New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism

New Woman Fiction Women Writing First-Wave Feminism

Ann Heilmann

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New Woman Fiction

10.1057/9780230288355 - New Woman Fiction, Ann Heilmann

Also by Ann Heilmann

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THE LATE-VICTORIAN MARRIAGE QUESTION: A Collection of Key New Woman Texts (editor)

10.1057/9780230288355 - New Woman Fiction, Ann Heilmann

Ann Heilmann

10.1057/9780230288355 - New Woman Fiction, Ann Heilmann

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New Woman Fiction

Women Writing First-Wave Feminism

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.

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 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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ISBN 0–333–79416–8

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For Patrick

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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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Contents

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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

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List of Illustrations

The writing of this book would not have been possible without the sustained 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 HansWerner 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 Marriage 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.

x

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Acknowledgements

FOOTNOTES In all bibliographical references the place of publication is London unless otherwise stated. Abbreviations are used for the following publishers: AUP CUP MUP OUP UP

Associated University Presses Cambridge University Press Manchester University Press Oxford University Press University Press

PRIMARY TEXTS Anthologies (volumes are indicated with Roman letters) LVMQ

SOBF SSPSG

Heilmann, Ann (ed.), The Late-Victorian Marriage Question: A Collection of Key New Woman Texts. 5 vols. Routledge Thoemmes Press, 1998. Roberts, Marie Mulvey and Tamae Mizuta (eds), Sources of British Feminism. 6 vols. Routledge Thoemmes Press, 1995. Heilmann, Ann and Stephanie Forward (eds), Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand. 4 vols. Routledge Thoemmes Press, 2000.

Allen, Grant BBAR WWD

The British Barbarians. Lane, 1895. 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 V

Jane Eyre. 1847; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Villette. 1853; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959. xi

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Abbreviations

xii

Abbreviations

Brooke, Emma Frances ASW T

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

AL

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

Caird, Mona DD MOM PG SOS WOA

The Daughters of Danaus. 1894; New York: Feminist Press, 1989. The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman. George Redway, 1897. In LVMQ, I. The Pathway of the Gods. Skeffington, 1898. The Stones of Sacrifice. Simpkin, Marshall, 1915. 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 IB

The Girl from the Farm. Lane, 1895. The Image Breakers. Heinemann, 1900.

Dixie, Lady Florence GL IS TF

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

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Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Abbreviations xiii

Dixon, Ella Hepworth

SMW

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

Dowie, Ménie Muriel G

Gallia. Methuen, 1895.

Egerton, George ‘ACL’ ‘AKTK’

D ‘GU’ ‘HOA’ K RA ‘VS’ ‘WL’ WOG ‘WOT’

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

Ellis, Edith (Lees) NFM SW TMS

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

Fairbairns, Zoë SWAL

Stand We at Last. Virago, 1988.

Ford, Isabella O. OTT W&S

On the Threshold. Arnold, 1895. 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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AIKT

xiv Abbreviations

MOP

The Man of Property. 1906. In The Forsyte Saga. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974, I, 11–364.

CPGUN HL LCPG MMW MTM TC WHIO ‘YW’

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

Gissing, George OW

The Odd Women. 1893; Virago, 1987.

Grand, Sarah BB BTI ‘CC’ DE EM ‘FHT’ HT ID MMM ‘TU’

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

Grove, Lady (Agnes) TSF ‘UW’

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

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Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Abbreviations xv

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

Hardy, Thomas JTO

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

Holdsworth, Annie JT

Joanna Traill, Spinster. Heinemann, 1894.

Ibsen, Henrik ADH GH

A Doll’s House. 1879; Everyman, 1993. 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 F&SE

Dr Janet of Harley Street. Digby, Long, 1893. Feminism and Sex-Extinction. Unwin, 1920.

Linton, Eliza Lynn ACK ROF TOTM

The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, 3 vols. Bentley, 1885. The Rebel of the Family. 1880; Chatto & Windus, 1888. 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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TUL WOL

xvi Abbreviations

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

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 GMH TC VFW

WAYGT WS

A Dark Lantern. New York: Macmillan, 1905. Raimond, C. E. George Mandeville’s Husband. Heinemann, 1894. The Convert. 1907; Women’s Press, 1980. Votes for Women!. 1907. In Dale Spender and Carole Hayman (eds), How the Vote Was Won And Other Suffragette Plays. Methuen, 1985, 35–87. Where Are You Going To . . . ? Heinemann, 1913. 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 FMTM ‘PFP’ ‘TD’ W&L U

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

Sharp, Evelyn MOAP RW

The Making of a Prig. Lane, The Bodley Head, 1897. Rebel Women. Fifield, 1910.

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‘AN’ EW MF

Abbreviations

UA

xvii

Unfinished Adventure: Some Reminiscences from an Englishwoman’s Life. Lane, The Bodley Head, 1933.

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

Stoker, Bram DR

Dracula. 1897; Oxford: OUP, 1983.

Syrett, Netta NF PR RCM ST TV TW

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

Thurston, Katherine Cecil M

Max. Hutchinson, 1910.

Todd, Margaret MM

Travers, Graham. Mona Maclean, Medical Student. Blackwood, 1892.

Ward, Mrs Humphry DB MC

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

Wells, H. G. AV TNM

Ann Veronica. 1909; Virago, 1987. The New Macchiavelli. Lane, The Bodley Head, 1911.

Wilde, Oscar AIH CWOW DG

An Ideal Husband. 1895. In CWOW, 515–82. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994. 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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TUS

xviii

Abbreviations

O ‘PFW’

ROO TG

Orlando. 1928; Penguin, 1993. ‘Professions for Women’. 1931. In Michèle Barrett (ed.), Virginia Woolf on Women & Writing. Women’s Press, 1979, 57–63. A Room of One’s Own. 1929; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945. Three Guineas. 1938; Hogarth Press, 1986.

Wotton, Mabel E. ‘FE’

‘The Fifth Edition’. Day-books. Lane, 1896. In Elaine Showalter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence. Virago, 1993, 139–64.

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Woolf, Virginia

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 journalism, 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 importance, 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 evolution 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 determine 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 sexuality. Her increasing cultural impact and international4 resonance accentuated concerns about the feminization of literature and the demise of virile Englishness.5 Yet with her call for the restoration of moral standards and her exaltation of women’s maternalistic ethic she proclaimed herself an agent of the ‘purification’ of the nation,6 countering conservative 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 1

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Regen(d)eration

2

New Woman Fiction

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

Who or what was the New Woman? A literary construct, a press fabrication 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 creature’ the New Woman had become since she had conceived her, while the other (George Egerton) rejected the concept altogether.7 The semantic instability of the term ‘New Woman’ derives in part from the multiplicity 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

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Towards a genealogy of the New Woman

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Regen(d)eration 3

1: ‘Donna Quixote’

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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 cartoon considerable space is taken up by female warriors whose pursuits 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 connection it establishes between the literary (self-)representation of the New Woman, turn-of-the-century popular culture, and first-wave feminism. 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 emphasis 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 movement: 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 committed 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 Political 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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4

early nineteenth century by Charles Fourier, entered the English language 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 narrative writing to carry into practice their project of social renovation. 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 correlation 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 surrounding.’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 produced 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 womancentred and woman-authored genre which gave cultural resonance to the political concerns of the Victorian and Edwardian women’s movements 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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Regen(d)eration 5

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 ideology – 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 important because technically most innovative and aesthetically sound producers 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 contemporaries, the New Woman and the decadent are today often seen as analogous 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 authorial perspective. Rita Kranidis suggests that the realists’ interest in the New Woman was primarily driven by literary and aesthetic considerations.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 literature of aestheticism. ‘The Novel of the Modern Woman’, the journalist W. T. Stead

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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 protagonists) and ‘fiction by New Women’ (the authors). This unstable balance between the persona of the writer and her fictional character(s) manifests itself in and through a variety of narrative techniques, in particular 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 increasingly 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 classification, 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 categorization. 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, formoriented, important art) over the ‘feminine’ (popular, polemical, content-oriented, inessential)? French feminism, which validates ‘feminine’ 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 modernism, in terms of canon formation, but also with regard to the assumption that (post)modernism radicalized literary criticism and revolutionized character (de)construction. Did the modernist transformation 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

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 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 governing 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 aesthetic 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 representation’. 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 particular 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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The novel of the modernist woman?

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 multiplicity 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 indicative of the contradictions they grappled with as women, as writers and as feminists, not of their wish to invite complex techniques of interpretation and deconstruction. If anything, New Woman fiction constitutes 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 independentlyminded 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 exclusionary 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 challenge 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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New Woman Fiction

Feminist cross-currents 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 lateVictorian 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 unacceptably teleological view of history. The reverse angle is clearly less problematic: 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 lateVictorian culture this conflict was reflected on the literary level (l’art pour l’art versus ‘purposeful’ art), in the late twentieth century it is transcribed 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 competing 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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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

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11

a perpetual bias against feminine subject-matter and female subjectivity . . . tends to belittle stories about women’s lives . . . In the 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 . . . learning 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 constructions of New Woman characters, they guided their readers’ aesthetic 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 ‘truthfulness 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 literary 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 theoretical 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 academic 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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feminization of literature and falling standards echo the cultural climate of the fin de siècle:

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 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 gestation. With its emphasis on textuality and its uneasy relationship with the socio-political ‘reality’ of women’s lives, and indeed with the category ‘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 heterosexual 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 political 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 exemplified 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 (twentiethcentury) New Woman’s aspirations, her inconsistencies and soulsearching, 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 lateVictorian 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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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 conceptualize ideological frameworks in remarkably similar ways. My argument, then, is that a connection, however tentative and cerebral, 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 secondwave 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 locating 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 prefigures 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 specifically concerned with close readings of texts and their theoretical underpinnings. 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-ofthe-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 fictional 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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New Woman Fiction

dressing and of the various conceptualisations of motherhood in Chapter 4 highlights the diversity of New Woman approaches by offering 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 creating metaphors. In what sense did writers revise the Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman tradition in order to (re)construct the problems and conflicts inherent in their own position as women artists? What metaphors did they mobilize in their exploration of female identity and fragmentation, 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 political self-affirmation.

