Spectacles of Suffering: Self-Harm in New Woman Writing 1880-1900

Spectacles of Suffering: Self-Harm in New Woman Writing 1880-1900 Alexandra Louise Messem The thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Portsmouth. March 2014 Abstract This thesis aims to provide an examination of texts produced by and about the New Woman of the late-nineteenth century, with specific reference to the trope of self-harm. It aims to explore the connections between the fictional bodies of text in which the New Woman was represented, and the damaged bodies of women who committed self- destructive acts. It examines both the religious frameworks within which Victorian women’s fiction operated, and three specific forms of self-harm which feature across a range of textual artefacts. To this end, the thesis discusses New Woman novels, poems, and short stories as well as newspaper and magazine articles, archival materials, and popular works of art, all of which discuss or display the damaged female body. The scope of this project is limited to New Woman writing produced between 1880 and 1900, although it does consider the ways in which the New Woman built on, or challenged, discourses about self-harm which appear in materials produced during the earlier half of the nineteenth century. This research demonstrates that New Woman writers drew on forms of self-harm such as anorexia, alcoholism, and self-mutilation, to express their frustrations at the contradictory requirements of women endorsed by conventional religion, at a time during which attitudes towards the body were changing. It shows how the female form embodied various Victorian political and social debates, and how it was deployed as a strategic symbol, in writing which sought to disrupt women’s subordinate position within the patriarchal system. Consequently, this research contributes to the fields of psychiatric history, New Woman studies, and more generally the study of Victorian women’s writing, by examining both canonical and critically neglected texts by women alongside non-fictional materials from the period. It explores both fictional acts of self-harm, and textual strategies, which have yet to be examined in New Woman writing, and which are key to understanding her complicated place in the male-oriented publishing environment of the Fin de Siècle. Contents Introduction 01 1. Saintly Self-Harm: The Victorian Religious Context 38 2. Getting Beyond the Fleshly Veil: Self-Starvation in the New Woman Novel 85 3. Deconstructing the Drunkard’s Path: Alcoholic Bodies in New Woman Fiction 134 4. Damaging the Body Politic: Self-Mutilation as Spectacle 181 Conclusion 218 Bibliography 222 Declaration Whilst registered as a candidate for the above degree, I have not been registered for any other research award. The results and conclusions embodied in this thesis are the work of the named candidate and have not been submitted for any other academic award Word Count: 79892 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Patricia Pulham, for her careful reading and advice, throughout both the course of this project as well as during my time as an MA student and an undergraduate at Portsmouth. I thank the University of Portsmouth for funding my project, and the staff at the Centre of Studies in Literature for their support and guidance. I especially thank the postgraduate community with whom I have shared my experience, and whose inspiration and understanding has been immeasurable. I am grateful for the support of my partner Niall, whose patience has been unwavering, and whose proof reading has been (almost) as impressive. Finally, special thanks go to my mother Catherine, without whose love and belief in me, this thesis could not have been completed. for Catherine and Niall. 1 Introduction This thesis examines the representation of acts of self-harm by women in novels, poems, and short stories by and about the New Woman of the late-nineteenth century. It situates these fictional acts as a response to the particular cultural conditions of the Fin de Siècle, in which women writers were experimenting with new modes of literary expression; they were also deploying increasingly violent images of self-damage in the face of patriarchal pressures underpinned by bourgeois religion and morality. While there is little documentary evidence to suggest that Victorian women (particularly those outside the working classes) resorted to self-harm in any other than the most extreme circumstances, I suggest that a history of self-harm as a strategy of feminine survival can be traced in a number of texts produced by the New Woman. I place critical emphasis on the work of Mark Seltzer, whose conceptualisation of a Victorian ‘wound culture’ forms the basis of my argument that the New Woman exploited fin-de-siècle concerns about the female body as an object of display and desire, opening up a rhetorical space for the damaged body as a crucial juncture between notions of the public and the private. Furthermore, I argue that in adopting newer and more experimental forms of writing, the New Woman was progressively