This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G
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This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. New Women, New Technologies: The Interrelation between Gender and Technology at the Victorian Fin de Siècle Lena Wånggren PhD in English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2012 1 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is entirely my own work. Ideas and passages reproduced from other sources have been properly acknowledged. The thesis has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Lena Wånggren 2 Acknowledgments I am incredibly grateful to Bob Irvine, my supervisor, for his invaluable comments, suggestions, and encouragement. I would also like to thank Penny Fielding, my second supervisor, for her generous support and kindness. Further thanks to Jonathan Wild with whom I have been able to discuss ideas, and to Laura Marcus for helpful talks early on in the process. Thanks also to my examiners Andrew Taylor and Pamela Thurschwell. Thanks indeed to the whole English Literature Department in Edinburgh – students, faculty, and administrative staff – for intellectual exchange, great work, and very fine company. I also owe gratitude to the fabulous feminists in and outwith Edinburgh, for our fruitful mixing of business with pleasure. My gratitude further goes to the College of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Edinburgh, and to various funding institutions in Sweden, for the financial support without which this project had not been possible. I thank the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh Library for their assistance with my research. Most of all, warmest thanks to my family and friends, both absent and present – for being wonderful and mine. My grandparents, who lived and worked in the aftermath of nineteenth-century technological modernity (a telephone operator, a nurse, a railway administrator, and a socialist sheet metal worker keen on cycling), have often been in my thoughts during the process. 3 Abstract This thesis treats the interrelation between gender and technology at the Victorian fin de siècle, focusing on the figure of the New Woman. It aims to offer a re- examination of this figure of early feminism in relation to the technologies and techniques of the time, suggesting the simultaneously abstract and material concept of technology as a way to more fully understand the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman; her emergence as both a discursive figure in literature and as a set of social practices. Major authors include Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, and H. G. Wells, examined in the larger context of late-Victorian and fin de siècle popular and New Woman fiction. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical and methodological premises of the thesis. Locating a specific problematic in the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman, it draws upon wider discussions within gender and feminist theory to consider this central concern in New Woman criticism. Criticising gynocritical assumptions, the chapter offers a way of reading New Woman literature without relying on the gender of the author – taking Grant Allen’s (in)famous New Woman novel The Woman Who Did as a case in point. It concludes by suggesting technology as a way of examining the figure of the New Woman in its historiospecific and material context. Chapter 2 establishes the typewriter as a case in point for examining the interrelation between gender and technology at the fin de siècle. Through reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys, it examines the semantic ambiguity of the term ‘typewriter’ to demonstrate the sexual ambiguity of the New Woman and also the mutual interaction between individual agency and technology. Chapter 3 examines the technology most associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. Through reading H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures, it considers how the social practice of bicycling comes to be associated with concepts of female freedom, problematising the notion of the bicycle as a technology of democratisation. Chapter 4 discusses the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the Nightingale New Style nurse. Examining the emergence of the clinical hospital, it places the New Woman nurse in a context of medical modernity. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, it explores the institutional technology of the hospital in the formation of notions of gender. 4 Table of Contents Declaration ................................................................................................................... 1 Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... 2 Abstract ........................................................................................................................ 3 Preface ......................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1 The New Woman and the Gender-Technology-Modernity Nexus 1.1 Fin de Siècle Modernity and the New Woman ........................................ 11 1.2 Examining New Woman Scholarship ...................................................... 19 1.3 New Women, New Technologies ............................................................ 49 Chapter 2 Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle 2.1 The New Woman Typist .......................................................................... 68 2.2 Situating Technologies within Mobile Power Relations .......................... 77 2.3 Typewriters and Typists in Fiction .......................................................... 86 Chapter 3 The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle 3.1 The New Woman as Literary Bicyclist .................................................. 107 3.2 Cycling and Rational Dress as Embodied Practice ................................ 124 3.3 The New Woman Cyclist in Fiction....................................................... 129 Chapter 4 The New Style Nurse: The New Woman in Medical Modernity 4.1 Modern Nursing and the New Woman .................................................. 168 4.2 Medical Modernity: Institutional Technology and Modern Tools ......... 183 4.3 The New Style Nurse in Fiction ............................................................. 190 Coda ......................................................................................................................... 221 Works Cited ............................................................................................................ 224 5 Preface And I heard a sound of something cracking and I looked and I saw the band that bound the burden on to her back broken asunder; and the burden rolled on to the ground. And I said, ‘What is this?’ And he said, ‘The Age-of-nervous-force has killed him with the knife he holds in his hand; and silently and invisibly he has crept up to the woman, and with that knife of Mechanical Invention he has cut the band that bound the burden to her back. The Inevitable Necessity is broken. She must rise now.’ (Olive Schreiner, ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ (1890), 310) The close of the nineteenth century marks an epoch of social revolutions! Humanity is borne more and more rapidly along on the course of the ever- widening, the ever-swifter flowing stream of progress, through scene after scene of novelty, where stupendous events and marvellous discoveries and inventions crowd thickly one upon another. ... [M]ore discussed, debated, newspaper paragraphed, caricatured, howled down and denied, or acknowledged and approved, as the case may be, than any of them, we have the new woman ... immeasurably the first in importance, the most abounding in potentialities and in common interest. ... Is the nineteenth century new woman a myth, as so many people aver – a figment of the journalistic imagination ...? Is she, indeed, none other than an intensely aggravated type of the unwomanly, unlovable, unlovely, untidy, undomesticated, revolting, shrieking, man-hating shrew of all the centuries? Or is she on the other hand, verily an altogether new type of woman evolved from out the ages? (Mrs. Morgan-Dockrell, ‘Is the New Woman a Myth?’ (1896), 339-340) In Olive Schreiner’s 1890 short story ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ the narrator, having fallen asleep under a mimosa tree, in three dreams experiences an allegorical journey from slavery to emancipation. In the first dream the narrator finds herself in a desert, in which she encounters the figure of a woman lying motionless in the sand, bound by chains and weakened by ages of subordination. But after having her chains cut off by ‘Mechanical Invention’, the