Keynotes and Discords

Abstract

The most conspicuous ‘keynotes’ of New Woman fiction, at least for its late-Victorian readership, were the gender and sexual politics of the writers: whether they welcomed or detested feminism, contemporary critics agreed that it was the ‘Modern Woman’ from whose pen the new fiction was springing. The stability provided by the concurrence of gender and genre is misleading, however, for the attempt to define the ideological parameters of the New Woman novel immediately points up a number of ‘discords’. Evidently it was a novel that broke with sexual taboos in literature; but was it celebrating sex (in women: Ellis’s Seaweed) or castigating it (in men: Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman)? Were its protagonists daringly ‘modern’ women because they lived with men who were not their husbands (Dix’s The Image Breakers), or because they lived without the men who were (Grand’s Ideala)? Did writers exalt women’s mothering capacities (Iota’s A Yellow Aster) or blame mothers for their daughters’ subjection (Caird’s Daughters of Danaus)! These dissonances raise a number of questions: to what extent did writers adopt allegorical and Utopian modes of writing in order to be able to project idealized solutions to the woman question they were unable to address from within a realist framework? In its self-reflexivity and disruption of the conventional structures of the Victorian novel, did New Woman fiction offer a politically inspired variant to malestream experimentations with genre and form?