A Woman's Novel: Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, and Hélène Cixous'sÉcriture Féminine

Abstract

In the 1880s and 1890s, New Woman writers changed the face of British society and British fiction through their sexually open works, which critiqued old notions of marriage, and through their stylistic experimentation, which announced the modernist novel. New Woman scholarship has often studied their work in connection with that of French feminists of the late twentieth century, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous. This article reconsiders the nature of this connection through a close examination of novels by two of the most popular New Woman authors, Mona Caird (1854–1932) and Olive Schreiner (1855–1920). I read Caird's The Wing of Azrael (1889) and Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) through the lens of Hélène Cixous's theories of écriture féminine, or feminine writing, to question the accusation of biological determinism which is frequently directed at both groups of writers. By applying Cixous's notions of feminine aesthetics, bisexuality, and alterity to Caird and Schreiner, my study provides the basis for a new understanding of their novels. More generally, it complements and qualifies the connection between the New Woman and so-called French feminism, thereby helping produce a more complex framework to study the fin de siècle.