Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman (review)

Both the figure and the fiction of the New Woman continue to fascinate scholars of the Victorian fin de siècle, in part because we find the project of parsing the New Woman's misbehavior irresistible. Whether a historical composite or a tangled social construction, the New Woman is symptomatic of national anxieties—and in these anxious days, such icons are strangely satisfying objects of analysis. Patricia Murphy's new book takes up this appeal with the straightforward claim that both time and gender converged as twin obsessions toward the end of a century that was marked by varied strains of cultural "turbulence." Specifically, Murphy points to geological discoveries, evolutionary theory, technological progress, and a burgeoning railway culture, among other things, to explain why Victorians viewed time as both a threat and a comfort, and ultimately sought temporal security through the construction of what the author calls a "natural order of time" (3). As Murphy argues, if the uncertain margins of geological or evolutionary time successfully called into question human, historical, or even sexual identity, for example, Victorians found consolation in placing themselves at the conclusion of that ever-attenuated teleology—an otherwise unthinkable linear scheme made serviceable by the myth of a privileged endpoint. Thus, potentially disruptive shifts in cultural value at the end of the century were recuperated by the same temporal preoccupation that provoked them in the first place.

Or so it seemed, Murphy contends. Although she acknowledges in her introduction that time had become "a covert but potent means of naturalizing repressive definitions of female subjectivity in response to the threatening New Woman" (2), she ultimately shows how in the New Woman novel "the temporal construct can be reconfigured to allow women to structure their time under their own terms and accommodate their own desires" (172). The New Woman draws Murphy's attention, then, because her misbehavior transcends the scope of her fictive life to include a more subtle intertextual response to cultural anxieties about time.

After an introductory chapter that contextualizes the project by discussing relevant debates in the four key areas of history, progress, Christianity, and evolutionary theory, Murphy turns to the five authors who form the axis of her study. In five main chapters, she methodically traces the New Woman's "confused placement within history" (78), citing myriad examples of women who find it difficult to negotiate the linearity of masculine time because of their often heavy-handed associations with dead languages, paganism, and prehistory (H. Rider Haggard's She [1887]), aesthetic monumentalization and the "essence" of femininity (Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles [1891]), intuition, orality, and performance (Sarah Grand's The Beth Book [1897]), the compartmentalization and triviality of women's domestic time (Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus [1894]), and the fluidity, ambience, and earthiness of unsanctioned spirituality (Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm [1883]).

In a field of study that, after nearly thirty years, is still trying to fine-tune its generic scope, Murphy's most intriguing and original claim redraws the boundaries yet again by including Haggard's oeuvre among the novels of the New Woman. Admittedly, since the late 1970s the genre has been variously defined as anything from thinly disguised feminist polemic, to realistic fiction that artfully characterizes the rebellious woman, to a proto-modernist aesthetic experiment. Murphy, however, defines the genre not by virtue of the New Woman's limited breach of the "woman's sphere," but by her transgression and blurring of gender itself: "In thus problematizing the distinction between masculinity and femininity, [Haggard's antagonist Ayesha] is the quintessential New Woman," whether dead or alive by novel's end (58).

This is ultimately a deconstructive move, but one Murphy does not explicitly theorize as such, despite occasionally invoking the French feminist triumvirate of Luce Irigaray, Hélène...