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Feminist Writing 1880-1900 Coventry University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The new woman and the new science feminist writing 1880-1900 Randolph, Lyssa Award date: 2001 Awarding institution: Coventry University University College Worcester Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of this thesis for personal non-commercial research or study • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission from the copyright holder(s) • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 09. Oct. 2021 LANICIDTIT IILIIRITYll 1 1 II 3 8001 00333 6165 THE NEW WOMAN AND THE NEW SCIENCE: FEMINIST WRITING 1880-1900 LYSSA RANDOLPH A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the University's requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy OCTOBER 2001 Coventry University in collaboration with University College Worcester i Abstract In this thesis I contend that evolutionary scientific discourses were integral to the work of "New Woman" writers of late Victorian literary culture in Britain. In the cultural debates that raged over the new gender politics and their relationship to social and moral values at the fin de siècle, the questions raised about femininity, modernity and the "woman question" were also central to the "new sciences" of sexology, eugenics, psychology and anthropology. This thesis investigates the issue of whether the new sciences offered an enabling set of discourses to New Women through which to produce new artistic, professional and personal feminine identities and to campaign for feminist goals. An understanding of the field of cultural production informs this discussion; I argue that science functions as cultural and symbolic capital in literary production of the period, and consider the dynamics between constructs of value, status, and the feminine in the literary market-place and their relationship to scientific narratives. This analysis is developed through the illumination of the relationship between New Woman novelists and poets, female aesthetes, and other forces in the field, in discussion of the thematic concerns and literary strategies of those participating in these debates: amongst others, Mona Caird, "Iota" (Katherine Mannington Caffyn), Victoria Cross(e) (Annie Sophie Cory), Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth McFall), Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Alice Meynell, May Kendall, Constance Naden, and the anti-New Woman male writer, Grant Allen. An examination of a variety of literary forms and genres, in addition to the novel — the principal focus for much scholarship on the New Woman — such as the feminist periodicals, poetry, journalism and the ii short story, is central to the thesis and enables identification of shared literary strategies and techniques as well as consideration of readers and critical contexts. The roles and representation of "woman" in this period were produced within biological determinist concepts of sex and Nature. The study concentrates on ways in which essentialist dichotomies of cultural and biological reproduction redefined notions of literary and artistic "genius", motherhood and female citizenship, as they intersect with "race" and sexuality in imperial contexts. Women's critique and construct of these subjectivities differed; study of the women's journals reveals a consumer culture saturated in discourses of health and hygiene, negotiated by a divided community of readers. Focus on theories and representation of the child in late Victorian culture finds that Alice Meynell's writing challenged evolutionary psychology, and relates Sarah Grand's child genius to emergent Galtonian eugenics. I argue that late nineteenth-century feminism was intimately involved in imperialism and eugenics, and suggest that current feminist scholarship must confront and analyse these investments. In this thesis I find that boundaries between the groups' identities are fluid; points of intercourse and affiliation are revealed, such as the ways in which scientific constructs of "race", as in Mona Caird's use of the Celtic, are deployed in order to comment on literary value. I have highlighted the ambivalences at work in these appropriations, and suggest that the New Woman text was not always polemical, nor did it reject "high art" values, and that the female aesthetes also express feminist convictions. I contend that for many feminist writers, participation in these late nineteenth-century debates was a necessary and productive critical intervention, with radical, if not always progressive, implications. iii Contents Abstract i Contents Abbreviations vii Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 The New Woman 11 The New Science 14 The Field of Literary Production 16 Outline of thesis 19 Chapter 1 The New Woman invasion: discourses of hygiene and health in the feminist periodicals. 