‘The New Woman’: Lady Macbeth and sexual politics in the Stalinist era

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH A. WELLS
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Tensions ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Lady Macbeth ◽  
Representation Of Sexuality

Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District became extraordinarily infamous after its damnation by Pravda in 1936. The amount of violence and sex in the opera distinguishes it from the Leskov novella on which it was based, and seems to have underpinned Stalin's disapproval. The complex relation between Shostakovich's detailed representation of sexuality and his portrait of Katerina, the opera's tragic heroine, mirrors the social tensions of the sexual revolution and the conservative backlash of the 1920s and 1930s. The writings of feminist Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) about the new Soviet woman display striking similarities to Shostakovich's portrayal of his female characters and offer a context for his approach.

“A LITTLE POLITICAL WORLD OF MY OWN”: THE NEW WOMAN, THE NEW LIFE, AND NEW AMAZONIA

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Beaumont
Keyword(s):  
Social Isolation ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Friedrich Engels ◽  
East End ◽  
Socialist Politics

“I READ THE PAPERS and have a little political world of my own.” So Margaret Harkness confided to her second cousin Beatrice Potter (who would later marry the Fabian Sidney Webb) in a letter sent in February 1880 (qtd. in Hapgood 130). Subsequently disavowed by her repressive father, an Anglican priest, because she was insufficiently subordinate to him, Harkness was still living at home at this time. Her social isolation, as well as her political frustration, is palpable. But if the tone of this apparently resigned statement is poignant, it is at the same time too defiant to be dismissed as self-pitying. Later in the 1880s she worked among the poor and unemployed in the East End of London, the environment that she explored in some seven novels written under the pseudonym “John Law,” from A City Girl (1887) to George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905). In this decade she also circulated, uneasily enough, in the Social Democratic Federation, a socialist organization dominated by the acolytes of Friedrich Engels, vainly searching for a progressive model of friendship that might alleviate her sense of alienation. Indeed, Harkness became a formidable activist as well as an impressive novelist. She seems however to have grown disillusioned with socialist politics in the 1890s and to have drifted into philanthropic activities instead (see Ledger 144).

scholarly journals Performing the Female Alternative in Victorian Popular Drama: The “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”

2021 ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Victoria Puchal Terol
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Popular Drama

During the nineteenth century, theatregoing became the favoured entertainment of both the lower and upper classes in London. As Davis (1994, 307) suggests, the plays were a “mirrored reflection” of society, and they had the ability to reflect important socio-political issues on stage, while also influencing people’s opinion about them. Thus, by turning to the popular stage of the mid-century we can better understand social issues like the Woman Question, or the tensions around imperial policies, among others. As such, this article scrutinises the ways in which Victorian popular drama influenced the period’s ideal of femininity by using stock characters inspired by real women’s movements. Two such cases are the “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”, protofeminists that would go on to influence the New Woman of the fin-de-siècle. We analyse two plays from the mid-century: the Adelphi’s Our Female American Cousin (1860), by Charles Gayler, and the Strand’s My New Place (1863), by Arthur Wood. As this article attests, popular plays like these would inadvertently bring into the mainstream the ongoing political fight for female rights through their use of transgressive female characters and promotion of scenarios where alternative feminine identities could be performed and imagined.

Over Her Dead Body: Marianella Morena’s Delmira Agustini in No daré hijos, daré versos

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-423
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Misemer
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Delmira Agustini

No daré hijos, daré versos, by Marianella Morena, debuted in October 2014 in Montevideo during the centennial year of Delmira Agustini’s death at the hands of her ex-husband Enrique Job Reyes. It was also performed in Spain in 2016. Over Agustini’s dead body, Morena and her acting group, La Morena, develop multiple strands of meaning in differing temporalities and frameworks of power as they demonstrate an engagement with affective currents and attitudes toward both views of the body and memory through performance, space, and trauma. In the play, they create theatrical and poetic space to explore and move beyond binaries to conclude modernization’s project of sexual revolution and to finish the story of the New Woman–at least as it pertains to Uruguay’s “New Woman” as characterized by Agustini and her poetry.

scholarly journals New Woman as Seen in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Lexicon ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 224
Author(s):  
Rheavanya Winandhini ◽  
Rahmawan Jatmiko
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper discusses the influence of feminism in the classic Victorian novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The New Woman is a feminist ideal that appeared in the 19th century, more specifically amidst the rise of the first wave of feminism. The method of research used in this study covers close reading of the source material and analyzing the characters of the novel through the perspective of the New Woman ideals. The female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula portrayed the New Woman characteristic to some degree. Women’s independence, intellect, hyperfemininity, and hypersexuality, are some of the aspects of the movement that go against the norm and values of women in Victorian Britain, such as Mina’s “man’s brain” and Lucy’s hyperfemininity, while the Brides of Dracula provide contrast as the oppressed women with their submissive and compliant attitude towards him. Without erasing their representation of these New Woman ideals, Mina and Lucy also portrayed the complexity and dimensionality of being a woman in the Victorian era; their beauty and appeal were praised while their more “unwomanly” aspects present some threats towards men.

