
painted in her novels incorporated many of the aspects with which
feminists endowed the New Woman: her desire for knowledge; the criti-

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cal spirit with which she approached established traditions and male
authority; her sense of a mission and reformist zeal (TOTM, 39–41).
Feminists like Grand constructed the New Woman in not dissimilar
terms but emphasized that her knowledge did not ‘unsex’ her since her
impeccable morals kept her ‘intellect clear and senses unaffected’ (HT,
23). Linton, on the other hand, referred to the good qualities of the New
Woman only to link them to clichés. Thus her New Women are deca-
dents drawn to morbid subjects but with no serious commitment to
social change; mere amateurs, they are ‘never thorough’: as ‘artists, as
literati, as tradeswomen, as philanthropists, it is all a mere touch-and-
go kind of thing with them’.24 What emerges from behind the anti-
feminist rhetoric is the older professional’s fear of her young competi-
tors who were attacking the system that had rewarded her: this was a
war about the terms of female professionalism as much as about femi-
nism. Some 40 years later Virginia Woolf would return to this issue in
Three Guineas: ‘do we wish to join that procession, or don’t we? On what
terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us,
the procession of educated men?’ (TG, 72). Anti-feminists, who had
based their careers and social standing on being part of the procession,
had a stake in defending its ceremonial.
In their novels anti-feminist women used two different plot structures
to discredit the New Woman: they contrasted the ugly feminist with the
‘fair young English girl’,25 and featured heroines temporarily infected by
New Woman ideas but ultimately rescued by good Old Men. Unregen-
erate New Women were always severely punished for their transgressive
behaviour.
In juxtaposing New Woman and Old Girl, writers sought to revitalize
the old ideal of Victorian womanhood. The problem with this kind of
heroine was that even anti-feminists had ceased to believe in her. By
the late nineteenth century, the Angel in the House had acquired the
sickly pathos Virginia Woolf was to describe with such wicked irony in
1931:

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She


was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life.
She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 25

there was a draught she sat in it – in fact she was so constituted that
she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympa-
thize always with the minds and wishes of others.
(‘PFW’, 59)

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The vulnerability of such a heroine did not stand comparison with the
New Woman’s momentous vitality and strength of character, even if she
was constructed as a caricature. In The One Too Many (1894) Eliza Lynn
Linton sketches four different types of deviant women (the tomboy, the
sentimental romantic, the man-hater, and the neurotic decadent),
describing the tomboy and the decadent in greater detail. Only one of
these, Effie Chegwin, could be said to represent the New Woman
‘proper’. The decadent Laura Prestbury is a revamped version of the
stock villainness, with some ‘modern’ elements thrown in to link her
superficially to the New Woman. The only attribute she shares with Effie
is her staying power: despite having ‘burnt herself out’ on a diet of
‘stimulants, material and mental’, her love of wine apparently com-
pounding the ravages wreaked by higher education (TOTM, 59), she
proves a great deal more resilient than the good Old Girl whose husband
she steals.
Too engrossed in her pathological studies to give any thought to her
femininity, and too relaxed with men to be aware of sexual difference,
the New Woman and fearless amazon Effie displays an alarming affin-
ity to the female invert, then the subject of intense sexological scrutiny.
And yet Linton cannot have prevented contemporary readers from
liking Effie for her amazing bouts of energy and the intrepidity with
which she pursues her projects. An accomplished Girton Girl, she is emi-
nently successful in everything she undertakes, and men find her irre-
sistible; her unfortunate cousin is consumed with unrequited love, and
the man lucky enough to be favoured by her affection happily submits
to her love-making: ‘It was she who wooed and he who yielded – she
who from the first forced the pace and made the running’ (TOTM, 112).
Ultimately, Linton was unable to resist the great vitality and charm of
the character she intended as a warning. Her aim of promoting
the Angel of the House proved a spectacular failure: this is shown by
the barely concealed impatience with which the narrator deals with the
character who represents ‘the sweet girls still left among us who have no
part in the revolt but are content to be dutiful, innocent, and sheltered’,
to whom Linton dedicated the novel (emphasis in original).
Blond-haired, soft-natured and weak-willed, Moira West is Effie’s very
opposite. Doomed to be ‘the one too many’, she is unable to take her

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26 New Woman Fiction

life into her own hands, and never so much as raises her voice in protest:
she simply has ‘not force enough to resist’ (TOTM, 32). The narrator
implies that her demise is ultimately her own fault, and that her life
could have been very different, had she only refused to play ‘the rôle of
victim’ (TOTM, 355–7).

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The diametrically opposed fates of the two main characters suggest
very clearly that to be a sweet girl was as exasperating to onlookers as
it was harmful to herself, and that the New Woman had an incompa-
rably better time of it, to say nothing of her better chances of survival.
Not surprisingly, contemporary readers did not think much of the
novel; like her polemic The New Woman (1895), this was a book which
‘boomeranged’ on Linton, hastening her departure from the literary
scene.26 The strategy of contrasting a weak Old Girl with a dynamic New
Woman was a recipe for disaster.
A more successful means of promoting traditional values was to cast
the heroine as a (moderate) New Woman and to contrast her with a
mad, ugly and man-hating feminist whose actions cause a crisis which
propels the heroine back into the arms of a conventional husband. In
this way the focus could be shifted from the war of the sexes (very much
in the spotlight in novels like The One Too Many with its downtrodden
wife and abusive husband), to the war within one sex (women), and
often within one female character (the heroine). Male figures were thus
divested of their negative role as women’s jailers and made into knight
errants eager to rescue the heroine from the grasp of a destructive
woman. While feminists were associated with the discourses of madness
and violence, their male opponents became the voice of reason and
freedom: ‘You have your own life to lead, your own nature to perfect,
and you may carry submission and self repression too far,’ Leslie
Crawford tells Perdita in Linton’s The Rebel of the Family (1880), adding
that she should keep clear of the ‘unsexed’ women’s righters who want
her to join their radical lesbian community (ROF, 225). Feminist argu-
ments thus serve to wean women away from feminism. Perdita, who
initially had no other wish than that ‘she could have been born a boy
and could go out into the world’ (ROF, 44), and who struggled hard to
find employment in the face of maternal opposition, is so disillusioned
by her feminist friends that she decides to throw them over, and her
job with it, to embrace the very domesticity from which she had sought
to escape: ‘Oh, but being married to a good man and having children
of your own is better than all this . . . After all, work is only a substitute’
(ROF, 122).
The marriage plot thus reinstated conservative male values, humbling

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 27

the head-strong and independent-minded heroine into accepting the


expediency of conventional domesticity. This is the case in Mrs
Humphry Ward’s Marcella (1894), which attacks feminism in its alliance
with political radicalism by positioning the heroine between two men
representing, respectively, socialism and capitalism, political/moral

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anarchy and Conservative family values. In Ward’s anti-suffrage novel
Delia Blanchflower (1915) the opponent of law and order is no longer
cast as a socialist, but as a suffragette. Like Marcella ambushed ideologi-
cally by a clever strategy of emotional blackmail, Delia becomes entan-
gled with the man-hater Gertrude Marvell to the extent of joining her
‘Daughters of Revolt’. While Linton discredits suffragists as adventurers
and exhibitionists in search of erotic pleasure, Ward disparages her
militant feminists as failed women and freaks of nature consumed by
anger and resentment:

In the dim illumination the faces of the six women emerged, typical
. . . of the forces behind the revolutionary wing of the woman’s
movement. Enthusiasms of youth and age – hardships of body and
spirit – rancour and generous hope – sore heart and untrained mind
– fanatical brain and dreaming ignorance – love unsatisfied, and ener-
gies unused – they were all there, and all hanging upon . . . some-
thing called ‘the vote,’ conceived as the only means to a new heaven
and a new earth.
(DB, 146)

The struggle for women’s enfranchisement is reduced to the personal


vendetta of a bunch of crackpots. Militant feminism is contrasted with
the rescue work undertaken by social reformers. The true spirit of fem-
ininity, Ward implies, resides in philanthropy – but only if it is coupled
with the capacity for self-denial. The respectable lady reformer wishes
to ‘inspire’ great social change while herself remaining anonymous:

[Miss Dempsey] had written – without her name – a book describing


the condition of a great seaport town where she had once lived. The
facts recorded in it had inspired a great reforming Act. No one knew
anything of her part in it . . . Many persons indeed came to consult her;
she gave all her knowledge to those who wanted it; she taught, and
she counselled, always as one who felt herself the mere humble mouth-
piece of things divine and compelling; and those who went away en-
riched did indeed forget her in her message, as she meant them to do.
(DB, 165, emphasis added)

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28 New Woman Fiction

Attacking feminist activism in the guise of supporting non-militant


action, Ward curiously undermined her own position as educational
reformer and anti-suffrage activist. The leading voice behind the ‘Appeal
Against Female Suffrage’ in 188927 and the first president of the Anti-
Suffrage League in 1908, she was anything but a ‘mere humble mouth-

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piece’ who wanted to be ‘forgotten in her message’. Moreover, Miss
Dempsey’s noble yet unspecified activities are strongly reminiscent of
Josephine Butler’s work with prostitutes in Liverpool and her campaign
against the Contagious Diseases Acts – a cause as notorious in its time
as suffragette militancy was after the turn of the century, and one whose
social purist ethic and political strategies directly inspired the later
movement. As an example of feminine moderation this was a non-
starter. Moreover, by insisting on the need for gentle self-effacement,
Ward inadvertently validated the argument for militant action: the
point of the suffragettes was precisely that the constitutional suffragists
had permitted their demands to be ‘forgotten’; it was only by making
a public nuisance of themselves that women could hope to achieve their
political ends.28
Ward packaged her anti-suffrage message in a plot at the centre of
which is a love triangle between Gertrude, Delia, and her guardian, Mark
Winnington. In the end, Gertrude self-destructs after fire-bombing the
house of an MP. Like a medieval witch, she is burnt alive after failing
to save a girl-child trapped in the flames, the very nature of her death
pointing to the return of her repressed womanly instincts. The suf-
fragette takes on human shape only in her capacity as a failed mother;
in her death, she becomes a warning to other women:

in Delia there will reverberate till death that wail of a fierce and child-
less woman – that last cry of nature in one who had defied Nature –
of womanhood in one who had renounced the ways of womanhood:
the child! – the child!
(DB, 409–10, emphasis in original)

With the evil spirit of feminism exorcised, the male order is restored
and the ‘revolting daughter’ speedily transformed into a doting wife.
The happy ending of Ward’s novel did not, however, translate into good
sales figures. In 1894 Marcella had been an instant bestseller on both
sides of the atlantic; Delia Blanchflower, by contrast, was a flop.29 The
popular appeal of feminist writers meant that anti-feminism had ceased
to pay.
This was compounded by the blatant inconsistencies between the
writers’ independent, professional lives and their ultra-conservative

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 29

message. Linton, for example, did not marry until well into her thirties
and then acted as the breadwinner of the family; when ‘the restrictions
of home began to irk and gall’, she separated from her husband and
his children, stating in her fictionalized autobiography that she only
ever lived for her work (ACK, III, 40, 192–3). The ambivalences and

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contradictions so prominent in anti-feminist lives and works can
be exemplified by a brief comparison of the way in which the
subject of the professional woman was approached by the two groups
of writers.
A physician herself, Arabella Kenealy attacked the medical woman in
Dr Janet of Harley Street (1893), constructing her as a mannish character
with a ‘deep voice’, a figure of ‘ample proportions’ dressed with utter
disregard to social conventions, her divided skirt and ‘man’s shooting
coat’ indicative of her blurring of gender boundaries (DRJ, 86). This
ambiguously sexed doctor adopts a young woman on the run from a
violent husband, expressing a personal interest which carries distinctly
lesbian undertones: ‘I warn you to let her alone,’ she advises her cousin,
‘I won’t have you make love to her – I won’t have any man make love
to her. I want her for myself’ (DRJ, 142). Inevitably, of course, she fails:
a true woman, Phyllis has not the slightest inclination for any kind
of occupation, least of all a medical career, dropping into Paul’s arms at
the earliest possible opportunity.
Although they themselves were distinguishing themselves in male-
dominated professions, anti-feminists thus suggested that a public
career divested women of their femininity, and that only an already
unsexed woman would strive for it. Feminist writers, on the other hand,
wrote about the problems their heroines encountered in having to
balance the contrasting demands of love and work, sometimes creating
characters who succeed in getting the best of both worlds. In Margaret
Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892), a novel modelled on Emily
Flemming’s life and enthusiastically praised by Sarah Grand and Sophia
Jex-Blake,30 a female medical student serves a moral and professional
apprenticeship before entering a working partnership with her husband.
The novel emphasizes the crucial role the woman doctor plays in the
female community: to her great relief, a shy and embarrassed female
patient is instantly referred to Mona. Drawing on the metaphor of a
bridge, Todd suggests that in the present state of society women have
a collective responsibility towards their sex:

[I]t seems to me . . . as if we women had gone half-way across a


yawning chasm on a slender bridge. The farther shore, as we see it
now, is not all that our fancy pictured; but it still seems on the whole

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30 New Woman Fiction

more attractive than the one we have left behind . . . It would be a


terrible thing for the leaders of any movement to lose faith in the
middle of the bridge, and, if we cannot strengthen their hands, we
are bound at least not to weaken them.
(MM, 465–6)

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Anti-feminist writers had stopped half-way across the bridge, enjoying
their privileged position, but barring the way for others to follow. This
is the diametric opposite of the role writers like Olive Schreiner and
Mona Caird invoked when they conjured up the image of a bridge
formed with the bodies of feminists ready to sacrifice themselves for
future generations of women (‘TD’, 82–3; DD, 451).
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued that nineteenth-century
women writers’ sense of isolation and their fear of overstepping the
mark resulted in an ‘anxiety of authorship’. This anxiety could even
take the form of a ‘schizophrenia of authorship’ when writers found
themselves trapped in male scripts, with stereotypical female characters
they could not identify with.31 Anti-feminist New Woman writers, who
attempted to reinscribe male plots and stereotypes on to a female
genre with feminist conventions, had to contend with an even more
paradoxical situation. The only way they were able to negotiate their
own transgression, as writers and as women who lived very unusual
lives, appears to have been through an exaggerated promotion of the
values of the dominant culture and the public denunciation of other
women.
Feminist writers were quick to turn to their own advantage the vitri-
olic tone of anti-feminist works, exploding the conservative notion of
the ‘shrieking sister’ by declaring that it was the Old Woman, not the
New, who was unfeminine: ‘the loudest and most hysterical screamers’,
Grand proclaimed, ‘are the women who are for ever attacking their own
sex.’32 At the same time feminist heroines were presented as models of
virtuous womanliness. By enveloping their characters in a feminine
mystique, writers sought to ‘seduce’ their readers to the New Woman’s
sexual politics.

Seduction stories

The ‘ugly and careless way’ in which some ‘excellent women, allied with
the advanced movement’, presented themselves to the public had,
Grand deplored, ‘thrown back the woman’s cause fifty years’.33 In order
to win popular support, she exhorted feminists to improve on their

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 31

image by ‘mak[ing] the most of [their] appearance’ and cultivating the


‘art of pleasing’:

On no account leave the heart out of your calculations. . . . To


succeed all round, you must invite the eye, you must charm the ear,

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you must excite an appetite for the pleasure of knowing you and
hearing you by acquiring that delicate aroma, the reputation of being
a pleasing person . . . People have been made to believe that a knowl-
edge of politics unsexes women . . . One safeguard from [this preju-
dice] is to adopt a policy which shall disarm it.34

The ‘Grand’ strategy of seduction was painstakingly applied to New


Woman fiction, with many writers going to great lengths to stress
the hyper-femininity of their heroines. While turning the tables on the
Old Woman by casting her in the role of ‘shrieking’ virago, feminists
also poked fun at the Old Man and his sexual susceptibility to the
very women to whose political views he was so averse. In ‘Ubiquitous
Woman’ (1909), a short story by Agnes Grove (a suffragette as well
as a travel and fashion writer), the male narrator, an MP invited to
speak against the motion at a suffrage meeting, suffers a not inconsid-
erable shock when he realizes that the ‘small and slight and unmistak-
ably beautiful’, ‘faultlessly dressed’ and vivacious young lady with ‘just
that indescribable air of distinction in her “deportment” ’ whom
he had immediately classed as one of his own, is in fact the main
speaker (‘UW’, 443). Since she also speaks exceedingly well and to the
purpose, he finds that ‘all [his] preconceived notions’ are thrown into
‘a state of confusion and disorder’: ‘No one could say . . . that that
intensely feminine-looking woman standing there and speaking . . . was
performing an unwomanly action’ (‘UW’, 578). Even greater is his con-
sternation when his ‘side’ is represented by a very different kind of
woman:

a lady had arisen whom I had noticed before, and as emphatically


labelled ‘for’ as I had labelled my divinity ‘against.’ She was dressed
in a garment of brown silk, made, to judge from the effect produced,
several generations ago; a bright blue, uncompromising-looking
feather standing bolt upright adorned her headgear.
(‘UW’, 578)

Repelled by the phallically trimmed woman with a ‘hard, strident voice’,


he converts to women’s rights and gets engaged to the suffragist ‘divin-

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32 New Woman Fiction

ity’ (‘UW’, 578). Similarly, in Gertrude Colmore’s Suffragettes (1911), the


charismatic Lady Geraldine Hill (modelled on Constance Lytton) turns
the previously anti-feminist brother of a fellow suffragette into an
ardent supporter of the cause. Like Grove’s MP, the male narrator of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Moving the Mountain (1911) is aggrieved to

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find that one of the few women to cling to the old values is exactly the
one he does emphatically not fancy: ‘It was annoying beyond measure
to have the only specimen of the kind of woman I used to like turn out
to be personally the kind I never liked’ (MTM, 49).
In their fiction feminists thus responded to the conservative challenge
by turning the dual fronts of the (female versus male, and younger
versus older female) war of the sexes into a ‘sexy war’ in which clever
and determined women conquered male opposition with the combined
forces of deft logic and supple flesh. Feminists’ persuasive powers could
also be directed towards women: in Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert
(1907), the suffragette Vida Levering gains the reluctant political
support of the local Tory MP by threatening to enlist his fiancée in the
cause. Vida’s personal magnetism is juxtaposed to the unpleasantness
of an ungainly ‘anti’ who, her meek and down-trodden ‘hang-dog
husband’ in tow, reprimands the suffragettes for neglecting their domes-
tic duties (TC, 107).
The alluring qualities of the invariably elegant and always meticu-
lously and stylishly dressed heroines of these seduction stories were
meant to appeal to the fashion-consciousness of an (upper) middle-class
female audience, with the aim of making them conceive the incon-
ceivable, that suffering made a lady, and that the only true lady was a
feminist. The enormous success of the Edwardian suffragettes in mar-
keting their image was at least in part due to the fin-de-siècle writers who
had paved the way by conceptually linking martyrdom with political
activism, and feminism with feminine chic.
As many New Woman writers were politically active feminists, their
articles and books served a double purpose: to further the cause of
women’s rights by promoting the feminist as a quintessentially ‘good’,
as well as immeasurably attractive, woman who had suffered injustice
at the hands of men, but also to reflect on their own identities as femi-
nists and New Women by providing an insider’s commentary on their
position with regard to the movement. This duality of authorial purpose
is reflected in their writing: they individualized women’s oppression in
a character the readers could identify with and then generalized this
oppression by showing that all women suffered the same injustices. The
solutions they offered followed the same principle of combining the

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 33

individual with the collective: they demonstrated both personal and


organized feminist means of overcoming the problems they had anat-
omized fictionally.
Pro-New Woman journalists invoked the same discourse of feminin-
ity that writers mobilized in their novels. The ‘real’ New Woman was
presented as the only truly ‘womanly woman’;35 a ‘reformer and friend

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of her sex and of humanity’, she deserved to be called the ‘Best
Woman’.36 Feminist values (independence, courage, truthfulness, self-
respect, knowledge, intellect, education, strength of body and mind,
self-determination, and purposefulness) were linked to traditional femi-
nine traits (motherliness, domesticity, gentleness and purity):

She came into the college and elevated it; into literature, and hal-
lowed it; into the business world, and ennobled it. She will come into
government, and purify it; into politics, and cleanse its Stygian pool;
for woman will make home-like every place she enters, and she will
enter every place on this round earth . . . [Society’s] welcome of her
presence and her power is to be the final test of fitness to survive.
. . . The steadfast faith and loyal, patient work we are to do, in the
wide fields of reform, will be the mightiest factor in woman’s con-
tribution to the solution of the greatest problem of the English-
speaking race, and will have their final significance in the thought
and purpose, not that the world shall come into the home, but that
the home, embodied and impersonated in its womanhood, shall go
forth into the world.37

The ‘sweetly womanly’38 woman that emerged from this discourse of


domestic ‘housekeeping’39 was anything but the frightening revolu-
tionary who spelt the demise of the family and the ‘race’ – the two areas
at the centre of public anxiety. Even New Women notorious for their
radical views sometimes chose to tone down their message; thus in her
‘Defence of the So-called “Wild Women” ’ (1892), Caird countered
Linton’s diatribe by stressing the ‘quiet, steady, philosophic, and genial
spirit’ that marked the women’s movement.40 Caird emphasized com-
radeship rather than sex antagonism, the evolutionary rather than
revolutionary nature of the movement, the saintly striving rather than
the fiercely fighting mood of its members. Authorial moderation, the
adoption of a language of femininity, a discourse which accented the
New Woman’s conciliatory spirit, and the frequent recourse to expedi-
ency arguments thus served the strategic purpose of disseminating and
popularizing feminist concepts and ideas. The final section of this

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34 New Woman Fiction

chapter will deal with the imprint the New Woman left on popular
thought, in particular fashionable middle-class women’s opinions and
self-image.

Consumer culture and the revolting daughter

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The profound political impact New Woman fiction had by establishing
a ‘community of women readers’41 was considerably aided by the reader
debates fostered by the periodical press. As the concepts of femininity
and feminism moved closer together, the younger generation of middle-
class women were increasingly attracted to the lifestyle issues associated
with the New Woman: her demand to be treated as a reasonable adult
able to determine her own destiny without undue parental intervention
or supervision, her wish for greater freedom of movement, her desire
for increased educational opportunities, her expectation of professional
fulfilment. While many of their mothers felt drawn to the New
Woman’s moral discourse of social purification and regeneration,
younger readers were primarily interested in questions of fashion,
modernity and self-development.
As the image of the independent woman gained momentum, the
public discourse of the New Woman became imbued with spatial
metaphors which reflected these young women’s aspirations. A fash-
ionably streamlined image of the modern woman now entered the
pages of popular women’s magazines, with the caricature of the
mannish virago making way for the sporty lady (terms no longer con-
sidered a contradiction). Bursting with health, the athletic New Woman
boasted eminently good looks and had an accomplished sense of dress,
‘her figure set off to the best advantage by the new cycling costume’.42
Many feminist writers encouraged this dual identification of the New
Woman with the fashion model on the one hand and the sportswoman
on the other, drawing their interviewers’ attention to their own exper-
tise in the art of beautification and their keen interest in experiment-
ing with the latest Rational Dress outfits. Grand’s readers, for example,
learnt that ‘her friends consult her taste on questions of the toilet with
as much confidence as on literary matters’,43 and that she particularly
enjoyed her trips to Paris because the French were so much more
modern and relaxed about lady cyclists in bloomers.44
The bicycle had momentous repercussions on the lives and the self-
perception of late-Victorian middle-class women and significantly
contributed to the transformation of gender relations: ‘This revolution-

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 35

ary traveling machine changed patterns of courtship, marriage, and


work . . . ; it altered dress styles and language, exercise and education.’45
It was pronounced to be the ideal mode of physical recreation for
schoolgirls, students and professional women.46 Grand swore by its
‘medicinal’ and recuperative powers: ‘I had been . . . very ill from

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nervous prostration, and directly I took up riding I began to feel better.
I think cycling is a perfect refreshment for brain workers.’47
One of the major attractions for young women was that the bicycle
dismantled the unpopular chaperon system and facilitated compan-
ionship between the sexes. In fact, the advent of the lady cyclist, the
Lady’s Realm observed, had ‘revolutionised the pastime and endowed it
with social graces’. Women had brought colour, communal life and a
carnivalesque atmosphere to a sport previously marred by men’s obses-
sion with speed and competition: ‘ladies have introduced cycling-at-
homes, musical rides, . . . flower parades’ and were at the vanguard of
the new cycling clubs. Moreover, the bicycle provided an ideal oppor-
tunity for women to branch out on new careers: the enterprising lady
could set up as a wheelwright or cycling instructor; indeed, ‘many neces-
sitous gentlewomen may find it a remunerative and pleasant occupa-
tion’.48 Clementina Black clearly had a point when she noted in 1895
that the bicycle was ‘doing more for the independence of women than
anything expressly designed to that end’.49
Such popularity did cycling enjoy with women of the middle and
upper classes that it could be used as a marketing ploy to sell fashion
products such as hair curlers (Figure 8). Readers were informed of the
latest fashions of ‘Famous Beauties Who Cycle’ and of titled ladies ‘unri-
valled for the elegance and beauty of their cycling costumes’, and were
given details of suitable colour schemes in order to match their bicyl-
ces with the season: ‘green in spring, white in summer, a tan shade, sug-
gestive of fading leaves, in autumn, and in winter . . . a useful black
machine.’50 Invoking images of the Victorian catwalk (a fashionable
London street) to stress the feminine grace of women cyclists (Figure 9),
specialist magazines like the Hub humorously explored women’s
empowerment and its potential repercussions on men. ‘The Love of
Cynthia’ (a satirical story in which the hero is rejected by his beloved
because of his inferior choice of bicycle) is illustrated with a drawing
which features a man reduced to the size of a boy and attached to the
apronstrings, as it were, of the lady cyclist (Figure 10). Faced with the
threat of imminent role reversal, conservatives were apt to emphasize
female helplessness: in the Punch cartoon ‘The Force of Habit’ (Figure

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36 New Woman Fiction

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11), a would-be ‘Diana’ is so inept at handling her machine (which she


mistakes for a horse) that she has to ask her male companion to take
control.
Cyclists and the cycling industry deliberately drew on a discourse
which blurred the boundaries between feminist and feminine attributes:
the divided skirt made of ‘Amazon’ cloth in Figure 12 is advertised as
‘stylish and graceful in appearance’. By contrast, conservatives, nervous
of the effects on the female psyche of having rather too much freedom
of movement, appealed to women cyclists’ feminine vanity and addi-
tionally mobilized medical arguments in their attempt to dissuade them
from pursuing the sport. Cycling was declared to produce hideous defor-
mities in the arms and fingers as well as causing humpbacks and rav-
aging a woman’s beauty forever.51 Just as two decades earlier, women

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 37

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9: ‘Do English Lady Cyclists Ride Gracefully?’

desirous of higher education had been warned of the disastrous reper-


cussions of academic study on their regenerative system, so now over-
enthusiastic female cyclists saw themselves at imminent risk of ‘nervous
exhaustion’, inflammation of the internal organs, appendicitis, even
‘chronic dysentery’.52 An emblem of the new liberty brought about by
the New Woman and therefore also indicative of her moral transgres-
sion, the bicycle was sometimes regarded as the yardstick for female
respectability. In her autobiography Netta Syrett records how a prospec-
tive colleague, about to take up a teaching position at Swansea High
School, was sacked after being seen riding a bicycle on a Sunday (ST,
56).
The debate on the New Woman and her demands, particularly the
right to self-development, entered the middle-class family when jour-
nalist B. A. Crackanthorpe announced in 1894 that there was a ‘very
large percentage of households where war, open or concealed, exists
between mother and daughter’.53 Her Nineteenth Century article on ‘The

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38 New Woman Fiction

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10: ‘The Love of Cynthia [A Modern Romance]’

Revolt of the Daughters’ sparked off immediate rejoinders from other


journalists and quickly turned into a debate between ‘mothers’ and
‘daughters’ when readers began to respond to the topic. It proved such
a popular issue that other papers soon followed suit. The overriding
sentiment of the readers was that young middle-class women should
be allowed the same opportunities for personal development as their
brothers – the freedom to come and go as they wished, a latchkey54 to
enable them to do this, an end to the chaperon system,55 the experi-

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 39

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11: ‘The Force of Habit’

ence of earning their own livelihood,56 and even a period of Wander-


jahre:57 ‘They are young. They are vital . . . They desire ardently to try
things on their own account . . . They pray passionately to be allowed
to travel ever so short a way alone.’58 Crackanthorpe pleaded with
mothers to tell their daughters the facts of life and then to trust them
to make their own decisions.59 M. E. Haweis argued that ‘the problem
of revolt would be solved’ if girls were given the same opportunities as
boys to develop into healthy, autonomous, fulfilled individuals: ‘the
superfluous energy . . . wants its proper outlet . . . The solution is work.’60
‘A great deal of the ill-health of our delicate girls arises from repression
of their young energy’, one sympathetic mother confirmed, ‘The boys,
too, would be hysterical if their youth were hedged in with so many
conventional restraints that there would be no room left for self-
restraint.’61 Daughters expressed their bitter resentment of being kept in
a cage of conventions, which made them liable to rush into marriage.62
Conservative writers used the same arguments as in their debate with
New Women: the ‘romance’ would go out of life if girls were given a
freedom for which they had neither ‘the constitution nor capacity’;

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40 New Woman Fiction

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12: ‘Good News for Lady Cyclists’

nothing would make up for the loss of their innocence.63 The most inter-
esting contribution, from Alys W. Pearsall Smith, echoed the sentiments
expressed in Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra:64

unmarried girls [are] . . . slowly but surely withering in ideas and


interests, and [their] lives [are] becoming less and less fruitful and
more and more limited every day . . . These girls are withering
because they are not allowed to live their own lives, but are always
compelled to live the lives of other people. They have no chance of
self-development, no work or pursuits of their own; their especial
talents are left to lie dormant, and their best powers are allowed
no sphere of action. They must continually crush back the aspira-
tions of their own natures, and must stifle the cry of their own
individuality.65

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 41

Self-development, purposeful work and an object in life, independence,


the absence of which leads to physical and mental ill-health – Smith’s
words reflect the aspirations and experiences of many New Woman
characters. Feminist writers thus pinpointed the late-Victorian equiva-
lent of Betty Friedan’s ‘problem with no name’,66 giving their readers

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the words and concepts with which to express their dissatisfaction with
traditional role expectations.
The ‘Revolt of the Daughters’ debate shows that feminist ideas had
entered the mainstream. The political battle for women’s rights had
become an individualized struggle for personal freedom – but these
developments within the context of the family had an enormous impact
as they prepared the ideological ground for more radical ideas. For a
while, even confirmed anti-feminists like Arabella Kenealy felt happy to
‘Thank heaven for the New Woman!’67 Years later she was to realize that
the feminist ‘extremist’ whose demise she had announced somewhat
prematurely in her laudatio on the New Woman was not as ephemeral
as she thought (F&SE). For the time being, however, the New Woman
had achieved an unconditional success with the mainstream public.
This chapter has, then, suggested that New Woman fiction and jour-
nalism played a major part in contributing to the complex social
changes which led to a redefinition of gender roles and a consolidation
of the notion of women’s rights at the turn of the century. Even if the
mainstream version of the New Woman may at times have looked like
mere lipstick feminism, the wide diffusion of feminist ideas had impor-
tant repercussions, paving the way for the success of the suffragettes in
the first two decades of the twentieth century.
To promote their ideas New Woman writers used a complex strategy
of feminization. First, by turning the tables on the anti-feminists who
masculinized and pathologized the New Woman, they emphasized her
femininity, her ladylike appearance and manners, her sex appeal in
order to ‘seduce’ (and convert to feminism) fictional characters and real-
life readers alike. Secondly, New Woman writers employed a discourse
of feminine moderation, tactically understating the radical potential of
their political beliefs and pointing to the expediency of helping women
to help men improve the conditions of human life. They also utilized
and feminized contemporary scientific discourses by linking feminism
to evolution. Thirdly, New Woman writers feminized feminist ideas
about female independence and self-determination by associating them
with traditional womanly, maternal and domestic virtues.
New Woman writers were self-consciously using a sophisticated dis-
course of femininity to subvert conservative notions of femininity, yet

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42 New Woman Fiction

their strategy far exceeded Irigaray’s concept of mimicry. Instead of ‘per-


forming’ patriarchal ideas about Woman, they redefined Woman, radi-
cally revising male stereotypes and advancing a new, female-inspired,
ideal, that of the feminine feminist. Even more crucially, they combined
their rhetoric of femininity with a political discourse on women’s rights.

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With the intention of distancing themselves and their objectives from
the caricature that had been constructed, New Woman writers evolved
a discourse of difference which ultimately led to the emergence of what
we would now describe as feminist theory. Thus while the feminists
of the 1850s through 1870s wrote texts which defined the problem
by launching a discussion about women’s rights, describing the various
ways in which women were oppressed, and advocating measures to end
social and sexual injustice, the New Woman defined herself, positioning
herself within the larger feminist movement and generating a critical
analysis of patriarchy. While this chapter concentrated on the debate
between women, the next one examines New Woman fiction in its
relation to contemporary literary and social movements dominated
by men.

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2
Keynotes and Discords

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[I]n fiction there has not been, until comparatively recently,
any such thing as a distinctively woman’s standpoint. . . . But
in the last year or two the Modern Woman has changed all that.
Woman at last has found Woman interesting to herself, and
she has studied her, painted her, and analysed her as if she had
an independent existence . . .
W. T. Stead, ‘The Novel of the Modern Woman’ (1894)1

It is only lately that woman has really begun to turn herself


inside out, as it were, and to put herself into her books . . . No
man, were he the greatest genius alive, could write them, and
in them the true spirit of feminism dwells.
Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘The Psychology of Feminism’ (1897)2

As the novel heroine of the New Woman we have already been


made extremely familiar with her. . . . She has only to strike a
vibrating ‘key-note’ on her seductive lyre, and behold [tyrant
man] lies grovelling at her feet! . . . In short, she is ‘Grand,’
every ‘Iota’ of her!
M. Eastwood, ‘The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact’
(1894)3

The most conspicuous ‘keynotes’ of New Woman fiction, at least for its
late-Victorian readership, were the gender and sexual politics of the
writers: whether they welcomed or detested feminism, contemporary
critics agreed that it was the ‘Modern Woman’ from whose pen the new
fiction was springing. The stability provided by the concurrence of
gender and genre is misleading, however, for the attempt to define the

43

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44 New Woman Fiction

ideological parameters of the New Woman novel immediately points up


a number of ‘discords’. Evidently it was a novel that broke with sexual
taboos in literature; but was it celebrating sex (in women: Ellis’s Seaweed)
or castigating it (in men: Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman)? Were its pro-
tagonists daringly ‘modern’ women because they lived with men who

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were not their husbands (Dix’s The Image Breakers), or because they lived
without the men who were (Grand’s Ideala)? Did writers exalt women’s
mothering capacities (Iota’s A Yellow Aster) or blame mothers for their
daughters’ subjection (Caird’s Daughters of Danaus)? These dissonances
raise a number of questions: to what extent did writers adopt allegori-
cal and utopian modes of writing in order to be able to project ideal-
ized solutions to the woman question they were unable to address from
within a realist framework? In its self-reflexivity and disruption of the
conventional structures of the Victorian novel, did New Woman fiction
offer a politically inspired variant to malestream experimentations with
genre and form?
While the previous chapter examined the cultural background within
which New Woman fiction developed, this chapter serves to place the
genre in relation to its literary context, with the aim of defining some
of its textual and structural parameters. Showalter’s scathing remark that
fin-de-siècle feminist writers ‘had but one story to tell, and exhausted
themselves in its narration’4 assumes monolithic structures which, in
this form, never existed. Rather than looking for the ‘one’ unifying story
of the New Woman, this book scrutinizes the multitextuality of the
genre while remaining attentive both to its overarching feminist frame-
work and to the internal contradictions to which it gave rise. I start with
a discussion of its instability as exemplified by George Egerton, a writer
who vehemently rejected the New Women label and yet by the very
hybridity of her work appears to epitomize the genre.

Sexual/textual instability

Egerton’s short stories published in Keynotes and Discords came to be


closely associated with the New Woman movement – rather ironically
so, given her consistent repudiation of feminism. An instant success,
the first collection (1893) inspired John Lane to launch his Keynote
Series of ‘decadent’ novels.5 A considerable number of the 33 texts pub-
lished in this series featured New Woman protagonists from a range of
gender perspectives. The ideological divide between writers was not
simply one of gender; George Egerton herself is a case in point.
While feminists mobilized images of feminine stylishness in order to

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Keynotes and Discords 45

contest the stereotype of the ‘ugly’ New Woman, Egerton essentialized


the concept of femininity, pitting it against feminism’s ‘desexualised’
‘Advanced Woman’.6 By exposing domestic and sexual violence (‘Virgin
Soil’, ‘Gone Under’ and ‘Wedlock’, all in Discords) and exploring female
sexuality (‘A Cross Line’ in Keynotes; Rosa Amorosa), she seemed to posi-

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tion herself both in the centre (violence against women) and at the
margins (women’s sexual pleasure) of the genre, yet her celebration of
the ‘eternally feminine’ principle replicated rather than challenged
patriarchal thinking about women. She saw women as ‘embryo
mothers’, objected to their entry to the workforce, questioned their right
to enjoy the same moral (sexual) freedom as men even as she was
exploring women’s erotic fantasies, dismissed the principle of equality
on the grounds that woman was an ‘even bigger beast’ than man,
and unequivocally distanced herself from the term New Woman, its
feminist implications, and writers like Sarah Grand and Mona Caird.7
Despite her disclaimers, George Egerton has enjoyed the status of the
prototypical New Woman writer. In the 1894 Punch cartoon discussed
in the introduction, ‘Donna Quixote’s’ key and (presumably inflamma-
tory) book constitute a rebus on Keynotes. Egerton is further represented
through her glasses, facial features and hairstyle.8 In the eyes of the con-
servative mainstream, Egerton embodied the ‘hysteria’ of the highly
strung, over-intellectualized, under-domesticated and inappropriately
sexed ‘revolting daughter’ of the decadent fin de siècle. Today she is
largely credited with having revolutionized the genre by introducing
stylistic innovations, exploring female sexual desire at a time when most
feminists were fighting shy of the issue, and anticipating French femi-
nist concepts of fluidity, difference and écriture féminine. Her strident
inconsistencies point to the instability of New Woman discourses whose
subversive impetus and reformist vision were all too often clogged by
essentialism.
However representative of the New Woman in this respect, Egerton
significantly differed from other writers in her pronounced opposition
to the women’s movement. Grand, too, was apt to sit on the fence and
divulge reactionary views on women’s duties, but as the president of the
Tunbridge Wells branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage
Societies and a member of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, as well
as of other feminist organisations,9 she publicly demonstrated her com-
mitment to women’s rights.
Rosie Miles argues that John Lane’s marketing of Keynotes was calcu-
lated to appeal to the aesthetic and sexual desires of his predominantly
male readership.10 And indeed, Egerton seems to have been writing with

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46 New Woman Fiction

an eye to the male rather than female market; in any case she categori-
cally objected to being interviewed or having her picture taken for the
fashionable women’s papers11 – the very audience targeted by other New
Woman writers, most notably Grand. The specifically sexual stimula-
tion men received from her writing is indicated by an early reviewer

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who (mistaking her for a man) advised her to consider ‘the effect on a
young fellow . . . of a particularly warm description of rounded limbs
and the rest. It puts him in a state that he either goes off and has a
woman or it is bad for his health . . . if he doesn’t.’12 Although Egerton
was often censored for the erotic licence of her texts, the contemporary
press on the whole tended to treat her with more leniency than other
writers. Perhaps she was constructed as the New Woman par excellence
(just as today’s French feminists have been adopted by the academic
malestream) because her tribute to the feminine mystique was easier to
handle than the iconoclasm of ‘hard-liners’ like Sarah Grand or Mona
Caird. At the end of the day, Egerton’s sexual fantasies proved consid-
erably less challenging than the feminists’ political demands. All their
differences notwithstanding, however, both feminist and non-feminist
New Woman writers were constructed as decadents by contemporary
reviewers.

Literary degeneration

The contemporary debate on New Woman fiction formed part of a wider


discourse on decadence, degeneration and the crisis of masculinity in
society, art and literature. Max Nordau’s book Entartung (1893), trans-
lated into English in 1895, had the effect of prejudicing Oscar Wilde at
his trial.13 Degeneration painted a grim picture of modern civilisation, a
world fatally infected with mental fatigue and moral aberration. If anar-
chy was the prevailing mode of social and political life, sexual perver-
sion had become the hallmark of literature. Nordau’s rhetoric of disease
was adopted from the medical discourse on hysteria, hence implicitly
linked to women, and more specifically to disobedient women.
As the quintessentially female disorder of the nineteenth century, hys-
teria was constructed in a number of contradictory, mutually exclusive
ways. It was at once a ‘normal’ correlative of the female body with its
strange fluids and cycles, and yet a symptom of an ‘abnormal’ devel-
opment, manifesting itself as a sexual and/or mental disorder: lack of
compliance or lack of restraint. Women refused to perform their conju-
gal duties, displayed too much enthusiasm in the act, or were addicted
to ‘self-abuse’; they insisted on getting a male education, clamoured for

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Keynotes and Discords 47

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13: ‘Extremes That Meet’

political rights, and rejected traditional values and authorities. By the


late nineteenth century, the feminist and the hysteric had become the
symbol of social and sexual deviance.14 Male transgression was associ-
ated with effeminacy because it was linked to hysteria, hence to femi-
ninity. Thus, even when writers like Nordau discussed male art with no
direct reference to female agency, they implicitly attributed the demise
of ‘virile’ culture to women’s pathology.
In their consummate challenge to social and sexual norms, the
feminist and the gay man, the New Woman writer and the decadent
artist seem perfectly complementary representations of the subversive
politics of the fin de siècle. ‘[A]t once passively degenerate and actively
destructive’, they appeared to be ‘twin apostles of social apocalypse’,15
each presenting an inverted copy of the other’s perversion. Both
provoked a fierce backlash from the conservative establishment; both
became the target of satire (Figure 13). When Wilde was sentenced to
two years hard labour, Punch celebrated the event as the death blow to
Dandyism and New Womanism alike.16

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48 New Woman Fiction

In many ways, however, feminist writers, who saw themselves as


agents of moral renovation, were the antithesis of fin-de-siècle deca-
dence. They challenged the sexual stereotyping of women reinforced by
the aesthetic fetishization of the femme fatale.17 The antagonistic rela-
tionship between the New Woman and the decadent is frequently

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reflected in narrative and dramatic plots. Joseph Stein notes that Wilde’s
An Ideal Husband (1895) stages the defeat of the femme fatale (Mrs
Chevely) at the hands of the Dandy (Lord Goring), only to contain his
anarchic spirit in his marriage to the New Woman (Mabel Chiltern).18
At the same time the older, more puritanical version of the New Woman
(Lady Chiltern), who pursues the moral regeneration of her husband
with ruthless severity, is taught to submit to the lessons of Dandyism,
acknowledging at the end of the play that a ‘man’s life is of more value
than a woman’s . . . I’ve just learnt this . . . from Lord Goring. And I will
not spoil your life for you’ (AIH, 579). Feminist writers were consider-
ably less charitable to decadent characters, especially if they happened
to be their protagonists’ husbands.
Linda Dowling has suggested that, in that they were ‘determined to
subvert high culture by asserting the claims of the “low,” the “un-
natural,” and the “unfortunate” ’, New Woman and decadent were both
embarked on a ‘revolt against established culture, [a] rejection of culture
by culture’.19 But as Rita Kranidis has pointed out, the dichotomy
between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture was itself reflected in the collision
between aesthetic elitism and feminist efforts to mobilize a mass audi-
ence.20 The very emphasis of decadent writers on form and brilliancy of
style sharply differentiated them from New Woman writers’ preoccupa-
tion with content and women’s social reality. If the decadent password
was l’art pour l’art, the feminist’s was the novel with a purpose. New
Woman writers like Grand emphatically repudiated the decadent credo
so famously couched in Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890) that ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written or badly written. That is all’ (DG, 17). Feminists
reacted strongly against what they regarded as the affectation, narcis-
sistic self-absorption and misogyny of aesthetes; as I show later on
in this chapter, Grand’s The Beth Book constitutes a particularly viru-
lent example of the New Woman’s moral and literary refutation of
decadence.
Just as New Woman writers had a stake in differentiating themselves
from the aesthetes, whom they, too, regarded as moral degenerates, so
male naturalist or socialist writers accused of (‘French’, foreign) deca-
dence were keen to reinvest the image of hysteria and Otherness with

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Keynotes and Discords 49

markers of gendered difference to defend their own position as the truly


masculine, and therefore only healthy, one. Ironically, female writers
were blamed for the censorship practices of circulating libraries at
the very time when the ‘adult’ subject matter of their books caused
never-ending problems with publishers and prompted accusations of

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immorality from conservatives. In ‘Literature at Nurse, or Circulating
Morals’ (1885), George Moore contrasted the ‘strength, virility, and
purpose’ of British literature with the frigidity of the suffragist in
bloomers and her deadly alliance with the ‘British mamma’ and her
patron, Mudie, both equally determined to keep the realities of life out
of books and therefore out of the reach of the middle-class daughter.
Moore’s conclusion – ‘Let us renounce the effort to reconcile those two
irreconcilable things – art and young girls’ – suggested that women had
no place in literature.21 In fact, the legal clampdown on the (abridged)
English translations of Zola’s novels in 1889 ensured that for a number
of years girls (and, of course, working-class readers) had no access to
these texts.
Like Moore, G. B. Shaw distanced himself from the ‘fictitious and
feminine standard of morality’. Deriding the ‘novel readers and writers’
of the day as ‘half-educated women, rebelliously slavish, superstitious,
sentimental, full of the intense egotism fostered by their struggle for
personal liberty’, he contrasted the feminist ‘egotist’s dream of inde-
pendence’ with his own (and other men’s) writing to suggest that the
male narrative project was as certain to serve, as women writers and
readers were to obstruct, ‘the collective interests of society’ (Appendix
to TUS, 254–5).
Whatever stand male critics and writers took in the debate on the
nature and purposes of ‘good’ literature, women’s purity (or lack of it)
was an integral part of the discourse even when, as Gaye Tuchman and
Nina Fortin have shown, women themselves were largely excluded from
the production or reception of particular genres, and from the decision-
making processes in the publishing industry.22 When feminists wrote
about taboo subjects associated with naturalism, they were pathologized
to a considerably greater extent than male writers. For conservative
critics, the New Woman writer showed clear symptoms of ‘the ravings
of lunacy’.23 Not only did her ‘morbid pessimism’ and ‘worship of ugli-
ness’,24 above all her ‘erotomania’,25 consign her to the ‘physiologico-
pornographic school’ of decadent and naturalist writers;26 she com-
pounded her sins by displaying the trappings of the man-hating virago:
lack of humour caused by over-education, a predilection for preaching
which she confused with ‘art’, ‘ego-mania’ and a ‘prurient purity’

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50 New Woman Fiction

(Moore, MF, 55) which, in sharp contrast to her pretence of morality,


made her lust after sexual sewerage:

[T]he New Woman, or ‘the desexualised half-man’ . . . is a victim of


the universal passion for learning and ‘culture,’ which, when ill-

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digested, are apt to cause intellectual dyspepsia. With her head full
of all the ‘ologies and ‘isms, with sex-problems and heredity, and
other gleanings from the surgery and the lecture-room, there is no
space left for humour, and her novels are for the most part merely
pamphlets, sermons, or treatises in disguise. The lady novelist of
today resembles the ‘literary bicyclist’ . . . She covers a vast extent of
ground, and sometimes her machine takes her along some sadly
muddy roads, where her petticoats – or her knickerbockers – are apt
to get soiled.27

An ‘imbecile, bully, or libertine’, this ‘woman of the new Ibsenite neu-


ropathic school’ openly called for violent insurrection: ‘It is rebellion
all along the line’;28 ‘while uttering their smooth, Evadne-phrases, they
are drawing their conclusions and moving to the point of assault.’29 The
‘key-note’ of these novels, the Reverend William Barry wrote, was
‘Revolt’ against men and society as a whole.30 In general, ‘Tommyrotics’
was the literary equivalent of the machinations of the ‘political anar-
chist’: ‘The one works with the quill, the other with the bomb; and the
quill is the more dangerous weapon of the two.’31 What was particularly
frightening about this fiction was its immense popularity: ‘The sale
of these books by thousands is not a healthy sign,’ warned Hugh Stut-
field,32 and Margaret Oliphant appealed to readers to consider the con-
sequences of increasing the circulation of such works: ‘The conversation
of the drawing-room is already most sensibly affected. . . . Is this what
we desire?’33 Even the more liberal-minded W. T. Stead was concerned
with the copy-cat effect that New Woman fiction might have on young
and impressionable female readers, inciting them to ‘do as George Eliot
did’, or make a rush for the divorce courts.34
Anxieties about feminism were thus intricately bound up with a per-
ceived female invasion of the literary marketplace and the emergence
of a mass readership which threatened to turn away from the dominant
(male) values of Victorian culture and society. A frequent strategy of dis-
crediting the (political) project of New Woman writers was the charge
that they courted sensationalism from mere ‘commercial considera-
tions’.35 Feminist writers countered this accusation by stressing the
moral nature of their venture, contrasting their own meliorist inten-

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Keynotes and Discords 51

tions with the disreputable motives that prompted their male contem-
poraries to adopt a similar choice of subject matter. Grand, for example,
asserted:

Most of us write with loathing of the subject [venereal disease] – I

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certainly do – but are impelled to it by the hope of remedying the
evils which exist. Men do it because these things are in their minds,
and they have not the excuse of the object to be attained.36

Erotomania (madness which manifested itself as sexual perversion) was


without doubt the most damaging personal accusation levelled against
female New Woman writers; this was of course a calculated attempt to
demolish the ‘respectability’ of feminists, who, as Grand’s example
shows, were apt to return the compliment to sender. Despite the criti-
cal hype about sex, writers’ exploration of erotic desire was by no means
the most threatening aspect of the new literature. Egerton’s Keynotes,
which delved into female (while mimicking male) sexual fantasies, were
cited as deserving of artistic licence, and attracted rather less censure
than The Heavenly Twins, a novel which argued that both sexes should
follow a strict moral code and that men who did not come up to scratch
ought to be banned from marriage. In his discussion of ‘The Fiction of
Sexuality’, James Ashcroft Noble juxtaposed the ‘position of the artist’
(Egerton and Hardy) with that of the ‘Philistine’ (Grand), whose ‘aggres-
sive’ ‘moralising’ he condemned in the strongest terms.37 As I show
in the next chapter, the really explosive element was not the portrayal
of female sexuality (as long as it was contained within heterosexual
couplings) but the idea of female sexual autonomy, linked to an attack
on or rejection of male sexual practice.
The most revealing indication that the charge of erotomania was a
rhetorical device concealing other more substantial fears was that some
of the most virulent critics were not above pandering to the porno-
graphic tastes of their own (conservative) readership. In the guise of
warning obstinate female readers of the dangers awaiting the woman
who strays from conventional paths, William Barry’s The New Antigone
(1887) features a highly suggestive midnight scene in which the
heroine, blissfully unaware of its sexual implications, offers a ‘free
union’ to her lover. Although fantasizing about ‘plucking the rose’,
Barry’s hero nobly resists the impulse to ravish her on the spot, sinking
his teeth into his armchair instead of her heaving bosom (TNA, 143–4,
149). Intriguingly, male opponents and some proponents of New
Woman fiction seemed to meet at this very point: the fantasy of ‘free’

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52 New Woman Fiction

sex with a ‘pure’ (and in every other respect, reassuringly submissive)


woman who insists on being ‘dishonoured’ for her own good. D. F.
Hannigan, who pleaded for the candid representation of sexual relations
and against censorship in literature, chose a narrative strikingly similar
to Barry’s to make his point. In Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did

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(1895) the heroine (another free lover who enjoys giving in to man’s
superior will) presents herself to the male gaze in the same sacrificially
white dress for both her ‘wedding’ and suicide nights (so much
for female pleasure). Enthusing about Allen’s ‘Evangel of Free Love’,
Hannigan berated widespread feminist criticism of the novel as ‘the
combativeness of the androgyne’.38
As we can see, both conservative and self-styled ‘progressive’ male
critics attacked feminists: the conservatives for their obsession with
sex, the progressives for their frigidity. Both groups favoured semi-
pornographic scenes which represented the existing power relations
between the sexes, so radically challenged by the feminists, as liberating
for women. When the threat of feminist texts could no longer be con-
tained within a discourse of male-defined heterosexuality, some writers
resorted to announcing the genre’s premature death. In 1896 H. G. Wells
declared that ‘it is now the better part of a year since the collapse of the
“New Woman” fiction began’;39 his own (misogynistic) contribution to
New Woman fiction, Ann Veronica, was published 13 years later.
Critics who had some sympathy for the women’s movement
applauded the spirit of ‘noble reform’ that manifested itself in feminist
works even while deploring the ‘unwholesome’ tendencies that they
shared with ‘scientific realists’ (naturalists). Although objecting to
writers’ ‘unwelcome frankness’ and ‘loud clamour’, Blanche Leppington
yet acknowledged that the ‘quest on which this daring generation has
set out is not the mere quest of lawlessness, but the search for a higher
law and a purer atmosphere’,40 and Thomas Bradfield affirmed that
despite their lack of faith these books deserved to be ‘reverence[d]’ for
the principle of ‘purity’ they promoted.41 Elizabeth Rachel Chapman
expressed her aversion to naturalism but praised the ‘passionate protest’
that spoke out of women’s feminist works.42 Even Margaret Oliphant
could not help admitting to having ‘a kindness still’ for feminists like
Sarah Grand. (Indeed, some five years earlier Oliphant had felt so
inspired by Ideala that she came out as a supporter of the women’s
movement.)43
Thus, although the late-Victorian debate on New Woman fiction
was a debate on feminism in literature, this central aspect was often
obscured by other issues: realism, naturalism and decadence; the ques-

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Keynotes and Discords 53

tion of whether sexuality should be openly discussed in fiction, and


whether sexually explicit literature should be available to all; the debate
turning on the freedom as opposed to the moral imperative of art. The
effect that this wider debate had on feminist New Woman fiction was
that the specific questions it raised about the construction of gender

