The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact (review)
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Angelique Richardson, Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter, and Chris Willis, former scholar and member of the editorial staff of Gender and History, have together edited a fascinating collection of articles that explore the range and complexity of the New Woman icon emerging in the 1890s. The fourteen essays begin with Talia Schaffer's "'Nothing but Foolscap and Ink': Inventing the New Woman," which delineates the broad tension between the media caricature of the New Woman as "the unsexed, terrifying, violent Amazon ready to overturn the world" (39) and real New Women figures. In addressing questions of why such a caricature appeared, who found it useful, and what sort of negotiations progressive feminist women made around the label, Schaffer provides an effective foundation for the more particular investigations that follow.
Willis's essay distinguishes between commercial and polemical New Woman fiction, noting that the less didactic commercial species reached a wider audience than the polemical (written by recognized New Women authors), but also depicted heroines capitulating to marriage in the end. Ann Heilmann and Laura Marcus study the relationship between real and fictive New Women and hysteria, emerging psychoanalysis, and daydreaming. Heilmann examines an English, American, and German New Woman response (from Sarah Grand, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Bertha Pappenheim respectively) to the medical establishment's categorization of hysteria, while Marcus argues that New Women fiction represented both feminism as external and hysteria/daydreaming as internal manifestations of female rebellion. Sarah Wintle explores the technological influences of the bicycle and automobile, and Sally Ledger the aesthetic influences of Ibsen's theatre (via George Bernard Shaw) on the New Woman and the shape of British Victorian feminism.
Essays by Angelique Richardson, Matthew Beaumont, Gail Cunningham, Regina Gagnier, Ann Ardis, Lesley Hall, Rebecca Stott, and Carolyn Burdett elucidate important tensions informing constructions of the New Woman. Richardson traces the opposition between essentialism in biological determinism and social construction in utopian possibilities, with particular focus on Mona Caird, who offered a radical feminist resistance to eugenic feminism. Beaumont highlights the fin de siècle's "concern with post-capitalist or post-patriarchal social intercourse" (213) and probes the relationship between feminism and utopianism in a representative utopian novel by Elizabeth Corbett. Cunningham's "'He-Notes': Reconstructing Masculinity" examines New Womanhood and masculinity [End Page 429] in texts by George Egerton and Ménie Murial Dowie to find texts that did not offer the usual erasure or surrender of New Woman characters but instead treated males/masculinity as something to be accepted or rejected by the New Woman herself. Gagnier revisits the New Womanhood versus Male Decadence binary using an "optic of difference and tension rather than regret" (239) to elucidate the tension between "productive bodies" / "productivist aesthetics" and "pleasured bodies" / "hedonics" (241); whereas Ardis scrutinizes whether or not the New Hellenism – which did so much to legitimize and elevate male love – actually "enable[d] or discredit[ted] female intellectuality" (108). Hall recuperates a history of Stella Brown, less important in regard to suffrage than to radical feminism focused on female sexuality and sexual desire and a woman's right to control her own sexuality by refusing maternity. Stott and Burdett explore the complementary and contradictory relationships between the discourses of colonization and feminism with special attention to works of Olive Schreiner. Most essays in the collection give some attention to the periodical press, either as source of primary texts, or for contemporary commentary upon those primary texts or as a medium for shaping the popular cultural responses to the New Woman. However, Stott, Beaumont, Hall, Richardson, and Cunningham appear to draw on periodicals most deeply.
The overall literary and historical success of Richardson and Willis's volume renders it a "must have" for any academic library; the introduction alone is invaluable for anyone studying New Woman fiction or fin de siècle feminism. By and large the essays combine complex reading and insight with accessible prose. As...
