The New Woman Gothic: Reconfigurations of Distress by Patricia Murphy (review)

Patricia Murphy’s The New Woman Gothic: Reconfigurations of Distress successfully brings together two seemingly disparate genres: the gothic novel of the late eighteenth century and the New Woman novel of the late nineteenth century. Although echoes of the gothic in fin-de-siècle fiction have been discussed in Victorian studies, particularly through analyses of novels such as H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886–87) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), no critic has detailed with such depth how specific gothic conventions appear in New Woman novels not typically categorized as gothic. Examining novels such as Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894), George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), and Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), Murphy offers refreshing interpretations of novels that have already received consideration for their realistic representations of the advanced woman. In addition, Murphy brings attention to lesser-known texts, including those that sympathetically portray the New Woman, such as Annie E. Holdsworth’s Joanna Traill, Spinster (1894), and those that do not, such as George Paston’s A Study in Prejudices (1895). The inclusion of anti-New Woman novels in this study is key, Murphy argues, because these novels show how extreme the threat of the New Woman was to traditional Victorian culture and how this threat was the impetus for the use of gothic conventions in fin-de-siècle fiction.

The structure of Murphy’s study has both advantages and disadvantages. The introduction reminds readers of the key components of late-eighteenth-century gothic novels as it lays out a logical plan for Murphy’s argument about the New Woman gothic. This task involves several steps: showing “The Blurred Boundary” between New Women and prostitutes (Part I with three chapters); examining “Reimagined Conventions” such as the labyrinth, live burial, entrapment, and the ruined body (Part II with four chapters); and analyzing “Villainous Characters,” especially bad husbands and mothers (Part III with three chapters). One advantage of this structure is that readers can compare and contrast examples for the same concept with relative ease. For example, when discussing “London as Sexualized Labyrinth,” the topic of chapter 4, Murphy is able quickly to cite six different novels in order to capture the “exhilaration” New Women felt upon their arrival in London and another three novels to express the frustration these women felt once they realized that London was home to the “ubiquitous male pest,” who was continually approaching them on the street under the assumption they were prostitutes (117).

Still, one disadvantage to such a structure is that readers must work hard to develop sustained readings of individual texts. Murphy does refer readers back to earlier discussions as the book progresses. For example, her discussion of the role repression plays in New Women’s unhappy marriages in chapter 8 looks back to a consideration of the New Woman’s body as gothic ruin in chapter 7. However, this reader sometimes found the structure that worked around particular conventions frustrating, especially earlier in the book, when the connections to later chapters were not as clearly delineated. Furthermore, early in the book, direct connections between eighteenth-century gothic texts and New Woman novels are not as clear as they might be. Part I shows very clearly how the New Woman was linked to prostitution through the type of housing she occupied, her philanthropic efforts to help poor women, and her work in the field of “literary prostitution,” but there are only scarce references back to the eighteenth-century gothic in this section, making it difficult for this reader to see how the gothic will be relevant to understanding the New Woman (60).

Still, by the end of the book, Murphy’s argument is convincing and shows a commitment to scholarship that pushes the boundaries of what we have come to expect in discussions of fin-de-siècle fiction. The most compelling section of Murphy’s book was, for this reader, the discussion...