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and male violence in society, about the institutions of marriage and
motherhood, and about women’s right radically to redefine every aspect
of their position in the world, were all too often submerged in the sen-
sationalism of the ‘sex question’.
While critics sympathetic to feminism showed an understanding of
the genre and identified its dominant themes (‘questions of sex, ques-
tions of marriage, questions of maternity’),44 male anti-feminists from
both the conservative and the progressive camps displaced the feminist
attack on contemporary sexual politics and the exploitation of women
into a discourse of eroticism, pornography and censorship. By reducing
the subversive content of feminist writing to an aesthetics of sensual-
ity, they attempted to diminish the political explosiveness of these
works. For the same reason they failed to take note of the different
politics of female and male New Woman writers, particularly where the
representation of sexuality was concerned. By contrast, female critics
generally and those (female or male) critics who sympathized with the
feminist movement, recognized and reflected on this difference. As they
were quick to point out, the war against women and feminism could
take many forms, the most insidious one being male writers’ coloniza-
tion of New Woman fiction for expressly misogynist purposes: ‘in spite
of . . . the cant in these books about “freedom” and “moral emancipa-
tion” . . . for women,’ Chapman indignantly declared, ‘no careful
student of them can fail to perceive that, on the contrary, their ten-
dency is towards the degeneration, the degradation, and the rapid re-
enslavement of women.’45
If, as Sally Ledger suggests, New Woman fiction exemplifies Foucault’s
concept of the ‘reverse discourse’,46 then anti-feminist writers created
yet another layer of oppositional literature by ‘writing back’ to the
women who dominated the genre. Thus Grant Allen professed to being
an ‘enthusiast on the Woman Question’,47 while for his part H. G. Wells
‘confess[ed himself] altogether feminist’ and had ‘no doubts in the
matter’ (TNM, 411), yet both produced stridently misogynistic novels
which postulated female sexual submission to eugenically sound men
as a mark of feminist liberation. While feminist women writers chal-
lenged the existing structures that underpinned sexual relations, envis-
aging radically new forms of existence for their heroines which

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54 New Woman Fiction

decentred and sometimes excluded men altogether, anti-feminist men


used their novels as a vehicle for the expression of sexual fantasies. The
sexual frisson of anti-feminist writing was considerably enhanced by the
authors’ awareness of the hegemonic relationship between male writer
and female reader: it is women, wrote Allen,

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whom one mainly desires to arouse to interest in profound problems
by the aid of this vehicle. Especially should one arouse them to such
living interest while they are still young and plastic, before they have
crystallised and hardened into the conventional marionettes of polite
society.
(BBAR, 13–4; emphasis added)

In her autobiography Netta Syrett records how ‘terribly embarrassing’


she found the insistence with which Allen entertained inexperienced
young women like herself with his favourite subject; as a literary adviser,
he was more congenial company (ST, 47; see also Dixon’s AIKT, 136).
Anti-feminist men countered the feminist threat to institutionalized
heterosexuality and motherhood by expounding women’s biological
and social function as breeders of the nation and therefore their inher-
ent urge to yield to masculine desire. It was women’s special purpose in
life to ‘long for motherhood, as a privilege and a pleasure – as the ful-
filment of their own most profound aspirations’;48 to further this end,
state legislation was to consecrate them to organized collective moth-
ering (Wells, TNM, 411). Writers like Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
deplored, ‘saw women only as females and wanted them endowed as
such. [They] never [were] able to see them as human beings’ (MTM, 76).
By contrast, social purity feminists, who also mobilized eugenic dis-
course, insisted on female autonomy and male subjection to feminist
standards of morality – the very opposite of what Wells and Allen envis-
aged. Indeed, their fear of female sexual resistance became manifest in
their preoccupation with the vexed question of how to persuade women
to bear at least four children each in order to safeguard the continuance
of the ‘race’: under no circumstances was female emancipation to ‘inter-
fer[e] in any way with this prime natural necessity’.49
Of course all male writers by no means pursued an anti-feminist
agenda. Henrik Ibsen, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, to name but
a few, were supportive of feminist concerns about the sexual double
standard and marital oppression and were praised as such by the con-
temporary feminist press: ‘he is free from the masculine tendency to
dogmatize to them’, one female reviewer remarked on Ibsen, while

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Keynotes and Discords 55

another celebrated the author of Diana of the Crossways as ‘a friend of


woman’s liberty, quite as hearty as J. S. Mill’.50 Feminists and realists
shared an interest in the social-problem novel, which they inhabited
and adapted for their respective purposes. Yet as male realists wrote
about, but could not possibly write as New Women, their narrative

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points of view were necessarily different. As Liz Stanley argues, men,
however sympathetic to feminism, cannot share women’s ontology or
bodily experience, and this has inevitable repercussions on their epis-
temology.51 The different ontology of male realists is most clearly
reflected in their heroines’ subjectivity, which is either inaccessible or
constructed through the male gaze (as is so famously the case in Tess of
the D’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd).
Male writers’ perception of the feminist as Other is reflected in their
creation of characters who epitomize the mystery of Woman. Sue Bride-
head remains as incomprehensible and indeed ‘obscure’ to us as she is
to Jude. Conceived as ‘the slight, pale “bachelor” girl – the intellectu-
alized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were
producing’ (Preface to JTO, 42), she displays some of the features of
female-authored New Women, yet the reasons for her behaviour are
never explained, nor does her inner voice become the focus of the nar-
rative discourse, as it does in women’s novels. Hardy’s claim to her rep-
resentative nature notwithstanding, she appears an isolated instance of
modern femininity since there is no other ‘bachelor girl’ to share her
thoughts or provide emotional support. In the absence of any kind of
female counter-community and in light of Sue’s manifest failure to
move beyond her personal condition, it is difficult to understand how
Hardy could conceptualize her as ‘the woman of the feminist move-
ment’ (Preface to JTO, 42). Since we see her not through her own eyes,
but through Jude’s, she is a perpetual puzzle, the disembodied intellec-
tual counterpart to Arabella’s exclusive physicality.
This enigmatic quality also distinguishes Irene Forsyte in John
Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906): ‘An enigma to him from the
day that he first saw her, she was an enigma to him still’; like Soames,
the reader ‘never had known, never would know, what she was think-
ing’ (MOP, 113, 228). In contradistinction to Sue, Irene does develop
traces of a feminist consciousness involving active commitment to other
women (MOP, 324, 337), but like Tess, she is doomed to enthrall the
wrong kind of men with her ‘seductive power beyond [her] own control’
(MOP, 214): ‘her attraction seemed to be in this soft passivity, in the
feeling she gave that to pressure she must yield’ (MOP, 253). Always ‘a
little unknown, retaining the fascination of mystery’, she represents ‘a

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56 New Woman Fiction

kind of modern Venus, very well-dressed’: tantalizingly desirable and


forever inscrutable (MOP, 353; IC, 541).
Female characters like Sue and Irene may have enabled male writers
to act out their own uncertainties and ambivalences with regard to the
New Woman, but they never reflect politically active identities. Signifi-

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cantly, Galsworthy’s feminist is a man rather than a woman, ‘young’
Jolyon Forsyte (IC, 547). As in Jude the Obscure, there is no sign of a
women’s movement to which this feminist consciousness could attach
itself. Galsworthy faithfully records the stir and trauma of the Boer War,
yet fails to mention the political turbulence caused by suffragette mili-
tancy; the entire decade is omitted from In Chancery (1920). Realists thus
tended to neutralize the feminist challenge of the New Woman by
isolating, depoliticizing and essentializing her.52
In its preoccupation with social problems and its avowed political
agenda, naturalist writing might appear more closely related to feminist
writing: the naturalist focus on working-class subjectivity corresponded
to the feminist exploration of female identities; both naturalists
and feminists examined the often devastating effect of sexuality and
madness, and both were concerned with the interrelationship of
personal and collective oppression. Some New Woman writers like
George Egerton were strongly influenced by naturalist (especially
Scandinavian) literature; others held contradictory and unstable views.
Thus Grand approved of the ‘earnestness’ with which naturalism aimed
at ‘giving true views of life’, praising George Moore and Emile Zola for
the ‘noble service’ they had accomplished in ‘brushing aside the merely
conventional, and showing life as it is’; yet to see her own name
‘coupl[ed]’ with Zola’s amounted to a ‘charge of indecency’ and an ‘inju-
rious imputation’ for which she was prepared to seek legal redress for
libel.53 Similarly, Olive Schreiner, who declared Zola ‘a man of power,
almost of genius’, admitted that she ‘hate[d] Zola and that school more
and more’, while asking, in the same breath, to be sent ‘any of their
novels’.54
Whatever the complex relationship between feminism and natural-
ism, passion was never far from the surface. There can be no doubt, for
example, about the electrifying, even ‘violent’55 impact of Ibsen’s plays
on the first generation of New Women. Thirty years after the event Edith
Lees Ellis recalled the ‘breathless . . . excitement’ with which the first
London performance of A Doll’s House was greeted by her friends
(among them Schreiner and Eleanor Marx). It was this play which, in
conjunction with The Story of an African Farm, she singled out as the
decisive factor which ‘drove thinking women further towards their
emancipation’.56 Yet as Sheila Stowell has pointed out, the relative ease

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Keynotes and Discords 57

with which Nora leaves her children would have been perceived as
problematic by contemporary feminists (indeed, in the Woman’s Signal
one female reviewer castigated Nora as a ‘criminal’).57 Stowell suggests
that Vida Levering’s grief at the loss of her child in Votes for Women!
(1906) constitutes Elizabeth Robins’s ‘feminist response’ to Ibsen’s
conclusion.58 Similarly, Grand (HT), Dixon (SMW) and Gilman (TC)

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rewrote the script of Ghosts (1882) by creating more rebellious versions
of Mrs Alving who refuse to put up with ‘fallen’ men.
It is primarily in their representation of women’s sexuality and their
maternal sensibilities that differences emerge between naturalist and
New Woman writers. This can be illustrated via a comparison between
George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894) and Egerton’s ‘At the Heart of the
Apple’ (Symphonies, 1897), a story to which I will return in Chapter 4.
Both texts deal with seduction and single motherhood; in both cases
the abandoned mother lays claim to her exclusive right to her son when
the father returns to assert his paternity. But while Egerton’s New Eve
categorically refuses to be contained within a patriarchal economy,
Esther buckles under pressure. Acting on the advice of her employer,
Miss Rice (a writer and, inevitably, shrivelled old maid), she allows
William access to their son, and subsequently marries him, begrudg-
ingly, just to restore the biological father to her child. With her mar-
riage her son abruptly ceases to occupy her mind and is pushed to the
margins of the text, to re-emerge only after William’s death some ten
years later, when he resumes precedence in Esther’s life. Father and son
are clearly interchangeable; the key to Esther’s identity is her orienta-
tion towards masculinity. Though initially fiercely independent – she
bravely faces social ostracism and ‘didn’t want to marry any one’ (EW,
208) – she eventually becomes resigned to the traditional idea that ‘A
woman can’t do the good that she would like to do in the world; she
has to do the good that comes to her to do’ (EW, 279). Most impor-
tantly, she ceases to believe in a wife’s right to ‘interfer[e]’ with her
husband, even if his pursuits are injurious to his family (EW, 281).
While the text invites analogies with New Woman fiction in its invo-
cation of the existence of strong emotional bonds between women, sis-
terhood ultimately falls by the way-side as it is subordinated to men’s
superior claims. Towards the end of the novel, when Esther returns to
the widowed Mrs Barfield, we catch a glimpse of a female counter-
family, yet once again women’s emotional energies are redirected
towards men: the text closes with a visit by Esther’s by now grown-up
son and her sense of fulfilment in having ‘accomplished her woman’s
work – she had brought him up to man’s estate’ (EW, 362). Egerton’s
story, too, ends with the unity of mother and son, but here the empha-

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58 New Woman Fiction

sis is on reproductive (and implicitly, as I shall argue in Chapter 4,


creative) independence from patriarchal interference.
Whereas feminists radically decentred masculinity, male writers
emphasized women’s emotional dependence on men: clearly, they felt
the need to reaffirm the patriarchal hegemonies that women were

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engaged in deconstructing. Similarly, by mobilizing the discourses of
science, objectivity and rationality, naturalists aligned themselves with
the very traditions and institutions whose invasive and oppressive prac-
tices were being scrutinized and condemned by feminist writers. While
male science and much of male literature constructed women as hys-
terical and diseased, women writers appropriated scientific discourses in
order to construct men as sites of contagion. ‘The suffering . . . the awful,
needless suffering!’ Evadne exclaims in The Heavenly Twins after reading
novels by Zola and Maupassant with which her husband had hoped to
seduce her (HT, 221, emphasis in original).
To many feminists, male writing appeared injurious to the state and
its foundation, ‘healthy’ marriage between partners ‘sound’ in body and
in mind. In her vehement repudiation of Allen’s The Woman Who Did,
Millicent Garrett Fawcett accused unscrupulous men of ‘attacks upon
marriage and the family’ (a standard charge levelled at feminists):
women’s interests, she asserted, were ‘directly and unmistakably
assailed’ by ‘socialist doctrines in the matter of sex’.59 By associating lib-
ertinage and social irresponsibility with socialism, Fawcett implied that
feminism had nothing in common with the labour movement; that, in
fact, the two movements were diametrically opposed, one working
towards the destruction, the other towards the reconstruction of society.
The ideological division between the proponents of women’s rights and
workers’ rights was reaffirmed by committed socialists like Eleanor Marx
who, in The Woman Question (a treatise co-authored with Edward
Aveling), attached ‘little value’ to the political work of feminists because
it made ‘no suggestion that is outside the limits of the society of to-day.’
On the other hand, she drew attention to the analogies between the
subject condition of women and workers, suggesting that a closer asso-
ciation would benefit both groups.60 This was precisely the point social-
ist feminist New Woman writers like Isabella Ford and Olive Schreiner
made when they argued that, because the two movements had ‘the
same common origin and the same aims’ (W&S, 2), they needed to be
‘brought into close harmony and co-operation’ (W&L, 124). Clearly,
then, there was no unified feminist position vis-à-vis socialism. The
perennial tensions, rifts and instabilities which Sally Ledger has identi-
fied between the two turn-of-the-century movements61 as well as indi-

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Keynotes and Discords 59

vidual efforts to mediate between them are inscribed into many New
Woman novels.

Social(ist) regeneration

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Unlike male writers, female writers could found their identity as New
Women and active feminists on the autobiographical experience and
political principle of a ‘sisterhood of women’, an idea that took on
paradigmatic importance in their works: modern women, Ella Hepworth
Dixon declared, were ‘to help each other, not to hinder’ (SMW, 213);
this was ‘a plea for a kind of moral and social trades-unionism among
women’.62 Did New Woman writers, who in the main came from
middle-class, in some cases upper-class, backgrounds, extend this
‘trades-unionism’ to working-class women? To what extent were they
in a position to show any informed concern for, or understanding of,
working-class issues when, as Eleanor Marx claimed, there was ‘no more
in common between a Mrs Fawcett and a laundress than . . . between
Rothschild and one of his employees’?63 How did they define their own
class position in relation to that of their characters, and to what degree
did they write socialism into New Woman fiction and women into
socialism?
In New Woman novels female characters reverse the stereotype of
sexual competition between women by siding with their supposed
rivals against their husbands and offering each other sustained help
at times of emotional and marital crisis. Though enacted across class
divisions, this feminist principle of gender solidarity is arguably cir-
cumscribed by the firm middle-class bias most New Woman writers
maintained. Class ascriptions tend to be along stereotypical lines;
working-class women are paired off with middle-class heroines in
diametrically opposed roles: wife and mistress or prostitute (Grand’s
Ideala, Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman), student and servant (Ford’s
On the Threshold). Only rarely are working-class women given pro-
tagonist status; when they are, narratives focus on a specific theme
the writers associated with working-class life, such as female adultery,
poverty, alcoholism and violence. Edith Ellis’s Seaweed (1898) prob-
lematizes the tensions between love and sex and, through the figure
of a disabled miner, pleads for open and strikingly generous marriage
arrangements. A naturalist study of a woman’s descent into violence,
Egerton’s ‘Wedlock’ (Discords, 1894) is also a metafictional account of
the woman writer’s working conditions. While the narrative fore-
grounds a working-class woman who, driven insane by abject poverty

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60 New Woman Fiction

and domestic violence, kills her stepchildren, we catch fleeting glimpses


of her lodger, a writer:

She is writing for money, writing because she must, because it is the
tool given to her wherewith to carve her way; she is nervous, over-

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wrought, every one of her fingers seems as if it had a burning nerve-
knot in its tip . . . she is writing feverishly now, for she has been
undergoing the agony of a barren period for some weeks . . . she has
felt in her despair as if she were hollowed out, honeycombed by her
emotions, and she has cried over her mental sterility. Her measure of
success has come to her, her public waits, what if she have nothing
to give them?
(‘WL’, 123–4)

Distracted by her own problems, the writer neglects to act to avert the
human tragedy unfolding before her very eyes: the story reads like a
parable on the New Woman writer’s failure to apply the principle of sis-
terhood so prominent in her writing to the real-life situation of working-
class women in her immediate environment.
As Evelyn Sharp notes in her autobiography, a cerebral kind of (Chris-
tian) socialism was fashionable in the circles which New Woman writers
frequented (UA, 82), and many therefore developed class themes in their
writing. The dialogue with socialism could take three forms: some
writers projected a socialist feminist vision, while others mobilized
social-democratic ideas; more commonly, though, socialism was dis-
missed as morally and politically corrupt demagogy.
A political activist with a socialist feminist vision, Isabella Ford exem-
plifies the first category. Born into a radical Quaker background, she
moved in socialist circles from an early age. A trade union leader, social-
ist speaker and member of the Independent Labour Party as well as a
feminist writer and suffragist, she published three novels, a pamphlet
on women’s working conditions and Women and Socialism (1907).64 Her
best-known novel, On The Threshold (1895), raises important questions
about the private and public, sexual and economic conditions regulat-
ing women’s lives. The conclusions which Ford reaches can be related
to second-wave socialist feminism, and especially to Heidi Hartmann’s
work.
Second-wave socialist feminism is premised on the notion that, unless
it is informed by feminist analysis, socialism is marked by gender-
blindness since it fails to account for the specific conditions of and
reasons for women’s exploitation in society. This is because socialist

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Keynotes and Discords 61

men, as part of the ruling gender, have a stake in protecting the sexual
status quo, and thus, in relation to women, are apt to replicate the
oppressive nature of the capitalist system they seek to overcome.65
Socialist feminist theory is informed by two different approaches,
dual-systems theory and unified-systems theory. While unified-systems

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theorists regard capitalism and patriarchy as two aspects of the same
system, dual-systems theorists like Heidi Hartmann consider capitalism
and patriarchy as two separate systems which combine to exploit
women.66 In two important articles, ‘Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job
Segregation by Sex’ (1976) and ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and
Feminism’ (1979), Hartmann argued that patriarchal capitalism’s social
organization through hierarchical order was rooted in the sexual divi-
sion of labour. For both sexual and class subordination to end, men
would have to ‘give up their favored positions in the division of labor
– in the labor market and at home’.67 In its ‘marriage’ with marxism,
feminism had suffered the fate of a silenced and neglected wife; change
was possible possible only if women organized separately. Feminism
would benefit men as well as women and was essential to the regen-
eration of society because, as a result of their political position and spe-
cific socialization, women had learnt how to respond to ‘human needs
for nurturance, sharing, and growth’, and had developed the ‘potential
for meeting those needs in a non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal
society’.68
On the Threshold anticipates important aspects of Hartmann’s argu-
ments in three specific ways: Ford takes issue with the misogynist ten-
dencies in much male socialist thought; she analyses the relationship
between capitalism and patriarchy by examining the way in which
women’s ‘external’ (economic) and ‘internal’ (sexual) oppression inter-
connect; and she articulates a feminist vision for social change premised
on cooperation and mutual nurturing.
The protagonists, Lucretia and Kitty, are introduced as students, but
it is their personal and political rather than academic education that is
foregrounded by the text. Excited about the new world of ideas, they
join a socialist group, only to find to their dismay that most of the men
hold orthodox views on the position of women. As they learn, ‘Woman
is a spiritual being’ and therefore ‘must be the inspire[r] of the world’;
yet because she is also ‘naturally conservative’, she cannot be entrusted
with social or political authority (OTT, 30, 36). The communist utopia
envisioned by the men would retain the principle of separate spheres.
Ford uses a strategy of comic exposure to deflate the patriarchal nature
of male socialist thought:

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62 New Woman Fiction

‘. . . the men in our society must do all the really hard work. If . . . we
start a co-operative household, the men must go out into the world
and earn money, and the women must – er – must –’
‘Do the cooking and scrubbing, and washing and mending?’ inter-
posed Kitty, as he hesitated.

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‘Won’t you?’ he asked gently.
‘In that case, will you black the boots, and carry up the coals, and,
as you express it, do the really hard work?’
‘Well, we shall scarcely have time,’ he said timidly – evidently the
expression of Kitty’s eye was making him nervous. ‘You see, we shall
be out all day earning our living, I mean the living of all the society,
yours and ours –’
. . . ‘That is the worst of Socialism’, said a fair-haired girl standing
in the group near Kitty, ‘it takes no more heed of women, and of
what they think or want, than does any other creed.’
(OTT, 30–1)

None of the women is fooled by the male speaker’s discourse of chivalry


which barely hides the exploitative reality underlying the sexual divi-
sion of labour, organized along the principle that while the real work is
done by women, the pecuniary benefits go to the men. In her analysis
of the way in which the conceptualization of work is mediated through
the category of gender, Ford prefigures central tenets of modern
feminist thought: in a society where men hold economic and political
power, ‘women’s work’ is not defined as ‘work’ (Perchet does not even
have a name for it), hence is not remunerated; the only ‘real’ work
in the sense of paid work is ‘men’s work’. As they have a stake in
ensuring that the concept of paid work remains linked to their sex,
men attach gendered (‘soft’ and ‘hard’) labels to the different kinds of
work, irrespective of whether a given task is physically strenuous or
requires prior training. In a similar way, modern socialist feminists
have drawn attention to the way in which the definition of ‘skilled
work’ is conceptualized through gender, with ‘pink’ and ‘blue’ labels
attached to different sectors, tasks and hierarchical positions.69 Throw-
ing into relief the close link between the gendered nature of social
organization (sexual segregation) and women’s economic condition
(unpaid domestic labour, resulting in poverty), Ford highlights the way
in which economic and sexual exploitation combine to the detriment
of women.
Miss Burton, the woman with whose voice the discussion above ends,
knows from personal experience that separate-spheres ideology com-

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Keynotes and Discords 63

pounds women’s oppression. Overworked and underpaid, she barely


survives on a school mistress’s salary, starving herself to subsidise her
mother trapped in a violent marriage:

if I were but a man, and could get money for my work as a man gets

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it, how happy I should be! I wish the world were full of women, that
there were no men in it! . . . They talk of chivalry, and they talk of
men’s protecting women . . . but it is all untrue: there is no such
thing; there is no meanness, no cruelty of which a man is not capable
towards a poor over-worked, half-starved woman! . . . Think of my
life and the life of hundreds and hundreds of women like me! We
cannot get paid, we cannot walk home at night from our work in
peace, we cannot, if we have a father such as mine was, live our own
lives or even think our own thoughts; we can do nothing but sit and
smile and endure, all because of men!
(OTT, 60)

Ford thus points to the link between men’s collective interest in main-
taining unequal pay levels and their individual sexual exploitation of
women. Patriarchal society oppresses women in the home (through
abusive fathers and husbands), at work (through low wages) and in the
street (through sexual violence). Women are paid starvation wages to
prevent them from attaining independence; for sheer survival they are
forced to fall back on men: ultimately, the only choice is that between
prostitution and marriage. This is further illustrated by Miss Burton’s
desperate bid for economic security by agreeing to marry a man whose
outlook in life is at odds with her own and for whom she throws over
some of her women friends, who are prostitutes. The tragic fate of
Beatrice Ratcliffe, a maid employed by Kitty and Lucretia’s landlady (Mrs
Mount), is another example of the way in which economic and sexual
oppression are shown to interact. Sacked from her job, Beatrice becomes
embroiled with a violent pick-pocket who eventually batters her to
death.
Significantly, Beatrice’s case also illustrates that women neither all
share the same experiences nor are oppressed in identical ways; class
crucially intersects with gender to alienate women from one another.
Middle-class women contribute to working-class women’s exploitation:
Beatrice’s decline starts with the loss of her job and Mrs Mount’s refusal
to give her another chance. Even when there is no express intention of
oppression, class divisions between women appear almost insurmount-
able, especially when they are further complicated by sexual alliances.

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64 New Woman Fiction

Lucretia and Kitty genuinely wish to help Beatrice, but this help takes
the form of the moral management of the ‘lower’ by the ‘higher’ class:
‘we must instruct Beatrice every Sunday for an hour, in reading and
writing, and in the general principle of goodness’ (OTT, 89–90). Beat-
rice is fully aware of the class discourse that mar(k)s her ‘friendship’

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with the two women, pointing out that it is easy enough for them to
lead ‘honest’ lives since they will always have somebody to turn to in
times of need (OTT, 91). Class, she implies, is more divisive than sex:
‘You’re a lady, miss, that’s what it is . . . Ladies don’t know nothin’ about
such things, he [her lover] said’ (OTT, 155).
Crucially, however, the text challenges the idea that the shared inter-
ests of working-class lovers must always prevail over women’s friend-
ship across class barriers, suggesting instead that female solidarity is
more important (and healthier) than class alliances. Beatrice’s speech
is immediately followed by the assault on her by her common-law
husband; she dies from her injuries without regaining consciousness.
Lucretia cannot save her life, but she befriends another hospital patient
whom she helps to come to terms with her impending death. This ex-
perience is decisive in confirming the pledge to social commitment with
which the novel ends: Lucretia resolves not to follow the example of
the other women by expending her energies in marriage; instead she
will work to transform society to make it into a better place for women.
In this political work the love of women, a universalized, not indi-
vidualized (heterosexual) love, is of crucial importance: ‘we must swear
to one another, on our love for each other, that we will set about chang-
ing all this’ (OTT, 52). Ford thus affirms the principle of feminist nur-
turing that Heidi Hartmann, writing in 1979, saw as the essential
precondition for making the ‘marriage’ between socialism and feminism
viable.
Ford was one of the few New Woman writers who were passionately
committed to socialist feminism. Others like Lady Florence Dixie were
inspired by socialist thought, drawing on some of its ideas when for-
mulating their feminist vision. Raised in the Scottish aristocracy as the
daughter of the seventh Marquess of Queensberry, Dixie seems an
unlikely candidate for socialist leanings. Eccentric and strong-minded,
she first became known through her travel writing, and was politically
committed to many causes, among them Zulu nationalism, Scottish and
Irish Home Rule, vegetarianism and feminism. She was a member of the
Humanitarian League and a liberal anti-imperialist.70 In Towards Freedom
(1905), a pamphlet which attacked institutionalized Christianity and its

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Keynotes and Discords 65

‘ “rib” doctrine’, she enjoined her readers to resist ‘superstition’ (patri-


archal thinking) and work towards the ‘regeneration’ of society (TF, 37,
38, 43). Regeneration was also a keynote in the socialist-feminist revo-
lutions chronicled in her utopian narratives. Her epic poem Isola, or The
Disinherited (1877) ends with the proclamation of a written constitution

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which enshrines socialist-inspired principles: universal human and
citizenship rights, equality of opportunity, cooperative legislation, full
employment, council housing for the poor, steep taxation for the
wealthy, religious disestablishment and secular government, civil mar-
riage, the abolition of the ‘House of Bores’, the establishment of an
elected second chamber and a monarchy divested of its regal powers.
Dixie’s charter also reflects the feminist agenda of the time: full sexual
equality, animal rights, civic training informed by caring values, sex
education, women’s reproductive rights, fatherhood strictly conditional
on demonstrable health, peace as a governing principle of national and
international politics, and the creation of international arbitrating
bodies to achieve global peace (IS, 143–9). Many feminists then believed
that peace could only be maintained by female government. Dixie’s
emphasis on men’s (sexual) health and women’s reproductive control
was a response to contemporary social purist concerns about venereal
disease; her advocacy of contraception71 was radical in the aftermath of
the Bradlaugh-Besant trial.
Few New Woman narratives paint such a positive picture of the mar-
riage of socialism and feminism. The more typical trajectory is that of
a heroine experimenting with socialism or anarchism before moving
towards a more woman-friendly programme informed by social welfare
policies. Horrified to see their socialist group mutate into a centre of
eugenist thought, the protagonists of Mona Caird’s Stones of Sacrifice
(1915) leave to found their own organisation of ‘Alternatives’. In Emma
Frances Brooke’s Transition (1895) Lucilla Dennison is torn between
reformist and revolutionary visions of social change represented by two
men who both express a personal interest in her. Rejecting the Christ-
ian socialist position as a compromise, she turns to revolutionary anar-
chism, only to realize that the main contribution she is expected to
make is of a sexual rather than political nature. Her rapid descent into
illness and death is contrasted with her friend Honora’s growth from
spoilt rebel without a cause to successful, upward-moving teacher, ful-
filled and independent woman and caring, socially committed citizen.
The end of the novel signals the very compromise Lucilla had refused
to countenance, suggesting that there is a middle ground between

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66 New Woman Fiction

conformism and anarchy: Honora marries a man who had previously


encouraged her to devote herself to a career and whom, in her turn, she
had inspired to take up left-wing politics.
The feminist portrayal of the socialist as a sexual libertine, misogy-
nist and demagogue bears some resemblance to the construction of

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socialism in anti-feminist novels by women. In Mrs Humphry Ward’s
Marcella (1894), the heroine, a (sexually) ‘inexperienced girl’, is tem-
porarily ‘rouse[d]’ to the ‘naked thrust’ of the words and revolutionary
spirit of a political charlatan (MC, 198–9). Female feminists and anti-
feminists apparently agreed on the sexual and social corruption repre-
sented by the socialist/anarchist male; the crucial difference was that
feminists exposed the patriarchal politics to which socialism all too
often subscribed, especially in its unholy alliance with eugenics. ‘[The
socialist’s] and [the old woman’s] views are twin blossoms on a parent
stem,’ observes Claudia in Stones of Sacrifice; ‘[he] talks about the Com-
munity and the Race . . . while [she] tolls on about the Home and the
Family’ (SOS, 162). In anti-feminist novels the heroines turn to social-
ism for primarily narcissistic reasons: ‘What power! – what a position!
– what a romance!’ exclaims Marcella at the thought of publicly declar-
ing herself a socialist. The text leaves little doubt that what inspires her
is not a genuine desire for social transformation, but rather ‘a passion-
ate ambition – ambition to be the queen and arbitress of human lives’
(MC, 113, 73). By contrast, the heroines of feminist writers are seriously
engaged in working towards a political regeneration of society. Most
importantly, feminist writers constructed an alternative to male-
identified socialism by outlining feminist-inspired socialist or other
political programmes.
Just as the politics of conservative writers were reflected in their
narrative orthodoxy, so feminist fiction was pushing beyond the bound-
aries of patriarchal ideology by simultaneously challenging estab-
lished social and aesthetic structures. As Teresa Mangum points out, the
interrogation of gender and genre was intricately intertwined in
New Woman fiction: in their revision of the traditional marriage plot,
writers drew ‘attention to the potentially masculinist authority of
narration . . . through intersecting generic structures and conventions,
multiple plotting, and “feminizations” of the bildungsroman and the
kunstlerroman plots’.72 Rachel DuPlessis notes that novels like Schreiner’s
The Story of an African Farm served to mark the ‘end of the consoling
stories of the Christian, quest, and romance varieties’.73 The New
Woman’s rebellious sexual politics had their equivalent in her textual
practice.

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Keynotes and Discords 67

An aesthetics of resistance

In their experimentation with different forms and styles, New Woman


writers exploded narrative conventions by merging different genres
(fiction, drama, epic poetry), mixing incongruous elements, fragment-

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ing narratives (Victoria Cross’s ‘Theodora’) and introducing shifting
points of view as well as stream-of-consciousness techniques. These
‘rebellious structures’, Gerd Bjørhovde argues, are indicative of the
writers’ dissatisfaction not only with the woman question but also with
dominant modes of writing at the time in terms of narratology and
material format (the threedecker).74
While few writers explicitly theorized art or their own writing in any
consistent manner, the use of metafictional elements in their works is
striking. New Woman novels are peopled by artists struggling to find
time and space for their work, who reflect on their conception of what
(feminist) art should/could look like. It is tempting to regard the analo-
gies between Schreiner’s breaching of race and gender boundaries and
the subversive structure of her works as evidence of her ‘aesthetics of
literary miscegenation’,75 especially since she made explicit statements
about the artistic conception of her novels. In the ‘Author’s Preface’
to The Story of an African Farm (1883), she argued that hers was not
the ‘stage method’, according to which every fictional element had its
predestined and logical place within the imaginary universe, but
‘the method of . . . life’:

Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going


of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away.
When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return.
When the curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are
brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no
one knows. If there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that
the players in the gaslight cannot hear his breathing.
(AF, n.p.)

Reaffirming this principle with regard to From Man to Man, Schreiner


contrasted her notion of ‘organic’ and ‘real’ art with the ‘inorganic’ and
‘artificial’ creation of a ‘manufactur[ed] produce’, well-proportioned and
beautiful perhaps, but not, in her eyes, ‘true, inevitable, like a work of
God’s’.76 This did not prevent George Moore, ‘struck by . . . the inabil-
ity of writers, even of the first class, to make an organic whole of their
stories’, from criticizing African Farm for its artistic shortcomings:

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68 New Woman Fiction

‘sincere and youthful, disjointed but well written . . . but of art nothing;
that is to say, art as I understand it, rhythmical sequence of events
described with rhythmical sequence of phrase.’77 What feminists like
Schreiner foregrounded in their concept of art – an organic (disjointed,
ruptured, lifelike) structure – was misrecognized as inexperience and

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lack of skill by male writers, to whom ‘real’ art was often synonymous
with the rhythm of language and style. The emphasis on style came
vehemently under attack in The Beth Book (1897), in which Grand
emphatically placed purpose and political vision over formalistic
considerations: ‘give us books of good intention – never mind the
style!’ (BB, 460) The serious-minded artist, Grand asserted, should adopt
‘a style that is the natural outcome of [her] subject, [her] mind, [her]
character, not an artificial but a natural product’ (BB, 375). This was
because

You compress all the blood out of your subject when you make it
conform to a studied style, instead of letting your style form itself
out of the necessity for expression. This is rank heresy, I know, and
I should not have ventured on it a few years ago; but now, I say . . .
put your own individuality into your work – I’ll answer for it that
you will arrive sooner and be read longer than the most admired
stylist of the day. Be prepared to sacrifice form to accuracy, to avoid
the brilliant and the marvellous for the simple and direct.
(BB, 374–5)

Beth’s decision to produce ‘art for [wo]man’s sake’78 and write for a
female audience in The Beth Book, Rebekah’s concentration on autobio-
graphical forms of writing and feminist philosophy in From Man to Man,
Valeria’s feminist novels in Caird’s Daughters of Danaus, even Egerton’s
(in the event, self-contradictory) remarks about wanting to describe
‘woman as she [knows] herself to be, not as man like[s] to imagine her’
(‘AKTK’, 58): all point towards a systematic feminist reconceptualization
of art and literature.
This revisionary impulse was specifically directed against established
or ‘high’ categories of art among which aestheticism, even as an emerg-
ing avant-garde movement, must be counted: ‘Men entertain each other
with intellectual ingenuities and Art and Style, while women are busy
with the great problems of life, and are striving might and main to make
it beautiful’ (BB, 376). The decadent artist-critic (and confirmed misog-
ynist) featured in The Beth Book masks his personal and professional
inadequacies behind a façade of fin-de-siècle languor but is put firmly in

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Keynotes and Discords 69

his place by the feminist protagonist. Recent attempts at invoking


Grand’s ‘belated modernist aesthetics’79 are at variance with her deep
suspicion of ‘high’ literature; clearly she conceived of her own writing
in very different terms: The Heavenly Twins, she congratulated herself in
1923, ‘has never been accused of being a work of art . . . Art is exclusive,

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human nature is for everybody; and what was wanted was something
for everybody’ (‘FHT’, ix). On the other side of the Atlantic, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman was making strikingly similar points when she con-
trasted (feminist) ethics and (masculinist) aesthetics, ‘applied art’ and
‘pure art’ (MMW, 77–8). The one was as beneficial to the interests of the
commonweal as the other was damaging in its self-obsession and cul-
tural elitism. In her opinion, it was ‘a pretty poor thing to write . . .
without a purpose’ (LCPG, 121). In the absence of any ethical frame-
work, organic (truthful) art would quickly degenerate into the ‘un-
natural’ and ‘ignoble’ product of twisted, anti-social minds (MMW, 81).
Teresa Mangum and Marilyn Bonnell have drawn attention to the ‘style
wars’ that pitted feminists against aesthetes at the fin de siècle; Rita
Kranidis argues that New Woman writers ‘attempted to instil in their
readers a critical consciousness that would effectively end their com-
plicity with mainstream literary values’.80 The established hierarchies
between ‘high’ and ‘low’ were under attack, whether they applied to the
relations of the sexes or the production of art.
Anti-aestheticism was perhaps less true of Schreiner, who was, after
all, successful with both kinds of market: as always, New Woman fiction
defies easy classification and contests boundaries. However, what writers
like Grand and Schreiner shared was that, impelled by the urgency of
their political project, they mobilized propagandistic modes of expres-
sion. Sarah Grand’s remarks about how to address ‘the blockhead major-
ity’ are hardly conducive to endearing her to her readers, but they
certainly clarify her intentions: ‘you must not only give them your text,
you must tell them also what to think of it, otherwise there will be fine
misinterpretation’ (BB, 375). For New Woman writers, the most impor-
tant aspect of their writing was their message and its impact on their
readers. If the packaging of the message lent itself to misunderstand-
ings, then the book was meaningless. The structure of their writing
appears symptomatic of the need to deal with their subject matter in
every available narrative form and style. As Lyn Pykett has suggested,
the ‘attempts of the New Women writers to write for women, to write
about women and, in some cases, to write woman herself, led them to
use the available forms in new ways and to look for new . . . ways of
writing’.81 By voicing their concerns over and over again in a plurality

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70 New Woman Fiction

of forms, New Woman writers sought to counteract any attempt to


silence or misinterpret them.
This propagandistic element does not seem to have had any detri-
mental effect on the popularity of feminist writers (anti-feminists fared
rather less well). An 1897 list of ‘Women Novelists of the Day’ gave

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Grand’s Ideala pride of place, closely followed by sensation novelist
Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.82 Schreiner’s African Farm, a text
considerably less polemical than Ideala, was in twentieth place. That
Schreiner and Grand ranked so high more than a decade after their
novels first appeared says something about their appeal to the public.
However responsive the contemporary readership was to feminist
didacticism, this is clearly not a style to which modern readers take
kindly. Not surprisingly, Paul Foot pleads for patience in his introduc-
tion to Schreiner’s From Man to Man:

the plot appears to falter, and even to get lost in huge chunks of
Rebekah’s thinking and secret letter-writing . . . Certainly, the impa-
tient reader can easily get fed up. So please be patient with these pas-
sages. They are vital to the book, which is a frail thing without them.
They are not just didactic propaganda. They are the thoughts of Olive
Schreiner, sensitively and powerfully expressed as an argument
between a woman and herself . . .
(FMTM, xiv, emphasis in original)

The conjunction of didacticism and structural irregularity is seen as a


central problem. Foot constructs a number of important dichotomies.
First there is the tension between the plot, associated with speed and
progression (in Schreiner’s novel it ‘falter[s]’), and the disruptive struc-
ture, associated with stasis and suspension (the plot threatens to dis-
appear into the black hole of Rebekah’s mind). Secondly, the ‘didactic
propagand[ism]’ of the novel is implicitly contrasted with ‘real’ art.
Thirdly, Foot says that although the contemplative passages may read
like propaganda, they are not really, or exclusively, so; in fact, they are
‘vital for the book’ because without them it would be ‘a frail thing’.
Does this mean that the only thing that makes the book worth reading
is the very element which must disqualify it in our eyes as a work of
art? Or, conversely, that the gulf between art and politics has been
bridged by means of Schreiner’s ‘sensitive and powerful’ mode of trans-
mission, which in some way makes up for the fact that our consump-
tion of the text is subject to constant interruptions? I would argue that
it is precisely this tension between ‘art’ on the one hand and ‘propa-
ganda’ on the other, that makes New Woman fiction a unique expres-

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Keynotes and Discords 71

sion of autobiographically informed fin-de-siècle feminist writing. The


most typical manifestation of this tension is in the (didactic) artist-
novel. It is through this medium that New Woman writers could address
the very specific problems they faced as women whose feminism and
artistic careers made them doubly deviant.

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Feminist fiction and auto/biography

Given that it focused on issues of personal significance in the lives


of the writers (childhood socialization, education, marriage, sexual
inequality and exploitation, artistic development, feminist awakening
and political activism), New Woman fiction could be regarded as a genre
which drew on auto/biographical forms of writing. Fiction presented
a more detached, less self-revelatory medium for the exploration of
controversial, intimate or painful autobiographical matters which the
writers may not have wished to address when they were writing their
memoirs: ‘Much of that past’, Netta Syrett wrote in the preface to her
autobiography, ‘I have no intention of unravelling at all’ (ST, 6), and
Evelyn Sharp qualified her claim to truthfulness by the remark that her
reminiscences would be ‘sincere, I hope, as far as they go’ (UA, 10,
emphasis added). They certainly did not go as far as including any
details of her love life: the subject of intense scrutiny in New Woman
fiction was strictly taboo in ‘autobiography proper’. It was ‘only in a
novel’, Syrett argued, that the author could provide the fullest picture
of a person’s life; indeed, in her early novels, she had made ‘more use
of personal experiences’ than she realized – a point to which she
returned throughout The Sheltering Tree (ST, 6, 10–11). What Syrett
seems to be suggesting is that fiction is subliminal autobiography (the
recreation of the self in the fictional other), while autobiographical
writing is really fiction (the construction of a self by means of carefully
de/selected dramatic moments). As if to emphasize this point further,
the first chapter of her memoirs features a dramatized confrontation
between her mother and her schoolmistress, the legendary Miss Buss
(ST, 12), in much the same way in which Maya Angelou would later
picture her grandmother’s clash with the white dentist in Stamps (CBD,
185–6).
The autobiographical memoir, written at the end of a long career,
could serve to screen a writer’s earlier political commitment to femi-
nism which her autobiographically inspired novel(s) had spotlighted.
While playing down the political mission of her fiction, Syrett places
considerable emphasis on her friendships with the 1890s decadentsia
and the literary and artistic malestream. Her novels charge parents and

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72 New Woman Fiction

particularly (grand)mothers with narrow-minded authoritarianism and


an embittered resistance to the idea of female independence; The Shel-
tering Tree, on the other hand, stresses the liberal background in which
Syrett grew up: the ‘tolerant attitude’ of her parents meant that she, at
least, ‘had no such obstacles to overcome.’ (ST, 6; see also 65). In Unfin-

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ished Adventure (1933) Evelyn Sharp does engage with her feminist
beliefs and reflects back on her suffrage past, but her discussion of the
‘yellow’ 1890s is strangely bare of any mention of the New Woman.
Similarly, Ella Hepworth Dixon’s ‘As I Knew Them’ (1930) concentrates
on establishing the author’s place in the fashionable art world; there are
no references to woman-to-woman ‘trade unionism’ or to the New
Woman. While The Story of a Modern Woman records a young woman’s
uphill struggle to gain a foothold in the male world of publishing (an
activity Dixon herself was engaged in at the time of writing her first
novel), in her later memoirs the Grub Street story is replaced by a
heavily compressed success story: ‘To my great suprprise, [the novel]
caught on at once’ (AIKT, 136). In the novel, Mary Erle’s first book
is rejected, and male publishers are anything but supportive of her
aspirations; Dixon’s autobiography presents a very different picture.
In many ways, then, New Woman fiction was at once more revela-
tory of the author and more self-consciously political than the auto-
biographical memoir; both modes of writing invested in the narrative
(re)construction of female self-projections. The dynamic interplay
between fiction, autobiography and the construction of feminist selves
is epitomized in suffragette writing, which was both intensely personal
and acutely political. In Prisons and Prisoners (1914) Constance Lytton
describes a vision she experienced in Walton Gaol when, recovering
from her third forcible feeding, she saw the shadow of the setting sun
illuminate the wooden bars of her window to reveal three crosses (PAP,
276). The political metaphor which equates forcible feeding with cruci-
fixion, and the suffragette’s endeavour with Christian redemption, is
central to suffrage literature; the scene is reproduced almost verbatim
in Gertrude Colmore’s Suffragettes (SSTW, 278).83
Like Edwardian suffragette literature, New Woman fiction mobilized
personal experience for political purposes. Many writers, for example
Grand in The Beth Book, Gilman in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and
Elizabeth Robins in The Dark Lantern (1905), engaged directly with auto-
biographical matter, while others, like Margaret Todd in Mona Maclean
(1892), incorporated aspects of biography into their fiction. The most
typical subgenres of New Woman fiction are the Bildungsroman and the
Künstlerroman; the former is also, as Liz Stanley suggests, the ‘autobio-

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Keynotes and Discords 73

graphical archetype’.84 Domna Stanton sees ‘autogyno-graphic’ writing,


the term she introduces for female autobiography (the ‘graphing of the
auto’, or the inscription of the female self), as marked by the same con-
flicts that also shape New Woman fiction – the public versus private and
the personal versus professional dichotomies – conflicts which arise in

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both cases from women writers’ assertion of female subjectivities. Like
female autobiographers, New Woman writers could be said to have had
a ‘global and essential therapeutic purpose’ in mind, that of ‘consti-
tut[ing] the female subject’.85 The features Stanley regards as character-
istic of feminist autobiography (its self-conscious and self-confident
mixing of genres and its interrogation of the boundaries of conventional
forms of writing)86 coincide with central aspects of New Woman fiction.
Laura Marcus notes that at the turn of the century autobiography, as a
hybrid form which contests boundaries, played ‘a central role in dis-
cussions of a perceived crisis of . . . culture, marked by such notions as
alienation, reification, the decline of community and the rise of mass
society’.87 Like autobiography, New Woman fiction served as a bound-
ary marker which fuelled and underpinned debates about cultural
change through textual change, in particular debates about ‘serious’ and
‘popular’ modes of expression and the status and nature of new forms
of writing.88
Modern criticism highlights the instability of the categories of fiction
and auto/biography, and frequently refers to the prominence of the
autobiographical mode in Victorian literature and, more generally, in
women’s writing. Stanley regards autobiography and fiction as ‘twin
sisters under the skin of a different textual guise’,89 and Shoshana
Felman suggests that we read autobiographically by inscribing ourselves
into the text: ‘people tell their stories (which they do not know or
cannot speak) through others’ stories.’90 Did New Woman writers tell
their own stories through those of their protagonists? How does the
genre reflect the interplay between women’s fictional and auto/
biographical writing? In its merging of different genres and conven-
tions, could New Woman fiction be seen as prefiguring contemporary
women’s autobiographical and fiction writing?
It would certainly be wrong to assume that New Woman writers ex-
perimented with literary forms and themes for the same reasons and in
the same ways as feminist writers of the twentieth century. Although
many Victorian and Edwardian women produced autobiographical
memoirs and New Woman and particularly suffragette writers published
their personal reminiscences (in the 1930s), there is no late-Victorian
equivalent to the confessional autobiography of second-wave feminism

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74 New Woman Fiction

(Kate Millett), and nothing to match the self-confident interpolation of


autobiography and fiction that distinguishes the best work of Simone
de Beauvoir, Janet Frame and Maya Angelou (‘there is no such thing as
autobiography,’ Jeanette Winterson quipped in a 1994 interview, ‘there’s
only Art and Lies’, a comment emphatically reaffirmed by Angelou).91

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Nor did fin-de-siècle feminist writers play with autobiographical expec-
tations to make a point about fiction in the manner of Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando or Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. On the contrary,
New Woman writers were often at pains to distance themselves from
the autobiographical import of their works: when in The Beth Book
Angelica speculates that Beth ‘is certain to put some of herself’ into her
book, Ideala instantly puts her right: ‘If by that you mean some of her
personal experiences, I should think you are wrong’ (BB, 459). Of course
there was much more at stake for late-Victorian feminists, whose lives
were exposed to constant scrutiny by conservatives keen to pounce at
the first sign of a scandalous past.
Given the historic specificity of New Woman fiction and the condi-
tions with which fin-de-siècle feminist writers had to contend, there are
important points of contact between the fiction they produced and the
autobiographical genre as such, just as there are links between fin-de-
siècle and twentieth-century women’s writing. Referring to Gertrude
Stein, Stanley suggests that in writing autobiography women writers
deconstruct conventional notions of selfhood by demonstrating that
one person’s life is connected with everybody else’s, is in fact ‘Every-
body’s autobiography’.92 Susan Stanford Friedman extends Stanley’s
argument by discussing the female ‘group consciousness’ women auto-
biographers construct in their writings. The female self, Friedman
argues, is created in these texts through identification with other
women and the projection of a shared identity. This complex identity,
informed by an individual as well as a collective sense of self, is fre-
quently overlooked by both traditional and postmodern theorists:

In taking the power of words, of representation, into their own


hands, women project onto history an identity that is not purely
individualistic. Nor is it purely collective. Instead, this new identity
merges the shared and the unique. In autobiography, specifically, the
self created in a woman’s text is often not a ‘teleological entity’, an
‘isolate being’ utterly separate from all others, as Gusdorf and Olney
define the autobiographical self. Nor is the self a false image of alien-
ation, an empty play of words on the page disconnected from the
realm of referentiality, as a Lacanian and post-structuralist critic of

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Keynotes and Discords 75

autobiography might say. Instead, the self constructed in women’s


autobiographical writing is often based in, but not limited to, a group
consciousness – an awareness of the meaning of the cultural category
WOMAN for the patterns of women’s individual destiny. Alienation
is not the result of creating a self in language, as it is for Lacanian

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and Barthesian critics of autobiography. Instead, alienation from the
historically imposed image of the self is what motivates the writing.
Writing the self shatters the cultural hall of mirrors and breaks the
silence imposed by male speech.93

Like women’s autobiography, New Woman fiction constructs a collec-


tive female identity while foregrounding an individual subject(ivity).
Novels frequently double or multiply the character of the protagonist;
even if there is only one central heroine, her fate is always echoed in a
number of minor characters. The heroine’s life thus transcends the
destiny of an exceptional individual and comes to represent the prob-
lems ‘all’ (white, middle-class) women encounter in their quest for per-
sonhood. By foregrounding the paradigmatic fates of outstanding
characters, writers were presenting ‘an argument from exception’: ‘it is
precisely because they are not as other women’, Penny Boumelha
remarks, ‘that they are able to represent a claim on behalf of all
women.’94 Mona Caird, for example, explicitly stated that she conceived
the heroine of The Daughters of Danaus as

the portrait of a woman, exceptional in her power and insight,


whose life is spent in a long and bitter contest with the conditions
common to all women, but which bear upon [her more than] her
sisters, since in all directions she sees and feels and thinks more than
they do.95

Many aspects of Hadria’s marital problems-to-be are prefigured in


negative role models, and later she sees herself playing the ‘humble rôle
of scarecrow’, a warning to younger women (DD, 474).
The heroine’s function as ‘ambassador’ of her sex is often apparent
from the very title of the novel. Relatively few narratives introduce the
protagonist in the title (The Beth Book, Babs the Impossible); more often
the main character’s name is followed by a descriptive term which casts
her as the representative of a particular group of women (Joanna Traill,
Spinster; Mona Maclean, Medical Student; Isola, or The Disinherited). Alter-
natively, the heroine’s special status as both other than and representa-
tive of all women is couched in a name that expresses a general idea(l)

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76 New Woman Fiction

(Ideala, Gallia, Undine, Gloriana). Most typically, however, the absence


of an individual name shifts the title’s emphasis to women in their
collectivity (A Yellow Aster, A Superfluous Woman, A Sunless Heart, The
Daughters of Danaus, The Image Breakers, The Making of a Prig, The Story
of a Modern Woman). In addition, some protagonists themselves empha-

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size the representative nature of their story: ‘I believe that there are
thousands and thousands of women whose lives have run on parallel
lines with mine’ (DD, 451).
As the New Woman heroine turns into Everywoman, she is cast in
a multiplicity of roles, all of which challenge traditional notions of
femininity by defining her not through her private but through her
professional life, locating her within a community of like-minded
women: writer (Mary/Moll in Egerton’s The Wheel of God), poet
(Katharine in Robins’s A Dark Lantern), painter (the protagonist of
Thurston’s Max), composer and pianist (Hadria in The Daughters of
Danaus); student (Kitty and Lucretia in On the Threshold), journalist
(Mary in Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman), teacher (Katharine in
Sharp’s The Making of a Prig), doctor (the epynomous heroine of Todd’s
Mona Maclean), businesswoman (Phillida and Katherine in Syrett’s Three
Women), social reformer (the protagonist of Grand’s Ideala), political
activist (Ideala, Angelica and Beth in Grand’s The Beth Book), and politi-
cian (the heroine in Dixie’s Gloriana). These novels describing the group
identity of their female characters served to produce a sense of female
solidarity in their readers, while at the same time outlining program-
matical alternatives to the traditional female life-cycle: in The Beth Book,
Beth joins a feminist community of political activists, in The Wheel of
God, Mary joins a community of writing women.
This chapter has examined the analogies between the sexual and
textual politics of New Woman fiction, suggesting that the works of
feminist writers share specific structural features and thematic concerns.
As committed feminists with a vision of social regeneration through
didactic literature, they sought to reach and politicize a mass reader-
ship; for this reason they adapted the short forms popular in aesthetic
circles while at the same time revitalizing the traditional three-decker
novel by incorporating shorter narrative forms. This structural hybrid-
ity is also apparent in the transitions between New Woman fiction and
auto/biographical writing. With the wider framework of New Woman
fiction now established, the next chapters will concentrate on the
themes and issues on which the new fiction focused.

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3
Marriage and Its Discontents

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‘The Woman Question is the Marriage Question.’
Sarah Grand, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman
Question’ (1894)1

With all its contempt for the accepted moralities, [New Woman
fiction] is helping to carry the pressure of the moral question
into the sacred enclosure of marriage itself, from which all
questioning has been too long excluded; and it is perhaps
hardly too much to say that no service could well be greater
than this.
Blanche Leppington, ‘The Debrutalisation of Man’ (1895)2

This chapter aims to analyse the parameters of the New Woman writer’s
onslaught on the ‘sacred enclosures’ of Victorian orthodoxy: marriage,
(hetero)sexual relations and, by implication, heterosexuality itself. If by
1896, as the contemporary critic Elizabeth Rachel Chapman claimed, it
had ‘become difficult to take up a novel in which . . . the institution of
marriage is not . . . put upon its trial’,3 what role did New Woman fiction
play in the literary and cultural deconstruction of marriage, and how
radical was this attempt at restructuring society through the tool of lit-
erature? To modern critics, feminist writers did not go far enough; Sally
Ledger attributes the ‘pessimism’ of these novels to the writers’ ‘inabil-
ity to think beyond heterosexual marriage’.4 Others have suggested that
writers were clinging to the romance script even while they were herald-
ing the collapse of the old order: what they wanted to achieve was to
convince their readers of the expediency of a far-reaching overhaul of
marital relations, not to promote the more radical idea that the concept
should be abandoned altogether.5 In what way was the narrative cri-

77

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78 New Woman Fiction

tique of marriage connected with the reformist efforts of the women’s


movement, and to what degree can New Woman fiction be seen as a
response to medical, legal and social practices which withheld from
women the exclusive right to determine what happened to their bodies?
The Virgin/Whore dichotomy underpinning the sexual double stand-

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ard, which was inscribed into Victorian family law and the Contagious
Diseases Acts,6 cast working-class women as prostitutes and then disci-
plined them for ‘corrupting’ and ‘infecting’ men, while defining middle-
class women as the upholders of a morality whose parameters they were
denied a voice in shaping. The feminist attack on marriage challenged
and exploded these male definitions of morality; in what sense did it
help to destabilize traditional notions of sexuality? Were New Woman
writers primarily attacking male sexual conduct, or were they also
redefining female sexuality? How serious were New Woman writers
about exploring alternatives to marriage and heterosexual identity
when they featured single women and their involvement in feminist
counter-families? Is it possible to read these female communities as
‘cover stories’,7 meant to enable the writers to articulate and yet contain
lesbian desire? These are some of the questions examined in this
chapter.

