Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Ann Heilmann
New Woman Fiction
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
Acknowledgements x
Abbreviations xi
Regen(d)eration 1
1 Contesting/Consuming Femininities 15
Departures 194
Notes 196
Index 214
vii
ix
FOOTNOTES
xi
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hall, Radclyffe
TUL The Unlit Lamp. Jonathan Cape, 1926.
WOL The Well of Loneliness. 1928; Virago, 1992.
Hardy, Thomas
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.
Moore, George
‘AN’ ‘Albert Nobbs’. Celibate Lives. Heinemann, 1927, 44–96.
EW Esther Waters. 1894; Dent, 1976.
MF Mike Fletcher. 1889; Ward & Downey, 1899.
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.
Shaw, G. B.
TUS The Unsocial Socialist. 1884; Virago 1988.
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.
Todd, Margaret
MM Travers, Graham. Mona Maclean, Medical Student. Black-
wood, 1892.
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.
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.
Wotton, Mabel E.
‘FE’ ‘The Fifth Edition’. Day-books. Lane, 1896. In Elaine Showal-
ter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence. Virago, 1993, 139–64.
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
shaped central aspects of British literature and culture from the late-
Victorian age through the Edwardian period and beyond.
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
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
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
‘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
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
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-
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
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
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
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)
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).
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)
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
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
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
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
chapter will deal with the imprint the New Woman left on popular
thought, in particular fashionable middle-class women’s opinions and
self-image.
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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
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
Sexual/textual instability
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
Literary degeneration
tions with the disreputable motives that prompted their male contem-
poraries to adopt a similar choice of subject matter. Grand, for example,
asserted:
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)
vidual efforts to mediate between them are inscribed into many New
Woman novels.
Social(ist) regeneration
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-
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
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
‘. . . 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.
if I were but a man, and could get money for my work as a man gets
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.
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’
An aesthetics of resistance
‘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
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
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)
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
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
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).
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-
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
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).
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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-
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)
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
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
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.
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
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)
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
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
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.’
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,
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
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)
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-
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)
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
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:
Mon, thee – thee and no other art all as I want i’ this world.
(SW, 150)
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
117
(Un)masking desire
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)
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-
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.
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
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
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-
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
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-
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-
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)
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.
‘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
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-
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’
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
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
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
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)
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
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)
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-
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).
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
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:
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
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.
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
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-
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
‘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 . . .
‘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
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
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
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
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
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?’
‘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)
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
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:
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
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-
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
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)
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
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:
‘[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
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
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
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.
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)
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
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.
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-
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
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)
(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
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
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)
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
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,
194
Regen(d)eration
196
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).
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.
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-
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.
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).
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
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
Departures
1. Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen (eds), Women, the Family and Freedom,
2 vols (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1983), II, 318.
214
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
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
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