Journal of American
Studies of Turkey
11 (2000) : 51-62
Breaking
the Ties that Bind: Literary Representations of the
New
Woman in American Society
It was not until American women writers found the uniqueness of
their lives a worthy subject, which is to say, not until those lives began
sufficiently to change, that the female hero, even in the hands of the most
accomplished practitioners, was capable of entering the American imagination
with the resonance and permanence of her fictional brothers. The emergence of
this new woman began at the turn of the century and continued through the first
quarter of the twentieth century. The so-called New Woman fiction, written
during the highly transitional period of the turn of the century, not only
engages with new ideals of womanhood but it also contains important connections
with the literary traditions that precede and follow them. In The Man-Made
World (1911) and “Coming Changes in Literature” (1915), Charlotte Perkins
Gilman called for a “new” kind of fiction about women that would transcend
conventional literary paradigms. In The Man-Made World, Gilman was
calling for a literature that presented women with complexity and in a
realistic variety of ways, rather than merely as innocent ingenues, angelic
wives and mothers, or shameful fallen women. As she does in “Coming Changes in
Literature,” Gilman goes on to assert that the “art of fiction is being reborn
these days” (123).
Gilman herself, as well as Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton, lived during the fascinating time of transition from the “old type of woman” to the “new.” The fiction of all three authors reflects the challenges that this era posed, portraying in diverse ways women who transgress their conventional role and negotiate, with varying success, the ideals of New Womanhood. Other writers contemporary with Chopin, Wharton, and Gilman treated the New Woman in their fiction and presented challenges to the social prescriptions for female behavior. Their fiction was mainly concerned with “the indicators of power--gender, race, class, sexuality--that affect women’s lives and [the] privileging of women’s consciousness, women’s subjectivity and, therefore, women’s agency” (Rosenfelt 209). Unlike the old woman, the New Woman female hero leaves behind whatever power she had available to her in the familial community because, while safe, it is on the periphery of life. Her separation from the real workings of society makes her vulnerable to following a marginalized agenda, to a deathlike passivity that comes from being irrelevant.
What, in fact, does happen to the American woman’s fiction at
the turn of the century is a fictional embracing of the “new woman” philosophy
surfacing at the time. As more and more women entered the work place and formed
independent communities, and the public discussions of divorce and remarriage
raged, women, who were themselves breaking out of the confines of marriage as
their only choice and finding independence in work, wanted to see these
experiences reflected in fiction. The “New Woman” fiction has come to represent
this fiction that demonstrated both the frustration and restrictions placed on
middle-class Victorian women, as well as the possibility of escape to a room of
one’s own, a career, and a man who can appreciate the female for her new found
independence. This fiction, with its overt feminist rhetoric, decentered the
ideals of True Womanhood as well as the domestic ideology and marriage telos by
keeping its focus on the female hero’s internal development and independence.
As Eve Kornfield and Susan Jackson contend: “The creators of this fiction in
America lived extraordinary lives, and, consciously or not, their lives
affected their fiction” (74).
The ideal Victorian woman was being shaken in America by many
revolutionary movements. Of course, nineteenth-century America was
characterized by unprecedented change and tension. On the whole, this
tumultuous age embodied diversity and multiplicity of elements and paradoxes. It
was a “time of industrialization, knowledge explosion, immigration and vast
population growth, urbanization, geographical expansion, changing race
relationships, and the greatest armed conflict on American soil” (Howe 507). By
the 1840-60 period, the contours of American Victorian culture were
dramatically changing and evolving and steadily contributing and adding to the
growing pains of a budding, unsettled society. In fact, the sweep of
Modernization was forcefully under way at mid-century America, and rapid
technological advances were in full swing, bringing about an increasing upward
social mobility and restlessness. Also, the fluid and economically expanding
American society seethed with intellectual movements and idealistic reforms
that absorbed both elite and popular cultures: Bloomerism, Expansionism,
Transcendentalism, Feminism (The Women’s Rights Movement), domesticity, and the
prominent issues of slavery and Abolitionism. Hence, nineteenth-century
Americans faced profound changes in virtually all phases of their lives,
changes that prompted their burgeoning growth into a continental power.
