- The New Woman Gothic: Reconfigurations of Distress by Patricia Murphy
Patricia murphy's study argues that what are considered "the discrete forms of the Gothic novel and the New Woman novel" in fact reveal "fascinating intersections" (1). It is a compelling and original thesis that challenges scholarly ideas about both the generic location of Gothic and its gendered significance at the fin de siècle, and it promises to open up valuable new lines of inquiry.
While Murphy discusses some supernatural thrillers in which Gothic monsters with New-Womanish qualities appear—Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), H. Rider Haggard's She (1886–87), and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897)—her focus is on the predominantly realist New Woman novels of the 1890s. The New Woman Gothic explores an impressively wide range of this fiction, from novels by well-known writers, including Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, Grant Allen, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Marie Corelli, to those by lesser-known writers, such as Emma Frances Brooke, Ménie Muriel Dowie, George Paston, and Netta Syrett. Murphy's central thesis is that these writers adapt conventions from both Romantic and Victorian Gothic fiction either to depict the New Woman as Gothic menace or—more frequently—to articulate her distress within the terms of a Gothicized victimhood.
Early chapters explore the ways in which the figure of the New Woman became blurred in the Victorian imagination with that of the prostitute. While Murphy's readings of various fictions persuasively demonstrate that anxieties about sex work and New Women were being negotiated, I was not fully convinced that this particular blurred boundary took on Gothic dimensions.
The case for a New Woman Gothic is much more compellingly made in succeeding chapters, which focus on tropes drawn from Romantic-era "Female Gothic" (151): the labyrinth, entrapment, ruins, and the bad father. The discussion unpacks how these motifs become altered in their transformation from the eighteenth to the late nineteenth century and explores what this transformation might suggest about writers' perceptions of women's progress. For example, as Murphy argues, while in Radcliffian narratives the heroine's marriage represents her escape from "Gothic difficulties," in novels by New Woman writers, marriage is figured as a condition of entrapment or even live burial and has itself become "the horrific factor" (151). Murphy concludes that such texts evince "a profound awareness … that the female condition has remained virtually static across generations" and that progress is a "cruel myth" (151–52).
The New Woman Gothic is equally valuable in reading New Woman fiction alongside and against the male-authored canon of fin-de-siècle Gothic. The [End Page 197] chapter "The Body as Ruin," one of several that draw upon Julia Kristeva's work on abjection, demonstrates how, in New Woman fiction, the "female body metamorphoses into a Gothic body, indelibly stamped by the forces of decay" (172). Murphy shows how this degeneration, often brought on by nervous disorder or syphilitic contagion, is crucially not one for which the advanced woman herself is to blame, but rather is initiated by a reactionary society that denies women the capacity to fulfill their potential. The analysis persuasively argues that these texts offer a "counternarrative" (172) to male-authored fictions such as She in which transgressive women unleash degeneration upon innocent males. In so doing, Murphy provides a welcome complication of the scholarly idea that Gothic in this period is predominantly a male genre and a patriarchal reaction against female advancement.
A minor concern for me is the study's tendency to discuss novels as being either broadly sympathetic or antagonistic toward the New Woman, since such characterizations risk occluding the extent to which some fictions are simultaneously both. For example, The Beetle is given extensive discussion as a "startling late-century assault" (245) on the New Woman, whose vilification, Murphy contemplates, likely cannot be matched in other fiction. While Murphy recognizes this novel's relatively sympathetic treatment of its "realistic New Woman," Marjorie Lindon, as opposed to that of its...