行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告
再探「新女性」： 城市空間、商品文化、物質身體和世紀
末倫敦小說(第 2 年)
成果報告檔案上傳
計 畫 類 別 ： 個別型
計 畫 編 號 ： NSC 96-2411-H-004-033-MY2
執 行 期 間 ： 97 年 08 月 01 日至 98 年 07 月 31 日
執 行 單 位 ： 國立政治大學英國語文學系
計 畫 主 持 人 ： 陳音頤
計畫參與人員： 碩士班研究生-兼任助理人員：詹淳惠
報 告 附 件 ： 國外研究心得報告
出席國際會議研究心得報告及發表論文
處 理 方 式 ： 本計畫可公開查詢
中 華 民 國 98 年 08 月 06 日
目錄
報告內容────────────────────────────2-4
參考文獻────────────────────────────5-6
報告內容：
前言
本計畫為兩年期，現已執行完畢，特此報告。
研究目的、文獻探討、研究方法
本人一向對都市文學尤其是倫敦文學具有濃厚興趣，最近三年研究，聚焦在世
紀之交倫敦女性和都市現代性及商品文化的題材，分別從新興女性的馬路行走、在
百貨公司逛覽以及閱讀消費大眾女性刊物這三個層面探討女性進入城市公共領域，
經歷都市現代性和商品文化過程中的種種社經文化議題，因此對倫敦文學相關的空
間、疆域、再現、性別等相關議題具有相當準備。最近兩年計畫將觸角延續到晚近
1980 年代後期和 1990 年代的後現代世紀末倫敦城市文學（以辛克萊最為代表）
，相
隔一百年，兩大世紀末有相似又有不同的情懷，正如上文提到，辛克萊筆下的後現
代倫敦，有太多和之前的現代時期世紀末相遇、對照、並行的層面，故此新題材，
仍舊一脈相承本人之前對現代時期倫敦文學的關注。
此兩年計畫，試圖再從另一角度繼續本人對現代時期倫敦文學的一貫興趣。近
年來文壇對「新女性」文學日漸關注，也以各種不同新的角度給此文學投注新的視
野和探討，本人在前三年研究現代時期普通中下階級女性的城市經驗時，多少是以
強調這些普通女性和具有強烈政治意識、受過菁英教育的中上階級「新女性」的不
同，強調普通人群有別於菁英抗爭者的默默挪移、但也並非全然缺乏抵抗的台面下
歧見為重點。在這樣的研究中，似乎多少排除了作為十九世紀末女性經歷中重要成
員的「新女性」
，忽視了「新女性」自己的經驗和日常生活。但是仔細探討新女性文
學和文化現象，其實是相當錯綜而多元的。在英美文學研究界，對新女性文學的權
威看法似乎在 1970 年代的女性主義評論中就已定調, Elaine Showalter (
A Literature of
Their Own
1977)雖然肯定新女性文學的政治主張，但也明確指出其藝術成就受到其
過於「說教」的政治主張的拖累，而無法真正創造出主流現代文學的藝術創新和純
熟。Gail Cunningham 的
The New Woman and the Victorian Novel
（1978)則主要以探討
描述「新女性」的男性主流作家為重點，雖然也提到一些「新女性」作家自己，但
也是強調「新女性」和政治、法律議題如女性財產、投票、婚姻的重要性。近年來
英美評論界對「新女性」議題又重起興趣，與早年 1970 年代的評論不同的是，早年
評論只侷限在小說範圍，強調「新女性」打破傳統、離經叛道的女性形象，但是近
年評論則是隨著文化研究的題材拓展，將觸角延伸到非經典文本、傳統上被視為通
俗文化的報刊雜誌以及相關的社會、歷史文本，將「新女性」文學和當時的更大範
圍的世紀末文化聯繫起來，這種作法在某種程度上已經延續和拓展了 Showalter 自己
在後來的另一本
Sexual Anarchy
（1990）中將「新女性」和世紀末性別關係相連結的
作法，但是近年研究在更大程度上打破文學和其他論述和文本的界線。Heilmann
(
New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism
2000), Ledger (
The New
Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siecle
1997), Richardson and Willis (The New
Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siecle Feminisms 2002)都同時檢視「新女性」文本
和大眾媒體如報刊和漫畫裡大肆描繪的「新女性」形象間的互動，以強調「新女性」
在世紀末大文化背景的重要性，以及「新女性」文本和真實生活中試圖改變生活和
權利的世紀末女性間的互動。
這些新研究打破「新女性」文學和非文學、大眾傳媒以及社會、歷史文本間界
線的作法，正是本研究所欲繼承和延續的，但本研究試圖切入上述研究所尚未足夠
關注的一個重要角度。雖然近年來「新女性」研究擴大論述範圍，也強調「新女性」
文本和世紀末文化的聯繫，但是在「新女性」和現代城市空間、商品文化間的研究
上，仍然相當匱缺。近年來文化研究界對現代時期都市空間議題興趣濃厚，女性主
義者對現代主體的性別化、女性行人等議題的爭論也產生重要的影響，但即使是
Deborah Parsons 在 2000 年出版的、論述精彩的
Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the
City and Modernity
，仍舊延續 Showalter 在 70 年代所提出的「新女性」文學只以「室
內」題材為主的觀點，認為其只關注政治和道德、性別議題，卻缺乏對城市公共空
間的關注、對女性和空間互動的興趣，很少以城市為創作題材。不過本研究試圖指
出的是，新女性小說其實相當複雜，仔細閱讀其作品，可以發現其中一些重要議題
的逐漸演變，已不能只用既定的看法來完全涵蓋。「新女性」概念本身出現在 1890
年代，但在這之前報章雜誌和文學描述中已出現相當多對不同於傳統仕女、懷疑婚
姻、要求女性政治權利、推動社會道德淨化運動的早期女性運動者的描述，因此隨
著「新女性」這個名詞在 1890 年代初的出現，英國社會對稍早年代女性運動者的刻
板印象，都投射在這個名詞上，使得「新女性」的早期意義，和街頭抗爭、男性化
裝扮、極端主張的「尖叫姊妹」(Shrieking Sisterhood)相提並論。但是到了世紀末，
這個觀念有所改變，隨著大眾傳媒對「新女性」現象的不斷炒作和渲染，也隨著各
種商品文化的蓬勃發展，
「新女性」的形象逐漸演變，尤其對於年輕中上階級女性世
代，「新女性」所指的日漸是關注個人自我發展（而不只是女性運動和大眾改造）、
獨立自主又不自外於時尚、充分瞭解最新流行信息的現代時髦女性，文學和傳媒中
的「新女性」論述也日漸充斥空間比喻和修辭，
「新女性」不管是穿著最新時上尚、
騎著腳踏車，或坐公車、火車穿越市區街道，在在反映了「新女性」和城市公共空
間的密切互動。而「新女性」代表作家莎拉格藍德(Sarah Grand)自己，在常常發表作
品和「新女性」宣言的女性雜誌接受訪問時（1896）
，特別強調自己在美容、打扮和
時尚也引領風騷，
『她的朋友們對她在時尚打扮上的品味和對她在文學上的見解一樣
敬佩』
，她自己也特別喜歡去巴黎購物。「新女性」和商品化城市空間的錯綜關係，
也可反映在部分「新女性」自己也投入商品文化，開設茶店、餐廳和俱樂部，將女
性出外購物、跟上流行文化，和擺脫舊有性別規範相為聯繫，儘管也有不少「新女
性」批判商品文化的欺騙性及其以購物快感來轉移女性政治意識的覺醒，但因為「新
女性」文本本身的多元化，多種聲音的並存，仍舊可以發現其對女性和城市空間、
商品文化有相當討論，而並非是將「新女性」和商品文化完全切割。本研究從這個
角度切入，即是試圖指出，商品化的城市空間在「新女性」的現代經歷中，是個不
可或缺的重要環節。
本研究第二年的計畫以身體為重點，空間和身體的互動向來至為關鍵，以女性
主義空間理論的觀點來看，空間並非客觀先設的存在，而是由具有身體的主體間的
互動方才產生（Grosz, MacDowell），也因此，十九世紀末的重要空間範疇─公共領
域和私有領域，以及性別隔離領域，就是以是否排除特種身體（女性和某些階級）
為基礎的。女性主義評論家繼承 Foucault 有關「自然」身體並不存在、身體是在各
種道德、法律、社經以及人際互動的多元論述作用下方才產生的論點，但同時又指
出身體並非一個全然被動、等待被書寫的空白表面，而是具有表演特質，Grosz 更是
以多少被 Foucault 所忽視的女性身體為重點，指出身體也不乏「擴展各種限制性的
架構」的可能(1994：xi). 身體是性別構成的重要場域，十九世紀女性性別規範的建
構，就是以女性身體的空間範圍以及對身體欲望的規範為基礎，因此探討「新女性」
文本中描寫的女性身體欲望（包括對食物和商品化空間的胃口和快感）
，以及這種慾
望的覺醒為何總是在其身體移動於公共空間之時，就成為第二階段的重點。
國內對十九世紀末倫敦文學的研究似乎以主流作家為主，對「新女性」文學的
研究早期有學者從第一波女性主義的角度切入有所著墨，但之後一直相當缺乏，本
研究結合近年來英美學界對「新女性」文本的重新關注，加上重要的現代城市空間
和商品文化、以及女性身體的議題，希冀帶來新的成果。