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Contesting/Consuming Femininities

[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 characteristic 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, combining the ‘sweet, domestic graces’ of the bygone days with a wideminded 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 unemployed, 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 cultural 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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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 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, funloving, ‘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 rejection 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 destabilize 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 unconditional 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 ‘monstrous 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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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 uncomplimentary. 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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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 17

New Woman Fiction

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

Age is the New Woman. The elegantly dressed and unambiguously gendered figures in the background serve as a further reminder that her pursuits 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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New Woman Fiction

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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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 particular appeal resided in her successful synthesis of ‘old’ and ‘new’ qualities (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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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 21

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 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 particular attention to the decisive role played by women (as feminists, antifeminists, 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 ‘grandmother’ 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; sexually 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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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 invented by feminist periodicals which, aiming to mobilize widespread female support for a ‘new female political identity’, encouraged womanto-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 finde-siècle New Woman.21 It was in order to counter the cultural dissemination 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 traditional 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 periodicals; 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 construction 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 movement. It would be more appropriate to say that, while feminist journalists 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 formation of public opinion. The most intriguing thing about female antifeminism 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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Contesting/Consuming Femininities 23

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 critical 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 decadents 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-andgo kind of thing with them’.24 What emerges from behind the antifeminist rhetoric is the older professional’s fear of her young competitors who were attacking the system that had rewarded her: this was a war about the terms of female professionalism as much as about feminism. 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. Unregenerate 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

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 compounding 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 affinity 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 eminently successful in everything she undertakes, and men find her irresistible; 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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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 sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. (‘PFW’, 59)

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). 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 incomparably 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 arguments 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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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 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 ideologically by a clever strategy of emotional blackmail, Delia becomes entangled 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 energies unused – they were all there, and all hanging upon . . . something 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 femininity, 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 mouthpiece of things divine and compelling; and those who went away enriched did indeed forget her in her message, as she meant them to do. (DB, 165, emphasis added)

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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 AntiSuffrage League in 1908, she was anything but a ‘mere humble mouthpiece’ 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 nonstarter. 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 suffragette 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 childless 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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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 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 maledominated 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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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 vitriolic 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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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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On no account leave the heart out of your calculations. . . . To succeed all round, you must invite the eye, you must charm the ear, 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 knowledge of politics unsexes women . . . One safeguard from [this prejudice] 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 inconsiderable shock when he realizes that the ‘small and slight and unmistakably 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 consternation 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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image by ‘mak[ing] the most of [their] appearance’ and cultivating the ‘art of pleasing’:

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 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 domestic duties (TC, 107). The alluring qualities of the invariably elegant and always meticulously 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 inconceivable, that suffering made a lady, and that the only true lady was a feminist. The enormous success of the Edwardian suffragettes in marketing 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 feminists 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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individual with the collective: they demonstrated both personal and organized feminist means of overcoming the problems they had anatomized fictionally. Pro-New Woman journalists invoked the same discourse of femininity that writers mobilized in their novels. The ‘real’ New Woman was presented as the only truly ‘womanly woman’;35 a ‘reformer and friend of her sex and of humanity’, she deserved to be called the ‘Best Woman’.36 Feminist values (independence, courage, truthfulness, selfrespect, knowledge, intellect, education, strength of body and mind, self-determination, and purposefulness) were linked to traditional feminine traits (motherliness, domesticity, gentleness and purity): She came into the college and elevated it; into literature, and hallowed 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 contribution to the solution of the greatest problem of the Englishspeaking 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 revolutionary 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 comradeship 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 expediency arguments thus served the strategic purpose of disseminating and popularizing feminist concepts and ideas. The final section of this

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Consumer culture and the revolting daughter 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 middleclass 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 fashionably 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 considered 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 expertise in the art of beautification and their keen interest in experimenting 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 selfperception of late-Victorian middle-class women and significantly contributed to the transformation of gender relations: ‘This revolution-

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

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 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 companionship 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 obsession with speed and competition: ‘ladies have introduced cycling-athomes, musical rides, . . . flower parades’ and were at the vanguard of the new cycling clubs. Moreover, the bicycle provided an ideal opportunity for women to branch out on new careers: the enterprising lady could set up as a wheelwright or cycling instructor; indeed, ‘many necessitous gentlewomen may find it a remunerative and pleasant occupation’.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 ‘unrivalled for the elegance and beauty of their cycling costumes’, and were given details of suitable colour schemes in order to match their bicylces with the season: ‘green in spring, white in summer, a tan shade, suggestive 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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New Woman Fiction

8: ‘Bates’ FRIZETTA Keeps the Hair in Curl’

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 additionally mobilized medical arguments in their attempt to dissuade them from pursuing the sport. Cycling was declared to produce hideous deformities in the arms and fingers as well as causing humpbacks and ravaging a woman’s beauty forever.51 Just as two decades earlier, women

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9: ‘Do English Lady Cyclists Ride Gracefully?’

desirous of higher education had been warned of the disastrous repercussions of academic study on their regenerative system, so now overenthusiastic 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 transgression, the bicycle was sometimes regarded as the yardstick for female respectability. In her autobiography Netta Syrett records how a prospective 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 journalist 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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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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11: ‘The Force of Habit’

ence of earning their own livelihood,56 and even a period of Wanderjahre: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 selfrestraint.’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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New Woman Fiction

12: ‘Good News for Lady Cyclists’

nothing would make up for the loss of their innocence.63 The most interesting 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 aspirations of their own natures, and must stifle the cry of their own individuality.65

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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 equivalent of Betty Friedan’s ‘problem with no name’,66 giving their readers 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 journalism 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 important 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 reallife 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 discourse of femininity to subvert conservative notions of femininity, yet

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New Woman Fiction

their strategy far exceeded Irigaray’s concept of mimicry. Instead of ‘performing’ patriarchal ideas about Woman, they redefined Woman, radically 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. 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

[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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Keynotes and Discords

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 protagonists daringly ‘modern’ women because they lived with men who 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 allegorical and utopian modes of writing in order to be able to project idealized 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 framework 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 published 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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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 position 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 inflammatory) book constitute a rebus on Keynotes. Egerton is further represented through her glasses, facial features and hairstyle.8 In the eyes of the conservative 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 feminist 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 commitment to women’s rights. Rosie Miles argues that John Lane’s marketing of Keynotes was calculated 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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an eye to the male rather than female market; in any case she categorically 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 stimulation men received from her writing is indicated by an early reviewer 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 considerably 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), translated 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 anarchy was the prevailing mode of social and political life, sexual perversion 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, hysteria 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’ development, manifesting itself as a sexual and/or mental disorder: lack of compliance or lack of restraint. Women refused to perform their conjugal 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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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 associated with effeminacy because it was linked to hysteria, hence to femininity. 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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In many ways, however, feminist writers, who saw themselves as agents of moral renovation, were the antithesis of fin-de-siècle decadence. They challenged the sexual stereotyping of women reinforced by the aesthetic fetishization of the femme fatale.17 The antagonistic relationship between the New Woman and the decadent is frequently 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 considerably 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 “unnatural,” 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 audience.20 The very emphasis of decadent writers on form and brilliancy of style sharply differentiated them from New Woman writers’ preoccupation 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, narcissistic self-absorption and misogyny of aesthetes; as I show later on in this chapter, Grand’s The Beth Book constitutes a particularly virulent 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) decadence were keen to reinvest the image of hysteria and Otherness with

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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 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 independence’ 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 decisionmaking 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 ugliness’,24 above all her ‘erotomania’,25 consign her to the ‘physiologicopornographic school’ of decadent and naturalist writers;26 she compounded 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

[T]he New Woman, or ‘the desexualised half-man’ . . . is a victim of the universal passion for learning and ‘culture,’ which, when illdigested, 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 neuropathic 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 anarchist’: ‘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 Stutfield,32 and Margaret Oliphant appealed to readers to consider the consequences 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 perceived 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 discrediting the (political) project of New Woman writers was the charge that they courted sensationalism from mere ‘commercial considerations’.35 Feminist writers countered this accusation by stressing the moral nature of their venture, contrasting their own meliorist inten-

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(Moore, MF, 55) which, in sharp contrast to her pretence of morality, made her lust after sexual sewerage:

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Most of us write with loathing of the subject [venereal disease] – I 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 critical 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 ‘aggressive’ ‘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 pornographic 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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tions with the disreputable motives that prompted their male contemporaries to adopt a similar choice of subject matter. Grand, for example, asserted:

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 (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 semipornographic 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 contained 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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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 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 sensationalism of the ‘sex question’. While critics sympathetic to feminism showed an understanding of the genre and identified its dominant themes (‘questions of sex, questions 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 sensuality, 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’ colonization of New Woman fiction for expressly misogynist purposes: ‘in spite of . . . the cant in these books about “freedom” and “moral emancipation” . . . for women,’ Chapman indignantly declared, ‘no careful student of them can fail to perceive that, on the contrary, their tendency is towards the degeneration, the degradation, and the rapid reenslavement 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 challenged the existing structures that underpinned sexual relations, envisaging radically new forms of existence for their heroines which

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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 inherent 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 fulfilment of their own most profound aspirations’;48 to further this end, state legislation was to consecrate them to organized collective mothering (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 discourse, insisted on female autonomy and male subjection to feminist standards of morality – the very opposite of what Wells and Allen envisaged. 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 ‘interfer[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 contemporary feminist press: ‘he is free from the masculine tendency to dogmatize to them’, one female reviewer remarked on Ibsen, while

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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,

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 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 epistemology.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 Bridehead remains as incomprehensible and indeed ‘obscure’ to us as she is to Jude. Conceived as ‘the slight, pale “bachelor” girl – the intellectualized, 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 narrative discourse, as it does in women’s novels. Hardy’s claim to her representative 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 movement’ (Preface to JTO, 42). Since we see her not through her own eyes, but through Jude’s, she is a perpetual puzzle, the disembodied intellectual 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 thinking’ (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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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. Significantly, 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 militancy; 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 ‘injurious 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 naturalism, 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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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) 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, begrudgingly, just to restore the biological father to her child. With her marriage 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 orientation 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 importantly, 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 invocation of the existence of strong emotional bonds between women, sisterhood 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 counterfamily, 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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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 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 practices were being scrutinized and condemned by feminist writers. While male science and much of male literature constructed women as hysterical 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 libertinage 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 association would benefit both groups.60 This was precisely the point socialist 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 identified between the two turn-of-the-century movements61 as well as indi-

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

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 circumscribed 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 protagonist 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) problematizes 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 foregrounds a working-class woman who, driven insane by abject poverty

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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, overwrought, every one of her fingers seems as if it had a burning nerveknot 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 sisterhood so prominent in her writing to the real-life situation of workingclass women in her immediate environment. As Evelyn Sharp notes in her autobiography, a cerebral kind of (Christian) 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 dismissed as morally and politically corrupt demagogy. A political activist with a socialist feminist vision, Isabella Ford exemplifies the first category. Born into a radical Quaker background, she moved in socialist circles from an early age. A trade union leader, socialist 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 regulating 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 genderblindness 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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and domestic violence, kills her stepchildren, we catch fleeting glimpses of her lodger, a writer:

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 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 division 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 regeneration of society because, as a result of their political position and specific 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 arguments in three specific ways: Ford takes issue with the misogynist tendencies 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 interconnect; 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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‘. . . 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?’ interposed Kitty, as he hesitated. ‘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 division 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 Throwing 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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if I were but a man, and could get money for my work as a man gets 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 maintaining 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 insurmountable, especially when they are further complicated by sexual alliances.