The emergence of a new capitalist and urbanized nineteenth-century society greatly changed traditional family life and the relationship of the home to economic production. Industrialization, for instance, gradually separated economic production from the home. According to Rosemary R. Ruether, male work “became increasingly disconnected with the home and was collectivized in a separate sphere. They more and more lost their own productive work, as well as their integration with male work” (196-197). Women were confined to the home sphere and their functions were reduced primarily to that of consumer, child-rearer, and domestic caretaker. Women were determined by their reproductive system, which dictated their physical fragility, emotional passiveness, and homebound maternal role (Smith-Rosenberg 46-47). The Cult of True Womanhood was formulated and this in its own turn transformed the nonproductive women into “angels in the home” and “paragons of virtue.” A “true woman” was supposed to possess the four cardinal feminine virtues of “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (Welter 152). She was innocent, modest, and very content with the warmth and security of the home. She was pretty, elegant, and capable of amusing her husband, bringing up her children, and managing the household. Above all, her religious piety and her moral purity enabled her to inspire man to a more spiritual life. In the words of Anne Scott, she was expected to be “a natural teacher, and wise counselor to her husband and children” (5).
Of course, women were traditionally viewed by men as different
and inferior creatures. Since Classical Greece, men had insisted that “man
represented the mind, woman the body, man the creative principle, woman the
reproductive impulse, man the heaven-born aspect of human nature, woman its
earth-bound component” (Smith-Rosenberg 258). In his widely read and
influential essay “Of Queen’s Garden,” John Ruskin relates man’s qualities as
active, speculative, and creative: “He is eminently the doer, the creator, the
discoverer, the defender” (135). “He is fitted for adventure, for war, and for
conquest; whereas, woman is not fitted for this kind of activity. She should be
protected from the hazards of the ‘open world’” (136). “Her intellect is not
for invention and creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision”
(135). In his prescription of True Womanhood, Ruskin sums up late
nineteenth-century social expectations of woman:
So far as she rules [in the home], all must be right, or nothing else is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise--wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side: wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service—the true changefulness of woman (137).
True Womanhood was in fact a patriarchal ideology that expected woman to be perfect in her virtues but denied her autonomy as a full-fledged human being. It extolled her as an angel but restricted her role narrowly to the domestic sphere as a subservient caretaker. Women, especially middle- and upper-class women, became idle and decorative. They were what Olive Schreiner called a “sex parasite,” or what Thorstein Veblen called a “conspicuous consumer” (77; 83). According to Veblen, women were constructed to appear autonomous but really were ornamental and decorative creatures, whose “conspicuous consumption” signifies men’s wealth and power (83).
Just as there were women who unquestionably accepted this
socially constructed role and tried hard to live up to the ideals of True
Womanhood, there were also women who felt imprisoned by this narrowly defined
place and openly defied patriarchal oppression. In the second half of the
nineteenth century, women’s defiance of patriarchal order and their demands for
equal rights became a mass movement in America. Industrialization, as Ruether
explains, completed the earlier marginalization of women by confining them
strictly in the home, but it also created “a new level of contradiction between
women’s experience of their capacities and the shrunken and dependent place
assigned to them” (9). As a result, women in larger numbers than ever before
began to question the traditional ideologies of female subjugation and to
challenge the “naturalness” of the separated spheres. Increasingly, women, as
Smith-Rosenberg argues, left “the home in droves to purify the world, to
elevate themselves, to fight injustice--to create meaningful and fulfilling
female roles” (89).
Women, who found their traditionally inferior role intolerable,
began to join hands and fight together for equal rights and equal
opportunities. At the Seneca Fall Convention in 1848, which officially marked
the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton declared that the history of mankind had been “a history of
repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman” and called
for woman’s suffrage and her equal participation in various trades,
professions, and commerce (70-73). A female rebel, Margaret Fuller, in her
influential book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), argued for a
widening of woman’s sphere, demanding “Let them be Sea-captains if they will.”
