PROPUESTA PEDAGÓGICA ALTERNATIVA
B.2 ANÁLISIS DE LOS DATOS RECOGIDOS DEL INSTRUMENTO APLICADO A LOS ESTUDIANTES
In their essay “The Man Who Wrote a New Woman Novel: Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did and the Gendering of New Woman Authorship”, Colette Colligan and Vanessa Warne collect contemporary as well as recent criticism of Grant Allen’s notorious novel. While Allen himself was eager to present The Woman Who Did as New Woman fiction,1 Colligan and Warne conclude that his “alliance with the women’s movement” was shaky at best, and occasionally even met with “marked resistance”.2 One such critic who resisted was the contemporary suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who flatly declared that “Mr. Grant Allen has never given help by tongue or pen to any practical effort to improve the legal or social status of women”.3 Colligan and Warne’s summary of the assessment of the novel by feminist critics suggests that his later readers were similarly uneasy with Allen’s “self-posturing as a New Woman writer”:
[w]ithout exception, recent critics express dissatisfaction with the gender politics of Allen’s novel, some insinuating that a man could but
awkwardly promote women’s social and sexual freedom.4
The question that motivates Fawcett’s criticism, and which is raised by recent feminist critics as well, is one of authenticity: is The Woman Who Did a New Woman novel, or is it not?
The fact that many critics have expressed dissatisfaction with the text as a New Woman novel suggests the existence of a horizon of expectation, a fixed perception of the elements that a New Woman novel must contain, or the function it must perform, in order to be counted as “real”. For Fawcett, Allen’s work failed as New Woman writing because it did not help to improve the legal or social status of women, and later critics
1 Vanessa Warne and Colette Colligan, “The Man Who Wrote a New Woman Novel: Grant Allen’s The
Woman Who Did and the Gendering of New Woman Authorship”, Victorian Literature and Culture 33.1 (2005), pp. 21-46: p. 22.
2 Warne and Colligan, “The Gendering of New Woman Authorship”: p. 26.
3 Millicent Garrett Fawcett in a 1895 review of Grant’s work for the Contemporary Review, quoted in
Warne and Colligan, “The Gendering of New Woman Authorship”: p. 29.
have focussed on Allen’s failure to contest traditional gender roles (some, as Warner and Colligan suggest, even exclude him on account of his sex), but in either case, the question of whether or not The Woman Who Did “counts” as a New Woman novel seems to be of central importance to its reception.
In this chapter, I will examine three novels which pose a similar challenge to critics who would have New Woman writing conform to a relatively unified formula: Jessie Fothergill’s Kith and Kin, Mary Cholmondeley’s Diana Tempest, and Iota’s A Yellow Aster.5 Although all three contain elements with which the reader of New Woman fiction is familiar, such as a strong female protagonist who supports herself, they also contain elements that seemingly disrupt the familiar narrative, as did the episodes of recoil examined in the previous chapter. The difference between the novels examined here and those examined in the second chapter is one of degree, not of kind, and this circumstance complicates their classification as either “real” or “unreal” New Woman fiction. In my reading, the single most disruptive factor in all three novels is the positive depiction of Old Men, which sets these works at variance with all the other novels examined in this study.
The positive portrayal of male dominance which characterises Kith and Kin, Diana Tempest, and A Yellow Aster is severely at odds with the New Woman’s wariness of male power and control which expressed itself so decidedly in the depiction of the binary male characters examined in the first chapter. To distinguish him from the binary man, I propose to call this type of male character the heroic man. Heroic men do not fit easily into the conception of the New Woman genre that has emerged since the 1970s. They are neither the tyrannical old husbands that the New Woman protagonist so often had to fight against, nor are they the impaired friend or lover against whom she could
5 The idea of recoil and the heroic man can also be applied with benefit to a reading of the following
novels: Lucas Malet’s Deadham Hard: A Romance (Colonel Carteret) and The Far Horizon (Dominique
Iglesias), Violet Hunt’s The Maiden’s Progress (Edward Lord Coniston) and A Hard Woman (Ferdinand
assert her power. Instead, it is precisely the heroic man’s absolute superiority that attracts her.6 This pleasure of being dominated frequently clashes with the beliefs and values expressed elsewhere in the same texts, and the resulting tension complicates an easy categorisation of these novels as New Woman fiction. Nonetheless, I believe it is crucial to read these novels, if not as “New Woman fiction”, then as “fiction of the New Woman period”,7 for if we disconnect them from those novels commonly accepted as
examples of the genre, the resulting lack of context impoverishes our understanding even of those exemplary works. As is often the case with this particular time period, it is towards the contradictions, and not away from them, that research must advance.
6 The figure of the heroic male character may remind one of the type of character that Elaine Showalter
has described as the “brute” in her chapter on “The Woman’s Man” (Showalter, “The Woman’s Man”, p. 139.) However, as will become apparent in this chapter, the similarities between Showalter’s “brutes” and the positive Old Men of New Woman fiction are superficial. The dominance of the “brute”, Showalter explains, is frequently impaired before he makes a suitable companion to the protagonist (what Showalter refers to as “the blinding, maiming, or blighting” of men: Showalter, “The Woman’s Man”, p. 150.), whereas the type of male character I propose to examine here is attractive precisely because his superiority is never diminished.