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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:

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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). Beatrice is fully aware of the class discourse that mar(k)s her ‘friendship’ 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 interests of working-class lovers must always prevail over women’s friendship 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 experience 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 individualized (heterosexual) love, is of crucial importance: ‘we must swear to one another, on our love for each other, that we will set about changing all this’ (OTT, 52). Ford thus affirms the principle of feminist nurturing 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 formulating 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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‘ “rib” doctrine’, she enjoined her readers to resist ‘superstition’ (patriarchal thinking) and work towards the ‘regeneration’ of society (TF, 37, 38, 43). Regeneration was also a keynote in the socialist-feminist revolutions chronicled in her utopian narratives. Her epic poem Isola, or The Disinherited (1877) ends with the proclamation of a written constitution 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 marriage, 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 marriage 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 Christian socialist position as a compromise, she turns to revolutionary anarchism, 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, fulfilled 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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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, misogynist and demagogue bears some resemblance to the construction of socialism in anti-feminist novels by women. In Mrs Humphry Ward’s Marcella (1894), the heroine, a (sexually) ‘inexperienced girl’, is temporarily ‘rouse[d]’ to the ‘naked thrust’ of the words and revolutionary spirit of a political charlatan (MC, 198–9). Female feminists and antifeminists apparently agreed on the sexual and social corruption represented 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 Community and the Race . . . while [she] tolls on about the Home and the Family’ (SOS, 162). In anti-feminist novels the heroines turn to socialism for primarily narcissistic reasons: ‘What power! – what a position! – what a romance!’ exclaims Marcella at the thought of publicly declaring herself a socialist. The text leaves little doubt that what inspires her is not a genuine desire for social transformation, but rather ‘a passionate 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 maleidentified 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 boundaries of patriarchal ideology by simultaneously challenging established 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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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, fragmenting 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 analogies 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 inability 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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An aesthetics of resistance

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‘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 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 autobiographical 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 emerging 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 misogynist) 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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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, 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 contrasted (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 cultural elitism. In her opinion, it was ‘a pretty poor thing to write . . . without a purpose’ (LCPG, 121). In the absence of any ethical framework, organic (truthful) art would quickly degenerate into the ‘unnatural’ 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 complicity 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 expression. Sarah Grand’s remarks about how to address ‘the blockhead majority’ 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 important aspect of their writing was their message and its impact on their readers. If the packaging of the message lent itself to misunderstandings, 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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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 detrimental effect on the popularity of feminist writers (anti-feminists fared rather less well). An 1897 list of ‘Women Novelists of the Day’ gave 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 introduction 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 impatient reader can easily get fed up. So please be patient with these passages. 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 structure, associated with stasis and suspension (the plot threatens to disappear 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 transmission, which in some way makes up for the fact that our consumption of the text is subject to constant interruptions? I would argue that it is precisely this tension between ‘art’ on the one hand and ‘propaganda’ on the other, that makes New Woman fiction a unique expres-

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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 feminism 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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sion of autobiographically informed fin-de-siècle feminist writing. The most typical manifestation of this tension is in the (didactic) artistnovel. 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.

New Woman Fiction

particularly (grand)mothers with narrow-minded authoritarianism and an embittered resistance to the idea of female independence; The Sheltering 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 Unfinished 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 revelatory of the author and more self-consciously political than the autobiographical 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 crucifixion, 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 autobiographical 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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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 conflicts that also shape New Woman fiction – the public versus private and the personal versus professional dichotomies – conflicts which arise in 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 ‘constitut[ing] the female subject’.85 The features Stanley regards as characteristic 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 discussions 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 boundary 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 conventions, 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 experimented 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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(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 Nor did fin-de-siècle feminist writers play with autobiographical expectations 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 conditions 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-desiècle 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 ‘Everybody’s autobiography’.92 Susan Stanford Friedman extends Stanley’s argument by discussing the female ‘group consciousness’ women autobiographers 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 frequently 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 alienation, 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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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 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 collective 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 problems ‘all’ (white, middle-class) women encounter in their quest for personhood. 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). Alternatively, the heroine’s special status as both other than and representative of all women is couched in a name that expresses a general idea(l)

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(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 emphasize 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 politician (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 programmatical 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 readership; 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 hybridity 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

‘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 literature? To modern critics, feminist writers did not go far enough; Sally Ledger attributes the ‘pessimism’ of these novels to the writers’ ‘inability to think beyond heterosexual marriage’.4 Others have suggested that writers were clinging to the romance script even while they were heralding 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 cri77

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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 standard, which was inscribed into Victorian family law and the Contagious Diseases Acts,6 cast working-class women as prostitutes and then disciplined them for ‘corrupting’ and ‘infecting’ men, while defining middleclass 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 mainstream 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, foregrounding 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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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). 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 “medicinal”: antidotes to the traditional (male, dysgenic) romance, and guidebooks to responsible sexual selection and marriage, steeped in medical aims and allusions.’9 This also applies to Grand’s American contemporary, 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 middleclass men’s sexual exploits among working-class women. Women’s right to education, one of the central demands of the feminist movement, was reinterpreted to include the right to vital sexual information. The patriarchal ideal of ‘beautiful innocence’ was nothing but ‘dangerous 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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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’ discussion throws into relief the ideological differences between ‘maternalists’ 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 particularly 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, educating 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 dangerous 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 impressionable 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 Maternalists, 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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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 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 inequality went some way towards bridging the gap between social purists like Grand and free lovers like George Egerton, who was otherwise so reluctant 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 understanding 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 brutality. ‘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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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 husbands, they had every right to refuse sexual relations and leave a marriage which amounted to nothing more than ‘legal prostitution, a 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 spiritual 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 villains, 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 transformed 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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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 – more than would be naturally required – and there were two children, 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 scientist 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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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 Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh) resolved the threat of male profligacy or unrestrained mastery by impairing the masculine potency of the hero and making him physically dependent on the female, finde-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 principles, 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 Cornerstone 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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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 conservative texts: most New Woman narratives, in fact, contain eugenicist undertones. Marriage (in social purist novels) or co-habitation (in free 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 Havelock 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 constructive 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 commitment). 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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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 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 implementation 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 secondary 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 continued to be made into the twentieth century, and as late as the Second World War, venereal disease was officially blamed on ‘ “easy” girlfriends’.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 Heavenly 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 legitimizing feminist resistance to the law of the father in all its forms and

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Written on the body To modern critics like Elaine Showalter, New Woman writers and characters 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 perspective can be read as a radical step towards female sexual selfdetermination 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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institutions. The syphilis plot therefore constituted a concerted attack on male sexual, marital, religious, medical and legal authority and practice.

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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 themselves, 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 evolution (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 SmithRosenberg 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 construct 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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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:

the matter was how to express this desire while protecting its autonomy, in other words, how to articulate an erotic discourse which resisted 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 selfsufficient. 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 wilderness 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 powerful 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 conventionality, the language of merging by the territorial claims of phallocentricity: ‘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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As the natural world ceases to offer a refuge from the demands of bourgeois 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 specific 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 concepts, because in both cases their proponents were liable to punishment. Whether they practised free love or preached sexual resistance, Victorian 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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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)

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 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 counteract 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) femininity 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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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 husbands after Brown had finished with them).49 Although Brown came into disrepute and was expelled from the Obstetrical Society in 1867,50 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 examined, handled, doctored . . . In the hospital it is a man again who makes prayers and reads the Bible for us. We are had up before magistrates 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 comments; ‘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 practice 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 feminist 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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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 Fairbairns’s Stand We at Last (1988) Helena Croft, one of two Victorian 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 ‘selfabuse’. 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 responsible for forcibly examining and detaining women suspected of prostitution, 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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. . . [T]he horrid cry was once more repeated. It seemed to come from under the calico sheet. Beth . . . took the sheet off deliberately, and saw a sight too sickening for description. The little blackand-tan terrier . . . lay there, fastened into a sort of frame in a position which alone must have been agonising. But that was not all. 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 comprehensive 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 narrator 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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As in Kingsford’s allegory, the vivisection of animals in The Beth Book connotes medical violence against women. This is indicated by the collapse 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 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 experiments; 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 connives 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 clitoridectomy, 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 masturbators.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 fanciful in her food, sometimes express even a distaste for it, and apparently . . . 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 occasionally firmly contracted, but generally much dilated. This latter symptom, together with a hard cord-like pulse, and a constantly

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

less fortunate in his choice, and ruins the lives of three people. Romantic 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 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 discourse of self-sacrifice sometimes functions as a blind which conceals a character’s resistance to the romance script. As a rule, heterosexual relationships 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 Protection-’ (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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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 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 femininity; 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 principle 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 approbation 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 nineteenth 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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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 womanto-woman friendships. Nineteenth-century medicine, which sharply distinguished between ‘normal’ women’s reproductive instincts and ‘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 (hypertrophied 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 ‘intermediate’ sex70 seemed a convenient label for discrediting women who strove to gain access to male domains. Sheila Jeffreys notes that, as ‘feminists 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 abandoned 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 flinging herself into her arms.

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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.’ Constance smiled . . . But her smile was more forced than spontaneous, 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 dependence and subserviency which the champion of her sex found so infinitely 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, amanuensis, 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 institution 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 Crawford 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 wellfounded) 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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always hostile to the idea of her daughter’s working for her livelihood, blames her friendship with an unacceptable man on her lowly occupation 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, 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 ‘psychopathia 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 protagonists’ 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 feminism 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 fantasies 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 allegory 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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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 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 transposed 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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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 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 sexuality. 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 biological 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 Wallpaper’ 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 ventilated, 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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While New Woman fiction did not explicitly explore sexual relationships between women, the woman-centredness of its female communities 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 socializes women into heterosexuality, encouraging them to regard each other as rivals and discouraging female bonding, women’s friendship constitutes 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 programmatical 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 psychological, emotional and physical needs and energies into institutionalized 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 communities, Edwardian literature was more open about the potentially sexual aspects of female bonding. In Votes for Women! (1906), a play subsequently 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 conservative 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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‘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 personally 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 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 melodramatic 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 ‘restlessness’, 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 ‘weekenders’ like Miss Levering, is alarmed by Vida’s interest in, and disconcerting knowledge of, suffrage matters: ‘what can a woman like you know about it?’ (VFW, I, 46–8; emphasis in original). Men’s incomprehension 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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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 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, tries to make her way through the knot of people surging round her. (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) JEAN

STONOR

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 attitude 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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. . . 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, inflexible creature could rouse in men the old half-superstitious fear – STONOR: ‘Fear’? I believe you are mad. 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 halffinished 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 dramatizing 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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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 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 backdrop 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 patriarchal control, only to find themselves caught once again within conventional 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 antifeminists (WHIO, 380). This sharp rebuke from within feminist ranks

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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 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 determination 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 sensationalist 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 community 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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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 that, while free love might well be ‘free’ for male Hintonians, it certainly 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 leadership 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 position of promiscuity and moral delinquency. As Arthur Wing Pinero illustrated 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 successive 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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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 conjugal rights after his wife Emily had left him. When she failed to comply with the court order to return home, Jackson abducted her and initiated 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, comparing 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 husband, 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 relationships 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 middleclass socialist who openly lived with her lover, Lanchester was committed 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 romantic love from the stigma of promiscuity; thus Schreiner distanced herself sharply from readers who embraced short-lived couplings: ‘Because

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[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 relationships, marriages in principle though not in name, with the difference 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 knowledge’ of what marriage entailed and to make a ‘deliberate choice’ (NFM, 10–13). The freedom to enter and terminate relationships was materially contingent 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. Unfortunately 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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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 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 distance 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 conceptualizes their relationship as a power-struggle. Insisting on the principle 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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sign of her and Redgold’s freedom, he remains stuck in stereotypical notions of female morality and gendered power relations:

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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 unaccountably. 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 agreement 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 ideological 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 synonymous 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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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 identity, while he, for his part, begins to smart under the restrictions placed on his freedom of movement:

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 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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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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[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 psychological, 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 conservative 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 contemporary men of inherent immorality, and by contrasting male sexual violence 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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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 difference as social and spatial. The reproductive imperative conceptually conflated woman into womb, while the structures regulating motherhood 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 represent 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 heterosexuality 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 performativity of gender, it enabled feminists to challenge biological notions of sexual difference deployed to rationalize women’s political disempowerment 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 audiences and wages.3 As personal accounts were turned into literature consumed 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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It was against the background of individual and collective dissatisfaction 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 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’ escapades. 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 perception 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 interaction, feminist writers argued, was not the gender of the person con-

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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 protagonist’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 embedded in the plot itself; thus when Mrs Caldwell counters Beth’s subversive 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 masquerading 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 entertainment 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’ preoccupations 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 colleague. While the pursuit of individual happiness threatens to undermine professional objectives, feminist characters who use their ‘male’ identity for specifically political purposes, by trying to effect larger structural changes in society, are more successful: their stories serve as blueprints 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 transform 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 transformative power of cross-dressing in New Woman fiction relates directly to wider cultural debates of the time. This is confirmed by contemporary voices at the other end of the political spectrum. When in 1912,

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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 feminists was the beginning of a political process which had turned erstwhile 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 sensation 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 successful, mainly because towards the end of the century rational dress came to be associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetic style promoted 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 continued to face considerable hostility. In 1879 the Lancet had declared bifurcated garments not only ‘unnecessary’ for women, but also ‘detrimental 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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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 function 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 feminism by having the protagonist draw inspiration for her work with the British women’s movement from Chinese women’s resistance to footbinding. Significantly, it is with dress reform that Ideala starts her political 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 implication, 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 ‘selfpossession, 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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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’ undergarments 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:

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 possession of her mind. Soon she grows restless: ‘I want something to do 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. Irigaray 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 patriarchal 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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by self-loathing and acute bodily discomfort. Paul does not stop cheating her; instead, one of his friends singles her out for sexual harassment: mimicry fails because it is decoded incorrectly. Significantly, the narrative resolution comes not through feminine mimicry, but through the feminist principle of sisterhood: Dolly and Agatha become friends. 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 oppression. 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 ‘artificial’ 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 adopting ‘feminine’ styles – he wore velvet outfits and confounded the patriarchal 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 considerably, 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 implications. 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 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 helpless . . . 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 eponymous 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 necessarily 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 Victorian newspaper Family Doctor. Reader correspondence between 1886 and 1894 points to significant differences between male and female dis-

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courses: men dominated the debate and emphasized the sensual pleasure 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 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 correspondent, aptly calling him/herself ‘Dolly’, offered to send pictures ‘showing [her] figure, feet, and ankles’ to interested readers.16 In contradistinction to this discourse of erotic pleasure articulated by the male cross-dressers, one of the few women who wrote in to reveal her transvestism 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 correspondents . . . ? 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 accomplished. 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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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 a marvel the corsets do not burst’) through a rhetoric of health, praising 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 tightlacing, 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 discourse 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 narratives 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 confound patriarchal culture’s postulation of femininity, but while the cross-dressing plot served to destabilize the categories of gender and sexuality, many feminist writers went to extraordinary lengths to clear their heroines of any suspicion of deviance, sexual desire or even heterosexual 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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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 sexual slander, caused many female soldiers to take great pains to uphold their chastity, or at least strongly to protest it in their retrospective accounts. New Woman writers, similarly intent on avoiding the charge of sexual perversion, tended to displace their heroines’ ambivalent 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 Crossdressing 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 masculine 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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Blurring the differences between anatomical sex, socially constructed 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 sexologists 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 feminism) on to the deviant male; it is for this reason that female crossdressing in New Woman fiction frequently turns into an implicit exploration of homosexual desire. How effectively, then, did the cross-dressing theme challenge Victorian notions of gender and sexuality, and what role did the homosexual 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 crossdressing 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 themselves 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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nounced taste for smoking . . . but there is also a dislike and sometimes incapacity for needlework and other domestic occupations, while there is often some capacity for athletics.24

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 differently in each case. In The Heavenly Twins the threat of homosexuality is defused by Angelica’s hasty return to femininity, in Gloriana the resolution comes through the initiation of a heterosexual relationship. Transvestism is thus explored through a complex system of female-tomale, 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 heterosexual romance). In Grand’s novel the heroine masquerades for purposes of convenience, in Dixie’s she practises gender fraud in order to instigate 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 transcend 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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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 her head.’ Ironically, it is Angelica’s very desire to experiment with different 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 performative, never ontological, nature of femininity, Grand anticipates Freudian analyst Joan Riviere’s contention that there is no essential difference 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 entitled ‘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 seriousminded feminist would have been. The Heavenly Twins operates a clever strategy of comic relief, defusing the moral high tone and grave rectitude 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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cutting the feminist challenge of the New Woman, Angelica’s crossdressing 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 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 emotional 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 performs 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 parameters remain unknown to him. Angelica also deceives herself. Her friendship with the Tenor, by replacing the lost companionship with her brother, allows her to recapture 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 ambiguity. 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 performing a female as well as a male role (an Angelica adored from afar in the daytime, a companionable Diavolo at night), she can simultaneously experience romance and non-sexual comradeship. That this is ultimately 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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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 exaltation 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 landmarks 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, followed by the revelations of her own body which crush the Tenor’s unarticulated 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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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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‘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 rendering 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 chivalrous romantic love. ‘The taboo against incest and, implicitly, homosexuality’, Judith Butler argues, causes the ‘repression of an originally homosexual libidinal directionality and produces the displaced phenomenon 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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minated by a shooting accident (HT, 426). At the very moment when the Tenor made ready to shoot a particularly ‘splendid’ stag, his benefactor, who had been away for the day, emerged, presumably to embrace him:

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 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 submerged in the water only to reflect a female identity). Faced with a desire which, though no longer unthinkable, is both prohibited 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 discovers the ‘monster’ the Tenor called up with his illicit love. Full of guilt and remorse, she returns to her husband, initiating their first passionate 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 ‘feminine’ (sexualized) behaviour while engaging in a male-dominated discourse, 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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arena and her appropriation of a male role, Angelica has effectively subverted 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 repentant, submissive and essentially sexual femininity. 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 regulated 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 needlework and childcare after being sacked from her job on board a ship, and in the 1830s the female sailor George Wilson ‘was punished with solitary 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 femininity 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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an alternative space for the exploration of feminist fantasies of social and political transformation. Since in feminist utopia female transvestism 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 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 efficiently 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, consequently, motivated by a similar agenda for political change. The need

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for sweeping reform in order to eradicate social injustice and break down the artificial barriers which block personal and collective advancement 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 suggests that Gloriana’s masquerade (the infiltration of politics by a woman) is no different to the working-class struggle to achieve political 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 represents 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 demasculation – 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 redressing of political identity and moral integrity. ‘Hector’, the mythological 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 establishment, Hector is ‘killed’, only to be reborn as Gloriana, who returns to government in female dress. The novel ends with a glimpse of the millenium: a century after the revolution Britain is a green, communitarian 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 Queensberry 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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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 relationships, 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 conjured up in his famous speech at the Queensberry trial. The text simultaneously 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 immediately 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 impression 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, emphasis 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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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’ 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 interchangeable 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 sexologists’ 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 regarding 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-thecentury male impersonation may have been enacted from within a heterosexual framework, yet it always served as a ‘visual icon of the possibility 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 fantasies 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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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 protagonist’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, offering 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 patriarchal 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 therefore 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: heterosexual 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. Exploring 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 emancipation. ‘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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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 contest the sex/gender correlation; they also had to explode the equation of woman and mother. To illustrate the destructive impact of Victorian ideology, they explored the maternal body as a site of patriarchal 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 fundamental 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 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. 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 competitiveness 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 motherhood’ 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 generated 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, motherlove 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 womanhood, 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 organized 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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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 essentialism; Amy Bulley, for example, affirmed: ‘It does not follow that there 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 conceived 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 selfsacrifice. New Woman heroines respond to these pressures in different ways: some begin by complying with social norms, marry and have children, and then start to rebel; others rebel by rejecting motherhood altogether, 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 selfalienation (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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She realized now, with agonizing vividness, the sadness of her mother’s life, the long stagnation, the slow decay of disused faculties, 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 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 motherdaughter 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 motherhood 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’, disenfranchised, 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 children. 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 selfesteem. Her need for possessive control and her latent desire for revenge will feed into perpetuating the cycle of female self-denial. The daughter 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 surrogate. 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 daughter, is the essential female tragedy’.46 The absence or displacement of

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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.’ 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 aspirations against a backdrop of societal and familial pressures, is given over to an analysis of (self-)destructive mothering. Betrayed by her biological 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 extensions 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 motherdaughter relations as an egalitarian friendship premised on mutual respect and, crucially, the striving for self-fulfilment: ‘[I]f mother had

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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 to herself and her environment, not only that ‘free motherhood’ is possible, 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 question (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, mutually empowering mother–daughter relationship, Hadria hopes to end the vicious circle of female self-sacrifice and victimization. Ultimately,

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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 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 novelist 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 professional life, she assists Mrs Fullerton in press-ganging her into marriage. Valeria’s insistent confusion of Hadria’s ‘true’ (domestic) nature with her own unfulfilled desires is strikingly inconsistent with her fictional 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 superimposed 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 professional lives and creating unorthodox female protagonists while condemning 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 motherdaughter relationship, if it is to be woman-centred, has to break free from patriarchal control. Some writers, less concerned with deconstructing 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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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, circumvent male control by recreating themselves. By using motherhood as a matrix for female creativity, these writers explode the cultural myth of 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 childhood 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 representation 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, uninfluenced 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 movements 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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The transition from the pre-oedipal world of jouissance (‘the enjoyment 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 ‘masculine’ desire for possessive control, a desire always counterbalanced by the need to keep the feminine at bay by mythologizing it: the abundance 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 imposition 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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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 fearless look . . . puzzled him . . . Why did the Huldre stare at him so? he felt uncomfortable under her close scrutiny’ (‘HOA’, 190). Although physically 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 incomprehensible 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 original). 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 interest 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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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 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 character obliterates the patrocentric family by ejecting the man from the mother-and-child unit. Like Cixous, Egerton contrasts women’s libidinal with men’s cultural and appropriatory economy, visualizing female creativity and the feminine aesthetic as a self-pleasuring bodily experience. ‘What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts?’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 quinzecoloured 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 determine 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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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 withered 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 brassrimmed 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 recreate 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, jouissance, 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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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:

New Woman Fiction

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing . . . this practice 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 philosophicotheoretical domination, it will be conceived of only by subjects who 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 femininity and maternity resonates with essentialist and eugenicist notions (woman, the ‘eternal womb’, redeems fallen masculinity) – the analogies 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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‘[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 artistic 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 developing’ were, Caird suggests in her artist novel, the institutional pressures 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 mothering and childbirth metaphors to link what Victorian patriarchy perceived 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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image of female self-discovery, artistic self-expression and feminist selfassertion. 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 lives ended in ‘forgotten churchyards’ but who, under different circumstances, might have had just as important an impact as their artistbrothers. 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 mothering 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) selfhood 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 objective 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 converge. 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 Künstlerroman, 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 importantly, to revalidate the mother as a source of inspiration.4 This transi-

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The death of the author Narratives of failure have two typical scripts: they narrate the literal or metaphorical death of the author (the demise of the artist or the destruction of her work); alternatively, they focus on the protagonist’s frustrated 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 selfsacrifice, 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 publishes 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 discourse 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 reverend seems entirely unaware of the symbiotic connection that exists

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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.