The syphilis plot

Lyn Pykett argues that ‘marriage, the destination of the plot of the main-
stream Victorian novel, and the resolution of all of its (and supposedly
the heroine’s) problems, became, in the New Woman novel, both the
origin of narrative and the source of the heroine’s problems’.8 Feminist
writers thematized the failure of marriage in its present form, fore-
grounding issues of sexual exploitation, violence and disease in order
to suggest not only that recent legislation did not go far enough, but
that it had not even begun to touch on the central question of consent
and women’s essential right to own and protect their bodies. Three
demands were at the forefront of the feminist vision of social and
marital reconstruction: sex education for all, an end to the sexual double
standard, and the civic duty of (male) chastity. Public attention had to
be shifted away from female morality, which had never constituted a
problem, to male sexuality, which so evidently had. If men were
instructed in self-control, and parents took their responsibility towards
their daughters seriously by screening the antecedents of suitors, the
health and happiness of the nation could be restored. Above all women

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Marriage and Its Discontents 79

had to stop being submissive: ‘So long as men believe that women will
forgive anything they will do anything,’ Sarah Grand’s Evadne tells her
mother in The Heavenly Twins (1893): ‘The mistake from the beginning
has been that women have practised self-sacrifice, when they should
have been teaching men self-control’ (HT, 92).

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As Angelique Richardson points out, social purity feminists like Grand
mobilized medical metaphors when they replaced the romance plot
with the eugenic plot, which made the sexual selection of a morally
sound partner a matter of civic responsibility: ‘Her texts were “medici-
nal”: antidotes to the traditional (male, dysgenic) romance, and guide-
books to responsible sexual selection and marriage, steeped in medical
aims and allusions.’9 This also applies to Grand’s American contempo-
rary, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in whose utopia Moving the Mountain
(1911) society is restructured on strictly eugenic principles. Feminist
laws ensure that marriage licences are issued only on evidence of a
satisfactory health record and doctors are required to report venereal
disease. As a result, infected men (rather than prostitutes, whose
profession no longer exists) are registered with the Department of
Eugenics, and the transmission of venereal disease is liable to state
prosecution. In their health conciousness Gilman’s New England New
Women go rather further than their cigarette-inhaling British sisters: the
use of tobacco, if not altogether outlawed, is strongly frowned upon;
with heavy smokers and drinkers known to stand little chance of success
in the marriage market, young men aspiring to the state of wedlock take
care to abstain from such obnoxious habits. In this health-centred
society, poverty and sexual exploitation have been eradicated – as have
morbidly oversexed individuals: ‘cases for medical treatment’, they are
usually referred for surgery (MTM, 79).
While few writers advocated such extreme measures, most feminists
blamed the moral and legal double standard that regulated marriage
and prostitution for encouraging men’s sexual exploitation of women.
By keeping middle-class girls and women ignorant of the physical
side of marriage and of their husbands’ past, society condoned middle-
class men’s sexual exploits among working-class women. Women’s
right to education, one of the central demands of the feminist move-
ment, was reinterpreted to include the right to vital sexual information.
The patriarchal ideal of ‘beautiful innocence’ was nothing but ‘danger-
ous ignorance’: this was ‘not a safe state in which to begin the battle of
life’, Angelica’s forward-looking mother cautions Evadne’s conservative
one, advising her to ‘instruct! instruct!’ (HT, 41; emphasis in original).

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80 New Woman Fiction

Far from ensuring their happiness, let alone protect them against
syphilis, innocence deprived women of the right to make informed
decisions.10
Grand’s views were echoed by a number of writers who, in 1894, were
asked to contribute to a symposium on sex education initiated by the
New Review.11 As Claudia Nelson has noted, the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ dis-

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cussion throws into relief the ideological differences between ‘mater-
nalists’ and ‘professionalists’, groups both in favour of sex education,
yet sharply divided on the issue of exactly what girls and boys should
be taught, and by whom. Drawn from the ranks of feminists and social
purists, maternalists maintained that, as mothers, women were particu-
larly well suited to reconstruct society by purifying the home, and that
it was therefore their special responsibility to guide children of both
sexes towards a moral understanding of their reproductive duties, edu-
cating them to reject lower animal instincts for higher spiritual values,
and lust for love. Professionalists, by contrast, emphasized the need for
public (male) instructors, revalidating the idea of separate spheres which
feminists had blamed as the root cause of all ills by insisting that, while
girls should be trained for motherhood, boys needed to channel their
sexual energies into the ‘proper’ expression of masculinity. Maternalists
were primarily concerned with policing unchaste men so that their dan-
gerous and abusive sexual practices would cease to afflict the ‘body’ of
the ‘race’ (women and children); professionalists were anxious to repress
any desire (above all masturbation and homosexual experimentation)
likely to impair the development of an ‘appropriate’ (‘virile’) male body
politic.12
The professionalist position frequently served to legitimate the double
standard. This is illustrated by Walter Besant’s contribution to the
debate. Cautiously approving of the idea of sex education for girls as
long as it was kept within bounds, he expressed his fear that impres-
sionable feminine minds might be twisted beyond recall if they were
told too much about male sexuality: girls ‘may cease to believe in the
possible virtue of any man,’ he wrote, ‘they may lose their faith in the
very existence of virtue.’ This dangerous ‘loss of faith’ in man, hence in
the authority of religion (masculinity and divinity were clearly linked
in Besant’s world-view), was sadly encouraged by the New Woman
writers’ ‘deplorable’ lack of moderation: ‘Already there have appeared
certain books in which this attitude . . . is plainly taken up.’13 Mater-
nalists, literary or otherwise, were more dangerous by far than the few
wild oats young men were apt to sow. In defence of conservative double
standards, Besant emphasized that, while ‘[t]here is never any closed

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Marriage and Its Discontents 81

chapter at all in [women’s] lives’, this did not apply to their husbands: in
their case, ‘the chapter is closed and is never reopened after the man
has contracted the responsibilities of marriage’.14
It is of course precisely the grave repercussions, for women, of the
supposedly ‘closed chapters’ in men’s lives which New Woman fiction

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took so much care to place in the spotlight. If girls were denied a proper
education, then the writers themselves would provide it in their novels.
The sense of injustice many women felt in the face of flagrant inequal-
ity went some way towards bridging the gap between social purists like
Grand and free lovers like George Egerton, who was otherwise so reluc-
tant to be bracketed with the New Woman. In ‘Virgin Soil’ (1894),
Egerton has an Angry Young Woman confront her mother in much the
same vein in which Grand’s Evadne blames hers for her own unhappy
marriage (‘VS’, 157).
Protecting girls from entering marriages with unacceptable partners
was not the only reason for New Woman writers to advocate sexual
openness as a principle of civic education. As Iota emphasized in A
Yellow Aster (1894), to be suddenly faced with marital sex could be a
‘horror made manifest’:

‘It is ghastly!’ she cried, ‘it is degradation, feeling towards him as I


do, and as I’ve always done! I am debased to think that any man
should have the least part of a woman so terribly in his power, when
she can’t, can’t,’ she almost shrieked, ‘give him the best. What do
girls know of the things they make lawful for themselves? If they did,
if they were shown the nature of their sacrifice, then marriage would
cease till it carried love, absolute love in its train.’
(YA, 245–6)

The sex education debate enabled feminist writers to deal with rape in
marriage, and to demand women’s exclusive right to their bodies,
within (by implication also outside) marriage: ‘even the idea of “duty”
ought to be excluded’, Mona Caird urged, ‘there must be a full under-
standing and acknowledgement of the obvious right of the woman to
possess herself body and soul, to give or withhold herself body and soul
exactly as she wills.’15 If women were unresponsive to their husbands,
it was not because they had no sexual desire (as Victorian doctors so
often maintained) but because this desire had been killed by male bru-
tality. ‘Habits of dutiful submission’, Grand’s Beth finds, ‘destroy the
power to respond, and all that they leave to survive of the warm reality
of love at last is a cold pretence’ (BB, 344).

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82 New Woman Fiction

New Woman writers insisted that whenever women found themselves


the victims of irresponsible parents, perverse social laws, reprobate male
suitors and their complicit doctors, insensitive and even violent hus-
bands, they had every right to refuse sexual relations and leave a mar-
riage which amounted to nothing more than ‘legal prostitution, a

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nightly degradation’ (‘VS’, 155) ‘as absolute, as repugnant, as cruel, and
as contrary to nature as that of the streets’ (BB, 424–5). Thus, after
receiving a letter informing her of her husband’s (presumably syphilitic)
antecedents, Grand’s Evadne absconds on her very wedding day. In the
subsequent confrontation with her parents she accuses her father of
knowingly imposing on her a man she considers little better than a
‘moral leper’, asserting her right to dissolve a marriage ‘taken under a
grave misapprehension’: ‘having been kept in ignorance, I consider . . .
that every law of morality absolves me from fulfilling my share of the
contract’ (HT, 89).
Investing the patriarchal myth of woman’s ‘natural’ purity and spiri-
tual superiority with new meaning, social purity feminists declared
contemporary man unfit for marriage. Once ‘fallen’, men were to be
regarded not only as second-hand goods – hence inconceivable for any
self-respecting woman – but as contagious matter destructive of the
commonweal. ‘He will plead to be reformed, perhaps, but we know what
that means,’ Grand warned prospective brides; ‘Once a dog, always a
dog.’16 To spell out the consequences of marrying the wrong kind of
man, writers like Grand and Emma Frances Brooke mobilized highly
melodramatic machinery, spiking their novels with syphilis-ridden vil-
lains, gruesomely infected children, and maddened wives whose only
release from suffering lay in death. In The Heavenly Twins Edith Beale
fails to be protected by her father (a bishop, who is fully aware of the
past life of her husband, Sir Mosley Menteith), and dies within a year
after giving birth to a syphilitic baby. Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman
(1894), whose heroine rejects an uncorrupted farmer for an inveterate
lord, turns the ‘madwoman in the attic’ paradigm into a fin-de-siècle
image of race degeneration by replacing Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha
Mason with a pair of ‘contaminated’ children immured in the nursery.
The spectacle of bigamy and ‘wild animal’ sensuality (JE, 321) that
Rochester offers his wedding guests in Jane Eyre (1847) is here trans-
formed into the spectre of monstrous offspring as Jessamine reveals the
secret of her marriage to her doctor:

He stood with her on the threshold of a wide and cheerful room,


towards which she had led him. A woman dressed as a nurse had

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Marriage and Its Discontents 83

frowningly objected to his presence. She spoke of his lordship’s strict


command, of the secrecy of years. Jessamine, with gentle firmness
and entreaty, broke through her objections. And then he stepped
forward, and the secrets of the House of Heriot lay before him. The
room he stood in was a nursery; there were one or two attendants –

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more than would be naturally required – and there were two chil-
dren, aged respectively, he surmised, eight and six years.
He passed with rapid scrutiny and a horror-stricken heart from one
to the other. On those frail, tiny forms lay the heritage of the fathers.
The beaten brows, the suffering eyes, expiated in themselves the
crimes and debauchery of generations.
. . . Once, in a confusion of horror and shock, he put his hand out
to touch the drooping head of the elder. And then the mother caught
his fingers, and snatched them back.
‘Take care,’ said [Jessamine] in a dull and gentle voice; ‘at times she
is malicious. That is my boy,’ she said, pointing to the other.
And he saw a poor malformed thing – a child who lived in pain,
and whose eyes alone answered for him; and these, the Doctor
thought, followed his mother up and down the room with an awful
look of reproach.
(ASW, 257–8)

By linking Mary Shelley’s idea of the ‘hideous progeny’17 of a mad sci-


entist who, in his attempt to circumvent the maternal, interferes with
female reproduction, with Brontë’s script of the husband whose sexual
‘past’ almost proves fatal for the heroine, New Woman writers created
a potent image of female victimization brought about by men’s sexual
and medical misconduct. In her adaptation of Shelley’s and Brontë’s
Gothic myths, Brooke articulated her attack on male upper-class vice
and medicine through the scientific discourse prevalent at the time,
‘race’ and genetically transmitted disability. Although in Brontë’s and
Brooke’s texts the moral responsibility lies with the male, his sins are
imprinted on, and expiated through, the dead body of an imprisoned,
hence violent, female: just as Bertha destroys herself when she sets fire
to Thornfield Hall, Brooke’s ‘idiot girl’ (ASW, 258) runs riot in the
nursery, as a result of which she and her brother are killed. But whereas
in Jane Eyre the reprobate male can be purged by fire, and remodelled
into a reformed, considerably weakened and therefore acceptable
partner, no such dénouement is possible for Brooke’s heroine: ‘The
important thing was not that Heriot should reform, but that he and his
race should pass into annihilation’ (ASW, 269–70). Jessamine wills

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84 New Woman Fiction

herself to die so that the Heriots, the last of whom she carries inside
her, will become extinct.
While mid-Victorian feminist writers like Charlotte Brontë and Eliza-
beth Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh) resolved the threat of male pro-
fligacy or unrestrained mastery by impairing the masculine potency of

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the hero and making him physically dependent on the female, fin-
de-siècle writers resorted to a rhetoric of eugenics. These ideas, William
Greenslade notes, ‘empowered . . . women to state more openly than
before the necessity of curbing the curse of male promiscuity in the
interests of social purity and racial health’.18 As Angelique Richardson
points out, the ‘masculine narrative’ of degeneration became feminized
as New Woman writers reversed its plots and gendered parameters.19 In
addition to advocating sexual selection along eugenically sound princi-
ples, they promoted marriage rejection as a means of ‘race regeneration’:
‘the once vicious man becomes the father of vicious children and the
grandfather of criminals. [How can y]ou persuade women to marry these
men[?]’, Evadne declares in The Heavenly Twins (186), and Dr Corner-
stone asks Jessamine whether it was ‘no crime to become a mother by
that effete and dissipated race?’ (ASW, 259). Indeed, as feminists took
pains to impress on women, marriage and motherhood carried grave
risks. In 1870, Josephine Butler had stated that among men venereal
disease was ‘almost universal at one time or another’,20 and some 40
years later Christabel Pankhurst, claiming that up to 80 per cent of men
were affected, enjoined women to think twice about marriage:

Let every woman not yet married remember that the vast majority
of men contract sexual disease in one of its forms before they are
married . . . The unmarried woman . . . may within one day of her
marriage lose her health for ever . . . Never again must young women
enter into marriage blindfolded. From now onwards they must be
warned of the fact that marriage is intensely dangerous, until such
time as men’s moral standards are completely changed and they
become as chaste and clean-living as women.21

Clearly it seemed by far the safest option not to marry at all. Even when
they were not actual carriers of venereal disease, men of lax morals were
still considered a health hazard since their ‘lower’ nature was bound to
leave an indelible mark on their wives’ mental constitution: ‘The
tragedy of such a marriage consists in the effect of the man’s mind
upon the woman’s, shut up with him in the closest intimacy day and

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Marriage and Its Discontents 85

night, and all the time imbibing his poisoned thoughts’ (BB, 356). Many
feminist novels are variations on the ‘fallen male pollutes pure female’
theme; this was not the exclusive trademark of sexually more con-
servative texts: most New Woman narratives, in fact, contain eugenicist
undertones. Marriage (in social purist novels) or co-habitation (in free

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love novels), even a mere period of engagement typically results in
women’s mental and physical breakdown, frequently leading to female
insanity or death. A recovery seems possible only if and when women
live separately from men. ‘In the ideal condition for which we look men
and women will walk close, hand in hand,’ Schreiner wrote to Have-
lock Ellis in 1884, ‘but now the fight has . . . to be fought out alone by
both.’22 The ‘male–female romance plot’ which Tess Cosslett regards as
the predominant feature of New Woman fiction23 almost always serves
to discredit the concept of love by associating it with infection. The
glimpses readers are allowed of an egalitarian relationship between
mature, well-matched and ‘healthy’ partners constitute instances of the
(hetero)feminist blueprint of the ‘politically correct’ future and only
rarely promote the viability of sexual relations between women and
men in the present. Significantly, Schreiner’s most famous allegory,
‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ (1890), posits separatism, not sexual passion,
as the gateway to freedom and thence to future companionship, and
From Man to Man breaks off at the precise point at which New Woman
meets New Man.
Judging by the many casualties in their novels, feminist writers
appeared not over-optimistic about women’s ability to go it alone and
make a success of it, but the ‘woman-alone ending’24 did present a con-
structive alternative to the Victorian marriage plot because it removed
the heroine from her conventional domestic setting (with its romantic
engagements) to the public arena (hence professional and political com-
mitment). And while few novelists came anywhere near to contesting
the validity of heterosexuality as such, most texts were constructed
around the collapse of heterosexual relationships. Heterosexual contact,
by implication, carried the germs of disease, and women were best
advised to forget about it.
Without doubt Christabel Pankhurst’s statistics on venereal disease
were exaggerated. Half a century earlier, in 1859, the doctor Graham
Balfour had, indeed, warned that one man in every four was infected,25
but a Royal Commission report of 1916 gave a lower figure: 10 per cent
of men were estimated to have syphilis and a considerably higher
number gonorrhoea (which, unlike syphilis, was curable).26 As Showal-

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86 New Woman Fiction

ter notes, syphilis was in decline in the 1890s (though some 70 per cent
of the male asylum population were suffering from general paralysis,
the terminal stage of the disease).27 Yet even if only one man in ten
was, in fact, affected by some form of venereal disease, this was not a
promising prospect for women considering marriage – especially if

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they were faced with the devastating experience of friends and relatives.
Grand knew ‘8 of those dreadful Edith cases’ personally and had,
she said, been urged to write The Heavenly Twins ‘by other women,
who send me accounts of cases so horrifying and so heartrending’
that ‘to pretend to ignore [the subject] any longer would be criminal’
(‘FHT’, viii–ix).28
The spectre of syphilis in New Woman fiction has to be placed in the
context of malestream discourses of Victorian medicine and fiction. By
making men into sites of contagion, feminists were turning the tables
on the medical establishment which, in order to legitimate the imple-
mentation of the CD Acts, had demonized women. They were also
responding to male novelists’ anxieties about the sexual and social
repercussions of feminism, fears reflected in predatory and monstrous
females (Stoker’s female vampires, Rider Haggard’s She ‘Who Must Be
Obeyed’). Syphilis was incurable until the introduction of antibiotics in
the 1940s.29 In its congenital form, the disease was already in the sec-
ondary stage and affecting the nervous system: the repercussions on
children were therefore particularly grave. Edith Beale’s and Jessamine
Halliday’s monstrous offspring could have sprung straight from medical
reports of the time, in which syphilitic children figure as ‘small,
wizened, atrophied, weakly, sickly’, monkey-like creatures.30
Feminists were outraged at the institutionalized double standard
which coupled an utter disregard for women’s health and safety with
the effort to safeguard male access to ‘safe’ prostitutes. Although the CD
Acts were repealed in 1886, attempts to have them re-enacted contin-
ued to be made into the twentieth century, and as late as the Second
World War, venereal disease was officially blamed on ‘ “easy” girl-
friends’.31 It is significant that the villains of New Woman fiction are
drawn from the three bastions of patriarchy which underpinned the CD
acts: the army (Sir Mosley Menteith and Major Colquhoun in The Heav-
enly Twins), Parliament (Lord Heriot, a Peer in the House of Lords), and
the medical profession (Dunlap Strange in Dixon’s Story of a Modern
Woman, Dan Maclure in The Beth Book). By highlighting the complicity
of familial and religious leaders with male crimes against women and
the state, writers dramatized the collapse of paternalism, thereby legiti-
mizing feminist resistance to the law of the father in all its forms and

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Marriage and Its Discontents 87

institutions. The syphilis plot therefore constituted a concerted attack


on male sexual, marital, religious, medical and legal authority and
practice.

Written on the body

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To modern critics like Elaine Showalter, New Woman writers and char-
acters seem ‘disgusted by sex’.32 Their attack on male sexuality and the
frequent(ly programmatic) absence of fulfilling personal relationships
have been interpreted as a reflection of the writers’ sexual repression.
Though challenging sexual orthodoxy by attacking the double standard,
feminists had internalized Victorian notions of female morality and
sexual anaesthesia: as Olive Banks notes, ‘women were taught to see not
only men’s sexual desires as immoral but their own as well’.33 This is
perceived to have had negative repercussions on the quality of their
work: ‘Women writers at the turn of the century . . . were confined by
a conservative sexual ideology that was an aesthetic dead end.’ Frigid
feminists, it seems, could only produce frigid art, or even no art: ‘The
unchanging nature of woman as pure spirit made good politics but bad
fiction . . . [their] celibacy was increasingly sterile.’34
Premised on the prevailing myth of our own age (that an active sex
life must be central to us at all times), such arguments ironically revive
the discourse of fin-de-siècle male writers who charged contemporary
feminists with imperilling the virility of Victorian Britain. It is easy to
berate feminists for prudery, yet what appears ‘frigid’ from one per-
spective can be read as a radical step towards female sexual self-
determination from another. To turn-of-the-century and Edwardian
feminists, Frank Mort writes, ‘celibacy was a positive step in women’s
self-advancement . . . women were choosing not to have sexual relations
with men as a political act.’35
This is illustrated in an 1896 article in which Coralie Glyn responded
to a male debate on women’s sexual function. St George Mirvart had
expressed moral outrage about feminist writers who encouraged readers
to refuse sexual intercourse in marriage. While it was only natural for
women to feel disgusted by their conjugal obligations, the experience
of self-sacrifice was bound to instill in them a wholesome attitude
towards their function: ‘[b]y submission . . . the wife yields to the
injunctions of reason and justice, and conforms to the moral law.’36
In his rejoinder, Grant Allen mobilized feminist arguments, drawing
analogies between enforced marital sex and rape, only to impose
another male cliché by invoking women’s social function as breeders

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88 New Woman Fiction

for the state.37 As Glyn pointed out, neither Mirvart nor Allen seemed
concerned about what women wanted to do with their lives – it did not
occur to them, for example, that men, marriage and childbearing might
not hold the central position they occupied in male minds:

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until quite recently women’s ideas on the sex-question have been
almost entirely interpreted by men . . . In these latter days women
have come forward and said – ‘Speaking not as a theorist, but as an
actual flesh-and-blood woman – I am conscious of certain emotions.
I hold certain views – and I have reason . . . to suppose that . . . my
fellow-women feel likewise.’ Many women have thus revealed them-
selves, and their revelations . . . have come upon man with a strange
shock of novelty.38

Glyn suggested that what made the New Woman into such an incisive
issue of the day was that she ‘revealed’ women to men (who did not
grasp, even while they were obsessed with defining, ‘woman’), but
above all to women, offering them a shared sense of identity in place
of the old stereotypes. This new female self constituted itself through
lived and embodied experience, for it was premised on actuality not
‘theory’, and looked back on a (mute, hidden) tradition of fore-mothers.
Glyn’s title, ‘Nature’s Nuns’, linked this new female identity to evolu-
tion (nature) and celibacy/chastity (nun), clearing feminist writers of
the charge of ‘abnormality’ and ‘degeneration’, and implying that New
Woman fiction was the secular equivalent of a religious ‘sisterhood’.
To what extent, then, was this positive female and feminist sense of
identity contingent on the rejection of sexual passion? Carroll Smith-
Rosenberg argues that, caught between the discourses of mid-Victorian
medicine, which repudiated the notion of female sexual pleasure in
‘respectable’ women, and late-Victorian sexology, which pathologized
feminists as sexual deviants, New Women ‘had no language in which
to conceive of their erotic relations . . . as sexual; they could not con-
struct themselves as sexual subjects’.39 However, as I show in this
chapter, this was not altogether the case: Lynne Huffer draws on the
image of the letter whose ink-covered pages conceal a secret message
written in milk to suggest that we need to be more sensitive to the
undercover codes (invisible ink) hidden between the lines of historical
women’s writing.40 On the face of it most New Woman writers stressed
the sexual purity of their model women (a potent political strategy,
if nothing more), yet at the same time developed, albeit cryptically, a
subterranean language which, through a complex system of nature
metaphors, revealed even as it veiled female sexual desire. The crux of

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Marriage and Its Discontents 89

the matter was how to express this desire while protecting its auton-
omy, in other words, how to articulate an erotic discourse which re-
sisted fulfilment because the object of desire was either untouchable
(other women) or a threat to female subjectivity (men): how to create
characters who were sensual and passionate yet remained ever self-

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sufficient.
As I have argued elsewhere, Sarah Grand explored women’s sexuality
as an elemental force of nature, associating sexual passion with the
waves of the sea, and representing orgasm as drowning.41 Each of the
three novels of her feminist trilogy, which all articulate a strong message
of social purity, contain fantasies of sexual drowning, and while this
image certainly pinpoints the dangers of relinquishing control, it also
conveys a forceful sense of physical pleasure (the merging of body
boundaries). While earlier women writers (Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning), and late-Victorian and Edwardian male writers
(Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence) represented desire through the wilder-
ness of gardens, fin-de-siècle feminist writers like Grand went some way
towards prefiguring Woolf’s image of the waves as a symbol of female
(sexual) fluidity.
Grand was not the only social purist to create heroines with power-
ful sexual urges. Brooke’s ‘superfluous woman’, too, experiences this
‘wild and fearful joy’, an ‘ecstatic sense of youth and health’ (ASW, 153,
108). Significantly, it is only in a Scottish Highlands setting that such
feelings (fantasies) can flourish, that is, in a natural environment safely
removed from the world of social conventions (‘English’ drawing-room
domesticity):

‘Give yourself to Colin!’ cried the strong voice of Nature. . . . [T]he


cup was there, and . . . the lips should drink it every drop, nor pause
till it was drained; and just there it was that the wild fiery throb kept
burning, and stabbing, and thrilling her through and through.
(ASW, 193, 205)

As in The Beth Book, female sexual pleasure is disrupted by male con-


ventionality, the language of merging by the territorial claims of phal-
locentricity: ‘I don’t want you to be anything, or to care to be anything,
but just my wife,’ Alfred declares the day after he and Beth have shared
an orgasmic experience on the beach (BB, 247). Similarly, Jessamine’s
dream of a free union is shattered by Colin’s insistence on marriage:

within this seemingly mutual trance of emotion, difference was


already at work . . .

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90 New Woman Fiction

All the best gifts he had to offer seemed to her as fetters and a
dungeon. Her love had the quality of self-abandonment . . . Shame
she would have accepted, but noble endurance was . . . beyond her.
The contract, the contract!
(ASW, 209, 214)

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As the natural world ceases to offer a refuge from the demands of bour-
geois society, and the fantasy of free (and uncorrupted because ‘natural’)
love is quashed by the reality of contractual bonds, Jessamine returns
to England and marries Lord Heriot.
New Woman writers were at the forefront of the feminist revision of
male and female sexuality. If this revision frequently took the form of
disciplining and containing heterosexual desire, then it was because this
desire appeared harmful to women: at best it confined them to married
domesticity, at worst it destroyed them. While all feminist writers agreed
on the need for an equal sexual standard, they were divided on the spe-
cific parameters of this standard. Social purists, who foregrounded the
dangers rather than pleasures of sex, were intent on taming passion with
the principle of civic responsibility and demanded chastity for both
sexes in the interest of a healthy nation. Advocates of free love argued
that female sexual autonomy was possible only outside the institution
of marriage, and privileged the quest for individual desire and personal
development. As my previous examples show, social purity and free love
elements could be present in one and the same text. Both attitudes can
be regarded as radical, complementary rather than contradictory con-
cepts, because in both cases their proponents were liable to punishment.
Whether they practised free love or preached sexual resistance, Victo-
rian women were subjected to severe reprisals, even, occasionally, to
radical surgery. The eugenic agenda of fin-de-siècle social purists was of
course highly problematic, yet the feminist call for male chastity and
female celibacy must be seen in the context of institutionalized sexual
violence against women.
While neither coherent nor unified, Victorian medicine tended to
deny, pathologize and criminalize female sexuality that threatened to
break free from male-controlled parameters. In 1875 William Acton
made his notorious statement that ‘the majority of women (happily for
society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.
What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally.’42 These
‘exceptional’ women were either prostitutes who lured young men to a
life of debauchery, or nymphomaniacs, that is, insane. Acton was not
so much describing life as he saw it, as prescribing a moral code of

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Marriage and Its Discontents 91

behaviour which would ensure women’s confinement to marriage, the


home, and motherhood: ‘a modest woman’, his readers learned, ‘seldom
desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s
embraces, but principally to gratify him; and, were it not for the desire
of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.’ Pitting

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the ‘perfect ideal of an English wife and mother’ (who loathes sex but
loves to sacrifice herself) against the feminist (who dislikes sex and
won’t have it), he railed against one of his patients who ‘maintain[ed]
women’s rights to such an extent’ as to banish her husband from the
marital bed: such behaviour was criminally negligent.43
The truly Other woman was therefore not the prostitute or the
nymphomaniac, for they could be contained within male institutions:
the prison or the asylum, institutions whose power structures reflected
those in place in marriage and the family. The truly deviant woman was
the woman who rejected heterosexual contact altogether, who resisted
the attempt to confine her to and within male law. This is why a writer
like George Egerton, who was writing about women’s sexual pleasure
with men, was still within the limits of the acceptable, a ‘womanly
writer’,44 albeit daring and neurotic, whereas Sarah Grand was so often
deemed beyond the pale. As ‘a prig in petticoats’,45 she was implicitly
(and ironically) associated with Mary Wollstonecraft (Walpole’s ‘hyena
in petticoats’),46 hence with a woman whom the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries considered a dangerous sexual and political
anarchist.
The brutal medical treatment of women who displayed too much
sexual desire was more than matched by the measures taken to coun-
teract female resistance or sexual practices that threatened to make men
redundant. Some Victorian doctors were prepared to go to extreme
lengths to regulate women who betrayed evidence of independent
sexual urges (masturbation) or who expressed their distaste for marital
intercourse. When they resorted to clitoridectomy, what physicians like
Isaac Baker Brown sought to suppress or excise was any form of female
desire that was not directed towards men or reproduction: Brown’s claim
that his ‘operation’ restored women’s child-bearing capacities suggests
that, in his mind at least, ‘proper’ (heterosexual and reproductive) femi-
ninity was contingent on the erasure of female sexuality.47At the other
end of the scale, ovariotomy advanced the interests of eugenic birth
controllers by helping to curb the procreative impetus among the
‘lower’ classes of women.48 As with the CD Acts, with which these
practices coincided, sexual assault served to discipline and contain the
unruly body of woman in the name of male ‘health’ at a time when the

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92 New Woman Fiction

Divorce Act of 1857 and the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870–82)
had established a limited degree of independent rights for women.
(Indeed, some ‘hysterics’ were ‘cured’ of their wish to divorce their hus-
bands after Brown had finished with them).49 Although Brown came
into disrepute and was expelled from the Obstetrical Society in 1867,50

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medical hysteria about female (and also, of course, male) masturbation
continued; as late as 1886 (the year which saw the repeal of the CD
Acts), clitoridectomies and related surgery were still being performed.51
Towards the close of the century, male doctors displaced their fear of
female sexual organs into other parts of the body; in 1895, Sigmund
Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fliess, convinced that women’s nose problems
revealed their masturbatory habits, operated on Emma Eckstein, nearly
killing her in the process.52
Against this background of female genital mutilation, it may not be
surprising that many feminists had little interest in sex, least of all when
it had to do with men, for it was men who were seen to be the prime
originators and perpetrators of systematic violence against women. As
one woman bitterly complained to Josephine Butler,

It is men, only men, from the first to the last, that we have to do with!
To please a man I did wrong at first, then I was flung about from
man to man. Men police lay hands on us. By men we are ex-
amined, handled, doctored . . . In the hospital it is a man again who
makes prayers and reads the Bible for us. We are had up before mag-
istrates who are men, and we never get out of the hands of men till
we die!53

‘And it was a Parliament of men only who made this law,’ Butler com-
ments; ‘When men, of all ranks, thus band themselves together for an
end deeply concerning women . . . it is time that women should arise
and demand their most sacred rights.’54 It was this pervasive atmosphere
of a male conspiracy to objectify, exploit and abuse women that has to
be seen as the cause for many women’s rejection of heterosexual prac-
tice and glorification of chastity. Dismissing late-Victorian feminists as
‘prudes’ ignores the reasons behind their attitudes and belittles their
actions, which to a considerable extent anticipate modern radical femi-
nist efforts to combat violence against women and children.55
While the specifically sexual nature of oppressive medical practices,
in particular doctors’ role in the implementation of the CD Acts and
the regulation of prostitution, was widely discussed in New Woman
fiction, clitoridectomy, even for writers like Grand who, as the wife of
an army surgeon, may have had access to the medical details, would

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Marriage and Its Discontents 93

have been perceived as too unmentionable to be explored openly; in


any case it is difficult to imagine what publisher would have been
willing to take the subject on board. It is only in second-wave feminist
fiction that, looking back, the theme is explicitly broached: in Zoë Fair-
bairns’s Stand We at Last (1988) Helena Croft, one of two Victorian

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sisters, contracts syphilis from her husband, and dies as a result of
surgery undergone because her doctor, reluctant to acknowledge her
husband’s sexual misdemeanours, concentrates on curbing her ‘self-
abuse’. Clitoridectomy was, however, briefly mentioned by Christabel
Pankhurst in The Great Scourge, and was, here too, linked with medical
attempts to conceal men’s infection with syphilis from their wives.56 In
fin-de-siècle feminist fiction, sexual violence against women (specifically
prostitutes), and implicitly also clitoridectomy, was displaced on to the
theme of medical violence against animals and articulated through an
anti-vivisectionist discourse. Thus in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book
(1897), Beth’s husband is not only a lock hospital doctor, hence respon-
sible for forcibly examining and detaining women suspected of prosti-
tution, but is also a vivisectionist.
The feminist anti-vivisection movement, which was recruited from
within the ranks of anti-CD Acts campaigners, formed after the Cruelty
to Animals Act of 1876 gave experimenters widespread legal protection.
Feminists were outraged at the vivisection of docile dogs and other
domestic animals, the absence of anaesthetics, and the application of
drugs which inhibited the animal from struggling but did not still its
pain.57 Late one night, when her husband is out on call, Beth discovers
a dog, vivisected and still living, in his surgery:

just beside her, as it seemed, some one shrieked. Beth, gasping with
terror, ran . . . into the hall, and struck a match . . . It seemed an age
before she could get the candle lit with her trembling hands, and in
the interval, the horrible cry recurred, and this time she thought it
came from the surgery . . . Dan always kept the room locked up . . .
She went to the door now, bent on breaking it open, but she found
that for once the key had been left in the lock. She turned it and
entered boldy; but her candle flickered as she opened the door . . .
She held it high above her head, however, and as the flame became
steady she looked about her . . . The room was large and bare. All that
it contained was a bookcase, some shelves with books on them, a
writing-table and chair, an arm-chair, a couch, and another table of
common deal, like a kitchen table, on which was a variety of things
– bottles, books, and instruments apparently – all covered up with a
calico sheet.

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94 New Woman Fiction

. . . [T]he horrid cry was once more repeated. It seemed to


come from under the calico sheet. Beth . . . took the sheet off delib-
erately, and saw a sight too sickening for description. The little black-
and-tan terrier . . . lay there, fastened into a sort of frame in a position
which alone must have been agonising. But that was not all.

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Beth had heard of these horrors before, but little suspected that
they were carried on under that very roof. She had turned sick at
the sight, a low cry escaped her, and her great compassionate heart
swelled with rage; but she acted without hesitation . . . and poured
some drops [of poison] down the poor little tortured creature’s throat.
(BB, 436–7)

While this scene can of course be read literally, the Gothic metaphors
of the candle, the key and the forbidden room suggest a more compre-
hensive encoding. The ‘madwoman in the attic’ paradigm, in Brooke’s
novel turned into the ‘monstrous progeny in the nursery’, has now
become the ‘poor tortured creature in the surgery’. In Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) the conceptual conflation of
nursery, surgery and the sexual torture of women is complete, with the
nursery’s ‘rings and things in the wall’, its soundproof location at the
top of the paradigmatically patriarchal ‘colonial mansion’, separated off
from the rest of the house by gates, the bars on the windows, the nar-
rator pinned to a ‘great heavy bed’ which ‘looks as if it had been through
the wars’, nailed to a floor ‘scratched and gouged and splintered’, the
strange, smelly, yellow stains all over her and her husband’s clothes (his
sister-in-law ‘wished we should be more careful’), and the ‘ravages’ of
the ‘revolting’ wallpaper which ‘slaps you in the face, knocks you down,
and tramples upon you’, and which reduces her to creeping; all of this
hints at sexual assault (YW, 9, 12, 13, 17, 19, 25, 27). (Little surprise,
then, that the yellow room, in an anonymous sado-masochist text with
this title, published a year earlier, sets the scene for the torture of
women, in particular the whipping, and through whipping, cutting, of
female genitalia.)58 In her allegory ‘The City of Blood’ (Dreams and
Dream Stories, 1888), the theosophist feminist and anti-vivisectionist
physician Anna Kingsford, like Gilman and Grand, mobilized the
Gothic (domestic confinement, keyless doors, barred windows, muffled
screams, streams of blood) to establish a direct link between animal
abuse and femicide. Scrolls attached to houses announce the horrors
inflicted on women and animals behind closed doors: ‘This is the
Laboratory of a Vivisector’, ‘Here is a husband murdering his wife’, ‘This
is a slaughterhouse’.59

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Marriage and Its Discontents 95

As in Kingsford’s allegory, the vivisection of animals in The Beth Book


connotes medical violence against women. This is indicated by the col-
lapse of private (sexual) and public (medical) roles: furnished with a
couch and an operating table, books and ‘instruments’, the surgery
serves both as a space for recreation and as an operating theatre, just as

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the marital home is the site of sexual domination and a place of torture.
In the wake of her discovery, Beth not only stops her husband’s experi-
ments; she also withdraws from any further sexual relations with him:

I’m not going to have any of your damnable cruelties going on under
the same roof with me . . . I know that every woman who submits in
such matters is not only a party to her own degradation, but con-
nives at the degradation of her whole sex.
(BB, 439, emphasis in original)

Grand clearly associates the sexual ‘degradation’ of women with the


‘damnable cruelties’ carried out with the surgical knife. (As Sally
Mitchell points out, the devices into which animals were strapped bear
an uncanny resemblance with the gynaecological stool).60 Thus, while
New Woman fiction did not explicitly expose the practice of clitoridec-
tomy, it indirectly engaged with it by conceptually linking other forms
of male violence with women’s sexual violation. This was not limited
to women’s writing. Just as the Gothic paradigm of the discovery and
exposure of the head of the household’s dark secrets made this theme
available to feminist writers, so too the Gothic enabled male writers to
enact violent sexual fantasies on the female body. In Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1897), Lucy Westenra’s ‘waxen pallor’ (131), ‘dull eyes’ (161),
listless state and mysterious wasting disease bear striking similarity with
Isaac Baker Brown’s description of the symptoms of his patients, and
also recall William Acton’s account of the ‘downcast look’, ‘convulsive
movements’, morbid condition and ‘great vital exhaustion’ of mastur-
bators.61 The typical hysteric, Brown noted,

becomes restless and excited, or melancholy and retiring; listless and


indifferent to the social influences of domestic life. She will be fan-
ciful in her food, sometimes express even a distaste for it, and appar-
ently . . . live upon nothing. She will always be ailing . . . There will
be wasting of the face and muscles generally; the skin sometimes dry
and harsh, at other times cold and clammy. The pupil will be occa-
sionally firmly contracted, but generally much dilated. This latter
symptom, together with a hard cord-like pulse, and a constantly

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96 New Woman Fiction

moist palm, are . . . pathognomonic of this condition. There will be


quivering of the eyelids, and an inability to look one straight in the
face.62

Like many Victorian hysterics, ‘nymphomaniacs’, and women guilty of

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‘self-abuse’, Stoker’s version of the New Woman is subjected to a sexual
‘operation’. The narrative attention paid to Van Helsing’s ominous black
leather bag, his medical instruments and ‘operating knives’ (DR, 214),
coupled with his obsession with the mutilation of sexually deviant
women, all of it so reminiscent of Jack the Ripper (then widely believed
to be a doctor),63 again link the medico-scientific discourse with sexual
violence against women. The sexual symbolism of the women’s decapi-
tation is abundantly clear, although, as Elaine Showalter suggests, it can
also be read as an attempt to separate the New Woman’s mind from her
body: ‘it is a Draconian way to shut women up.’64
Faced with the fantasy as well as the reality of male attempts to shut
women up sexually and socially through the discourses and practices of
phallocentric science, feminist writers responded by exposing medical
malpractice and by offering an individual solution to a collective
problem: leaving an abusive husband meant escaping from both marital
assault and the threat of medical surgery.

No friend like a sister?65

The conflation of the roles of husband and doctor in New Woman


fiction served as a potent reminder of the dominant power structures
which feminists sought to overcome, destabilizing the notion of roman-
tic love which had been an important influence on female writing of
the mid-century. While earlier writers had constructed Byronic heroes
whose moral ambivalence was counterbalanced by the chastening
impact of a symbolic demasculation, fin-de-siècle feminists tended to
create femininized and androgynous lovers whose ethereal bodies and
spiritual frame of mind posed no threat to the New Woman. At the
extreme end, Grand’s New Men (Vaincrecourt in A Domestic Experiment,
the Tenor in The Heavenly Twins) are so insubstantial that the slightest
shock to their nervous system dispatches them to the other world.
If they are not otherworldly, New Men often suffer from romantic
delusions which make them choose the wrong women. In Caird’s Stones
of Sacrifice (1915) Alpin falls for two Old Girls before realizing that his
friend and intellectual equal, the New Woman Claudia, is the ideal wife.
Professor Fortescue, Hadria’s mentor in Daughters of Danaus (1894), is

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Marriage and Its Discontents 97

less fortunate in his choice, and ruins the lives of three people. Roman-
tic dénouements are the exception in New Woman fiction, and in the
few instances in which New Women are paired off with New Men, the
sentimentality of the ending jars with the rest of the narrative. When
after her breakthrough as a public speaker, Beth sees her Arthurian

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knight riding towards her, even Victorian readers must have felt the
impulse to groan. Fortunately for us perhaps, not many relationships
between New Women and New Men are allowed to proceed to such a
state of bliss; more commonly, the romantic hero dies (A Domestic
Experiment), or the heroine opts for self-abnegation (in Schreiner’s From
Man to Man, Grand’s Ideala, Syrett’s Nobody’s Fault). The conservative dis-
course of self-sacrifice sometimes functions as a blind which conceals a
character’s resistance to the romance script. As a rule, heterosexual rela-
tionships constitute a threat to the New Woman’s self-determination,
and as such are typically juxtaposed with female friendships.
Many novels present marriage resistance as the cornerstone of female
solidarity. In Ella Hepworth Dixon’s Story of a Modern Woman (1894),
Alison Ives breaks off her engagement to the doctor Dunlap Strange
once she has identified him as the man responsible for the ‘ruin’ and
subsequent slide into prostitution of a shop assistant now dying in the
poor ward of the hospital where Alison acts as a health visitor. Like
Grand’s Ideala, Alison replaces sexual passion with female friendship,
embracing social and rescue work and ‘adopting’ the working-class
single mother Evelina: the spiritual idea of the ‘sisterhood of women’
supersedes a heterosexuality fraught with disease. ‘If women only used
their power in the right way! If we were only united we could lead the
world,’ Alison impresses on her friend Mary Erle, urging her always to
stand by other women (SMW, 213). Mary later rejects the man she loves
because of the responsibility she feels towards his estranged wife. The
text throws into sharp relief the contrast between Victor Hemming’s
selfish preoccupation with his own needs – ‘You would inspire me to
noble things’ – and Mary’s feminist sense of gender solidarity: ‘I can’t
do it . . . I can’t, I won’t, deliberately injure another woman’ (SMW,
253–5). Admittedly, her chances of finding lasting happiness with Victor
are slim – all that is on offer, after all, is a relationship with a married
man whose egoism and opportunistic careerism Mary has had ample
opportunity to observe: not the kind of partner with whom a New
Woman could flourish. And yet her ultimate decision to give him up
for the ‘other’ woman – who, as in Schreiner’s ‘Policy in Favour of Pro-
tection-’ (Dream Life and Real Life, 1893) may not even appreciate the
gift – does not come easy and is motivated by her genuine commitment

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98 New Woman Fiction

to the political principle of sisterhood. That this principle is often mixed


up with less heroic impulses is illustrated by Alison’s story.
As I argued in Chapter 2, the feminist principle of sisterhood is
frequently compromised by the class divide between New Women and
their protégées. It is a striking feature of the feminist fiction of the time

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that social hierarchies remain largely unchallenged by the very women
(authors and characters) who struggle so hard to overcome sexual
inequalities. Genuine (egalitarian) friendships develop only between
New Women themselves, who usually come from the same middle to
upper-class background. Alison may share her secrets with Mary, but
Evelina’s role is to confide unreservedly in her benefactress without the
expectation of any reciprocity. Alison’s seamless journeying between tea
parties and sick wards, and the ease with which she makes herself at
home in both aristocratic circles and the world of slums may reflect the
authorial message that feminism does not strip a woman of her femi-
ninity; it nevertheless casts into doubt the precise nature and degree of
her commitment to the working woman’s cause. As Tess Cosslett points
out, the novel repeatedly forecloses the potential of mutuality between
New Women and fallen women, and Alison’s actions, meant to
strengthen the bond between women, actually reinforce marriage.66
After arranging a match for Evelina, Alison herself – one of the ‘odd’ or
‘redundant’ women – disappears from the text: she dies, presumably of
a broken heart at the collapse of her own engagement. The sisterhood
which the narrative purportedly celebrates appears an abstract princi-
ple rather than a genuine, lived experience.
Ambiguous, unstable and often problematical, female friendship and
political sisterhood nonetheless constitute an important counter-plot to
marriage. Even in texts which feature happy marriages, such as Isabella
Ford’s On the Threshold, sexual passion is given less authorial approba-
tion than sisterly intimacy, the ‘cramp[ing]’ love of men being sharply
offset by the ‘endless, boundless’ love of women for women – especially
if they happen to come from the same class background (OTT, 186–7).
Saturated as it is with lesbian undertones for modern readers, can the
strong female bonding many narratives explore be read as an implicit
discourse on lesbian love? Lesbian historians Lilian Faderman and Sheila
Jeffreys have argued that before the advent of the sexologists, the nine-
teenth century had not developed a concept of sexual relations between
women. This made it possible for many women to form passionate and
physically close friendships, sometimes to enter same-sex ‘marriages’,
which today would be regarded as lesbian.67
While women accused of lesbian acts had been widely prosecuted and

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Marriage and Its Discontents 99

even executed during the medieval and early modern periods,68 the rise
of sentimental literature in the later eighteenth century ‘normalized’
(and thus desexualized) the expression of physical affection in woman-
to-woman friendships. Nineteenth-century medicine, which sharply
distinguished between ‘normal’ women’s reproductive instincts and

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‘abnormal’, sexually active, hence socially transgressive women, defined
women’s sexuality exclusively in relation to heterosexuality and men.
Female same-sex desire was linked with anatomical deformity (hyper-
trophied genitalia); the lesbian appeared a biological monstrosity on a
par with the ‘bestiality’ of the Black female and the supposed atavism
of the (working-class) prostitute.69 The medical conceptualization of the
lesbian as a freak of nature was ironically instrumental in fostering
public disbelief in the possibility that sexual acts could be carried
out between ostensibly ‘normal’, respectable women. These beliefs were
overtaken by the rise of the feminist movement, which fuelled fears
about ‘unsexed’ women. The sexologist concept of the ‘third’ or ‘inter-
mediate’ sex70 seemed a convenient label for discrediting women who
strove to gain access to male domains. Sheila Jeffreys notes that, as ‘fem-
inists were . . . slotted into a picture of lesbian women who were really
pseudo-men’, women’s friendships came under increasing suspicion.71
In anti-feminist literature, feminists were cast as masculine types who,
albeit unsuccessfully, entered into sexual contests with men for a more
‘feminine’ woman. This butch/femme stereotype was reaffirmed by the
sexologists, who defined the congenital lesbian as a ‘naturally’ mannish
woman while regarding ‘feminine’ lesbians as pseudohomosexuals,72 an
idea which was still influential in the early twentieth century, and is
reflected in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). In Henry
James’s The Bostonians (1886), the ‘masculine’ feminist Olive Chancellor
loses the ‘feminine’ pseudohomosexual Verena Tarrant to Basil Ransom,
while in The Rebel of the Family (1880), Eliza Lynn Linton explicitly
polemicized a butch/femme relationship. In her bid for independence
and more enlightened female companionship than her conventional
sisters and mother are able to provide, Perdita Winstanley gets drawn
into a feminist circle dominated by a rabid man-hater who has aban-
doned her husband and children in order to share a home with her
‘little wife’:

Mrs Blount . . . opened the door of a small room . . .


‘Connie!’ she called in a caressing voice.
‘Bell!’ responded a little woman, darting up from the sofa and fling-
ing herself into her arms.

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100 New Woman Fiction

They kissed each other fondly; as friends who had been separated
for as many months or years as they had been parted hours.
‘This is my good little wife!’ then said Mrs Blount, turning to
Perdita; ‘and’ – to Constance Tracy – ‘I have brought you a new
friend, dear. She is to become one of us.’

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Constance smiled . . . But her smile was more forced than sponta-
neous, and the quick, scrutinizing look with which she measured
Perdita from head to foot had less of welcome in it than of suspicion
and latent hostility. A rival or a friend? [. . .]
Connie Tracey . . . lived with Mrs Blount on those terms of depend-
ence and subserviency which the champion of her sex found so infi-
nitely degrading when they exist between men and women. It was
Mrs Blount who had the money while Miss Tracey had nothing but
her industry and devotion . . . She was everything that one woman
could be to another – lady’s-maid, milliner, housekeeper, amanuen-
sis, panegyrist in public, flatterer and slave in private; and Mrs Blount
thought the arrangement honourable to both as things were; when,
had it been a husband to whom her friend had been devoted and on
whom she had been dependent, it would have been a degrading insti-
tution and the sign of woman’s shame and destitution.
(ROTF, 33)

Luckily ‘Perdita’, troubled by the women’s friendship and repelled by


Bell’s advances, is saved by a pharmacist, who, though stuck with a mad
wife in his attic, is, Linton seems to suggest, at least a man. Leslie Craw-
ford is also, of course, a representative of the medical trade: once again
science is mobilized to confute and master the New Woman.
In Linton’s and other texts the anti-feminist cliché of the virago
in men’s garb is subsumed into the stereotype of the lesbian butch, a
woman who assumes all the negative characteristics of which she
accuses the other sex. Bell Blount oppresses her partner, patronizes her
as her ‘little’ wife, keeps her financially dependent and house-bound,
exploits her as cheap labour, and exposes her to (presumably well-
founded) jealousy. The lesbian is cast as a male impostor and sexually
voracious predator: Bell’s ‘she is to become one of us’ sounds ominous,
and is clearly taken as a threat by both Constance and Perdita, albeit
for different reasons. Ironically, Bell is essentially indifferent to the
woman’s cause. Once Perdita proves impervious to her charms and gets
involved with the enemy (the pharmacist), Bell denounces her to her
mother, thus endangering Perdita’s independence (since the mother,

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Marriage and Its Discontents 101

always hostile to the idea of her daughter’s working for her livelihood,
blames her friendship with an unacceptable man on her lowly occupa-
tion as a post office worker, and pressurizes her to give up her job). By
exposing Bell’s feminist discourse as but a ploy to enable her to prey on
women, Linton discredits the women’s movement as unscrupulous,

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power-driven and morally depraved.
As anti-feminist writers transcribed their anxieties about feminism
into an anti-lesbian rhetoric, feminist writers took care to stress that
their heroines’ decision to leave their husbands for a community of
women had nothing to do with sexual preference. Any hint of ‘psy-
chopathia sexualis’73 would have had negative repercussions on the
popularity of novels already condemned by conservatives for their
openness on (hetero)sexual matters. The fact that Edward Carpenter and
Havelock Ellis explicitly associated the New Woman with ‘love’s coming
of age’, and therefore with homosexuality, will have made most New
Woman writers only the more sensitive to the fact that their protago-
nists’ behaviour, if not their own, would come under close scrutiny. The
obscenity trial against Hall’s Well of Loneliness some thirty years later
was to prove them right.
New Woman writers wanted to put across to their readers that femi-
nism could provide a political and structural solution to the problems
women faced in a male-dominated society – what they had to avoid
at all costs was their message becoming submerged in fears and fan-
tasies about female perversion. It is hardly surprising, then, if lesbian
desire seems absent from their texts or, if hinted at, is immediately
retracted: whether in Ford’s On the Threshold or Gertrude Dix’s The
Image Breakers (1900), intense and intimate friendships between women
are ultimately disrupted by and displaced into heterosexual attraction:
‘There is always a man in the case!’ Honora sighs ‘discontentedly’
in Brooke’s Transition (1895); ‘I wish . . . [t]hat we could do without
men – altogether’ (T, 84, 86; emphasis in original). Even the absence
of men does not bespeak the presence of lesbian love: the female
counter-communities evoked at the end of Grand’s Ideala and in the
second of Olive Schreiner’s ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ serve social and
political, not libidinal purposes (indeed, the message of Schreiner’s alle-
gory is that women need to sacrifice love for freedom). In Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s all-female Herland (1915) love is de-personalized and
directed towards the young and the collective; it is the arrival of three
men, not female closeness, which rouses the women into the discovery
of individual passion.

