Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918

9. The New Woman

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of the New Woman1 marked the arrival of one of the most complex and transgressive characters to inhabit the Anglo-American cultural arena. Middle-class and assertive, she challenged marriage and conventional domesticity while claiming the right to higher education, the ballot, unescorted travel, sexual freedom, and a professional career. Her material symbols of independence were the bicycle, sensible clothing, the latchkey, and sometimes the cigarette. Talia Schaffer has pointed out that the figure we now identify as the New Woman was in many ways a fictional construct who served as a focal point for anxieties about first-wave feminism, and was often far removed from the daily realities of the working and activist women who spearheaded social change.2 In Britain and the US, novels that engaged with some or all of the issues that constellated around the New Woman were sufficiently numerous to form a distinct sub-genre. Ann Ardis has identified over one hundred titles published in England between 1880 and 1920 on different sides of the woman question, two-thirds of them written by women, although many of the best-known titles were by men: Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, H.G. Wells’ Ann Veronica, and George Gissing’s The Odd Women.3 Canada, in contrast, produced only a handful of novels that overtly reflect concerns associated with the New Woman. A highlight in Canada’s relatively slender contribution to the genre is the social critique that animates Joanna Wood’s The Untempered Wind (1894), a defence of an unwed mother penned by an admirer of Thomas Hardy. Wood makes a sympathetic case for Myron Holder, resident of the sniping village of Jamestown, who refuses to divulge the name of her 159 nine
The New Woman child’s unfaithful father and marries him only when on her deathbed. Myron’s pregnancy is presented as the outcome of her response to the “voice of nature.” In her own eyes and those of her author, her promise to her lover, made “under no more sacred canopy than the topaz of a summer sky—with no other bridal hymn than the choral of the wind among the trees,”4 is as valid as a formal marriage. On the whole, the power of Wood’s writing generated a positive reception in Canada and the US; Current Opinion of New York described the book as “the strongest and best American novel of the year,” and placed Wood in the company of Thomas Hardy, George Moore, George Meredith, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens.5 However, exception was taken by the Toronto Globe, which took Wood to task for “magnifying the littleness of village life to the dimensions of an improbable malignity.”6 The Untempered Wind was not the first book by a Canadian woman to command attention for its anti-romantic representation of social behaviour; Mary Leslie’s novel, The Cromaboo Mail Carrier (1878), published under the pseudonym of James Thomas Jones, was reputedly banned (or “withdrawn from circulation”)7 by her fellow citizens of Erin, Ontario, for its thinly disguised depiction of their community as “the most blackguard village in Canada.”8 Such books were exceptions to the normal practice of nineteenth-century Canadian 160 breaking new ground after 1875 Figure 9.1 Sara Jeannette Duncan, 1890s (Johnston and Hoffman, Library and Archives Canada, C-046447) fiction writers, who tended to handle social criticism with kid gloves. Similar to the way that Agnes Maule Machar took pains to sanitize Canada by setting Roland Graeme in the US, Wood used her second novel to correct the unflattering representation of rural Ontario in her first. Judith Moore; or, Fashioning a Pipe (1898), takes place in a lushly pastoral community and does an about-face in its representation of social norms by rejecting independence for the woman artist when the soprano heroine chooses marriage to a Canadian farmer over a career on the concert stage. Misao Dean finds that both of Wood’s novels conform to a pattern that she sees as typical of Canadian New Woman fiction, in which “an identification between womanhood and the natural world” serves to “reconfine the New Woman within the bounds of a biologically defined femininity.”9 Canada’s most prominent author of New Woman fiction was Sara Jeannette Duncan, who...