Mothers in New Woman Fiction: Map** “the Terra Incognita of Herself”

Podnieks, Elizabeth

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_3

Elizabeth Podnieks²

201 Accesses

Abstract

In New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism, Ann Ardis documents that from 1883 to 1900, more than one hundred novels by both female and male writers featured the New Woman. Ardis finds that New Woman narratives instigated “ideological challenges […] to the bourgeois social and literary tradition.” As her book illuminates, against a backdrop of Victorian convention, many of these stories reject the endorsement of and narrative culmination in marriage; resist the binary of ‘pure’ and ‘fallen’ woman; explore erotics over romantic love; privilege female-centered friendships over female-male couplings; and recognize women’s career aspirations. More specific to motherhood, authors created heroines who registered and experimented with disruptive, radical, and transgressive maternal identities and experiences. Ardis offers a taxonomy of multiple and often-competing mother-driven themes in New Woman fiction wherein protagonists embrace unwed mothering; prefer non-biological over biological children; engage in (or desire) sexual activity; subscribe to eugenic principles for reproduction; demand control over their maternal bodies; and seek creative and professional fulfillment outside of their families. Such discourses co-exist with what Ardis calls a trope of “disempowerment” or “boomerang” plotting in which the New Woman’s political, social, and artistic activisms and ambitions are abandoned or failed, and the protagonist is punished for her derring-do by being called back to home, husband, and children; condemned to a lonely existence as a spinster; or killed off.

Egerton, “A Keynote,” 58.

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Notes

1.
Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 4.
2.
Ibid., 58.
3.
Ibid. See for example 97, 139–40, 148.
4.
High modernism is generally associated with the publication in 1922 of Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.
5.
Egerton, “A Keynote,” 58.
6.
Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” 737.
7.
Besnault-Levita and Gillard-Estrada, “Introduction,” Beyond the Victorian/Modernist Divide , 6, 8.
8.
Mao and Walkowitz, “Introduction,” Bad Modernisms, 1.
9.
Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 5.
10.
Ibid., 170.
11.
Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood, xxi.
12.
Ardis suggests that many New Woman writers also experimented with form, in terms of disrupting linearity, for example (169–170). Egerton, who wrote experimental, surrealist short stories (collected in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894)), is perhaps unsurprisingly regarded as the most “modernist” of New Woman authors. For a discussion on her formal innovations, see Ledger’s “Introduction” to her edition of Keynotes and Discords, pp. ix–xxvi.
13.
Ingram, “Introduction,” 5–6.
14.
Schenck, “Exiled by Genre,” 229.
15.
Ibid., 230–31.
16.
Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 60, 29.
17.
Ibid., 30–31.
18.
Ibid., 31–32.
19.
Ibid., 88.
20.
Ibid., 37.
21.
Ibid., 3.
22.
Ibid., 37, 116.
23.
Ibid., 42.
24.
Ibid., 42.
25.
Ibid., 45.
26.
Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 57.
27.
Ibid., 57.
28.
Ibid., 57.
29.
Ibid., 57.
30.
Ibid., 57.
31.
See, for example, Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 169; Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 15; Ledger, The New Woman, 2.
32.
Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 15.
33.
Scott, “Introduction,” Gender in Modernism, 12–13.
34.
Ledger, The New Woman, 180–81.
35.
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 83.
36.
Miller, Jane, Rebel Women, 7.
37.
Ibid., 8.
38.
Ibid., 41.
39.
Ibid., 195.
40.
Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 134.
41.
Ibid., 139.
42.
Ingram, “Introduction,” Women’s Writing in Exile, 4–6.
43.
Friedman, “Exile in the American Grain,” 88.
44.
Ibid., 94–95.
45.
Benstock, “Expatriate Modernism,” 28.
46.
Ibid., 28.
47.
Ingram, “Introduction,” Women’s Writing in Exile, 5.
48.
Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 16.
49.
See A History of the Mothers’ Union by Cordelia Moyse.
50.
Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 9; Scott, “Introduction,” The Gender of Modernism, 14.
51.
For Ledger’s use of the term “reverse discourses,” see Chap. 2; for my term “improper maternities,” as adapted from Pykett’s notion of “proper” and “improper” femininities, see Chap. 2. “Bad” modernism alludes to Mao and Walkowitz’s Bad Modernisms, which I turn to in this chapter’s conclusion.
52.
Linton, “The Wild Women,” 79.
53.
Ibid., 80.
54.
Linton, “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents,” 596, 604.
55.
Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 818.
56.
Ibid., 819–20.
57.
Ibid., 821.
58.
Ibid., 824.
59.
Ibid., 825–26.
60.
Ibid., 828.
61.
Caird, “The Emancipation of the Family,” 57.
62.
Ibid., 58, 59.
63.
Caird, “The Morality of Marriage,” 137.
64.
Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 19.
65.
Linton, “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents,” 604.
66.
Cunningham, “He-Notes,” 97.
67.
Ibid., 96.
68.
Ibid., 99.
69.
Ibid., 99.
70.
Ledger, The New Woman, 70.
71.
Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 819.
72.
Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 19.
73.
Ibid., 18.
74.
Ibid., 20, 24–25.
75.
Ibid., 18.
76.
Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 211.
77.
Pykett, The ‘Improper Feminine,’ 12
78.
Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 9, 13.
79.
Rich, Of Woman Born, 13.
80.
Miller, Jane, Rebel Women, 195.
81.
Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 819.
82.
Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 96.
83.
Willis, “Heaven Defend Me,” 56–57.
84.
Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 211.
85.
Stavney, “Mothers of Tomorrow,” 539.
86.
Ibid., 545.
87.
Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 9.
88.
Wilks, “New Women,” 569.
89.
Ibid., 570.
90.
Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 190.
91.
Ibid., 191.
92.
Calloway, Black Family (Dys)Function, 11.
93.
Ibid., 16.
94.
For a discussion of Helga’s biracial identity, see Calloway 81–83.
95.
Friedman, “Exile in the American Grain,” 94.
96.
Miller, Jane, Rebel Women, 195.
97.
Ledger, The New Woman, 11; Patterson, “Introduction,” 2.
98.
Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 819.
99.
Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 3.
100.
Ibid., 38–39.
101.
Mao and Walkowitz, “Introduction,” Bad Modernisms, 2–3.
102.
Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 828.

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Department of English, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Elizabeth Podnieks

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Podnieks, E. (2022). Mothers in New Woman Fiction: Map** “the Terra Incognita of Herself”. In: Maternal Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_3
Published: 02 December 2022
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-031-08911-4
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