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  • New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire
  • Patricia Murphy (bio)
New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire, by LeeAnne M. Richardson; pp. vii + 181. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006, $59.95.

LeeAnne M. Richardson's New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain examines the intersections between the seemingly antipodal subgenres of New Woman and colonial adventure fiction. Observing that these enormously popular texts "interacted in profoundly suggestive ways—formally as well as ideologically" despite their divergent agendas (1), Richardson argues that New Woman and colonial adventure [End Page 705] fiction appropriated elements of each other in challenging or reinforcing constrictive gender standards. Engaged in a dialogic relationship, Richardson argues, the narratives intertwine so extensively in their deployment of discourses, thematic concerns, and customary tropes that they function as complementary forms. Underlying Richardson's analysis is a concern with discursive formations and genre types in evaluating the narratives' reactions to each other and broader societal debates.

By pairing two ostensibly opposed subgenres, Richardson makes an interesting contribution to Victorian studies. She focuses not only on noteworthy examples of fiction but also on contemporary discussions of cultural matters and literary developments, as well as modern scholarship and theoretical perspectives, particularly those of Michel Foucault and Homi Bhabha. Richardson's analysis is rich and accessible, and close readings are deftly handled.

Chapter 1 explores the generic and gendered debate over realism and romance fiction. Richardson situates the two subgenres within this discussion, detailing the tendency of New Woman narratives to favor realism and of colonial adventure fiction to prefer romance while still pointing to the convergences between the two styles. Both, for instance, generally reach closure through completion of quests by resourceful protagonists with analogous characteristics, and neither subgenre resorts to the typical conventions of the marriage plot with its supposedly unproblematic resolution. On a more thematic level, the subgenres share an anxiety over degeneration and employ evolutionary discourses, albeit for different purposes, as both narratives resist societal constraints. Richardson reveals that the subgenres blend aspects of realism and romance rather than demonstrate unvarying allegiance to either generic designation.

As control over language tends to be the major marker of dominance in each subgenre, chapter 2 turns to the power implications of representation and the conflict over discursive authority. Within the framework of the lively periodical debates over gender in the late nineteenth century, Richardson assesses The Odd Women (1893) in conjunction with King Solomon's Mines (1885) and "Heart of Darkness" (1902) to delineate how a dominant cultural voice in each novel strives to present women or colonized individuals as simultaneously understandable and unfathomable. Challenges over the discourses of patriarchy and imperialism reveal striking parallels as the voices of authority seek to silence dissent. Richardson investigates the contested terrain of the term "New Woman" and the stakes of the definitional dispute before proceeding to the imperial desire to establish the terms of the colonial other's subjectivity in both King Solomon's Mines and "Heart of Darkness." Richardson's analysis of the traversing patriarchal and colonial discourses in "Heart of Darkness" provides a particularly compelling reading as she probes telling linguistic nuances. Similarly, she points to the embedding of imperialist discourses in The Odd Women that explicate the phenomenon of the independent woman and rationalize male domination.

Chapters 3 and 4 cover comparable terrain in that each is concerned with the New Woman situated within an adventure novel. Chapter 3 is a reading of three male-authored stories—Dracula (1897), She (1887), and Mr. Meeson's Will (1888), a lesser-known H. Rider Haggard adventure—that appropriate the New Woman in an effort to control her, aligning the unruly figure with menacing characters battled by the heroes and eventually expelling her from the story. Part of the rationale for colonizing the New Woman, Richardson suggests, is to take advantage of the figure's standing in the literary marketplace as [End Page 706] well as to counter widespread interest in the female authors of such fiction. Wielding the threats of degeneracy, invasion, and unnatural female power, the narratives "take the New Woman in and swallow her...

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