Within the next four decades, numerous national and countless State and city organizations
cropped up all over the country. Among them, the National Woman Suffrage
Association, the American Woman Suffrage Association, the General Federation of
Women’s Clubs, the National Council of Women, the National Woman’s Trade Union
League, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were the best known and most
powerful.
These organizations exerted a considerable influence on the
lives of late nineteenth-century American women, especially women writers, and
on the social issues concerning them. Organizations, like the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union, formed in 1874, became what William L. O’Neill has called
“safety valves by which frustrated women could find an outlet for talents and
ambitions that home life could neither satisfy nor healthily contain” (43).
Moreover, as the writer and feminist theoretician Charlotte Perkins Gilman
pointed out, these organizations put women into “the broader contact and
relationship so essential to social progress” (The Living of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman 257). Repudiating conventional gender distinctions and
restrictions, women became a novel social political phenomenon. They were the
“New Women” of the late nineteenth- and the early twentieth-century. Young and
unmarried, these “New Women” refused to submit themselves to social conventions
and sought to live autonomous lives. Education, Smith-Rosenberg argues, was
their “first self-conscious demand” (247). Many young women saw in college
education “an opportunity for intellectual self-fulfillment and for an autonomous
role outside the patriarchal family” (247). Smith-Rosenberg shows that college
years prepared young women for roles outside the conventional home--roles that
had heretofore been reserved for men (253). New Women came to define themselves
through their own political and professional existence rather than through
their domesticity, marriage, and motherhood.
In short, the New Women were highly educated, mostly single,
and economically autonomous. Resenting indoctrinations that society imposed on
women, they began to create an alternative self-image around the issues of
female intellectual power, self-fulfillment, and non-domestic roles. They
argued that gender distinctions were artificial, man-made constructions, and
thus changeable. They asserted that women were as intelligent as men and
therefore entitled to a career and to a public voice. They defied traditional
properties and pioneered new roles for women. By the early twentieth century,
the New Women had firmly established themselves within the professional world
that had traditionally been defined as man’s sphere (Smith-Rosenberg 176). They
were self-conscious feminists who had rejected the idea of True Womanhood and
openly challenged patriarchal ideologies of maleness and femaleness
(Smith-Rosenberg 245-246). Between the 1890s and 1920s, the New Women, argues
Smith-Rosenberg, “amassed greater political power and visibility than any other
group of women in American experience” (256).
Women educational reformers, physicians, women writers and
artists were the most visible of the New Women. In fact, the term “New Woman”
was first used by the British novelist Sarah Grand, the pen name of Frances
Elizabeth McFall, in reference to those who were dissatisfied with
nineteenth-century prescriptions of femininity. In her essay “The New Aspects
of the Woman Question,” which appeared in the North American Review,
Grand wrote that “the new woman” is one who “has been sitting apart in silent
contemplation all these years thinking and thinking, until at last she solved
the problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with the
Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere, and prescribed the remedy” (272). However, it was
popular novelist Ouida, the pen name of Marie Louise de la Remee, who selected
the phrase and capitalized it for her rebuttal in May 1894:
In the English language there are conspicuous at the present moment two words which designate two unmitigated bores: The Workingman and the Woman. The workingman and the Woman, the New Woman be it remembered, meet us at every page of literature written in the English tongue, and each is convinced that on its own especial W hangs the future of the world (610).
The New Woman fiction constitutes an important episode in
women’s literary history. It not only departs significantly from the
sentimental novel that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century,
but it also strongly affirms the notion that women were primarily individuals
with human needs for substantive work as well as political rights. What
distinguishes the New Woman fiction from the sentimental novel is that the
female hero’s hostility to the patriarchal order is overt and grounded in her
desire for self-actualization rather than for eros. She embarks on a quest to
find meaningful work in a world ruled and dominated by men, consistently
privileging her passion for self-expression or independence over her romantic
attachments, important as those are to her. Female heroes in the sentimental
novel also value their independence, but they tend to betray it, either by acting
against their will or by rationalizing the advent of male power into their
autonomous but incomplete lives. While pursuing her own course, the sentimental
female hero spends most of the narrative disentangling her conflicted emotions
about a man she experiences as more powerful than herself. The New Woman
character, though not immune to emotional upset or even self-betrayal, is
placed more firmly in a world of her own making and either finds a mate
compatible with it or recommits herself to a woman’s right to have a life apart
from marriage. Even when she was unable to make a good love match, her
vocational rewards tended to balance her romantic losses.