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between his sister and her novel, and Wotton’s unscrupulous plagiarist perceives as fantastic, and consequently wants to omit, the most powerful 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 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 mothering: 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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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 contention that to be forgotten was ‘exactly what Miss Suttaby would have wanted’ (‘FE’, 164). Helen Gresley mounts a more determined opposition 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 invisibility. 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 protagonists 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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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 journey within, and art as the product of consumed and consuming passions, 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’ imagination by suggesting that the male artist has regressed to a mere ‘painting 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, aesthetic imagination with ardent political purpose. Subverting the stereotypical 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 lateVictorian 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 selfconcern’9 applies to protagonists of either sex, the last chapter showed

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that what is understood to constitute a ‘monstrous’ thought or action depends to a large extent on gender expectations. Thus the Künstlerroman’s traditional point of departure – the protagonist’s clash with and rejection of social norms – provokes a stronger reaction when this protagonist is a woman. As New Woman fiction illustrates, it is a girl or 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, attempting 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 character 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 irregular 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 independent 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 gradually 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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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

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 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 obstacles 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 regression 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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version of the artist-novel, replacing the notion of a gradually progressing ‘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 distinguishes female from male artist-novels is not so much their structure 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 futility 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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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). Sisterhood 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 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 traditionalminded, 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 Cottingham’ novels. In The Victorians Rose, who comes from a petty-bourgeois background, is juxtaposed with her friend Helen Fergurson, the daughter 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 pregnancy, 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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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, 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 consistently 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 presence, a critical examination of what is at the heart of Helen’s success 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 dispassionate self-determination, and the suspension of self through overidentification 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 ambitions 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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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 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 resulting in the actual death of the heroine (The Story of an African Farm). If fragmentation, dissonance and disruption are characteristic of the artistheroine’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 everywhere, 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 femininity (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 painting. 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 identifying 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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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 artistic achievement, the reinvention of her femininity, proves to be an act of artistic self-destruction: Maxine does not paint, but ‘loves’. Virginia Woolf (‘PFW’, 57–63) argues that, at the outset of her artistic 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 stifling bigotry of their home by becoming a prostitute; instead of working constructively towards an independent existence, both act in a selfdestructive 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 externalize 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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In what ways, then, do fin-de-siècle feminist writers (p)reconfigure psychoanalytic 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 own reflection, we recognize ourselves both as whole and unified, and as separate (from our own image, from our parents).20 The threat contained 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 precipitates 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 identification with the other and selfhood as separation from the other is not possible, the ego constitutes itself as a permanently divided self. Translated 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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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 professional aspirations have collapsed. After completing a painting course at the London School of Arts, she fails to qualify for further training, 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 exacerbated by the fact that she has to support herself with hack journalism, feeding the prurient tastes of the very public she is prevented from educating 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 dialogue with her mirror image. While her rational, moral self dictates selfsacrifice, 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 individuality. 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 individual . . . 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 triumphant, 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 intoxication of achievement? . . . Why, since you take joy from me, why do you let me live?’ Here, indeed, was a greater temptation than the one from which she had just escaped. She sprang up, horrified, afraid of the haunting 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 coincides 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 situation of acute crisis, her reflection assumes the status of an only friend, a person who will give her all the unconditional love and security unattainable 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 point is that Lyndall can so manifestly not help herself. Her communion 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 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 transformed 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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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 was to sit demurely pouring out tea to the wives of the local politicians 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 fundamental 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 circumscribed female. Not only does Redgold’s choice of picture reflect his traditional 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 marketplace are paramount, and resigned herself to earn her livelihood by illustrating 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 strategy 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 understanding 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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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 apprehensiveness about Redgold’s motives materialize into conscious thought 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 division. Virginia Woolf and Luce Irigaray argue that woman is conceptualized 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 communicate 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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New Woman Fiction

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 relationship 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 temporary 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 conflict. 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 selfaffirmation 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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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 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 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 rebellion 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 available to women. By displacing their aggressive energy into their characters, 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 appearing 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, madwoman and victim become interchangeable. This is illustrated in Mona Caird’s Wing of Azrael (1889), whose protagonist, 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 consequences; 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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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

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 nearby sea, whose rhythms and, in more turbulent weather, maelstroms modulate the cyclical bouts of Viola’s violence. The very first manifestation, in childhood, of her impetuous and tempestuous nature links the heroine to the victim, and the victim to the ‘madwoman’, precipitating 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, bewildered 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 ManorHouse; 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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‘[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 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 collision between angel and monster the potential for arriving at a selfdetermined 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 – suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis! 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, attributing middle-class women’s depression and nervous disorders to the allpervasive 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 offending or of hurting someone.’ The constant interruption women suffer and the trivial pursuits they are forced to follow are tantamount to ‘suffocation’ 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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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

New Woman Fiction

ria) becomes an end in itself. In this way the space required for selfdevelopment 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 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 characters’ 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 wellfurnished 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 educational 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 rebellion, 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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between the categories of ‘artist’ and ‘feminist’, the New Woman protagonist 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. 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 catalyst 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 independence) 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 perpetually 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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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 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 selfdetermined existence. Katharine stoically overcomes her disappointment 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 problems 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 autobiographical 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 contributor 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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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 movement.30 Her life is probably the best illustration of her novel’s point about the advantages of putting professional objectives first. 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’ opposition, 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 unreasoning, 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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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

New Woman Fiction

stalling her in a stifling middle-class environment replete with antimacassars, 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 bound; as in the narrator’s case in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the only (ultimately self-destructive) means of escape will be through her mind: ‘I wonder if I’m going mad?’ she worries on the last page. The concluding 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 regeneration 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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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 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 Mansfield 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 constantly 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 establishment, 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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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 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 protagonists’ ‘birth’ as artists to the (re)discovery of this tradition. Where Barrett Browning lamented that she ‘look[ed] everywhere for grandmothers 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. Positioning 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 adolescence, 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 inspiration (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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of reminders of her past: in a figurative sense, Beth recovers her discarded 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 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 tradition 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 imminent 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 reconnects her with the outside world by giving her a separate identity (that of the working woman as opposed to the wife). Mere escapism (provided 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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recovery, Grand presents a powerful counter-narrative to the contemporary medical discourse on hysteria. Middle-class women, especially if they were educated and had intellectual aspirations, were often subjected to rest cures when they showed signs of repulsion with regard to their ‘natural’, subordinate roles as wife and mother.32 Clearly intended 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. Meditating 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 predecessors like George Sand and the Brontës, that provides her with the confidence 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 difficulties, 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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ing ‘verses and stories . . . fireworks of the brain, pleasant, transient, futile distractions with nothing more nourishing in them than the interest and entertainment of the moment’ (BB, 357). The ‘serious’ male tradition, which enables her to regain her equilibrium, sharpens her intellect to the point where she turns it against this tradition, rejecting 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’ patriarchal 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 instability 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 concentrated 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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(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 struggling professional striving to succeed in a culturally hostile environment: 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 material conditions in which art is produced and sold that her paradigmatic 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 enamoured 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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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 ‘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 projects 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 disapproval, 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 importance 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 selfdetermination 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 solution 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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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 followers; the role-reversal is complete when she converts his studio into a feminist salon. Stripped of his identity as an artist, he becomes 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 determination to save his daughter from feminist contamination. With her loving admiration of him, Rosina presents the perfect feminine counterfoil 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 disappointing 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 attitude. 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 dispossessed, 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 destruction 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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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 the feminist analysis of gendered time-space relations and the narrator’s stridently anti-feminist overtones. Not surprisingly, contemporary feminist critics mistook the misogyny of the husband for that of the author, and attacked the novel as a prime example of male writers’ institutionalized 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 artistic 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 pictures?” 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 resentful of her success. Clearly he thinks that their marriage cannot accommodate 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 subverted into a burlesque. This was not the only instance of a satirical

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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 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 separate 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 production of art, New Woman writers modified the Künstlerroman tradition, countering the belief that art was a quintessentially male prerogative. 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 personal 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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dence that the concept of ‘a room of one’s own’ entered feminist literature 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 inspiration necessary for moral and philosophical enquiry and, ultimately, 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 maledominated discourses of art. The room which the artist-heroine appropriated 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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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

‘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 forerunner, 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 everyone’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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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 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 groundwork undertaken by first-generation writers, who opened up a gynocentric space in culture and literature for the discursive interrogation of and experimentation with new female subjectivities.

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Regen(d)eration 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’, Neohelicon, 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), Cultural 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 Frauenfrage 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, Bicycles, 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 (Pennsylvania 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

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

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 Literature 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 Novel 1880–1920 (Brighton: Harvester, 1979). Vineta Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (University of London Press, 1970), 1. 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 englische Fin de siècle zwischen Dekadenz und Sozialkritik (Munich: Francke, 1983), 147–63; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 169–87. Kranidis, Subversive Discourse, xvi, 108, 113. W. T. Stead, ‘The Novel of the Modern Woman’, Review of Reviews, 10 (1894), 64, LVMQ, V. 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. 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 Fictions; Ledger and McCracken, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle; Christopher 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). 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). 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? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (Routledge, 1996). 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’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (Routledge,

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Notes 197

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

Notes 1992); Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai (eds), Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Angelique Richardson, ‘The Eugenization of Love: Darwin, Galton, and New Woman Fictions of Heredity and Eugenics’ (doctoral thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London, 1999). 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). Lecture presented at the University of Leeds, 8 May 1996. Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 7–9. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 3–4. Miller, Rebel Women, 6–8. Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 13. 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). Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 15, 70. Ibid. 57. Flint, Woman Reader, 311. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), 14. Ledger, New Woman, 6. 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. Elaine Showalter, ‘Written Off’, Guardian (Educational Supplement), 11 May 1999, 3. Margaret Drabble, cited ibid. 3. Joan Smith (ed.), Femmes de Siècle. Stories from the ‘90s: Women Writing at the End of Two Centuries (Chatto & Windus, 1992). Ralf Schneider, ‘Feministische Literaturkonzeptionen im Kontext viktorianischer feminist periodicals’, in Andrea Gutenberg and Ralf Schneider (eds), Gender – Culture – Politics: Zur Geschlechterforschung in der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft. Festschrift für Natascha Würzburg (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1999), 449–71. Natascha Würzbach, ‘Virginia Woolf’s feministische Literaturtheorie im Wandel kultureller Kommunikation: Bestandsaufnahme, Reinterpretation und Rezeption’, Anglia, 116 (1998), 3. Maggie Humm, The Dictionary of Feminist Theory (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 168, 198. Mary Maynard, ‘Methods, Practice and Epistemology: The Debate about Feminism and Research’, in Mary Maynard and June Purvis (eds), Researching Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective (Taylor & Francis, 1994), 18–20. ‘Woman as Such Does Not Exist’: Julia Kristeva, cited in Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (Routledge, 1994), 230. Meares, New Woman, 18, 211, 22. Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 2. ‘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. 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. 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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1. Contesting/Consuming Femininities