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102 New Woman Fiction

Among the rare exceptions are Gertrude Dix’s The Girl from the
Farm (1895) and George Egerton’s The Wheel of God (1898), whose
final tableaux of female communion and home-coming seem to signal
more than ‘just’ a celebration of women’s spiritual unity. Dix’s novel
ends with the New Woman Katharine Marchant leaving her family

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with an Ibsenite finality to set up house with a close female friend
and a pregnant girl who has been seduced and abandoned by her
brother:

Katharine went swiftly up to the girl and took her by the hand . . . A
few steps from the house the girl tried to disengage her hand.
‘Miss,’ she said, ‘dear Miss, please let me go.’
The strange woman held her yet more firmly. She answered – ‘No,
I cannot let you go. You are mine.’
‘But, Miss, if you understood – if you knew the things they say –
the shame.’
‘Shame!’ the other laughed a loud defiant laugh . . . ‘Shame! There
is no shame for you!’
The night was frosty and clear now, after the sleety day . . . The two
women could see each other’s faces by the light of the stars, and the
reflection from the white patches of unmelted snow.
The one kissed the other, and said – ‘Now you will come with
me . . .’
The other clung to her hand for answer, and the two passed out of
the close and down the steep streets of the town.
Half an hour later they were speeding with the night mail to
London – and Mary.
(GFF, 226–8)

The New Woman motif of sisterhood in sexual adversity is here trans-


posed into a pointedly evocative image of same-sex affection. The erotic
undercurrents of female togetherness are also highlighted at the close
of Egerton’s novel. After the breakdown of her marriage the protagonist
joins a community of women artists:

As she stood there thinking, the valley seemed to stretch out to an


illimitable plain, filled with myriads of women. Each one looked up
towards her, and there was a demand in every eye . . . Her heart
streamed out with a rush of infinite tenderness, of love and sorrow,
to all these asking souls; and the tears that filled her eyes washed out
every rest of bitterness, every trace of self-seeking, and a great peace
gathered in her soul, and the question of her childhood, and maid-

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Marriage and Its Discontents 103

enhood, and womanhood, seemed to be answered, and she stepped


into the inheritance of her self . . . A slender, crescent moon cut a
scoop out of the sky, and threw her figure into relief against the white
stile; a breeze whispered in the trees, and the lights gleamed out of
the cottage windows below. A golden bar was thrown across the road

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from a suddenly opened door, and shadowy forms came up the path
and stood at the gate below, and called up to where she stood alone
on the height, ‘Mary, Mary, Mary!’ with tender, eager seeking in their
voices, that seemed but as the mouthpiece of hundreds of other
voices, calling to her from the valleys where the shadows gather. And
her heart seemed to grow hot within her, and to burn out the last
atom of self; and she hastened down the slope with eager steps to
where the women were calling in the gloom.
(WOG, 321–2)

In many of her writings Egerton mobilizes a discourse of nature to


explore women’s heterosexuality (and, usually, their reproductive
urges). Here, nature is the site of and a metaphor for the emergence of
same-sex desire: it is in the darkness of the night that women can come
into their own and embrace the shadow selves of their repressed sexu-
ality. The union of self and other is orchestrated by the stars in Dix’s
text and the moon in Egerton’s: traditionally a marker of women’s bio-
logical difference (their menstrual periodicity), the moon is a frequent
symbol of female desire in women’s writing (in Jane Eyre, Bertha’s and
Jane’s moments of intensest emotion are modulated by the moon,
which plays a similarly significant role in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-
paper’ and Caird’s The Wing of Azrael).
It may be intriguing that of all writers it was Egerton, elsewhere so
dismissive of women’s (political) communities, who should have venti-
lated, however tentatively, a lesbian discourse. But then she made her
name as a writer of sexually ‘daring’ texts, and with one elopement and
‘free union’ and two marriages to her name,74 her heterosexuality was
firmly established in the public mind, even to the point of notoriety. If
Egerton could get away with it, the matter was more complex for writers
like Edith (Lees) Ellis who were, in actual fact, lesbians. Ellis dealt openly
with extramarital sex in her novel Seaweed (1898), but excluded any
mention of lesbianism. By contrast, her husband Havelock included
her (albeit anonymously) in his case studies on female inversion.75
Lesbianism, it seemed, was primarily the object of scientific studies
and anti-feminist fiction; rarely was it the subject of lesbian writers
themselves.

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104 New Woman Fiction

While New Woman fiction did not explicitly explore sexual relation-
ships between women, the woman-centredness of its female communi-
ties can be read in radical lesbian terms as illustrating Adrienne Rich’s
notion of the ‘lesbian continuum’. In ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and
Lesbian Existence’ (1980) she argued that, as long as patriarchy social-

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izes women into heterosexuality, encouraging them to regard each other
as rivals and discouraging female bonding, women’s friendship con-
stitutes a form of lesbian (woman-centred) interaction, irrespective of
whether this includes actual sexual contact. She suggests that it is not
so much a matter of what women ‘do’, as what they want (from each
other), and how they define themselves in relation to other women and
also in relation to men, that determines their specific location on the
lesbian continuum. The ‘primary intensity between women’ pinpointed
by Rich as a marker of woman-identified (lesbian) existence is a key
theme of New Woman fiction, where the protagonists share their inner
life with other women, bond against male oppression, form part of a
political network for women’s rights, and in their personal life and
public work challenge male access to women. Indeed, the program-
matical celibacy of so many New Woman heroines is a self-consciously
political act, and as such rooted in the resistance to what Rich calls
‘compulsory heterosexuality’ – the imposition of social, political, legal,
economic and cultural pressures in order to channel women’s psycho-
logical, emotional and physical needs and energies into institutional-
ized dependence on and subservience to men.76
Politicized woman-centredness within a feminist organization was
nowhere so prevalent as within the Edwardian suffragette movement
and its literature. While late-Victorian feminist fiction merely hinted at
the existence of lesbian sub-cultures through the theme of female com-
munities, Edwardian literature was more open about the potentially
sexual aspects of female bonding. In Votes for Women! (1906), a play sub-
sequently fictionalized (The Convert), Elizabeth Robins radically revised
Henry James’s and Eliza Lynn Linton’s scripts of the lesbian feminist
who competes with an anti-feminist man for the ‘possession’ of another
woman. Robins’s suffragette Vida Levering is an ultra-feminine woman,
whose great personal charm and attractiveness serve to disarm conser-
vative men and ridicule their cliché of the ugly feminist while pressing
women into her service: ‘She’s bewitched you!’, an alarmed Geoffrey
Stonor tells his fiancée (VFW, III, 78), and The Times conjectured
whether Vida took ‘such care to make the best of her good looks and
pretty figure and wear such charming frocks’ because she wanted to

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Marriage and Its Discontents 105

‘please other women’.77 Indeed, it is precisely because of her sex appeal


to another woman that Vida is able to defeat her male rival both per-
sonally and politically. ‘Ransom’, the name for James’s victorious hero,
here turns into the ‘service’ Vida exacts from the Tory MP Stonor: his
party political support for a women’s suffrage bill in exchange for his

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fiancée, Jean Dunbarton: ‘Either her life, and all she has, given to this
new service – or a Ransom, if I give her up to you’ (VFW, III, 85).
Heralding the suffrage play promoted by the Actresses’ Franchise
League (founded in 1908 to lend support to the movement for women’s
enfranchisement),78 Votes for Women! was a clever publicity stunt,
‘seducing’ its audience into paying attention to its political message
through its shrewd combination of drawing-room drama (Act One),
political rally richly furnished with suffragette wit (Act Two), and melo-
dramatic love plot (Act Three). The play was first performed in London’s
Court Theatre in April 1907 and ran for three months; most of its 10
matinées and 13 evening performances were sold out.79 The lesbian
‘counter-family plot’80 runs through the three acts, culminating in the
sexual contest between Vida and Stonor in Act Three.
Act One, a social gathering at Jean’s uncle and aunt’s (Lord and Lady
Wynnstay), debunks men and marriage by farcically exposing men’s
stereotypical views of women and their inability to conceive of them
other than in relation to themselves. Lord John is convinced that
women’s commitment to social and political causes is rooted in ‘rest-
lessness’, with the only remedy consisting in getting them settled with
a husband as soon as possible; each of his appearances is punctuated by
the parrot-like phrase ‘she’s a nice creature; all she needs is to get some
“nice” fella to marry her’ (VFW, I, 45, emphasis in original). The Liberal
MP Sir Greatorex, who makes a sharp distinction between the ‘unsexed’
crowd of ‘discontented old maids and hungry widows’ ‘smell[ing] of
indiarubber’ who clamour for the vote, and ‘decent’, attractive ‘week-
enders’ like Miss Levering, is alarmed by Vida’s interest in, and discon-
certing knowledge of, suffrage matters: ‘what can a woman like you
know about it?’ (VFW, I, 46–8; emphasis in original). Men’s incompre-
hension of what women want – ‘My dear boy, you know as little about
what’s in a woman’s line as most men,’ Lady John tells Farnborough,
an officious young accolyte of Stonor’s (VFW, I, 45) – is contrasted with
women’s bonding even across political divides. While the men think
and speak in clichés, all the meaningful discourse takes place between
the women, who, for all their political differences, are linked in their
personal commitment to one another. In the course of the conversation

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106 New Woman Fiction

it transpires that the most conservative female character, Mrs Heriot,


who strongly objects to feminism, dislikes Vida’s project of opening a
refuge for homeless women and disapproves of her candid discussion
of prostitution, nevertheless came to her rescue when she was destitute
and homeless herself. Many years previously Vida had been left stranded

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after being pressurized into an abortion by the family ‘friend’ who
seduced her. Act One thus establishes sisterhood and female complicity
as essential principles underlying women’s relationships with one
another, and which act as a bulwark against men’s sexual exploitation
of women. Just as Vida’s personal experience opened her eyes to the
general position of working-class women in particular, so Vida’s story
acts as a catalyst for Jean.
As Sue Thomas notes, Jean’s physical attraction to Vida in effect
‘unheterosexes’ her.81 Coupled with her indignation about the sexual
double standard, it paves the way for her emotional initiation into
personal-political commitment to feminism during the suffragette rally
at Trafalgar Square, the setting of Act Two. At the end of this act,

JEAN tries to make her way through the knot of people surging round her.
STONOR (calls): Here – Follow me!
JEAN: No – no – I –
STONOR: You’re going the wrong way.
JEAN: This is the way I must go.
STONOR: You can get out quicker on this side.
JEAN: I don’t want to get out.
STONOR: What! Where are you going?
JEAN: To ask that woman to let me have the honour of working with
her.
She disappears in the crowd.
(II, 73, emphasis in original)

The potentially sexual implications of Jean’s decision to ‘go the wrong


way’ are elucidated in Act Three. By now she has rightly guessed that
Stonor is no other than Vida’s one-time seducer. As in Oscar Wilde’s
A Woman of No Importance (1893), the ‘fallen’ man is urged to make
amends to the woman he wronged: Jean wants Stonor to marry Vida.
Vida, who does not care a straw for Stonor (it was she who terminated
their relationship in the past), turns Jean’s naïve and self-sacrificing atti-
tude to political advantage by blackmailing Stonor with the threat that
even this seemingly most heterosexual of creatures can be turned into
a lover of women:

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Marriage and Its Discontents 107

MISS LEVERING: . . . I know what it is that men fear. It even seems as if


it must be through fear that your enlightenment will come . . . More
than any girl I know – if I keep her from you – that gentle, inflexi-
ble creature could rouse in men the old half-superstitious fear –
STONOR: ‘Fear’? I believe you are mad.

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MISS LEVERING: ‘Mad’. ‘Unsexed’. These are the words of today. In the
Middle Ages men cried out ‘Witch!’ and burnt her – the woman who
served no man’s bed or board.
STONOR: You want to make that poor child believe –
MISS LEVERING: . . . You teach us not to look to you for some of the
things we need most. If women must be freed by women, we have
need of such as – (Her eyes go to JEAN’s door.) – who knows? She may
be the new Joan of Arc.
(VFW, III, 85, emphasis in original)

While the discussion is ostensibly about feminism, the gaps and half-
finished sentences in the text point to the ‘unspeakable’ love, as does
Vida’s allusion to the witches, Othered women ‘who served no man’s
bed or board’. At this stage in the play Vida’s sexual indifference to men
has been well established: she unceremoniously sends on his way a
young male suffragist enamoured with her, takes Lady John to task
about ‘keep[ing] up that old pretence . . . That to marry at all costs is
every woman’s dearest ambition . . . You and I know it isn’t true’ (VFW,
III, 79; emphasis in original), and revels in her own freedom from
heterosexual ties: the ‘difference between me and thousands of women
with husbands and babies is that I’m free to say what I think. They aren’t’
(VFW, III, 81; emphasis in original).
Thus, while anti-feminist writers like Linton conceptualized feminism
as lesbianism, neutralizing the threat of lesbianism by staging its defeat
at the hands of heterosexual masculinity, feminist writers like Robins
radically destabilized the concept of heterosexuality, or fixed sexuality,
by making their lesbians into renegade heterosexuals, women who turn
to each other because men drive them to it: ‘No woman begins that way’,
Vida argues, ‘Every woman’s in a state of . . . allegiance to her idea of
romance and her hope of motherhood. They’re embodied for her in
man. They’re the strongest things in life – till man kills them’ (VFW, I,
59, emphasis in original).
The play subverts the cliché of the frustrated lesbian feminist by dra-
matizing her personal and political power: about to lose his wife and
his parliamentary seat at once, Stonor is compelled to take the suffrage
question seriously. There is, of course, a deeply problematic side to Votes

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108 New Woman Fiction

for Women! which hinges on the younger woman’s disempowerment.


Vida and Stonor decide Jean’s fate in her absence; Jean finds a political
voice only to lose it again in marriage and motherhood, which Vida
sees as incompatible with feminism, or at least with feminist activism.
Although Vida is aware of Jean’s limited chances of finding fulfilment

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as Stonor’s wife, she feels no compunction about ‘sacrificing’ her for the
cause: ‘One girl’s happiness – against a thing nobler than happiness for
thousands – who can hesitate?’ (VFW, III, 85). In the personal-political
fight for women’s rights, the play suggests, the stakes can sometimes be
too high, and feminists risk re-enacting male scripts when they replace
the principle of woman-centredness with that of woman-sacrifice. If
Robins was voicing her concerns with regard to a woman-led movement
that was sacrificing individual women, she was also articulating her
ambivalent feelings about lesbianism and about a sisterhood that
exploited the love of younger women in order to consolidate positions
of power for the élite. Robins herself resisted the call for self-sacrifice.
Her suffragette writings, collected in Way Stations (1913), were of
immense propagandist value to the WSPU, but, though on the WSPU
Committee, she refused to participate in activities likely to result in
imprisonment and forcible feeding. Her break with the WSPU in 1912
reflected her alienation from the autocratic leadership style of the
Pankhursts, in particular the inhuman sacrifices they continued to exact
from members who, like Constance Lytton, had already suffered severe
and permanent damage to their health.82
The lesbian theme was thus fraught with difficulties for feminist
writers, partly because even those who developed it against the back-
drop of anti-feminist and anti-lesbian fiction and sexology, remained
ultimately caught between the utopian idea of egalitarian sisterhood
and the power-dynamics of woman-to-woman relationships which all
too often replicated patriarchal hegemonies. A similar tension between
ideal and reality marked feminist fiction dealing with the free love
theme: here, too, female characters attempted to break free from patri-
archal control, only to find themselves caught once again within con-
ventional heterosexual scripts.

Free love and the anti-marriage league83

Women who demanded a greater degree of sexual freedom, Charlotte


Perkins Gilman complained, were ‘almost as bad as the antis’, the anti-
feminists (WHIO, 380). This sharp rebuke from within feminist ranks

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Marriage and Its Discontents 109

notwithstanding, some writers like Olive Schreiner did adopt a liberal


position, arguing for new forms of partnership outside the existing
structures of marriage, which had, after all, proved so injurious to
women. Others like Gilman combined their attack on marriage and the
patrilinear nuclear family with an insistence on social purity and

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eugenic communitarianism. The most conservative group, represented
by Sarah Grand, railed against the shortcomings of marriage and the
injustice of the laws that regulated it, while nevertheless continuing to
uphold its principles. The reason why contemporary marriage was a
failure was that men were not taking it seriously enough. For women
simply to follow in their footsteps amounted to a ‘return to the customs
of the poultry yard’: ‘We want progress, not retrogression. Men could
be taught the self-restraint which women have had to learn, and we
want the same law for men as for women in these matters.’84 While they
sometimes explored the sexual fantasies of their female characters, these
writers went to great lengths to stress that, when it came to living in
the real world, extramarital sex was the opposite of female liberation.
Grand, who herself had separated from but not divorced her husband,
affirmed that ‘women have nothing to gain and everything to lose by
renouncing the protection which legal marriage gives’.85 The determi-
nation with which her heroines terminate (or refuse to consummate)
sexual relationships with husbands who fail to come up to scratch is
strangely at odds with their reluctance to consider divorce even after
they have left their marriage. Divorce was not an option; not only was
it difficult to obtain for women, in Grand’s eyes it also – unaccountably
– amounted to ‘self-indulgence’86 and was thus almost as bad for the
nation’s health as the promiscuous sex of the free love camp.
The free love debate of the 1890s developed against the sensational-
ist background of Howard Hinton’s bigamy trial in 1886. The main
agenda of the trial was to discredit the theories that Howard Hinton’s
father, James Hinton, had promoted, and to expose the Hintonian com-
munity which was practising them. In Life in Nature (1862), James
Hinton had advocated free love as a mystical form of communion with
nature. His book had an immense impact on late-Victorian thinkers;
Havelock Ellis wrote half a century later that ‘the universe was changed’
for him after reading it,87 and Edith Ellis devoted most of her Three
Modern Seers (1910) to James Hinton, whom she saw as the major seer
(guru) of his age, a forerunner of Nietzsche and Edward Carpenter (TMS,
17–153). At the heart of Hintonism was the idea that men and women
should not feel bound by institutional ties, but should express and

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110 New Woman Fiction

live their sexuality in harmony with their bodies. In practice, Hinton


ascribed a very different place to women than to men. As Havelock Ellis
remarked in a letter to Schreiner, he insisted on women’s nakedness but
oddly failed to mention men’s.88 With more evidence of James Hinton’s
sexual obsessions coming to light, it became clear even to his admirers

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that, while free love might well be ‘free’ for male Hintonians, it cer-
tainly was not for the women. ‘Did he apply the same measures to man
and to woman?’ Schreiner nervously asked in 1884, ‘Would he have
been satisfied if his wife had had six “spiritual husbands”?’89 A year later
her ambivalent feelings had turned into openly acknowledged
‘loathing’. Hinton’s sister-in-law had told her that he ‘used to sit her
naked on his knees, and play with her: his theory was that a man’s wish
for contact with a woman’s body was right, and must be gratified’.90
Emma Frances Brooke recalled an incident which involved Hinton
chasing her through a garden, all the while maintaining that she had a
sacred duty to sacrifice herself to his needs.91
While not every male advocate of free love had similar inclinations,
the Hinton affair illustrates very clearly that there was a great deal more
at stake for women than for men. Even when, as in the case of the
female Hintonians, they were subjected to sexual exploitation, they still
faced rather more social ostracism than the men. In fact, as some female
members of the Legitimation League stated in the late 1890s, the prize
women paid could be ‘unendurable’: economic dependence, sole
responsibility for any children resulting from free unions, and loss of
respect and social standing in the outside world.92
When in 1897 the Legitimation League (founded in 1893 to lobby for
illegitimate children’s rights) started to promote free love, the leader-
ship took pains to assure its members that free love was predicated on
sex equality and women’s bodily autonomy. Yet even in its own ranks
some men held that it was impossible to ‘love and respect a woman
who is “the common property of the herd” ’.93 Such beliefs reintroduced
the double standard through the backdoor, pushing women into a posi-
tion of promiscuity and moral delinquency. As Arthur Wing Pinero illus-
trated in The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895), free-loving women were
inevitably degraded to the role of mistress. Ironically, what most female
free lovers wanted was not more sex, but the right to give or withhold
their consent to whether sexual intercourse would take place.
While ‘free’ love was generally interpreted as the freedom to form suc-
cessive relationships, to many women it encapsulated freedom from
unwanted physical contact. This was of crucial importance at a time
when marriage still rested on the notion of permanent and irretrievable

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Marriage and Its Discontents 111

consent to sexual intercourse. It was only in the early 1890s that a


husband’s right to ‘detain’ (a euphemism for rape) his wife came to be
challenged by the courts in a case that made legal history. In the late
1880s Edmund Jackson had obtained a decree for restitution of conju-
gal rights after his wife Emily had left him. When she failed to comply

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with the court order to return home, Jackson abducted her and initi-
ated further legal proceedings while keeping her confined to a relative’s
house. In 1891 the court ruled that he was in the right since ‘where
the relations are those between husband and wife, there may be a
detention which is not illegal’.94 However, the Appeal Court judges
overturned the verdict and unanimously found for Emily Jackson, com-
paring her detainment to slavery. To feminists, this was a decisive
‘turning point’ in marital relations: Grand wrote that it ‘practically
emancipated the married woman from the degradation imposed upon
her when she was a mere chattel of her husband’s’.95 For the first time
in British legal history, wives were acknowledged to have the right to
refuse cohabitation – the first step towards outlawing marital rape (not
to become a criminal offence until a full century later, in 1991). Legal
opinion was divided at the time, and conservative critics like Eliza Lynn
Linton (though herself a separated wife) strongly sided with the hus-
band, conjuring up images of the end of marriage and the demise of
civilization.96 Emily Jackson and her sisters were attacked by mobs after
the Appeal Court ruling.97
Whether they refused sex within marriage or practised it in relation-
ships that were not sanctioned by the law, women had to bear the full
brunt of public disapproval and personal reprisals. As Edith Lanchester’s
case demonstrates, these could be extremely serious. A young middle-
class socialist who openly lived with her lover, Lanchester was com-
mitted to a private asylum in 1895 at the instigation of her father, but
was released after some days when public pressure was mounted by her
political friends. The official medical diagnosis was ‘insanity’ resulting
from ‘over-education’; her refusal to marry proved that she could not
take care of herself and had to be looked after in an institution.98 This
was not an isolated case of moral hysteria; under the Mental Defectives
Act of 1913 (in force until 1959), some 10,000 women were sent to
mental hospitals because they had had premarital sex or illegitimate
pregnancies.99
Faced with public disapprobation or worse, New Woman writers who
advocated free love were at pains to differentiate their model of roman-
tic love from the stigma of promiscuity; thus Schreiner distanced herself
sharply from readers who embraced short-lived couplings: ‘Because

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112 New Woman Fiction

[Lyndall,] that poor little child of seventeen . . . nobly refused to marry


a man she did not absolutely love, I have had women of six and twenty
write to me as if I could feel it right that they should form temporary
unions!!!’100 What writers like Schreiner envisioned were long-term rela-
tionships, marriages in principle though not in name, with the differ-

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ence that both partners were guaranteed individual freedom and the
exclusive right to their own bodies. Love could not be legislated for, it
was only in an atmosphere of freedom that feelings were able to develop
naturally.101 Free love writers rejected the existing system of marriage
because it gave men sexual licence without moral responsibility while
depriving women of their most basic rights, and because it forced
couples to stay together, whether they cared for each other or not.
Not only marriage but also the restrictions that were placed on
the social contact between unmarried women and men came under
attack. In her pamphlet A Noviciate for Marriage (1894), Edith Ellis took
the innocence/ignorance debate of writers like Grand a significant
step further by proposing that couples considering marriage should
be given the official stamp of approval for premarital sex. This would
give both partners, especially the woman, the opportunity to get
to know the other person intimately, enabling her to gain ‘full knowl-
edge’ of what marriage entailed and to make a ‘deliberate choice’
(NFM, 10–13).
The freedom to enter and terminate relationships was materially con-
tingent on the economic independence of both; this freedom, Schreiner
emphasized, was not available when one partner was financially
dependent on the other:

I think that for a successful sexual union it is absolutely necessary


the woman should be materially independent of the man and have
her own work life, otherwise he is not free. A man cannot say to a
woman who depends entirely on him, and has no work in her life,
‘Leave me’.102

That freedom and equality are in jeopardy as soon as female autonomy


is at stake is illustrated in Gertrude Dix’s The Image Breakers (1900). As
long as Leslie Ardent leads her own professionally independent life, her
relationship with John Redgold represents the ideal free union. Unfor-
tunately he proves too conventional to understand her concept of free
love. Whereas, at the start of their sexual relationship, she opens a bird
cage bought in town, releasing the birds into the fresh country air as a

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Marriage and Its Discontents 113

sign of her and Redgold’s freedom, he remains stuck in stereotypical


notions of female morality and gendered power relations:

It would have grieved her if she could have guessed at Redgold’s


mental phrasing as he told himself that he was caught at last . . . He

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had been used to traps rather than to temples with the candid open
door. Now, too, his pleasure-loving nature realised an unwonted
responsibility . . . He could say with truth that he had never been a
first invader, preferring those safer grounds which fly their own
signals . . . The game had been played according to the rules of such
games. It had but meant the catching of birds in open cages. If the
silly creature forgot to sing, moped, made a prison of a momentary
halting-place, it had itself to blame, and a certain unlooked-for
embarrassment was only to be got over by setting comfortable dis-
tance between the cage and you . . . But all this pretty sport was over
now. It seemed to him as if, for the first time, life had begun in
earnest. He was no longer the freelance of yesterday . . . He welcomed
with open heart his delicate burden. Sweet, darling butterfly! her
wings were still untarnished. Great heavens! He held his breath to
think of the dangers this wild innocence had escaped. Safe – safe with
him! As soon as it was possible, he must take her away from the
scramble of her Bohemian existence, to place her in the security of
that home which now formed the subject of his thoughts – safe shrine
of the well-beloved woman.
(IB, 190–1; emphasis in original)

In Redgold’s traditional mind, women (literally ‘birds’) are only


respectable if they live in cages, whereas men must at all costs avoid
getting trapped into wanting to share their cage. Aware of Leslie’s
‘respectability’ (virginity), he is confused by her wish to be with him
and yet for them to remain legally unbound. Incapable of conceiving
of a responsible, egalitarian and non-exploitative sexual relationship
outside marriage, he can only think of institutionalizing their love even
though he resents the idea of marriage. From the beginning, he con-
ceptualizes their relationship as a power-struggle. Insisting on the prin-
ciple of exclusive ownership, at one point he tries to make Leslie give
up her best woman friend. Increasingly, Leslie is torn between her love
for Redgold and her reluctance to become part of a conventional family
set-up. The intense pressure he exerts on her when marriage becomes
an opportune step in his political career triggers a severe depression

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114 New Woman Fiction

which costs her her job; the loss of her financial independence leads to
the breakdown of their relationship. Materially and emotionally more
and more dependent on Redgold, she loses all sense of her own iden-
tity, while he, for his part, begins to smart under the restrictions placed
on his freedom of movement:

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From day to day Leslie’s struggle grew more hopeless; her moment
of confessed failure . . . a more imminent terror. Sometimes she had
felt that the most successful and easy independence would not be
too great a price to pay for love, the warm house, the child. But now,
when the fight [to find work] went hardest, she most dreaded to give
it up for lame wifehood with the man to whom it seemed, she had
ceased to be a companion . . . At the same time, with nothing in
herself to cling to, her whole being was absorbed in one unspoken
appeal to him for his love . . . He knew that she was suffering unac-
countably. Her pale face haunted him like a reproach, while he asked
himself what more he could do – what else she wanted. He began to
dread the hours he must spend with her . . . He told himself over and
over again that when they were married all would be right. But this
conviction did not deepen as the time went on . . .
(IB, 306–8)

Frozen into duty, their relationship is at breaking-point when Leslie


decides to leave so that she can try and recover her independence: ‘Only
her own will to win self-mastery by work could restore her to strength
and sanity once more’ (IB, 332). Eventually the couple get together
again: by then Leslie has found new work and Redgold has broken free
from his political opportunism. The novel ends with their mutual agree-
ment that they will never marry. The text thus reverses traditional
paradigms: true romance, it suggests, is possible only outside marriage.
When feminist writers discussed free love, they thus frequently drew
attention to the need for both sexes to liberate themselves from the ide-
ological cage of conventional marriage. Women had to protect their
material independence at all costs; men had to guard against possessive
urges and struggle free from their sexual conservativism. If men did not
release women into the (professional, financial and social) freedom they
themselves enjoyed, ‘free’ love turned into convention and became syn-
onymous with institutionalized marriage.
Free love as a theme is complemented in New Woman novels by the
theme of female sexual transgression within the context of marriage.
Some novels introduce the topic through theoretical discussions which

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Marriage and Its Discontents 115

are then programmatically acted out by the heroine. Thus in Mona


Caird’s Daughters of Danaus (1894), Hadria warns her husband-to-be that
if their marriage should ever break down, she would not feel obliged to
honour her vows. He does not take her seriously until she leaves him
and their two sons to pursue a musical career in Paris; later, when she

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has been forced to return, she takes a lover.
Other novels envision experimental or utopian solutions: marriages
in which the partners live in separate flats (as in Caird’s The Stones
of Sacrifice), or are prepared to accommodate other sexual partners.
When in Edith Ellis’s Seaweed (1898), the disabled Kit Trenowith finds
out about his wife’s sexual relationship with another man, he offers to
have ‘that chap fetched – Yes! – with emphasis – Yes, by God! he shall
come and dwell wi’ we, and I’ll throttle any bit o’ jealous devil left in
me right away if it’ll make thee happy again’ (SW, 158). But Janet has
relieved her sexual urges which, she says, were ‘just love spasms as come
and go like those of the beasts i’ the field’ (SW, 159); her husband’s
tolerance strengthens her love for him and works to consolidate their
marriage:

Mon, thee – thee and no other art all as I want i’ this world.
(SW, 150)

Cause thee’ve understood as no one else could . . . how it was as I


were mazed wi’ life and took the rope length as you gave me . . . You
may let the rope go, mon! Yes the whole length of it, and perhaps
‘cause you’ll never tighten it nor yet knot it, I’ve a mind to stop. The
queer part is I’m noane repentin’ as I ought to, for if I’d never gone
from thee for that day I should never i’ all this world know what I
know for sure now . . .
(SW, 160)

Some texts, like Syrett’s Three Women (1912), feature free women
devoted to their careers, who have occasional affairs without getting
seriously involved; others are about women who choose men merely to
get pregnant by them, and break off the relationship once they have
achieved their objective. In Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia (1895) the
heroine marries only for the child she desires to have; she picks the man
who seems most suited as a biological father, not the one she likes best.
New Woman fiction thus reconceptualized late-Victorian ideas of
female and male sexuality by challenging patriarchal medical, popular
and literary definitions of heterosexuality and lesbianism, rejecting

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116 New Woman Fiction

institutionalized male sexual exploitation of women, and projecting a


new kind of sexual relationship outside conventional marriage. This
sweeping revision of sexual roles was complemented by, and related to,
the New Woman’s even more radical dislocation of the concept of
gender.

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4
The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality

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[I]t must never be forgotten that the differences which nature
has fixed between the sexes are insuperable . . . The protectors
of ‘true womanhood’ insist on these differences; but the
insurgents ought to insist on them too. It is not only useless,
it is suicidal to deny them . . . The perpetual . . . unassailable
differences, organic and functional, biological and psycho-
logical, between men and women are just the safeguard which
may enable men without scruple and apprehension to make
women their political peers. Women may safely be relieved
from political disabilities simply because they can never become
men.
J. B. Bury, ‘The Insurrection of Women’ (1892)1

At a time when even those sympathetic to the women’s movement


asserted rigid notions of sexual difference, if only to deflate conserva-
tive fears about the sexual anarchy that would follow in the wake of
women’s political emancipation, feminists challenged the biological
and psychological premise on which the sex/gender equation was based.
While in the motto to this chapter women’s claim to citizenship is
linked to their inalterable difference from men, New Woman writers,
arguing for women’s rights on the grounds of their essential sameness,
suggested in their cross-dressing narratives that women could, in fact,
become men.
The last chapter explored the degree to which masculinity became the
target of feminist anger. By seeking to incriminate virtually all contem-
porary men of inherent immorality, and by contrasting male sexual vio-
lence with the caring ethic of many women, writers mobilized gendered
stereotypes about intrinsically ‘male’ and ‘female’ traits. At the same

117

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118 New Woman Fiction

time they defined gender as a social, not biological, category by showing


that, in order to keep women subordinated to men, traditional notions
of femininity were enforced by the patriarchal framework of the family,
marriage, and medicine. The primary signifiers of femininity, female
dress codes and the cult of motherhood visibly inscribed biological dif-

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ference as social and spatial. The reproductive imperative conceptually
conflated woman into womb, while the structures regulating mother-
hood imposed domesticy, dependency and self-sacrifice. Denied the
right to bodily autonomy, women writers turned the body into a site of
feminist resistance. This chapter examines the way in which the New
Woman’s cross-dressing and mothering plots served to destabilize the
Victorian body politic.
Transvestism, Marjorie Garber argues, disrupts the binary opposites
which structure the sexual and social order (male/female, sex/gender,
straight/gay), thereby visualizing ‘not just a category crisis . . . but the
crisis of category itself’.2 To what extent, then, did feminist writers rep-
resent the fin-de-siècle crisis of gender as a crisis of category, and how
important was their suggestion that gender was not only fundamentally
separate from anatomical sex, but also that femininity and heterosexu-
ality themselves constituted elaborate masquerades?

(Un)masking desire

A cultural phenomenon and vibrant metaphor long before the fin de


siècle, women’s cross-dressing was reinvigorated by the Victorian
women’s movement because, by demonstrating the essential performa-
tivity of gender, it enabled feminists to challenge biological notions of
sexual difference deployed to rationalize women’s political disempow-
erment as the product of ‘nature’. Feminists were keen to celebrate
activist forebears and military heroines whose cross-dressing exploits
showed that it was costume, not the body, which inscribed gender and
assigned social power to the wearer.
From the mid-century ‘disguise autobiographies’ by notable women
sailors and soldiers began to enjoy immense popularity, and at the fin
de siècle music hall impersonators like Vesta Tilley attracted record audi-
ences and wages.3 As personal accounts were turned into literature con-
sumed by a mass audience, individual readers were inspired to follow
the example of their heroines, and in their turn came to provide textual
material for further stories.4 In fiction about cross-dressing, protagonists
often refer to real-life women like George Sand and the doctor James
Barry as role models (Grand, HT, 456).

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 119

It was against the background of individual and collective dissatis-


faction with feminine role expectations on the one hand, and lived
experience transmuted into intertextual referentiality on the other, that
female cross-dressing developed as a theme in fin-de-siècle feminist
fiction. The New Woman novel reconfigured the Amazon heroine as a

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middle-class daughter, often with artistic aspirations, who, frustrated
with the constraints of domesticity, seeks to carve out a space for herself
by disguising herself as a man. It is unusual for such a heroine to take
on an entirely new gender identity; more commonly she complements
her experience of ‘femininity’ through clandestine ‘masculine’ esca-
pades. In The Heavenly Twins Angelica goes on nightly outings in the
guise of her twin brother Diavolo because she is bored and angry at
being prevented from training for a musical career:

I was not supposed to have any bent, I found a big groove ready
waiting for me when I grew up, and in that I was expected to live
whether it suited me or not. It did not suit me. It was deep and
narrow, and gave me no room to move. You see, I loved to make
music. Art! That was it . . . I wanted to do as well as to be, and I knew
[what] I wanted to do; but when the time came for me to begin, my
friends . . . came out to oppose me . . . I felt a galling sense of restraint
. . . and I determined to break the law that imposed it . . . [and] see
the world as men see it . . . and so I prepared this disguise . . .
(HT, 450–3)

In Grand’s The Beth Book the teenage protagonist dresses up as a boy in


order to join two male friends for an evening out. When taken to task
by her scandalized mother for flirting with another girl, Beth ‘burst out
laughing. “All the boys had their arms round girls,” she explained. “I
couldn’t be singular.” ’ (BB, 450–3) New Woman writers may have
sugared their message with humour, but their attack on Victorian
gender codes was entirely serious. Rewriting the Jekyll-and-Hyde theme
from a feminist perspective, they drew attention to the fact that it was
not an individual’s change of ‘body’ or conduct, but society’s percep-
tion of two diametrically opposed genders (represented by costume),
which determined moral judgements about that individual’s actions.
Behaviour which would be considered acceptable in Angelica’s or Beth’s
brothers assumes almost criminal proportions when displayed by young
women: ‘You’ve done a monstrous thing’, Beth’s mother thunders,
‘you’re so queer’ (BB, 255–6). What should really count in human inter-
action, feminist writers argued, was not the gender of the person con-

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120 New Woman Fiction

cerned, but the moral or immoral, constructive or destructive nature of


people’s actions.
To drive this point home, cross-dressing was often linked with the
themes of social purity and sexual exploitation – an odd combination
at first glance, but one which enabled writers to mitigate the female pro-

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tagonist’s transgression by contrasting it with male characters’ more
dangerous, anti-social drives and actions. Cross-dressing narratives
therefore frequently carry a warning, implying that society should be
more attentive to women’s healthy desire to lead purposeful lives, and
less tolerant of men’s wrong-doings. This message is sometimes embed-
ded in the plot itself; thus when Mrs Caldwell counters Beth’s subver-
sive impulses by sending her to her first school at the advanced age of
14, she attempts to remedy a situation which has arisen from her total
disregard for her daughter’s education. If Beth’s inquisitive mind had
been occupied by serious study, she might never have thought of mas-
querading as a boy, just as Angelica, had she been supported in her wish
to start out an artistic career, would not have opted for mere entertain-
ment instead: ‘[If] I was not allowed to apply [my gifts] systematically’,
she says, ‘[at least] I should be amused . . . And I began to be amused at
once’ (HT, 450–1).
In contradistinction to the real-life experience of many women who
lived as men and were able to gain public recognition, cross-dressing
narratives which focus on the attainment of individual fulfilment often
end with the protagonist’s voluntary return to ‘feminine’ preoccupa-
tions and the collapse of her professional career: Angelica never
becomes an artist because her husband objects to her exposing herself
to public display, and the heroine of Katherine Cecil Thurston’s Max
(1910) stops painting after falling in love with a more experienced col-
league. While the pursuit of individual happiness threatens to under-
mine professional objectives, feminist characters who use their ‘male’
identity for specifically political purposes, by trying to effect larger struc-
tural changes in society, are more successful: their stories serve as blue-
prints for feminist revolution. Thus the epynomous heroine of Lady
Florence Dixie’s Gloriana; or, the Revolution of 1900 (1890) contrives to
become Britain’s first female Prime Minister in drag in order to trans-
form the country into a socialist feminist utopia.
Whatever the plausibility of Dixie’s plot, her novel suggests that the
metaphor of the costume and the socially, sexually and politically trans-
formative power of cross-dressing in New Woman fiction relates directly
to wider cultural debates of the time. This is confirmed by contempo-
rary voices at the other end of the political spectrum. When in 1912,

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 121

at the height of suffragette militancy, the male critic Titterton looked


back at the Victorian women’s movement, he conceptualized it entirely
in terms of its challenge to dress (and therefore gender) codes, thus
implying that the improper blurring of gender identities by earlier femi-
nists was the beginning of a political process which had turned erst-

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while ladies into terrorists: ‘In the early days of the women’s movement
(roughly speaking, from Mrs Bloomer to Lady Harberton) it was the
whim of advanced female reformers to dress up as men.’5 In the 1850s
the American feminist Amelia Bloomer had failed to establish the use
of oriental pantaloons worn underneath full-skirted, knee-length
dresses; the ‘bloomer’ instantly became the target of satire, entering sen-
sation fiction with Charles Reade’s The Course of True Love Never Did Run
Smooth (1857). Thirty years later, Viscountess Harberton’s efforts to
introduce divided skirts and other trouser-like garments, by founding
the Rational Dress Society with Mrs King in 1881, were more success-
ful, mainly because towards the end of the century rational dress came
to be associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetic style pro-
moted by Constance and Oscar Wilde, William Morris, Walter Crane,
the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the Healthy and Artistic Dress
Union.6 In an article on ‘Woman’s Dress’ (1884) Wilde recommended
the use of dresses designed to hang from the shoulder rather than the
waist, thus making corsets unnecessary, defending the divided skirt on
the grounds of its ‘ease and liberty’, and advocating a style which would
unite ‘Greek principles of beauty with German principles of health’
(CWOW, 945–6). Aesthetic, feminist, and ‘hygienic’ reformers (the latter
represented by Dr Jaeger and G. B. Shaw) were clearly agreed on the
principles of ‘health, comfort and beauty’ (Rational Dress Society).7 The
establishment of women’s higher education and the inclusion of sports
in the new curriculum also contributed to changes in fashion; when
cycling became a popular leisure activity, even mainstream journals
started running or reviewing articles on ‘Bicycle Dress’ and other forms
of (moderate) rational dress.8
While aesthetic style, perhaps because it did not call into question
the principle of sexual difference (dresses for women, trousers for men),
became a middle-class vogue, feminists who challenged the sex/gender
equation by mixing ‘masculine’ garments and ‘feminine’ pursuits con-
tinued to face considerable hostility. In 1879 the Lancet had declared
bifurcated garments not only ‘unnecessary’ for women, but also ‘detri-
mental to [their] health and morals’, and as late as 1898 Lady
Harberton was denied entry to a coffee room because she was wearing
trousers, and was told to use the common bar parlour instead.9 Just as

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122 New Woman Fiction

Harberton’s adoption of ‘masculine’ clothes, perceived as a loss of sex,


was translated into a loss of class status, so the lack of ‘feminine’ under-
garments could serve as a metaphor for social degradation. In From Man
to Man (1926) Olive Schreiner’s heroine Rebekah is ridiculed for not
wearing a corset:

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when I go down the Government Avenue, and the coloured girls
sitting there laugh because they see I don’t wear stays as other women
do, it’s as if a knife ran into me under my ribs. I know I’m right; that
in years to come people will wonder women could be so mad and
foolish to deform themselves. And yet, when these women laugh at
me, I am so full of pain I can hardly walk down to the station; and
when I come home I feel I want to creep on to the bed and cry.
(FMTM, 440)

That the women who deride Rebekah are black servants, and thus triply
exploited in terms of race, class, and sex, illustrates the ideological func-
tion of dress codes which, by shaping the identity of oppressed groups
in the interests of patriarchal hegemony (Government Avenue), work
to undercut the possibility of political solidarity based on shared bodily
experience (sexual subjection). Grand’s novel Ideala (1888) makes the
opposite point, indicating the potential of cross-cultural/racial femi-
nism by having the protagonist draw inspiration for her work with the
British women’s movement from Chinese women’s resistance to foot-
binding. Significantly, it is with dress reform that Ideala starts her politi-
cal campaign: tight-lacing, it is implied, is closely allied to other forms
of social control enacted on the female body, such as the CD Acts, sexual
violence, and the abuse of prostitutes.
Dress reform was central to British feminism because it attacked
Victorian patriarchy by highlighting the constructed (and constricting)
nature of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ clothes, and therefore, by impli-
cation, of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ spheres. By throwing into relief
the disfigurement caused by corseting, feminists were able to draw
analogies between women’s bodily imprisonment in unnatural,
unhealthy and cramping garments and their confinement to mentally
and physically disabling roles, Sarah Grand was at the forefront of
writers who exposed the corset as a straitjacket of the mind. Her novel
A Domestic Experiment (1891) may serve as a case in point.
Agatha Oldham starts off her married life as the picture of ‘self-
possession, purity, and health’, and this enviable condition of mind and
body is reflected in her comfortably loose and stylishly aesthetic gar-

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 123

ments. Her ‘well-regulated mind and equable temperament’, we must


infer, are the direct result of her resistance to corseting (DE, 3–4).
However, this felicitous state of ‘perfect proportion’ is threatened by her
lack of an occupation and the sense of constriction which takes pos-
session of her mind. Soon she grows restless: ‘I want something to do

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badly,’ she says, ‘I want an object in life . . . Those who are content to
lead such an existence are mere vegetables’ (DE, 26–7). The discovery
of her husband Paul’s adultery contributes to her depression; when,
despite her illness, she rouses herself to action, the nature of her
response is affected by her mental condition. With the intention of
teaching Paul a lesson, she starts emulating the artificial dress style of
his lover:

The gown she wore now was an unhealthy, degenerate descendant


of a once rich red, and the very lines of her figure, which had been
so perfect in its natural grace and symmetry, had been deformed to
the fashion of a vulgar age. She had the regulation small waist now,
above which her bust bulged up and her shoulders expanded out of
all proportion, while her arms stood away from her sides as if they
had been attached too high to her figure. She had made herself look
as much like a Dutch dolly as she could . . .
(DE, 64–5)

Agatha’s decision to express her rebellion indirectly by refashioning


herself into a ‘Dutch dolly’ (Dolly is, in fact, the name of Paul’s lover)
could be read as an illustration of Luce Irigaray’s notion of mimicry. Iri-
garay argues that, while feminist direct action is ultimately ineffective
because it attempts to liberate women by means of the very discourse
employed to keep them subordinated to patriarchal structures (logic,
reason, and a rhetoric of rights), ‘feminine’ rebellion seeks to subvert
the male order by mimicking male discourses on Woman. An excessive
display of ‘femininity’ serves to lay bare the artificial nature of patriar-
chal images, with the result that men become entangled within their
own discursive web of gender stereotypes.10 In Irigaray’s sense, Agatha
mimics the sexual stereotype of the ‘whore’ in order to expose the fact
that her husband imposes this role on two women, his lover (the
woman in red, whose colours Agatha has adopted) and his wife.
However, Grand takes pains to show that, far from liberating her,
Agatha’s costume of hyper-femininity makes her what Dolly has been
since childhood, a creature ‘deformed figuratively as well as physically’
(DE, 65). Agatha’s depression deepens because it is now compounded

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124 New Woman Fiction

by self-loathing and acute bodily discomfort. Paul does not stop cheat-
ing her; instead, one of his friends singles her out for sexual harassment:
mimicry fails because it is decoded incorrectly. Significantly, the narra-
tive resolution comes not through feminine mimicry, but through the
feminist principle of sisterhood: Dolly and Agatha become friends.

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Crestfallen, Paul promises to reform, while Agatha returns to her
healthy style of thinking and dressing: ‘Agatha’s gown was of the
fashion that became her – the long loose statuesque draperies which
adapted themselves to the natural lines of her beautiful figure, and the
colours which satisfy.’ No longer trapped within male discourses, she is
‘herself again’ (DE, 238–9). While earlier male writers like Wilkie Collins
had suggested a correlation between unlacing and the growing of a
moustache,11 Grand makes the opposite point, emphasizing that it is
only by discarding the patriarchal apparel of ‘femininity’ that Agatha
can salvage her ‘authentic’ feminine self.
New Woman writers thus used the debate on dress reform to make
far-reaching statements about women’s external and internal oppres-
sion. Above all, woman had to refuse to be defined by male norms so
that she could be ‘herself again’, ‘as she knew herself to be, not as man
liked to imagine her’ (‘AKTN’, 58). The binary opposition between (in
George Egerton’s phrase) female self-definition and male erotic fantasy
is reflected in Grand’s novel through the dichotomy between ‘natural’
femininity, predicated on health and freedom of movement, and ‘arti-
ficial’ femininity, based on the sexual objectification of the body. And
although New Woman writers often drew on the vogue for aesthetic
fashion to make a point about rational dress, it is this emphasis on the
social rather than the sensual function of dress which differentiated
feminist from aesthetic dress reformers.
The most prominent proponents of aesthetic dress were male, and
those who were gay arguably had a vested interest in exploding rigid
codes about dress and gender. Wilde’s subversion of male dress by adopt-
ing ‘feminine’ styles – he wore velvet outfits and confounded the patri-
archal conflation of woman and flower by making lilies and sunflowers
his trademark – attracted no less hostility than women’s adoption of
‘masculine’ garments. The American response to Wilde’s knee breeches
was not dissimilar to the outrage Lady Harberton provoked with her
cycling trousers (in fact the two outfits were related in style).12
While the public reaction to male and female, decadent and feminist
cross-dressing was the same because they all raised the spectre of
androgyny, the motivation behind cross-dressing could vary consider-
ably, depending on the sex and sexual orientation of the individuals
concerned. If cross-dressing encoded sexual liberation for gay men, it

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appealed to many women primarily for economic and health reasons,


and was adopted by feminist writers for its social and political implica-
tions. Lesbians were able to combine personal fulfilment with social
status and the added cash value of male rates of pay. Thus in the early
twentieth century, Valerie Arkell-Smith, who passed herself off as a

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retired officer, married her lover and pursued a number of trades which
she would have found difficult to enter as a woman. ‘Trousers make a
wonderful difference,’ she wrote after her exposure; ‘dressed as a man I
did not, as I do now I am wearing skirts again, feel hopeless and help-
less . . . I want to up and do those things that men do to earn a living
rather than to spend my days as a friendless woman.’13 For Arkell-Smith,
male costume not only conferred economic and social power, it also
had a marked psychological impact, gendering the mind in addition to
the body. In Orlando (1928) Virginia Woolf makes the same point,
arguing that ‘clothes wear us and not we them . . . they mould our
hearts, our brains, our tongues’ (O, 132), and in The Heavenly Twins
Angelica suggests that dressing as a man, and enjoying a man’s freedom
of movement, had a profoundly masculinizing effect on her psyche: ‘I
was a genuine boy, I moved like a boy, I felt like a boy; I was my own
brother in very truth’ (HT, 456).
By contrast, when male writers took up the theme, they presented
the female cross-dresser as a castrated, sexless and sad neuter: the epony-
mous protagonist of George Moore’s ‘Albert Nobbs’ (Celibate Lives, 1927)
finds that ‘she no longer thought and felt as she used to when she wore
petticoats, and she didn’t think and feel like a man though she wore
trousers. What was she? Nothing, neither man nor woman, so small
wonder she was lonely’ (‘AN’, 64). Clearly, Moore’s female eunuch is a
far cry from the women (fictional and factual) who felt energized and
empowered, rather than traumatized, by their breeches.
If women who assumed male identities gained the social and mental
privileges of masculinity, men who cross-dressed as women did not nec-
essarily forego these privileges: they neither became shy and helpless,
nor did they suffer a loss of income. This is suggested by a letter sent
to the Family Doctor in 1888, from a man who had taken on a female
identity and who wrote that he ‘continue[d] to pursue [his] profession,
that of a painter in water colours; but [his] leisure time [he] employ[ed]
like other ladies’ – a remark echoed by a modern cross-dresser in a BBC
documentary in 1995, that he worked as a man to have more money,
but lived as a woman to be closer to people.14
One of the sites of the public debate on cross-dressing was the Victo-
rian newspaper Family Doctor. Reader correspondence between 1886 and
1894 points to significant differences between male and female dis-

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126 New Woman Fiction

courses: men dominated the debate and emphasized the sensual plea-
sure they derived from dressing as women. Thus ‘A Male Wasp-Waist’
proclaimed in 1886 that he found it ‘very comfortable to dress up in a
pretty dress, bonnet or hat, and high-heeled boots, with a tiny waist
into the bargain’. Indeed, he had been ‘struck by the number of men

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who admired [him], and would, no doubt, have liked to put their arms
around [his] small waist. If they had only known [he] was also one of
their sex!’15 ‘I simply revel in tight lacing and love to don female attire,’
a ‘Would Be Female’ reported in the same paper, and a third corre-
spondent, aptly calling him/herself ‘Dolly’, offered to send pictures
‘showing [her] figure, feet, and ankles’ to interested readers.16 In con-
tradistinction to this discourse of erotic pleasure articulated by the male
cross-dressers, one of the few women who wrote in to reveal her trans-
vestism expressed her wish for spatial freedom, voicing not her sexual,
but her social discontent with the restricting role imposed by female
garments. Significantly, she called herself a ‘Misfit’:

What sort of men, if men they be at all, are your male correspon-
dents . . . ? Why don’t they, if tired of masquerading as men, have
the courage of their convictions, and lay aside their trousers, and the
other distinguishing articles of dress of the sex they mis(s)represent
and boldly assume the petticoats . . . of the sex that they appear to
envy . . . Let them take a leaf out of the reforming programme of
women, who, when dissatisfied with . . . their own costume, bodily
annex and wear in its stead such garments of the opposite sex as we
desire. As for myself, I wear the male hat, tie, collar, cuffs, coat, and
vest, as well as the ‘unmentionables’ . . . These portions of men’s
costume I, together with a large number of women, have adopted
because I am thoroughly disgusted with the dress of our sex, and
hope for a still more sweeping reform than has yet been accom-
plished. I . . . have been through the whole process of figure training,
having had while at school to wear stiff and heavily-boned stays, as
tightly laced as possible, both day and night, over which all the
pupils had securely locked steel waist-belts, the keys of which were
kept by the house governess . . . I long for the freedom of the male
attire . . .17

The difference this letter presents to the male accounts is striking. For
a woman to dress as a man brought relief from the physical constraints
of Victorian femininity; for a man to dress as a woman meant to capture
the elusive nature of femininity (George Moore, ‘enthralled by the

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 127

mystery of petticoats’, had lady’s corsets delivered to his address).18


Female undergarments even appeared to boost masculine potency:
‘Nothing becomes a man or boy so well as the erectness produced by
wearing stays’. The men sought to sanction their sexual arousal (‘The
sensation of a tight-lacer is exquisite when laced in so tight that it seems

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a marvel the corsets do not burst’) through a rhetoric of health, prais-
ing the ‘comfort and benefit’ the female attire bestowed on them, and
‘remasculinising’ their masquerade by pointing to the frequent use
made of the corset by cavalry officers and the Prussian military.19
In reality, the corset was a health hazard: it deformed the skeleton
and impaired the blood circulation, causing respiratory problems and
long-term damage to the lungs and liver; at worst, physical exertion and
dancing could have fatal consequences. In view of doctors’ frequent
advice to women to guard against the ‘systematic torture’ of tight-
lacing, the male cross-dressers’ recourse to ‘health’ arguments was
a rhetorical non-starter.20 Although the woman transvestite also
employed a discourse of health and comfort, she did not fetishize her
male garments, expressing instead her dissatisfaction, not simply with
female dress, but with women’s general lack of freedom. Most of the
male correspondents represented their cross-dressing as a leisure-time
activity complementary to, but not a substitution for, their male gender
identity; the female cross-dresser, on the other hand, wanted to free
herself from the restrictions of femininity. She thus used a similar dis-
course to that of feminist novelists.
Like ‘Misfit’ in the Family Doctor debate, and like many of the women
who assumed male identities, the protagonists of New Woman narra-
tives masquerade as men in order to escape physical and social
restraints. With its socially dissonant discourse on dress reform and its
recurrent theme of transvestism, New Woman fiction sought to con-
found patriarchal culture’s postulation of femininity, but while the
cross-dressing plot served to destabilize the categories of gender and sex-
uality, many feminist writers went to extraordinary lengths to clear their
heroines of any suspicion of deviance, sexual desire or even heterosex-
ual awareness in their intimate friendships with men. Thus Grand’s
Angelica, though ‘work[ing] upon the Tenor [the man she visits every
night] with little caressing ways that won his heart and drew from him
expressions of tenderness’, steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that she
is physically attracted to him: ‘I’ll have no sex in my paradise,’ she
declares before her identity is lifted, and maintains afterwards that
she should ‘never have wanted to marry him’ because she could not
have ‘care[d] for him in any other relation’ than that of a friend (HT,

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128 New Woman Fiction

405, 423, 483). The appearance of sexlessness was, in fact, a necessary


prerequisite for many real-life female cross-dressers to protect their
social standing: ‘once sexually active’, Julie Wheelwright notes, ‘their
entire identity was placed in jeopardy.’21 The threat of being exposed as
a woman or, later, of seeing their professional reputation damaged by