Though she may have been christened by a British novelist, the
New Woman represents ideals of female agency that have substantial precedent in
American history and letters. The first published woman writer in America, Anne
Bradstreet, asserted her resistance to “each carping tongue / Who says my hand
a needle better fits” in defending her right to be a poet (6-8). In 1650, she
knew that a literary profession to which men had unquestioned entrance would be
an uphill battle for a woman and that skeptics might attribute her success as a
poet to plagiarism or to mere luck. Her point is confirmed by other literature
of the day. In 1645, John Winthrop claimed in his journal the “sad infirmity”
of the wife of Governor Hopkins. He was sure that her loss of “understanding
and reason” resulted from being allowed to read and write extensively rather
than attending to her proper domestic concerns:
Her husband, being very loving and tender of her, was loathe to grieve her; but he saw his error, when it was too late. For if she had attended to her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably in place God had set her (45).
The New Woman fiction, which was part and parcel of
turn-of-the-century American society, shocked many conservative readers with
its description of sexual intimacy, its feminist portraits of independence,
psychologically complex women, and its melodramatic assertion that “the eternal
wildness, the untamed primitive savage temperament that lurks in the mildest
best woman” is the “keynote of woman’s strength” (Egerton 29). While such a
fiction prompted and sparked hostile debates, it may be seen as significant for
its willingness to question both the social assumptions about gender and the
literary conventions regarding subject matter. As Ann Ardis has argued, it may
be seen as an important antecedent to the development of literary modernism in
the 1910s (3). Most importantly, it helped define literary representations of
the New Woman in American society, codifying the rights for which this figure
came to stand.
As both real women and fictional characters continued to
challenge Victorian notions of femininity in the final decades of the
nineteenth century, the New Woman, for better or worse, became a pervasive
cultural phenomenon in American society. The question of female identity and
individuality grew stronger and more urgent and women writers could no longer
be reconciled with the ideals of True Womanhood. The widening gap between the
ideal of the “true woman” and the social realities of female adolescence
necessitated a radical change in the portrayal of women in fiction. The
concurrence of the New Woman’s emergence in fiction with the period of literary
realism and naturalism is a logical one. In general, the rise of realism
contributed to the demystification of the image of woman in fiction. Between
the end of the Civil War and the 1910s, many writers strove to represent their
world as realistically as possible in literature, and there were corresponding
effects on the presentation of women in fiction. More importantly, since
America itself had evolved greatly throughout the century because of
industrialization and urbanization, writers began portraying setting and
characters that reflected these changes. They began to depict women characters
in non-domestic contexts, working outside their homes in many of the new
occupations that resulted from these influences. Writers also began to
overthrow the nineteenth-century ideals of True Womanhood and to characterize
the conditions of female upbringing. As the century proceeded, they ventured
upon the question of female identity and her attempts at self-realization.
The diverse portraits of New Women by American writers at the
turn of the century represents fundamental challenges to the Victorian ideal of
True Womanhood and replaces that ideal with the ideal of New Womanhood.
Fragility, fainting, domesticity, and submissiveness were the signs of the
heroine’s superiority and fine feelings; she was too pure for this corrupt
world with its mercenary rules of commerce and brutal male power. Her realm was
the home, the influence of which she hoped to extend to civilization at large.
In contrast, the New Woman relished action and strenuous physical activity. She
was athletic, healthy, and eager to take on challenges in the non-domestic
world. By the 1910s, the woman of action and fortitude had made great headway
in replacing the delicate ideal of sentimental fiction and was becoming central
to a new fantasy of competence in the roughest circumstances. The woman of
action could not stand on a pedestal, immobile, for she was too curious about
life beyond home and marriage. She is anxious to flee the circumscribed orbit
of parental and societal authority in order to make her way in an urban
environment bustling with change and possibility. In doing so, she is rejecting
settled, family-oriented life on the margins in favor of an open-ended,
individual effort within the heart of modern society. She is released from the
roles assigned to women by history and myth. She is now intent on remaking
herself into a New Woman in harmony with the dawning new age.