本計畫包含參與國際學術會議的經費，其中有 2008 年 10 和 11 月分別參加在北
京和首爾舉辦的國際學術會議，發表新女性相關論文兩篇，獲得良好迴響，和學者
切磋。綜合這兩年研究，成果以期刊論文一篇，發表在國內外國文學一類刊物「中
山人文學報」
。
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成果評估
本人將研究成果以期刊論文發表，附上文章如下。
N
ew
W
oman
F
iction and
F
in de
S
iècle
U
rban
C
ommodity
C
ulture
Yin-I Chen 陳音頤
English Department National Cheng-Chi University
The New Woman as a literary representation and journalistic myth has been typically constructed as well-educated, socially privileged upper-middle-class women in the last years of the 19th century who radicalized political and social issues like the female suffrage, elimination of inequality in marriage, advocacy of social and moral purity, and expansion of education and employment possibilities for women. New Women fiction is also duly perceived as written by and/or about these New Women, a genre of fiction that highlights the political and social rebelliousness of these radical women. The official christening of the New Woman as a capitalized term istraced to a1893 articleentitled “TheSocialStanding oftheNew Woman,”published in thewomen’spressWoman’sHerald(Tusan 170), though a more widely known source takes the form of a May 1895 debate in the pages of North American Review between anti-feminist sensation writer Quida [Marie Louise de la Ramée] and New Woman writer Sarah Grand over the importance of the Woman Question. That same month, the politically conservative mass humor magazine
Punch parodied the debate in cartoon forms and helped catapult the term into the popular imagination as a
highly visible though controversial concept that crystallizes many of the conflicting political, moral and cultural attitudes over the woman issue in the fin de siècle period. The genesis of the concept also partly explains the crucially constitutive importance of mass media construction and literary representation to the phenomenon of the New Woman, as well as the frequent blurring and conflation between the phenomenon’sdiscursivedimension and itsexistence as a historical fact. The New Woman thus often refers both to the press and literary New Woman characters featured in fiction and media discussions, and also to the New Women writers, journalists and political activists themselves who write such fiction and articles.
The naming of the New Woman and much of the textual configuration of the New Woman by the periodical press does reflect attempts by the conservative press to ridicule and negate the late 19thcentury women’s movement. But the density of such media coverage also forces attention on the woman issue to an extent that has been unprecedented. Feminist writers, journalists and the women’s press quickly joined in, many sympathetic to the New Woman and defending her from the masculine press, so that a discursive space and what Sally Ledger, using Foucault, calls a “reverse”discourse is prised open (10). With the popular press in heated discussions over the New Woman, and more and more New Woman fiction getting published and becoming bestsellers, the New Woman as a phenomenon does become a site saturated with
multiple strands of sometimes mutually conflicting positions and issues. If novels published in the 1880s and dealing with the women issue are included, over 100 New Woman novels were published in the 17 years between 1883 and 1900 (Ardis 4). Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twin (1893), for example, ran to six editions in the first year of its publication and sold well over 20,000 copies inside England alone after just one year (Flint 305). The Westminster Review wrote in 1895 that “it is not possible to ride by road or rail, to read a review, a magazine or a newspaper, without being continually reminded of the subject which lady-writers love to call the Woman Question. “The Eternal Feminine,”the “Revolt of the Daughters,”the Woman’s Volunteer Movement, Women’s Clubs, are significant expressions and effective landmarks” (Sykes 396).