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sexual slander, caused many female soldiers to take great pains to
uphold their chastity, or at least strongly to protest it in their retro-
spective accounts. New Woman writers, similarly intent on avoiding the
charge of sexual perversion, tended to displace their heroines’ ambiva-
lent sexualities on to their men friends.
Frequently accused of ‘erotomania’ by conservative critics, feminist
writers knew only too well that with their choice of cross-dressing plots
they were opening themselves up to attack. Patriarchal anxieties about
the unsexing effect of feminism were reinforced at the turn of the
century by the sexologists, whose conflation of homosexuality and
transsexuality (the belief that lesbians and gays were really men and
women trapped in the wrong body) reimposed a heterosexual economy
on to the transgressive body, while marking women who did not
conform to normative ‘feminine’ behaviour as sexual deviants.22 Cross-
dressing was defined as a clinical symptom of homosexuality, with men
suffering from ‘effemination’ and women from ‘viraginity’: their ‘strong
preference for male garments’, Krafft-Ebing claimed, demonstrated their
‘strongly marked characteristics of male sexuality’. At the extreme end
of ‘degenerative homosexuality’, ‘gynandry’, women possessed ‘of the
feminine qualities only the genital organs; thought, sentiment, action,
even external appearance are those of the man.’23 ‘[S]exually inverted
women’, Havelock Ellis wrote, showed ‘a very pronounced tendency
. . . to adopt male attire’, and generally resembled men in character
and temperament:

when they still retain female garments these usually show some traits
of masculine simplicity, and there is nearly always a disdain for the
petty feminine artifices of the toilet. Even when this is not obvious,
there are all sorts of instinctive gestures and habits which may
suggest to female acquaintances the remark that such a person ‘ought
to have been a man’. The brusque energetic movements, the attitude
of the arms, the direct speech, the inflexions of the voice, the mas-
culine straightforwardness and sense of honour, and especially the
attitude towards men, free from any suggestions either of shyness or
audacity, will often suggest the underlying psychic abnormality to a
keen observer . . . In the habits not only is there frequently a pro-

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 129

nounced taste for smoking . . . but there is also a dislike and some-
times incapacity for needlework and other domestic occupations,
while there is often some capacity for athletics.24

Blurring the differences between anatomical sex, socially constructed

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gender and individual sexual orientation, the sexologists feminized gay
men while attributing stereotypical ‘masculine’ traits to lesbians. Gay
himself, Edward Carpenter retained the cliché of the ‘fiery, active, bold
and truthful’, yet somewhat harsh and unrefined female invert, whose
mind was ‘more logical, scientific, and precise than usual with the
normal woman.’25 What this, of course, implied was that ‘normal’
women were ‘naturally’ deficient in sharp thinking and moral rectitude,
just as ‘real’ men were biologically unfitted for domestic chores. Women
who showed the same incapacity were lesbians, and lesbians were men
in all but the most essential of aspects: ‘[n]o masculine character is
usually to be found in the sexual organs,’ Ellis reassured his readers, and
‘we do not find any trace of a beard or a moustache’.26 Thus, in their
attempt to classify sexuality and its different articulations, the sexolo-
gists froze gender into fixed categories; by contrast, feminists, concerned
with regulating male sexuality, sought to release women from the rigid
constraints of male-defined femininity. Having to contend with male
fears of feminist ‘inversion’, New Woman writers projected the socially
and sexually transgressive nature of transvestism (a metaphor for femi-
nism) on to the deviant male; it is for this reason that female cross-
dressing in New Woman fiction frequently turns into an implicit
exploration of homosexual desire.
How effectively, then, did the cross-dressing theme challenge Victo-
rian notions of gender and sexuality, and what role did the homosex-
ual plot play in this process? The close reading of two exemplary texts,
Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and Dixie’s Gloriana (1890), will help
to determine the parameters within which costume became the site of
fin-de-siècle sex/gender contestation and destabilisation in New Woman
fiction. These novels reflect two of the three variants of female cross-
dressing listed by Jann Matlock, who distinguishes between ‘Crazy
Masquerade[r]s’ (anatomical women who believed that they were really
men), ‘Gender Frauds’ (women who impersonated men), and
‘Masquerade[r]s of Convenience’ (women who dressed male in specific
– often work-related – contexts, but who did not otherwise pass them-
selves off as men).27 The Heavenly Twins and Gloriana represent the two
latter categories; their female protagonists masquerade not as men but
as boys in order to avoid detection and because by mimicking adoles-

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130 New Woman Fiction

cents they hope to escape sexual attention. The inevitable sexual crisis,
which arises out of the increased attraction they represent for their male
companions who masquerade as heterosexual men, is resolved differ-
ently in each case. In The Heavenly Twins the threat of homosexuality
is defused by Angelica’s hasty return to femininity, in Gloriana the reso-

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lution comes through the initiation of a heterosexual relationship.
Transvestism is thus explored through a complex system of female-to-
male, male heterosexual and feminine masquerades, and underpinned
by factors ranging from convenience (women’s non-sexual interaction
with men) to fraud (concealing feminist sentiments behind a discourse
of femininity; masking homosexual desire with a rhetoric of heterosex-
ual romance). In Grand’s novel the heroine masquerades for purposes
of convenience, in Dixie’s she practises gender fraud in order to insti-
gate a feminist revolution.
Both texts make the point that if costume is an arbitrary signifier of
gender identity, so too are names. Names are often are no more than
verbal costumes: ‘Gloriana’ turns herself into ‘Hector’ at the beginning
of her offensive against patriarchy, reverting to ‘Gloria’ to celebrate her
feminist victory over it, and when ‘Angelica’ masquerades as a man, she
becomes ‘Diavolo’. By juxtaposing different-sexed twins whose sex roles
clash with their ‘natural’ inclination, Grand explicitly challenges the
social construction of gender. Diavolo’s gender and name reflect
Angelica’s nature to a much greater extent than they do his: not only
‘the taller, stronger, and wickeder of the two’ and the leader in all their
pranks, Angelica is also her brother’s intellectual superior (HT, 126). It
is she who wants to have a career, he who would be content with a
‘feminine’ lifestyle; in stark opposition to their ‘natural’ leanings, he
is trained for an active public life, whereas she is consigned to
domesticity.
Coincidental with the transition from childhood androgyny to
teenage gender training, the breakdown of the twins’ quasi-symbiotic
relationship is instrumental to the imposition of inflexible sex-role
expectations. As children the fusion of separate-sex identities (a comic
variation of the theme explored in Wuthering Heights) and, equally
importantly, parental permissiveness made it possible for them to tran-
scend gender. Cross-dressing proved empowering, enabling them to
shape their experience (for example, by managing to be co-educated).
All of this changes with the onset of puberty.
In her mid-teens Angelica learns that, when coupled with a maturing
female body, gender codes impose a feminine masquerade which, by
accentuating sexual difference, disrupts the psychic unity with her

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 131

brother. As if to illustrate that ‘costume, not anatomy, is destiny’,28 the


transition from gender resistance to the reluctant recognition of gender
norms, and from symbiosis to separateness, is marked by a garment that
inscribes femininity: ‘She came down to the drawing room quite shyly
in her first long dinner dress, with her dark hair coiled neatly high on

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her head.’ Ironically, it is Angelica’s very desire to experiment with dif-
ferent roles which precipitates her confinement. What she sees as an
assertion of her fluid sense of self – ‘it [is] only . . . a disguise’, she tries
to reassure her brother – is decoded as a sign of her acceptance of a
stable gender identity: the reaction of the adults ‘mak[es] her feel as if
she were on the eve of something momentous’, and ‘Diavolo would not
look at her a second time’ (HT, 174–5).
Once she has assumed the mask of femininity, Angelica loses her
earlier freedom to play with gender. When the twins decide to give a
public performance of a play she has written, their father intervenes to
enforce separate, firmly gendered, once and for all fixed roles: genteel
domesticity for the daughter, a military career for the son. Playing at
femininity thus only serves to establish femininity as a social role which
then becomes a permanent fixture. By highlighting the essentially per-
formative, never ontological, nature of femininity, Grand anticipates
Freudian analyst Joan Riviere’s contention that there is no essential dif-
ference between ‘genuine womanliness and the “masquerade” . . . they
are the same thing.’29 It is no coincidence that the never-performed play
which spells the end of Angelica and Diavolo’s joint masquerades is enti-
tled ‘The Condemned Cell’, an apt metaphor for the ‘deep and narrow’
cell (‘groove’) of femininity in which Angelica is now condemned to
live ‘whether it suit[s] [her] or not’ (HT, 450). Dubbed ‘The Condemned
Sell’ by Diavolo, the ‘play’ (masquerade) by a further slip of the tongue
becomes a metaphor of the condemned (female) self; indeed, Grand’s
epynomous short story is about a ‘lady’ sentenced to death.
The failed play serves a metaphorical function in more than one
sense. By drawing attention to her playfulness, the text highlights the
anarchic aspects of Angelica’s character: an amusing heroine, she was
more likely to ‘seduce’ a Victorian readership than a more serious-
minded feminist would have been. The Heavenly Twins operates a clever
strategy of comic relief, defusing the moral high tone and grave recti-
tude of the New Woman Evadne (who, as George Meredith noted,
‘would kill a better work with her heaviness’)30 by making her story
interact with the lively adventures and explosive wit of Angelica, whose
pleasure-loving character is more endearing, even if her beliefs and
actions are more radical than Evadne’s. While thus ostensibly under-

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132 New Woman Fiction

cutting the feminist challenge of the New Woman, Angelica’s cross-


dressing actually strengthens it.
On the other hand it is her very playfulness which prevents Angelica
from developing a sense of responsibility. After the paternal showdown
she adopts two new masquerades simultaneously, wifehood (she marries

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a much older friend of the family, instantly conferring on him the
sexless function of a ‘Daddy’) and boyhood (she impersonates her
brother and befriends the village tenor). Her failure to consider the emo-
tional impact she has on the men in her life is ultimately condemned.
In a sense, Angelica not only plays a boy, she also assumes some of the
qualities of a playboy, trifling with the feelings of the Tenor, who per-
forms the feminine male to her masculine female. What for Angelica
starts off as a masquerade of convenience (being able to go out at night
and experience ‘life’ without the risk of sexual harassment) soon turns
into a fraud as she deceives the Tenor into an intimacy whose para-
meters remain unknown to him.
Angelica also deceives herself. Her friendship with the Tenor, by
replacing the lost companionship with her brother, allows her to recap-
ture some of the freedom of her childhood. But the imaginary return
to a state of ‘non-sexed’ androgyny is a dangerous delusion, for
Angelica’s relationship with the Tenor is suffused with sexual ambigu-
ity. Given that, by telling Diavolo about his infatuation with Angelica,
the Tenor effectively courts the Boy by proxy, her failure to read between
the lines is astounding. Despite his (to late-twentieth century readers,
obvious) sexual attraction to her, she continues to believe that, by per-
forming a female as well as a male role (an Angelica adored from afar
in the daytime, a companionable Diavolo at night), she can simultane-
ously experience romance and non-sexual comradeship. That this is ulti-
mately an illusion becomes clear after a boating accident during which
her identity is revealed. The Tenor’s shocked realization of the Boy’s
‘real’ sex is accompanied by his even more unsettling recognition of the
specific nature of his desire, a desire implicit from the very beginning:
after their first meeting the Tenor ‘looked for him both by day and
night’, before their fourth encounter he wakes from a ‘queer dream’,
only to find the Boy playing the violin outside his door, and from that
point onwards ‘[h]is heart burned within him. It was no use to tell
himself that the Boy was only a boy’ (HT, 380, 386, 396).
The mirror scene, which compels him to acknowledge his forbidden
love, is itself the direct outcome of the homoerotic tension which
Angelica belatedly begins to sense. After an extended rowing excursion,
the Tenor, deeply absorbed in the sensuous atmosphere of the night and

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 133

unwilling to let go of the Boy, makes a move towards him. Suddenly


aware of the sexual implications of their close contact, Angelica is
unable to keep up her masquerade; the Boy eludes the Tenor only to
lose his balance and go overboard:

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Air perfumed with flowers; music, motion, warmth, and stillness;
moonlit meadows, shadowy woods, the river, and the boat; it had
been a time of delight too late begun and too soon ended. But exal-
tation cannot last beyond a certain time at that height, and then
comes the inevitable reaction. It came upon the Tenor and the Boy
quite suddenly, and for no apparent reason. It was the Boy who felt
it first, and let off playing, then the sound ceased, and the Tenor
rowed on diligently . . . [T]he Tenor . . . had not noticed the land-
marks as they passed, and thought they had still some distance to go
. . . he made a gesture toward [the Boy].
The Boy jumped up laughing, and flourishing his violin as if he
would hit the Tenor on the head with it. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he cried,
‘or I’ll . . .’
‘Take care, for God’s sake!’ the Tenor exclaimed.
But too late. His excitable companion, in the middle of cutting a
fantastic caper, reeled, lost his balance, plunged head foremost into
the water, and sank like a stone.
(HT, 441–2)

The sexual connotations of the ‘delight too late begun and too soon
ended’, the meaningful gaps in the Boy’s last speech before ‘he’ ceases
to exist (which recall similar absences in Robins’s Votes for Women!), the
‘landmarks’ the Tenor fails to recognize, the musical instrument with
the ‘female’ body with which the Boy threatens to enlighten him, fol-
lowed by the revelations of her own body which crush the Tenor’s unar-
ticulated hopes – when read in conjunction with his highly ambiguous
antecedents, the homosexual encoding of this scene becomes blatantly
obvious.
In the course of their friendship the Tenor disclosed his secret. When
an orphan of about the Boy’s present age, he was adopted by an older,
rich, ‘very liberal’ and unmarried gentleman who heard him sing one
day and vowed to ‘make a great singer’ of him if he would ‘go away
with him’. The Tenor takes care to assure the Boy that ‘he was a good
man’ and that he, the Tenor, did his utmost not to ‘disappoint’ him,
either in his desire to train his voice or ‘otherwise’. Their relationship
rested on deep ‘affection’ and ‘love’, but was abruptly and tragically ter-

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134 New Woman Fiction

minated by a shooting accident (HT, 426). At the very moment when


the Tenor made ready to shoot a particularly ‘splendid’ stag, his bene-
factor, who had been away for the day, emerged, presumably to embrace
him:

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‘just as I pulled the trigger, someone sprang up from the heather
between me and the stag – sprang up, uttered a cry, and reeled and
fell’ – the last words were spoken with a gasp.
(HT, 429)

Again the homosexual moment is marked by gaps (and gasps), its


textual non-representation prompting its visualization as an image. The
Tenor shot the man he loved ‘as [a] son’ at the precise point at which
this father substitute threatened to break the incest taboo. Years later
Angelica unwittingly reenacts this scene by jumping overboard when
the Tenor is about to breach the homosexual taboo. The discursive ren-
dering of the two ‘falls’ is remarkably similar. While Angelica gets away
with the bare shock, the Tenor, for whom the boating incident recalls
the earlier shooting accident, and with it, his fear of castration, has to
confront his homosexual desire:

this was not the Boy, but the Tenor’s own lady, his ideal of purity,
his goddess of truth, his angel of pity, as, in his foolishly fond way
[of] idealizing, he had been accustomed to consider her. It was
Angelica herself! . . . ‘The little wretch,’ he began, ‘how dare he’ – he
stopped there, realizing the absurdity of it, realizing that there
was no Boy; and no lady for the matter of that . . . It was a terrible
blow . . .
(HT, 446)

In his simultaneous fear of and attraction to homosexuality, the Tenor


had projected his wish for ‘normality’ on to an idealized woman, a safe,
because inaccessible, object of veneration, while at the same time
feeding his forbidden desire through the physical proximity of her
brother, even articulating this desire through the discourse of chival-
rous romantic love. ‘The taboo against incest and, implicitly, homo-
sexuality’, Judith Butler argues, causes the ‘repression of an originally
homosexual libidinal directionality and produces the displaced phe-
nomenon of heterosexual desire.’31 In other words, the Tenor starts by
camouflaging his homoerotic desire through masquerading as a straight
if frustrated lover, but then ends by believing in the actuality of his

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 135

heterosexual attachment. His discovery that the Boy is not, in actual


fact, a boy, but is the very girl he professed to love because there seemed
no danger that he would be called on to act on it, is, indeed, ‘a terrible
blow’, as it brings home to him both the imaginary nature of his
heterosexual love-making (directed at a woman who, in this idealized

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form, never existed), and the real nature of his homosexual desire: a
‘delight too late begun’ (since only on the boating excursion did the
Tenor fully recognize his sexual impulse towards the Boy qua boy), and
‘too soon ended’ (since the mirror of the male object of desire was sub-
merged in the water only to reflect a female identity).
Faced with a desire which, though no longer unthinkable, is both pro-
hibited and now unrealizable, the Tenor seeks, but patently fails, to
annul this desire: ‘how sick he was of the whole subject! If only it would
let him alone! But what pretty ways he had had . . . What a dear, dear
lad he had been . . . if only the Boy had been left him!’ (HT, 504). Unable
to go either forward or backward, he slips sideways, into death. His last
thoughts – a supplication to the divine spirit to ‘make her a good
woman yet’ (HT, 509) – reflect his identification with the ‘monster’ the
Boy has roused to life. ‘Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic
tumult of her drives . . . hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?’
Hélène Cixous asks;32 and the Tenor, in his last moments, prays, not for
himself, but for her, Angelica, and by implication for the monster which
is not Angelica (‘the monster had not yet appeared, for that . . . girl was
no monster at all’) but a representation of his living desire (HT, 504).
With the Tenor’s death Angelica suffers a major emotional crisis,
which comes to a head when she observes a ‘real’ boy grieving at his
grave: ‘All that was womanly in Angelica went out to the poor little
fellow. She would like to have comforted him, but what could she say
or do? Alas! alas! a woman who cannot comfort a child, what sort of
a woman is she?’ (HT, 519). In her lack of womanliness Angelica dis-
covers the ‘monster’ the Tenor called up with his illicit love. Full of guilt
and remorse, she returns to her husband, initiating their first passion-
ate embrace as if to expiate at one and the same time the Tenor’s sexual
and her own social transgression.
By offering herself sexually to a husband who is a father-figure,
Angelica resumes the masquerade she previously sought to elude when
she started cross-dressing: femininity. An ostentatious show of ‘femi-
nine’ (sexualized) behaviour while engaging in a male-dominated dis-
course, Riviere argued in 1929, can be a mask which a woman dons
‘both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals
expected if she is found to possess it’.33 With her entry into the male

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136 New Woman Fiction

arena and her appropriation of a male role, Angelica has effectively sub-
verted the principle of masculinity. Now that the inevitable retribution
has followed the act of ‘castration’ to which she symbolically subjected
the Tenor, she exchanges her mask of masculinity for that of a repen-
tant, submissive and essentially sexual femininity.

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In order to achieve ‘normality’, Irigaray argues, women must adopt
the mask of femininity. Established and sustained through the Oedipus
complex, the feminine masquerade constitutes ‘woman’s entry into a
system of values that is not hers, and in which she can “appear” and
circulate only when enveloped in the needs/desires/fantasies of others,
namely, men’.34 By consummating her marriage to the Father, Angelica
achieves what the Tenor was unable to consider, in his complementary
roles as son (to his benefactor) and father-figure (to the Boy). Once she
resolves the Oedipus complex, she can ‘circulate’ her ideas to a wider
audience of men, even though she remains critically tied to and regu-
lated by their desires and fantasies. At the end of the novel we read that
‘[h]er devotion to her husband continues to be exemplary, and he has
been good-natured enough to oblige her by delivering some of her
speeches in parliament lately, with excellent effect’ (HT, 567). Just as
Angelica ‘plays at’ femininity, so her husband ‘obliges’ by ‘playing at’
feminism. He does not mean it seriously, nor do his colleagues miss the
joke – whatever response suffragist speeches received in Parliament in
the 1890s, it certainly was not an ‘excellent’ one, and as a prominent
suffrage activist Grand knew this only too well.
Texts in the realist tradition like The Heavenly Twins, in which the
cross-dressing heroine is disciplined for her invasion of male space,
learns to recant her rebellious feminism, and ultimately converts to
male-identified femininity, reflect some aspects of the conditions factual
cross-dressers faced after detection. That the return to feminine clothes
and roles often constituted a punishment in itself is illustrated by
Valerie Arkell-Smith’s sinking feelings with regard to her future life in
skirts. A century earlier, Mary Ann Arnold was given lessons in needle-
work and childcare after being sacked from her job on board a ship, and
in the 1830s the female sailor George Wilson ‘was punished with soli-
tary confinement, lashings, and a diet of bread and water for refusing
to perform tasks that would mark her re-entry into the female world’.35
In view of such harsh refeminizing regimes it is not surprising that many
cross-dressers decided to accept the inevitable and embraced feminin-
ity by settling down to marriage, domesticity and, often, poverty.
In contradistinction to the realist novel, which was wary of idealistic
resolutions too far removed from contemporary reality, utopia provided

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 137

an alternative space for the exploration of feminist fantasies of social


and political transformation. Since in feminist utopia female trans-
vestism serves a political rather than individual purpose, ‘gender fraud’
becomes a sign of heroism. This is the case in Dixie’s Gloriana.
When asked what made her assume a male identity, the American

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Civil War soldier Emma Edmonds replied that it was her ‘sense of [her]
mother’s wrongs’ which had infused her with her ‘love of independence
and . . . hatred of male tyranny’.36 Like Edmonds spurred into action by
her mother’s experience of sexual oppression, the 12-year-old Gloriana
de Lara turns herself into Hector D’Estrange so that she can transform
patriarchy from within. Once elected to Parliament, she introduces a
women’s suffrage bill, but is abducted by the opposition after being
appointed Prime Minister. The outcome of the ensuing revolution is
profoundly affected by her ‘happy marriage’ of the constituencies of
feminism and socialism. As Ann Ardis has pointed out,37 it is Hector’s
unveiling of herself as a woman which gains her the support of the
wider population:

‘Friends,’ she calls out . . . ‘the greatest evils we have to face are the
social ones. To them I ascribe all the sufferings and sins of the poor,
the sins and false position of the rich. . . . [Y]ou must set Nature on
an even footing, and do away with the artificial barriers which you
have raised against woman’s progress and advancement; for until she
has the same powers and opportunities as man, a thorough and
exhaustive reform of the evils which afflict Society, will never be effi-
ciently undertaken . . . The time has come when I must confess
myself. Before you you see one of the despised and feeble sex, the
unfitted to rule, the inferior of man. I am a woman! . . .’
. . . It never enters these men’s minds to depreciate her deeds, to
belittle her acts, because she is a woman. Their reason tells them that
she understands their wants, that her great heart is in sympathy with
their needs, that she has sought to help them when in power, and
that now . . . all their loyalty and devotion is needed to support the
cause, which she has told them lies at the root of all future social
reform, which means progress, comfort, and happiness for the toiling
millions.
(GL, 181–2, emphasis in original)

Dixie’s vision of socialist feminism locates women and the working class
as two social groups with a comparable history of oppression and, con-
sequently, motivated by a similar agenda for political change. The need

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138 New Woman Fiction

for sweeping reform in order to eradicate social injustice and break


down the artificial barriers which block personal and collective advance-
ment is of equal concern to both groups; as Hector/Gloriana argues, the
sex question is so intricately connected with the class question that
without addressing one, it is impossible to deal with the other. Dixie

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suggests that Gloriana’s masquerade (the infiltration of politics by a
woman) is no different to the working-class struggle to achieve politi-
cal representation. Her speech appeals to their shared political identity
as the disenfranchised Other (‘the despised and feeble . . . the unfitted
to rule’). In the eyes of the male elite, a working-class politician repre-
sents the same imposition, the same transgression against social norms,
as a woman.
In Dixie’s text the metaphor of the costume is thus significantly
extended: from being a mere marker of gender it comes to cover a wider
political dimension. Since the male costume inscribes social position
and political power, the lifting of the mask does not spell demascula-
tion – the symbolical ‘castration’ which led Angelica to assume the mask
of femininity – but instead confers further authority because this act of
uncovering is interpreted as a statement of personal authenticity, a re-
dressing of political identity and moral integrity. ‘Hector’, the mytho-
logical male mask which denotes great heroism but also tragic death, is
shed so that ‘Gloriana’ can lead her women’s army to victory.
In the subsequent battle between Gloriana’s all-female paramilitary
‘volunteer companies’ and the army still loyal to the male establish-
ment, Hector is ‘killed’, only to be reborn as Gloriana, who returns to
government in female dress. The novel ends with a glimpse of the mil-
lenium: a century after the revolution Britain is a green, communitar-
ian and eminently prosperous society in which poverty, social injustice
and sexual inequality have been eradicated.
This programmatic tale of socialist feminist revolution is undercut by
the homoerotic relationship that develops between Hector and his best
friend and political ally, Evelyn Ravensdale. With his championship of
women, Hector soon sways the female nation, but his influence is also
heartfelt among the male intelligentsia: ‘He was undoubtedly the idol
of his day’ (GL, 37), writes the sister of the eighth Marquess of Queens-
berry and aunt of Lord Alfred Douglas, five years before the momentous
trial that was to topple a cultural icon. The association of Hector
d’Estrange with Oscar Wilde is made explicit in that Gloriana, too, has
a mother called ‘Speranza’ (Lady Wilde’s nom de plume). It is tempting
to speculate that Dixie, a radical in feminist and social matters who
appealed to ‘thoughtful men and women’ not to be ruled by ‘super-

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 139

stition’ (TF, 37–45), sought to suggest that in a free society the social
and political liberation of women and workers should be complemented
by sexual tolerance. Her vision of the ideal society as one in which sex
and and class equality are allied to rural communitarianism, and which
is supportive of alternative sexual identities and unorthodox relation-

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ships, resonates with the principles of the Fellowship of the New Life,
the precursor of the Fabian Society.
Hinting at his ambiguous sexuality by giving him an androgynous
name suggestive of the Biblical Eve, the text leaves no doubt as to the
state of ‘Evie’s’ feelings: ‘Evelyn Ravensdale’s heart has gone out to
Hector d’Estrange, and he loves him with that devoted, admiring love
which some men have been known to inspire in others’ (GL, 58) – the
equivalent to the ‘deep spiritual . . . form of affection’ which Wilde con-
jured up in his famous speech at the Queensberry trial. The text simul-
taneously articulates, and silences, this ‘Love that dare not speak its
name’: the reticence about the precise nature of their attachment is in
stark contrast to the startling declaration that ‘he loves him’. Nor is he
(Evelyn) oblivious to the implications of this love: ‘Ah, Hector! if you
were only a woman how madly I should love you’, an affirmation imme-
diately followed by the foreclosure of homosexual desire: ‘for love you
as I do now, it can never be the same love as it would be if you were a
woman’ (GL, 123–4). ‘Have you ever adored a young man madly?’ Wilde
was asked by the prosecuting barrister. ‘No, not madly. I prefer love –
that is a higher form,’ Wilde rejoined, in the same manner in which
Dixie circumvents the homosexual taboo.38
Much of the subplot of the text revolves around the question, ‘What
was the subtle power that . . . attracted him to Hector d’Estrange, which
. . . made him body and soul the devoted adherent of the young
reformer?’ (GL, 221). Although Dixie takes care not to create the impres-
sion that anything ‘unwholesome’ occurs between the two men (who
are, after all, a heterosexual couple in drag), she does suggest that the
public visibility, and physical expression, of male friendship (and
implicitly love) is at least partly a matter of custom. Hector and Evelyn
start a fashion for men friends to display physical closeness: ‘it has
become the proper thing for men to walk arm-in-arm’ (GL, 221–2, empha-
sis in original). Implicitly, then, if the definition of what constitutes
‘proper’ or ‘improper’ conduct between males is socially constructed, it
is open to radical change.
This of course also applies to the relations between men and women.
When Gloriana reveals that she is a woman, ‘Evie’ finally ‘understands
it all now . . . There is no mystery about that love any longer’ (GL, 213).

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140 New Woman Fiction

Neither are there any interdictions left; Dixie hints at the fact that the
couple now, at last, share a full sexual relationship: ‘Gloria’s contact
with the world . . . has not blunted or dulled the instincts of Nature’
(GL, 220). On the face of it, the ensuing diatribe against the outdated
attitudes and social prohibitions of ‘our grandmothers and grandfathers’

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who, because they ‘judged Nature from the narrow-minded platforms
on which they had been educated’, would have condemned Gloria for
her knowledge of ‘the coarser things of life’, serves to promote the idea
of ‘free’ heterosexual activity between adults (GL, 220). Given the
prominence of the homoerotic double entendre throughout the earlier
part of the text, Dixie’s narrative disapprobation could also be directed
against those of her homophobic contemporaries who ‘knew nothing
of’, and therefore had no sympathy for, Evie’s ‘strange, yearning love
. . . [so] hard to fathom’, and who accordingly chose to ignore ‘the sighs
of liberty, or the rights of Nature’ (GL, 213, 220).
Dixie deploys a discourse of personal rights (liberty) and inherent
physical needs (Nature) which can be related in equal and inter-
changeable ways to the straight couple (Evie/Gloria) and the gay couple
(Evie/Hector). Evie’s comment in the early stages of their friendship,
‘You ought to have been a woman’ (GL, 124), exacts a smile from Hector
because that’s of course exactly what she is; but it also recalls the sex-
ologists’ concern about the woman ‘who ought to have been a man’,
the sexual deviant. Through the use of a complex layer of masquerades
Dixie’s novel thus engages with the cultural anxieties of the time regard-
ing the sexual ambiguities of women and men and the nature of their
mutual relationships. One of the questions which emerges is whether
the woman (Gloria) masquerading as a man (Hector), who loves and
is loved by another man (Evie), reflects heterosexual or homosexual
desire? I would argue that Dixie uses the theme of transvestism, among
other things, to (un)cover homosexual desire through a discourse of
masked heterosexuality. As Martha Vicinus has noted, turn-of-the-
century male impersonation may have been enacted from within a
heterosexual framework, yet it always served as a ‘visual icon of the pos-
sibility of alternative sexual desire’.39 The sexual anarchy of this desire,
which in Dixie’s text mirrors the revolutionary politics of the main
actors, is ultimately defused through marriage and a new constitution,
with the narrative ending reconstituting the various disrupted orders
and suggesting that in a feminist utopia, at least, sexual and social fan-
tasies can be celebrated and contained at one and the same time.
Masquerade in New Woman fiction thus emerges as a sophisticated,
polymorphous theme which served to interrogate prevalent ideas of

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 141

gender and sexuality while simultaneously addressing cultural and


political anxieties on a wider scale. Grand, who projected the sexually
transgressive nature of transvestism on to the deviant male, examined
the possibility of individual development but drew attention to the
failure of masquerade qua rebellion: without a definite purpose, her pro-

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tagonist’s cross-dressing results in the re-imposition of femininity. By
contrast, Dixie explored the personal and political, sexual and social
fears and desires that could be articulated through transvestism, offer-
ing a more positive solution to the problem of how to subvert rigid
gender norms without denying individual sexual desire.
The theme of cross-dressing thus enabled writers to challenge patri-
archal essentialism by exploding the category of gender. If women could
exchange female and male costumes at will and ‘perform’ masculinity
without being detected, then both masculinity and femininity were
socially constructed roles, not inherent biological facts; there was there-
fore no justification for sexual apartheid in public and political life.
Further, New Woman fiction destabilized the category of sexuality by
drawing attention to the homoerotic aspects of the friendships that
developed between ostensibly heterosexual men and transvestite
women. These friendships can be read in two different ways: hetero-
sexual men felt drawn to other men because these men were really
women in drag; conversely, gay men masquerading as ‘straight’ men
confronted the true nature of their desire when falling in love with
other men, irrespective of the fact that they were really women. Explor-
ing masquerade as an expression of social and sexual revolt, feminist
writers addressed contemporary anxieties about the sexual anarchy that
would result from the erosion of fixed gender identities and from the
changing relationship between women and men, outlining the utopian
potential of an androgynous society.
Another central anxiety of the time was the demise of motherhood,
which anti-feminists feared would follow in the wake of female eman-
cipation. ‘Whatever aspirations of an intellectual kind [women] may
have,’ the eminent physician Henry Maudsley proclaimed, ‘they cannot
be relieved from the performance of these offices so long as it is thought
necessary that mankind should continue on earth.’ Girls’ education
should therefore be geared towards ‘the perfect development, not of
manhood, but of womanhood’ – should prepare them for their future
domestic and reproductive role instead of sharpening their intellectual
capacities and infusing them with dangerous professional ambitions.40
Women had to be trained for femininity, and femininity could only be
sustained through motherhood; terrible things would befall the ‘race’ if

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142 New Woman Fiction

the natural order were to be meddled with by shrieking and probably


infertile females. Grant Allen accused feminists of denying ‘the whole
feminine function in women, often even going [to] the length of talking
as though the world could get along permanently without wives and
mothers.’41 For New Woman writers it was therefore not enough to

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contest the sex/gender correlation; they also had to explode the equa-
tion of woman and mother. To illustrate the destructive impact of
Victorian ideology, they explored the maternal body as a site of patri-
archal domination, contrasting this image with their vision of
autonomous motherhood.

My (m)other, myself

In The Heavenly Twins, Angelica’s sudden realization that she lacks fun-
damental mothering qualities brings home to her her violation of the
‘laws of nature’ and precipitates her return to a womanliness which
effectively ends her rebellion. Lyndall, the heroine of Schreiner’s The
Story of an African Farm, is plunged into a fatal illness after her child’s
death, and wills herself to die to atone for her failure to keep it alive.
Stifled by motherhood, the protagonist of Caird’s The Daughters of
Danaus suffers long-term depression. Gwen Waring, in Iota’s A Yellow
Aster, is disgusted by her husband’s sexual embraces, but after she falls
pregnant she starts feeling ‘a woman at last, a full, complete, proper
woman’ (YA, 291). In Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia the heroine chooses
her husband entirely on the basis of the superior genes he will transmit
to her prospective children. As these very different narrative approaches
demonstrate, feminist writers by no means agreed on the psychological
effects of biological motherhood on individual women.
Whether writers celebrated or problematized the experience, they
deconstructed and reconstructed the patriarchal myth of motherhood,
focusing on the mother so often othered (glorified or marginalized) in
male writing, with the result that the father was radically decentred.
Earlier women writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth
Gaskell, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while highlighting the
problem of motherhood in a male-centred society, frequently ended
their narratives by killing the mother. In New Woman fiction mothers
live to tell their own stories.
A complex and ambivalent concept, motherhood was thematized
in three specific ways. In a more general sense motherhood was an
emblem of moral and spiritual superiority, validating the feminist
call for women’s social and political leadership. When writers explored

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 143

the physical experience and social repercussions of motherhood in


a patriarchal society, they pointed to its institutional character, its
political function of socializing women into subordination. As a
metaphor, motherhood was often conceptually linked with artistic
production.

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In their political discourse, many writers and feminists in general
mobilized what Angelique Richardson calls ‘eugenic maternalism’42 in
order to contrast the idea of women’s humanitarian ethic with men’s
social Darwinism, female altruism and self-sacrifice with male competi-
tiveness and aggression. Grand’s Ideala is constructed as an exemplary
feminist, a paradigmatic ‘mother nursing the Infant Goodness of the
race’ (ID, 300). As the suffragist Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy asserted,
the ‘imaginative sympathy’ resulting from women’s ‘faculty of mother-
hood’ would ‘speed [the world’s] progress towards a nobler future’.43 In
Woman and Labour (1911), Schreiner expressed the same thought when
she discussed women’s ‘natural’ abhorrence of war. Since women gen-
erated life, they had a radically different understanding of it than men:
‘No woman who is a woman says of a human body, “It is nothing!” ’
(W&L, 170). It is precisely men’s self-destructive militarism which leads
to the evolution of a peaceful all-female society in Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s Herland (1915). In this parthenogenetic matriarchy, mother-
love and a caring communal spirit are the highest moral values; they
inform every social structure and extend to the management of animal
and plant life. Gilman’s conception of the ideal human society as one
which admits males only as long as they are willing to adhere to these
‘female’ principles corresponds very closely to some of Schreiner’s
Dreams (1890).
With its uncomfortable echoes of the patriarchal conflation of woman
and womb, the political celebration of the maternal principle was
highly problematical: ‘No woman who is a woman’ – Schreiner’s phrase
suggests that there is an essential as opposed to an incomplete woman-
hood, a ‘real’ woman signifying one who has given birth. In other
words, women’s biological capacity for creating life made them the
morally superior sex. It was because their identity was rooted in the
experience of ever changing and merging body boundaries that they
defined themselves through mutuality, not otherness, the concept so
prevalent and socially divisive in androcentric society. In a state orga-
nized around the principle of motherhood, Gilman stressed in Moving
the Mountain (1911), any sense of personal self would by definition
incorporate the wider social whole: ‘We do not think of “neighbours”,
“brothers”, “others” any more. It is all “ourself” ’ (MTM, 102).

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144 New Woman Fiction

Few feminists of the time were sceptical about the reinscription of


biological arguments on to the female mind; indeed, as the last chapter
illustrated, many women drew political capital out of eugenist concepts.
There were, however, some voices who warned against feminist essen-
tialism; Amy Bulley, for example, affirmed: ‘It does not follow that there

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is any reason for the adoption of superior airs on the part of women
generally, merely because they are women.’44 Mona Caird linked her
vision of a socially caring society not to women’s reproduction, but to
the nurturing capacities of both sexes.
While most New Woman writers attached a symbolical value to the
concept of a maternal ethic, they provided widely differing accounts of
the impact which biological motherhood had on their heroines’ lives.
It is not unusual to find contradictory views in the works of one and
the same writer. Thus George Egerton depicted motherhood both as ‘a
hateful yoke under which [women] age, mere bearers of children con-
ceived in a sense of duty, not love’ (‘VS’, 155), and as fulfilling for
women, the culmination of a sexual relationship: ‘The little ones alone
make the white flower of union, are the only pure reason for it; all other
is base’ (‘WOT’, 155). At the heart of this contradiction lies the conflict
between individual and social, female- and male-centred notions of
femininity and maternity. Late-Victorian society not only expected
women to be mothers, but deployed motherhood as a form of social
control by linking reproduction to marriage and the duty of female self-
sacrifice. New Woman heroines respond to these pressures in different
ways: some begin by complying with social norms, marry and have chil-
dren, and then start to rebel; others rebel by rejecting motherhood alto-
gether, or by developing alternative models of mothering which place
them in conflict with society. Thus motherhood can be the means of a
woman’s autonomy and self-creation (if the heroine practises a radical,
self-identified motherhood). By contrast, male-controlled and socially
imposed motherhood is always the marker of female subjection and self-
alienation (in this case the heroine can only regain control by rejecting
motherhood).
In Caird’s writings in particular motherhood is explored as a central
site of female oppression. It is the symbol of enforced marital sex, a
prison-house of social norms, a centre for the reproduction of ever more
victims. ‘Dis-eased’ mothers infect their daughters by breaking their
resistance to the system which has robbed them, the mothers, of their
identity. Mothers are at once victims, and perpetrators of a despotic
system:

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 145

She realized now, with agonizing vividness, the sadness of her


mother’s life, the long stagnation, the slow decay of disused facul-
ties, and the ache that accompanies all processes of decay, physical
or moral . . . the injury from without, and then the self-injury, its
direct offspring; unnecessary, yet inevitable; the unconscious thirst

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for the sacrifice of others, the hungry claims of a nature unfulfilled,
the groping instinct to bring the balance of renunciation to the level,
and indemnify oneself for the loss suffered and the spirit offered up.
(DD, 362–3)

New Woman novels are often written from the perspective of daughters
who fail in their careers precisely because they cannot struggle free from
their patriarchal mothers. In their analysis of oppressive mother-
daughter relationships, writers anticipated aspects of modern radical
feminism. The links between first-wave and second-wave radical theory
can be demonstrated by applying Adrienne Rich’s concept of mother-
hood to Caird’s novel Daughters of Danaus.
In Of Woman Born (1977), Rich defined the institution (as opposed to
the experience) of motherhood as a powerful form of social control. In
patriarchy, she argued, institutionalized motherhood degrades women
by reducing them to the status of children: ‘unproductive’, disenfran-
chised, economically and emotionally dependent, ghettoized.45 It is
because of a mother’s very powerlessness in the external world that the
system reproduces her will-to-power in her relationship with her chil-
dren. She will encourage her son to assert himself because some vestige
of his power will reflect back on her, the creator but not possessor of
authority. By identifying with him, she can displace her otherness and
her sense of un-belonging; through him, she is able to take possession
of the world by proxy. By contrast, her daughter represents her own
victimization; it is on her that she will unload her unacknowledged
frustration with her role in life, her guilt about her anger, her low self-
esteem. Her need for possessive control and her latent desire for revenge
will feed into perpetuating the cycle of female self-denial. The daugh-
ter will respond to this absence of positive mothering with resentment
and matrophobia. With the bond between mother and daughter
severed, the daughter is propelled into a lifelong quest for a mother sur-
rogate. She may spend her life searching for mother figures, or she may
try to make up for her mother’s betrayal by ‘mothering’ others; in either
case, ‘[t]he loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daugh-
ter, is the essential female tragedy’.46 The absence or displacement of

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146 New Woman Fiction

female bonding reinforces patriarchal power structures as, locked in


internal conflict, women are prevented from channelling their energies
into political demands. To break this cycle of mutual rejection, mothers
must start refusing to be victims: ‘As daughters,’ Rich argues, ‘we need
mothers who want their own freedom and ours.’

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Written a century earlier, The Daughters of Danaus reads like a fictional
exposition of Rich’s theory from the perspective of a daughter. Much of
the novel, which maps the heroine’s failure to fulfil her artistic aspira-
tions against a backdrop of societal and familial pressures, is given over
to an analysis of (self-)destructive mothering. Betrayed by her biologi-
cal mother, Hadria Fullerton seeks alternative models of mothering by
successively turning to a surrogate mother and adopting a girl child.
However, as all the mothering in the text is shaped by patriarchal power
relations, it remains an instrument of oppression even when there is an
explicit intention of feminist subversion.
Frustrated and embittered with her own meaningless existence, the
protagonist’s mother, Mrs Fullerton, applies strong emotional pressure
on her two daughters to lead conventional lives. With her artist nature
singularly ill-equipped to deal with constant psychological warfare, the
younger daughter, Hadria, is propelled into an unhappy marriage, and,
after producing two sons, embarks on a series of attempted escapes, all
ultimately futile. She removes herself to Paris to work on her musical
career, but at the precise moment when her breakthrough as a pianist
and composer seems near, her mother’s critical health, brought on by
her anger at Hadria’s incomprehensible action, forces her to return
home. Stifled by genteel country life, Hadria then takes as lover a man
deeply contemptuous of women who, when she ends their relationship,
discloses, and enforces, his paternal rights over the illegitimate baby girl
she has taken into her care. Finally, told that Mrs Fullerton’s survival
depends on her presence and compliance, Hadria buries her plans for
an independent life.
In its utter pointlessness, Hadria’s self-sacrifice mirrors her mother’s
equally wasted life; while fulfilling their respective duties in the eyes of
society, they both react vindictively and destructively by passing their
resentment on to the next generation. Both use their daughters as exten-
sions of their own failed lives, both are what Nancy Chodorow calls
‘hypersymbiotic’ mothers.47 Unlike Mrs Fullerton, Hadria is aware of the
psychological processes which warp their relationship. Faced with her
mother’s hostility, she defines ‘good’, female-identified mother-
daughter relations as an egalitarian friendship premised on mutual
respect and, crucially, the striving for self-fulfilment: ‘[I]f mother had

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 147

only not sacrificed herself for us . . . [w]hat sympathy there might have
been between us all! If she had but given herself a chance, how she
might have helped us, and what a friend she might have been to us,
and we to her!’ (DD, 326–7).
Hadria’s adoption of the baby Martha represents an attempt to prove

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to herself and her environment, not only that ‘free motherhood’ is pos-
sible, but also that it is the only motherhood worth the name (DD, 342).
It is only on the basis of choice and freedom from the imposition of
legal or biological ties that maternal affection can take its ‘true’
(‘natural’) course:

Hadria had begun to feel a more personal interest in her charge. She
had taken it under her care of her own choice, without the pressure
of any social law or sentiment, and in these circumstances of
freedom, its helplessness appealed to her protective instincts. She felt
the relationship to be a true one, in contradistinction to the more
usual form of protectorate of woman to child.
(DD, 240, emphasis added)

The text provides ample evidence of how personally unfulfilling and


artificial (‘untrue’), hence inefficient, a ‘protectorate’ of the more formal
kind can be. Hadria shows little interest in and no affection for her sons,
perhaps because their very gender reinforces her sense of oppression (at
best, they are constant reminders of their father, whom she despises; at
worst, they are two more males who circumscribe her life). Moreover,
while Caird never explicitly refers to marital rape, Hadria’s disgust with
the ‘humiliating, the degrading, the contemptible’ side of marriage is
so pronounced (at one point the wedding night is compared to ritual
human slaughter) that consensual sexual relations seem out of the ques-
tion (DD, 168, 249). As Simone de Beauvoir noted in 1949, women’s
experience of sexual brutality can impair the mother–child relationship
– which is precisely what Caird implies between the lines.48
While Hadria’s sons are marital ‘duty’ personified, the product of
patriarchal barbarity sanctified by the institution of marriage, Martha
represents the ‘freedom’ of love, affection shared outside and beyond
formally, even violently, imposed parameters. Consequently, to mother
the offspring of such a union constitutes a quasi-revolutionary act: ‘I
feel in defending this child . . . that I am . . . opposing the world and the
system of things that I hate’ (DD, 188). By initiating a positive, mutu-
ally empowering mother–daughter relationship, Hadria hopes to end
the vicious circle of female self-sacrifice and victimization. Ultimately,

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148 New Woman Fiction

however, she fails to live up to her feminist ideals, for her wish for the
girl to develop into a strong-minded, free woman is motivated primarily
by the spirit of revenge: Martha is to become a model feminist who, by
exacting retribution on mankind, would redeem women’s wrecked lives.
Even as an infant, Martha becomes a human pawn in the war of the

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sexes; once this strategy proves unworkable, Hadria relinquishes her
with ‘breathless haste’ to the law of the father (DD, 444). Thus, even
chosen motherhood can have a destructive impact when the daughter
is functionalized. While not replicating Mrs Fullerton’s perverse desire
to crush her, Hadria does objectify Martha by using her to vindicate her
own unfulfilled existence.
Hadria’s treatment of Martha is reproduced in her own betrayal by
her older friend and adoptive mother, Valeria du Prel. An acclaimed nov-
elist and independent woman, Valeria has achieved everything to which
Hadria aspires. Ironically, Valeria bitterly resents her lack of a husband
and family; instead of supporting Hadria’s wish for autonomy and a pro-
fessional life, she assists Mrs Fullerton in press-ganging her into mar-
riage. Valeria’s insistent confusion of Hadria’s ‘true’ (domestic) nature
with her own unfulfilled desires is strikingly inconsistent with her fic-
tional portrayal of a Hadria-inspired heroine, Caterina, who, in Valeria’s
novel, leaves her unhappy marriage. Just as Martha embodies ‘revenge’
for Hadria, so Hadria means little more than a character study to Valeria.
It is only when Hadria starts behaving like Caterina that Valeria begins
to feel a deeper personal interest in her: in a sense, Hadria becomes real
for her only through her compliance with the fictional model super-
imposed on her.
By introducing a metafictional element via the character of a woman
writer, Caird constructs yet another level of maternal disloyalty. Like
Valeria, real-life anti-feminist writers like Eliza Lynn Linton, Mrs
Humphry Ward and Arabella Kenealy were leading independent pro-
fessional lives and creating unorthodox female protagonists while con-
demning this very attitude in their younger contemporaries. Here too,
the mothers were betraying their daughters.
Through Hadria, Caird is able to project the possibility of autonomous
and self-determined mothering, while showing that the mother-
daughter relationship, if it is to be woman-centred, has to break free
from patriarchal control. Some writers, less concerned with decon-
structing oppressive social structures and more interested in developing
alternative models of mothering, allow their characters to succeed in
bypassing, negating or abolishing the role of the father. What on the
narrative level is portrayed as an act of female self-(pro)creation, can be

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 149

read as a metafictional discourse on the artistic autogamy of the woman


writer. Radically rewriting phallocentric structures and themes, women
writers ‘give birth’ to their ‘mind-children’ who, in their turn, circum-
vent male control by recreating themselves. By using motherhood as a
matrix for female creativity, these writers explode the cultural myth of

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art as an essentially male-engendered product.
George Egerton’s writings are particularly relevant in this context, not
least because they can be used to exemplify French feminist theory. Lyn
Pykett has examined the way in which Julia Kristeva’s concept of the
hysteric and Luce Irigaray’s notion of mimicry can be applied to
Egerton’s short stories.49 Another striking point of contact are Hélène
Cixous’ writings on écriture féminine, a concept Egerton anticipated in
her avowed aim ‘to put myself as woman into my writing . . . put [my]
own sex into it’.50 ‘Woman must write herself . . . Woman must put
herself into the text,’ Cixous wrote 70 years later; ‘the true texts of
women [are] female-sexed texts.’51 The following discussion serves to
elucidate the analogies in the conceptualization of motherhood, female
sexuality and creativity between Cixous’ ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ and
Egerton’s ‘At the Heart of the Apple’, a story published in Symphonies
(1897).
‘At the Heart of the Apple’ features a girl’s development from child-
hood through sexual awakening to pregnancy and motherhood. The
story unfolds on the outskirts of civilization, on a small and isolated
Norwegian island. In a way typical of Egerton’s writing, foreign
wild(er)ness serves as a metaphorical and literal setting for the repre-
sentation of ‘natural’ woman in her most essential form:

She was a thing of absolute health, every muscle, every fibre sound,
every nerve strung to the right key, – a creature of instinct, pure and
simple, quick with natural impulses, always acting from them, unin-
fluenced by any system founded on social expediency; a young
female animal with her basic instincts intact.
(‘HOA’, 184)

Indicative of the fluidity and periodicity of femininity, the girl’s move-


ments also reflect the natural environment within which she is placed,
her ‘curving, swaying, swinging’ motion answering to the ‘gurgle of
trickling water, the gushing music of the melting snows, the rhythmic
trickle of a thousand rivulets’ (‘HOA’, 162, 172). Significantly, the girl
remains unnamed until she is ‘discovered’ (defined) by the patriarchal
institutions of religion (a vicar’s son) and art (a painter).

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150 New Woman Fiction

The transition from the pre-oedipal world of jouissance (‘the enjoy-


ment of her skill’, ‘HOA’, 162) to the symbolic order of names, letters,
and gender roles occurs with the onset of puberty. On her roams
through the island the nine-year-old girl comes across a teenage boy,
whose very first gesture – an enquiry for her name – signals the ‘mas-

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culine’ desire for possessive control, a desire always counterbalanced by
the need to keep the feminine at bay by mythologizing it: the abun-
dance of his romantic appellations for her – ‘Frost Fairy’, ‘sprite’ and
‘mysterious Princess’ – contrasts oddly with his reluctance to disclose
his own name (‘Einar’), which she learns only months later (‘HOA’, 167,
171, 178). Though induced to name (stabilize) herself, the girl, patently
unaware of any father’s name, continues to cling to the imaginary,
prompting the boy to wonder ‘if she were quite normal’ (‘HOA’, 168).
At the same time, however, her ignorance/defiance of the law
(‘nom’/’non’) of the father does not mean that she is entirely ungoverned
by it; thus her very name, ‘Evir’, so evocative of biblical Eve, points to
the ‘master’ (biblical he, too), whose influence is ever present in the
form of ‘orders’ even though he himself is absent for most of the time
(‘HOA’, 169).
The master’s distant injunctions are personalized by the vicar’s son
who, alarmed at the state of Evir’s ignorance, takes her education in
hand by teaching her to read. This process of socialisation, because it
inscribes linearity and passivity on to a body full of radical energy and
movement, has an adverse effect on Evir, who gets headaches from
trying to follow ‘the little black signs crawling, like files of ants, from
the middle of the book towards the edges’ (‘HOA’, 173, emphasis added).
Her entry into the symbolic order of signs coincides with the imposi-
tion of sex-role expectations: ‘Don’t stay out after six, Miss Evir; you are
growing big now, and must not run so wild; you must do some sewing’
(‘HOA’, 174). Perhaps because she was allowed to ‘run wild’ for the first
nine years of her life, she is able to resist this attempt at feminization;
in any case, Einar leaves for university, and Evir resumes her childhood
rambles.
Six years later, when she is 15, her encounter with an older painter
startles her into sudden sexual self-awareness. As so often in Egerton’s
stories, erotic desire and sexual passion are explored in a relationship
charged with violence, yet one which at the same time resists facile
gender stereotyping by repeatedly shifting the positions of pursuer and
pursued, aggressor and victim. Thus in his desire to take possession of
Evir, the painter mimicks indifference, encouraging her to assume the
‘masculine’ role of hunter (‘Pursue her and she will flee . . . give up the

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 151

chase and she will seek you’) so that she will end by surrendering to her
‘feminine’ urge for submission: ‘the ineradicable first instincts . . . in her
make her yield more gladly to the captor who dominates, than to the
suitor who pleads submissively’ (‘HOA’, 198). From the first his attempt
at dominance is challenged by the power of her gaze: ‘The shy yet fear-

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less look . . . puzzled him . . . Why did the Huldre stare at him so? he felt
uncomfortable under her close scrutiny’ (‘HOA’, 190). Although physi-
cally the stronger, he is unable to get close to her until he gives up his
‘masculine’ striving for instant, direct (linear) possession, allowing
himself to be guided by her ‘feminine’ (fluid, shifting, rocking, drifting)
body economy. In his effort to track her down, he

darted in and out round the islands to no purpose; then let himself drift
slowly on a current that rounded a tongue of island. It carried him
through a ring of rocks into a shorter, wider fjord: ‘Eureka!’ he cried
exultantly, for before him, rocking gently in her boat, sat the girl . . .
(‘HOA’, 196, emphasis added)

As in the earlier case of the vicar’s boy, the ‘male’ need to mythologize
the object of desire (he calls her by a multiplicity of names, though
never by her own) is set off against her self-sufficiency and ‘driftnatur’
(‘HOA’, 207). When he leaves at the end of the summer, she still does
not know his name, nor is she affected by his departure. As if to reflect
the natural world’s cycle of seasons, her desire moves from sexuality to
maternity, conception to creation; pregnancy imbues her with the same
‘animal’ passion with which she previously embraced mating. The social
response to her pregnancy, on the other hand, is utterly incomprehen-
sible to her: she refuses to consider giving her child up and cannot
understand why she should feel anything but pride.
Seven years later the painter suddenly returns to claim paternity rights
over their son, only to find that she dismisses the idea out of hand: ‘you
mistake when you say ours; he is mine!’ (‘HOA’, 215, emphasis in origi-
nal). His protestation that part of him is in the child is countered with
the observation that she ‘need not develop it. I have no use for you’
(‘HOA’, 216). The perfect unity of mother and child is contrasted with
the male intruder who, once he has served his sexual function, has no
place in their relationship. As Evir contends, it is his narcissistic desire
for possession, his wish to be reflected in others, rather than a real inter-
est in closeness, that prompts him to demand ownership: ‘I don’t think
you would be so eager to claim us if his beauty and . . . mine did not
rouse you. I don’t want to be claimed’ (‘HOA’, 215; emphasis added).