The pitting of old against new ideals of womanhood not only
signals the shattering of an old consensus about the nature of women and their
progression but also forms the core of New Woman fiction. Women writers began
engaging with their new roles, displaying a variety of attitudes toward women’s
public occupations and economic independence, the idea of marriage as a
companionate union entered out of choice, the ending of a sexual double
standard, and women’s opportunity to be artists. Within this framework, I have
chosen four representative women writers with the most continuing appeal to
modern readers. Taken together, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather,
and Ellen Glasgow tend to be the most representative of New Woman fiction.
These novelists come to express their dissatisfaction with the confinements of
woman’s old ideals by creating defiant female heroes who protest more or less
frankly against artificial demands of femininity. Their novels A Country
Doctor (1884), The Awakening (1899), The Song of the Lark
(1915), and Barren Ground (1925), which feature young, middle-class,
heterosexual women in adventurous roles, center on the experiences of New
Women. In fact, these novels not only come close to a feminist standpoint in
demanding that women at least be allowed to choose and to live on their own
terms, but they also paint a bright picture of the prospects for
self-actualization and personal integrity for women within the confines of a
patriarchal, capitalist society.
Several American novels surrounding the turn of the century
treat the right of women to pursuits outside the home, including the
traditional professions. The predominance of novels in the 1880s and 1890s
portraying women as physicians suggests that medicine, in particular, was the
focus of much interest. In many of these novels, the protagonist’s central conflict
exists between her career and her marriage, and the authors resolve it in
various ways. For example, Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor has for
its female hero a strong, talented, and highly focused woman named Nan Prince.
While in medical school, Nan grows to enjoy the affections of a young man,
George Gerry, but she soon realizes that her career and marriage are
incompatible. However, she remains satisfied with her choice to remain single
and fulfill her calling. The actual importance of the book lies in the fact
that for the first time a woman writer presented an adolescent female hero who
breaks with the tradition of the “true woman” without being punished in the
end. Nan Prince does not conform to societal pressures but successfully asserts
her individuality defining herself via the profession she has chosen. A
Country Doctor is indeed the first novel about a woman who resolves the
long-known conflict of marriage versus profession in favor of the latter. Thus,
it deserves to be called a turning point in the description of the New Woman
fiction.
Jewett repeatedly emphasizes in the novel that the woman’s
choice of profession must be seen as a vocation. Time and again the author
expresses her belief that all human beings are created for a special purpose
and that each individual should be allowed to make use of his or her God-given
talents. Arguing that Nan would be violating her true nature if she let her
talent lie idle, Jewett succeeds in invalidating the nineteenth-century concept
of “true womanhood.” Jewett refuses to condemn Nan’s deviation from socially
sanctioned norms of female behavior; in doing so, she comes to challenge
fundamental assumptions about woman’s nature. In contrast to popular
nineteenth-century writers such as Alcott who makes her protagonists go through
a transformation, Jewett justifies Nan’s search for self-definition, placing
the female hero’s individuality above contemporary social conventions that
circumscribed woman’s sphere. Significantly, Jewett calls the chapter in which
Nan makes her crucial decision to become a doctor “Against the Wind.” The
author’s main concern in A Country Doctor is with pointing out that Nan
simply wishes to become what nature intends her to be and that she has to
fulfill this mission in life if she is to remain true to herself. Nan Prince
becomes a forerunner of woman’s right to self-fulfillment.
Many American novels from this era also respond to another
ideal of the New Woman economic independence. While this belief is connected to
the New Woman’s desire for a career, the characters in works treating female
economic freedom are often not professional New Women, such as physicians. Some
of Ellen Glasgow’s later novels contain female heroes who come out of a
successful living by their own efforts, including the dairy-farmer Dorinda
Oakley in Barren Ground. In this novel, Dorinda’s extraordinary ambition
and her pioneer spirit are revealed. Dorinda, who is a strong-willed woman of
driving practicality, competes victoriously in a man’s job in a male’s world.