Conservative, masculine press as well as some literary portrayals by male writers tend to parody and ridicule the New Woman who is usually presented as upper- middle-class (thus socially privileged) and disruptive of established gender order (thus politically and socially radical). The critic Juliet Gardiner summarizes the conservative perceptions in the following way:
[The New Woman] eschewed the fripperies of fashion in favor of more masculine dress and severe coiffure. She had probably been educated to a standard unknown to previous generationsofwomen… Shewasfinancially independentoffatherorhusband… She affected emancipated habits, like smoking, riding a bicycle, using bold language and taking the omnibus or train unescorted. She belonged to all-femaleclubs… Shesought freedom from, and equality with, men. In the process, she was prepared to overturn all convention and all accepted notions of femininity. (4)
More negative ridicule is evidenced in mass cartoon journals. An 1895 cartoon by Punch, for instance, depicts a severely dressed New Woman wearing college ties and smoking a cigarette and discussing books piled high on the table, while the man of the house is forced to the servant’s quarter for tea and gossip (qtd. in Ledger 16). Another magazine Idler published a cartoon in 1894 captioned “The Man of the Future”, which shows a small, tearful man pleading “I will be good! Oh, I will be good!”to a group of angry women who hurl at him New Women novels like The Superfluous Woman and The Heavenly Twins (qtd. in Bittel 31). Such discourse, which demonizes the New Woman as the emasculating, gender-binding and anti-nature Shrieking Sisterhood, actually projects onto the New Woman an anxiety and unease that has been accumulating over the decades since the rise of the women’s movement in the mid-century. Thus although the New Woman as a phenomenon only arose in the fin de siècle period, its popular image has nevertheless inherited stereotypes first forged several decades ago. It also follows that when this paper discusses later the fluidity and multiple dimensions embedded in the concept of the New Woman, a contrast between dimensions that are new to the fin de siècle New Woman and earlier traits of the women’s movement is also intended.
Such a contrast is actually corroborated by some New Woman writers themselves. Chris Willis quotes an 1893 popular New Woman novel Ships that Pass in the Night, which describes its New Woman heroine, the Girton girl Bernardine, as eagerly objecting to conservative press’s stereotypical dismissal of the ugly bluestocking:
The writers who rail against the women of this date are really describing the women of ten years ago. Why, the Girton girl of ten years ago seems a different creation from the Girton girl of today. Yet the latter has been the steady outgrowth of the former…The Girton girl of ten years ago … was a somber, spectacled person, carelessly and dowdily dressed .. She was probably not lovable; but she deserves to be honored and thankfully remembered. She fought for women’s right, … and I cannot bear to hear her slighted. The fresh-hearted young girl who nowadays plays a good game of tennis, and … is book learned without being bookish, and … who does not scorn to take a pride in her looks
because she happens to take a pride in her books … she is what she is by reason of that grave and loveless woman who won the batter for her. (qtd. in Willis 56)
This New Woman character is obviously also socially privileged and of upper- middle-class stock, as Girton, the first female college in Cambridge, is often equated with the birth-place of radical New Women. Other female-penned New Woman literature depicting less socially privileged New Woman characters may paint a less rosy and more gloomy picture of the life awaiting these independent women, but one thing uniting them all is their shared departure from the mannish, aggressive rioters attacked and ridiculed by the conservative press. The New Woman characters these female-penned novels portray are often highly feminine, highly talented though also extremely sensitive and vulnerable, wedged painfully between their restless dissatisfaction with the established gender categories and frustration over the prospects and high costs of change. Reflecting both the impact of tradition and also their desires for change, these women are emphasized for their womanliness which also seems to be demonstrated in their very feminine attitude to fashion and appearance, as is attested to by the above quotation.1
Critical scholarship on New Woman literature has traditionally prioritized works on the New Woman written by more canonical male writers. George Meredith, George Gissing and Thomas Hardy are three oft-mentioned and discussed writers (Cunningham, Stubbs).2 With the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1970s that aimed to resurrect women’s writings, female writers of New Woman literature were given unprecedented attention.3 Yet despite the difference in approach to the New Woman phenomenon demonstrated by these male and female writers, the former more satirical and focusing on the New Woman’s perceived unconventionality and radicalism, the latter much more sympathetic, often heavily autobiographical and defensively reacting against the mainstream vilification, one thing that seems to unite these more famous literary presentations, with the possible exception of Gissing, is that these New Woman characters are more likely to be of better social and economic positions and are often portrayed in domestic settings. The focus is always on marriage (or the rejection of marriage), free love and domestic issues, and however frustrated or unhappy these New Woman characters are, they are immune from financial worries
1
. Fin de siecle New Women seem to embrace fashion in an often studied attempt to distinguish themselves from the earlier, much maligned women’s movement activists. The New Woman writer Sarah Grand, for instance, both depicts highly feminine and elegantly attired New Woman characters in her fiction, and also herself embodies that image in many of the press interviews she gives, where she is emphasized as a knowledgeable modern woman of wide interest, including interest in fashion, “her figure set off to the best advantage by the new cycling costume,”and “her friends consult[ing] her taste on questions of the toilet with as much confidence as on literary matters”(qtd. in Heilmann 2000b: 212, 237).
2
. The male writer Grant Allen wrote the most notorious and hotly contested New Woman novel The Woman Who Did in 1895, whose repercussions could still be felt 14 years later in 1909 when H. G. Wells wrote Ann Veronica wherein the heroine’s father blamed all that press and fictional coverage and the “Women Who Did”on his daughter’s restlessness (24). Yet by the time of Wells’work, most New Woman literature had petered out (Richardson and Willis 24). In Allen’s novel, the most radical claim staged by the New Woman heroine is her rejection of marriage and insistence on free love. Such emphasis on the New Woman’s radical, “unnatural,”un-feminine and emasculating qualities characterizes most male-penned mainstream representations of the New Woman. Yet Allen’s work is generally seen as of lower literary merit than the more famous male writers like Meredith, Gissing and Hardy,
3
. Yet despite such attention, many feminist literary critics of the 1970s tend to find the female-penned New Woman writings to be lacking in literary merit and not as complex as the male modern writers (Showalter 1977: 215). They all seem to have only one story to tell while exhausting themselves in telling it (ibid), and their form is compromised by and buckling under the weight of their feminist rhetoric (Stubbs 132). The New Woman character is also presented as a radicalized political vanguard waging her battles mostly in the upper-class drawing-room or club, the cloistered courts of the women-admitting colleges or the occasional political rallies in the public street.
should they choose to stay estranged from or not to marry a man. The 1890s novels by Hardy and Meredith that feature New Woman characters, notably Jude the Obscure (1895) and Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894), prioritize marriage (or anti-marriage) and the New Woman’s sexuality.4 The novels of Sarah Grand, the most famous female New Woman writer, blame the failure of marriage on men, accusing men of sexual double standards and of infecting their wives with venereal disease and thus generally bringing misery and frustration to women (Cunningham 2-3). Yet despite such opposing portrayals, marriage (or anti-marriage), sexuality and domesticity are still the paramount concerns for both these male and female writers.5 While Grand’s descriptions of marriage problems and frustrations do touch the hearts of her mass female readers, her mostly upper-class New Woman characters are still removed from the daily financial worries of her more ordinary, less well-educated and mostly lower-middle-class and middle-class women readers.