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152 New Woman Fiction

The fact that we are presented with a painter lends a metafictional


element to the ending: just as Evir insists on reproductive autonomy,
so the author makes a point about her self-creation as an artist. The
contact with male art may have provided the spark that engendered her
creative vision; the end-product, however, is hers alone, and he – the

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male artist, male-defined art – has no right to claim her. Like the painter
in the story, the male artist is not interested in the essence of the woman
writer’s creation but merely wants to recognize and reflect himself in it;
the point of the story, then, is to teach him that she and her art exist
in their own right and independently from him.
In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous conjures up the unadulterated,
‘feminine’ woman who resists patriarchal claims, the woman ‘from afar,
from always: from “without”, from the heath where witches are kept
alive; from “below”, from beyond “culture”; from [her] childhood
which men have been trying desperately to make [her] forget’;52 in ‘At
the Heart of the Apple’, Egerton has such a woman reject male culture
in the figure of the painter. In order to create, Cixous argues, woman
has ‘to break up, to destroy’ phallocentric structures;53 Egerton’s char-
acter obliterates the patrocentric family by ejecting the man from the
mother-and-child unit. Like Cixous, Egerton contrasts women’s libidi-
nal with men’s cultural and appropriatory economy, visualizing female
creativity and the feminine aesthetic as a self-pleasuring bodily experi-
ence. ‘What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these out-
bursts?’54 the painter might well ask in Cixous’s words when he sees
woman and child, creator and creation, merge and separate in the sea:

The two perfect nude figures might have reconciled a pessimist to


hope for humanity, – the bronze head of the woman, and the quinze-
coloured head of the laddy, closely, crisply curled . . . supple strength,
skilled grace, her white arms cleaving the water for her beautiful body
to follow; the gay laughter of the child, the half-frightened catch of
his breath, as the water caught his breast when he slipped to the
small of her back; the clear deep eyes of exquisite hazel filled with
content that looked out so fearlessly under her level brows.
(‘HOA’, 213)

The symbiosis of mother and son, fused together into one body whose
shape, like the waves, is ever-changing, so that it is not possible to deter-
mine where she ends and he begins, captures Cixous’ notion of ‘the other
bisexuality’, which she posits as the precondition for ‘writing . . . (in)
the in-between’: ‘each one’s location in self . . . of the presence . . . of

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The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 153

both sexes, non-exclusion either of the difference or of one sex, and


. . . multiplication of the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts
of my body and the other body’.55 It is significant that the literal
‘inscription’ of the desire to create previously coincided with the girl’s
pregnancy:

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she . . . wrote a few words on a slip of paper, then laid it on the psalm
book in Sigrid’s lap, leaning heavily over the back of the curiously
carved settee, as the old woman read it. She read it slowly, her with-
ered cheek went a shade duller, her eyelids twitched nervously, and
she moistened her lips as if they had become suddenly dry. The girl
took the paper again, wrote a few words more, and gave it back to
her. The woman muttered a reply without raising her eyes.
The girl . . . took down a coloured almanac . . . and traced the
months eagerly, setting a thumb-nail dent against each one as she
ticked it off. When she came to April she marked it deeply, and
pointed it out to the old woman, with so radiant a smile that the
latter shook with nervous non-understanding, whilst the helpless
tears welled in her faded eyes and dimmed the glasses of her brass-
rimmed spectacles.
(‘HOA’, 201–2)

In Cixous’s terms, the girl has broken the patriarchal injunction not to
write herself, to repress the bodily reality of her desire, or at least to
explore this desire in secret and then to punish herself for it; and she
has broken it peremptorily, too, by overwriting and blotting out the
texts of patriarchy (the Bible, the site of a very different creation story).
The old woman’s response to the girl’s flaunting of her ‘creativity’, her
‘writ[ing] in white ink’, reflects her internalization of what Cixous calls
the ‘taboo of the pregnant woman’.56 The girl’s ‘radiant’ energy and
rhythmic motion (her ‘writing’ is preceded by spinning) are juxtaposed
with Sigrid’s twitching eyes and nervous, disjointed movements,
markers of the tamed and alienated body of the male-identified woman
whose dry lips can but mutter inarticulate sounds, but will never recre-
ate the female body in writing. Inevitably, the only text Sigrid produces
reinstates the law of the father. Summoned by her letter, Evir’s adoptive
father arrives to persuade her to give up her child (the pleasure, jouis-
sance, of creating) since it constitutes ‘a bar to every plan he formed for
her future’ (‘HOA’, 207). However, just as she will later defy the painter,
so she now resists his attempt to ‘theorize, enclose, and code’ her body
and contain her creativity:

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154 New Woman Fiction

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing . . . this prac-


tice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded . . . it will always surpass
the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will
take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-
theoretical domination, it will be conceived of only by subjects who

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are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority
can ever subjugate.57

The girl in Egerton’s story will be neither defined nor claimed. An


‘unnatural beast’ in the painter’s eyes after she has defied his naming
of her as ‘Huldre’ (‘fairy’),58 the girl-woman-mother embodies Cixous’s
vision of Medusa, ‘beautiful and laughing’,59 and always returning to
the female, creative, maternal body: at the heart of the apple, the story
implies, is the call for the ‘Mother!’ with which the text ends (‘HOA’,
215, 217–18).
While Egerton’s work is deeply problematic – the conflation of femi-
ninity and maternity resonates with essentialist and eugenicist notions
(woman, the ‘eternal womb’, redeems fallen masculinity) – the analo-
gies with Cixous are striking. I have drawn extensively on Cixous in
order to illustrate the metaphorical slippage, so central to the work of
both writers despite the temporal and conceptual divide forged by
seventy years, between the maternal body and the body of the woman
writer’s text. The concept of motherhood in New Woman fiction is thus
much more than a fin-de-siècle feminist-eugenicist metaphor for
women’s biological superiority, for it provides both a critical discourse
which points to links between New Woman writers and second-wave
radical theorists, and a metafictional discourse on the genesis of the
‘feminine’ woman artist which prefigures central aspects of French
feminist theory. The slippage between the mothering of children and
the mothering of texts was central to the paradigmatic sub-genre of New
Woman fiction, the artist-novel.

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5
The Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Woman

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‘[L]et us put the question shortly such. Given . . . great artistic
power, given also a conscience and a strong will, is there any
combination of circumstances which might prevent the artis-
tic power . . . from developing and displaying itself, so as to
meet with general recognition?’
‘No,’ asserted Ernest . . .
‘You have the easier cause to champion,’ [Hadria] said . . . ‘for
all your evidences can be pointed to and counted; whereas
mine, poor things – pale hypotheses, nameless peradventures
– lie in forgotten churchyards – unthought of, unthanked,
untrumpeted, and all their tragedy is lost in the everlasting
silence.’
Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus (1894; DD, 11, 13)

The ‘circumstances which might prevent the artistic power from devel-
oping’ were, Caird suggests in her artist novel, the institutional pres-
sures of motherhood. As the last chapter established, the theme of
motherhood was also used figuratively to denote women’s creativity.
New Woman fiction drew on a complex system of extended mother-
ing and childbirth metaphors to link what Victorian patriarchy per-
ceived to be women’s ‘natural function’ with cultural and literary
production, from which this function seemed so often to exclude
them. The ‘mothering-as-creating’ theme was developed through
two central metaphors, those of birth and death. The desire to write, to
give birth to the vision within, was often encoded in the image of a
room which symbolized the maternal body, a metaphorical womb
into which the protagonist withdrew to emerge a new-born artist.
Anticipating Virginia Woolf, this ‘room of one’s own’ was a potent

155

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156 New Woman Fiction

image of female self-discovery, artistic self-expression and feminist self-


assertion.
The mothering theme also enabled New Woman writers to explore
the reasons for women’s failure to become artists. Again anticipating
Woolf, feminist writers mapped the stories of ‘nameless’ women whose

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lives ended in ‘forgotten churchyards’ but who, under different cir-
cumstances, might have had just as important an impact as their artist-
brothers. The second central image connected with women’s creativity
is therefore that of death, the metaphorical miscarriage or abortion of
the artist’s projects and ambitions.
To reflect the dynamic interrelationship between creativity and moth-
ering in New Woman fiction, this chapter has a cyclical structure which
traces the exploration of this theme from ‘gestation’ and ‘miscarriage’
to ‘birth’, beginning with narratives of artistic failure (encoded in the
death metaphor) and ending with narratives of artistic success (encoded
in the room metaphor). The ‘death’ and metaphorical ‘(re)birth’ of the
woman artist is mediated by the quest for identity and (artistic) self-
hood in what I call ‘suspended narratives’.
The novel of the New Woman as artist can be approached from a
variety of interrelated angles: as a self-reflexive representation of the
female artist’s response to the conflicting pressures of domesticity and
New Grub Street,1 and a ‘vehicle for explorations of contradictions’
between the writers’ frequently exhilarating sense of personal success
(reflected in their autobiographical accounts) and their political objec-
tive of outlining the obstacles placed in the way of the aspiring female
artist (hence their novels’ emphasis on artistic failure).2 As I argued in
Chapter 2, fin-de-siècle fiction became the site of contestation between
masculinist (decadent) and feminist (ethically grounded) aesthetics of
art, between (high) ‘art’ and the world of mass culture and ‘commerce’.3
The mothering metaphor so central to turn-of-the-century feminist
writing is, I would argue, the place at which all of these factors con-
verge. With its precarious balance between matrophobia (mother–
daughter oppression) and the celebration of maternal creativity and
matrilinearity, New Woman fiction constitutes a boundary marker
between nineteenth and twentieth-century variants of the female Kün-
stlerroman, embodying the transition between, on the one hand, the
Victorian artist-heroine’s failure to overcome the binary limitations
imposed by mother, lover, and male artist figures, and, on the other, the
modern(ist) woman artist’s coming-into-her-own, not least because of
her ability to reconceptualize art as artisanship, and, even more impor-
tantly, to revalidate the mother as a source of inspiration.4 This transi-

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 157

tion was by no means an easy one; indeed, as the next section shows,
many writers concentrated on the factors which conspired to turn the
gifted woman into an artiste manquée.

The death of the author

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Narratives of failure have two typical scripts: they narrate the literal or
metaphorical death of the author (the demise of the artist or the destruc-
tion of her work); alternatively, they focus on the protagonist’s frus-
trated efforts to become an artist. The parameters of artistic failure are
illustrated by Mabel E. Wotton’s ‘The Fifth Edition’ (1896) and Mary
Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899).
In ‘The Fifth Edition’, Jane Suttaby leads a life of poverty and self-
sacrifice, supporting herself and her siblings with hack work until their
death leaves her desolate. A chance meeting with a fashionable writer
completes this process of self-immolation (‘sutt[ab]ee’). Grateful for
Leyden’s patronizing attention, she entrusts him with her life’s work,
an autobiographical novel which he promptly publishes under his own
name. When, after the fifth edition of his much-acclaimed new book
has come out, Leyden finally goes to pay her a visit, she has died.
Hester Gresley, the artist-protagonist of Red Pottage, writes and pub-
lishes her first novel under the aegis of a rich and supportive aunt. After
her death, Hester moves to her clergyman brother’s, in whose stern
household her writing is regarded with suspicion. Alarmed by his sister’s
unfeminine activities, Mr Gresley burns the manuscript of a book that
has cost her over a year and the best of her health to write.
Read in conjunction, these two narratives tell a disturbing story of
the artist’s development as a woman. It seems that once her creativity
has materialized into a visible product, the woman artist fades into
nothingness; and conversely, that her continued presence results in the
loss of her work. Since ‘woman’ and ‘art’ cannot coexist, either she
herself or her work must disappear. Thus, while they were successfully
creating artistic space for themselves, feminist writers frequently saw the
essence of the woman artist’s position in the world as residing in her
very absence from it.
By exposing men’s need to possess or destroy the woman artist’s work,
both narratives locate the binaries Woman and Art within a male dis-
course that is highly antagonistic to women and manifestly ignorant of
their lives. In each instance the men fail to decipher the real-life stories
written into the women’s works. Cholmondeley’s self-righteous rev-
erend seems entirely unaware of the symbiotic connection that exists

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158 New Woman Fiction

between his sister and her novel, and Wotton’s unscrupulous plagiarist
perceives as fantastic, and consequently wants to omit, the most pow-
erful parts of the narrative in which autobiography feeds into fiction:
‘one could hardly ask one’s readers to accept the notion of a woman
that was otherwise sane taking a roll of baby clothes to bed with her in

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lieu of the dead child for whom she roused herself by feeling in her
sleep . . .’ (‘FE’, 156).
Both Wotton’s and Cholmondeley’s stories counter the myth of the
artist as masculine creator by establishing an explicit link between
female creativity and mothering. Through her novel Jane Suttaby
affirms and maintains a symbolic motherhood whose quasi-biological
counterpart has ended in tragic loss. Reinscribed into the plot of her
novel, this loss foreshadows the impending loss of her creative labour,
her book. For Hester, the destruction of her novel is tantamount to child
murder: ‘When Regie was ill,’ she shouts at her brother, ‘I did what I
could. I did not let your child die. Why have you killed mine?’ (RP, 276).
Hester and Jane see not simply a metaphorical connection but a very
real, material interrelationship between mental and physical mother-
ing: the one is informed by the other, both types of mothering come
‘naturally’ to them and are contrasted with the men’s ‘unnatural’ lack
of insight and charity.
As Susan Stanford Friedman notes, male writers’ use of the childbirth
metaphor reinforces the patriarchal division of mind (masculinity)
and body (femininity), art (man) and essence (woman). By contrast,
the female childbirth metaphor explodes this concept of a gendered
division of labour ‘by establishing a close connection between creation
and procreation and by suggesting a subversive community of artists
who can literally and literarily (pro)create.’5 Thus, when Jane Suttaby
and Hester Gresley link writing and mothering, they reaffirm their
right as women to participate in cultural production at the precise
moment when this right is most fiercely contested by the men in their
lives.
While challenging the validity of traditional discourses on art by
drawing attention to the sanitizing measures deployed by men to
exclude women, the two texts also voice an implicit criticism of the
women artists’ fatal lack of resistance. Wotton’s artist figure has drilled
herself in self-sacrifice to the point of self-erasure: ‘She never seemed to
have had any individual existence at all, since with her it had always
been bound up with and dominated by “the others” ’ (‘FE’, 153). Her
failure to believe in the power and significance of her voice and her
unquestioning submission to male authority are instrumental in bring-

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 159

ing about her death. Faced with the presence of conflict (the choice
between publicly revealing her authorship and demanding adequate
payment), she settles for her own absence; the text ends on the con-
tention that to be forgotten was ‘exactly what Miss Suttaby would have
wanted’ (‘FE’, 164). Helen Gresley mounts a more determined opposi-

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tion against the attempt to silence her, but the destruction of her work
effectively terminates her artistic ambitions. Although the novel holds
out hopes for her recovery, it is the woman in her and not the artist
who survives: she loses her art but gains a lover.
A reading of these two texts suggests three basic assumptions with
regard to the construction of the artist in New Woman fiction. First,
feminist writers problematize the conflicting desires and pressures
women artists feel when their private and public roles are in collision.
In particular, they explore the precarious balancing act women artists
have to perform between conforming to traditional notions of feminine
morality and securing their individual professional survival. Narratives
of failure feature protagonists like Miss Suttaby who conform to the duty
of female self-sacrifice. As Helen’s case shows, protagonists who assert
themselves do not necessarily prevail against the odds, but they are
more likely to be successful.
Second, by focusing on the specific problems women artists face, New
Woman writers shed light on the marginal position of all women in
patriarchal society and the processes that lead to their silence and invis-
ibility. These processes have such a powerful impact because they work
from both without (society) and within (the woman’s psyche). Heroines
who have internalized social expectations do not stand much chance
of survival. The lower the pressure a heroine faces from within, the more
she is able to grapple with external problems. Success stories figure pro-
tagonists who refuse to regard their need for autonomy as ‘selfishness’
and are resilient enough to withstand sustained opposition. Finally, in
both kinds of narrative, female creativity and material motherhood are
conceptually linked; both feature women artists who explicitly reflect
on this connection. If, then, New Women rewrote the artist-novel from
a feminist perspective, in what ways do their narratives reconstruct this
genre?
Traditionally, the novel of the artist features the hero’s development
from initial rebellion against society either to reconciliation (Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister) or to permanent discord (Thomas Mann’s Death in
Venice). Embarked on a journey of self-discovery (Proust’s Marcel in A
la Recherche du Temps Perdu), the artist-hero may challenge or reject the
dominant ideology of his society, but one premise that he will not

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160 New Woman Fiction

normally call into question is its male orientation. Even when there is
a clash between the norms and discursive systems of two different
societies, as in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,6 their
shared patriarchal roots will constitute an important stabilizing factor.
The choice between ivory towers and sacred founts,7 between art as the

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journey within, and art as the product of consumed and consuming pas-
sions, may result in social isolation, even in crime, but it does not place
the artist at odds with the overarching system of patriarchy (however
radical Adrian Leverkühn’s metaphysical challenge in Mann’s Doctor
Faustus, it does not seek to dislodge the patriarchal power structures at
work in society).
By contrast, the woman artist finds herself faced with the problem of
having to inhabit patriarchal structures while being actively engaged in
exploding them. As a woman who is also an artist, she has to contend
with two mutually exclusive roles: passively inspiring muse and active
creator. In her allegory ‘The Undefinable’ (1908), Sarah Grand satirizes
this dichotomy between ‘feminine’ inspiration and ‘masculine’ imagi-
nation by suggesting that the male artist has regressed to a mere ‘paint-
ing machine’ whose work can only come alive if it is brought into
contact with the female imagination (‘TU’, 265). It is the woman artist
who is infused with ‘genius’, which Grand defines as the quality that
combines reflection and conceptual thought with a caring ethic, aes-
thetic imagination with ardent political purpose. Subverting the stereo-
typical role of the muse, Grand’s female artist poses as a model only to
propel the male artist into acknowledging and celebrating the ‘free
woman’ she represents: ‘a new creature, a source of inspiration the like
of which no man hitherto has even imagined in art or literature’ (‘TU’,
287). Ultimately ‘undefinable’, she resists all attempts to contain her
within the male gaze and decamps once she has completed her mission.
While allegory presents a suitable medium for resolving the schism
between Woman and Artist in programmatic terms, realist late-
Victorian and Edwardian novels of the woman artist are usually charged
with the tension of the as yet unreconstructed relationship between
the ‘male’ genre and its female protagonist. This conflict is central to
the conception of the narrative and has a strong impact on plot and
character; as a result the artist-heroine’s development is, as Elizabeth
Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland have noted, ‘often more
conflicted, less direct’ than that of a male protagonist.8 While the need
to assert the artistic self to the point of adopting what Janet Eldred calls
‘a “monstrous” value system based on ruthless independence and self-
concern’9 applies to protagonists of either sex, the last chapter showed

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 161

that what is understood to constitute a ‘monstrous’ thought or action


depends to a large extent on gender expectations. Thus the Künstlerro-
man’s traditional point of departure – the protagonist’s clash with and
rejection of social norms – provokes a stronger reaction when this pro-
tagonist is a woman. As New Woman fiction illustrates, it is a girl or

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woman’s very striving for independent thought that is considered
deviant. The rigorous opposition she encounters takes the form of a
Foucauldian system of surveillance premised on material and emotional
restraints. Foucault argues that as a ‘microphysics of power’, ideology
has operated on the basis of constant surveillance over, and disciplinary
procedures performed on, the ‘docile body’ of a governable group of
individuals.10 In feminist fiction, the ideology of domesticity imposes
economic dependence on the not-so-docile bodies of women, attempt-
ing to ensure their compliance with social expectations by regulating
and disrupting their time and space.
The female Künstlerroman frequently starts off as a Bildungsroman in
the most literal sense, charting the formation of the heroine’s charac-
ter against the backdrop of a fragmented education, and is frequently
the novel of a frustrated artist. Netta Syrett’s The Victorians (1915) and
Rose Cottingham Married (1916) are typical examples of Janet Eldred’s
category of the ‘failed artist novel’.11 Both texts foreground the irregu-
lar and circumscribed development of the female artist from childhood
to adult life. As a girl, Rose’s creative impetus is held in check by her
family and teachers, and in her late teens, the possibility of indepen-
dent development is undermined by her sister, so that by the time Rose
marries, she has internalized the notion of familial duty and personal
self-sacrifice and resigned herself to living for others rather than for her
art.
In The Victorians Rose’s creative imagination is continually curbed by
her grandmother’s narrow views on what constitutes a ‘proper’ female
upbringing. Creative impulses sparked off by day-dreaming are almost
instantly checked by a forcible return to drill:

‘I wish I could draw Miss Piddock teaching the birds.’ Then suddenly
in a flash came the notion, ‘But I can write it!’ The idea was blinding
in its radiance, and turning over her slate, she began in feverish haste
to compose the first sentence of what was to be the funniest fairy
story ever written. As she struggled for the words, excitement gradu-
ally mounted in her brain. She had never tried to write before. How
absurd! Why, of course she could write books. Real books about fairies
and mermaids and all sorts of things . . .

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162 New Woman Fiction

‘Rose, is your sum finished?’ The voice of her story’s heroine woke
her with a start of annoyance from her new dream of art, and she
hastily tried to rub out with her pinafore the few sentences she had
written on the reverse side of her slate . . .
‘[. . . W]hat have you been doing all this while? What is all this

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scribbling at the back of the slate? You’re a very naughty girl! Now
come and say your grammar.’
(TV, 44–5, emphasis in original)

When after equally uninspiring years at school Rose, now a young


woman, starts planning for a career, she is called home to keep her sister
company. It is only when she realizes the futility of her sacrifice, and
puts herself out of reach of further emotional demands by moving to
France (a frequent location for female liberation in New Woman
fiction), that she can achieve what, since the age of nine, she has been
intending to do: write. But even with her first novel published, her
further development as an artist is poignantly uncertain. Rose does not
stay in France or even in London; she rejoins her grandmother. The
novel ends with two different glimpses of Rose’s potential future: her
public success as a writer, and the possibility of a private romance with
a rising star of the decadent movement. The novel thus reaffirms the
choice with which the woman artist is faced from the outset, that of
being a writer or a lover, an artist or a woman.
As The Victorians demonstrates, New Woman novels of the artist focus
not so much on the processes that form an artist, as on the many obsta-
cles that prevent her from becoming – or remaining – one. The fact that
social pressures begin to operate from an early date, and that they are
more pervasive than in the case of a male protagonist, often results in
a time lag. The artistic breakthrough, if it happens at all, comes into
play not in childhood or young adulthood but at a time when the
heroine has fulfilled traditional role expectations and has recognized
the deficiencies of wifehood and motherhood.12 Some New Woman
writers pointedly draw attention to periods of suspension and regres-
sion in their protagonist’s development: in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly
Twins the part that deals with Edith’s disastrous marriage, Angelica’s
unwilling move into ‘femininity’, and Evadne’s promise to her husband
to steer clear of feminist involvement is entitled ‘Development and
Arrest of Development’.
Visualizing conflict rather than artistic formation, the late-Victorian
female Künstlerroman reflects modern narrative structures in that it
disrupts the linear sequence of events that can be found in the older

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 163

version of the artist-novel, replacing the notion of a gradually pro-


gressing ‘apprenticeship’ with a discontinuous and fragmented course
in which delay is frequently followed by ‘brief epiphanic moments’,13
without, however, leading to a definite conclusion. Of course all male
novels of the artist do not follow a teleological, linear structure; what

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distinguishes female from male artist-novels is not so much their struc-
ture as the intensity of the conflict between personal and professional,
private and public roles, a feature which, as I argued in Chapter 2, the
feminist Künstlerroman shares with female autobiography.
In the New Woman novel the external conflict between artist and
society is displaced into the psyche of the heroine. Torn between her
creative urges and social expectations, the heroine is painfully aware
that, whatever course of action she decides to take will disqualify her
either as a woman or as an artist. As Grace Stewart notes, the female
protagonist is caught between

the penalties of expressing sexuality and suppressing it, between the


costs of inner concentration and of direct confrontation with society,
between the price of succumbing to madness and of grasping a
repressive ‘normality’ . . . Marriage and community mean sacrificing
integrity and work; sexuality focuses the frightening relations
between men and women and spells the loss of a nurturing female
bond. Yet withdrawal to the inner life leads to fever, hallucination,
and death.14

The fact that in so many instances the heroine’s fate indicates the futil-
ity of all available alternatives suggests that the writers themselves could
only strike a precarious balance. The inevitable fate of the female artist
is a ‘choice of sacrifices’: ‘She can repeat the sacrifice of self as woman
or the sacrifice of womanhood as self (which, to her, means as artist).’15
This sacrifice of self is conveyed through three frequently interlacing
scripts which establish the circular movement of the narrative. First, the
heroine’s ever more desperate attempts at escape only contrive to bind
her more closely into patriarchal structures; this is the case, for example,
in Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus and Syrett’s Nobody’s Fault. Secondly,
her quest for identity leads to a crisis which may result in the loss of
self, culminating in madness or death: in Grand’s The Heavenly Twins
Evadne fails to recover from her depression, and Lyndall, in Schreiner’s
The Story of an African Farm, dies as a result of hers.
Thirdly, the futility of the protagonist’s struggle is reflected in the fates
of other female characters: friends, sisters, aunts, and mothers. Caird’s

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164 New Woman Fiction

novels revolve around symbolic and biological mothers and daughters


(Hadria, Martha, Mrs Fullerton and Valeria in The Daughters of Danaus;
Claudia, Mrs Temple and Mrs Duncan in The Stones of Sacrifice). Sister-
hood is explored literally in Schreiner’s From Man to Man and Robins’s
Where Are You Going To . . . ?, and symbolically in Dixon’s Story of a

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Modern Woman, Ford’s On the Threshold, Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage,
Dix’s Image Breakers and Syrett’s Three Women.
The ‘doubling’ of the heroine is of particular interest when her quest
is set off against the fates of male as well as female characters. Lyndall
(The Story of an African Farm), Evadne and Angelica (The Heavenly Twins)
are contrasted with more conventional women (Em and Edith) and are
also paired with men (Lyndall with Waldo and Gregory, Angelica with
Diavolo). In Caird’s Stones of Sacrifice Claudia and Alpin are juxtaposed
with a plethora of other figures: the egocentric Henrietta, the naïve
Graine, the rebellious and self-destructive Leah, their traditional-
minded, ailing spinster sisters Maggie and Ruth, the aesthetic Old
Woman Elsie, Claudia’s selfish brother Stephen, the idealistic Frank, the
sexually exploitative Drummond, the political reactionary Gilbert.
Doubling plays an important part in both of Syrett’s ‘Rose Cotting-
ham’ novels. In The Victorians Rose, who comes from a petty-bourgeois
background, is juxtaposed with her friend Helen Fergurson, the daugh-
ter of a free-thinking socialist professor with decadent leanings. In the
sequel, Rose Cottingham Married, Syrett contrasts her protagonist’s futile
endeavour to combine a literary career with marriage and motherhood
with Helen’s adoption of a radically different lifestyle as a free woman,
feminist and suffragist. The difference in the two friends’ lives allows
Syrett to pinpoint the compromises and shortcomings involved in
either position. The novel confirms Helen’s dark prophecy that marriage
will spell ‘the end of all [Rose’s] literary ambitions’ (RCM, 213). Her
first years of married life are spent performing an endless number of
unrewarding household tasks entirely taken for granted by her socialist
activist husband who, patently unaware of the labour question in his
home, moves his secretary into Rose’s study. It is only through preg-
nancy, by becoming the repository of a new life, that she regains some
control over her time. She resumes her writing, but also continues to
assist her husband with the composition of his speeches. This period of
enthusiastic activity and boundless creative energy comes to an abrupt
end with the birth of their child. Biological motherhood supplants
artistic ‘mothering’; her son becomes Rose’s one absorbing interest, with
everything that had previously given her life a purpose – her writing,
socialism, her husband – gradually falling by the wayside.

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 165

By contrast, Helen remains true to her principles and maintains an


almost rigid independence. She does not allow her marriage to impinge
on her time; after her divorce, she takes lovers but takes care not to get
too attached to them. There is nothing more dangerous than the notion
of ‘romantic love’, she tells Rose, because its only function is to glorify,

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and thereby encourage, an attitude of subservience: women ‘must learn
to put “love” in its proper place, instead of sacrificing everything to an
emotion which doesn’t last, and then going on with the sacrifice out of
habit – or cowardice!’ (RCM, 256).
Helen may be in perfect control of her life, but she does not pursue
a career in the proper sense of the word. She becomes an ardent
feminist, rallies suffragettes around her until their militancy becomes
an embarrassment, and keeps salon for London’s most sought-after
artists and intellectuals. Significantly, though, she is not an artist herself,
and her self-assurance almost entirely rests on the security provided by
her wealthy background. She collects experiences and people, but con-
sistently backs out of real involvement: it is the hedonist in her and not
the woman with a purpose who responds to love, art and feminism.
Thus, while at first glance Helen’s forceful character, self-sufficiency
and assertiveness present an appealing alternative to Rose’s fading pres-
ence, a critical examination of what is at the heart of Helen’s suc-
cess undermines this more optimistic message, for ultimately it is her
lack of artistic depth and passion that allows her to achieve personal
autonomy. At the same time the text seems to suggest that Rose is
predestined to fail precisely because she has the making of an artist:
deep feeling and a capacity for infinite absorption. (In The Daughters
of Danaus, Caird offers a similar explanation for Hadria’s failure).16 The
choice Syrett’s novel offers, then, is between detached and dispas-
sionate self-determination, and the suspension of self through over-
identification with others – between lack of passion and loss of self. The
narrative device of doubling the protagonist thus serves to demonstrate
the inadequacy of existing alternatives.
Typically, the New Woman Künstlerroman ends with a bleak outlook.
The heroine, who has come to realize the incompatibility of her ambi-
tions with social role expectations, must, Grace Stewart argues, choose
between ‘a rejection of herself as woman, an acceptance of herself
as monster, [and] a welcoming of death-in-life as preferable to the
struggle’.17 In Syrett’s novel Rose is faced with ‘death in life’ when her
son, her ‘creation’ and life’s purpose, dies on the battlefields of the First
World War. Grand’s epynomous Ideala represents a variant of Stewart’s
first option: she removes herself from the demands of conventional

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166 New Woman Fiction

womanhood by moving into spiritualised and untouchable femininity,


supplanting artistic with political agency. By contrast, Schreiner’s and
Caird’s protagonists dare to face the monster by espousing ‘immorality’
(pre- and extra-marital sex, single motherhood, resistance to the notion
of maternal ‘instincts’ or marital obligations). Ultimately, however, the

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decision to brave social norms proves fatal, either (as in The Daughters
of Danaus) leading to psychological paralysis when all attempts at escape
have failed (‘death-in-life’ as the absence of an escape route), or result-
ing in the actual death of the heroine (The Story of an African Farm). If
fragmentation, dissonance and disruption are characteristic of the artist-
heroine’s journey through life, what are the milestones of her inner
development?

Suspended selves

‘It is not against men we have to fight,’ Olive Schreiner wrote in 1889,
‘but against ourselves within ourselves.’18 This dilemma is inscribed into
the plot of Katherine Cecil Thurston’s Max (1910). With the conviction
that in order to become an artist she ‘must possess herself’ and can
therefore ‘belong to no one’ (M, 324), the heroine decamps from her
native Petersburg on the eve of her second marriage in order to start
out on a painting career in Paris in the guise of a young man. However,
painting does not come easy to ‘Max’: most of her time is taken up with
following an older male painter around Parisian bars. In this variant of
a cross-dressing narrative, it is not unavowed homosexual, but rather
heterosexual desire that fractures the masquerade. The crisis of the novel
occurs with Max’s realization of her feelings for Blake. In a poignantly
symbolical bedroom scene positioned at the centre of the narrative, Max
opens the mysterious bag she has been carrying around with her every-
where, to reveal the long hair that she cut off when turning herself into
a boy. The moment of self-recognition (the acknowledgement of her
sexual desires) is encoded by a mirror: looking at her reflection while
draping around her shoulders the visible marker of her dormant femi-
ninity (her hair, kept hidden yet accessible in a bag under her pillow
every night), the boy is transformed back into a woman – and the
woman is much more interested in winning Blake’s love than in paint-
ing. The culmination of Max’s artistic career is a self-portrait which
recaptures the earlier scene by depicting ‘Maxine’, Max’s female alter
ego, glancing at a mirror. Reappropriating the woman in herself by iden-
tifying with the woman in the picture, who is herself melting into her
female mirror-image, Maxine erases Max, and the painter with him. The

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 167

remainder of the novel is a comedy of mixed and mistaken identities,


as Maxine, posing as Max, introduces Blake to herself as Max’s twin
sister, with whom Blake instantly falls in love. Max’s single lasting artis-
tic achievement, the reinvention of her femininity, proves to be an act
of artistic self-destruction: Maxine does not paint, but ‘loves’.

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Virginia Woolf (‘PFW’, 57–63) argues that, at the outset of her artis-
tic self-inquiry, the creative woman has to kill the Angel in the House
(the patriarchal model of femininity to which women are expected to
aspire). If, as in Thurston’s novel, the artist-heroine puts her emotional
needs first, she reverses this process by reinstating the Angel and killing
the Artist. Since there is rarely a satisfactory solution to the conflict
between public and private fulfilment, the New Woman protagonist
(whether she has artistic ambitions or not) frequently turns her anger
at her frustrated hopes inwards, venting it on herself and her body, and
punishing herself either by withdrawing into fatalistic resignation or by
plunging into reckless action. These alternatives are reflected in the fates
of two sisters in Caird’s The Stones of Sacrifice. While Madge Galbraith
escapes into invalidism, her younger sister Leah reacts against the sti-
fling bigotry of their home by becoming a prostitute; instead of working
constructively towards an independent existence, both act in a self-
destructive manner. Artistic heroines, while they have an advantage
over other characters in that they, at least, have a clear vision of the life
they want to lead, are often burdened with a dreamy, impressionable
temperament which makes them easily susceptible to external pressure
and particularly vulnerable to depression. To overcome this depression,
the artist-heroine must first address her self-division, and then exter-
nalize the conflict between personal desire and social norms by actively
resisting these norms. These two courses of action are encoded in the
images of the madwoman and the mirror.
Almost half a century before the mirror stage was first theorized by
Lacan and Freud, New Woman writers introduced a feminist version of
the alienated self. Like other social-problem novelists of the time, they
attributed the split self to the existing social conditions, suggesting that
collective action pointed a way out of self-fragmentation.19 New Woman
fiction posited individual female rebellion against the patriarchal family
as a first step towards setting up an alternative political community.
Whilst male theorists were to define the (generically male) child as
forever seeking, and dreading, an imaginary unity with the (m)other,
women writers staged the programmatic resolution of the conflict by
emphasizing women’s ability to overcome separation and reconnect
with themselves and each other.

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168 New Woman Fiction

In what ways, then, do fin-de-siècle feminist writers (p)reconfigure psy-


choanalytic theories of subject constitution? According to Freud and
Lacan, the mirror phase, which we experience between the ages of six
and eighteen months, marks our discovery of our subjectivity as well as
our difference from others. Identifying the image in the mirror as our

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own reflection, we recognize ourselves both as whole and unified, and
as separate (from our own image, from our parents).20 The threat con-
tained in this recognition of a selfhood predicated upon difference can
be addressed by

identifying with the image (based on the assumption that even if it


is separate, it is like us), or by aggression towards that which pre-
cipitates this sense of division and incompleteness – othering some
part of what also constitutes us as a self.21

However, as a resolution of the conflict between selfhood as identifica-


tion with the other and selfhood as separation from the other is not
possible, the ego constitutes itself as a permanently divided self. Trans-
lated into our interaction with society, this means that we learn both
to accept (identify with) and to challenge (separate ourselves from) the
existing social order.
In New Woman fiction, the mirror does not induce the discovery of
a personal identity, nor does it serve to affirm a deviant identity (as
when Miss Havisham appraises herself through Pip’s eyes in Dickens’s
Great Expectations); instead, it marks the recognition of self-alienation.
This theme is already broached in Charlotte Brontë’s writing; in Jane
Eyre (1847) the protagonist’s split self is projected on to another woman.
The night before her wedding, Jane sees Bertha’s reflection (a figure
dressed in the marital veil) in the mirror of her closet; the next morning
she encounters her own reflection, ‘a robed and veiled figure, so unlike
my usual self that it seemed almost the image of a stranger’ ( JE, 311,
315). In later feminist writing, this ‘figure so unlike my usual self’ not
only comes out of the closet but also enters into communication with
her ‘original’, telling her, as Bertha tries to tell the fainting Jane, of the
discrepancy between her desires and actual reality.
By confronting her mirror image, an alter ego with a will of her own,
the New Woman heroine either challenges the role society expects her
to play (her reflection in the mirror presents her with the domesticated
woman she has no wish to be), or she attempts to come to terms with
hitherto unacknowledged desires (in this case the mirror reflects the
person she wants, but does not dare, to be). This conflict between dis-

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 169

sonant visions of the self is resolved when the heroine rejects one of
the two selves. The remaining or newly reinstated persona then assumes
the status of a unified self.
In Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman, Mary Erle
becomes aware of her mirror image at a time when all her personal and

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professional aspirations have collapsed. After completing a painting
course at the London School of Arts, she fails to qualify for further train-
ing, and takes up journalism in the hope of launching a writing career.
But her ‘novel with a purpose’ is rejected by her employer, who advises
her that in order to be publishable, fiction ‘[m]ust be fit to go into every
parsonage in England’ (SMW, 181). Mary’s disillusionment is exacer-
bated by the fact that she has to support herself with hack journalism,
feeding the prurient tastes of the very public she is prevented from edu-
cating with more serious writing. It is at this juncture that the (married)
man she loves asks her to live with him.
In the penultimate chapter of the novel, significantly entitled ‘The
Woman in the Glass’, Mary acknowledges her desires in a dramatic dia-
logue with her mirror image. While her rational, moral self dictates self-
sacrifice, her reflection passionately urges her to make the most of the
chance of personal fulfilment:

Her other self revolted against the injustice of human laws. The
woman within her cried aloud in the darkness. What had she done
that she was always to be sacrificed? Why was she to miss the best
that life has to offer? . . .
In the mirror of the dressing-table she caught sight of herself as
she passed . . . How the eyes looked at her – hauntingly, appealingly
– from out of a pathetic little face. She slipped into the chair at the
table, and leaning her face on her hands, looked gravely at the mirror.
For a long time now she had had a strange sense of dual individual-
ity. When she looked in the glass a woman looked back at her with
reproachful, haunting eyes. And to-night the woman looked at her
appealingly . . .
‘Nature – insolent, triumphant nature – cares nothing for the indi-
vidual . . . Yet we do have the present moment; let us keep it and hold
it. We are alive now. We love each other. Give him to me! . . . And I’,
pleaded the woman in the glass, ‘I shall have lived.’ . . .
When [Mary] raised her head again, the eyes were no longer tri-
umphant, they were reproachful. ‘Who am I? Why am I here? [the
eyes] asked: ‘To live is to suffer; why do you let me live? . . . I am a
living, suffering entity,’ said the woman in the glass, ‘in a world of

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artificial laws; of laws made for man’s convenience and pleasure, not
for mine. Have I one thing for which I have longed? Have I a human
love, have I the hope of immortality, have I even tasted the intoxi-
cation of achievement? . . . Why, since you take joy from me, why do
you let me live?’

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Here, indeed, was a greater temptation than the one from which
she had just escaped. She sprang up, horrified, afraid of the haunt-
ing eyes.
(SMW, 261–5)

Unable to resolve the conflict within, Mary comes perilously close to


contemplating suicide. Salvation comes from without: she opens
the window to let in fresh air; this symbolic gesture reconnects her with
the outside world and saves her from her self-destructive impulse. The
thought of two people (both of them dead) provides her with a new
purpose: her father and his maxim never to give up struggling; her best
friend’s plea always to stand by other women. The reconstruction of her
disunited female selves into one unified whole is to a large extent
brought about by her belief in women’s common cause: ‘All we modern
women mean to help each other now’ (SMW, 255).
Dixon’s text makes the heroine’s survival contingent on two factors:
her reconnection with herself (based on the assumption that there is a
‘real’ self), and her reconnection with the external world. Significantly,
the unity within does not guarantee the preservation of self if it coin-
cides with the withdrawal from everything without. Thus in Schreiner’s
Story of an African Farm, Lyndall’s retreat into herself is followed by
physical and mental disintegration and, ultimately, death. In a situa-
tion of acute crisis, her reflection assumes the status of an only friend,
a person who will give her all the unconditional love and security unat-
tainable or undesired from others:

‘One day I will love something utterly, and then I will be better,’ she
said once. Presently she looked up. The large dark eyes from the glass
looked back at her. She looked deep into them.
‘We are all alone, you and I,’ she whispered; ‘no one helps us, no
one understands us; but we will help ourselves.’ The eyes looked back
at her. There was a world of assurance in their still depths . . .
‘We shall never be quite alone, you and I,’ she said; ‘we shall always
be together, as we were when we were little.’
The beautiful eyes looked into the depths of her soul.
‘We are not afraid; we will help ourselves!’ she said.
(AF, 223–4)

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 171

The point is that Lyndall can so manifestly not help herself. Her com-
munion with her mirror image spells a morbid self-absorption, a refusal
to take her life in hand. While at school she wrote ‘some plays’ (AF,
169) and later expressed her strong belief that if a woman aspiring to
become an actress ‘moves straight towards’ her aim, ‘she must succeed

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at last’ (AF, 199), she herself makes no serious attempt to strike out on
any career. In the absence of a clearly-defined objective, death becomes
the ultimate destination, the celebration of a self-reflexivity which
posits the author as the only surviving participant in a triad of mirror
images. Her gaze alone remains unchanged, taking in, and reflecting in
her writing, the dead images of both her heroine and her heroine’s alter
ego:

Slowly raising herself on her elbow, she took from the sail a glass that
hung pinned there . . . She put the pillow on her breast, and stood
the glass against it . . . The dying eyes on the pillow looked into the
dying eyes in the glass; they knew that their hour had come. She
raised one hand and pressed the stiff fingers against the glass . . . She
tried to speak to it, but she would never speak again . . . Then slowly,
without a sound, the beautiful eyes closed. The dead face that the
glass reflected was a thing of marvellous beauty and tranquillity.
(AF, 264–5)

Here the death of the artist follows the ‘stillbirth’ of her ambition. It
could of course be argued that Lyndall is unable to give birth to her
artistic ideas because another kind of birth interferes: that of an
unwanted child. If mothering is a metaphor for creating art, then
Lyndall can mother neither her biological nor her symbolical child. In
fact she suggests that she herself has not yet been born into life herself:
‘till I have been delivered’, she tells Waldo, ‘I will deliver no one’ (AF,
179).
In other narratives, the mirror encapsulates not the heroine’s retreat
from the world, nor the clash of conflicting desires, but her collision
with sex-role expectations. In this case, the mirror is sometimes trans-
formed into a mere picture – the one-dimensional, static, lifeless image
of external demands which threatens the heroine’s self-conception. In
Gertrude Dix’s The Image Breakers (1900), Leslie Ardent feels increasingly
alienated from her lover Jack Redgold when, as his political career
advances, he begins to impose a more conventional format on their
relationship. The incompatibility of their desires – hers for freedom
and equality, his for a bourgeois marriage – is made manifest by a
painting:

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172 New Woman Fiction

as she brushed the silver paper from the glazed surface, the phrase
[in his letter] occurred to her, ‘It will be just the thing to go over the
fireplace in our best room.’ Tragically disappointed, she turned her
back upon the picture and walked to the window, where she stared
out, seeing nothing of visible things . . . Their best room, where she

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was to sit demurely pouring out tea to the wives of the local politi-
cians and the Unitarian minister! They were to hang that lie, that
sentimental lie, over the mantelpiece! She went back and tore the
last shred of paper from the broad expanse of gilt frame. She gazed
with exaggerated contempt on the smooth-visaged, well-nourished
young person it contained, with the nicely-curling hair. ‘The Soul’s
Awakening!’ forsooth! . . . She put the picture on the floor, with its
face to the wall . . . She felt as though she had already begun to look
at the world through front-parlour windows . . . She felt for the first
time as though love weakened, tied, and fettered her. For one of the
first times in her life she felt impotent and afraid.
(IB, 230–1)

The pathetic nature of the portrait’s pretensions to art and its funda-
mental dishonesty expose the sender’s fantasy of married bliss as a
sham. With her instinctive move towards the window, Leslie signals her
desire to escape from a situation which repositions her, hitherto an
‘ardent’ agent of her destiny, as the ‘impotent’, ‘castrated’ and circum-
scribed female. Not only does Redgold’s choice of picture reflect his tra-
ditional assumptions about their relationship; it adds insult to injury
by turning Leslie from the active role of a painter into the passive
recipient of a sentimental figure frozen on to canvas. By this time she
has already had to come to terms with the collapse of her ambition of
‘mak[ing] her way as an artist in black and white’ (IB, 102). Like Mary
Erle in Dixon’s novel she has learnt that the demands of the market-
place are paramount, and resigned herself to earn her livelihood by illus-
trating advertisements for such prosaic products as shampoo, pepper
and temperance tracts. Forced to trivialize her art at work, she now feels
reduced to a cheap image at home.
It is against the backdrop of her employer’s cynical marketing strat-
egy and her partner’s domestic orthodoxy that Leslie first encounters
her reflection in the mirror. As she feels threatened by an alien image
of herself imposed from outside, the dialogue with her mirror image,
instead of spelling inner dissociation, helps her to gain a better under-
standing of herself and her position. Her vague misgivings about certain
incidents are reflected by her other self in all their plainness. Emotion-

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 173

ally detached where she herself is hopelessly entangled, her alter ego
proves a wise and discerning friend who can judge situations with more
sagacity but will also confront her with unpleasant truths. Thus Leslie’s
unacknowledged doubts about her impending marriage and her appre-
hensiveness about Redgold’s motives materialize into conscious thought

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when she glances at their joint reflection in the mirror:

She looked again into the glass, curious to see the couple so soon to
be made man and wife . . . The man looked at peace with the world
and well pleased with himself; the girl had a critical air, and did not
look very brilliantly happy.
(IB, 242)

While Leslie is unable to articulate openly her reservations about their


relationship, her mirror image brings home to her their manifest divi-
sion. Virginia Woolf and Luce Irigaray argue that woman is concep-
tualized as man’s specularized Other, so that her image gives meaning
to him;22 Leslie’s mirror image, however, gives meaning primarily to her
own experience. Thus, when shortly afterwards Redgold snatches away
from her one of his political articles, her shrewder self guesses the
reason:

Why on earth was she to be thwarted and treated like a child? Why
were things to be concealed from her? As she raised her head, the
critical eyes looked straight into hers from the mirror. ‘He is afraid
to let you see what he has written in the article.’ . . . That hateful
mirror! Leslie bent her eyes upon her plate, trying to force down her
food.
(IB, 242–3)

The ‘critical eyes’ also tell her why Redgold is unwilling to communi-
cate his political plans: ‘The scarcely seen eyes of the girl in the mirror
shot a swift glance at her. “He is evading you. He does not want you to
know the truth.” She pushed her plate away from her, and fell to a
minute study of the pattern on the tablecoth’ (IB, 243). In her wish to
avoid having to face the facts about her relationship, Leslie projects her
realistic vision on to her mirror image, and takes to ‘studying the
pattern’ of domesticity, a course of action which eventually freezes her
into the very position she so despised when unwrapping ‘The Soul’s
Awakening’. Her own ‘awakening’ to the accuracy of her specular other’s
insight helps her to separate from Redgold. Their relationship later

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174 New Woman Fiction

resumes, with both partners now mature enough to maintain their own,
and respect the other’s, independence. The novel ends with a scene
which recaptures, and transforms, the earlier moment when Leslie saw
herself and Redgold reflected in the mirror. Then their reflection spelled
discord; now it symbolizes the unity of lovers:

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The frame of the mirror was carved in the rude semblance of a snake.
That was Eternity. The smooth surface of the glass it held was like
life – life in which one sees one’s self. Suddenly as she stood there
she drew a deep breath, still gazing into the mirror, and beside her
own face, rosy with the wind and the sun, lo! the face of the man
also.
(IB, 392)

By drawing on classical mythology, in which ‘a woman with a snake,


and a mirror’ personifies Prudence,23 Dix suggests that only a relation-
ship which allows for individual autonomy makes for a ‘prudent’ and
fulfilling union.
The inner development of the artist-heroine of a New Woman novel
thus proceeds along the following lines: the clash between external
expectations and internal desires, or between conflicting impulses
within her psyche, precipitates an inner crisis which culminates in tem-
porary paralysis. The second phase is marked by her recognition of her
inner dissociation into two discordant selves. In the third and final
phase she chooses one of these two positions. The inner equilibrium
she regains allows her to undertake definite steps to address the con-
flict. The success of her actions is largely contingent on the form this
resolution has taken. If she has merged into the image in the mirror,
she has exchanged authenticity for the mere reflection of social norms
or her desires. In this case her quest for identity leads to the loss of
authenticity; she fails because she has allowed illusion to replace reality.
Thus Thurston’s Max loses her artistic persona the moment she fuses
with the Maxine of her painting.
It is only the reverse course that leads to narrative success. In this case
the mirror image, deprived of its independent existence, resumes its
original function of representing the heroine – a heroine grown in
stature, whose glance at her reflection in the glass expresses self-
affirmation rather than self-doubt. On the metafictional level, the
heroine who has found her ‘true self’ reflects the novel’s author, who is
(re)constructing her autobiographical quest for artistic identity in her
fictional character. ‘The one plot that seems to be concealed in most of

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 175

the nineteenth-century literature by women’, note Gilbert and Gubar,


is the ‘story of the woman writer’s quest for her own story . . . of the
woman’s quest for self-definition . . . the story of her attempt to make
herself whole by healing her own infections and diseases.’24 Perhaps
New Woman writers insisted on their characters’ striving for a unified

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self because they themselves harboured doubts about the attainability
of absolute inner harmony, and indeed about the practical validity of
the feminist message that women’s recognition of their internalization
of patriarchal norms was itself the first step towards rebellion and that,
provided they responded to this conflict in the right way, their rebel-
lion would be successful. The inconclusive ending of The Story of a
Modern Woman, the uncomfortably cynical undertones discernible in
the conclusion to Rose Cottingham Married, the disastrous consequences
of attaining a self too exclusively unified in The Story of an African Farm:
much seems to indicate that the original conflict is never quite resolved.
This is also implied by the exploration of the madwoman theme.
Although suggesting that female anger must be externalized in order to
be channelled into constructive action, New Woman fiction often calls
into question the possibility of individual liberation.
The frequency with which female monsters, notably madwomen,
surface in Victorian women’s writing has been read as a reflection of the
authors’ frustration with the restricting and contradictory roles avail-
able to women. By displacing their aggressive energy into their charac-
ters, Gilbert and Gubar argue, writers could both externalize their anger
and safely contain it within their fiction.25 As early to mid-Victorian
women could not yet fall back on an established feminist movement,
they had to find a way of rejecting patriarchal structures while appear-
ing to endorse them. This ambiguity may account for the fact that it is
not the heroines themselves who become the site of (violent) rebellion,
but ‘mad’ or ‘monstrous’ women, who are then duly punished. In the
New Woman novel, subversion still exacts a heavy price, but now the
angle is an entirely different one. The punishment, even destruction of
the transgressing woman can no longer be read as the victory of reason
and feminine moderation (Jane Eyre) over an insane and monstrous
female (Bertha Mason); instead the roles of monster and heroine, mad-
woman and victim become interchangeable.
This is illustrated in Mona Caird’s Wing of Azrael (1889), whose pro-
tagonist, Viola Sedley, is cast both as a ‘monster’ and as a victim. Even
as a child she pushes a boy out of a window, with almost fatal conse-
quences; years later, she stabs him to death. Although her aggressive
acts are always attributable to self-defence, the narrative establishes an

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176 New Woman Fiction

undercurrent of violence as part of Viola’s unconscious. As in the case


of Brontë’s Bertha, the eruptions of her temper are associated with
natural phenomena: here it is not the moon but the waves of the near-
by sea, whose rhythms and, in more turbulent weather, maelstroms
modulate the cyclical bouts of Viola’s violence. The very first manifes-

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tation, in childhood, of her impetuous and tempestuous nature links
the heroine to the victim, and the victim to the ‘madwoman’, precipi-
tating a vicious circle which ultimately culminates in murder. Because
the child feels guilty for her ‘monstrous’ (violent) reaction to sexual
harassment, the young woman allows herself to be pressurized into
marrying a man she abhors. Ostensibly assuming the role of the Angel
in the House by not directly opposing her husband, she yet consistently
resists his attempts to possess and rule her. Finally, after she has borne
his violence for years and he threatens to confine her to an asylum,
the only alternative she can conceive is to kill him or to kill herself.
Significantly, she does both: by first stabbing her husband and then
rushing off to throw herself off the cliffs, she kills both the monster (her
husband and the madwoman in herself) and the angel (the good woman
who, because she remains stuck in the role of victim, bears some of the
responsibility for her destiny).
Like Jane Eyre, Caird’s novel, steeped in symbolism, draws extensively
on the Gothic. In her childhood Viola is driven from a paradisal garden,
only to discover a ruin in which she is harassed by her future husband;
they later move to a Gothic mansion, an uninhabited part of which she
starts to ‘haunt’ secretly. She feels particularly drawn to a room called
the ‘Death Chamber’, in which a female ancestor was murdered by her
husband, and where Viola will eventually kill hers. While the Gothic
theme aligns Viola with the madwomen of earlier women’s writing,
Caird carefully contextualizes the emotional development of her
character, implying that Viola is driven by adverse circumstances and
inhuman pressure, not by fate, and that under different conditions she
could have developed into an artist.
When Viola is a girl, her ‘nervous temperament’ and ‘sensitive, bewil-
dered soul’, dreamy nature, and ‘poetic faculty’ seek for an outlet which
she is always denied (WOA, I: 6, 62). ‘Only now and then in poetry
would she find relief for this pent-up painful rapture,’ the narrator
explains, ‘but books of poetry were not very plentiful at the Manor-
House; besides, Mrs Sedley did not think any poet, except Cowper, safe
reading for her daughter’ (WOA, I, 14). Viola grows up in a suffocating
home in almost complete social seclusion, receiving only the most
rudimentary education, above all internalizing her mother’s lesson to

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 177

‘[e]ndure bravely, and in silence; that is the woman’s part’ (WOA, I, 134).
She is not allowed to earn her own living, but is instead bullied into an
abusive marriage, with the result that the passion that could have been
channelled into meaningful work vents itself destructively. What Caird
suggests, then, is that the qualities that make the artist also serve, when

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the artist is stifled and oppressed, to awaken the monster.
As Viola’s example shows, the mere rejection of female stereotypes
fails to offer a solution to the problem of how to construct a new
(woman) identity: killing both the angel and the monster in herself
before she has found and affirmed a radically different self proves
fatal for the New Woman heroine. It is precisely because in the colli-
sion between angel and monster the potential for arriving at a self-
determined identity is constantly in danger of being erased, that any
resulting energy, instead of being directed towards a specific external
goal, erupts into ‘madness’ and self-destructive violence. Yet only the
externalization of her rebellion would provide a way out of the inner
chaos. The New Woman as heroine must kill the angel but transform
the self-defeating monster into a constructive agent of her destiny, a
rebel who accepts temporary setbacks and even pain as part of the birth
pangs of a new life:

Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts – suffer-


ing rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing.
But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paraly-
sis! A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the
new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the serf, heralding the
way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore!26

With this passionate appeal written in the 1850s, Florence Nightingale


anticipated the New Woman’s struggle for self-determination, attribut-
ing middle-class women’s depression and nervous disorders to the all-
pervasive colonization of their time, space and energy: ‘Women never
have an half-hour in all their lives (excepting before or after anybody
is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offend-
ing or of hurting someone.’ The constant interruption women suffer
and the trivial pursuits they are forced to follow are tantamount to ‘suf-
focation’ and to torture: ‘It’s like lying on one’s back, with one’s hands
tied and having liquid poured down one’s throat’ (a striking image
featured also in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh).27 As the only
socially sanctioned means of escape is through invalidism, many
women, Nightingale argues, embrace illness, until finally illness (hyste-

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178 New Woman Fiction

ria) becomes an end in itself. In this way the space required for self-
development contracts to that of a sick room. What women need is a
personal space which guarantees both freedom of movement and
freedom from interruption. New Woman fiction prefigured Woolf’s
notion of ‘a room of one’s own’ by making the emergence of an

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autonomous female self contingent on the appropriation of this private
space.