Although she has been seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by her lover, Dorinda
overcomes these challenges, comes to own successful enterprises, and witnesses
the dissolution of the man who deserted her. Her capacity for survival and her
great desire for independence enable her to gain control over her own body and
mind, over the earth, and finally over the man who had destroyed her early
happiness. The “keynote of her character” is the impulse “to protect, to lift
up, rebuild and restore” (350). She realizes, no matter what, she “has got to
go straight ahead” (280). Her reward is financial security as well as a
respected place, a niche in the community that no other person and certainly no
other woman in Pedlar’s Mill is granted. Barren Ground is undoubtedly an
important and optimistic fictional example of a woman who begins with literally
nothing but eventually earns her living through meaningful, pleasing work.
Truly, Dorinda’s public work has become synonymous at this time with not only
individual freedom, but with an expanding universe for all women and for their
independence from the restricted experience of family duty. A triumph for one,
then, is portrayed as a victory for all.
Several authors in this period take on perhaps the most
controversial issue associated with the New Woman: her right to sexuality and
her claim to sexual self-determination. Coming to her age and her artistic
maturity in the era of the New Woman, Kate Chopin studied woman’s sexual,
social, and economic status in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century
America and relentlessly criticized society’s subjection of women. Chopin was a
conscious rebel of the patriarchal social order, a significant “new woman”
writer at the turn of the century. In her greatest achievement, The
Awakening, whose meaningful title testifies to the author’s revolutionizing
intentions, she, for the first time, openly acknowledged the existence of
sexual desire in women. Her liberal treatment of female sexuality, including
direct allusions to the female hero’s physical enjoyment of sexuality together
with an unprecedented criticism of the institution of marriage, along with its
sexual double-standards, provoked an outcry of public indignation that
destroyed the author’s further career. What led to the virulence of these
attacks was not simply the admittedly sensitive themes of sex and suicide; it
was the fact that here was a novel in which a young woman, who was dissatisfied
with her marriage, leaves her husband and children to take a house of her own,
falls in love with one man, has an affair with another, and finally, unable to
face a future without love or hope, drowns herself--and nowhere in the novel is
she condemned.
Unlike the nineteenth-century fictional heroines before her,
Edna Pontellier in The Awakening protests against artificial definitions
of femininity and journeys to discover not “life” but “self.” When midway
through the novel, Edna announces, “I would give my life for my children, but I
wouldn’t give myself,” (48) the American female hero makes a quantum leap into
the future. In Chopin’s portrayal of Edna, that aspect which brings to American
fiction a wholly original conception of the female hero is the gradual
revelation of a woman’s inner life, an area of consciousness so universally
disregarded by earlier writers as to deny the fact of its existence. It is in
defining the precise nature of that self and concomitantly, in revealing the
rich, inner life of a woman who defies tradition that Chopin’s unique and
incontestable artistry lies. Indeed, Chopin brings to literature a woman who
chooses to sacrifice “life” in the insistence on and celebration of “self.” If,
in the creation of this woman, Chopin utters a cry of anguish at the plight of
being female in a patriarchal world, she expresses as well, in the story of
Edna Pontellier, a sign at the terrible loss to all of humanity whenever the
attempt to find and to be true to the self is defeated.
A final group of novels published at the turn of the century
deals with the New Woman’s interest in artistic expression. The artist, whether
she be painter, singer, dancer, actress, or writer, is a primary figure of New
Woman fiction. Indeed, the artist female hero’s desire to engage in such
activity alienates her from the traditional woman’s world of family and
community service and identifies her as a modern person. The concept of the
female artist served a variety of important functions in the transition to new
conceptions of women. For one thing, she engaged in work that lasted as opposed
to the Sisyphian chores of housework. More importantly, though, art bridged the
gap between woman’s traditional sphere and the new ideal of assimilation into
public roles. The artist female hero formed a bridge between private and public
realms and was well positioned for the leap from female culture to male. She
was a symbol of change, for the artist demonstrated her talents in a public
way, calling attention to her achievements and seeking acknowledgement for
them.