This paper seeks to point out that while the issues of marriage and domesticity are indeed crucial ones in the New Women’s challenge of inequality and unfairness in the established categories, the phenomenon of the New Woman often presents a more complicated and variegated picture, and its multiple and changing nature reflects the volatile socio-cultural scene of the fin de siecle. Apart from marriage and domesticity, another strand of New Woman literature is increasingly concerned with the New Woman and her role as self-supporting worker in the commodified fin de siecle city. The New Woman novels by George Gissing, Ella Hepworth Dixon and Amy Levy, three works studied in this paper, belong to this strand. Such New Woman characters are usually less privileged and of lower-middle-class or middle-class origin. They have to work for their own livelihood, often as journalists or popular writers for the newly booming mass market provided by the big cities, and they equate self-supporting work with self-autonomy and female independence. These women thus participate in the urban commodity culture accelerating in the last years of the 19th century, and in their struggles and joys they are close to the heart of the expanding army of ordinary, less politically as conscious, working women who could no longer count on marriage but have to work for their own keep. The trials and hopes of such working and living experiences in the public spaces of the fin de siecle city is thus their top concern, a concern that also constitutes the main theme of this other branch of New Woman literature.
Indeed, apart from her more famous challenges of gender inequality, the New Woman is also very much a product of the modern city. Olive Schreiner, a key New Woman writer, has made it clear in her stories, for instance, that London lodgings and a silver cigarette case are the two essential marks of New Womanhood (qtd. in Showalter 1993: xvi), thereby underlining the importance of the urban ambience (particularly that of London) to the New Woman phenomenon. The rise of the New Woman writers and of New Woman literature has benefited from the escalation of urbanization, the spread of compulsory
4
. Hardy, famous for his descriptions of rural and small town life in the fictional Wessex, portrays the New Woman heroine Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure (1895). Though Sue worked for some time as an art-designer and teacher, she is, as Cunningham points out, less concerned with her career than with marriage and sexuality (110). Hardy himself acknowledged the centrality of the marriage question to the novel, and the contemporary reviewers focused on Sue’s sexuality, or her distaste of sex altogether, and called Sue, after Grant Allen’s free-love novel The Woman
Who Did, as the woman who won’t. Meredith’s 1885 novel Diana of the Crossways features an aristocratic feminist, but it is his 1894 novel Lord Ormont and his Aminta that shows most clearly the New Woman rhetoric of the 1890s. Meredith’sNew Woman heroine likewise is shown as torn between different lovers and preaches anti-marriage and free love mostly in domestic settings. See Cunningham 104-26.
5
. Though other female New Woman writers like Mona Caird reject marriage, Sarah Grand actually insists on the sanctity of marriage and home, contrary to mainstream perceptions of the New Woman as home-wreckers. Grand also calls for female sexual self-control instead of sexual self-expression and for the repression of unsanctioned desires. This rather conservative politics is seen by later critics as a failure to escape the biases of the race, class and sexual preferences that shape the gender politics she challenges (Mangum 13, 7; Bittle 35), but it also shows the complicated and multi-voiced nature of the New Woman literature. See also Tusan 172.
education, the entrance of educated women into the urban public sectors opened up by mass commodity culture, and the disruptions to established social and cultural categories all this has led to. Expanding commodity culture, in fueling the rise of popular journals and the mass market which caters to the growing urban population, has crucially provided a livelihood to many New Women writers and contributed toward their independence. This close relation to the market and to mass commodity culture is also a distinct trait marking most New Woman literature apart from more canonical literature and explains the often best-seller status of many New Woman texts. As such, the interaction between the New Women and the fin de siècle social scene should necessarily exceed a long-held political and moral dimension.6
From 1861 to 1901, the number of educated women finding employment in the professions (teachers, clerks and nurses) rose from 106,000 to 429,000. Of the professions, the clerk is a job most unambiguously belonging to the public sphere and used to be held exclusively by men. According to a 1901 census, the number of women employed as clerks in government agencies like the Post Office rose from 6,000 in 1881 to nearly 25,000 in 1901. With the expansion of commodity economy, women clerks employed by private companies also rose to 60,000 by the same year (Richardson and Willis 5). Yet the pay these professional women received was not ample and often not sufficient to maintain health, as is testified to by the findings of the late Victorian female social investigator Clara Collet (141-42). These independent yet struggling women no doubt provide a ready audience for the New Woman literature with its penchant for describing the struggles and longings of modern women. With the New Woman literature’s popular nature and wide sales, its frowned-upon “popular”“new”status as opposed to the “classics”(Ardis 4), it is perhaps not very conceivable that such literature should consolidate its often bestseller status and its apparent appeal to the urban female reader upon an exclusion or neglect of the modern urban public space or the daily facts of urban living or, for that matter, the mass commodity culture that daily affects women and has enabled their entrance into the workforce.
In recent scholarship on the New Woman (Ardis, Heilmann 1998, 2000a, 2004, Ledger, Nelson, Vadillo), most attention tends to focus on more established writers like Sarah Grand with her primary concerns for marriage and domesticity. The last few years have witnessed a welcoming increase of critical attention in other, less well-known New Woman works that feature single, less socially privileged New Woman characters working for survival in the modern city (Leggins, Vadillo). While such scholarship sheds new light on the relationship between the New Woman and the modern city, further detailed research is necessary to attain a better understanding of this traditionally neglected yet important subject. This paper seeks to prove that aside from the New Woman’s unconventional and radical challenges of established gender categories, a concern she duly replicates and carries on from the women’s movements activists of the earlier decades, the fin de siecle New Woman has also increasingly come to harbor an image of a modern urban woman struggling for independence and tackling the facts of daily living in the fin de siecle city. While many New Woman novels continue to problematize marriage and question its unequal nature, other New Women works already start to move on to a serious exploration of the alternative to marriage and the tribulations as well as comforts entailed by self-supporting employment in a big city. This important shift from marriage to market marks the fin de siecle New Woman literature away from earlier feminist representations of the woman issue. The ambience of female struggle has changed, and the place where female autonomy is to be exercised and nourished, often accompanied by pain and frustration, is distinctly the great cities.
