scholarly journals Parody as Translation: Ibsen’s new woman in the pages of Punch

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Rebecca Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Women ◽  
Woman Character ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Cultural Medium ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Doll's House

“Parody as Translation: Ibsen’s new woman in the pages of Punch” examines four comic parodies of Ibsen written by Thomas Antsey Guthrie, a British journalist and humourist also known as F. Antsey. The plays examined include parodies of Rosmersholm, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder — comically abbreviated renditions of Ibsen originals that featured striking new women characters. Reading these parodies as responses to their originals, I examine what happens to the new woman character when she is subjected to comic parodic treatment. Although the parodies do not directly focus on the alteration of these key female characters, I argue that Antsey’s parodic critique of Ibsenian dramaturgical mechanics, conventions, and tropes indirectly impacted their representation, transforming them from tragic heroines to comic figures and raising further questions about the relationship between gender and comedy. In each parody, the psychological complexity of the new woman character is compromised through Antsey’s alteration of one or more of her key purposes within Ibsen’s text. Overall, I argue that the reassessment and reinterpretation of these key Norwegian texts can be viewed as a mode of transition between Ibsen and those impacted and influenced by him, providing a cultural medium or “buffer” that helped connect the notably “serious” Scandinavian playwright with British audiences.

The New Woman and Her Ageing Other

2015 ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
Teresa Mangum
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Physical Phenomenon ◽  
Young Person ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
New Women ◽  
Diverse Field ◽  
The New Woman

This essay focuses on the powerful grip anxieties about ageing had on the increasingly diverse field of texts associated with the New Woman. A number of women poets from the period seem uniquely aware of the potential consequences for single women when they transition from being a ‘young person’ to being a spinster. Novelists of the period emphasized effects of ageing not only as a physical phenomenon, but also as an affective, social, economic, and relational influence that affected a character’s identity and options as profoundly as gender and sexuality. Nowhere is the fear of ageing more prominent than in those novels where New Women characters and plots intersect with late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, whether the Gothic setting is the urban or actual jungle.

New Women in the New Pacific: Japanese–American Romances in the Context of U.S. Empire

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 395-418
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The West ◽  
Japanese Men ◽  
New Women ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Influential Book

In the title of a 1903 American Journal of Sociology essay, Ernest W. Clement announces a new phenomenon: “The New Woman in Japan.” By this title, he quickly explains, he does not mean to satirically compare this Japanese sociological development to the American “parody of man” usually associated with the phrase, because “such a creature as that called the ‘new woman’ in the Occident has not yet appeared to any great extent among the Japanese.” Although sometimes in Japan “the process of the new woman's evolution may be disfigured by some accident” producing “a sickening sort of person,” Clement's interest is not in particular aberrations, but rather in “the abstract, legal new woman” created by recent changes in Japan's civil code. In this abstraction Clement sees improvement on previous Japanese laws that “relegat[ed] woman to an abnormally inferior position.” Clement thus assures readers that, although Japan's modernization hinges upon its women's legal and cultural status, female advancement in Japan will not approach the “abnormal” excesses of the United States. Quoting Alice Mabel Bacon's influential book Japanese Girls and Women to stress this point, Clement explains that Japanese men are adopting many Western habits and opinions, but they still “shrink aghast, in many cases, at the thought that their women may ever become the forward, self-assertive, half-masculine women of the West.” Yet still, many of these Japanese men express “a growing dissatisfaction with the smallness and narrowness of the lives of their wives and daughters — a growing belief that better educated women make better homes.”

Robins, Elizabeth (1862–1952)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne E. Gates
Keyword(s):  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Stage Management ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Joint Management ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Elizabeth Robins ◽  
Nora Helmer ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
A Doll's House

Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1862, Elizabeth Robins established herself in the American theater and then relocated to London in 1888. She epitomizes the grasp that the plays of Henrik Ibsen held on performers in the 1890s. Indeed, she outshone other professionals by laying claim to performing and producing the first English-speaking Hedda Gabler (1891) and the first Hilda Wangel (1893, in The Master Builder). She felt that the stage-management system prevented women from having a say in their profession, and therefore she welcomed the Independent Theatre Movement. She formed the Joint Management Company with American actress Marion Lea, her stage partner and co-producer for Hedda Gabler, and she organized several subscription series to mount not only Ibsen’s plays but also other artistic theater. Her feminist play Votes for Women (1907) was at the vanguard of pro-suffrage drama. Performances organized by Robins of Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder were rivaled in impact only by the initial sensation created by Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer in her London production of A Doll’s House in 1889. Robins’ other Ibsen roles included Martha in The Pillars of Society, Asta in Little Eyolf, Agnes in a production of Act 4 of Brand, Ella Reintheim in John Gabriel Borkman, Mrs Linde in A Doll’s House, and Rebecca West in Rosmersholm.

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.

