'The New Woman at Home and Abroad: Fiction, female identity and the British Empire' (original) (raw)

‘Marie Corelli's British new woman: A threat to empire?’

At the height of the British Empire, England was in the midst of major social, economic and moral upheaval. The roles and status of middle-class women were particularly affected by many of these changes. In turn, as the gap between idealism and ‘reality’ grew, the validity or usefulness of Victorian notions or ideals of womanhood increasingly came under attack. Arising from this commotion was the figure of the late Victorian and Edwardian ‘New Woman.’ Her appearance provoked further confusion and ambiguity about gender that had repercussions for empire. This paper addresses the way in which the role of English women in sustaining the British Empire intensified the social pressures on them in the metropole. It examines the threat to nation and empire represented by the New Woman by looking at how she was presented to the rapidly growing general reading public at the end of the nineteenth- and beginning of the twentieth century. This is achieved by looking at the bestselling novels of Marie Corelli, a phenomenally popular turn-of-the-century author. Corelli's novels repeatedly affirm that the New Woman represented the threat of ‘modernity,’ that she was a danger to ‘civilisation’ and therefore to British imperialism.

Threatening the Victorian Empire: Colonialism and Womanhood

San Román Cazorla, Julio, 2019

This work, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four and A Scandal in Bohemia, will deal with the analysis of Victorian society, considering Imperialism as the beginning of a new way of thinking and industrialization as a reflection of the new ideology and social system in Great Britain. I will develop the explanation of the Victorian project, dealing with the threat that imperialism supposed to it, the ‘Woman Question’, the creation of a collectively-driven personality and the differences between social classes, exposing the character of Sherlock Holmes as the ultimate Victorian gentleman (according to the ideas of the Carlylean hero).

The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women’s Fiction

Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, 2014

The vast majority of novels and periodicals read by colonial Australian girls were written and published in Britain. ‘Daughters of the Southern Cross’ were more likely to have access to the Girl’s Own Paper by subscription or to imported fictions that had proven popular with British girl readers than any locally produced depictions of girlhood. From the 1880s, however, Australian authors produced several milestone fictions of girlhood for both adult and juvenile audiences. Rosa Praed's An Australian Heroine (1880) and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl (1890) gave voice to the lived experience of Australia for young women, and their publication in Britain contributed to an emergent reciprocal transpacific flow of literary culture. Two canonical Australian novels that focus on the maturation of girl protagonists who live on bush homesteads were also published in this period. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894) and Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) feature intelligent girls who are not able to be effectively socialised to embrace domesticity. Turner’s Judy Woolcot is distinct among her six siblings as a plucky girl who instigates trouble, while Franklin’s aspiring writer Sybylla Melvyn is informed that ‘girls are the helplessest, uselessest, troublesomest little creatures in the world.’ The 1890s saw an agricultural depression in Australia that only fuelled the urban perpet-uation of the idealised and nationalistic bushman myth in literary and popular culture. The ubiquity of the myth problematised any attempt to situate women heroically within the nation outside of the home. British fictional imaginings of Australian girls lauded their lack of conformity and physical abilities and often showed them bravely defending the family property with firearms. In contrast, Australian domestic fiction, this chapter argues, is unable to accommodate bracing female heroism, postulating ambiguous outcomes at best for heroines who deviate from the feminine ideal. Judy’s grandmother describes her ‘restless fire’ as something that ‘would either make a noble, daring, brilliant woman of her’, or ‘would flame up higher and higher and consume her’. Turner does not allow Judy’s unconventionality to prosper. Instead, she is killed by a falling gum tree while saving the life of her brother, leaving the future fulfilment of the domestic ideal to her sister, Meg, whose subsequent story occupies Little Mother Meg (1902). Franklin’s Sybylla expresses her inability to be content with the simple pleasures of keeping a home, and this informs her decision to reject a marriage proposal from a wealthy suitor. The novel’s indeterminate conclusion does not allow fulfilment of Sybylla’s writing aspirations, situating her outside the feminine ideal yet not affirming the merits of her desire to reject married life. While Sharyn Pearce suggests that Judy’s tragic end follows a narrative pattern that sup-ports the glorification of male heroes and renders ‘over-reaching women’ as ‘noble failures’, the novel might also productively be read within the context of other fictions featuring girl protagonists of the period, such as Praed and Martin's novels. This chapter makes the case that Turner and Franklin’s thwarted heroines critique the containment of Australian girls to the banalities of the home by exposing the negative and uncertain outcomes for those who desire the freedoms and aspirations permitted to boys and men. Unlike British fictions that champion adventurous girls, these Australian fictions critique the continuation of gendered restrictions in the colonies by proposing that girls who desire excitement and independence ‘should have been…boy[s]’ (as Sybylla’s mother remarks).