scholarly journals New Woman as Seen in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Lexicon ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 207
Author(s):  
Rheavanya Winandhini ◽  
Rahmawan Jatmiko
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper discusses the influence of feminism in the classic Victorian novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The New Woman is a feminist ideal that appeared in the 19th century, more specifically amidst the rise of the first wave of feminism. The method of research used in this study covers close reading of the source material and analyzing the characters of the novel through the perspective of the New Woman ideals. The female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula portrayed the New Woman characteristic to some degree. Women’s independence, intellect, hyperfemininity, and hypersexuality, are some of the aspects of the movement that go against the norm and values of women in Victorian Britain, such as Mina’s “man’s brain” and Lucy’s hyperfemininity, while the Brides of Dracula provide contrast as the oppressed women with their submissive and compliant attitude towards him. Without erasing their representation of these New Woman ideals, Mina and Lucy also portrayed the complexity and dimensionality of being a woman in the Victorian era; their beauty and appeal were praised while their more “unwomanly” aspects present some threats towards men.

scholarly journals WOMEN'S ISSUE IN THE AESTHETICS OF THE SOVIET POSTER OF THE 1930–1950-IES

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (87) ◽  
Author(s):  
Taras Naidenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
New Woman ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Characteristics ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
The Real ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Artistic Images

The article analyzes the history of the women's issue in the USSR on the basis of systemic, semiotic, and comparative-historical approaches on the examples of Soviet posters of the 1930s and 1950s. The analyzed posters are made in different techniques, have a big difference in circulation and distribution areas, have several types of semiotic code of visual propaganda. The artistic images of women presented on the posters are considered in two dissonant discourses: ideological and everyday. The relationship between the spread of the women's movement in the USSR, legislative policy, the place of women in Soviet society and the artistic representation of the image of the "new woman" in the campaign poster is shown. The inconsistency with the real practices of the main Soviet declared social characteristics of the image of the "new woman", her self-sufficiency and independence, legal equality, the reflection of this image in the socialist poster of the era and the real evolution of the social position of women. The analysis of visual sources and their comparison helped to trace the changes in society's attitude towards the current metamorphoses that occurred with the social roles of women in Soviet society on the example of the feminization of Soviet education and the reflection of the process in pedagogical posters. Reconstruction of social relations allows us to conceptualize the cultural and archaeological process of finding visual markers that can help a deeper understanding of the role of women in the educational processes of the 1930s - 1950s. To analyze the course of development and formation of the image of the "new woman" in Soviet society and the dichotomy of views on these processes of society and the state as actors of agitation and propaganda. Deconstruction of the visual semiotic code allows to analyze the system or randomness of the feminization of education in the USSR, to reflect the process on the posters of the era, and to try to understand the attitude of society and the state to this process. Variants of aesthetic solutions were identified in the Soviet poster, which highlighted the changes in society's values regarding the "women's issue" in the USSR. The influence of agitation and propaganda of the official "party line" on the reflection of women's images in mass art and on the determination of the place of the "women's issue" in the aesthetics of socialist realism has been clarified.

scholarly journals Deux figures féminines hors normes de la fin du XIXe siècle – Raoule de Rachilde et Selma de Benedictson

Nordlit ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Cecilia Carlander
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Young Women ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Xixe Siecle ◽  
Xixe Siècle

A year after the French success scandal that Rachilde had with her decadent novel Monsieur Vénus, a novel by the Swedish writer Victoria Benedictsson, Money [Pengar], is published in Sweden in 1885. The two novels focus on young women having to find their identities within society's new possibilities, as well as the new gender roles; developed by the new society. In their relations with both conventional and non-conventional male characters, the two female characters transgress society's former established and given norms. In this article, the aim is to present how two female protagonists, the French Raoule and the Swedish Selma, are given different background conditions and qualities that finally can contribute to picture and explain their outstanding independence. Moreover, the new gender roles and their impact on the two female characters are discussed within themes and terms such as the "new woman", androgynity, sexuality and other explicite ingredients and symbols often discussed in a decadent context. Through the comparisons, this article shows how the two female portraits express the decadent transgressivity, in several aspects similarly, with individual voices, despite their two separate literary milieux.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

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