“She looked ten years older”: Mechanisms of the new Woman's marriage and premature aging under patriarchy in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins

Abstract

This article examines how the New Woman's premature aging happens in tandem with patriarchal marriage at the fin de siècle through a scrutiny of Sarah Grand's New Woman novel, The Heavenly Twins (1893/1992). The novel is a narrative of female degeneration, in which its three young and married New Woman characters become impuissant to realize the cumbersome feminized ideals of national regeneration and age or die prematurely in their twenties. Their premature decline is caused by moral and sexual degeneration of their military husbands who practice the ideology of progress at the imperial frontier. In the article, I explain how the patriarchal culture of the late Victorian society expedites women's aging process in marriage. The symptoms of mental and physical sickness experienced by the novel's Victorian wives in their twenties are a product not merely of excruciating syphilis but also the patriarchal culture. I ultimately contend that Grand unveils the other side of the male-oriented ideology of progress in criticizing the late Victorian reality where there is negligible scope for the New Woman's vision of female-led regeneration.