Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London by Elizabeth F. Evans

Abstract

Reviewed by: Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London by Elizabeth F. Evans Mary Jean Corbett Elizabeth F. Evans. Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London. Cambridge UP, 2019. xii + 261 pp. Threshold Modernism integrates several distinctive approaches to literary and cultural analysis in engaging, insightful ways. Elizabeth F. Evans charts the emergence of (primarily) middle-class women, actual and fictional, into turn-of-the-century London's public sphere, with particular attention to their work in shops, their presence on streets, and their participation in clubs. She argues as well that the new visibility of such women gave "perceived outsiders . . . a method for articulating their own belonging in the imperial city" (6), a point most closely borne out in her final chapter on the reverse imperial ethnographies undertaken by colonial men of color. And because it [End Page 574] takes its initial bearings from late-Victorian developments, the study extends modernism's temporal and spatial dimensions in provocative fashion, establishing the centrality of women's increasingly palpable participation in the London scene between 1880 and 1940 to "the material and ideological transformations of the age" (7). If the "public woman" (6) had long been shorthand for the prostitute, while "the new woman" (22) could be alternately construed as sexless or oversexed, then the term "new public woman" (6) foregrounds "the notably public presence of women nonetheless claiming respectability" (15), some of whom were "simultaneously the object of the gaze and its knowing conductor" (28). The first chapter, which closely analyzes visual and verbal representations of the barmaid, develops a genealogy that links this type (and several others) through their participation in everyday life—as walkers, workers, or activists—and not just as objects of display. To register the dual status of the "new public woman" (6) as both spectacle and spectator, Evans coins the term "spectacality" (27), of which Édouard Manet's Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882) forms an apt example. While the barmaid may be figured as a type, for example, she potentially leverages her visibility for her own ends, suggesting that even such types contain the seeds of a subjectivity forged in the interplay between looking and being looked at. The second chapter considers three very different fictions of the shopgirl. In her discussion of Millicent Henning from Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886), Evans claims that this "strikingly underanalyzed character" (43) is much more "integral to the novel's main plot" (45) than most critics have noted. Millicent exemplifies James's own fascination with "spectacality" (27) in her "occupation of public rather than private spaces" (53), and Evans makes the important point that readers have no access to either Millicent's rooms or her consciousness. The agency she derives from her liminal status—not a "public woman" (6), in the sexual sense, but not a lady either—contrasts sharply with that of other shopgirl characters Evans considers. With their father's death issuing in the loss of financial and social status, the Lorimer sisters of Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop (1888) start up a photography business, while only the youngest, most marriageable of the four orphaned Madden sisters in George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893) becomes a shopgirl. Thus, the concerns these fictions develop—about how to manage an enterprise or conduct a courtship—derive in good part from the declining class fortunes of respectable ladies. While being on display incurs sexual risk for characters in each text, Evans also emphasizes [End Page 575] these female figures' access to the broader terrain of London life: as in her discussion of The Princess Casamassima, the inclusion of maps that locate characters' homes around the metropolis as well as their sites of work, meeting spots, and public transport conveys the scope and limits within which these new public women operate. A subtle shift in the maps of the third chapter, from marking physical locations to tracking character movements around the city, implies the simultaneous shift in attention from late-Victorian to modernist writers. H. G. Wells's Ann Veronica (1909) and Virginia Woolf's Night and Day (1919) and The Years...