Abstract
The New Woman writing of the 1890s grappled with the legacy of mid-nineteenth century constructions of romance and gender ideology. In their bid to promote a new vision of heterosexual relations between the sexes, New Woman writers often explicitly engaged with earlier ideals of Separate Spheres and the “Angel in the House.” The short story provided an ideal form for exploring these issues, freeing writers from the generic conventions of the traditional three-volume novel. This article examines the ways in which three women writers of the 1890s attempted to rewrite the script of mid-Victorian courtship through the short story genre. In different, but related ways, Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing Room,” Ella D’Arcy’s “The Pleasure Pilgrim” and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s “One Doubtful Hour” all offer a challenge to the doctrine of separate spheres. Yet, while each of these texts critique what they present as outmoded views of woman’s sphere and nature, they also articulate the difficulties experienced by both genders in imagining an evolved and improved model of sexual relations. These short stories represent the collapse in New Woman fiction of the traditional “courtship plot” through a failure to re-imagine and re-map the mid-Victorian gender ideology they seek to dismantle.
Highlights
In Mona Caird’s 1887 novel, One That Wins, a character articulates a problem that would increasingly exercise the New Woman writer throughout the 1890s: “Must we women eternally be forced to choose between liberty and love? Must the apple of life always be cut in two, so that we can never feel in our hands the rounded whole, but only the hard-edged half?” (Caird 1887, 2: 45)
The short story is short precisely because of the kind of experience or reality embodied in it, and the kind of experience we find in the short story reflects a mode of knowing which differs essentially from the mode of knowing we find in the novel. (May 1984: 328)
By the fin de siècle, New Woman writers were rethinking women’s relationship to both public and private spaces, and the idea of separate spheres offered a logical point of reference for their various critiques and deconstructions of traditional boundaries
Summary
In Mona Caird’s 1887 novel, One That Wins, a character articulates a problem that would increasingly exercise the New Woman writer throughout the 1890s: “Must we women eternally be forced to choose between liberty and love? Must the apple of life always be cut in two, so that we can never feel in our hands the rounded whole, but only the hard-edged half?” (Caird 1887, 2: 45). Key Words Mona Caird; Ella D’Arcy; Ella Hepworth Dixon; New Woman; short story; Victorian courtship plot.
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