The New Woman in embryo: Masculine women in Victorian Novels (original) (raw)

In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft defined the term "Masculine woman" as "the imitation of manly virtues, or (more accurately) the achieving of the talents and virtues that ennoble the human character and raise females in the scale of animal being when they are brought under the comprehensive label 'mankind'" (33). 102 years later, in 1894, Sarah Grand coined the term "New Woman" as the term for a woman liberated from oppressive Victorian standards, who "does not in the least intend to sacrifice the privileges she enjoys…especially of the kind which man seems to think she must aspire to as so much more desirable" (273). In that century between those two terms, there is a history of women fighting for the necessary reforms that would allow them equal freedoms to their male counterparts. In this paper, I will examine three novels-Wuthering Heights, Daniel Deronda, and Jude the Obscure-in the context of Victorian society and women's issues at the time, highlighting how the struggles faced by the heroines in each novel are congruent with the silent struggles of women at the time. Each of these novels features