The Old Woman’s Farcical Rejuvenation in The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1897)

Abstract

Charlotte O’Conor Eccles’s The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1897) is a comedic New Woman narrative in which a lonely, middle-aged, single woman gets rejuvenated after drinking an elixir. Miss Semaphore’s rejuvenation goes wrong, for she accidentally turns into an infant—not a beautiful woman in her twenties—and goes through babyfarming, which was a grave social problem in the Victorian era. At first glimpse, the text seems to make a farcical mockery of the old maid, but it also allows the aging female character to transgress Victorian gender and age norms. My goal is therefore to discuss how Eccles uses humour in letting her protagonist accidentally live backward and develop into a social activist, who testifies in court as a victim and witness of child abuse in the workhouse. Initially, the middle-class protagonist and her sister appear as old-fashioned Old Women at the beginning, but once the former unexpectedly turns into an infant, she indeed gets pushed out of a social safety net, as babyfarmers illegally adopt and abuse her. Eccles creates an ironic situation where the Old Women rejuvenate metaphorically into radical New Woman activists, who raise their own voice to fight against the given system of the world, in which unmarried women and their unwanted children are constantly marginalized. I claim that the comic rejuvenation enables the Old Woman characters to deviate from the normative women’s views and be reborn as New Women. The female rejuvenation plot bridges the gap between the New Woman and the Old Woman in a way that allows the formulation of New Woman ideals. The first part of my article will discuss Eccles’s and other New Woman writers’ critical essays on the female life course. The second part will scrutinize how Eccles’s comedic novel itself responds to the late Victorian female aging question. I ultimately argue that Eccles’s humorous New Woman narrative serves as a critique of social injustice that women and children were faced with in the late nineteenth century.