Writing against the “husband-fiend”: syphilis and male sexual vice in the new woman novel

Abstract

This article explores the representation of conjugal sexuality and the impact of the spread of syphilis on sexual and marital relations in the 1880s and 1890s. Drawing on medical material on syphilis and media representations of the New Woman, it highlights women's increasing antipathy to the role of innocent wife offered to them by society. The author suggests that the New Woman fiction examines the power struggle between doctors and husbands for the control of the wife's body and sexual health, reflecting the contemporary debates about sexual infection and the deaths of syphilitic children. Syphilis constituted something of a taboo subject in fiction at this time, yet the New Woman plot, with its critique of married life and horror of male sexual vice, allowed women writers to register their disapproval of male behaviour within marriage and to voice through their heroines their anger at the medical and social treatment of diseased women. The author concentrates on women's changing attitudes to sexuality in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893), Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), Emma Brooke's A Superfluous Woman (1894) and Menie Muriel Dowie's Gallia (1895). Whilst New Woman heroines sought to ignore cultural pressures to channel all their energies into a happy family life, surviving outside marriage was still perceived to be too radical to be incorporated into fictional plots so that most New Woman novels still ended with the heroine's death or her capitulation to the “Husband-Fiend”. As the novels explored women's fears of syphilitic infection, they also revealed the uncertain sexual identity of the New Woman and the difficulties of fictionalising alternative sexual lifestyles for women