Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman (review)

Abstract

Both the figure and the fiction of the New Woman continue to fascinate scholars of the Victorian fin de siècle, in part because we find the project of parsing the New Woman's misbehavior irresistible. Whether a historical composite or a tangled social construction, the New Woman is symptomatic of national anxieties—and in these anxious days, such icons are strangely satisfying objects of analysis. Patricia Murphy's new book takes up this appeal with the straightforward claim that both time and gender converged as twin obsessions toward the end of a century that was marked by varied strains of cultural "turbulence." Specifically, Murphy points to geological discoveries, evolutionary theory, technological progress, and a burgeoning railway culture, among other things, to explain why Victorians viewed time as both a threat and a comfort, and ultimately sought temporal security through the construction of what the author calls a "natural order of time" (3). As Murphy argues, if the uncertain margins of geological or evolutionary time successfully called into question human, historical, or even sexual identity, for example, Victorians found consolation in placing themselves at the conclusion of that ever-attenuated teleology—an otherwise unthinkable linear scheme made serviceable by the myth of a privileged endpoint. Thus, potentially disruptive shifts in cultural value at the end of the century were recuperated by the same temporal preoccupation that provoked them in the first place.