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 Edwardian (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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200

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. 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 Frauenfrage 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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Notes

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Notes Patrick Bridgwater, Anglo-German Interactions in the Literature of the 1890s (Oxford: Legenda, 1999), 59–61. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (Virago, 1987), 145. 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. 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. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Bloomsbury, 1991), 170. Joseph Stein, ‘The New Woman and the Decadent Dandy’, Dalhousie Review, 55 (1975–76), 59. Dowling, ‘Decadent and New Woman’, 58, 60. Rita S. Kranidis, Subversive Discourse: The Cultural Production of Late Victorian Feminist Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 28. George Moore, ‘Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals’ (1885), in Walter Greiner and Gerhard Stilz (eds), Naturalismus in England 1880–1920 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 150, 152. Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (Routledge, 1989), 65–92, 203–18. Janet E. Hogarth, ‘Literary Degenerates’, Fortnightly Review, 57 n.s. (1895), 588, LVMQ, V. Stutfield, ‘Psychology of Feminism’, 112. James Ashcroft Noble, ‘The Fiction of Sexuality’, Contemporary Review, 67 (1895), 493, LVMQ, V. Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 157 (1895), 836, LVMQ, V. Ibid. 837. Ibid. 835, 838. [William Barry,] ‘The Strike of a Sex’, Quarterly Review, 179 (1894), 305, LVMQ, V. Ibid. 296. Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, 837, 841. Stutfield, ‘Psychology of Feminism’, 115. [Margaret Oliphant,] ‘The Anti-Marriage League’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 136 (1896), 149, LVMQ, V. Stead, ‘Novel of the Modern Woman’, 73–4. Elizabeth Rachel Chapman, Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction, and Other Essays on Kindred Subjects (Lane, The Bodley Head, 1897), 12, LVMQ, V. Sarah A. Tooley, ‘The Woman’s Question: An Interview with Madame Sarah Grand’, Humanitarian, 8 (1896), 168–9, LVMQ, V. Noble, ‘Fiction of Sexuality’, 491, 493, 498. D. F. Hannigan, ‘Sex in Fiction’, Westminster Review, 143 (1895), 619, LVMQ, V. Cited in Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 311. Blanche Leppington, ‘The Debrutalisation of Man’, Contemporary Review, 67 (1895), 742, LVMQ, V.

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202

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. 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)’, Humanitarian, 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 viktorianischer 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. CronwrightSchreiner (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 Literaturkonzeptionen’, 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 Sonnenschein, 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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Notes

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. 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 TwentiethCentury 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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204

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). 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 Literature 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 examination 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 NineteenthCentury 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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13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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. Walter Besant, ‘Tree of Knowledge’, 677. Walter Besant, ‘Mrs Grundy as Censor of Fiction’, Review of Reviews, (1890), 43–4 (emphasis in original). Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’, Westminster Review, 130 (1888), 197–8 (emphasis in original). Sarah Grand, ‘On the Choice of a Husband’, Young Woman, 7 (1898), 3, SSPSG, I. Mary Shelley, ‘Introduction’ to Frankenstein (1831), in Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (eds), The Mary Shelley Reader (Oxford: OUP, 1990), 171. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 207. Richardson, ‘Eugenization of Love’, 140. Cited in Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, 130. 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. Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, 8 April 1884, in S. C. CronwrightSchreiner (ed.), The Letters of Olive Schreiner 1876–1920 (Unwin, 1924), 15. Cosslett, Woman to Woman, 138–9. Ibid. 138. Nancy Boyd, Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale (Macmillan, 1982), 41. Steve Humphries, A Secret World of Sex (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988), 19. Elaine Showalter, ‘Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de Siècle,’ in Lyn Pykett (ed.), Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions (Longman, 1996), 167. Sarah Grand to William Blackwood, 23 September 1891, SSPSG, II. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (Penguin, 1991), 96. Showalter, ‘Syphilis and Sexuality’, 170, 172. ‘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. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Virago, 1984), 190. Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 77. Showalter, ‘Syphilis and Sexuality,’ 181. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 138. St George Mirvart, ‘The Degradation of Woman’, Humanitarian, 9 (1896), 257, LVMQ, II. Grant Allen, ‘Is It Degradation? (A Reply to Professor Mirvart)’, Humanitarian, 9 (1896), 340–8, LVMQ, II. Coralie Glyn, ‘Nature’s Nuns (A Reply to Grant Allen)’, Humanitarian, 9 (1896), 423 (emphasis in original), LVMQ, II. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New

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206

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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. Lynne Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 119. Introduction to LVMQ, IV, xiii–xiv. William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1877), in Jeffreys, Sexuality Debates, 61. Acton, Functions and Disorders, 61–4. Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘The Psychology of Feminism’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 161 (1897), 109, LVMQ, V. Review of Grand’s BB, Review of Reviews, 16 (1897), 621, SSPSG, I. 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. Jeffreys, Sexuality Debates, 11–41. 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. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (Virago, 1987), 76. Pat Jalland and John Hooper (eds), Women From Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain 1830–1914 (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 261–3. Jalland and Hooper, Women From Birth to Death, 264–5. Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud and Child Sexual Abuse (Fontana, 1992), 55–144. 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). Ibid. 436–7. Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (Pandora, 1985), 54–85. Pankhurst, The Great Scourge, 318. Hilary Rose, ‘Learning from the New Priesthood and the Shrieking Sisterhood: 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. Anonymous, ‘The Yellow Room’ (1891), in The New Epicurean and The Yellow Room (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1996), 69–127. Edward Maitland (ed.), Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary and Work, 2 vols (John M. Watkins, 1913), I, 154–5. Sally Mitchell, ‘Introduction’ to Grand, BB, xvii. Lallemand, cited in Acton, Functions and Disorders, 58. Brown, On Some Diseases of Women Admitting Surgical Treatment (1866), in Jeffreys, Sexuality Debates, 30. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Virago, 1992), 191–228. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Bloomsbury, 1991), 181–2.

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Notes

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 (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 Underread 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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208

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 Morality 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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Notes

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 Peter Farrar (ed.), Men in Petticoats (Liverpool: Karn, 1987), 14. 15. ‘A Male Wasp-Waist’, Family Doctor, 26 June 1886, in Farrer, Men in Petticoats, 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 (Routledge, 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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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

211

Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, in Whitford, 136. Wheelwright, Amazons, 84–6. Cited ibid. 20. Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990), 119–20. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 422. 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. 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. Grant Allen, ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, Popular Science Monthly (1889), 175, LVMQ, V. 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. Cited in Ellis Ethelmer, ‘Feminism’, Westminster Review, 149 (1898), 54. Amy Bulley, ‘The Political Evolution of Women’, Westminster Review, 134 (1890), 7. 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. Rich, Of Woman Born, 237; next reference 247. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1978), 100–3. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949; Picador, 1988), 512. Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (Routledge, 1992), 169, 205–6. George Egerton to Ernst Foerster, 1 July 1906, in Ernst Foerster, Die Frauenfrage in den Romanen Englischer Schriftstellerinnen der Gegenwart (Marburg: N.G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1907), 46–47; LVMQ, V. Cixous, ‘Medusa’, 245, 247. Ibid. 247. Ibid. 245. Ibid. 246. Ibid. 254 (emphasis in original). Ibid. 251, 261. Ibid. 253 (emphasis in original). H. Scavenius (ed.), Gyldendals Ordbøker, Norsk–Engelsk (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1943), 123. 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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2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

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 Production of Late Victorian Feminist Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 47–70. Ann Ardis, ‘ ”Retreat with Honour”: Mary Cholmondeley’s Representation of the New Woman Artist in Red Pottage’, in Suzanne W. Jones (ed.), Writing 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: Representations of the Female Artist in New Woman Fiction of the 1890s,’ paper delivered at the ‘New Woman: Gendering the Fin de Siècle’ conference, Birkbeck 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). Teresa Mangum, ‘Style Wars of the 1890s: The New Woman and the Decadent’, in Manos and Rochelson, Transforming Genres, 47–66. Rachel DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of TwentiethCentury Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), 84–104. 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. Hans-Werner Ludwig, ‘Stephen Dedalus als Sprachkünstler: James Joyces Künstlerbildnis zwischen Ästhetizismus und Moderne’, Anglia, 94 (1976), 105–6. Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (New York: New York UP, 1964). Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland (eds), The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover: UP of New England, 1983), 11. Janet M. Eldred, ‘Gender and Creativity: Female Artist Subplots from Hawthorne to Fowles’ (doctoral thesis, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 1989), 18. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975), in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Penguin, 1991), 174, 179. Eldred, ‘Gender and Creativity’, 28. Abel, Hirsch and Langland, The Voyage In, 7. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 12–13. Grace Stewart, The New Mythos: The Novel of the Artist as Heroine 1877–1977 (Montreal: Eden, 1979), 50. 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. Stewart, The New Mythos, 180. Olive Schreiner to Mary Roberts, 1889, in Richard Rive (ed.), Olive Schreiner: Letters (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 145. See Lothar Fietz, Fragmentarisches Existieren: Wandlungen des Mythos von der verlorenen Ganzheit in der Geschichte philosophischer, theologischer und literarischer Menschenbilder (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 214.

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212

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. 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: Harvester, 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 Feminine (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,’ Humanitarian, 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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Notes

Abel, Elizabeth 160 Acton, William 90–1, 95 Actresses’ Franchise League 105 aesthete, aesthetic literature 2, 6, 10, 48, 68, 69, 121, 122, 124 see also decadence allegory 9, 85, 94, 160 Allen, Grant 6, 13, 52, 53–4, 58, 87–8, 142 androgyny 16, 52, 96, 124, 130, 132, 139, 141 Angel in the House 24–5, 167, 176, 177 Angelou, Maya 71, 74 animal rights 65, 93–4 see also vivisection anti-feminism 6, 20, 22, 23–30, 32, 41, 53, 54, 66, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107, 108, 141, 191 see also Old Man; Old Woman anti-imperialism 4, 64 Ardis, Ann 8, 137, 191 Arkell-Smith, Valerie 125, 136 art and the artist 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 47, 48, 49, 53, 67–8, 69, 70, 71, 87, 119, 120, 146, 152, 155–93 artist-novel 4, 71, 54, 155–93 narratives of artistic failure 146, 156–66, 174, 181, 192 narratives of artistic success 156, 159, 174, 178–92, 193 suspended narratives 156, 166–78, 192–3 see also Bildungsroman; Künstlerroman; matrilinearity; motherhood, metaphor for female creativity; tradition Arts and Crafts movement 121 Austen, Jane 183 autobiography 6, 7, 59, 68, 71–6, 118, 156, 157, 163, 174, 178, 186, 191