This paper also seeks to contribute a fresh argument to this latest scholarship on the New Woman and the modern city. While the shift in focus to the other branch of New Woman literature helps to lead to an
6
. The women’s movement since the mid 19thcentury focused on the political and economic position of women and called for the female suffrage, the expansion of education possibilities for women , and elimination of unfair provision in property and marriage laws which resulted in the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882. The women activists’moral reform focused on social purification, a higher moral standard for the nation and the salvation of prostitutes. See Richardson and Willis 6-9. See also Bittel 26-7.
increasing blurring of distinction between the New Woman and the mass army of ordinary, not as politically conscious, modern women who are similarly engaged in the day-to-day battle of urban survival, it is the position of this paper that such conflation needs to be adequately explored and explained and not just taken for granted. In most of the more recent critical scholarship, such conflation tends to be treated as natural and unproblematic and the two types of women are often discussed in the same context without much distinction. This paper argues that while such blurring of distinction between the two types of women is indeed increasingly evidenced in many contemporary texts by the last years of the 19th century, other contrastive representations of the two also abound. The relationship between the New Woman and the ordinary modern women has undergone a process of evolution and is further complicated by elements like the acceleration of modern commodity culture and shifts in feminist tactics that mark the New Woman off from earlier feminists. This complexity warrants sufficient critical awareness and discussion, as it sheds crucial light on the multi-layered and volatile socio-cultural ambience of the fin de siecle city.
The New Woman and the Male Writer
This paper uses three New Woman novels as the main texts for analysis, respectively George Gissing’s
The Odd Women (1893), Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888) and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story
of a Modern Woman (1894). Gissing is chosen because male-penned literature featuring New Woman
characters has traditionally constituted the mainstream representation of the New Woman and thus impacts strongly on how the New Woman is perceived, against which female writers often feel the need to offer a contrastive or different representation. A better understanding of the female-penned New Woman literature would not be achieved if the male version is not first analyzed. A second, more important reason is that, as has been mentioned, Gissing is the only major male writer of New Woman literature who features lower-middle-class New Woman characters having to work for their own keep in the public markets of London. This is what warrants his inclusion in this paper’s study, for the same reason that warrants the inclusion of the other two female-penned novels.
Gissing has always been known for his naturalism, and his dogged pursuit of accuracy almost to the level of the social investigator, but it is his paramount preoccupation with London and its bustling urban life that is of crucial concern here. Always preoccupied with “how to get into a lifetime the work suggested by this myriad-voiced London,”7 Gissing was commended in 1897 by the National Review as a writer to whom there is “not a corner of the metropolis which, with observant eye and quick ear, he has not explored, nor a phase of its varied existence that he has not studied”.8 The new phenomenon of the New Woman and particularly her interaction with the urban scene are thus captured in his so-called “Woman’s Question” works of the 1890s (Harmon 373), most of all in The Odd Women (1893). In this novel, generally seen as the most representative male-penned fiction on the New Woman,9 Gissing carries on the male writers’ concern with the New Woman’s sexuality and her stand on the marriage issue, but, probably reflecting his distinctly urban concern and his sympathy for the lower social strata of London’s population who are deeply embroiled in the daily struggles for life, Gissing also departs from the other male writers in starting
7
. See his letter to Thomas Hardy on 25 July 1887. Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 139.
8
. The National Review, 30 (1897) 258-66. Quoted in Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge. Eds. George Gissing: The
Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, 311.
9
. Gissing’s other novels like In the Year of Jubilee have sometimes been seen as also featuring the New Woman (Parsons, Harmon), but this paper argues that such female protagonists like Nancy belong to the bulk of modern women who desire less restriction in their personal freedom but are not as politically conscious as the New Women (who are often writers or journalists) nor as well-educated. The social rank of Nancy, the female lead of In the Year
of Jubilee, is lower and hovers uncertainly between the lower-middle-class lady and the working-class shopgirl. For
to address the issue of the New Woman and urban employment.
This issue is discussed in the novel as part of his more passionate concern with the dilemma and plight of ordinary, lower-middle-class women struggling for survival in the modern city, and the example of the working New Woman is offered both as a contrast and also as a potential alternative. Gissing’s intention is to study the self-supporting, marriage-rejecting New Woman as an intriguing contrast to the many ordinary urban women still hoping for marriage, but his characteristic concern with the urban scene leads to a much more focused account, than most of his male peers, of the New Woman’s interaction with the modern city. Studies on Gissing’s portrayal of the New Woman have traditionally focused on her sexuality and anti-marriage attitude (Cunningham, Ledger). While recent critical attention has increasingly turned to Gissing’s treatment of the modern woman and the city (Liggins, Spiers), and even to his treatment of his women characters (including prostitutes, working-class women and educated female professionals) as individual workers in the urban market, not enough attention has been paid to the specific role of the New Woman herself as urban workers, the economics of her self-supporting work or her relationship with urban commodity culture. Nor has there been sufficient distinction between Gissing’s New Woman and her ordinary sisters in their interaction with the modern city.
Gissing’s stand on women in general is contradictory and he has been called both a misogynist (Linehan 360) and “a woman-worshipping misogynist with an interest in female emancipation”(Grylls 141), however limited that may be. His stand on the New Woman in particular is reflected in his depictions of the two feminists in the novel, Rhoda Nunn and her older, aristocratic companion Mary who together run a feminist vocational school in London and train women with practical skills for financial independence. Echoing much ofthemainstream perception,Gissing atfirstfocuseson Rhoda’sradicalism,herfeminist anti-marriage principle and her call for women to shed their passive, traditional femininity and embrace masculine rationality, determination and independence. Even more radical than most other male-penned works where free love is advocated by the New Woman as an alternative principle to marriage, in Gissing’s novel even free love is rejected and found to interfere with Rhoda’s feminist work. Rhoda herself is emphasized for her masculine, aggressive qualities (The Odd Women 20), “intellectual keenness”(20) and vehement will (51), and almost nun-like, severe suppression of feminine desires “natural”to a young woman in her late 20s. She and Mary form a same-sex companionship and together they teach young ordinary women practical skills for decent employment, lecture regularly on women’s emancipation and maintain a circulating library with books on the Woman Question and allied subjects (54). The two women, “fervid prophetess[es] of female emancipation”(50), are “strenuouslyopposed”to the Ruskinian ideal of docile femininity and advocate instead a model of women who are “militant,”“defiant,”“hard-hearted,” “self-reliant,”and “nobly independent,”possessed of “intelligence,”“honest effort”and “moral strength” (135, 37, 136).
