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“The New Woman,” Ouida
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35 “The New Woman” Ouida R Born to an English mother and French father, Marie Louise de La Ramée (1839–1908) adopted the pen name Ouida with her first published story in 1859. Most of Ouida’s extensive body of short stories and romantic novels, including Under Two Flags (1867), her most popular, were published in Britain and the United States. Later in life she published a series of essays critical of women’s suffrage, animal cruelty, the British book trade, and British imperialism. By the late nineteenth century, she was a regular contributor to a number of American magazines, including Philadelphia’s Lippincott’s Magazine, Boston’s Living Age, the North American Review, and Cosmopolitan. As Ouida cultivated the life of a grande dame in Italy, she became increasingly known for her flamboyance, cynicism, and risqué subject matter, prompting one critic to call her an “apostle for insidious immorality.” Acknowledging that her florid writing style had inspired parody, the renowned English writer G. K. Chesterton quipped: “It’s impossible not to laugh at Ouida; and equally impossible not to read her.”1 It can scarcely be disputed, I think, that in the English language there are conspicuous at the present moment two words which designate two unmitigated bores: The Workingman and the Woman. The Workingman and the Woman, the New Woman, be it remembered, meet us at every page of literature written in the English tongue; and each is convinced that on its own especial W hangs the future of the world. Both he and she want to have their values artificially raised and rated, and a status given to them by favor in lieu of desert. In an age in which persistent clamor is generally crowned by success they have both obtained considerable attention; is it offensive to say much more of it than either deserves? Your contributor avers that the Cow-Woman and the Scum-Woman, man understands; but that the New Woman is above him. The elegance of these appellatives is not calculated to North American Review, May 1894, 610–619. recommend them to readers of either sex; and as a specimen of style forces one to hint that the New Woman who, we are told, “has been sitting apart in silent contemplation all these years” might in all these years have studied better models of literary composition. We are farther on told “that the dimmest perception that you may be mistaken, will save you from making an ass of yourself.”It appears that even this dimmest perception has never dawned upon the New Woman. We are farther told that“thinking and thinking”in her solitary sphynx-like contemplation she solved the problem and prescribed the remedy (the remedy to a problem!); but what this remedy was we are not told, nor did the New Woman apparently disclose it to the rest of womankind, since she still hears them in“sudden and violent upheaval”like“children unable to articulate whimpering for they know not what.”It is sad to reflect that they might have been“easily satisfied at that time” (at what time?), “but society stormed at them until what was a little wail became convulsive shrieks”; and we are not told why the New Woman who had“the remedy for the problem,” did not immediately produce it. We are not told either in what country or at what epoch this startling upheaval of volcanic womanhood took place in which “man merely made himself a nuisance with his opinions and advice,” but apparently did quell this wailing and gnashing of teeth since it would seem that he has managed still to remain more masterful than he ought to be. We are further informed that women “have allowed him to arrange the whole social system and manage or mismanage it all these ages without ever seriously examining his work with a view to considering whether his abilities and his methods were sufficiently good to qualify him for the task.” There is something deliciously comical in the idea, thus suggested, that man has only been allowed to “manage or mismanage” the world because woman has graciously refrained from preventing his doing so. But the comic side of this pompous and solemn assertion does not for a moment offer itself to the New Woman sitting aloof and aloft in her solitary meditation on the superiority of her sex. For the New Woman there is no such thing as a joke. She has listened without...