Abstract
Bunting surveys writings both by and about the “New Woman” of the 1880s and 1890s, exploring the ways in which the New Woman figure in all her configurations bridged Victorian and Modernist representations of gender ideology. Using Coventry Patmore’s fragile family metaphors and ideals of female domesticity as a starting point in illustrating the tensions between the “new” and the “old,” Bunting unpacks treatments of the themes of marriage and maternity, paying special attention to pregnancy outside of conventional marriage, family planning, eugenicist discourse, syphilis and inheritance of sexual infection and female-centric alternatives to traditional familial models.
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Notes
- 1.
Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 1990), 24.
- 2.
Ibid., 27.
- 3.
Ibid., 29.
- 4.
Coventry Patmore, “Prelude: The Rose of the World,” in The Angel in the House, 4th edn (London: Macmillan and Co., 1866), Canto IV, Part I: The Morning Call, lines 11–16.
- 5.
Natasha Moore, “The Realism of the Angel in the House: Coventry Patmore’s Poem Reconsidered,” Victorian Literature and Culture 43, no. 1 (March 1, 2015): 41.
- 6.
For further discussion of the proliferation of familial advice manuals and other writing which instigated this new rhetoric of idealised motherhood in the nineteenth century, see Ann Dally, Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences of an Ideal (New York: Schocken Books, 1983); and Jonathan Hardy-Gathorne, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972).
- 7.
As argued by Carolyn Dever in Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Cathy N. Davison and E. M. Broner, eds., The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980) which charts the tradition of absent and lost mothers in the literature from ancient works to the 1980s.
- 8.
Dever, Death and the Mother, 1 (see note 7).
- 9.
Ibid., 20.
- 10.
Details of Meynell’s imaginative construction as at once virgin/angel/ideal model of womanhood and tempting seductress in the poetic works of Francis Thomson, Coventry Patmore and George Meredith can be found in Maria Frawley, “Alice Meynell and the Politics of Motherhood,” in Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-readings, ed. Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson, 31–43 (Knoxville: Tennessee University Press, 1997).
- 11.
Viola Meynell, Alice Meynell: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 99.
- 12.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “An Extinct Angel,” in The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories, ed. Robert Shulman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 48; first published in Kate Field’s Washington, September 23, 1891, 199–200.
- 13.
Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in Collected Essays, Vol. 2, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), 285.
- 14.
Helen Rappaport, Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion (California: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 341.
- 15.
Mona Caird, “Marriage,” in A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, Drama of the 1890s, ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson (Ontario: Broadview, 2001), 185; first published in the Westminster Review 130, August 1888, 186–201.
- 16.
Ibid., 187–88.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Carolyn Christensen Nelson, “The Marriage Question: Introduction,” in A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, Drama of the 1890s (Ontario: Broadview, 2001), 184.
- 19.
As explored in Amy Levy’s poem “Ballade of an Omnibus” (1889).
- 20.
Rosy Aindow, Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870–1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
- 21.
Clement Scott, “Review of A Doll’s House,” Theatre 14, July 1889, 19–22.
- 22.
Truth, March 26, 1891. Quoted by William Archer, The Pall Mall Gazette, April 8, 1891.
- 23.
Ménie Muriel Dowie, Gallia (London: Everyman, 1995), 114.
- 24.
Ibid., 116.
- 25.
Ibid., 92.
- 26.
George Egerton, “The Star-Worshipper,” in Fantasias (London: John Lane, 1898), 24.
- 27.
Grant Allen, The Woman who Did (London: John Lane, 1895), 40–41.
- 28.
Ibid., 41.
- 29.
Ibid., 193.
- 30.
Ibid., 240.
- 31.
Ibid., 194.
- 32.
Grant Allen, “Plain Words on The Woman Question,” Fortnightly Review 46, October 1889, 448–58.
- 33.
Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell, Alan’s Wife (London: Henry and Co, 1893) and in New Woman Plays, ed. Linda Fitzsimmons and Viv Gardner (London: Methuen, 1991), 8–25.
- 34.
Alan’s Wife was staged independently in April and May 1893 with Elizabeth Robins, its co-author, in the lead role, though the authorship of the play remained anonymous.
- 35.
Anon., “Review of Alan’s Wife,” The Times, May 1, 1893, 4.
- 36.
Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell, Alan’s Wife (London: Henry and Co, 1893), 25.
- 37.
Jennifer Phegley, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England, Victorian Life and Times Series, ed. Sally Mitchell (Praeger: London, 2012), 166.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (New York: Cassell, 1893), 446.
- 40.
Ann Heilmann, “Narrating the Hysteric: Fin-de-siècle Medical Discourse and Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins,” in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 125, 128.
- 41.
Emma Frances Brooke, A Superfluous Woman (New York: Cassell, 1894), 317.
- 42.
Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (New York: Cassell, 1893), 672.
- 43.
George Egerton, “A Cross Line,” Keynotes (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893).
- 44.
Egerton, “A Cross Line,” Keynotes, 35 (see note above).
- 45.
Egerton, “Now Spring Has Come,” Keynotes, 56–57 (see note 43).
- 46.
Keynotes (see note 43) and Discords (John Lane, 1894) Keynotes and Discords (London: Virago, 1893).
- 47.
St John Hankin, The Last of the De Mullins (act 3, scene 1, lines 124–27), in The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 253; text references are to act, scene and line of this edition.
- 48.
Ibid., 3.1.505-13.
- 49.
Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989), 450.
- 50.
Claudia Nelson, Family Ties in Victorian England, Victorian Life and Times Series, ed. Sally Mitchell (Praeger, London, 2007), 15.
- 51.
Mary Cholmondeley, Diana Tempest (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1893), 1.
- 52.
“Between 1881 and 1911 there was an increase from 12.6 per cent to 23.7 per cent in the number of middle-class women in the total female workforce”; see Vivien Gardner and Susan Rutherford, The New Woman and her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914 (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 6.
- 53.
Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women: 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xvi.
- 54.
Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978).
- 55.
For instance, the single female was denied the opportunities for literary and scholarly research in the British Museum Reading Room until, in the late eighteenth century, a concession was made granting her admittance when accompanied by another woman reader; see G. F. Barwick The Reading Room of the British Museum (London: E. Benn, 1929), 65.
- 56.
See, for instance, Linda Hughes, “A Club of Their Own: The Literary Ladies, New Women Writers, and Fin-de-Siècle Authorship,” Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007): 233–60.
- 57.
Deborah Epstein Nord, “‘Neither Pairs nor Odd’: Female Community in Nineteenth Century London,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 4 (1990), 753.
- 58.
Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Women’s Press, 1985), 205.
- 59.
Deborah Epstein Nord, “Neither Pairs nor Odd,” 733 (see note 57).
- 60.
Gardner and Rutherford, The New Woman and her Sisters, p. 6 (see note 52).
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Bunting, K. (2018). The New Woman in Her Confinement: Fin-de-siècle Constructions of Maternity and Motherhood. In: Leonardi, B. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_4
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