Banks, Olive 87 Barry, James 118 Barry, William Francis 50, 51, 52 Beauvoir, Simone de 74, 147 Benson, E.F. 2, 3 Besant, Walter 80–1 bicycle 17–19, 34–40, 50, 121 Bildungsroman 14, 66, 72, 161, 179 see also artist-novel; Künstlerroman Bjørhovde, Gerd 67 Black, Clementina 35 Bloomer, Amelia 121 bloomers, 34, 49 see also dress reform; Rational Dress Bonnell, Marilyn 69 Boumelha, Penny 75 Braddon, Mary: Lady Audley’s Secret 70, 183 Bradfield, Thomas 52 Brontë, Charlotte 82–3, 89, 103, 167, 183 Jane Eyre 82–3, 103, 168, 175, 176, 183 Villette 183 Brontë, Emily 130, 142 Brontës, the 186 Brooke, Emma Frances 82, 110 A Superfluous Woman 44, 76, 82–4, 89–90, 94 Transition 65–6, 101 Brown, Isaac Baker 91–2, 95–6 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 84, 89, 142 Aurora Leigh 84, 177, 183–4 Bulley, Amy 144 Bury, J. B. 117 Butler, Josephine 28, 84, 92 Butler, Judith 134 Caird, Mona 2, 3, 4, 5, 30, 33, 45, 35, 81, 144–5, 166, 192

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motherhood, metaphor for female creativity Cross(e), Victoria 67 cross-dressing 13–14, 117–41, 166–7 see also masquerade; transvestism Cuffe, Kathleen 15 Dandy 47–8 decadence, the decadent 6, 10, 13, 24–5, 44, 45, 46–9, 52, 68, 71, 72, 124, 156, 162, 164, 181, 189 see also aesthete, aesthetic literature degeneration of literature and society 1, 6, 16, 23, 46–53, 82, 88, 123, 128 see also regeneration; renovation depression 35, 113, 123, 142, 167, 177, 180, 183, 184, 190 deviance 16, 25, 47, 88, 91, 127, 128, 129, 141, 168 see also homosexuality; lesbianism; perversion; transgression Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations 168 didactic, didacticism 6, 70, 71 see also purpose(ful) art; propaganda divided skirt 36, 40, 121 see also dress reform; Rational Dress division of labour 61–3, 158 see also professional woman divorce 50, 82, 109, 165, 191 Divorce Act 92 Dix, Gertrude The Girl From the Farm 102–3 The Image Breakers 44, 76, 101, 112–14, 164, 171–4 Dixie, Lady Florence 4, 64–5, 141 Gloriana 2, 76, 120, 129–30, 137–40 Isola, or The Disinherited 65, 75 Dixon, Ella Hepworth 54, 59, 72 As I Knew Them 54, 72 The Story of a Modern Woman 57, 59, 72, 76, 97–8, 164, 169–70, 175 Donna Quixote 2–3, 45

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The Daughters of Danaus 44, 68, 75, 76, 96–7, 115, 142, 145, 146–8, 155, 163, 164, 165, 166, 182 The Stones of Sacrifice 65, 66, 96, 115, 164, 167, 192 The Wing of Azrael 103, 175–7, 182 Carpenter, Edward 101, 109, 129 Carswell, Catherine 195 castration 96, 125, 136, 138, 171 celibacy 87–8, 90, 104 see also chastity; frigidity; marriage resistance; social purity Chaperon 4, 35, 38 Chapman, Elizabeth Rachel 52, 53, 77 chastity 78, 80, 84, 88, 90, 92, 128 see also celibacy; frigidity; marriage resistance; social purity childbirth metaphor 155–8, 171, 192 see also creativity; motherhood, metaphor for female creativity Chodorow, Nancy 146 Cholmondeley, Mary: Red Pottage 157–9, 164 Cixous, Hélène 135, 149, 152–4, 187 class issues 56, 57–60, 63–4, 98, 179–80 see also feminism, socialist clitoridectomy 91–3, 95 Collins, Wilkie 124 Colmore, Gertrude 32, 72 consumer culture 4, 9, 22, 34–41, 169, 172 see also mass market; popular culture contagion 58, 78–9, 87, 190 Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts 28, 8, 86, 91, 92, 93, 122, 205 n. 6 corset 121–2, 123, 127 Cosslett, Tess 85, 98 Crackanthorpe, B. A. 37–9 Crane, Walter 121 creativity 143, 144, 148, 149, 152–4, 155–93 see also childbirth metaphor;

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double standard 54, 78, 79, 80, 86, 106, 110 doubling 74, 164–5 Dowie, Ménie Muriel: Gallia 76, 115, 142 Dowling, Linda 48 dress reform 4, 121–2, 124, 127 see also bloomers; divided skirt; Rational Dress DuPlessis, Rachel 66, 187 Eastwood, M. 43 Eckstein, Emma 92 écriture féminine 45, 149 see also French feminism education 81, 176 see also sex education effeminacy 16, 47–8, 128 Egerton, George 2, 44–6, 51, 56, 68, 81, 82, 91, 102–3, 124, 144, 149–54 ‘At the Heart of the Apple’ 57–8, 149–54 ‘Wedlock‘ 59–60 The Wheel of God 76, 102–3 Eldred, Janet 160, 161 Eliot, George 50, 190 Ellis, Edith 56–7, 103, 109, 112 Seaweed 44, 59, 103, 115 Ellis, Havelock 101, 103, 109, 110, 128–9 erotic, eroticism 46, 51, 126, 150 erotomania 49, 51–2, 128 essentialism 45, 56, 141, 143, 149, 154 eugenics 7, 53, 54, 66, 79, 84, 85, 90, 91, 109, 143, 144, 154 Fabian Society 139 Faderman, Lilian 98 Fairbairns, Zoë: Stand We At Last 93 Family Doctor 125–7 fashion consciousness 8, 18, 32, 34–42 fallen man 82, 106 fallen woman 98 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett 4, 58, 59 Fellowship of the New Life 139 Felman, Shoshana 73

Felski, Rita 9 female friendship 97, 98, 99, 100, 101 see also lesbianism; sisterhood female tradition 184–7, 193 see also matrilinearity femininity 4, 7, 11, 15–21, 23, 25, 30–4, 36, 41–2, 44–5, 46, 49, 55, 80, 98, 99, 04, 118–41, 142, 144, 149–54, 158, 160, 162, 166, 167, 178, 181, 187, 190, 194 see also gender; masculinity feminism 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–13, 16, 22, 23–33, 34, 36, 41–2, 43–4, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58–9, 59–66, 68, 71, 76, 78, 80, 84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 98, 99, 101, 106, 107, 108, 111, 114, 117, 119, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131, 132, 136, 137–8, 142, 146, 148, 156, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 175, 178, 179, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194–5 first-wave 4, 10–13, 145 second-wave 10–13, 60–1, 73, 93, 145 third-wave 10 see also French feminism; lesbian feminism; liberal feminism; socialist feminism; psychoanalytic feminism; radical feminism; suffrage; women’s movement feminization 1, 8, 11, 16, 41, 6, 96, 129, 150, 187 femme fatale 48 flapper 194 Fliess, Wilhelm 92 Flint, Kate 9 Foot, Paul 70 Ford, Isabella O. 4, 58, 60, 180 On the Threshold 59, 60–4, 76, 98, 101, 164, 179–80 Fortin, Nina 49 Foucault, Michel 46, 53, 161 Fourir, Charles 5 fragmentation 9, 14, 166, 167 Frame, Janet 74 free love 52, 81, 85, 90, 108–16, 147

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see also marriage French feminism 7, 12–14, 45–6, 149–54 see also Cixous, Hélène; écriture féminine; Kristeva, Julia; Irigaray, Luce Freud, Sigmund 10, 92, 167–8 Friedan, Betty 41 Friedman, Susan Stanford 74–5, 158 frigidity 49, 52, 87 see also celibacy; chastity; marriage resistance; social purity feminism Galsworthy, John: The Man of Property 55–6 Garber, Marjorie 118 Gaskell, Elizabeth 142 gaze, the 52, 151, 160, 171 gender 1, 6, 8, 9, 19, 29, 41, 43, 44, 49, 53, 61, 62, 63, 84, 116, 117–42, 147, 150 and genre 5–6, 22–3, 30, 43–4, 46–59, 66–76, 160 see also femininity; masculinity Gilbert, Sandra 7, 8, 30, 175 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 32, 53, 54, 57, 69, 72, 79, 94, 101, 103, 108, 109, 143, 187 Herland 101, 143 Moving the Mountain 32, 79, 143 ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ 72, 94, 103, 182 Gissing, George 6 Glyn, Coralie 87–8 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 159 Gothic, the 83, 94, 95, 176, 186 Grand, Sarah 2, 3, 4, 12, 15, 16, 17, 23, 24, 29, 30–1, 34–5, 43, 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, 56, 68–9, 75, 77, 79–80, 82, 89, 91, 92, 109, 111, 112, 136, 141, 160 The Beth Book 48, 68–9, 72, 74, 75, 76, 81, 82, 84–5, 89, 93–4, 95, 97, 119–20, 183, 184–9 A Domestic Experiment 96, 97, 122–4 The Heavenly Twins 2, 3, 5, 50, 51, 57, 58, 69, 79, 82, 84, 86, 118,

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119, 120, 125, 127, 129–36, 142, 162, 163–4 Ideala 44, 52, 59, 70, 76, 97, 101, 122, 143, 165–6 Greenslade, William 84 Grove, Lady Agnes 31–2 Grub Street 71, 156 Gubar, Susan 7, 8, 30, 175 gynocentrism 4, 5, 6, 195 see also woman-centredness Haggard, H. Rider 86 Hall, Radclyffe 99, 101, 182, 194, 195 Hannigan, D.F. 52 Harberton, Lady 121–2, 124 Hardy, Thomas 6, 51, 54–5, 89 Jude the Obscure 55–6 Hartmann, Heidi 60–1, 64 Haweis, M.E. 5, 39 health 18, 21, 35–7, 39, 41, 46, 50, 65, 78–80, 84–5, 89–91, 97, 108, 120–5, 127, 184–5, 188 Healthy and Artistic Dress Union 121 heterosexuality 12, 51, 52, 54, 64, 77–8, 85, 90, 91, 92, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 115, 116, 118, 127, 128, 130, 143–5, 139, 140, 141, 166, 180 compulsory: 104 Hinton, Howard/James 109–10 Hirsch, Marianne 160 Holdsworth, Annie: Joanna Traill, Spinster 75 homosexuality 47, 80, 99, 101, 124, 128, 129, 130, 132–5, 138–41, 166 see also deviance; lesbianism Huffer, Lynne 88 Humanitarian League 4, 64 hysteria 39, 45–6, 47, 48, 58, 92, 95–6, 111, 177–8, 186, 191 see also madness Ibsen, Henrik 2, 3, 6, 50, 54, 56–7, 102 identity, quest for 156, 163, 166–78, 188, 189