26 Shafts, Signal, the Penny Paper and the female journalist 27 Hygiene and the New Woman 35 Hygienic motherhood: "scientific checks" and moral purity 44 Health and New Woman fiction: "the opening of the dustbins" 57 Feminists review the eugenic novel 67 Chapter 2 "The Romance of Race": science as cultural capital in Grant Allen's fiction. 79 The "Hill-top" novels: "a protest in favour of purity" 85 iv Strange Stories: the "unclaimed territory" of "race" 96 Negative eugenics and "free love union" 108 Sexual maternity in A Splendid Sin and The Woman Who Did 116 Chapter 3 Aesthetics, desire and the fantastic: Vernon Lee's Hauntings. 127 Associationism and Paterian aesthetics 131 Hellenic health and fitness 138 Renaissance beauty and the pleasures of the Gothic 142 Atavism in `Oke of Okehurst, or the Phantom Lover' 150 Androgyny in 'Amour Dure' 157 `Dionea': myth and the male gaze 160 Chapter 4 Verse or vitality?: evolution and the female poet. 173 Evolution not revolution 180 May Kendall's and Constance Naden's comic satires on Darwinism 191 Biological economies: the death of the poet 202 Constance Naden: Nature's "strange mistake" 205 Amy Levy's suicide: femininity and degeneration 212 V Chapter 5 Eugenics, racial maternity and infanticide: imperial femininities in the novels of "Iota" and Victoria Cross(e). 225 Iota's pronatalism and the new colonial girl 228 Imperial sexualities in Victoria Cross 239 Discourses of infanticide 246 Miscegenation and the New Woman 253 Anna Lombard: the femme fatale as heroine of Empire 263 Chapter 6 Evolutionary psychology: the child in Sarah Grand's The Beth Book and Alice Meynell's The Children. 274 James Sully's scientific mothers 277 The Children: romantic savages and palaeopsychic instincts 283 Psychology reads literature: Sully's critique of Meynell 293 The Beth Book: the "child genius" 297 Francis Galton's eugenic visionaries 306 Chapter 7 "The Woman of Genius", "race" and literary value: Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus. 317 'The Undefinable': the role of great art 320 Mona Caird on heredity and organic memory 330 vi Scientific constructs of racial genius 341 William Sharp and "The Celtic Renascence" 346 Celtic nature in The Daughters of Danaus: ancestral behaviours 351 Literary value and national culture 354 Afterword .363 Appendix to poems .371 Bibliography 379 vii Abbreviations Anthologies NCWP Nineteenth-Century Women Poets. Armstrong, Isobel and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. VWP Victorian Women Poets. Leighton, Angela and Margaret Reynolds, eds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995. WV Women's Voices: An Anthology of the Most Characteristic Poems by English, Scotch, and Irish Women. Sharp, Elizabeth Amelia, ed. London, Walter Scott, 1887. Nineteenth-century journals WS The Woman's Signal (1894— 1899). WH The Woman's Herald (1891-1893). WPP The Woman's Penny Paper (1888-1891). Primary texts Allen, Grant 'CP' 'The Child of the Phalanstery'. Belgravia 54 (1884): 163-176. SS Strange Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 1884. WBB What's Bred in the Bone. London : Titbits Offices, 1891. viii LS The Lower Slopes: Reminiscences of Excursions Around the Base of Helicon, Undertaken for the Most Part in Early Manhood. London: Elkin Matthews & John Lane, 1894. WWD The Woman Who Did (1895) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ASS A Splendid Sin. London: F.V White and Co., 1896. Brooke, Emma Frances SW A Superfluous Woman. London: William Heinemann, 1894. LA Life the Accuser. London: William Heinemann, 1896. Caird, Mona DD The Daughters of Danaus (1894). New York: Feminist Press, 1989. Cross(e), Victoria (Annie Sophie Cory) TWWD The Woman Who Didn't. London: John Lane, 1895. AL Anna Lombard (1901). London: John Long, 1902. Grand, Sarah (Frances Elizabeth McFall) HT The Heavenly Twins (1893) Michigan: Michigan University Press, 1992. BB The Beth Book (1897; reprint of 1898 edn.) Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994. `TU' 'The Undefinable: A Fantasia'. Emotional Moments (1908) Daughters of Decadence: Feminist Fiction at the Fin de Siècle. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago, 1993: 262-87. ix "Iota" (Caffyn, Katherine Mannington)
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