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.

MUCH MORE THAN AN ANTIFEMINIST: ELIZA LYNN LINTON’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE RISE OF VICTORIAN POPULAR JOURNALISM

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea L. Broomfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Volume Form ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Saturday Review ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Hostile Attitude

IT IS DIFFICULT TO DISCUSS the Victorian women’s rights movement and the antifeminist backlash which ensued without mentioning Eliza Lynn Linton’s contribution. Known primarily as the author of the notorious Saturday Review essay, “The Girl of the Period” (1868), Linton was and has been viewed primarily as an essayist who verbally lashed middle-class, progressive women. As late as the 1880s and 1890s, she maintained an active role in the woman-question debate, publishing her “Wild Women” essays, writing a New Woman novel, The New Woman in Haste and At Leisure, and reissuing her Girl of the Period (G.O.P) essays in volume form. Linton scholars have been particularly intrigued by the discrepancies between Linton’s emancipated lifestyle and the restricted one she advocated for other women. How could the first salaried woman journalist in England maintain such a hostile attitude towards her professionally inclined cohorts? More significantly, how could a woman who wrote one of the most radical, protofeminist novels of her time, Realities (1851), suddenly shift to promoting women’s subjection? Various, compelling answers have been offered to such questions. Vineta Colby, in The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, and Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Sheets, and William Veeder in The Woman Question. Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883 contend that the contradictions between Linton’s lifestyle and her antifeminist essays mirror Victorian England’s own contradictory attitudes regarding gender relations.1

Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Self Formation

The second chapter examines the link between the New Woman and the typewriter, a technology which proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the offices at the Victorian fin de siècle. The chapter provides a historical and literary account of both the machine and its operator, through reading fictional works as well as trade journals and other periodical press of the time. As the typewriter came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century, the New Woman typist became a recurrent literary motif. Reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903), the chapter emphasises a kind of secretarial agency formulated in these works, in which the New Woman typist figure appropriates the typewriter as a means of self-formation.

scholarly journals "A lady to take care of us at last"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Crocker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Political Uncertainties

This essay explores the depiction of the “New Woman” figure in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911). By exploring contradictory modes of femininity, Barrie’s novel points to the ways in which established norms of masculinity at the fin-de-siècle were defined and frustrated by their relation to an unstable feminine ideal. The following essay will argue that the novel’s inconsistent depictions of femininity point to an end-of-the-era anxiety surrounding the emergent New Woman, an ambivalence which is symptomatic of the wider social and political uncertainties that defined the aftermath of the nineteenth century.

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.

scholarly journals Bloody Women: How Female Authors Have Transformed the Scottish Contemporary Crime Fiction Genre

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-71
Author(s):  
Lorna Hill
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Practice Based Research ◽  
Changing Attitudes

Abstract This study will explore the role of female authors in contemporary Scottish crime fiction. Over the past thirty years, women writers have overhauled the traditionally male dominated genre of crime fiction by writing about strong female characters who drive the plot and solve the crimes. Authors including Val McDermid, Denise Mina and Lin Anderson are just a few of the women who have challenged the expectation of gender and genre. By setting their novels in contemporary society they reflect a range of social and political issues through the lens of a female protagonist. By closely examining the female characters, both journalists, in Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series and Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan series, I wish to explore the issue of gender through these writers’ perspectives. This essay documents the influence of these writers on my own practice-based research which involves writing a crime novel set in a post referendum Scotland. I examine a progressive and contemporary Scottish society, where women hold many senior positions in public life, and investigate whether this has an effect on the outcome of crimes. Through this narrative, my main character will focus on the current and largely hidden crimes of human trafficking and domestic abuse. By doing this I examine the ways in which the modern crime novel has evolved to cross genre boundaries. In addition to focusing on a crime, the victims and witnesses, today’s crime novels are tackling social issues to reflect society’s changing attitudes and values.

Intergenerational Collaboration and Conflict: Women’s Periodicals at the Fin de Siècle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Easley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Products ◽  
New Age ◽  
Women's Magazines ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Women's Periodicals

This chapter examines conflicts between different generations of women in the late decades of the nineteenth century as played out in the popular press, including the burgeoning market for women’s magazines. It shows how print culture, including in new feminist magazines, constructed and then exploited divisions between the ‘old lady’, ‘new woman’ and ‘new girl’, often for the purposes of advertising new products. It shows how at this time the modern woman was represented in the periodical press as a consumer and advertising commodity, as a sensationalist figure of controversy, as well as a symbol of the new age.

First Life—and then Fame

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew L. Reznicek
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman

Katherine Cecil Thurston’s 1910 novel, Max, explores the bohemian Paris of the fin-de-siècle through the eyes of a young artist newly arrived from Russia. This young man is, however, actually a young princess in disguise, trying to escape an abusive marriage. Through the use of disguise and the New Woman figure of the female-to-male transvestite, this novel represents Paris through two competing genres: the masculine adventure narrative and the female romance.

Fallen Corpses and Rising Cities: The Bell Jar and the Making of the New Woman

Novel Shocks ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 104-124
Author(s):  
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
East Side ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The New Woman

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar centers on two shock-fueled transformations: New York’s transformation from the nineteenth-century industrial city of slums, tenements, and factories to a shiny new metropolis and Esther’s transformation from an anxious, sick, and needy tenderfoot into a seemingly independent, liberated, and autonomous subject. Reading Esther’s psychic transformation against its geopolitical and spatial markers of renewal—the slumified lower east side of the Rosenbergs, the newly built glass-sheeted office buildings where the protagonist Esther works, and the newly constructed UN headquarters that hangs in Esther’s hotel window—the chapter challenges dominant readings of the novel, which often forefront how the double bind of consumer mass culture and patriarchal 1950s values trap and confine women. The chapter suggests the novel is less about the entrapment of women than it is about the formation of the woman we assume to be trapped. Specifically, it argues that the novel’s celebrated critique of the repressive, patriarchal state ultimately leads not to a more progressive position, but rather to the formation of a lactified, suburbanized, and entrepreneurial female subjectivity.

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