Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (review)

Cultural historians and literary critics have used the term "New Woman" exclusively to describe white, well-educated, politically progressive activists and realistic women writers at the turn of the twentieth century. In her richly archival study, Martha Patterson emphasizes instead "the important regional, ethnic, and political differences of the American New Woman" as an icon of modernity (16), as figured in the work of seven American women writers: Margaret Murray Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Edith Wharton, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather. A chapter on Charles Dana Gibson's popular illustrations establishes "the rhetorical and visual context" within which Patterson interprets these writers' "literary production" (22). Taking important cues from Dale Bauer's work on cultural dialogics and Judith Butler's on the performativity of gender, Patterson explores how these turn-of-the-century writers reconfigure the dominant trope of the New Woman by reading "that discourse in relationship to the other circulating 'new' tropes" (22)—that of the "New Negro," the "New Negro Woman," the "New China," the "New South"—which they alternately "co-opted, rejected, transformed, and/or reiterated" (26). Demonstrating how "a seemingly celebratory term like the New Woman" can emblematize not only "progressive reform, consumer power, and transgressive femininity" but also "racial and ethnic taxonomies, social Darwinism, and imperialist ambitions" (26), Patterson productively complicates the American New Woman's literary and cultural history, reinforcing the "important shift in New Woman criticism" first registered in the efforts of scholars such as Kathy Peiss, Susan Glenn, and Marjorie Wheeler to give the term "New Woman" "essential class, ethnic, and regional specificity" (18).

While Patterson does not herself stress this point, her study lends support to the argument Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham have recently made about both "the importance of the periodical press in the New Woman phenomenon" and the instrumental role that New Woman writers and the New Woman debates played "in developing the periodical press in all its diversity and polyvocality" at the turn of the twentieth century.¹ As noted above, Patterson describes her project's focus as being on the "literary production" of these writers, and this study does indeed include extensive close readings of novels and short fiction. Yet one of the most interesting aspects of this book is its treatment of these writers' contributions to a fascinatingly diverse array of national, regional, and local periodicals and both highbrow and middlebrow mass circulation magazines as they engaged in contemporary debates regarding the various sociopolitical trends that "signaled hope for and anxiety about political and economic change in a new century" (22).

If, for example, Sui Sin Far's "attitude toward the Chinese New Woman" is "necessarily … vexed because each word in the phrase is at the center of a contested sociopolitical debate" (24), it is also vexed because she is negotiating a complexly fragmented public sphere, writing for regional journals such as Walter Blackburn Harte's Lotus (Kansas City) and The Land of Sunshine: An Illustrated Monthly of Southern California, as well as for progressive, nationally syndicated periodicals such as The Independent. In the case of a writer like Willa Cather, the articles and literary reviews that reveal so much about her ambivalent fascination with the power and danger of a figure associated at once with "modernity, 'degeneracy,' professionalism, education, 'downright grit,' and gender transgression" (154) were collected and edited in the 1970s—and thus have been readily available to students and scholars for some time. By contrast, although Hopkins' "magazine novels" have recently been collected and edited, her writings for the Colored American Magazine have not. This study's wealth of references to uncollected periodical press writings speaks volumes about the complex staging of "a public sphere that is not one."² In this regard, though revisionary public sphere theory remains just beyond Patterson's explicit horizon of interests in this study, her research complements the arguments that scholars such as Todd...