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Index

Index

independence 34–41, 112, 114, 160, 161, 179, 180, 182, 188, 189, 192 intertextuality 8 Iota: A Yellow Aster 2, 3, 43, 44, 76, 81, 142 Irigaray, Luce 42, 123, 136, 149, 173 Jackson, Emily 111 Jaeger, Dr 121 James, Henry 6, 7, 99, 104, 105 Jeffreys, Sheila 98, 99 Jex-Blake, Sophia 29 John, Angela 191 Johnstone, Edith: A Sunless Heart 76 Joyce, James 160 Kenealy, Arabella 29, 41, 148 Kingsford, Anna 94 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 128 Kranidis, Rita 5, 6, 48, 69 Kristeva, Julia 149 Künstlerroman 14, 66, 72, 156, 161, 162, 163, 165, 178, 179, 192 see also artist-novel; Bildungsroman Lacan, Jacques 74–5, 167–8 Lanchester, Edith 111 Lane, John 44, 45 Langland, Elizabeth 160 latchkey 3, 38 Lawrence, D.H. 89 Ledger, Sally 5, 10, 53, 58, 77 Legitimation League 110 Leppington, Blanche 52, 77 lesbian feminism 13, 104 see also Rich, Adrienne lesbianism 13, 26, 29, 78, 98–108, 115, 116, 125, 128, 129 see also deviance; female friendship; homosexuality; sisterhood liberal feminism 180 Linton, Eliza Lynn 6, 15, 16, 23–4, 27, 29, 33, 104, 107, 111, 148 The One Too Many 25–6 The Rebel of the Family 26, 99–101 Lorde, Audre 187 Lytton, Lady Constance 32, 72, 108

madness 51, 56, 82, 85, 90, 111, 163, 177, 182, 183, 186 see also hysteria madwoman 82, 94, 100, 167, 175, 176, 186, 192 Mangum, Teresa 66, 69 Mann, Thomas 159, 160 Marcus, Laura 73 marriage 22, 35, 39, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 64–6, 71, 77–86, 89, 90, 91, 97, 98, 103, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 125, 132, 136, 142, 144, 146, 148, 162, 164–5, 166, 171, 173, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 191, 192 rape in 81, 87, 111, 144, 147 synonymous with prostitution 63, 82 see also free love marriage resistance 97 see also celibacy; chastity; frigidity; social purity Married Women’s Property Act 92 Marx, Eleanor 56, 58, 5 masculinity 7, 46, 49, 54, 57–58, 80, 84, 99, 107, 117, 119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 132, 135, 136, 141, 150, 151, 154, 156, 158, 160, 187 see also femininity; gender masquerade 13, 118, 126, 127, 129–42, 166 see also cross-dressing; transvestism mass market 4, 48, 50, 73, 76, 118, 156 see also consumer culture; popular culture masturbation 46, 80, 91–3, 95, 96 maternalism 1, 80, 143 Matlock, Jann 129 matrilinearity 156, 184–6 see also artist-novel; female tradition matrophobia 145, 156 Maudsley, Henry 141 May, Austin 15 May, Phil, cartoons 16–20

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narrative structures 6, 8, 66–7, 162–3 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies 4, 45 naturalism and naturalist novel 2, 13, 48–50, 52, 56–8, 59 see also realism Nelson, Carolyn Christensen 5 Nelson, Claudia 80 New Feminism 194 New Man 12, 85, 96–7 New Woman and womanliness 18, 21, 30–4 as reader 2, 5, 9, 34 early uses of the term 5, 22–3 synonyms for 16, 105 see also Old Man; Old Woman

Nightingale, Florence 40, 177–8, 183 Nordau, Max 46–7 novel with a purpose 48, 169 nymphomania 90, 91, 96 Oliphant, Margaret 50, 52 Old Man 24 see also anti–feminism; Old Woman Old Woman 4, 15, 20, 22, 23–30, 66, 194 see also anti-feminism; Old Man Ouida 23 ovariotomy 91–2 Pankhurst, Christabel 84, 85, 93 Parker, Roszika 187 peace movement 4, 65, 181 Peck, Winifred 194 perversion 46, 47, 51, 101, 128 see also deviance; transgression Pinero, Arthur Wing: The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith 110 pornography 49, 51, 52, 53 professional woman 25, 26, 29, 35, 72, 76, 115, 148, 156, 178, 179–82, 185, 188 see also division of labour propaganda 69, 70 prostitution 63, 78, 79, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 99, 106, 122, 123, 167, 179 Proust, Marcel 159 psychoanalytic feminism 14 see also Chodorow, Nancy Punch cover cartoon 2–4, 45 Pykett, Lyn 7, 8, 22, 69, 78, 149, 178 Radcliffe, Ann: A Sicilian Romance 183 radical feminism 14, 26, 92, 104, 145 see also Rich, Adrienne Rational Dress 17, 34, 121–2, 124 Rational Dress Society 121 see also bloomers; divided skirt; dress reform Reade, Charles 121

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Meares, Ainslie: The New Woman 1, 12–13 medicine 29, 36–7, 78, 79, 82, 83, 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 115, 118, 127, 186 Meredith, George 6, 54–5, 131 Millett, Kate 74 Mitchell, Sally 95 mirror, metaphor for self-division 132, 166–75, 192 see also artist-novel, suspended narratives modernism 7–9, 69, 156 monstrosity 16, 82, 86, 99, 119, 135, 160, 161, 165–6, 175–7, 190 Moore, George 6, 49, 50, 56, 57, 67–68, 125, 126–7 Morgan-Dockrell, Mrs 1 Morris, William 121 mother-daughter relations 144–9, 163–4, 182, 191 motherhood 14, 28, 44, 53, 54, 57–8, 80, 84, 91, 107, 108, 118, 141–54, 155, 158, 162, 164, 166, 186 metaphor for female creativity 143, 144, 148–9, 152–4, 155–6, 158, 159, 171, 191, 192 see also childbirth metaphor; creativity

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realism and realist novel 2, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 44, 52, 54–6, 136, 160 see also naturalism regeneration 1, 34, 48, 61, 65, 66, 76, 84, 188, 192, 193 see also degeneration of literature and society renovation 1, 5, 48 see also degeneration of literature and society reproduction 58, 65, 80, 83, 91, 99, 103, 118, 141, 144, 152 rest cure 186 reverse discourse 53 Revolt of the Daughters 2, 3, 15, 27–8, 34, 37–41, 45 Rich, Adrienne 104, 145–6 Richardson, Angelique 79, 84, 143 Riviere, Joan 131, 135 Robins, Elizabeth 4, 32, 72, 76, 108, 164, 180, 191 George Mandeville’s Husband 189–91 Votes for Women! 57, 104–8, 133 romance script and romantic love 77, 79, 85, 96, 97, 111, 114, 134, 162, 165 room as womb, metaphor for female creativity 155, 156, 182–9 room of one’s own 155, 178–93 Sand, George 118, 186 Schreiner, Olive 4, 30, 56, 58, 67–8, 69, 76, 85, 101, 109, 110, 111–12, 143, 166 From Man to Man 67, 68, 70, 85, 97, 122, 164 The Story of an African Farm 5, 56, 66, 67–8, 70, 142, 163–4, 166, 170–1, 175, 189 science 7, 41, 58, 83, 96, 100, 103, 192 seduction of reader 30–4, 41, 105, 131 self-sacrifice 27, 30, 79, 87, 91, 97, 106, 108, 110, 118, 144–7, 157, 158–9, 161, 162, 163, 169, 181, 188, 190, 192 sensation novel 22–3, 186

separate spheres 61–2, 80, 187, 189 separatism 12, 85 sex education 78–81 see also education sexology 25, 88, 98, 99, 108, 128–9, 140 sexual anarchy 1, 117, 140–1 sexual exploitation and violence 45, 62–4, 71, 78–9, 81, 87, 90, 91–6, 106, 110, 111, 115, 117, 120, 122, 124, 144, 147, 150, 195 see also marriage, rape in sexual pleasure and passion 45–6, 85, 88, 89–90, 91, 97, 98, 135, 150, 151, 187, 195 sexuality 1, 7, 44–6, 51–2, 53, 56, 78–116, 117, 127, 128, 129, 139, 140, 141, 149–54, 163, 194–5 and desire/fantasy 45, 46, 51, 54, 81, 87, 88–9, 90, 91, 95, 96, 101, 103, 109, 127, 129, 132–5, 136, 139–41, 150, 153, 169 and ignorance/innocence 40, 79–80, 81, 112 and sensuality 53, 82, 89, 132 Sharp, Evelyn 4, 60, 71, 72, 76, 180–2 The Making of a Prig 76, 180–1, 182 Unfinished Adventure 71–2 Shaw, G. B. 6, 49, 121 Shelley, Mary 83 Showalter, Elaine 5, 10–11, 22, 44, 85–6, 87, 96, 189 Sinclair, May 194 sisterhood 29–30, 57, 59, 60, 64, 74, 88, 96–108, 124, 163–4, 170, 188 shrieking 23, 30 see also female friendship; lesbianism Smith, Alys W. Pearsall 40–1 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll 88 social purity 4, 7, 28, 34, 54, 65, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 89, 90, 109, 120, 194 see also celibacy; chastity; frigidity; marriage resistance socialist feminism 4, 13, 58–9, 59–66, 137–8, 180

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textual instability 2, 8, 44–6, 66–7, 73 Thomas, Sue 106 Thurston, Katherine Cecil: Max 76, 120, 166–7, 174 Tilley, Vesta 118 Todd, Margaret 29–30 Mona Maclean, Medical Student 29–30, 72, 75, 76 transgression 16, 24, 30, 37, 47, 99, 114, 120, 128, 129, 135, 138, 141, 175 see also deviance; perversion transvestism 117–41 see also cross–dressing; masquerade Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth 23

utopia 9, 44, 61, 65, 108, 115, 120, 136–7, 137, 140, 141 venereal disease 51, 65, 78–80, 84–7 see also syphilis Vicinus, Martha 140 vivisection 4, 93–5 see also animal rights Votes for Women (WSP organ) 181 war of the sexes 2, 8, 22, 26, 32, 148 Ward, Mrs Humphry 27–8, 66, 148 Delia Blanchflower 27–8 Marcella 27–8, 66 Wells, H. G. 13, 52, 53, 54 Wheelwright, Julie 128 Wilde, Oscar 6, 46, 47–8, 106, 121, 124, 138–9, 139 Winterson, Jeanette 74 Wollstonecraft, Mary 91, 142, 183 Wolstenholme-Elmy, Elizabeth 143 woman-centredness 5, 104, 108, 148 see also gynocentrism women’s movement 4, 5, 10–13, 23, 27, 32, 33, 42, 45, 52, 78, 101, 117, 118, 121, 193, 194 see also feminism; suffrage Women’s Social and Political Union 4, 108, 180 Women Writers’s Suffrage League 4, Woolf, Virginia 7, 11, 24–5, 74, 89, 125, 155–156, 167, 173, 186, 195 work see professional woman; division of labour Wotton, Mabel E: ‘The Fifth Edition’ 157–9 Yellow Book

2, 3, 180

Zola, Émile 49, 56

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sportswomen 34–7 Stanley, Liz 55, 72–3, 74 Stanton, Domna 73 Stead, W. T. 6–7, 43, 50 Stewart, Grace 163, 165 Stoker, Bram 86, 5, 96 Stutfield, Hugh E. M. 43, 50 suffrage 4, 5, 13, 23, 27–8, 31–2, 45, 49, 72, 73, 104–8, 136, 143, 164, 165, 180, 194 suffragists and suffragettes 41, 56, 121 see also feminism; women’s movement syphilis 78–87, 93 see also venereal disease Syrett, Netta 37, 54, 71–2 Nobody’s Fault 97, 163, 181–2 Rose Cottingham Married 161, 164–6, 175 The Sheltering Tree 37, 54, 71–2 Three Women 76, 115, 164 The Victorians 161–2, 164

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