Figuring the New Woman: Writers and Mothers in George Egerton's Early Stories

Recent critical reevaluations of fin de siècle England have catalogued the contradictory attitudes held by and about New Women: ¹ they were over-sexed or asexual, championed free love or advocated stricter standards of purity, embraced eugenic attitudes toward motherhood or threatened the future of the race by rejecting maternity outright, eschewed the private sphere's domestic duties to fight public battles for improved educational and professional opportunities or flaunted their self-absorption by exhaustively anatomizing their emotional and psychological states. Even such a brief overview shows the absurdity of attempting to draw up a coherent, ideologically consistent list of the attributes and aims of the New Woman, but it is possible to identify the cluster of related concerns her advent sparked. The debates that raged around this figure in the 1890s repeatedly return to questions of female sexual desire, maternal identity, and women's representations of women.

Neither the mother nor the woman writer was a new figure in Victorian conversations about the parameters and perquisites of feminine identity. However, the discourses that emerged in the 1890s presented these familiar figures in a fresh light; the decade was characterized by its concern with female authors' and mothers' curiosity about and interest in themselves as women and as individuals with identities and interests distinct from those of their children. Mothers' self-scrutiny and authors' interest in chronicling and analyzing the lives of women challenged prescriptions for maternal selflessness and authorial modesty, leaving both figures open to charges of selfishness and egotism.

New Woman writers reevaluated maternity, variously questioning the nature and existence of a maternal instinct, representing mothers' ambivalence toward or distaste for maternity and exalting maternal love over heterosexual desire. They seemed to be arguing for newly expanded rights for the mother even as they declared her freedom from what were formerly understood to be her responsibilities. In thus attacking, from a range of directions, the maternal ideal of mid-century, these writers also fueled fears raised by the eugenic theories of Max Nordau and his English adherents, who emphasized the importance of motherhood to the continued evolution and superiority of White Western civilization and argued that New Women threatened the future of the race by reason of their supposed degeneration and concomitant asexuality. ² Eugenic theories and New Woman approaches to motherhood offered differently inflected versions of the idea that mothers possessed identities, desires, and interests that were independent of and might be opposed to those of their children. New Women writers raised a similar set of concerns when they began to assert their qualifications to speak about women. "Truth claims about human sexuality were an important part of what can be termed the original agenda of the New Woman novel," argues Ann Ardis. "Such claims delineated an area of expertise: they made the explorations of 'human nature'--and still more specifically, the investigation of female sexuality--the New Woman novel's primary focus" (37).

The figure of the mother, a central character in the controversy over the New Woman, thus was not only discursively produced, but was produced in part via self-consciously reflexive commentary about her discursive production. In other words, the debates about the New Woman in periodicals, novels, and scientific texts noted and sometimes deplored the extent to which the New Woman was a textual phenomenon. ³ My point is not that the discursive construction of identity was a new phenomenon, but that the attention paid to the textual nature of the New Woman indicated debaters' recognition, anxious or jubilant, that women, as writers, were taking an active and self-conscious role in constructing new female identities. ⁴ One result was that New Woman authors drew critical ire for the intent as well as the content of their writing; commentators who deprecated or challenged New Women's assertions did so not only on the grounds...