An Overview of Feminism in the Victorian Period [1832-1901]

This paper examines the concept of the “New-Woman” in Victorian literature in all genres written by men and women.The “New-Woman” was also referred to at this time as the “Woman Question”.In this paper the “New- Woman”, the “ Woman Question” and feminism are interchangeable. This write-up handles four issues: the problem faced by the Victorian woman, events, legislation and publications crucial to Victorian feminism, Queen Victorian and feminism and lastly the Victorian writer and the “Woman Question”.The Victorian writer wrote essays, novels, plays and poems.Using the feminist critical theory, the paper argues that the predominant theme in Victorian literature was the presentation of the “New- Woman”.The paper reveals that the “Woman Question” was so preoccupying that no writer could avoid it during the Victorian period and that feminism really or essentially started during the Victorian period when women were given or got remarkable improvements in their lives.

The Feminine Experience in the Margins of the British Empire (2012)

The book investigates the representations of Canada circulating at the heart of the British Empire, in the "metropolis", during the three decades preceding Canadian Confederation. The author uses Canada as an epitome for the "white" Empire. Readers will be interested in discovering which representations the Victorian public read and conceived about Canada, at the beginning of the “second” British Empire, through popular women’s travelogs and emigration narratives. The book analyses the general debate on empire building circulating in the public sphere, by taking into account its Canadian margins and their representation, through books published by well-known London publishing houses whose involvement in such “colonial” works is also examined in the course of the book.

A panoramic view of ‘the New Woman’ in Victorian literature

RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi

The great social and cultural changes in the Victorian period had a great impact on gender roles. In both public and private sphere, the divisions in gender roles started to disappear with the emergence of a type of woman willing to be active in every area of life. Along with more frequent appearance and growing numbers of women in the work force through the late nineteenth century Elaine Showalter’s notion of “sexual anarchy” and its different forms were invigorated. How the social status of women started to change along with industrialization by the end of the nineteenth-century was also reflected upon Victorian literature. For instance, in Mrs Warren’s Profession the protagonist Vivie represents the new woman type who is ambitious to get education and to participate in work life as a self-sufficient woman in Victorian drama. When compared with the traditional woman type, she is more free-minded, independent and career-oriented. In D. H. Lawrence’ The Rainbow, Ursula, is another s...

An Overview of Feminism in the Victorian Period

"The New Zealand New Woman: Translating a British Cultural Figure to a Colonial Context"

While New Woman scholarship has been a lively element of Victorian studies for the last thirty years, less attention has been given to the colonial space and the pressure it puts on the New Woman in the way in which her freedoms differed from that of her British counterpart. This essay for the Global Circulation Project begins to interrogate how the historical moment of the New Woman movement translates to a New Zealand context in the fiction of three turn-of-the-century New Zealand writers: Julius Vogel (1835-1899), Louisa Alice Baker (1856-1926), and Edith Searle Grossmann (1863-1931). The state of criticism on each of these writers has tended to focus on their productive engagement with New Zealand cultural history rather their being situated within a New Woman literary tradition. Ranging from the late 1880s through to 1910, their writing shows a progression from a utopian vision of harmony between Britain and the colonies, to a refutation of the intellectual and cultural limitations of the colonial setting, and finally, to a rejection of Britain in favour of a distinctly New Zealand home. The three novels under analysis here are judged to be examples of New Zealand New Woman fiction, and are recuperated within a wider framework of late nineteenth-century New Woman writing.

'The New Woman at Home and Abroad: Fiction, female identity and the British Empire' (original) (raw)

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