scholarly journals From a "Child of Light" to a "Woman of Genius": Sarah Grand's The Beth Book as the New Woman Bildungsroman

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilona Dobosiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Public Engagement ◽  
Growth And Development ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Social Activist ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Development Result

The New Woman fiction, popular in the last decade of the 19th century, contested the traditional notions of gender roles and participated in the public debates on women’s rights. The protagonists of the New Woman novels refused to conform to the submissive and self-abnegating Victorian ideal of femininity. The article discusses the ways in which Sarah Grand, a prominent New Woman novelist and social activist, uses and transforms both the elements of her own life and the Bildungsroman conventions in her 1897 novel The Beth Book to create a heroine whose growth and development result in her personal independence and her active public engagement in women’s issues. Cast in a variety of social roles, Beth Maclure reclaims her agency and becomes an embodiment of the New Woman.

scholarly journals ”Warum noch länger die demütige Magd, die ihrem Herrn die Füße wäscht?“

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Viktorija Bilic
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
German Language ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Male Supremacy ◽  
Traditional Norms ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The U.S

Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817-1884) was one of few women who have shaped German immigrant life in America during the second half of the 19th century. The Forty-Eighter, writer, and educator founded the first German-language Frauenzeitung in the U.S., and her network of correspondents included Susan B. Anthony.   The article sheds light on Mathilde Anneke as a “new woman” who broke with traditional norms of gender and sexuality. She divorced her first and abusive husband at the age of 20, raising her daughter alone before marrying Fritz Anneke with whom she had more children. This paper focuses on Mathilde's feminist essay Das Weib im Conflict mit den socialen Verhältnissen (1847). This text is a testament to her ideals and values, most of all her life-long fight for women’s rights. In this manifest, Mathilde envisions the “new woman” who would break out of the cage of male supremacy and demand equal rights. While Mathilde Anneke did not live to see the suffragist movement succeed, she made significant contributions to the early feminist movement, and she did so through her writing.

The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
The Third ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
Specific Technology

The third chapter examines the specific technology most commonly associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. When the safety bicycle first came into widespread use in the late 1880s it became connected with the New Woman and her ‘unsexing’ potential, with the loosening of social restrictions and with geographic mobility. Engaging first with medical as well as public debates around the perceived physical and social effects of the bicycle, along with guidebooks for female cyclists, the chapter moves on to consider how the bicycle through literature becomes a symbol of emancipation. Reading H. G. Wells Wheels of Chance (1897) and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), the chapter complicates the notion of the bicycle as a democratising ‘freedom machine’, by insisting on the class specifics of the New Woman and the commercialism of the late-Victorian literary market.

scholarly journals Beth Caldwell's Reading Experience

Spectrum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelby Elizabeth Haber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Personal Engagement

Near the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Grand coined the phrase "New Woman," which was influential throughout the first wave of the feminist movement. This paper examines how Sarah Grand's representation of Beth Caldwell's reading habits in her novel The Beth Book acts as a metaphor for the subversive femininity of the New Woman. My project explores the ways in which Grand's feminist ideals are reflected in The Beth Book through the scenes when Beth is reading. I suggest that Beth's atypical engagement with books as textual and physical objects can be equated to social dissent. However, Grand also portrays Beth reading within educational and marital institutions. These experiences lead Beth's engagement with the text to become similar to common nineteenth-century reading practices. I conclude with the argument that Grand represents any personal engagement with a book, even if it is not especially radical, as capable of re-evaluating systemically-enforced interpretations.

The New Woman

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Z. Zrakowski
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
New Women ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Female Consciousness ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Modernist Fiction ◽  
Ubiquitous Presence

A historical figure as well as a literary phenomenon, the New Woman was named in 1894 in an exchange between ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée) and Sarah Grand in the pages of the New American Review. The New Woman was a ubiquitous presence in fin-de-siècle literature and journalism concerned with debates about the ‘woman question’, and influenced twentieth-century ideas about feminism and gender. The New Woman novel, with its mapping of female psychological space and emphasis on female consciousness, shaped modernist fiction. New Women were often political activists as well as writers, and agitated for reform on political and domestic questions. Most New Woman fiction rejects aestheticism in favor of realism; it deals with sexuality with a frankness that departed from Victorian codes of propriety and takes up issues such as suffrage, marriage, domestic violence, and the emancipation of women. In its realism, New Woman fiction departs from the aestheticism of the period, although some writers, like George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), used the techniques of aestheticism to examine women’s experience.

scholarly journals Sarah Grand and Oscar Wilde: Decadence, Desire, and the Double Life

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 731-751
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Gender Ambiguity

It is usual to put the New Woman writer Sarah Grand alongside Oscar Wilde to mark their differences. However, this essay suggests that these two authors had more in common than at first appears, both with regards to the fashioning of their literary identities and to their literary productions. Grand's compendious best-selling novel The Heavenly Twins (1893) is usually seen as realist fiction, but its interlude titled “The Tenor and the Boy,” which was actually composed much earlier, presents a stand-alone narrative that owes more to the romance mode and is much more playful in tone and spirit. It also deals with the decadent theme of the secret double life, although crucially and dramatically Grand focuses on female subterfuge. After juxtaposing Wilde's “Lady Alroy” (1887), another text about the female double life, with Grand's interlude, I subsequently consider decadent qualities common to both “The Tenor and the Boy” and other Wildean texts including theatricality, doubling, gender ambiguity, and queer desire.

scholarly journals Žena u borbi / Žena u modi: Odjevne prakse u poslijeratnom periodu socijalističke Jugoslavije na primjeru časopisa "Žena u borbi" i "Naša Moda"

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Ivana Čuljak ◽  
Lea Vene
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Construction ◽  
Popular Magazine ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Women's Emancipation ◽  
Post War ◽  
Opposite Tendency ◽  
Ideological Construction

The research is based on the reviewing the ideological construction of the concept of saving up in the context of the struggle for women’s emancipation in early socialism of the post-war period. AFŽ (Antifašistička fronta žena – women’s antifascist front) as the main platform of women’s emancipation, promoted the New woman (emancipated, a political and socially aware worker) through direct propaganda in the magazine Žena u borbi (Woman in battle). At the same time, the AFŽ published a very popular magazine called Naša moda (Our fashion). It was a magazine which constructed a completely different media model of women whose interests are tied to fashion and family, emphasizing the role of the woman as housewife, mother and frivolous consumer. This dichotomy is important for the further reading of the public and media construction of modest/economic dressing which was seemingly embodied by the new woman, seeing as there as a simultaneous emergence of an opposite tendency and an alternative everyday practice. Faced with the ideological construction of emancipation, women continue performing the role of housewife who is now forced to rationalize her dressing practices and adapt to new political and economic conditions.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document