Abstract
New Woman texts are subversive not only in the creation of unfamiliar worlds (as with Perkins Gilman’s Herland, for instance), but also in the introduction of untraditional or transgressive role models for women. The figure of the Boy, or the attribute of ‘boyishness’, is one that comes up time and again in fin-de-siècle narratives. Scholars have paid much attention to the Boy, particularly in the context of Wilde’s work, where a priority value is placed on youthfulness, but also on impermanence, and where there is disaffection with nineteenth-century materialism and the adherence to ‘progress’. The Boy is located at the centre of these discourses: the Boy who loses his youth by growing up or by dying young or, in contrast, those Peter Pan-like figures of the 1890s such as Dorian Gray. We also find the Boy in some New Woman fiction. Thus, I would argue that ‘he’ is a crossover figure between these tangential fin-de-siècle groups. For New Woman writers, the Boy was one avenue through which they could access male privilege, at least temporarily. Much New Woman fiction concentrated on the equality pre-adolescent girls enjoyed alongside their brothers; for instance, Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book depicts the New Girl as a tomboyish character exploring the wilderness alongside the boys. New Woman writers deploy this prelapsarian experience to demonstrate the ways in which such girls are then contained within the private sphere as they grow older.
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Notes
For further discussion of this issue, see Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids (London: Pandora, 1989). Grand was probably familiar with Ellen Clayton’s treatment of the subject, which was used as an argument in favour of suffrage:
Ellen Clayton, ‘Female Warriors’, Memorials of Female Valour and Heroism from the Mythological Ages to the Present Era, Vol. I (London: Tinsley, 1895), p. 3.
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 48.
See Sally Cline, Radclyffe Hall: a Woman Called John (London: Murray, 1997), p. 22;
Nigel Nicholson, Portrait of a Marriage (London: Futura, 1973), p. 112.
See Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), particularly Chapter 4, pp. 95–125.
Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992; originally published 1893), p. 61. All references to The Heavenly Twins will be to this edition and will be made by page number in the body of the text.
Charlotte Goodman, ‘The Lost Brother, the Twin: Male Novelists and the Male-Female Bildungsroman’, Novel 17 (1983): 28–43.
Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 102.
Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs and Bloomers: the New Woman and the Popular Press (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990), p. 148.
Indeed, the first meeting between the Tenor and the Boy in itself may gesture to this subculture, (which had become quite visible by the end of the nineteenth century) in that the Tenor ‘picks up’ the Boy and takes him home for entertainment in much the same way as bourgeois men cruised for rent boys in public spaces in the period. See Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-Annes: Male Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’ in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), pp. 195–211.
Gerd Bjørhovde, Rebellious Structures (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1987), p. 108.
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 202–3.
Gerardine Meaney, ‘Decadence, Degeneration and Revolting Aesthetics: the Fiction of Emily Lawless and Katherine Cecil Thurston’, in ed. Anne Fogarty, Colby Quarterly 36 (3) (2000), p. 169. Meaney’s teaching and ongoing research on Thurston may be credited with making her work visible in recent years.
Katherine Cecil Thurston, Max: a Novel (London: Hutchinson, 1910), p. 2.
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
See Penny Tinkler, ‘Sapphic Smokers and English Modernities’ in Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture, eds Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 76–90. There is a clear sense that, in the period, tobacco consumption is linked to individual autonomy and progressive thinking. Laura Doan also addresses smoking as a ‘prop’ in the performance of female masculinities, see for instance Fashioning Sapphism: the Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 106.
Cross-dressing and disguise is used in a similar way in other New Woman novels, such as Lady Florence Dixie’s Gloriana, or the Revolution of 1900 (1890) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). Perhaps more unusually, it is a man who cross-dresses in order to claim female privilege. Here, Gregory Rose takes on the role of a nurse in order to be at the deathbed of the heroine, Lyndall. Assuming female clothing confers a certain dignity on this rather pathetic character; as a woman, he takes on not only a new role, but also new characteristics, in much the same way as Angelica in the above passage. It seems as if, in an ideal world, these authors say, Angelica would make a much more able man and Gregory Rose a better woman.
‘The love that dare not speak its name’ comes from the poem ‘Two Loves’ by Alfred Douglas, and was quoted by Wilde in court. See Brian Reade, Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900: An Anthology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 362.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008; originally published 1928), p. 188.
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (Paris: Pegasus Press, 1928), p. 73.
Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature’, Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 394.
See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thought (New York: Columbia Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 24.
Originally published in 1918 under the title ‘The Singular Story of Albert Nobbs’, Moore’s text was republished as a novella last year to tie-in with the release of the film, see Albert Nobbs (London: Penguin, 2011). The story may have been inspired by reports of court cases such as that of ‘John Bradley’, arrested in Dublin in 1889 for vagrancy, who was discovered in prison to be a woman, or Lois Swich, another working-class woman who cross-dressed as a man in order to gain employment. For more on these, see Katie Hindmarch-Watson, ‘Lois Schwich, the Female Errand Boy: Narratives of Female Cross-Dressing in Late-Victorian London’, GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14 (1) (2008): 69–98.
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O’Toole, T. (2013). The New Woman and the Boy. In: The Irish New Woman. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349132_6
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