Caroline Martin

Roundtable Abstract

Caroline Martin

New Woman fiction as a critical category is heavily indebted to second-wave feminism and the large-scale rehabilitation of women writers that was initiated by feminist literary scholars in the 1970s and that is still ongoing today. The label designates anglophone fiction written in the 1880s and 1890s (broadly considered) that engaged directly with contemporary debates about the figure of the “New Woman.” As such, New Woman research inherently furthers the two activist projects from which it stems (i.e. its production and its later critical recovery) yet it also threatens to reproduce some of the biases and limitations of these two epistemological moments. Indeed, one must tread a very fine line when writing about this corpus since foregrounding its feminist dimension automatically entails the risk of smoothing over its complicity in upholding hierarchical systems of thought such as imperialism, racism, eugenics, and class. This awareness informs my thinking about the relationship between narrative structure and ideology (which is my main research interest), and has led me to conceive of gender as only one out of the many loci where power relations manifest themselves textually.

I also approach the question of “literary activism” through the writers’ own conception of their work, since they often wrote on the assumption that literature’s potential to affect its readers may be harnessed to achieve social change. Drawing on Victorian anxieties about reading, New Woman writers reversed the argument according to which impressionable (i.e. female) readers had to be “protected”  from improper topics and argued instead that controversial issues need to be represented in fiction in order to educate readers and help them make informed life decisions. Their rhetoric about the importance of representation resonate with contemporary discourses about the politicization of education and help counteract conservative responses to academic advocacy.

 

Last updated on May 6th, 2024

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