7 I use the term New Woman period here not predominantly in a temporal sense, but rather to suggest the
prevalence of the idea of the New Woman during this time, and the possibilities this idea suggested to contemporaries.
Kith and Kin, Jessie Fothergill
Kith and Kin, Jessie Fothergill’s fifth novel, was published in 1881 – two years earlier than The Story of an African Farm, which is sometimes considered the first New Woman novel.8 By implication, the mere fact that Kith and Kin was published earlier than the genre’s constitutive novel9 thus becomes in some sense a barrier to its easy
absorption into the genre. Neither do the bare outlines of the plot suggest that Jessie Fothergill was writing New Woman fiction with Kith and Kin: the novel centres on a courtship plot, and ends with a marriage proposal and the prospect of marital bliss.10 Notwithstanding the fact that this short outline bears no similarities to the plotlines examined in the previous chapters as instances of New Woman fiction, Kith and Kin has recently been included in an anthology of New Woman writing.11 Editor Brenda Ayres admits in her introduction to the novel that in all its reception history, “[n]one of the reviewers and no feminist work has identified Kith and Kin . . . as a ‘New Woman’ novel”,12 yet she confidently asserts that it “is just that”.13 Instead of reading Kith and Kin as a decidedly feminist novel which is in many ways exemplary of New Woman fiction, as Brenda Ayres has done, I want to draw attention to the novel’s contradictory features. In my reading, Kith and Kin is a surprisingly unstable work. If it can be said to contain a New Woman “message”, at the very least it is conflicted about that message, and constantly undermines its own value system by interweaving recognisably modern
8 Here again, the underlying assumption is that a New Woman novel must fulfil certain minimal
requirements to qualify as such, and that SAF was the first novel to do so. As has been discussed in the first chapter, I personally consider SAF to be an exceptional New Woman novel in many ways, and if forced to classify, I would call it a precursor rather than the first example of New Woman fiction.
9 It was William T. Stead who argued that SAF was “the forerunner of all the novels of the Modern
Woman”. Cf. William T. Stead, “The Book of the Month: The Novel of the Modern Woman”, Review of
Reviews 10.1 (1894), pp. 64-74: p. 64.
10 See the appendix for a more detailed summary.
11 Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton, ed., New Woman Fiction, 1881-1899, 9 vols. (London: Pickering &
Chatto, 2010-2011).
12 Jessie Fothergill, Kith and Kin, Brenda Ayres (ed.) in: Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton (gen. ed.), New Woman Fiction, 1881-1899, vol. 1 of 9 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), p. xxvi. All further references are to this edition and will be given in the following format: KK p. xxvi.
elements with elements that are unfamiliar to the reader who approaches Kith and Kin via Sarah Grand’s or Mona Caird’s work, for instance.
Among the features that resemble the work of other New Women authors is the novel’s protagonist, Judith Conisbrough. Judith refuses to live in genteel poverty to protect her upper middle-class status, and counters her mother’s objections with the angry retort that it would be “the whole universe higher” to work for her own bread than to wait for a good match. She explicitly compares marrying “in exchange for a home and clothing” to prostitution: “[a]ny girl out of the street can do that”.14
A further parallel between Jessie Fothergill’s protagonist and those of other New Women writers is the fact that Judith’s character is interspersed with ostensibly
masculine attributes. For instance, her cousin Bernard Aglionby calls her “relentless”, and even claims that she has “unbounded power”15 over him. When Judith takes up nursing to support herself and her family, Bernard refers to her occupation as “a task which would make a strong man recoil”,16 yet Judith excels in it. Her employer
describes her as “physically strong and healthy, and in mind steadfast”,17 and after she
has spent three years working as a hospital nurse, the narrator praises Judith’s newly developed masculine qualities:
[f]or the rest, one could see that she was in every way developed. She had more ease as well as more dignity of manner. She was more beautiful than before, as well as older; her face and form now more than ever were such as the most heedless could not fail to observe.
There was a calm and settled power in [her face], not inferior, in its way, to that which dwelt in the countenance of Dr. Wentworth himself. The eyes were steady, scrutinising, and critical.18
It is worth noting here how carefully Judith’s masculine traits (her power, her strength) are feminised by the narrator’s description: although she has a power equal to that of her 14 KK p. 59. 15 KK p. 208, KK p. 290. 16 KK p. 246. 17 KK p. 240. 18 KK pp. 264-5, KK p. 264.
male employer, it is of a different kind, and the narrator compliments the development of her physique not because Judith is now healthier and stronger (she is), but because her body has become more attractive from the point of view of the implied male observer. Likewise, Judith’s lips are described as “steadfast, yet sweet”,19 as if the narrator was hastening to dispel the first impression by supplying a second, feminine adjective. This simultaneous display of traditional femininity and selected masculine attributes has been observed in the first two chapters of this thesis as characteristic of a wide range of novels whose “status” as works of New Woman fiction has not been contested. To this extent, the inclusion of Kith and Kin in an anthology of New Woman writing is perfectly justified.
