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  • Trained Bodies:From Gymnasts to "Jujutsu Suffragettes"
  • Laura Rotunno (bio)

One of the most memorable scenes in Thomas Hardy's A Laodicean (1881) features Paula Power "in a pink flannel costume … bending, wheeling, and undulating in the air … [,] ascending by her arms … , then lowering [End Page 37] herself till she swung level with the floor" (152). This "abandonment to every muscular whim that could take possession of such a supple form" (152) occurs in a gymnasium that Paula has custom designed "in imitation of those at the new colleges for women" (150). Paula's interest in gymnastics and women's higher education adds to her status as an outcast in Hardy's novel. That very combination, however, led to increased independence for some Victorian women who, educated at institutions such as Martina Bergman Österberg's Physical Training College in South Hampstead, London, and Rhoda Anstey's College of Physical Education in Birmingham, became gymnastic instructors.

The Career of Candida (1896), authored by Emily Morse Symonds and published under the pseudonym George Paston, focuses on just such an independent, educated athlete. In her youth, Candida not only engages in intellectual conversations with her father and the bright young man next door, but also has better biceps than any other girl (Paston 28–29). During her studies at Bloomsbury Gymnasium for Women, an institution likely based on Bergman Österberg's, Candida becomes a "distinguished gymnast" and later, when she is head instructor at a branch gymnasium, is known for having the "best figure in London" (59). She is also able to physically restrain a man who is beating a horse (60), and her first dates with the man she will marry entail exercises to aid his muscular growth. The exercises are successful, but their marriage is not. Unhappily married for several years, Candida leaves her husband, takes their son, and returns to teaching. Their separation is short-lived, for, a few months later, Candida meets her now-paralyzed husband in a park and returns to her role as his wife.

Candida's return to conventional domesticity unsurprisingly disturbs twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics. That is, critics often admit a feeling of momentary disappointment if New Woman characters like Paston's do not build on their potential by, for example, refusing to marry or starting a home for battered women. In her 1995 study of the "new girl" and her culture, Sally Mitchell describes such a critical feeling this way: "A contemporary feminist can hardly help being disappointed if the new girl merely turns into a new and improved version of the Victorian ideal mother" (177). Kate Flint's The Woman Reader (1993) identifies this type of "emotional response" about New Woman characters as "valuable," asserting that "regretting the effects ['of both unconscious and societal factors'] on a fictional character is the first step … in the readers' own critical examination of their own position within society" (297). If Symonds' disappointed readers critically examined the trained bodies of real Victorian women (specifically those trained in gymnastics), however, they might conclude that real life could turn out better than fiction, as this training afforded many women the intellectual and physical strength necessary to fight for women's rights.

While gymnastics had been practised by British youth throughout the nineteenth century, Bergman Österberg's Physical Training College, which [End Page 38] opened in 1885, established gymnastics as an avenue by which women could enter a profession and gain social and political agency. The students worked strenuously for these gains, thereby following the example of Swedish Madame Bergman Österberg, who, before creating her training college, successfully advocated for Pehr Henrik Ling's system of gymnastics to be adopted by the London school system. That fight took six years. Bergman Österberg did not ask quite so much of her budding gymnastics instructors, of whom she required two years of instruction in not only "Gymnastics on the Ling pattern, Swimming, and Outdoor Games," but also "Anatomy, Animal Physiology, Chemistry, Physics, Hygiene, and Theory of Movement" (May 36). Schools such as Rhoda Anstey's, founded in 1897, and Margaret Stansfeld's Bedford College, founded in 1903, maintained if not expanded upon Bergman Österberg's intellectual and physical...

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