The 1890s: New Women, Bloomer Girls, and the Old Ball Game

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra A. Shattuck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Professional Baseball ◽  
Baseball Players ◽  
Ball Game ◽  
New Women ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Way

The 1890s saw a dramatic redefinition of femininity that coalesced into the image of the Gibson Girl and “New Woman.” Men like Bernarr Macfadden taught women that athleticism was a prerequisite of beauty; thousands of women began riding bicycles and playing vigorous sports with gusto. Women’s professional baseball shifted from theatrical to highly competitive and featured talented female players like Maud Nelson and Lizzie Arlington. Their “Bloomer Girl” teams barnstormed the country playing men’s amateur and semi-professional teams. Many decried the New Woman ideal and critics of female baseball players called them Amazons and freaks. Bloomer Girl teams of the 1890s paved the way for the talented female teams of the twentieth century.

‘Vital friendship’: Sexual and Economic Ambivalence in Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina

2020 ◽  
pp. 133-153
Author(s):  
Lisa C. Robertson
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Social Position ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Heterosexual Relationships ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Sexual Power ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines Rhoda Broughton’s novel Dear Faustina (1879), which engages with the conventions of the New Woman novel for the purpose of commenting on the difficult social position of independent women. The novel’s representation of two key forms of new housing, women’ residences (or ladies’ chambers) and settlement housing, uncovers the way that these new domestic spaces made legible the relationship between economic and sexual power. While this novel has often been interpreted as a narrative of inversion or exchange between homosocial and heterosexual relationships, this chapter focuses on the ways that the novel is instead characterised by ambivalence in both form and theme.

New Women in the Civilizing Mission

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Motoe Sasaki
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
New Women ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Missionary Women ◽  
The U.S

This chapter explores how the notion of civilization affected historical consciousness in the U.S. and China, and was also involved in the creation of the subjectivities of the New Woman: on the U.S. side as a benevolent female emancipator by a country at the vanguard of historical progress in the world, and in China as a self-sufficient modern female in a country in imminent danger of falling into a state of wangguo. In addition, the chapter discusses the experiences of the first generation of American New Women missionaries who sailed to China to be part of the civilizing mission otherwise known as the U.S. foreign mission movement. They took issue with the direction of Chinese xin nüxing and with the radical activism among young Chinese women in the 1911 Revolution that overturned the Qing dynasty. By appropriating popularized versions of evolutionary theories, these missionaries constructed their legitimacy as teachers of Chinese women on the basis of comparisons with them, and they created educational projects and enterprises for Chinese women designed to create a more acceptable kind of New Woman that fell in line with mainstream views of American missionary women.

Rewriting Ibsen's Nora: Fiction and the New Woman in Thailand (1920s–1940s)

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-413
Author(s):  
Thosaeng Chaochuti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Thai Women ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
A Doll's House

Previous research has shown that the New Woman was a global phenomenon and that fiction was crucial to the emergence of this New Woman. One work that was of particular importance was Henrik Ibsen's A doll's house. This article examines the rise of the New Woman in early twentieth century Thailand. It traces the campaigns for gender equality that Thai women waged in local newspapers and magazines. It also examines the reactions towards these campaigns by three major authors, all of whom turned to Ibsen's play in their engagement with the New Woman phenomenon.

New Women in the New Drama

1990 ◽  
Vol 6 (21) ◽  
pp. 31-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Television Studies ◽  
New Women ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
New Drama ◽  
The University ◽  
Women Dramatists

While considerable attention has been paid in recent years to the work of women dramatists during the wave of proto-feminist activity in the early years of the present century, the way in which women characters – whether created by male or female writers – were presented has been less adequately investigated. Here, Jan McDonald, Head of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies in the University of Glasgow, explores the work of well-known and largely-forgotten playwrights alike, discussing the ways in which the ‘new drama’ – the subject of Jan McDonald's recent book for the ‘Macmillan Modern Dramatists’ series – reflected the concerns of the ‘new woman’.

scholarly journals The Image of New Woman as Portrayed in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Novel The Lowland

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 92-98
Author(s):  
D. Kavitha ◽  
Prof. M. Neeraja ◽  
Prof. M. Neeraja
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Major Shift

The last decade of the Victorian era witnessed a major shift in the social attitude of the woman. It was a break away from the patriarchal system, and women emerging as independent being and moving towards achieving gender equality. The ‘New Woman’ is considered as a precursor to the feminist movement and thus the legacy of New Woman lives on to this day. Jhumpa Lahiri, the significant writer of the Indian diaspora has emerged on the global literary scene with her remarkable writings. The novel has a compelling plot of family relations. It delineates the tender fraternal bond between Subhash and Udayan and how it gets affected by the various paths they chose in their lives. This intensely emotional tale unfolds diverse dimensions of the woman caught in the predicament of conservative cultural practices at home, political unrest in society and the life of an exile in the immigrant land. It also explores Gauri’s expression of identity, her struggle with love, Bela’s choice for individuality and pragmatism in life has turned the novel into a unique narrative. In her second novel, ‘The Lowland’ Jhumpa portrays her women characters devaluing the patriarchal setup. They break the myths of womanhood and motherhood. Prominence is given to assert their position in society by restoring self-identity than nurturing deeper family relations. They fight with courage and confront various challenges in their marital relationship.

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