In addition, characters who embody the old, unaltered notions of femininity and masculinity do not fare well in Kith and Kin. On the ideal of the “womanly woman”, the narrator scoffs:
[Mrs Vane was] the essence of the much-be-praised ‘womanly woman’, in the sense of not taking the most remote or elementary interest in any question outside personal, domestic, or family gossip. Advancing years had not made her more intellectual; the ardent hater of the ‘strong- minded female’ must have hailed Mrs. Vane as his ideal – no one ever had been able to accuse her of strong-mindedness.20
Mrs Vane’s lack of “strong-mindedness” is compared unfavourably to Judith’s presence of mind and her interest in politics. In addition, Kith and Kin contains a sharp critique of traditional masculinity, which is voiced by Marion Conisbrough, Judith’s mother. Marion Conisbrough has lived her entire life under the brutal rule of her patriarchal uncle, and her opinion of Old Men is understandably negative:
what brutes men are. Hard, gasping wretches! They keep us in slavery. They hate to see us free, lest they should lose our blind submission to them; I know they do. If we try to make ourselves free, they grind us to powder.21
19 KK p. 21.
20 KK p. 25. 21 KK p. 65.
Brenda Ayres rightly refers to this monologue as “characteristic New Woman discourse”.22 In conclusion, both Judith Conisbrough’s character and the narrator’s
attitude to traditional femininity and masculinity suggest that Jessie Fothergill was, on the whole, sympathetic to the burgeoning women’s movement.
However, several aspects of Kith and Kin plainly contradict the picture which has emerged so far, namely, that the novel was a straightforward celebration of women’s independence and professionalism. First of all, regardless of her conviction that working for her bread is a “whole universe” above marrying for security, Judith actually abhors the idea of nurse training and of moving to the city.23 Before she accepts the training position in Irkford, the appropriately named “dreadful, smoky place”, she says to her mother:
[i]t would be hateful [to be a nurse], and I should loathe it at first. But I am able to do nothing else, and it is not an expensive trade to learn. It would earn my bread.24
Even after her employment has had nothing but positive effects on her, as the narrator has pointed out, Judith turns down her employer’s suggestion to study medicine by saying,
[d]o you suppose I became a nurse because I wished to do so? Not at all, and I never would have done it if I could have had a happier lot. I “took to it,” as they say, because I was miserable, and wanted relief from my wretchedness; I did not like it then, and I do not like it now.25
As opposed to many of the protagonists examined previously, who longed to employ their talents usefully,26 Judith’s departure from her family home and her entry into the world of employment is not described as liberating, rather, it is the least terrible out of a number of terrible options, which she chooses only after rejecting all others. Her path to
22 KK p. xxx.
23 By contrast, many New Women novels portray the city as the New Woman’s especial habitat.
24 KK p. 180, KK p. 59. 25 KK p. 266.
26 Of the novels I have examined here, the examples that immediately spring to mind are Angelica (HT)
and Hadria (DoD). Note that Brenda Ayres suggests Judith likewise seeks employment because “she knows that she has brains and talents, and she does not want them to atrophy as they did for her mother” (cf. KK p. xxvii). I do not think the textual evidence supports this interpretation.
employment is accompanied by the anxious voices of well-wishers who seem to feel about the nursing profession as they do about a prolonged jail sentence. Her parson, in particular, expresses a strong aversion to her decision, and to the loss of status this step implies. He implores her to reconsider by pointing out that Judith will renounce her freedom by accepting a nursing position:
it behoves you to think seriously and long before you take such a step – before you, a lady born and bred, leave your quiet home in this beautiful and healthy spot, to venture out into a great city, where you will have onerous work, which will have to be carried on in the vitiated air of the same city. Remember, you renounce your freedom, your independence; you bind yourself to absolute servitude, absolute obedience . . .
Instead of comparing the servitude of a professional nurse favourably to that of a wife, as she had done in the argument with her mother, Judith here assures her parson that she is fully aware of the scope of her degradation. “I have made no light decision” she says, “I came to it on my knees – through fasting and prayer – not from carelessness or love of variety”.27 This exchange makes it abundantly clear that seeking professional
employment is hateful to Judith, and a burden she would prefer to evade.
In his article “The Psychology of Feminism” (1897), Hugh Stutfield draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the idea of work as a key factor in women’s liberation and emotional fulfilment was by no means uncontested among New Women writers. He compares Sarah Grand’s conviction of the benefits of paid employment to woman’s development to Mrs Roy Devereux’s28 opposing sentiment:
Mrs Grand, among others, has maintained, with much insistence and great wealth of pathological detail, that a great deal of the unhappiness and the ailments of women are due to their want of occupation . . . As for Mrs Devereux, she simply laughs at the idea of any woman really loving work as an end in itself. “To say that she loves work better than liberty and leisure is a pathetic pretence . . . Surely the fact that the New Woman is always trying to persuade herself that work is a blessing when she
27 KK p. 241, also the previous quotation.
28 The direct quotation of Mrs Devereux in the following paragraph of Stutfield’s article was taken from:
knows in her heart of hearts it is a curse, is one of the saddest of ‘life’s