The room as womb and the birth of the woman artist

Many New Woman writers, especially when they recreated their own
quest for artistic voice and individual space in their novels, saw the
reclaiming of privacy as being the necessary precondition for their char-
acters’ occupation of public spaces. Of autobiographical significance to
the writers themselves, the notion of a private living and working space
also reflected the larger aspirations and, to a certain degree, the social
reality of middle-class women at the turn of the century. For the first
time in British history, large numbers of young middle-class women
were leaving their parental homes to study or earn a living, looking for
meaningful work and independent accommodation. Situated as it was
at the interface of private and public worlds, the female bedsit or flat
represented a crucial point of departure from conventional middle-class
femininity. It held the promise of providing an autonomous private
space while at the same time allowing access to public life. Of course
it was also difficult to get hold of: the privacy and comfort of a well-
furnished flat required a financial security that most women did not
have. The alternatives, single rooms in boarding-houses or shared rooms
in hostels or clubs were often too austere or too public to make them
an altogether liberating experience, while the more comfortable ‘ladies’
residential chambers’ recreated the conditions of supervision and moral
restraint that women had sought to escape by leaving home.28
Many fin-de-siècle feminist narratives explore middle-class women’s
experience of living on their own for the first time. While not all of
these texts are artist-novels, the protagonists are always pursuing edu-
cational or professional objectives which sometimes lead to an artistic
career. The female Künstlerroman, when it deals with the New Woman,
thus extends its focus to the professional working woman in general.
As Lyn Pykett notes, the female artist was a paradigmatic figure of rebel-
lion, representing both women’s invasion of ‘male’ domains and the
feminist challenge to patriarchal discourse (exemplified by the feminist
reconceptualization of art as purposeful).29 As a result of the slippage

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 179

between the categories of ‘artist’ and ‘feminist’, the New Woman pro-
tagonist could be represented by either. Just as, in their discussion of
art, writers established a close connection between aesthetics and ethics,
so they shifted the boundaries between Künstlerroman proper and
Bildungsroman, artist and exceptional woman.

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What all these women wanted was, to start with, a room of their own.
Consequently, the privately rented room, in New Woman fiction, is a
synonym for intellectual freedom: a medium of self-expression, a cata-
lyst of experience, a precondition of emancipation. However, rooms are
also markers of economic hardship. The often fragile independence the
heroines enjoy is constantly threatened by their frustrated hopes of
professional success and their disillusionment with the monotonous
drudgery of a working life. If, as a result of parental interference or
romantic attachments, they exchange their rooms (signifying inde-
pendence) for domesticity and marriage, they almost inevitably lose
their foothold in public life.
In Isabella Ford’s On the Threshold, the first-person narrator Lucretia
and her friend Kitty, both in their early twenties, move to fin-de-siècle
London to study music and fine art. Although they are used to a much
more comfortable existence, the three dark and rather shabby rooms
they rent appear to them like ‘palaces of liberty’:

It was the first time that we had ever been in lodgings or had any
kind of liberty in our lives; we had hitherto lived entirely under our
respective parental roofs, and had not been allowed to hold any
opinions of our own . . . or to have any action of liberty whatever
. . . The hard, stiff sofa, the hideous sideboard, the one comfortable
chair, comfortable only because the bottom was gradually bursting
out, seemed like enchanted furniture out of fairyland, the fairyland
of freedom, where no authoritative or disapproving eye was perpet-
ually on us.
(OTT, 10)

As I discussed in Chapter 2, they have to adjust to some unpleasant


realities when they become embroiled in the problems of the homeless
working-class woman. Their active social commitment brings them into
close contact with poverty, prostitution, ‘domestic’ violence and crime.
Thus, while fulfilling a personally liberating function, their rooms also
serve as a gateway to the social reality faced by less privileged women.
The discovery of private space puts Ford’s heroines at a cross-roads
between the return to domesticity and the progression to independent

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180 New Woman Fiction

agency. For Kitty, whose father falls critically ill and who returns home
and eventually marries, life contracts again to the ‘narrow spaces’ (OTT,
190) inhabited by the dutiful daughter and affectionate wife. Unlike
Kitty, Lucretia has no intention of compromising her independence,
even though at the end of the novel she is left with no room to call her

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own either. On the other hand, the fact that she is by now mixing with
socialists and social workers may suggest, as does the title, that she has
crossed the ‘threshold’ from private to public space, and therefore from
personal identity politics to political activism. In a sense, then, the
novel breaks off at the precise point where the character’s possible
further progression and the author’s real-life present intersect. At the
time of writing this novel, Ford had already gained a reputation as a
socialist feminist activist and a leader of working-class women’s causes;
she was to become a very public woman.
Like Lucretia, the protagonist of Evelyn Sharp’s The Making of a
Prig (1897) prefers to risk an uncertain future for the sake of a self-
determined existence. Katharine stoically overcomes her disappoint-
ment with her poor living quarters and the difficulties she faces on an
overcrowded labour market, eventually settling into a teaching job from
which she derives great enjoyment. However, disillusioned by the prob-
lems she encounters in a heterosexual friendship, she returns to her
parents only to find that there is no longer any place for her. After a
period of depression, she comes to terms with the fact that she cannot
rely on men (her father or her lover) to provide her with a purpose in
life, regains her old ‘expansionist’ mood and takes up a job offer in Paris;
it is there that she finally reaches full adulthood and achieves lasting
success and stability in her professional and emotional life.
Lacking the broader political focus of Ford’s novel and Sharp’s own
later work on the suffrage movement (Rebel Women), this partly auto-
biographical narrative has a liberal feminist argument as its central
message: that it is only through financial independence, that is, through
paid employment, that women can fulfil themselves in both the public
and private spheres. Like her heroine, Sharp worked hard – initially very
much against the wishes of her parents – at getting an education and
starting out on a professional life. Determined to support herself, she
moved to London in 1894, where, living in a hostel like the one
described in her novel, she first worked as a teacher. Almost instantly,
she was able to launch her career as a writer by becoming a regular con-
tributor to the Yellow Book. After publishing a number of novels, she
turned to journalism and, inspired by Elizabeth Robins’s speeches,
joined the WSPU in 1906. When the movement split in 1912, she fol-

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 181

lowed the Pethick-Lawrences and took over the editorial of Votes for
Women. A committed ‘Peacette’ during the war, she later became a
member of the Labour Party and a supporter of the birth control move-
ment.30 Her life is probably the best illustration of her novel’s point
about the advantages of putting professional objectives first.

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Sharp’s optimistic message is called into question by Netta Syrett in
Nobody’s Fault (1896). ‘It seems that all one’s best strength is wasted in
raising a little platform for oneself – just room to stand on and breathe,
but quite bare and empty, when one has at last reached it,’ complains
Bridget, a young writer (NF, 134). Her life is punctuated by a sequence
of spatial expansions followed by setbacks which lead to an ever more
rigid confinement to conventionally defined feminine spaces. After
many years of arduous study continued in the face of her parents’ oppo-
sition, Bridget fulfils her aspiration to become a teacher, but, once
installed in her independent lodgings, she feels greatly disillusioned
with the prosaic reality:

Bridget drew the slippery horse-hair arm-chair up to the window and


leant her head against the window frame. The little street on to
which she looked, had the suburban air, characteristic of London
streets – it was respectable, and absolutely featureless. She shut her
eyes and her thoughts wondered back over the past two years. She
remembered all the opposition she had encountered, and conquered
. . . Well, that was all over and done with now! She had reached the
goal for which she had striven: she was a High School teacher,
earning eighty pounds a year, living in furnished apartments in
Wentworth Street, Hackney. Bridget opened her eyes, and looked all
round the room. The impassive, hideous furniture, the pictures that
looked down on her from the walls, filled her with a kind of unrea-
soning, impotent frenzy of despair. She sprang from her seat and
began to walk wildly from end to end of the narrow room.
(NF, 98–9)

With the publication of her first novel, her life opens up to a completely
new world, but almost immediately contracts again when she marries
a decadent writer whose emotional cruelty silences her artistic voice. In
a way typical of the New Woman novel of the failing artist, Bridget,
when faced with the choice between self-sacrifice and self-fulfilment (a
new relationship, this time one grounded in equality), inevitably opts
for the former, returning home to look after her ailing mother after her
father’s death. The novel’s ending brings her life full circle by rein-

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182 New Woman Fiction

stalling her in a stifling middle-class environment replete with anti-


macassars, Japanese fans, and florid yellow wallpaper (NF, 32–3). This
last detail, with its reminder of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s powerful
story about madness, hints at the bleakness of Bridget’s future prospects.
Like Hadria in Caird’s Daughters of Danaus, she is to remain in duty

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bound; as in the narrator’s case in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the only (ulti-
mately self-destructive) means of escape will be through her mind: ‘I
wonder if I’m going mad?’ she worries on the last page. The conclud-
ing sentence, which refers to her need to find ‘rooms for mother and
me’ (NF, 254), points to the stifling rather than liberating potential of
the conjunction of ‘room’ and ‘mother’. Held a prisoner by a mother
hostile to her self-creation as an artist, the daughter remains a captive
imagination, an ‘unlit lamp’ (as in Hall’s novel), forever tied to her
mother’s womb, the room of domesticity. It is only in the absence of
the (biological) mother that the daughter appears able to transform her
room into a site of personal reconstruction.
As New Woman writers suggest, then, to have a room and a regular
income of one’s own does not in itself guarantee an independent life or
lasting artistic or professional success. Although private lodgings are an
essential milestone on the New Woman’s journey to self-development,
even more crucial is her consistency of purpose and the determination
with which she protects and affirms her autonomy. Protagonists who
have achieved maturity of vision and purpose are sometimes rewarded
with emotional fulfilment. Thus at the height of her career, Sharp’s
heroine wins the admiration and love of the man who had previously
spurned her. Significantly, though, the novel ends with the prospect of
their marriage, not with a close-up of its daily routine. For the New
Woman who desires to be(come) an artist, emotional independence and
private space are the prerequisites for creative production because only
they safeguard the freedom from interruption required for concentrated
work.
In figurative terms, the room is much more than a marker of private
space. As a paradigm in turn-of-the-century feminist writing, it can
either denote a prison (the nursery in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,
the ‘Death Chamber’ in Caird’s The Wing of Azrael), or a place of regen-
eration and symbolical rebirth. If the room functions as a metaphorical
womb, it is a secret space, unknown or inaccessible to the heroine’s
husband or other patriarchal figures: it is here that she develops into an
artist by giving birth to her creative vision. By contrast, a room that is
not the heroine’s choice, and in which she is kept against her will, soon
becomes a tomb: a burial ground for failed aspirations.

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 183

Earlier women’s writing often focused on the room as a prison or a


site of patriarchal control. Thus in Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance
(1790) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman (1798) women
are incarcerated and buried alive by husbands, fathers, abbots and
robbers in vaults, castles, monasteries, and lunatic asylums. Both texts

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suggest that one of the dangers of this imprisonment is that women
may get used to it: after 20 years in the vaults of her husband’s castle,
Louisa de Bernini is afraid of freedom and reluctant to leave, and even
Wollstonecraft’s Maria loses her desire for liberty when she gets involved
in a love affair.
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, patriarchal rooms took on a
more benign aspect: Fanny Price, the protagonist of Jane Austen’s Mans-
field Park (1814), is given a room for her private use by her uncle, and
Barrett Browning’s epynomous Aurora Leigh (1857) recovers from her
depression at being exiled from Sicily partly because she comes across
her late father’s library in a hidden ‘garrett-room’. But Fanny is con-
stantly interrupted in her room and ultimately expelled from it when
she refuses to marry the man of her uncle’s choice, and Aurora is so
overawed by male literary tradition that she does not dare call herself
a poet (AL, First Book, ll. 833–4, 933–42).
In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) Lucy Snowe, suffering from an
absolute lack of privacy, retires to the attic of Madame Beck’s establish-
ment, where she is first locked up by one man, and then disturbed by
another; her exasperated comment that ‘no corner was sacred from
intrusion’ (V, 310) prefigures Beth’s desperate longing for ‘[a] secret spot,
sacred to herself, where she would be safe from intrusion’ in Grand’s
The Beth Book (347). Lucy Audley’s private apartments, in Mary
Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), are never safe from intrusion; in
fact it is their very penetration by three men (her nephew-in-law, her
first husband, and the husband of her maid) that secures her exposure
as a bigamist, as a result of which she is taken to her ‘living grave’, a
madhouse (LAS, 391). In Jane Eyre (1847) the colonizer’s country, the
marital home, the madhouse and the living grave all merge in Bertha
Rochester’s attic prison.
Clearly, rooms that belong to and are controlled by men do not allow
for female development, while rooms that do are beyond the reach of
patriarchal forces. In Aurora Leigh the artist-heroine not only discovers
her father’s books, she also has a ‘little chamber’ of her own, in which
she starts writing after everybody has gone to bed or before they are up
(the Nightingale syndrome). Window to her soul, this room is also a
window to the outside world, for by combining her writing with secret

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184 New Woman Fiction

outdoor rambles, Aurora gradually recovers her health and gains the
confidence publicly to declare herself an artist (AL, First Book, ll.
567–709).
The metaphorical conflation of room and womb, already hinted at in
Barrett Browning’s text, is turned into a central paradigm in New Woman

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fiction. It is no coincidence that this development should happen
towards the end of the century, at a time when women writers were able
to draw on a rich female tradition, and could therefore link their pro-
tagonists’ ‘birth’ as artists to the (re)discovery of this tradition. Where
Barrett Browning lamented that she ‘look[ed] everywhere for grand-
mothers and [saw] none’,31 Grand’s Beth, at 11, knows all about her
‘grandmothers’, telling a boy off for saying that women and writing do
not mix: ‘Women do write books, and girls too. Jane Austen wrote books,
and Maria Edgeworth wrote books, and Fanny Burney wrote a book
when she was only seventeen, . . . and all the great men read it’ (BB, 172,
emphasis in original). In her later writing practice, Beth is greatly
inspired by her knowledge of ‘those who had gone before’ (BB, 370).
Grand uses a complex system of spatial metaphors to describe the
development of the female writer from childhood to adult life. Posi-
tioning the young girl’s discovery of her ‘further faculty’ (BB, 17) within
the vast spaces of the wild Irish countryside, she links the emergence
of Beth’s artistic gifts to her freedom of movement. When, in adoles-
cence, her roaming spirit is curbed by a repressive boarding-school
regime, to which most of the students react with nervous disorders, Beth
(like Aurora Leigh) resorts to nightly outdoor excursions; these greatly
improve her health and powers of imagination, even if they lead to her
expulsion. Stifled by the depressing parochialism of her home, Beth
escapes into marriage only to realize that, in sharp contrast to her
husband Dan’s spatial expansion, she herself is now dispossessed of even
the smallest private space: ‘He had his consulting-room, a room called
his laboratory, his surgery, and a dressing-room, where no one would
dream of following him if he shut the door; she had literally not a
corner’ (BB, 345–6).
This situation is compounded by Dan’s increasingly violent invasion
of Beth’s space: he reads her letters, and when she locks herself into her
bedroom simply to be able to think straight, he threatens her with
breaking down the door. Beth, who ‘suffer[s] miserably from the want
of proper privacy in her life’, grows depressed, her fading interest in
nature and outdoor exercise resulting in the loss of her artistic inspira-
tion (BB, 344). Then one day she discovers a magic room at the very
top of the house, a secret attic space, its entrance hidden by trunks full

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 185

of reminders of her past: in a figurative sense, Beth recovers her dis-


carded and repressed self. The Alice-in-Wonderland-like way she enters
the room, by ‘going down on her hands and knees’ and crawling like
an infant, point to her psychological regression to childhood: ‘It was
the kind of thing a child would have done, but what was Beth but a

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child?’ (BB, 346). Once she has salvaged her forgotten childhood, she is
able metaphorically to reverse the birth process and return to the womb.
Traversing the darkness of the tunnel formed vertically by the trunks
and walls and horizontally by the sloping roof, she comes to a door
with a rusted lock, pushes inwards and re-emerges in a circular, ‘bright
and cosy’ room with walls of ‘pale warm pink’ which seems ‘curiously
familiar’: ‘her first impression was that she had been there before’ (BB,
346–7).
The room Beth discovers has a large window opening on to the back
garden which is ‘thickly covered with ivy’, hence almost invisible from
outside (BB, 346). The ivy, which in traditional discourse of the time
stood for the clinging female dependent on the strong and independent
male, represented by the oak, is here subverted into an image of female
self-containment and protection against male invasion. A refuge from
patriarchy, Beth’s attic is also the repository of a submerged female tra-
dition waiting to be rediscovered and inhabited: the room looks ‘as if
[it] had only lately been occupied’ (BB, 347); with its embroidered chairs
and mahogany bookcase, vases and floral ornaments, it points back to
a female predecessor with artistic tastes, and forward to Beth’s immi-
nent transformation into an artist. By furnishing this room with objects
from her past, Beth is able to unlock the ‘secret chamber’ of her mind:
‘Now . . . I shall be able to study, to read and write, think and pray at
last, undisturbed’ (BB, 356, 348).
Curiously perhaps for a stifled writer, Beth does not throw herself into
literature, but instead starts on a course of study. She immerses herself
in philosophy, mathematics, and the classical writers, reflecting on her
reading while carrying out paid needlework. The text draws attention
to the fact that this method of simultaneously exerting her manual
(artistic) and intellectual capacities gives her life much-needed structure;
it enables her to concentrate on her inner development and yet recon-
nects her with the outside world by giving her a separate identity (that
of the working woman as opposed to the wife). Mere escapism (pro-
vided by light literature and its ‘fanciful dreams’), it is implied, would
be detrimental to her health at a time when her mind is already affected
by the breakdown of her marriage (BB, 357).
By emphasizing the significance of meaningful work for Beth’s mental

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186 New Woman Fiction

recovery, Grand presents a powerful counter-narrative to the contem-


porary medical discourse on hysteria. Middle-class women, especially if
they were educated and had intellectual aspirations, were often sub-
jected to rest cures when they showed signs of repulsion with regard to
their ‘natural’, subordinate roles as wife and mother.32 Clearly intended

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to refeminize rebellious women by returning them to a maternal body
economy, the rest cure did not so much address women’s grievances as
men’s fears. Women writers responded to this patriarchal reduction of
female minds to passive bodies by writing a body politic of their own.
The rooms to which their heroines withdraw, while offering them a ‘rest
cure’ from their husbands, provide them with the space in which to
exercise their minds and bodies at one and the same time.
It is precisely because she has purposeful work to do that Beth
becomes, not a madwoman in the attic, but a feminist writer. Meditat-
ing on the philosophical problems she is reading about, she gradually
starts noting her thoughts down. Significantly her attempt to imitate
conventional patriarchal discourse stops the flow of her ideas (BB, 371).
Instead, anticipating Woolf, she feels inspired by her rediscovery of a
female tradition, as she, too, starts ‘think[ing] back through [her]
mothers’ (ROO, 63). Thus it is her growing awareness of women’s lives
as translated through the (auto)biographies of famous female predeces-
sors like George Sand and the Brontës, that provides her with the con-
fidence to believe in her own ambitions:

As she read of those who had gone before, she felt a strange kindred
with them; she entered into their sorrows, understood their difficul-
ties, was uplifted by their aspirations, and gloried in their successes.
Their greatness never disheartened her; on the contrary, she was at
home with them in all their experiences . . . It delighted her when
she found in them some small trait or habit which she herself had
already developed or contracted . . .
(BB, 370)

If Beth comes into her own as an artist only by orientating herself


towards writing which recreates female experience, why, then, must she
move away from the ‘vain imaginings’ of the feminine mind (BB, 357)?
The manifest tension between women’s superior writing and men’s
superior thinking is never quite resolved, reflecting perhaps Grand’s
ambivalence towards the ‘female’ forms which energized her own work
(Gothic symbolism, sensational plots, domestic themes). In any case,
Beth feels that she must discipline and suppress her habit of concoct-

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 187

ing ‘verses and stories . . . fireworks of the brain, pleasant, transient,


futile distractions with nothing more nourishing in them than the inter-
est and entertainment of the moment’ (BB, 357). The ‘serious’ male tra-
dition, which enables her to regain her equilibrium, sharpens her
intellect to the point where she turns it against this tradition, rejecting

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it as ‘academic’, ‘twisted’ and ‘artificial’ (BB, 371). She recovers with the
help of the ‘purposeful thought’ of the Fathers (BB, 357), but adopts the
language of the Mothers. What Grand seems to suggest, then, is that
women, in order to feminize culture, must first learn to ‘master’ patri-
archal thought processes; contrary to Audre Lorde’s dictum, in Beth’s
case, ‘the master’s tools’ do ‘dismantle the master’s house’ (language and
literature).33 By placing great emphasis on Beth’s embroidery, Grand
does not, as Roszika Parker and Rachel DuPlessis have argued, reaffirm
the notion of separate spheres;34 on the contrary, she interconnects these
spheres by blurring the distinctions between women’s (menial) work
(needlework) and men’s (brain) work (writing). ‘It is but a little while
since Harriet Martineau concealed her writing beneath her sewing when
visitors came in’, Gilman reminded her readers in 1911, ‘writing was
“masculine” – sewing, “feminine” ’ (MMW, 88). In Grand’s text, Beth’s
creative impulse joins together what is conventionally divided into
gender-specific activities: in metaphorical terms she embroiders her
thoughts and writes with her needle.
However, Beth’s attitude towards her creativity is marked by instabil-
ity which, again, is resolved through strict discipline. While ‘masculine’
writing is associated with ‘toil’ (BB, 371), her ‘feminine’ writing affords
her a quasi-erotic ‘jouissance’ very similar to the one described by
Hélène Cixous,35 a pleasure she increases by deliberately delaying the
moment of fulfilment, concentrating on less exciting tasks before she
allows herself to ‘indulge’ again (BB, 358): ‘the fervour of production
[was] . . . accompanied by a rapture and preceded by a passion of its own
. . . it was like love – love without the lover; she felt all the joy of love,
with none of the disturbance’ (BB, 394). Frightened by the elemental
force of this pleasure, Beth seeks to rein it in: since she does not want
to ‘lose’ herself in her inner world, but find a professional voice that
reaches beyond her room, ‘pleasure’ needs to be transformed into con-
centrated effort and ‘work’. The text lays great stress on Beth’s need to
‘serve a long apprenticeship’: ‘She meant to write and write and write
until she acquired power of expression’ (BB, 369).
Having defined her heroine as a ‘Woman of Genius’ in the subtitle,
Grand was at pains to establish a fundamental difference between the
contemporary (male) notion of the innate genius of the ‘true’ artist

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188 New Woman Fiction

(who realized ‘his’ potential against all odds and did not have to work
at it)36 and her own (feminist) concept of the woman artist as a strug-
gling professional striving to succeed in a culturally hostile environ-
ment: between art as self-expression and art as an impulse for political
reform. Consequently, it is only through hard work and an eye to the

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material conditions in which art is produced and sold that her para-
digmatic female genius can come into her own: Beth finishes her first
book, and with the income gained from her embroidery is able to rent
her own lodgings. In full possession of a new identity, with a room and
money of her own, and with an invigorating purpose in her life, she
can leave the safe boundaries of her sanctuary and re-enter the outside
world.
The space of resistance that the heroine of a New Woman novel
creates for herself is thus life-saving and life-giving. Place of last resort
against her husband’s colonization of her space and body, her room is
also a place of regeneration for her troubled mind. It is here that she
recovers her rights as a person denied to her as a wife, growing into an
artist whose female vision engenders a feminist purpose: Beth decides
that she is ‘going to write for women, not for men’ (BB, 376). With her
work bridging the gulf between the self and the world, she gains the
strength to separate from her husband and establish an independent
public existence.
This prospect of ultimate success is, however, often undercut by the
unstable balance between art and love, purpose and self-sacrifice, public
and private life. The heroines are permanently threatened by their fatal
attraction to emotional bonds. Thus after Beth leaves her husband and
moves to London, where she installs herself in yet another attic room,
her artistic progression and her health are critically undermined by her
growing attachment to a male writer. Initially, having ‘never felt
stronger in her life’, Beth throws herself into work until, once again,
pleasure intervenes to threaten her identity as an artist: ‘soothed by the
stultifying ease into temporary sensuous apathy’, she becomes enam-
oured with her next-door neighbour (BB, 495). Nursing him through an
illness, she sacrifices all her time, energy and money, to the point of
starving herself and even selling her hair to buy food for him, only to
be snubbed on his recovery.
If love almost destroys her life, it is female solidarity that saves it: her
friend Angelica (one of the ‘heavenly twins’ of Grand’s earlier novel)
rescues her from the attic that has now turned into a prison. Although
Beth is soon restored to health and able to revise her book, her creative
spirit has been dealt a blow: ‘[w]riting has lost its charm’ (BB, 520).

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 189

Perhaps because Beth has reason to suspect the pleasure principle, the
end of the novel sees her a feminist orator rather than a writer: the
political mission and the idea of collective advancement are, the text
implies, more important than the individual enjoyment Beth gains from
art. It could also be argued that, just as Grand calls into question the

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‘separate spheres’ doctrine at work in the privileging of mental over
manual creativity, artistry over artisanship, so she deconstructs the
seeming opposition between personal (artistic) and political (activist)
articulations of feminism, suggesting that oratory is one of the many
possible forms that feminist artistic expression can take. When Beth pro-
jects the power and rhythm of her voice to impress her beliefs on her
audience, she stages a public performance not so very dissimular to that
of an actor, musician or singer. In this sense, then, Beth does not turn
her back on art as absolutely as some critics have maintained.37 Grand’s
insistence on the close connection between art and politics, aesthetics
and ethics, constitutes a radical reconceptualization, rather than disap-
proval, of art, one that was diametrically opposed to the decadent mood
which conservative contemporaries so often saw reflected in her work.
One of the few artist-heroines in New Woman fiction to realize her
potential, Beth achieves both public (political) and personal (emotional)
fulfilment. The quest for privacy and a self-defined identity does not
always result in such unconditional success; protagonists who delay
the process of ‘giving birth’ to their reconstructed self risk failure. In
Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, Lyndall is trapped inside her
pregnant body before she has had time to create a proper space for
herself, bears a child unable to live and punishes herself by slowly
shrinking away to nothingness; as her case implies, it is of vital impor-
tance for a heroine to find a life, and not simply a room, of her own.
The appropriation of space must remain a futile attempt at self-
determination if it is not followed by real independence in the outside
world. If the protagonist remains in the embryonic state provided by
her sanctuary, the private room turns into what Elaine Showalter has
called a mere ‘womb with a view’.38
New Woman writers also suggested that, while women had to make
space for themselves, they had to guard against disregarding the spatial
needs of others; simply to reverse the situation did not provide a solu-
tion to the problem. A role reversal which ends in tragic death, not of
the female artist but of her daughter, is the subject of Elizabeth Robins’s
travesty George Mandeville’s Husband (1894). Energetically self-assertive,
bursting with self-confidence, yet criminally negligent of other people’s
needs, ‘George Mandeville’ has assumed the traditional male role to per-

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190 New Woman Fiction

fection; her husband, an artist himself, is only known by virtue of being


married to her. While his paintings are shunned by the public, she
becomes a best-selling feminist writer with a growing crowd of follow-
ers; the role-reversal is complete when she converts his studio into a
feminist salon. Stripped of his identity as an artist, he becomes

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depressed and is overcome by ‘an irrepressible longing to possess a room
– a den – of his own . . . where he, too, might display . . . a “Don’t come
in” placard’ (GMH, 43). His discovery of a ‘secret refuge’ (GMB, 46) – the
boxroom – revives his artistic impetus, yet also strengthens his deter-
mination to save his daughter from feminist contamination. With her
loving admiration of him, Rosina presents the perfect feminine counter-
foil to the monstrous, devouring feminism of his wife. In his marital
fight for survival, he denies subject-status to his daughter, reducing her
to a mere muse and model for his paintings, and flatly forbidding her
to follow her mother’s example: ‘nothing on earth would be so disap-
pointing to me as to see you trying to paint – nothing, that is, except
seeing you try to write’ (GMH, 79).
The only way Wilbraham seems to be able to come to terms with his
wife’s domestic imperialism is by upholding a fiercely misogynist atti-
tude. George Mandeville can be dismissed as ‘abnormal’, a ‘borderland
creature’ like George Eliot ‘who . . . was three parts man’ (GMH, 80–1);
but if his adored daughter followed in their train, he would have to face
the collapse of his already fractured sense of self. The more he is pressed
for spatial survival himself, the less he is prepared to make any room
for his daughter’s needs. When a feminist friend of his wife moves into
the flat and is allocated the boxroom, Wilbraham, once again dispos-
sessed, turns all his energies to moulding Rosina into the unassuming,
devotedly loving and nurturing angel that George refuses to be:

Rosina! She would never be like that. Thank God, she didn’t want to
discuss purity problems, or write, or paint, or model clay, or remodel
people, or even sing, except to her father when they were alone . . .
Rosina should be; the less she ‘did’, the better.
(GMH, 156–7, 158–9, emphasis in original)

With his suppression of his daughter’s artistic aspirations, the destruc-


tion of individual talent and living space comes full circle. Rosina gives
in to her father’s wishes, and consequently freezes into the ideal of
passive and self-sacrificing femininity. The woman who ‘is’ instead of
‘does’, who merely reflects male stereotypes, can only exist in the
imagination. Dying, Rosina is yet again turned into an art object, this

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 191

time by her mother, who in her latest novel constructs ‘not only an
imaginary relation, but an imaginary figure’ (GMH, 217). The literal
motherhood in which she failed so spectacularly is transformed into a
literary mothering of texts.
This is a difficult novel, its message suspended in the clash between

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the feminist analysis of gendered time-space relations and the narrator’s
stridently anti-feminist overtones. Not surprisingly, contemporary femi-
nist critics mistook the misogyny of the husband for that of the author,
and attacked the novel as a prime example of male writers’ institution-
alized sexism.39 Indeed, the narrative voice consistently berates George
Mandeville as an impostor, as being neither a ‘real’ artist nor a ‘good’
woman (wife and mother). This is of course the voice of the husband,
from whose perspective the novel is written. Was Robins, some six years
after George Parks’ suicide, working through autobiographical material,
gauging the hysteria of an insecure male artist who hated to see his wife
poring over books and threatened her with divorce in the event of
her becoming a writer?40 Yet even with the knowledge of hindsight it
is almost impossible to embrace the text as a feminist statement. If,
as Angela John has suggested, it was intended as a ‘tongue-in-cheek
representation’ of contemporary male anxieties about the ‘regiment of
women’,41 it overshot its aim by a long way. On the face of it, at least,
it is, as Ann Ardis argues, an indictment of the New Woman artist.42
Clearly many of the reservations Robins had about feminism at this
stage are reflected in this ambiguous early work, and so perhaps is her
ambivalence towards her own role as a distinguished actress but ‘failed’
wife.
Like Robins’s husband, Wilbraham attempts to circumscribe the artis-
tic ambitions of his wife. At the very outset of their marriage, he steers
her away from painting, in much the same way in which he later, more
successfully, contrives to keep Rosina in place: ‘ ”But why paint pic-
tures?” he said. “Why should a delicate woman” (she already weighed
twelve stone six) “enter the lists and tilt for fame? . . . You shall be my
inspiration, my ideal! Let me paint you!” ’ (GMH, 5–6). When, bored with
her traditional role, George takes up writing instead, he is deeply resent-
ful of her success. Clearly he thinks that their marriage cannot accom-
modate two artists, a view that she comes to share. Throughout the
novel it is evident that neither respects the other’s work or desire for
personal development; between them, they crush their daughter.
George Mandeville’s Husband is indicative of how prevalent the concept
of ‘a room of one’s own’ must have been in the mid-nineties to be sub-
verted into a burlesque. This was not the only instance of a satirical

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192 New Woman Fiction

adaptation of the theme; when the Lady’s Realm approached prominent


women writers to pronounce their views on whether marriage was
detrimental to women’s self-development, Mona Caird responded by
sending in a three-page role-reversal parody of an overburdened
husband and father haunted by dreams of scientific research which he

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is unable to put into practice for lack of time and space.43
What all these narratives demonstrate is that the suppression of
(female) self-expression results not only in the loss of creative potential,
but also in the disintegration of human relationships. One of the most
insistent messages of New Woman fiction was that true companionship
must allow for separate space and individual development. The ideal of
a free working partnership is described at the end of Caird’s Stones of
Sacrifice (1915). Here the protagonists conduct their marriage in two
separate (albeit adjacent) flats; sharing the living-room in the middle
but regarding the other parts as private, they continue to live their sep-
arate lives. Significantly though, this unconventional marriage is a
childless one, and neither of the two is an artist. Thus, when they
explored the possibility of (spatial) independence within a ‘successful’
marriage, fin-de-siècle feminist writers conspicuously excluded the artist
from the picture. Perhaps they felt unable to imagine a way out of the
conflicting loyalties demanded of women artists because there simply
was no easy solution.
This chapter has shown that, by drawing on the childbirth metaphor
and linking women’s real-life experience of mothering with the pro-
duction of art, New Woman writers modified the Künstlerroman
tradition, countering the belief that art was a quintessentially male pre-
rogative. In order to illustrate the adverse conditions under which
women strove to become, or to remain, artists, they concentrated much
of their effort on programmatic narratives of failure, suggesting that
there was a possibility of change if women only learnt to resist their
conditioning into self-sacrifice, and if society, husbands and families
were made to accommodate their spatial and temporal needs.
Suspended narratives, in which the childbirth metaphor was replaced
by those of the mirror and the madwoman, could lead to either artistic
failure or success. If the protagonist was unable to resolve her identity
crisis, or to use her anger constructively, her artistic projects inevitably
failed. Narratives of artistic success drew on the room as a marker of per-
sonal space, individual growth and artistic development. Unlike earlier
women writers, who encoded women’s imprisonment in patriarchy in
the metaphor of the room, New Woman writers sent their heroines on
voyages of self-discovery into womb-like sanctuaries. It is no coinci-

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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 193

dence that the concept of ‘a room of one’s own’ entered feminist litera-
ture at a time when the British women’s movement was making public
headway. Places of regeneration which were highly evocative of a now
reclaimed female tradition, these rooms provided the space and inspi-
ration necessary for moral and philosophical enquiry and, ultimately,

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for artistic activity. Narrating her own desire for and story of spatial
expansion through the eyes of a fictional alter ego, the feminist writer
was uncovering and exploring a female tradition hidden behind male-
dominated discourses of art. The room which the artist-heroine appro-
priated in her husband’s house thus represented the growing space the
New Woman writer claimed for herself in the house of literature.

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Departures

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‘Have you seen that funny old thing with the short grey hair?
. . . I believe she’s what they used to call a “New woman,” ’ said
the girl in breeches, with a low laugh. ‘Honey, she’s a forerun-
ner, that’s what she is, a kind of pioneer that’s got left behind.
I believe she’s the beginning of things like me . . .’
Radclyffe Hall, The Unlit Lamp (1926; 300–1)

‘Everyone’s here to celebrate [Enfranchisement day], and every-


one’s asking where you are . . . Of course we can’t do without
you! . . . Old? Why, that’s why we want you to tell of battles
long ago . . .’
Julia turned to her husband, her cheeks flushed and her eyes
young again.
‘They really want us,’ she said. ‘They haven’t fogotten me
after all! . . . Come along my dear, out into the new world!’
Winifred Peck, The Skirts of Time (1935; 307–8)

In their quest of for artistic self-affirmation, New Woman writers of the


second generation frequently problematized their uneasy relationship
with their roots by representing late-Victorian feminists through the
eyes of the ‘flapper’. Self-assured, sexually experienced, and proudly
assertive of her ultra-modern status, the ‘new’ woman of the twenties
was more intent on shocking the moral codes of the older generation
than in placing herself in a tradition of politically rebellious women. In
many ways the ‘granddaughter’ of fin-de-siècle feminist writers, she
reflected the double-edged success this earlier generation had had in
popularizing the image of the fashionably feminine feminist. Just as, in
the political arena, the turn-of-the-century women’s movement had
paved the way for New Feminism1 (a position considerably less radical,
with intriguing analogies to its 1990s namesake), the Flapper replaced
the fin-de-siècle New Woman and her Edwardian sister, the suffragette,
as a category of cultural contestation.
Keen to inhabit and represent the new climate of sexual liberalism,
many younger writers like May Sinclair distanced themselves from the
moral prerogatives of the earlier feminists, whose emphasis on social
purity and sexual resistance now seemed almost as ‘Old Womanish’ as

194

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Departures 195

Victorian prudery itself. Ultimately, they were inclined to reward their


heroines with sexually gratifying relationships, suggesting that female
liberation had a crucial physical component which feminists ignored at
their peril. As Virginia Woolf remarked in 1931, the greatest problem
the woman writer had to tackle in the twentieth century was how to

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tell the ‘truth about [her] own experiences as a body’ (‘PFW’, 62). New
Woman writers’ preoccupation with sexual oppression and abuse shifted
towards an exploration of sexual pleasure in the literature of the 1920s.
The new discourse on female sexuality that one encounters in texts like
Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door! (1920) and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well
of Loneliness (1928) would have been impossible without the ground-
work undertaken by first-generation writers, who opened up a gyno-
centric space in culture and literature for the discursive interrogation of
and experimentation with new female subjectivities.

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Notes

Regen(d)eration

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1. Mrs Morgan-Dockrell, ‘Is the New Woman a Myth?’, Humanitarian, 8 (1896),
339–40, LVMQ, II.
2. Ainslie Meares, The New Woman (Collins, 1974), 9, 11 (emphasis in
original).
3. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle
(Bloomsbury, 1991).
4. Livia Z. Wittmann, ‘The New Woman as a European Phenomenon’, Neohe-
licon, 19 (1992), 49–68.
5. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989),
xi–xvi; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 9–15; Sally Ledger, ‘The New Woman and
the Crisis of Victorianism’, in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (eds), Cul-
tural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 22–44.
6. Morgan-Dockrell, ‘Is the New Woman a Myth?’, 344.
7. Athol Forbes, ‘Impressions of Sarah Grand’, Lady’s World (1900), 883, SSPSG,
I; George Egerton to Ernst Foerster, 1 July 1900, in Ernst Foerster, Die Frauen-
frage in den Romanen Englischer Schriftstellerinnen der Gegenwart (Marburg:
N. G. Elwertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1907), 46–7, LVMQ, V.
8. Sheila Rowbotham, Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 8; Maggie Humm, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary
Feminist Literary Criticism (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 1.
9. Mrs [M. E.] Haweis, Words to Women: Addresses and Essays (Burnet &
Isbister, 1900), 70–1, LVMQ, V.
10. Undated letter attached to Grand’s letter to William Blackwood (28 June
1892), National Library of Scotland, SSPSG, II.
11. Olive Schreiner to Karl Pearson, 23 October 1886, in Richard Rive (ed.), Olive
Schreiner: Letters (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 109.
12. Margaret Morganroth Gullette, ‘Afterword’ to DD, 494; Patricia Marks, Bicy-
cles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington:
UP of Kentucky, 1990), 51.
13. ‘Rita’, Recollections of a Literary Life (Andrew Melrose, 1936), 173, SSPSG, I.
14. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing (Virago, 1984), 182–215; Rita Kranidis, Subversive Discourse:
The Cultural Production of Late Victorian Feminist Novels (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1995); Carolyn Christensen Nelson, British Women Fiction
Writers of the 1890s (New York: Twayne, 1996); Sally Ledger, The New
Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: MUP,
1997).
15. Lloyd Fernando, ‘The Radical Ideology of the “New Woman” ’, Southern
Review, 2 (1967), 206–20, and ‘New Women’ in the Late Victorian Novel (Penn-
sylvania State UP, 1976); A. R. Cunningham, ‘The New Woman Fiction of
the 1890’s’, Victorian Studies, 18 (1973), 177–86, and ‘The Emergence of the

196

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Notes 197

New Woman in English Fiction, 1870–1914’ (doctoral thesis, University of


Oxford, 1974); Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction
(Thames & Hudson, 1976); Leone Scanlon, ‘The New Woman in the Lit-
erature of 1883–1909’, University of Michigan Papers in Women’s Studies, 2
(1976), 133–59; Gail Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel
(Macmillan, 1978); Patricia Stubbs, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the

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Novel 1880–1920 (Brighton: Harvester, 1979).
16. Vineta Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth
Century (University of London Press, 1970), 1.
17. Joseph Stein, ‘The New Woman and the Decadent Dandy’, Dalhousie Review,
55 (1975–76), 54–62; Linda Dowling, ‘The Decadent and the New Woman
in the 1890’s’ (1978), in Lyn Pykett (ed.), Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions
(Longman, 1996), 47–63; Andreas Höfele, ‘Dandy und New Woman’, in
Manfred Pfister and Bernd Schulte-Middelich (eds), Die ’Nineties: Das engli-
sche Fin de siècle zwischen Dekadenz und Sozialkritik (Munich: Francke, 1983),
147–63; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 169–87.
18. Kranidis, Subversive Discourse, xvi, 108, 113.
19. W. T. Stead, ‘The Novel of the Modern Woman’, Review of Reviews, 10 (1894),
64, LVMQ, V.
20. Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative
Form (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 63–97; Cunningham, ‘The New Woman
Fiction of the 1890s’; and Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian
Novel, 50–1.
21. Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson (eds), Transforming Genres: New
Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994);
Lyn Pykett, Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth
Century (Edward Arnold, 1995), and her collection Reading Fin de Siècle Fic-
tions; Ledger and McCracken, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle; Christo-
pher Parker (ed.), Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature (Aldershot:
Scolar Press, 1995); Barbara Leah Harman and Susan Meyer (eds), The New
Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian Fiction (New
York: Garland, 1996).
22. Laura Stempel Mumford, ‘Virile Mothers, Militant Sisters: British Feminist
Theory and Novels, 1880–1920’ (doctoral thesis, University of Iowa, 1983);
Vivien Gardner and Susan Rutherford (eds), The New Woman and Her Sisters:
Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1992); Stephanie Forward, ‘Attitudes to Marriage in the Late Nineteenth
Century, with Special Reference to the Lives and Works of Olive Schreiner,
Mona Caird, Sarah Grand and George Egerton’ (doctoral thesis, University
of Birmingham, 1998).
23. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Sally
Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England 1880–1915 (New York:
Columbia UP, 1995); Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domestic-
ity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (Routledge, 1996).
24. Gerd Bjørhovde, Rebellious Structures: Women Writers and the Crisis of the
Novel 1880–1900 (Oslo: Norwegian UP, 1987); Catherine Elizabeth Hoyser,
‘Literary Viragos: Late Victorian and Edwardian Female “Bildungsromane” ’
(doctoral thesis, Indiana University, 1988); Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Femi-
nine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (Routledge,

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198 Notes

1992); Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai (eds), Rediscovering Forgotten Radi-
cals: British Women Writers 1889–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1993).
25. Angelique Richardson, ‘The Eugenization of Love: Darwin, Galton, and New
Woman Fictions of Heredity and Eugenics’ (doctoral thesis, Birkbeck
College, University of London, 1999).

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26. Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990); Jane Eldridge Miller, Rebel Women: Feminism,
Modernism and the Edwardian Novel (Virago, 1994).
27. Lecture presented at the University of Leeds, 8 May 1996.
28. Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 7–9.
29. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 3–4.
30. Miller, Rebel Women, 6–8.
31. Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 13.
32. Ibid. 12, 61; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of
the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988–94).
33. Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 15, 70.
34. Ibid. 57.
35. Flint, Woman Reader, 311.
36. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), 14.
37. Ledger, New Woman, 6.
38. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy; Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor: AIDS and Its
Metaphors (Penguin, 1991); Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight:
Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Virago, 1992). ‘Fin de
Siècle’ (‘Late Show’, BBC, 1994), discussion chaired by Melvyn Bragg.
39. Elaine Showalter, ‘Written Off’, Guardian (Educational Supplement), 11 May
1999, 3.
40. Margaret Drabble, cited ibid. 3.
41. Joan Smith (ed.), Femmes de Siècle. Stories from the ‘90s: Women Writing at
the End of Two Centuries (Chatto & Windus, 1992).
42. Ralf Schneider, ‘Feministische Literaturkonzeptionen im Kontext viktori-
anischer feminist periodicals’, in Andrea Gutenberg and Ralf Schneider (eds),
Gender – Culture – Politics: Zur Geschlechterforschung in der Literatur- und Kul-
turwissenschaft. Festschrift für Natascha Würzburg (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher
Verlag, 1999), 449–71.
43. Natascha Würzbach, ‘Virginia Woolf’s feministische Literaturtheorie im
Wandel kultureller Kommunikation: Bestandsaufnahme, Reinterpretation
und Rezeption’, Anglia, 116 (1998), 3.
44. Maggie Humm, The Dictionary of Feminist Theory (New York: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1989), 168, 198.
45. Mary Maynard, ‘Methods, Practice and Epistemology: The Debate about
Feminism and Research’, in Mary Maynard and June Purvis (eds), Research-
ing Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective (Taylor & Francis, 1994), 18–20.
46. ‘Woman as Such Does Not Exist’: Julia Kristeva, cited in Rosemarie Tong,
Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (Routledge, 1994), 230.
47. Meares, New Woman, 18, 211, 22.
48. Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s
Liberation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 2.
49. ‘Out of the Doll’s House’ (BBC 1990); see also Angela Holdsworth’s book
with the same title (BBC, 1990), 197.

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Notes 199

1. Contesting/Consuming Femininities
1. Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘Modern Man-Haters’, Saturday Review, 29 April 1871,
528.
2. Sarah Grand, ‘The New Woman and the Old’, Lady’s Realm, (1898), 466,
LVMQ, II.

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3. Austin May, ‘Womanly Women’, Woman’s Herald, 15 June 1893, 268.
4. Kathleen Cuffe, ‘A Reply from the Daughters’, Nineteenth Century, 35 (1894),
438, 441, LVMQ, II.
5. Mrs Morgan-Dockrell, ‘Is the New Woman a Myth?’, Humanitarian, 8 (1896),
339–50, LVMQ, II.
6. W. T. Stead, ‘The Novel of the Modern Woman’, Review of Reviews, 10 (1894),
64–75, LVMQ, V; Dixon, SMW.
7. ‘Character Note: The New Woman’, Cornhill Magazine, 23 n.s. (1894), 365–8,
LVMQ, II.
8. Emma Churchman Hewitt, ‘The “New Woman” in her Relation to the “New
Man” ’, Westminster Review, 147 (1897), 337, LVMQ, II.
9. Marie Merrick, ‘The Woman of the Period’, Arena, (1903), 161–6.
10. Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Girl of the Period’, Saturday Review, 14 March 1868,
339–40.
11. See Gissing’s OW and Brooke’s ASW.
12. See Eliza Lynn Linton’s diatribes against ‘Wild Women’, Nineteenth Century,
30 (1891), 79–88, 596–605, and 31 (1892), 455–64, LVMQ , I.
13. Sarah Grand, ‘Should Irascible Old Gentlemen Be Taught to Knit?’, Phil
May’s Illustrated Winter Annual (1894), 5–10, SSPSG, III.
14. David Cuppleditch, Phil May (Fortune Press, 1981), 68.
15. Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New
Woman Writing (Routledge, 1992), 140 (emphasis in original).
16. Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the
Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (Routledge, 1996), 118.
17. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle
(Bloomsbury, 1991), 9 (emphasis in original).
18. Cited in Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William
Veeder (eds), The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and
America, 1837–1883, 3 vols (Manchester: MUP, 1983), III, 125.
19. Pykett, ‘Improper’ Feminine.
20. Sarah Grand, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, and Ouida,
‘The New Woman’, North American Review, 158 (1894), 270–6, 610–9, LVMQ,
II.
21. Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, ‘Inventing the New Woman: Print Culture and
Identity Politics during the Fin-de-Siecle,’ Victorian Periodicals Review, 31
(1998), 169–70, 174; ‘The Social Standing of the New Woman’, Woman’s
Herald, 17 August 1893, 410.
22. Linton, ‘Man-Haters’, 529.
23. Ibid. 528.
24. Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Wild Women as Social Insurgents’, Nineteenth
Century, 30 (1891), 601, LVMQ, I.
25. Linton, ‘Girl of the Period’, 339.
26. Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism
(Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990), 165.

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200 Notes

27. ‘An Appeal Against Female Suffrage’, Nineteenth Century (1889), in Jane
Lewis (ed.), Before the Vote Was Won: Arguments For and Against Women’s
Suffrage 1864–1896 (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 409–17.
28. See Emmeline Pankhurst, ‘Speech to the Court’ (1908), in Midge Mackenzie
(ed.), Shoulder to Shoulder: A Documentary (New York: Vintage, 1988), 91.
29. John Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwar-

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dian (Oxford: OUP, 1991), 147–9, 343.
30. Frances McFall to William Blackwood, 5 and 28 December 1892, SSPSG, II;
David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s
(Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 30.
31. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP,
1979), 48–71.
32. Jane T. Stoddart, ‘Illustrated Interview: Sarah Grand’, Woman at Home, 3
(1895), 251, SSPSG, I.
33. ‘Some Famous Lady Cyclists’, Lady’s Realm, 2 (1897), 545, SSPSG, I.
34. Sarah Grand, ‘The Morals of Manner and Appearance’, Humanitarian,
(1893), 91, 93, SSPSG, I.
35. ‘The New Woman’, Woman’s Signal, 26 December 1895, 467.
36. Elizabeth Rachel Chapman, Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction, and Other
Essays on Kindred Subjects (Lane, The Bodley Head, 1897), xiii, LVMQ, II.
37. Frances E. Willard, ‘The New Ideal of Womanhood’, Woman’s Herald, 23
February 1893, 2–3.
38. Hulda Friederichs, ‘The “Old” Woman and the “New” ’, Young Woman, 3
(1895), 275.
39. Grand, ‘The New Aspect’, 276.
40. Mona Caird, ‘A Defence of the Wild Women’, Nineteenth Century, 31 (1892),
829.
41. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 305,
315.
42. Grand, ‘New Woman and Old’, 466.
43. Stoddart, ‘Illustrated Interview’, 248.
44. ‘Women of Note in the Cycling World: A Chat with Mdme Sarah Grand’,
Hub, 17 October 1896, 419, SSPSG, I.
45. Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular
Press (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990), 184.
46. Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England 1880–1915 (New York:
Columbia UP, 1995), 110; ‘Some Famous Lady Cyclists’, 544.
47. Ibid. 545; ‘A Chat with Mdme Sarah Grand’, 419.
48. ‘Some Famous Lady Cyclists’, 837.
49. Cited in Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes, 217.
50. ‘Some Famous Lady Cyclists’, 542–3; Mitchell, New Girl, 110.
51. ‘How Cycling Injures Health’, Review of Reviews, 1 (1890), 287.
52. ‘Cyclomania Morbus’, Review of Reviews, 15 (1897), 157.
53. B. A. Crackanthorpe, ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’, Nineteenth Century, 35
(1894), 23, LVMQ, II.
54. Gertrude Hemery, ‘The Revolt of the Daughters. An Answer – By One of
Them,’ Westminster Review, 141 (1894), 679, LVMQ, II.
55. Cuffe, ‘A Reply from the Daughters’, 437–42.

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Notes 201

56. M. E. Haweis, ‘The Revolt of the Daughters, II: Daughters and Mothers’,
Nineteenth Century, 35 (1894), 430–6, LVMQ, II.
57. Crackanthorpe, ‘Revolt of the Daughters’, 27.
58. Ibid. 24.
59. B. A. Crackanthorpe, ‘The Revolt of the Daughters, I: A Last Word on the
Revolt’, Nineteenth Century, 35 (1894), 424–9, LVMQ, II.

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60. Haweis, ‘Revolt of the Daughters, II’, 433 (emphasis in original).
61. Sarah M. Amos, ‘The Evolution of the Daughters’, Contemporary Review, 65
(1894), 519, LVMQ, II.
62. Cuffe, ‘Reply from the Daughters’, 441, 439.
63. May Jeune, ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’, Fortnightly Review, 55 (1894), 275,
LVMQ, II.
64. See Florence Nightingale, ‘Cassandra’, in Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short
History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (1928; Virago, 1988), 396–7.
65. Alys W. Pearsall Smith, ‘A Reply from the Daughters’, Nineteenth Century,
35 (1894), 443, LVMQ, II.
66. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983),
13–29.
67. Arabella Kenealy, ‘The Dignity of Love’, Humanitarian, 8 (1896), 439, LVMQ,
II.

2. Keynotes and Discords


1. W. T. Stead, ‘The Novel of the Modern Woman’, Review of Reviews, 10 (1894),
64, LVMQ, V.
2. Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘The Psychology of Feminism’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine, 161 (1897), 104, LVMQ, V.
3. M. Eastwood, ‘The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact’, Humanitarian, 5
(1894), 375–6.
4. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing (Virago, 1984), 215.
5. Wendell V. Harris, ‘John Lane’s Keynotes Series and the Fiction of the
1890’s’, PMLA, 83 (1968), 1407–13.
6. George Egerton, ‘Man Is Inferior’, Idler, 3 (1894), 195 (emphasis in
original).
7. George Egerton to Ernst Foerster, 1 July 1906, in Ernst Foerster, Die Frauen-
frage in den Romanen Englischer Schriftstellerinnen der Gegenwart (Marburg:
N. G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1907), 46–8, LVMQ, V.
8. Rosie Miles, ‘George Egerton, Bitextuality and Cultural (Re)Production in
the 1890s’, Women’s Writing, 3 (1996), 252.
9. Gillian Kersley, Darling Madame: Sarah Grand & Devoted Friend (Virago,
1983), 110–1.
10. Miles, ‘George Egerton’, 246–7.
11. Ibid. 252.
12. T. P. Gill to George Egerton, 10 March 1893, in Terence de Vere White (ed.),
A Leaf from the Yellow Book: The Correspondence of George Egerton (Richards,
1958), 24.
13. R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (Edward Arnold, 1983), 66–7;

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202 Notes

Patrick Bridgwater, Anglo-German Interactions in the Literature of the 1890s


(Oxford: Legenda, 1999), 59–61.
14. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture,
1830–1980 (Virago, 1987), 145.
15. Linda Dowling, ‘The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890’s’, in Lyn
Pykett (ed.), Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions (Longman, 1996), 57–8.

