Abstract
This chapter aims to analyse the parameters of the New Woman writer’s onslaught on the ‘sacred enclosures’ of Victorian orthodoxy: marriage, (hetero)sexual relations and, by implication, heterosexuality itself. If by 1896, as the contemporary critic Elizabeth Rachel Chapman claimed, it had ‘become difficult to take up a novel in which … the institution of marriage is not… put upon its trial’,3 what role did New Woman fiction play in the literary and cultural deconstruction of marriage, and how radical was this attempt at restructuring society through the tool of literature? To modern critics, feminist writers did not go far enough; Sally Ledger attributes the ‘pessimism’ of these novels to the writers’ ‘inability to think beyond heterosexual marriage’.4 Others have suggested that writers were clinging to the romance script even while they were heralding the collapse of the old order: what they wanted to achieve was to convince their readers of the expediency of a far-reaching overhaul of marital relations, not to promote the more radical idea that the concept should be abandoned altogether.5 In what way was the narrative critique of marriage connected with the reformist efforts of the women’s movement, and to what degree can New Woman fiction be seen as a response to medical, legal and social practices which withheld from women the exclusive right to determine what happened to their bodies? The Virgin/Whore dichotomy underpinning the sexual double standard, which was inscribed into Victorian family law and the Contagious Diseases Acts,6 cast working-class women as prostitutes and then disciplined them for ‘corrupting’ and ‘infecting’ men, while defining middle-class women as the upholders of a morality whose parameters they were denied a voice in shaping.
‘The Woman Question is the Marriage Question.’
Sarah Grand, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’ (1894)1
With all its contempt for the accepted moralities, [New Woman fiction] is helping to carry the pressure of the moral question into the sacred enclosure of marriage itself, from which all questioning has been too long excluded; and it is perhaps hardly too much to say that no service could well be greater than this.
Blanche Leppington, ‘The Debrutalisation of Man’ (1895)2
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Notes
Sarah Grand, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, North American Review, 158 (1894), 276
Blanche Leppinton, ‘The Debrutalisation of Man’, Contemporary Review, 67 (1895), 742
Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Tiction and Teminism at the Tin de Siècle (Manchester: MUP, 1997), 23.
Tess Cosslett, Woman to Woman: Temale Triendship in Victorian Tiction (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1988), 38–9
Carolyn Christensen Nelson, British Women Tiction Writers of the 1890s (New York: Twayne, 1996), 41–4.
In the 1860s three acts introduced the compulsory gynaecological examination of any woman believed to be a prostitute to ensure her freedom from venereal disease. In 1886 the repeal movement, in which Josephine Butler was a leading figure, achieved its aim, and the acts were abolished. See Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: CUP, 1980).
The concept of the ‘cover story’ is adopted from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 153.
Sarah Grand, ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, New Review, 10 (1894), 680
Claudia Nelson, ‘“Under the Guidance of a Wise Mother”: British Sex Edu-cation at the Fin de Siècle’, in Claudia Nelson and Ann Sumner Holmes (eds), Maternai Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875–1925 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 98–121.
Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’, Westminster Review, 130 (1888), 197–8 (emphasis in original).
Mary Shelley, ‘Introduction’ to Frankenstein (1831), in Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (eds), The Mary Shelley Reader (Oxford: OUP, 1990), 171.
William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 207.
Christabel Pankhurst, The Great Scourge and How to End It (1913), in Sheila Jeffreys (ed.), The Sexuality Debates (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 325.
‘Beware the CD Acts!’, Woman’s Dreadnought (1914), in Kathryn Dodd (ed.), A Sylvia Pankhurst Reader (Manchester: MUP, 1993), 63–7
Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 77.
St George Mirvart, ‘The Degradation of Woman’, Humanitarian, 9 (1896), 257
Grant Allen, ‘Is It Degradation? (A Reply to Professor Mirvart)’, Humanitarian, 9 (1896), 340–8
Coralie Glyn, ‘Nature’s Nuns (A Reply to Grant Allen)’, Humanitarian, 9 (1896), 423
Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘The Psychology of Feminism’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 161 (1897), 109
Pat Jalland and John Hooper (eds), Women From Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain 1830–1914 (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 261–3.
Josephine Butler, ‘Men, Men, Only Men’, Shield, 9 May 1870, in Janet Horowitz Murray (ed.), Strong-Minded Women And Other Lost Voices from 19th-century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 436
Hilary Rose, ‘Learning from the New Priesthood and the Shrieking Sisterhood: Debating the Life Sciences in Victorian England’, in Lynda Birke and Ruth Hubbard (eds), Reinventing Biology: Respect for Life and the Creation of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), 10.
Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), 145–230
Ruthann Robson, ‘Legal Lesbicide’, in Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell (eds), Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (Buckingham: OUP, 1992), 40–5.
Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 76–108
Ornella Moscucci, ‘Clitoridectomy, Circumcision, and the Politics of Sexual Pleasure in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams (eds), Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), 69–73.
Kate McCullough, ‘Mapping the “Terra Incognita” of Woman: George Egerton’s Keynotes (1893) and New Woman Fiction’, in Barbara Harman and Susan Meyer (ed.), The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Under-read Victorian Fiction (New York: Garland, 1996), 205–6.
Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980), in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 191–2.
Cited in Sheila Stowell, A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era (Manchester: MUP, 1992), 23.
Sue Thomas, ‘Sexual Matter and Votes for Women’, Papers on Language & Literature, 33 (1997), 58.
Sarah A. Tooley, ‘The Woman’s Question: An Interview with Madame Sarah Grand’, Humanitarian, 8 (1896), 168
Sarah Grand, ‘Marriage Questions in Fiction: The Standpoint of a Typical Modern Woman’, Fortnightly Review, 69 (1898), 389
Havelock Ellis, My Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), 164.
Olive Schreiner to Karl Pearson, 19 December 1885; in Richard Rive (ed.); Olive Schreiner Letters, I (Oxford: OUP; 1988), 69.
Cited in David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 55.
Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Judicial Shock to Marriage’, Nineteenth Century, 29 (1891), 691
Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes, 54–8; see also Maeve E. Doggett, Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 1–33
Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989), 177–83.
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© 2000 Ann Heilmann
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Heilmann, A. (2000). Marriage and Its Discontents. In: New Woman Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288355_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288355_4
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