Raising women as “an Invader”, Rhoda and Mary believe that “[t]hings are changing for women’, that they would try to “have our part in hastening a new order”(59) and to even effect “an armed movement,” “an active warfare,”“an invasion by women of the spheres which men have always forbidden us to enter” (135, 136). For that purpose they are particularly disdainful of sentimental, irrational qualities traditionally seen as feminine and warn their girl students not to be “enslaved by custom, by their weakness, by their desires”(136). “[S]elf-respect”and “self-restraint”should guide women to refrain from succumbing under “grievous temptation”(56), particularly temptation in the form of amorous relationships with men. Rhoda herself regards marriage as a form of bondage to the detriment of women because it subjugates them to the will and lordship of their husbands, and offers herself as a living example of positive female independence and freedom. When the male protagonist Everard proposes to her a union of intellects and free spirit without the form of marriage, Rhoda is first titillated, and then rejects the offer to emphasize her feminist gospel of independence.
The text’s presentation of Rhoda’s appearance and her determination to thwart the domination of men by cultivating masculine qualities of will and rationality echoes many press lampoons of the severely dressed, cigar-smoking, man-hating, blue-stocking New Women. The novel, for instance, abounds in
descriptions of Rhoda’s masculine, business-like and almost sexless appearance. Deliberately suppressing her feminine curves and advantages, Rhoda makes her first appearance in the text dressed in a nun-like black serge gown with white collar and cuffs and walking in strong, brisk, vigorous movements (20-1). When Rhoda is first introduced to her future admirer Everard, she is described to “have endeavored to liken herself to the suggestion of her name [Nunn] by the excessive plainness with which she had arranged her hair;”which makes her “look older,”and sits in a “stiff”attitude on an “upright”chair (78). As Rhoda gradually becomes titillated by Everard’s courtship, she changes her appearance and her “uniform black” dresses by wearing some “red silk blouse”(178) and arranging her hair in a more feminine fashion. By the end of the novel when she finally decides to reject Everard so as not to interfere with her feminist work, she again reverts to her old, unflattering hairstyle (323) as if to assert her defiant independence and her disdain of any “feminine”efforts to please men.
It is obvious that the novel sets out to represent the New Woman as a contrast from the ordinary women,thedifferencespeltoutclearly in termsofthe New Woman’sradicalpoliticalconsciousness,her masculine determination and even appearance, her activism and work ethic, her sexual and emotional abstinence and principled rejection of unequal marriage. Ordinary women like Monica who relies on marriage and men to save her from destitution are thus shown to be doubly pathetic, helpless and passive. Monica, born of a doctor father but reduced to the menial job of a London shopgirl after his untimely death, marries in haste for purely financial considerations, while her two elder spinster sisters, utterly unable to support themselves in the big city, count on Monica’s marriage to relieve their circumstances. In stark contrast from the workaholic Rhoda who preaches relentlessly the doctrine of hard work, disciplined independence and an almost nun-like abstinence from desires and temptations, the delicate and feminine Monica also enjoys pleasurable and aimless “free wandering about London”(25), taking rides in omnibuses, trains and the Thames steamboat, drinking tea at the popular tea-shops, and generally doing things that seem to have no positive or productive value apart from individual pleasure. Even in her pre-married days when toiling in poverty as a shopgirl, Monica would rather bear the hardship at the shop than become a studentin Rhoda’sfeminist school which she regards as a “worse form of bondage”(36). Another student, a Miss Royston who has been with the school for some time, also cannot persist in the hard work but drops out after succumbing to the temptation of an easy life as mistress of a married man. Rhoda, of course, has no patience but complete disdain for such feather-headed weakness and refuses to take back the girl later when she is abandoned and ruined. Even the girl’s eventual suicide after Rhoda’s rejection would not dissuade Rhoda from her firm belief that to work for the coming ofa“new order”, to raise women’s consciousness and cultivate their disciplined independence demands great but worthy sacrifices.
In such emphasis on theNew Woman’s radicalism and distance from ordinary women, Gissing seems to inherit many established popular perceptions of the New Woman’s predecessor, the women’s movement activists of the earlier decades. In the feminist campaigns and rallies for women’s rights and equality since the mid-century, a perception lingers on of their radical idealism, their crusader-like discipline and militancy, and their stigmatization of marriage and often men in general that seems to remove them from the mundane reaches of ordinary life and ordinary women. Fin de siecle ideas of the New Woman often carry on this perception; however upon a closer reading, this Gissing novel also delineates dimensions to the New Woman phenomenon that is more particular to and aggravating in the fin de siecle period. Women’s movement activists have long called for female independence and autonomy, but while many upper-middle-class New Women’s own independence has been enabled and buttressed by a private income, for most ordinary women, marriage, however confining, still provides the only livelihood. By the fin de
siecle period with the expansion of mass commodity culture and the creation of more jobs for women, that
feminist goal seems to find more sympathy among ordinary women and reaches into wider ranks as viable alternatives to marriage look increasingly likely. Here the New Woman’s call for female independence, motivated by more political and social concerns, and the ordinary women’s desire for less restriction and greater freedom and self-determination, couched in more individually-based terms, seem to converge and expand, and that convergence is made possible by the greatly expanded scopes for employment for women
by the fin de siecle period. Two strands of ideas about the New woman are thus interwoven into this Gissing novel, one a more generalized call for women’s spiritual upraising and for the dismantling of weak femininity, which speaks of earlier, mid-century roots in the women’s movement and which is also often lampooned by the conservative mass press as unfeminine, unnatural or disruptive of gender order, and the other a detailed discussion of practical, down-to-earth means of achieving a new means of self-reliance and independence, often through participating in the market and the commodity culture.
Thisisadistinctdimension thatsetsGissing’snovelofffrom many othermale-penned New Woman works.Gissing’sNew Woman characterisfirmly located in the urban context of London and crucially recognizing the impact of modern market forces. No longer just confined to domesticity and agitating over marriage and sexuality, the New Woman character is shifting her feminist focus to an advocacy of female autonomy through self-supporting work in the modern city. Rhoda in The Odd Women may make fervent, idealistic calls for female emancipation and equality, but such idealism is also followed with practical prescriptions entirely predicated upon women’s entry into the urban commercial world. That takes the form of learning the know-how and acquiring the funds of opening up small high-street businesses like the bookshop and chemist’s, starting a popular magazine, or most commonly equipping oneself for hire in the public commercial world as typists, clerks and bookkeepers (141). Rhoda’s feminist school is a vocational training school providing such skills, and it is able to prosper because her students, all non-feminists, are able to support themselves in the city with such skills. Most these women still desire marriage, but as is demonstrated in the case of Monica, increasing awareness of women’s rights and particularly of possible self-supporting alternatives to marriage should the latter prove unsuccessful have made women less afraid and more self-assertive and more, as Monica’s bitter husband sees it, accepting of a diluted form of feminist ideas (164). When Rhoda and Mary talk about women as the invader, it is specifically women as invaders into the urban, male commercial world that they have in mind. Such public invasion has not been possible in earlier decades, but with the participation of more ordinary women in urban employment by the end of the 19thcentury, their social importance and expanding number do make an impact. Mary has made it clear that her school does not train women for traditional genteel and feminine jobs like governesses or lady’s companions, which are still confined to the domestic area and which she regards as actually hampering women’s survival on their own in the modern city. In the same way that she and Rhoda help launch their students into the public commodity world, the school itself, located as it is in Great Portland Place in the heart of the West End and containing a houseful of typewriters for students to practice on, looks like “comfortable offices”(54) of a modern business. Though Mary professes not to “look upon her enterprise as a source of pecuniary profit”, the fact that it is indeed an enterprise, that it is “more than self-supporting” (55) and has made a profit, does serve to point to its business nature.