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16. Sally Ledger, ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’, in Sally
Ledger and Scott McCracken (eds), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle
(Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 24.
17. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle
(Bloomsbury, 1991), 170.
18. Joseph Stein, ‘The New Woman and the Decadent Dandy’, Dalhousie Review,
55 (1975–76), 59.
19. Dowling, ‘Decadent and New Woman’, 58, 60.
20. Rita S. Kranidis, Subversive Discourse: The Cultural Production of Late Victorian
Feminist Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 28.
21. George Moore, ‘Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals’ (1885), in Walter
Greiner and Gerhard Stilz (eds), Naturalismus in England 1880–1920 (Darm-
stadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 150, 152.
22. Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists,
Publishers, and Social Change (Routledge, 1989), 65–92, 203–18.
23. Janet E. Hogarth, ‘Literary Degenerates’, Fortnightly Review, 57 n.s. (1895),
588, LVMQ, V.
24. Stutfield, ‘Psychology of Feminism’, 112.
25. James Ashcroft Noble, ‘The Fiction of Sexuality’, Contemporary Review, 67
(1895), 493, LVMQ, V.
26. Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 157
(1895), 836, LVMQ, V.
27. Ibid. 837.
28. Ibid. 835, 838.
29. [William Barry,] ‘The Strike of a Sex’, Quarterly Review, 179 (1894), 305,
LVMQ, V.
30. Ibid. 296.
31. Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, 837, 841.
32. Stutfield, ‘Psychology of Feminism’, 115.
33. [Margaret Oliphant,] ‘The Anti-Marriage League’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine, 136 (1896), 149, LVMQ, V.
34. Stead, ‘Novel of the Modern Woman’, 73–4.
35. Elizabeth Rachel Chapman, Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction, and Other
Essays on Kindred Subjects (Lane, The Bodley Head, 1897), 12, LVMQ, V.
36. Sarah A. Tooley, ‘The Woman’s Question: An Interview with Madame Sarah
Grand’, Humanitarian, 8 (1896), 168–9, LVMQ, V.
37. Noble, ‘Fiction of Sexuality’, 491, 493, 498.
38. D. F. Hannigan, ‘Sex in Fiction’, Westminster Review, 143 (1895), 619, LVMQ,
V.
39. Cited in Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1993), 311.
40. Blanche Leppington, ‘The Debrutalisation of Man’, Contemporary Review, 67
(1895), 742, LVMQ, V.

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Notes 203

41. Thomas Bradfield, ‘A Dominant Note of Some Recent Fiction’, Westminster


Review, 142 (1894), 544, 539, 541–2, LVMQ, V.
42. Chapman, Marriage Questions, xii, 9–10, LVMQ, II and V.
43. Oliphant, ‘Anti-Marriage League’, 148; and ‘The Old Saloon’, Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine, 146 (1889), 257–8, SSPSG, I.
44. Stead, ‘Novel of the Modern Woman’, 65.

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45. Chapman, Marriage Questions, 36, LVMQ, V (emphasis in original).
46. Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle
(Manchester: MUP, 1997), 10, 20.
47. Grant Allen, ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, Popular Science Monthly
(1889), 172, LVMQ, V.
48. Grant Allen, ‘Is It Degradation? (A Reply to Professor Mirvart)’, Humanitar-
ian, 9 (1896), 340–1, LVMQ, II.
49. Allen, ‘Plain Words’, 172–3.
50. Women’s Penny Paper, 29 June 1889, and Shafts, 3 November 1892, cited in
Ralf Schneider, ‘Feministische Literaturkonzeptionen im Kontext viktori-
anischer feminist periodicals’, in Andrea Gutenberg and Ralf Schneider (eds),
Gender – Culture – Poetics: Zur Geschlechterforschung in der Literatur- und
Kulturwissenschaft (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1999), 463–4.
51. Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist
Auto/biography (Manchester: MUP, 1992), 253.
52. See Kranidis, Subversive Discourse, xvi.
53. Jane T. Stoddart, ‘Illustrated Interview: Sarah Grand’, Woman at Home, 3
(1895), 249–50; Grand, letter to the editor, Daily Chronicle, 3 May 1894, 3;
‘A Case for Apology’, 17 August 1897, letter by Sarah Grand, unidentified
periodical source, 224, William Heinemann Archive Collection. All in
SSPSG, I.
54. Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, 26 January 1888, in S. C. Cronwright-
Schreiner (ed.), The Letters of Olive Schreiner 1876–1920 (Unwin, 1924), 129.
55. Yvonne Knapp, Eleanor Marx: The Crowded Years 1884–1898 (Virago, 1979),
100.
56. Edith Lees, ‘Olive Schreiner and Her Relation to the Woman Movement’
(1915), in Cherry Clayton (ed.), Olive Schreiner (Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill,
1983), 46.
57. Woman’s Signal, 28 June 1894, cited in Schneider, ‘Feministische Litera-
turkonzeptionen’, 463.
58. Sheila Stowell, A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era
(Manchester: MUP, 1992), 33–4.
59. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, review of The Woman Who Did, Contemporary
Review, 67 (1895), 630, LVMQ, V.
60. Edward and Eleanor Marx Aveling, The Woman Question (Swan Sonnen-
schein, 1886), 6, LVMQ, II.
61. Ledger, New Woman, 38–9.
62. Stead, ‘Novel of the Modern Woman’, 71.
63. Cited in David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in
the 1890s (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 116.
64. June Hannam, Isabella Ford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
65. Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (Routledge,
1994), 173–5.

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204 Notes

66. Tong, Feminist Thought, 173–93.


67. Heidi Hartmann, ‘Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex’
(1976), in Maggie Humm (ed.), Feminisms: A Reader (New York: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1992), 101.
68. Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism:
Towards a More Progressive Union’ (1979), in Humm, Feminisms, 110.

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69. Anne Witz, ‘Women at Work’, in Diane Richardson and Victoria Robinson
(eds), Introducing Women’s Studies (Macmillan, 1993), 272–302.
70. ‘Saladin’, A Memoir of Lady Florence Dixie (W. Stewart, [1905]); Janet Todd
(ed.), Dictionary of British Women Writers (Routledge, 1989), 189–90.
71. ‘The Problem of the Future. By Lady Florence Dixie’, Review of Reviews, 7
(1893), 178.
72. Teresa Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New
Woman Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 16.
73. Rachel DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-
Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), 21.
74. Gerd Bjørhovde, Rebellious Structures: Women Writers and the Crisis of
the Novel 1880–1900 (Oslo: Norwegian UP, 1987), 180. See also Catherine
Elizabeth Hoyser, ‘Literary Viragos: Late Victorian and Edwardian Female
Bildungsromane’ (doctoral thesis, University of Indiana, 1988), 192.
75. Joyce Avrech Berkman, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner (Amherst:
University of Massachussetts Press, 1989), 195.
76. Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, May 1886, in Richard Rive (ed.), Olive
Schreiner: Letters (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 79.
77. Cited in E. A. Bennett, Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities
(Grant Richards, 1901), 239–40.
78. Sarah Grand to Professor Viëtor, 15 December 1896, in Foerster, Frauenfrage,
57, LVMQ, V.
79. John Kucich, ‘Curious Dualities: The Heavenly Twins (1893) and Sarah
Grand’s Belated Modernist Aesthetics’, in Barbara Leah Harman and Susan
Meyer (eds), The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Underread
Victorian Fiction (New York: Garland, 1996), 195–204.
80. Kranidis, Subversive Discourse, 76; Teresa Mangum, ‘Style Wars of the 1890s:
The New Woman and the Decadent’, in Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane
Rochelson (eds), Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the
1890s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 47–66; Marilyn Bonnell, ‘Sarah
Grand and the Critical Establishment: Art for [Wo]man’s Sake’, Tulsa Studies
in Women’s Literature, 14 (1995), 123–48.
81. Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New
Woman Writing (Routledge, 1992), 194.
82. ‘The Women Novelists of the Day’, Review of Reviews, 16 (1897), 597.
83. Published three years before PAP, Colmore’s novel probably drew on
Lytton’s autobiographical accounts in Votes for Women.
84. Stanley, Auto/biographical I, 11.
85. Domna Stanton, The Female Autograph (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 13–4; Stanley, Auto/biographical I, 93.
86. Ibid. 247.
87. Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice
(Manchester: MUP, 1994), 7.

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Notes 205

88. Ibid. 9, 13.


89. Stanley, Auto/biographical I, 160.
90. Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 13–8.
91. ‘Jeanette Winterson’ and ‘Maya Angelou’, in Jeremy Isaacs’ ‘Face to Face’
series, BBC (1994).

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92. Stanley, Auto/biographical I, 63.
93. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and
Practice’, in Shari Benstock (ed.), The Private Self: Theory and Practice of
Women’s Autobiographical Writings (Routledge, 1988), 40–1 (emphasis in
original).
94. Penny Boumelha, ‘The Woman of Genius and the Woman of Grub Street:
Figures of the Female Writer in British Fin-de-Siècle Fiction’, English Litera-
ture in Transition, 40 (1997), 173.
95. Mona Caird to Prof. Viëtor, 5 December 1896, in Foerster, Frauenfrage, 52–3,
LVMQ, V.

3. Marriage and Its Discontents


1. Sarah Grand, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, North American
Review, 158 (1894), 276, LVMQ, II.
2. Blanche Leppinton, ‘The Debrutalisation of Man’, Contemporary Review, 67
(1895), 742, LVMQ, V.
3. Elizabeth Rachel Chapman, Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction, and Other
Essays on Kindred Subjects (Lane, The Bodley Head, 1897), 10, LVMQ, V.
4. Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle
(Manchester: MUP, 1997), 23.
5. Tess Cosslett, Woman to Woman: Female Friendship in Victorian Fiction
(Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1988), 38–9; Carolyn
Christensen Nelson, British Women Fiction Writers of the 1890s (New York:
Twayne, 1996), 41–4.
6. In the 1860s three acts introduced the compulsory gynaecological exami-
nation of any woman believed to be a prostitute to ensure her freedom from
venereal disease. In 1886 the repeal movement, in which Josephine Butler
was a leading figure, achieved its aim, and the acts were abolished. See
Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the
State (Cambridge: CUP, 1980).
7. The concept of the ‘cover story’ is adopted from Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 153.
8. Lyn Pykett, Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth
Century (Edward Arnold, 1995), 57.
9. Angelique Richardson, ‘The Eugenization of Love: Darwin, Galton, and New
Woman Fictions of Heredity and Eugenics’ (doctoral thesis, Birkbeck
College, University of London, 1999), 215.
10. Sarah Grand, ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, New Review, 10 (1894), 680, LVMQ,V.
11. ‘Tree of Knowledge’, 675–90, in LVMQ, V.
12. Claudia Nelson, ‘ “Under the Guidance of a Wise Mother”: British Sex Edu-

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206 Notes

cation at the Fin de Siècle’, in Claudia Nelson and Ann Sumner Holmes (eds),
Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875–1925
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 98–121.
13. Walter Besant, ‘Tree of Knowledge’, 677.
14. Walter Besant, ‘Mrs Grundy as Censor of Fiction’, Review of Reviews, (1890),
43–4 (emphasis in original).

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15. Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’, Westminster Review, 130 (1888), 197–8 (emphasis
in original).
16. Sarah Grand, ‘On the Choice of a Husband’, Young Woman, 7 (1898), 3,
SSPSG, I.
17. Mary Shelley, ‘Introduction’ to Frankenstein (1831), in Betty T. Bennett
and Charles E. Robinson (eds), The Mary Shelley Reader (Oxford: OUP, 1990),
171.
18. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cam-
bridge: CUP, 1994), 207.
19. Richardson, ‘Eugenization of Love’, 140.
20. Cited in Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, 130.
21. Christabel Pankhurst, The Great Scourge and How to End It (1913), in Sheila
Jeffreys (ed.), The Sexuality Debates (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1987), 325. For statistics on VD, see pp. 315, 317.
22. Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, 8 April 1884, in S. C. Cronwright-
Schreiner (ed.), The Letters of Olive Schreiner 1876–1920 (Unwin, 1924), 15.
23. Cosslett, Woman to Woman, 138–9.
24. Ibid. 138.
25. Nancy Boyd, Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale (Macmillan,
1982), 41.
26. Steve Humphries, A Secret World of Sex (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988), 19.
27. Elaine Showalter, ‘Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de Siècle,’
in Lyn Pykett (ed.), Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions (Longman, 1996), 167.
28. Sarah Grand to William Blackwood, 23 September 1891, SSPSG, II.
29. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (Penguin,
1991), 96.
30. Showalter, ‘Syphilis and Sexuality’, 170, 172.
31. ‘Beware the CD Acts!’, Woman’s Dreadnought (1914), in Kathryn Dodd (ed.),
A Sylvia Pankhurst Reader (Manchester: MUP, 1993), 63–7; Humphries, Secret
World, 74.
32. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing (Virago, 1984), 190.
33. Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 77.
34. Showalter, ‘Syphilis and Sexuality,’ 181.
35. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 138.
36. St George Mirvart, ‘The Degradation of Woman’, Humanitarian, 9 (1896),
257, LVMQ, II.
37. Grant Allen, ‘Is It Degradation? (A Reply to Professor Mirvart)’, Humanitar-
ian, 9 (1896), 340–8, LVMQ, II.
38. Coralie Glyn, ‘Nature’s Nuns (A Reply to Grant Allen)’, Humanitarian, 9
(1896), 423 (emphasis in original), LVMQ, II.
39. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New

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Notes 207

Woman, 1870–1936’, in Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus and


George Chauncey, Jr (eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and
Lesbian Past (Penguin, 1991), 273.
40. Lynne Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Ques-
tion of Difference (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 119.
41. Introduction to LVMQ, IV, xiii–xiv.

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42. William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1877),
in Jeffreys, Sexuality Debates, 61.
43. Acton, Functions and Disorders, 61–4.
44. Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘The Psychology of Feminism’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine, 161 (1897), 109, LVMQ, V.
45. Review of Grand’s BB, Review of Reviews, 16 (1897), 621, SSPSG, I.
46. Miriam Brody, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Sexuality and Women’s Rights’, in
Dale Spender (ed.), Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Women’s Intellectual
Traditions (Women’s Press, 1983), 40.
47. Jeffreys, Sexuality Debates, 11–41.
48. Mary Ann Elston, ‘Women and Anti-vivisection in Victorian England,
1870–1900’, in Nicolaas A. Rupke (ed.), Vivisection in Historical Perspective
(Croom Helm, 1987), 277–81.
49. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture,
1830–1980 (Virago, 1987), 76.
50. Pat Jalland and John Hooper (eds), Women From Birth to Death: The Female
Life Cycle in Britain 1830–1914 (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 261–3.
51. Jalland and Hooper, Women From Birth to Death, 264–5.
52. Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud and Child Sexual Abuse (Fontana,
1992), 55–144.
53. Josephine Butler, ‘Men, Men, Only Men’, Shield, 9 May 1870, in Janet
Horowitz Murray (ed.), Strong-Minded Women And Other Lost Voices from
19th-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 436 (emphasis in
original).
54. Ibid. 436–7.
55. Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality
1880–1930 (Pandora, 1985), 54–85.
56. Pankhurst, The Great Scourge, 318.
57. Hilary Rose, ‘Learning from the New Priesthood and the Shrieking Sister-
hood: Debating the Life Sciences in Victorian England’, in Lynda Birke and
Ruth Hubbard (eds), Reinventing Biology: Respect for Life and the Creation of
Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), 10.
58. Anonymous, ‘The Yellow Room’ (1891), in The New Epicurean and The Yellow
Room (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1996), 69–127.
59. Edward Maitland (ed.), Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary and Work, 2
vols (John M. Watkins, 1913), I, 154–5.
60. Sally Mitchell, ‘Introduction’ to Grand, BB, xvii.
61. Lallemand, cited in Acton, Functions and Disorders, 58.
62. Brown, On Some Diseases of Women Admitting Surgical Treatment (1866), in
Jeffreys, Sexuality Debates, 30.
63. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in
Late-Victorian London (Virago, 1992), 191–228.
64. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle
(Bloomsbury, 1991), 181–2.

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208 Notes

65. Rossetti, ‘GM’, 176, ll. 562–3.


66. Cosslett, Woman to Woman, 139–42.
67. Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love
between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William
Morrow, 1981), 145–230; Jeffreys, Spinster, 102–27.
68. Ruthann Robson, ‘Legal Lesbicide’, in Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell

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(eds), Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (Buckingham: OUP, 1992),
40–5.
69. Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race
and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 76–108; Ornella Moscucci,
‘Clitoridectomy, Circumcision, and the Politics of Sexual Pleasure in
Mid-Victorian Britain’, in Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams
(eds), Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), 69–
73.
70. Edward Carpenter, ‘The Intermediate Sex’, Love’s Coming-of-Age (1896;
Methuen, 1914), 113–34, LVMQ, II. Havelock Ellis and John Addington
Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897; New York: Arno Press, 1975).
71. Jeffreys, Spinster, 106, 109.
72. Ibid. 107–9.
73. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (F. A. Davis, 1898).
74. Kate McCullough, ‘Mapping the “Terra Incognita” of Woman: George
Egerton’s Keynotes (1893) and New Woman Fiction’, in Barbara Harman and
Susan Meyer (ed.), The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Under-
read Victorian Fiction (New York: Garland, 1996), 205–6.
75. Case XXXI in Ellis and Symonds, Sexual Inversion, 92–4.
76. Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980),
in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Powers of
Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983),
191–2.
77. Cited in Sheila Stowell, A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the
Suffrage Era (Manchester: MUP, 1992), 23.
78. Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (Virago,
1981), 49–101.
79. Angela V. John, Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life 1862–1952 (Routledge, 1995),
148.
80. Sue Thomas, ‘Sexual Matter and Votes for Women’, Papers on Language &
Literature, 33 (1997), 58.
81. Ibid. 58.
82. John, Elizabeth Robins, 167–8.
83. [Margaret Oliphant,] ‘The Anti-Marriage League’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine (1896), 135–49, LVMQ, V.
84. Sarah A. Tooley, ‘The Woman’s Question: An Interview with Madame Sarah
Grand’, Humanitarian, 8 (1896), 168, LVMQ, V.
85. Ibid. 168.
86. Sarah Grand, ‘Marriage Questions in Fiction: The Standpoint of a Typical
Modern Woman’, Fortnightly Review, 69 (1898), 389, LVMQ, V.
87. Havelock Ellis, My Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), 164.
88. Cited in Ruth Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the
Woman Question (Secker & Warburg, 1990), 61.

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Notes 209

89. Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, 21 May 1884, in Crownwright-Schreiner,


Letters of Olive Schreiner, 20.
90. Olive Schreiner to Karl Pearson, 19 December 1885, in Richard Rive (ed.),
Olive Schreiner Letters, I (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 69.
91. Brandon, New Women and Old Men, 61.
92. Cited in Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Moral-

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ity 1885–1914 (Penguin, 1995), 157–8.
93. Cited ibid. 156–9.
94. Cited in David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in
the 1890s (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 55.
95. ‘Women in the Queen’s Reign’, Ludgate, (1898), 216, SSPSG, I.
96. Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Judicial Shock to Marriage’, Nineteenth Century, 29
(1891), 691, LVMQ, II.
97. Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes, 54–8; see also Maeve E. Doggett, Marriage,
Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1993), 1–33; Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and
the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989),
177–83.
98. Showalter, Female Malady, 146–7; Bland, Banishing the Beast, 159–61.
99. Humphries, Secret World, 64–5; see also his BBC (1991) series with the same
title, parts 1 (‘Forbidden Fruit’) and 5 (‘Acts of Violence’).
100. Olive Schreiner to J. T. Lloyd, undated, in Rive, Olive Schreiner Letters, 260.
101. Olive Schreiner to Karl Pearson, 13 July 1886, in Rive, Olive Schreiner Letters,
96.
102. Ibid. (emphasis in original).

4. The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality


1. J. B. Bury, ‘The Insurrection of Women: A Criticism,’ Fortnightly Review, 52
n.s. (1892), 657, 663 (emphasis in original).
2. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
(Penguin, 1993), 17.
3. Estelle C. Jelinek, ‘Disguise Autobiographies: Women Masquerading as
Men’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 10 (1987), 53–62; Sara Maitland,
Vesta Tilley (Virago, 1986), 5.
4. Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men
in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (Pandora, 1989), 114.
5. Cited in Maitland, Vesta Tilley, 1.
6. Elizabeth Wilson and Lou Taylor, Through the Looking Glass: A History of
Dress from 1860 to the Present Day (BBC Books, 1989), 28–32, 52–66; Stella
Mary Newton, Health, Art & Reason: Dress Reformers of the 19th Century ( John
Murrray, 1974), 3–10, 104–8, 140–1.
7. Wilson and Taylor, Looking Glass, 53; Newton, Health, Art & Reason, 140–1.
8. David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s
(Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 197–200. See Review of Reviews, 9 (1894), 291–2;
(1896), 368–9; 16 (1897), 485.
9. Newton, Health, Art & Reason, 109; Wilson and Taylor, Looking Glass, 57.
10. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, in Margaret Whitford (ed.), The
Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 124.

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210 Notes

11. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860; Oldham’s Press, n.d.), 34–5.
12. Compare Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Penguin, 1987), figures 23–4, and
Wilson and Taylor, Looking Glass, 58.
13. Cited in Wheelwright, Amazons, 50.
14. ‘Sex Acts,’ BBC (1995). For previous reference see ‘Josephine (formerly
Joseph)’, letter entitled ‘Male Stay Wearing’, Family Doctor, 7 July 1888, in

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Peter Farrar (ed.), Men in Petticoats (Liverpool: Karn, 1987), 14.
15. ‘A Male Wasp-Waist’, Family Doctor, 26 June 1886, in Farrer, Men in Petti-
coats, 11.
16. ‘Tight Lacing’ by ‘Would Be Female’, and ‘Tight Lacing and High Heels’ by
‘Dolly’, Family Doctor, 30 April 1892 and 11 February 1888, in Farrar, Men
in Petticoats, 16, 12.
17. ‘Tight Lacing and Male Stay-Wearing’ by ‘Misfit’, Family Doctor, 9 June 1888,
in Farrar, Men in Petticoats, 13 (emphasis in original).
18. A. Norman Jeffares, George Moore (Longman, Greens, 1965), 31; W. R.
Rodgers, Irish Literary Portraits (BBC, 1972), 82.
19. ‘Stays and Earrings for Males’ by ‘Reformer’, ‘A Male Wasp-Waist’, and ‘Tight
Lacing’ by ‘Commis’, Family Doctor, 21 December 1889, 26 June 1886, and
16 April 1892, in Farrar, Men in Petticoats, 12, 15.
20. Pat Jalland and John Hooper (eds), Women From Birth to Death: The Female
Life Cycle in Britain 1830–1914 (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 109–14.
21. Wheelwright, Amazons, 78.
22. Eveline Kilian, ‘New Women und modern girls: Weiblichkeitsentwürfe und
Geschlechterdiskurs’, in Christoph Bode and Ulrich Broich (eds), Die
Zwanziger Jahre in Großbritannien (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998), 122–3.
23. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (F. A. Davis, 1898), 383, 398,
399.
24. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897; New
York: Arno Press, 1975), 95–7.
25. Edward Carpenter, ‘The Intermediate Sex’, in Love’s Coming-of-Age (1896;
Methuen, 1914), 14; LVMQ, II.
26. Ellis and Symonds, Sexual Inversion, 97.
27. Jann Matlock, ‘Masquerading Women, Pathologized Men: Cross-dressing,
Fetishism, and the Theory of Perversion, 1882–1935’, in Emily Apter and
William Pietz (eds), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1993), 31–61.
28. Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in
Modern Literature’, in Elizabeth Abel (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference
(Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 206–7.
29. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1929), in Victor Burgin, James
Donaldt and Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy (Methuen, 1986), 38.
30. Cited in S. M. Ellis, George Meredith: His Life and Friends in Relation to His
Work (Grant Richards, 1920), 211.
31. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Rout-
ledge, 1990), 65.
32. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), in Elaine Marks and
Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester,
1981), 246.
33. Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, 38.

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Notes 211

34. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, in Whitford, 136.


35. Wheelwright, Amazons, 84–6.
36. Cited ibid. 20.
37. Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990), 119–20.
38. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 422.

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39. Martha Vicinus, ‘Turn-of-the-Century Male Impersonation: Rewriting the
Romance Plot’, in Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams (eds), Sexualities
in Victorian Britain (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), 187.
40. Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’ (1874), in Katharina
Rowold (ed.), Gender & Science: Late Nineteenth-Century Debates on the Female
Mind and Body (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), 38, 50.
41. Grant Allen, ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, Popular Science Monthly
(1889), 175, LVMQ, V.
42. Angelique Richardson, ‘The Eugenization of Love: Darwin, Galton, and New
Woman Fictions of Heredity and Eugenics’ (doctoral thesis, Birkbeck
College, University of London, 1999), 119.
43. Cited in Ellis Ethelmer, ‘Feminism’, Westminster Review, 149 (1898), 54.
44. Amy Bulley, ‘The Political Evolution of Women’, Westminster Review, 134
(1890), 7.
45. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
(1977; Virago, 1992), 13, 38. For subsequent references see 193, 205, 235,
243–4, 247, 253.
46. Rich, Of Woman Born, 237; next reference 247.
47. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Soci-
ology of Gender (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1978), 100–3.
48. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949; Picador, 1988), 512.
49. Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New
Woman Writing (Routledge, 1992), 169, 205–6.
50. George Egerton to Ernst Foerster, 1 July 1906, in Ernst Foerster, Die Frauen-
frage in den Romanen Englischer Schriftstellerinnen der Gegenwart (Marburg:
N.G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1907), 46–47; LVMQ, V.
51. Cixous, ‘Medusa’, 245, 247.
52. Ibid. 247.
53. Ibid. 245.
54. Ibid. 246.
55. Ibid. 254 (emphasis in original).
56. Ibid. 251, 261.
57. Ibid. 253 (emphasis in original).
58. H. Scavenius (ed.), Gyldendals Ordbøker, Norsk–Engelsk (Oslo: Gyldendal
Norsk Forlag, 1943), 123.
59. Cixous, ‘Medusa’, 255.

5. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman


1. Margaret Diane Stetz, ‘New Grub Street and the Woman Writer of the
1890s’, in Nikki Lee Manos and Mari-Jane Rochelson (eds), Transforming

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212 Notes

Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1994), 21–45; Rita S. Kranidis, Subversive Discourse: The Cultural Pro-
duction of Late Victorian Feminist Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995),
47–70.
2. Ann Ardis, ‘ ”Retreat with Honour”: Mary Cholmondeley’s Representation
of the New Woman Artist in Red Pottage’, in Suzanne W. Jones (ed.), Writing

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the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 333–50; Penny Boumelha, ‘The
Woman of Genius and the Woman of Grub Street: Figures of the Female
Writer in British Fin-de-Siècle Fiction’, English Literature in Transition, 3
(1997), 177–8; Lyn Pykett, ‘Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Rep-
resentations of the Female Artist in New Woman Fiction of the 1890s,’ paper
delivered at the ‘New Woman: Gendering the Fin de Siècle’ conference, Birk-
beck College, University of London, 27 February 1998, forthcoming in
Chris Willis and Angelique Richardson (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and
in Fact (Basingstoke: Macmillan).
3. Teresa Mangum, ‘Style Wars of the 1890s: The New Woman and the Deca-
dent’, in Manos and Rochelson, Transforming Genres, 47–66.
4. Rachel DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-
Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), 84–104.
5. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender
Difference in Literary Discourse’, in Elaine Showalter (ed.), Speaking of
Gender (New York: Routledge, 1988), 94.
6. Hans-Werner Ludwig, ‘Stephen Dedalus als Sprachkünstler: James Joyces
Künstlerbildnis zwischen Ästhetizismus und Moderne’, Anglia, 94 (1976),
105–6.
7. Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction
from Goethe to Joyce (New York: New York UP, 1964).
8. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland (eds), The Voyage
In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover: UP of New England, 1983), 11.
9. Janet M. Eldred, ‘Gender and Creativity: Female Artist Subplots from
Hawthorne to Fowles’ (doctoral thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, 1989), 18.
10. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975), in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The
Foucault Reader (Penguin, 1991), 174, 179.
11. Eldred, ‘Gender and Creativity’, 28.
12. Abel, Hirsch and Langland, The Voyage In, 7.
13. Ibid. 12.
14. Ibid. 12–13.
15. Grace Stewart, The New Mythos: The Novel of the Artist as Heroine 1877–1977
(Montreal: Eden, 1979), 50.
16. See Caird’s letter to Professor Viëtor, 5 December 1896, in Ernst Foerster,
Die Frauenfrage in den Romanen Englischer Schriftstellerinnen der Gegenwart
(Marburg: N. G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1907), 53, LVMQ, V.
17. Stewart, The New Mythos, 180.
18. Olive Schreiner to Mary Roberts, 1889, in Richard Rive (ed.), Olive Schreiner:
Letters (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 145.
19. See Lothar Fietz, Fragmentarisches Existieren: Wandlungen des Mythos von der
verlorenen Ganzheit in der Geschichte philosophischer, theologischer und liter-
arischer Menschenbilder (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 214.

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Notes 213

20. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (Routledge, 1990),


24–49.
21. Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893 (Thames & Hudson,
1992), 43.
22. Woolf, ROO, 31; Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, in Margaret
Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 56–7.

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23. James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (Murray, 1974), 254.
24. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP,
1979), 76.
25. Ibid. 78.
26. Florence Nightingale, ‘Cassandra’, in Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short
History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (1928; Virago, 1988), 398.
27. AL, First Book, ll. 467–9; Nightingale, ‘Cassandra’, 402.
28. David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s
(Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 69–93.
29. Pykett, ‘Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman’.
30. Olive Banks, The Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists (Brighton: Har-
vester, 1985), I, 180–1; Sharp, UA, 162.
31. Cited in Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet
Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Macmillan, 1987), 102.
32. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture,
1830–1980 (Virago, 1987), 138–44.
33. Audre Lorde, The Audre Lorde Compendium (HarperCollins, 1996), 158–61.
34. Roszika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Femi-
nine (Women’s Press, 1984), 7; DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, 89.
35. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de
Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 246.
36. See Boumelha, ‘Woman of Genius’, 172–8.
37. DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, 89, and Pykett, ‘Portraits of the Artist
as a Young Woman’.
38. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing (Virago, 1984), 202.
39. J. Peyton, ‘The Modern Malignant II: The Malignant in Fiction,’ Humani-
tarian, 9 (1896), 55.
40. Joanna E. Gates, Elizabeth Robins, 1862–1952: Actress, Novelist, Feminist
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 17.
41. Angela V. John, Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life 1862–1952 (Routledge, 1995),
109.
42. Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990), 148–9.
43. Mona Caird, ‘Does Marriage Hinder a Woman’s Self-development?’, Lady’s
Realm, 5 (1898–9), 581–3, LVMQ, II.

Departures
1. Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen (eds), Women, the Family and Freedom,
2 vols (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1983), II, 318.

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Index

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Abel, Elizabeth 160 Banks, Olive 87
Acton, William 90–1, 95 Barry, James 118
Actresses’ Franchise League 105 Barry, William Francis 50, 51, 52
aesthete, aesthetic literature 2, 6, 10, Beauvoir, Simone de 74, 147
48, 68, 69, 121, 122, 124 Benson, E.F. 2, 3
see also decadence Besant, Walter 80–1
allegory 9, 85, 94, 160 bicycle 17–19, 34–40, 50, 121
Allen, Grant 6, 13, 52, 53–4, 58, Bildungsroman 14, 66, 72, 161, 179
87–8, 142 see also artist-novel; Künstlerroman
androgyny 16, 52, 96, 124, 130, Bjørhovde, Gerd 67
132, 139, 141 Black, Clementina 35
Angel in the House 24–5, 167, 176, Bloomer, Amelia 121
177 bloomers, 34, 49
Angelou, Maya 71, 74 see also dress reform; Rational
animal rights 65, 93–4 Dress
see also vivisection Bonnell, Marilyn 69
anti-feminism 6, 20, 22, 23–30, 32, Boumelha, Penny 75
41, 53, 54, 66, 99, 100, 101, 103, Braddon, Mary: Lady Audley’s Secret
104, 107, 108, 141, 191 70, 183
see also Old Man; Old Woman Bradfield, Thomas 52
anti-imperialism 4, 64 Brontë, Charlotte 82–3, 89, 103,
Ardis, Ann 8, 137, 191 167, 183
Arkell-Smith, Valerie 125, 136 Jane Eyre 82–3, 103, 168, 175, 176,
art and the artist 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 183
47, 48, 49, 53, 67–8, 69, 70, 71, Villette 183
87, 119, 120, 146, 152, 155–93 Brontë, Emily 130, 142
artist-novel 4, 71, 54, 155–93 Brontës, the 186
narratives of artistic failure 146, Brooke, Emma Frances 82, 110
156–66, 174, 181, 192 A Superfluous Woman 44, 76, 82–4,
narratives of artistic success 156, 89–90, 94
159, 174, 178–92, 193 Transition 65–6, 101
suspended narratives 156, 166–78, Brown, Isaac Baker 91–2, 95–6
192–3 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 84, 89,
see also Bildungsroman; 142
Künstlerroman; matrilinearity; Aurora Leigh 84, 177, 183–4
motherhood, metaphor for Bulley, Amy 144
female creativity; tradition Bury, J. B. 117
Arts and Crafts movement 121 Butler, Josephine 28, 84, 92
Austen, Jane 183 Butler, Judith 134
autobiography 6, 7, 59, 68, 71–6,
118, 156, 157, 163, 174, 178, Caird, Mona 2, 3, 4, 5, 30, 33, 45,
186, 191 35, 81, 144–5, 166, 192

214

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Index 215

The Daughters of Danaus 44, 68, motherhood, metaphor for


75, 76, 96–7, 115, 142, 145, female creativity
146–8, 155, 163, 164, 165, 166, Cross(e), Victoria 67
182 cross-dressing 13–14, 117–41, 166–7
The Stones of Sacrifice 65, 66, 96, see also masquerade; transvestism
115, 164, 167, 192 Cuffe, Kathleen 15

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The Wing of Azrael 103, 175–7,
182 Dandy 47–8
Carpenter, Edward 101, 109, 129 decadence, the decadent 6, 10, 13,
Carswell, Catherine 195 24–5, 44, 45, 46–9, 52, 68, 71,
castration 96, 125, 136, 138, 171 72, 124, 156, 162, 164, 181, 189
celibacy 87–8, 90, 104 see also aesthete, aesthetic
see also chastity; frigidity; marriage literature
resistance; social purity degeneration of literature and society
Chaperon 4, 35, 38 1, 6, 16, 23, 46–53, 82, 88, 123,
Chapman, Elizabeth Rachel 52, 53, 128
77 see also regeneration; renovation
chastity 78, 80, 84, 88, 90, 92, 128 depression 35, 113, 123, 142, 167,
see also celibacy; frigidity; marriage 177, 180, 183, 184, 190
resistance; social purity deviance 16, 25, 47, 88, 91, 127,
childbirth metaphor 155–8, 171, 128, 129, 141, 168
192 see also homosexuality; lesbianism;
see also creativity; motherhood, perversion; transgression
metaphor for female creativity Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations
Chodorow, Nancy 146 168
Cholmondeley, Mary: Red Pottage didactic, didacticism 6, 70, 71
157–9, 164 see also purpose(ful) art;
Cixous, Hélène 135, 149, 152–4, propaganda
187 divided skirt 36, 40, 121
class issues 56, 57–60, 63–4, 98, see also dress reform; Rational
179–80 Dress
see also feminism, socialist division of labour 61–3, 158
clitoridectomy 91–3, 95 see also professional woman
Collins, Wilkie 124 divorce 50, 82, 109, 165, 191
Colmore, Gertrude 32, 72 Divorce Act 92
consumer culture 4, 9, 22, 34–41, Dix, Gertrude
169, 172 The Girl From the Farm 102–3
see also mass market; popular The Image Breakers 44, 76, 101,
culture 112–14, 164, 171–4
contagion 58, 78–9, 87, 190 Dixie, Lady Florence 4, 64–5, 141
Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts 28, 8, Gloriana 2, 76, 120, 129–30,
86, 91, 92, 93, 122, 205 n. 6 137–40
corset 121–2, 123, 127 Isola, or The Disinherited 65, 75
Cosslett, Tess 85, 98 Dixon, Ella Hepworth 54, 59, 72
Crackanthorpe, B. A. 37–9 As I Knew Them 54, 72
Crane, Walter 121 The Story of a Modern Woman 57,
creativity 143, 144, 148, 149, 152–4, 59, 72, 76, 97–8, 164, 169–70,
155–93 175
see also childbirth metaphor; Donna Quixote 2–3, 45

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216 Index

double standard 54, 78, 79, 80, 86, Felski, Rita 9


106, 110 female friendship 97, 98, 99, 100,
doubling 74, 164–5 101
Dowie, Ménie Muriel: Gallia 76, see also lesbianism; sisterhood
115, 142 female tradition 184–7, 193
Dowling, Linda 48 see also matrilinearity

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dress reform 4, 121–2, 124, 127 femininity 4, 7, 11, 15–21, 23, 25,
see also bloomers; divided skirt; 30–4, 36, 41–2, 44–5, 46, 49, 55,
Rational Dress 80, 98, 99, 04, 118–41, 142, 144,
DuPlessis, Rachel 66, 187 149–54, 158, 160, 162, 166, 167,
178, 181, 187, 190, 194
Eastwood, M. 43 see also gender; masculinity
Eckstein, Emma 92 feminism 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–13,
écriture féminine 45, 149 16, 22, 23–33, 34, 36, 41–2, 43–4,
see also French feminism 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55,
education 81, 176 56, 58–9, 59–66, 68, 71, 76, 78,
see also sex education 80, 84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 98, 99,
effeminacy 16, 47–8, 128 101, 106, 107, 108, 111, 114,
Egerton, George 2, 44–6, 51, 56, 68, 117, 119, 122, 123, 124, 125,
81, 82, 91, 102–3, 124, 144, 127, 129, 131, 132, 136, 137–8,
149–54 142, 146, 148, 156, 159, 161,
‘At the Heart of the Apple’ 57–8, 162, 164, 165, 175, 178, 179,
149–54 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194–5
‘Wedlock‘ 59–60 first-wave 4, 10–13, 145
The Wheel of God 76, 102–3 second-wave 10–13, 60–1, 73, 93,
Eldred, Janet 160, 161 145
Eliot, George 50, 190 third-wave 10
Ellis, Edith 56–7, 103, 109, 112 see also French feminism; lesbian
Seaweed 44, 59, 103, 115 feminism; liberal feminism;
Ellis, Havelock 101, 103, 109, 110, socialist feminism;
128–9 psychoanalytic feminism; radical
erotic, eroticism 46, 51, 126, 150 feminism; suffrage; women’s
erotomania 49, 51–2, 128 movement
essentialism 45, 56, 141, 143, 149, feminization 1, 8, 11, 16, 41, 6, 96,
154 129, 150, 187
eugenics 7, 53, 54, 66, 79, 84, 85, femme fatale 48
90, 91, 109, 143, 144, 154 flapper 194
Fliess, Wilhelm 92
Fabian Society 139 Flint, Kate 9
Faderman, Lilian 98 Foot, Paul 70
Fairbairns, Zoë: Stand We At Last 93 Ford, Isabella O. 4, 58, 60, 180
Family Doctor 125–7 On the Threshold 59, 60–4, 76, 98,
fashion consciousness 8, 18, 32, 101, 164, 179–80
34–42 Fortin, Nina 49
fallen man 82, 106 Foucault, Michel 46, 53, 161
fallen woman 98 Fourir, Charles 5
Fawcett, Millicent Garrett 4, 58, 59 fragmentation 9, 14, 166, 167
Fellowship of the New Life 139 Frame, Janet 74
Felman, Shoshana 73 free love 52, 81, 85, 90, 108–16, 147

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see also marriage 119, 120, 125, 127, 129–36, 142,


French feminism 7, 12–14, 45–6, 162, 163–4
149–54 Ideala 44, 52, 59, 70, 76, 97, 101,
see also Cixous, Hélène; écriture 122, 143, 165–6
féminine; Kristeva, Julia; Irigaray, Greenslade, William 84
Luce Grove, Lady Agnes 31–2

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Freud, Sigmund 10, 92, 167–8 Grub Street 71, 156
Friedan, Betty 41 Gubar, Susan 7, 8, 30, 175
Friedman, Susan Stanford 74–5, gynocentrism 4, 5, 6, 195
158 see also woman-centredness
frigidity 49, 52, 87
see also celibacy; chastity; marriage Haggard, H. Rider 86
resistance; social purity feminism Hall, Radclyffe 99, 101, 182, 194,
195
Galsworthy, John: The Man of Property Hannigan, D.F. 52
55–6 Harberton, Lady 121–2, 124
Garber, Marjorie 118 Hardy, Thomas 6, 51, 54–5, 89
Gaskell, Elizabeth 142 Jude the Obscure 55–6
gaze, the 52, 151, 160, 171 Hartmann, Heidi 60–1, 64
gender 1, 6, 8, 9, 19, 29, 41, 43, 44, Haweis, M.E. 5, 39
49, 53, 61, 62, 63, 84, 116, health 18, 21, 35–7, 39, 41, 46, 50,
117–42, 147, 150 65, 78–80, 84–5, 89–91, 97, 108,
and genre 5–6, 22–3, 30, 43–4, 120–5, 127, 184–5, 188
46–59, 66–76, 160 Healthy and Artistic Dress Union
see also femininity; masculinity 121
Gilbert, Sandra 7, 8, 30, 175 heterosexuality 12, 51, 52, 54, 64,
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 32, 53, 77–8, 85, 90, 91, 92, 97, 98, 99,
54, 57, 69, 72, 79, 94, 101, 103, 101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108,
108, 109, 143, 187 115, 116, 118, 127, 128, 130,
Herland 101, 143 143–5, 139, 140, 141, 166, 180
Moving the Mountain 32, 79, 143 compulsory: 104
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ 72, 94, Hinton, Howard/James 109–10
103, 182 Hirsch, Marianne 160
Gissing, George 6 Holdsworth, Annie: Joanna Traill,
Glyn, Coralie 87–8 Spinster 75
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 159 homosexuality 47, 80, 99, 101, 124,
Gothic, the 83, 94, 95, 176, 186 128, 129, 130, 132–5, 138–41,
Grand, Sarah 2, 3, 4, 12, 15, 16, 17, 166
23, 24, 29, 30–1, 34–5, 43, 45, see also deviance; lesbianism
46, 48, 51, 52, 56, 68–9, 75, 77, Huffer, Lynne 88
79–80, 82, 89, 91, 92, 109, 111, Humanitarian League 4, 64
112, 136, 141, 160 hysteria 39, 45–6, 47, 48, 58, 92,
The Beth Book 48, 68–9, 72, 74, 95–6, 111, 177–8, 186, 191
75, 76, 81, 82, 84–5, 89, 93–4, see also madness
95, 97, 119–20, 183, 184–9
A Domestic Experiment 96, 97, Ibsen, Henrik 2, 3, 6, 50, 54, 56–7,
122–4 102
The Heavenly Twins 2, 3, 5, 50, 51, identity, quest for 156, 163, 166–78,
57, 58, 69, 79, 82, 84, 86, 118, 188, 189

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218 Index

independence 34–41, 112, 114, 160, madness 51, 56, 82, 85, 90, 111,
161, 179, 180, 182, 188, 189, 192 163, 177, 182, 183, 186
intertextuality 8 see also hysteria
Iota: A Yellow Aster 2, 3, 43, 44, 76, madwoman 82, 94, 100, 167, 175,
81, 142 176, 186, 192
Irigaray, Luce 42, 123, 136, 149, 173 Mangum, Teresa 66, 69

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Mann, Thomas 159, 160
Jackson, Emily 111 Marcus, Laura 73
Jaeger, Dr 121 marriage 22, 35, 39, 51, 53, 54, 57,
James, Henry 6, 7, 99, 104, 105 58, 64–6, 71, 77–86, 89, 90, 91,
Jeffreys, Sheila 98, 99 97, 98, 103, 107, 108, 109, 112,
Jex-Blake, Sophia 29 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 125,
John, Angela 191 132, 136, 142, 144, 146, 148,
Johnstone, Edith: A Sunless Heart 76 162, 164–5, 166, 171, 173, 177,
Joyce, James 160 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184,
185, 186, 191, 192
Kenealy, Arabella 29, 41, 148 rape in 81, 87, 111, 144, 147
Kingsford, Anna 94 synonymous with prostitution 63,
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 128 82
Kranidis, Rita 5, 6, 48, 69 see also free love
Kristeva, Julia 149 marriage resistance 97
Künstlerroman 14, 66, 72, 156, 161, see also celibacy; chastity; frigidity;
162, 163, 165, 178, 179, 192 social purity
see also artist-novel; Bildungsroman Married Women’s Property Act 92
Marx, Eleanor 56, 58, 5
Lacan, Jacques 74–5, 167–8 masculinity 7, 46, 49, 54, 57–58, 80,
Lanchester, Edith 111 84, 99, 107, 117, 119, 121, 122,
Lane, John 44, 45 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 132,
Langland, Elizabeth 160 135, 136, 141, 150, 151, 154,
latchkey 3, 38 156, 158, 160, 187
Lawrence, D.H. 89 see also femininity; gender
Ledger, Sally 5, 10, 53, 58, 77 masquerade 13, 118, 126, 127,
Legitimation League 110 129–42, 166
Leppington, Blanche 52, 77 see also cross-dressing;
lesbian feminism 13, 104 transvestism
see also Rich, Adrienne mass market 4, 48, 50, 73, 76, 118,
lesbianism 13, 26, 29, 78, 98–108, 156
115, 116, 125, 128, 129 see also consumer culture; popular
see also deviance; female culture
friendship; homosexuality; masturbation 46, 80, 91–3, 95, 96
sisterhood maternalism 1, 80, 143
liberal feminism 180 Matlock, Jann 129
Linton, Eliza Lynn 6, 15, 16, 23–4, matrilinearity 156, 184–6
27, 29, 33, 104, 107, 111, 148 see also artist-novel; female
The One Too Many 25–6 tradition
The Rebel of the Family 26, 99–101 matrophobia 145, 156
Lorde, Audre 187 Maudsley, Henry 141
Lytton, Lady Constance 32, 72, May, Austin 15
108 May, Phil, cartoons 16–20

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Meares, Ainslie: The New Woman 1, Nightingale, Florence 40, 177–8, 183
12–13 Nordau, Max 46–7
medicine 29, 36–7, 78, 79, 82, 83, novel with a purpose 48, 169
86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, nymphomania 90, 91, 96
99, 100, 115, 118, 127, 186
Meredith, George 6, 54–5, 131 Oliphant, Margaret 50, 52

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Millett, Kate 74 Old Man 24
Mitchell, Sally 95 see also anti–feminism; Old
mirror, metaphor for self-division Woman
132, 166–75, 192 Old Woman 4, 15, 20, 22, 23–30,
see also artist-novel, suspended 66, 194
narratives see also anti-feminism; Old Man
modernism 7–9, 69, 156 Ouida 23
monstrosity 16, 82, 86, 99, 119, ovariotomy 91–2
135, 160, 161, 165–6, 175–7,
190 Pankhurst, Christabel 84, 85, 93
Moore, George 6, 49, 50, 56, 57, Parker, Roszika 187
67–68, 125, 126–7 peace movement 4, 65, 181
Morgan-Dockrell, Mrs 1 Peck, Winifred 194
Morris, William 121 perversion 46, 47, 51, 101, 128
mother-daughter relations 144–9, see also deviance; transgression
163–4, 182, 191 Pinero, Arthur Wing: The Notorious
motherhood 14, 28, 44, 53, 54, Mrs Ebbsmith 110
57–8, 80, 84, 91, 107, 108, 118, pornography 49, 51, 52, 53
141–54, 155, 158, 162, 164, 166, professional woman 25, 26, 29, 35,
186 72, 76, 115, 148, 156, 178,
metaphor for female creativity 179–82, 185, 188
143, 144, 148–9, 152–4, 155–6, see also division of labour
158, 159, 171, 191, 192 propaganda 69, 70
see also childbirth metaphor; prostitution 63, 78, 79, 86, 90, 91,
creativity 92, 93, 97, 99, 106, 122, 123,
167, 179
narrative structures 6, 8, 66–7, Proust, Marcel 159
162–3 psychoanalytic feminism 14
National Union of Women’s Suffrage see also Chodorow, Nancy
Societies 4, 45 Punch cover cartoon 2–4, 45
naturalism and naturalist novel 2, Pykett, Lyn 7, 8, 22, 69, 78, 149,
13, 48–50, 52, 56–8, 59 178
see also realism
Nelson, Carolyn Christensen 5 Radcliffe, Ann: A Sicilian Romance
Nelson, Claudia 80 183
New Feminism 194 radical feminism 14, 26, 92, 104,
New Man 12, 85, 96–7 145
New Woman see also Rich, Adrienne
and womanliness 18, 21, 30–4 Rational Dress 17, 34, 121–2, 124
as reader 2, 5, 9, 34 Rational Dress Society 121
early uses of the term 5, 22–3 see also bloomers; divided skirt;
synonyms for 16, 105 dress reform
see also Old Man; Old Woman Reade, Charles 121

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realism and realist novel 2, 6, 8, 9, separate spheres 61–2, 80, 187, 189
11, 13, 44, 52, 54–6, 136, 160 separatism 12, 85
see also naturalism sex education 78–81
regeneration 1, 34, 48, 61, 65, 66, see also education
76, 84, 188, 192, 193 sexology 25, 88, 98, 99, 108, 128–9,
see also degeneration of literature 140

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and society sexual anarchy 1, 117, 140–1
renovation 1, 5, 48 sexual exploitation and violence 45,
see also degeneration of literature 62–4, 71, 78–9, 81, 87, 90, 91–6,
and society 106, 110, 111, 115, 117, 120,
reproduction 58, 65, 80, 83, 91, 99, 122, 124, 144, 147, 150, 195
103, 118, 141, 144, 152 see also marriage, rape in
rest cure 186 sexual pleasure and passion 45–6,
reverse discourse 53 85, 88, 89–90, 91, 97, 98, 135,
Revolt of the Daughters 2, 3, 15, 150, 151, 187, 195
27–8, 34, 37–41, 45 sexuality 1, 7, 44–6, 51–2, 53, 56,
Rich, Adrienne 104, 145–6 78–116, 117, 127, 128, 129, 139,
Richardson, Angelique 79, 84, 143 140, 141, 149–54, 163, 194–5
Riviere, Joan 131, 135 and desire/fantasy 45, 46, 51, 54,
Robins, Elizabeth 4, 32, 72, 76, 108, 81, 87, 88–9, 90, 91, 95, 96, 101,
164, 180, 191 103, 109, 127, 129, 132–5, 136,
George Mandeville’s Husband 139–41, 150, 153, 169
189–91 and ignorance/innocence 40,
Votes for Women! 57, 104–8, 133 79–80, 81, 112
romance script and romantic love and sensuality 53, 82, 89, 132
77, 79, 85, 96, 97, 111, 114, 134, Sharp, Evelyn 4, 60, 71, 72, 76,
162, 165 180–2
room as womb, metaphor for female The Making of a Prig 76, 180–1,
creativity 155, 156, 182–9 182
room of one’s own 155, 178–93 Unfinished Adventure 71–2
Shaw, G. B. 6, 49, 121
Sand, George 118, 186 Shelley, Mary 83
Schreiner, Olive 4, 30, 56, 58, 67–8, Showalter, Elaine 5, 10–11, 22, 44,
69, 76, 85, 101, 109, 110, 85–6, 87, 96, 189
111–12, 143, 166 Sinclair, May 194
From Man to Man 67, 68, 70, 85, sisterhood 29–30, 57, 59, 60, 64, 74,
97, 122, 164 88, 96–108, 124, 163–4, 170, 188
The Story of an African Farm 5, 56, shrieking 23, 30
66, 67–8, 70, 142, 163–4, 166, see also female friendship;
170–1, 175, 189 lesbianism
science 7, 41, 58, 83, 96, 100, 103, Smith, Alys W. Pearsall 40–1
192 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll 88
seduction of reader 30–4, 41, 105, social purity 4, 7, 28, 34, 54, 65, 79,
131 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 89, 90, 109,
self-sacrifice 27, 30, 79, 87, 91, 97, 120, 194
106, 108, 110, 118, 144–7, 157, see also celibacy; chastity; frigidity;
158–9, 161, 162, 163, 169, 181, marriage resistance
188, 190, 192 socialist feminism 4, 13, 58–9,
sensation novel 22–3, 186 59–66, 137–8, 180

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sportswomen 34–7 utopia 9, 44, 61, 65, 108, 115, 120,


Stanley, Liz 55, 72–3, 74 136–7, 137, 140, 141
Stanton, Domna 73
Stead, W. T. 6–7, 43, 50 venereal disease 51, 65, 78–80, 84–7
Stewart, Grace 163, 165 see also syphilis
Stoker, Bram 86, 5, 96 Vicinus, Martha 140

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Stutfield, Hugh E. M. 43, 50 vivisection 4, 93–5
suffrage 4, 5, 13, 23, 27–8, 31–2, 45, see also animal rights
49, 72, 73, 104–8, 136, 143, 164, Votes for Women (WSP organ) 181
165, 180, 194
suffragists and suffragettes 41, 56, war of the sexes 2, 8, 22, 26, 32,
121 148
see also feminism; women’s Ward, Mrs Humphry 27–8, 66, 148
movement Delia Blanchflower 27–8
syphilis 78–87, 93 Marcella 27–8, 66
see also venereal disease Wells, H. G. 13, 52, 53, 54
Syrett, Netta 37, 54, 71–2 Wheelwright, Julie 128
Nobody’s Fault 97, 163, 181–2 Wilde, Oscar 6, 46, 47–8, 106, 121,
Rose Cottingham Married 161, 124, 138–9, 139
164–6, 175 Winterson, Jeanette 74
The Sheltering Tree 37, 54, 71–2 Wollstonecraft, Mary 91, 142, 183
Three Women 76, 115, 164 Wolstenholme-Elmy, Elizabeth 143
The Victorians 161–2, 164 woman-centredness 5, 104, 108, 148
see also gynocentrism
textual instability 2, 8, 44–6, 66–7, women’s movement 4, 5, 10–13, 23,
73 27, 32, 33, 42, 45, 52, 78, 101,
Thomas, Sue 106 117, 118, 121, 193, 194
Thurston, Katherine Cecil: Max 76, see also feminism; suffrage
120, 166–7, 174 Women’s Social and Political Union
Tilley, Vesta 118 4, 108, 180
Todd, Margaret 29–30 Women Writers’s Suffrage League 4,
Mona Maclean, Medical Student Woolf, Virginia 7, 11, 24–5, 74, 89,
29–30, 72, 75, 76 125, 155–156, 167, 173, 186, 195
transgression 16, 24, 30, 37, 47, 99, work see professional woman;
114, 120, 128, 129, 135, 138, division of labour
141, 175 Wotton, Mabel E: ‘The Fifth Edition’
see also deviance; perversion 157–9
transvestism 117–41
see also cross–dressing; Yellow Book 2, 3, 180
masquerade
Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth 23 Zola, Émile 49, 56

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