The Kunstlerromane or “artist-novels,” created by women in the
late nineteenth century, legitimize women’s right to express themselves in an
independent, non-gender-defined way. Some female characters in artist-novels of
this period who devote their lives to art include operatic singer Thea Kronborg
in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. On a visit to Panther Canyon,
Arizona, where she finds beautiful fragments of Native American pottery, Thea
experiences an epiphany that reflects her commitment to art. She acknowledges
her calling to the eternal process of cultural production, traditionally a
masculine realm in its most legitimized forms, rather than to the realm of
biological reproduction:
The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it in one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals (304).
Indeed,
Thea vows to use her body literally as a vessel not for the bearing of
children, but for the bearing of art. Thea likes waking up every morning with
the feeling that “life is your own, and your strength is your own, and your
talent is your own; that you’re all there, and there’s no sag in you”
(284-285).
By the late nineteenth century and by the early twentieth century, women writers, especially the representative writers discussed in this paper, rejected the idea of True Womanhood and openly challenged patriarchal attitudes of maleness and femaleness. These women writers departed from the ideology of the hearth and home and began to create new women who are vastly more lively, able, full-blooded and interesting human beings than we have been led to believe. Nan, Dorinda, Edna, and Thea not only battle alone to make their way in a society riddled with prejudice against their sex, but they also come to overcome that prejudice against their gender within a system that is basically open to any person with talent, fortitude, and ambition even if backward beliefs and individuals put women at a disadvantage. Their dedication to work and social progress is ennobling, making it possible for them to improve the modern scene as well as enter it. The New Woman fiction dealt with in this paper endorses and affirms a woman’s right to meaningful paid work outside the home, her right to choose what her destiny is regardless of gender, family obligation, tradition, or prejudice. The New Woman fantasy was more than a Cinderella tale with a feminist female hero, then; it was also a tale that posited female individual triumph within a male-dominated system that, nonetheless, made room for the woman of talent and ambition.
In their fiction, Jewett, Glasgow, Chopin,
and Cather authentically and poignantly present the new woman’s growth, her
awakening, and her self-redefinition. They do not attempt to hide their women’s
spirit and personality behind a tinsel façade of conventional charms. In fact,
they are one of the first women writers to debunk most of the Victorian myths
and to provide us with a window to new women’s lives. Their female heroes are
not architects of the cult of domesticity. They actually dare defy convention
and brazenly reach and strain for what they desire. The existence of early New
Woman fiction with feminist overtones suggests widespread interest in new ways
of thinking about women, an openness to female autonomy that can inspire our
own visions of change. This fiction, which has kept alive transformative dreams
issuing from the long fight to secure equal rights for women which has created
an image of competence in non-domestic arenas, can paint a possible world of
dreams grasped and limitations transcended that points toward a bright future
and away from a frustrating present. Such fiction lives not only because it
presents interesting views of new women’s changing roles but also because it
taps into human experience. In fact, such fiction transforms life into art, and
through that creative act it teaches us, arouses us, pleases us, nourishes
us--all of us, male and female.
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Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick:
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Kate. The Awakening. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1976.
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27 (1975): 507-32.
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Sarah Orne. A Country Doctor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884.
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Eve, and Susan Jackson. “The Female Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century
America: Parameters of a Vision.” Journal of American Culture 10 (1987):
69-75.
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William L. The Woman Movement: Feminism in the United States and England.
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(Marie Louise de la Ramee). “The New Woman.” North American Review 158
(1984): 610.
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Deborah Silverton. “Feminism, Postfeminism, and Contemporary Women’s Fiction.” Tradition
and the Talents of Women. Ed. Florence Howe. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1991.
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Rosemary Radford. New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human
Liberation. Minneapolis: Seabury P, 1975.
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John. “Of Queen’s Garden.” Sesame and Lilies. 1865. Philadelphia: Henry
Altemus, 1871.
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Olive. Woman and Labor. 7th ed. New York: Stokes, 1911.
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John. “Journal.” The American Puritans. Ed. Perry Miller. Garden City:
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