The result is that increasingly the New Woman’sfield ofinterestconvergeswith thatoftheordinary urban women, as both view the urban market as offering daunting challenges as well as possibilities. This leads to the result that though Gissing sets out to distinguish the two types of women, the novel ends up presenting many links between the two. The New Woman may traverse into overtly political domains, but ultimately, what defines a woman’s success and her autonomy in this novel is her independence and success in the market, her ability to financially support herself. As Rhoda’s own example demonstrates, even any kind of heterosexual relationship, including the ideal free-love, can be relinquished in favor of independent work at the vocational school. This sacrifice, instead of being interpreted as testifying to the New Woman’s sexual frigidity or unnatural abstinence, may actually mean that the New Woman in this Gissing novel has left behind the earlier preoccupation with marriage and sexuality and has instead embraced self-supporting employment as the most important subject for feminist attention and investigation at this stage. Urban work is now the new focus. When Gissing entitles the book The Odd Women and includes the New Woman among these odd women with whom there is simply “no making a pair”(37), he initially refers to their inability or refusal to get married. But by this stage, such grouping of the New Woman with the ordinary, single women also seems to refer to their shared need to face the challenge of working for self-independence in the modern city. Admittedly the better-educated and more determined New Woman is
more favorably equipped, but the text unwittingly exposes the underlying links between the New Woman and her ordinary sisters.
This is particularly seen in the New Woman character Rhoda. Rhoda herself is not just an idealistic feminist but combines her idealism with shrewd, business skills. She knows enough about the market to be able to give advice to Monica’s sisters on the feasibility of starting a kindergarten business. She promises to write for her student’s future magazine, and very possibly on feminist topics, but as testified by the bulk of feminist or women-friendly popular magazines of the time, such ideas are often packaged in a way so that the New Woman’s agenda on female emancipation is seen as not incongruous to ordinary women’s not so politically conscious desire for less restriction on their spatial movement and enlarged possibilities for both employment and leisure. Many New Woman writers contribute both to feminist magazines and more mainstream commercial ones (more later), and the former, itself often borrowing the promotional and vision-oriented skills of the commercial ones, is more enthusiastic than not about allying with modern commodity culture and about what some feminists see as the emancipatory potential of women’s participation in commodity culture.10
Admittedly, some feminists are also uneasy about the deceptive manipulation of ordinary women by business entrepreneurs. Rhoda, for instance, preaches hard discipline and disdains easy capitulation to desires for all kinds of frivolous pleasures which the commodity culture often promises to satisfy among its consumers. When she teaches commercial skills and aids the setting up of small businesses, it is more along the line of encouraging women to work and more likely based on a polarity between a privileged work ethic and a despised passivity or weakness for pleasure. But it must also be noted that such businesses the New Woman open or work for depend for their prosperity on the custom of ordinary shoppers and consumers, and in this sense even the pleasure-seeking,“passive”participation by ordinary women as consumers in the commodity culture is indispensable to and of benefit to the feminist agenda as the latter depends on the interaction and mutual promotion between the New Woman and the ordinary women. In this sense, though the novel on the one hand seems to set up a contrast between the New Woman’s focus on hard work and determined self-responsibility on the one hand, and the ordinary women’s lack of determination and easy capitulation to temptation and leisurely consumption, on the other, it also incorporates ideas that reflect the New Woman’s own increasing immersion in the market and the mutually supportive relationship between the New Woman and ordinary women.11
Already a difference is discernible between the more traditional New Woman Mary and the more modern and more urban Rhoda. Mary, like most women’s activists of the previous generations, is of upper-class origin and enjoys the privilege of a private income. Mary is mostly shown in domestic settings in the novel and surrounded by the cozy and well-furnished domesticity of her house which her private income makes possible. She rarely travels outside, and though she may advocate for women’s “invasion” into the public masculine realm and for public, political reforms, her feminism is also emphasized for its private, domestic nature. Mary is “no platform woman”and does her feminist work in a quiet way. She gives her talks in her own school to a dozen of her students, and even in terms of ordinary acquaintances, “[o]f society in the common sense Miss Barfoot saw very little”(54), preferring the secluded privacy of a gentlewoman not very dissimilar to traditional feminine domesticity.
10
. An example of the feminist magazine of this period is The Woman Worker, published by the National Federation of Women Workers. Its first issue published in September 1907 looks familiarly similar to other non-feminist mass women’s magazines in that ads and illustrations litter the page. Suffragette slogans like “WOMEN SHOULD VOTE”are arranged in the same eye-catching manner (in boldface and with exclamation marks) alongside ads for Fenning’s Children’s Powders (British Library, Newspaper Library). For information on differing fin de siecle feminist responses to the impact of commodity culture, see Rappaport 82-5, 94, 101, 166.
11
. New cultural studies scholarship has emerged in recent years to address the complicated relationship between feminists and modern commodity culture. See, for instance, Rappaport. This study tries to bring this subject to bear upon Gissing’s novels and to explore how this issue is given its literary representation.