at liberty to express the inexpressible, the unwomanly and disruptive acts of violence enacted upon the body which challenged both Victorian notions of femininity and the supremacy of masculine corporeal control. I show how these acts can be situated on a spectrum, which begins with passive-aggressive protest in the traditional or triple-decker novel, and ends with violent fantasies and spectacles of self-damage in the New Woman short story. The trajectory of self-harm in New Woman writing was largely temporal, and by implication also chronological; as New Women increasingly adopted shorter forms in which to dramatise self-destructive behaviours, these behaviours became progressively more violent. I demonstrate how New Woman writing both adheres to and rejects orthodox Christian notions of the body’s subordination to the soul, and how this dichotomy can be imagined in relation to the spatial dynamics of the texts into which damaged female figures were written by late-nineteenth century women writers. The Critical Field My research emerges at a moment when the British New Woman has enjoyed a decade of unprecedented interest, and collections which examine the work of many previously forgotten female writers of the Fin de Siècle are now widely available. Elaine Showalter’s 2 Daughters of Decadence (1993), Continuum’s Late Victorian and Early Modernist Women Writers series which began in 2002, and Angelique Richardson’s Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women 1890-1914 (2002) have increased students’ access to New Woman writing. More generally, for the past two decades, the New Woman has been a feature of academic monographs, collections of essays and conferences, and a wealth of new research has been devoted to reclaiming, critiquing and, to a certain extent, exposing New Woman writing to a wider audience as both seminal and suspect. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact, a collection of scholarly essays edited by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis published in 2001, brought together for the first time New Woman scholars working in such diverse areas as print culture, the theatre, queer theory, Victorian psychiatry, post- colonialism and aestheticism. Carolyn Nelson’s A New Woman Reader (2000) combines a variety of sources including short stories, articles and political writing, allowing the student of the New Woman phenomenon to read the fiction alongside crucial textual material from the period. In 2006 the Journal of Victorian Literature and Culture published an issue edited by Marion Thain and Ann Vadillo which was devoted to New Woman poetry (34:2); in the same year the journal Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies also put out an issue entitled ‘The New Women and Sexuality’ featuring contributions on Vernon Lee and George Egerton among others.1 In 2006 the MLA also called for papers on the topic of ‘Visualising the New Woman’ for a special session in Philadelphia. In July 2010 an international conference on ‘Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle’ took place at the University of London and the ‘British Women Writers Conference’ which calls for papers on the British New Woman, is due to take place at New York’s Binghamton University in July 2014. Although certain critics have noted the rhetoric of pessimism and self-defeatism intrinsic to much of the New Woman oeuvre, there is currently no detailed research which exposes the centrality of this defeatism across a spectrum of New Woman narrative forms.2 Self-harm is one of a number of self-defeating behaviours which appears in texts produced by the New Woman, which often depict melodramatic scenes of despair or philosophical cynicism.3 My work focuses on motifs of self-harm in a number of works which have been 1 See articles by Delfer (2006) & Hager (2006). 2 For example, Anna Maria Jones’s article ‘A Track to the Water’s Edge: Learning to Suffer in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins’ notes the ‘painful labour of self-fashioning’ (2007: 27) undertaken by Grand’s heroines. 3 Other forms of self-defeating behaviour found in New Woman novels include: overwork, sexual promiscuity, unsuitable or mercenary marriages, and the deliberate provocation of domestic violence. This thesis examines three types from a range of self-harming behaviours which also includes: skin-picking, trichotillomania, self-induced abortion, and drug addiction. 3 already examined by New Woman scholars, as well as lesser-known texts which have been, to a certain extent, critically neglected. It emphasises the importance of self-harming behaviours such as anorexia, alcoholism, and self-mutilation, as ways of reading women’s frustration and consequent rebellion against the status quo, as well as their reproduction of self-limiting patriarchal imperatives. These imperatives formed the locus of academic discourse on the New Woman during the 1990s, as scholarly works identified her as an important and polarising figure in fiction by and about women.

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