By contrast, Rhoda is already showing signs of difference. Coming from middle-class stock whose circumstances suggest a closer affinity with those of Monica and her sisters rather than with the more aristocratic Mary, Rhoda is shown to be more a city girl than Mary. While Mary stays mostly indoors, Rhoda is in charge of all the errands of the school that needs her to take constant trips around London. Not just taking her typing work to her office or from prospective clients, Rhoda is also shown as knowing the city well when she visits friends around the town, follows the unhappy Monica to find out about the latter’s affair, and travels by herself to suburban towns or even farther away to seaside resorts alone.12 Rhoda’s personal taste may reflect a traditional, nostalgic preference for the country and for a rustic, slow-paced, pre-commercial way of life, but she leaves no doubt that it is London, with its unprecedented opportunities and freedom, that proves the magnetic destination for her as a professional and as a feminist. Just as the more pleasure-seeking Monica left her small town for London not just because she was tired of the “dull country life”and was drawn by the thrill and excitement of London’s “shops and the people“(73), but also because she was “obliged to conduct herself”with “extreme discretion”in the country (31) while London by contrast affords her greater freedom, the New Woman Rhoda also left her small town home first for the provincial city of Bath to work in a department store and then soon after to London to work in an office—“It was a move towards London, and I couldn’t rest till I had come the whole way”(22). It is definitely in the city and not in the country that is to be located greater possibilities for women. And when the New Woman like Rhoda advocates female emancipation, it is beyond doubt a type of emancipation located in and contributed to by the distinctly urban ambience of bigger cities at a time of accelerated commercial development.
Rhoda as the New Woman not just possesses a distinct urban identity, but her own previous experience as a clerk and bookkeeper and her closer affinity with Monica and her destitute sisters suggest that by the
fin de siecle period, the line between the New Woman and the bulk of ordinary women may not be that
clearly demarcated. The novel may focus on Rhoda’s strength and her determination, but her similar past suggests that she herself must have gone through the same physical hardships and mental uncertainties and fears that Monica and her sisters are going through in order to get a foothold in the modern city. At the same time Rhoda has also been drawn to the big city because of similar anticipation of greater freedom and less restriction. The New Woman who has to work for her own keep finds herself increasingly interacting and in sympathy with her ordinary sisters. And this seems to have led to a subtle shift whereby the formerly emphatic political and social focus of the women’s movement is now adjusted toward a broader agenda that sees opportunities for political appropriations in the escalation of urban commodity culture. This is certainly an important dimension in the fin de siecle New Woman phenomenon that adds complications to an earlier, more monotonous image of the politically and socially radical women’s movement activists.
The New Woman and Female Writers
Male writings on the New Woman have traditionally constituted the mainstream representation of the
12
. Sally Ledger has argued that Monica is more streetwise and mobile around London streets than the mostly domestically bound Rhoda, and that Gissing’s work “wishes to contain the New Woman”and “refus[es] to articulate her presence in the public spaces of the city”(168). But this paper seeks to point out that though the novel does not as often depict Rhoda’s mobility than Monica’s, there is already a difference in the presentations of the two New Women whereby the younger Rhoda, with her ex-shopgirl status and work experience in shops and offices in the past and as de facto business manager of the vocational school at present, is more streetwise. While the novel may give less space depicting Rhoda’s mobility than Monica’s streetwalking which so irritates and threatens her conservative husband, it may well be that the New Woman Rhoda’s freedom to roam the streets of her own as a single, unattached woman is taken more for granted and resigned to by men. Anyway her darting between Great Portland Street, Herne Hill, Mrs Cosgrove’s residence and Milly Besper’s lodgings when she tries to find out about Monica demonstrates her easy familiarity with the London streets.
New Woman, against which female writers in their “reverse”discourse often have to take up a defensive tone, highlighting qualities in the New Woman that deliberately depart from male representations. As has been mentioned, while many famous female-penned New Woman novels still revolve around marriage and sexuality, another branch of New Woman fiction has started to feature less socially privileged New Woman characters who are of genteel birth but are forced to struggle for economic survival in the modern city after disruptions to traditional class affiliations, often caused by expanding commodity culture, lead to drastic changes in their family circumstances. This type of writings thus necessarily revolves around the New Woman’s interaction with the modern city and urban work, and Amy Levy’s The Romance of the Shop and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman, both bestsellers in their time, provide two female-penned examples.
Though both dealing with the same theme of the New Woman and urban work, the two female-penned novels also demonstrate tangible differences from Gissing’s novel. As has been pointed out, Gissing’s work sets out to portray the New Woman as distinct from her ordinary sisters. Though the text may eventually turn out to imply inherent links between the two types of women, Gissing’s presentation suggests that the New Woman, once she takes up feminist teachings and work, is much more assured in her financial prospects. All the bitter struggles and mental fears and frustrations that accompany urban survival on one’s own seem to be confined to only ordinary women like Monica (before her marriage) and her sisters. Rhoda as the New Woman is instead always shown as confident and steadfast once she joins Mary and leaves her early days behind. Her only worries and agitations are over her emotional entanglement with her lover as she fights to repress her feelings and reject his love. This leads to a rather optimistic picture of the working and living experience of the New Woman in the big city, against which the much more realistic portrayals of the heart-rending, day-to-day hardships of the Madden sisters are offered as a contrast. It is in this respect that the two female-penned novels show a marked departure. Indeed, the two heavily autobiographical novels by Levy and Dixon give a much more realistic and nuanced picture of the stark basics of the life of a New Woman working to survive in the big city. The New Woman characters still have progressive feminist ideas on gender and other social issues, but more space is devoted to the realistic details of their day-to-day urban struggle. Here the New Woman, despite her better education and feminist consciousness, are shown as not really transcendent of the struggles and bitter frustrations miring most ordinary, non-feminist women. The line between the two types of women is even more blurred, and the struggles, fears and joys of the New Woman as members of the ever expanding army of urban women employees are closer to the hearts of the bulk of the mass female readers.
Perhaps because of this affinity, these New Woman works often adopt a complicated, nuanced approach to the situation of working women in the modern city. While Gissing’s New Woman more optimistically predicts an emancipated future for modern women if they have the right skills and consciousness, in the female-penned works, emotions are more mixed. The greater, unprecedented freedom brought by women’s entrance into the urban public realm is indeed positively appreciated and advocated as necessary for female autonomy, but these works are also weighed down with frustration and even bitterness over the hardness of the struggle and the loneliness plaguing the female characters. Two traits seem thus to characterize such New Woman writings. One is that these New Woman characters, all emphasized to be highly feminine and thus different from the mannish, determined women in Gissing’s and other male writers’works, view self-supporting employment and urban survival in the fin de siecle market economy as beneficial to female autonomy and feminist consciousness-raising. Second is that this appreciation is also combined with a heavy sense of frustration and pain wherein such work is recognized as offering no easy solution but is instead costly and fraught with weighty problems.
Amy Levy’s novel The Romance of the Shop features such a New Woman character Gertrude whose unconventionality rests less with her explicit political or sexual radicalism than with her rejection of traditional marriage for independent survival in London through self-supporting work and employment. Critics have commented on Gertrude’s attempt at being a female writer as typical of the heroines of most New Woman novels (Parsons 92-3; Vadillo 213-18). Gertrude and her three single sisters are forced to sell
