Alex Messem - Thesis

250 Pages·2014·1.99 MB·English

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
.
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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
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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.
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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. This research also
connected the New Woman to the emergent modernism of the Fin de Siècle. Feminist
critics of the 1970s and 1980s such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Elaine
Showalter, reclaimed fin-de-siècle women’s writing as the next phase in a continuum
which included the mid-Victorian novel. However, these early critics failed to fully
acknowledge that New Woman writing contributed more to a modernist aesthetic than that
of its predecessors, and departed stylistically in ways which disrupted notions of linearity
in the development of the ‘feminist’ text (Ardis 1990: 6-7).4 The work of Ann Ardis, Lyn
Pykett, and Jane Eldridge Miller re-introduced the New Woman into academic debates
about the nineteenth-century Woman Question, reclaiming these writers as the missing link
between the latent feminism of mid-century women’s fiction, and the political activism of
the early-twentieth century.5
One of the most problematic concerns of any study of the New Woman is this rather
slippery collective term, since it was variously applied to a plethora of female types who
campaigned for gender equality, yet who rarely shared political viewpoints or agreed on
key issues. The British New Woman was not, as Sally Ledger has shown, a stable identity
or easily definable stock character, but a composite of conflicting, contradictory, and
discursively constructed ideas about women’s rights at a time of social and political uproar
(1997: 1-2). As literary critics like Ledger have established, supposedly ‘New’ women
failed to agree on almost all aspects of the nineteenth-century campaign for women’s rights
and freedoms.6 The infamous New Woman novelist Sarah Grand for example, was
scathing of gender double standards and regarded women’s education as paramount, yet

4 I use the term ‘feminist’ here, as throughout, with an awareness of its anachronistic deployment since it is a
twentieth-century terminology not in currency during the Victorian period.
5 See: Ardis (1990) New Woman, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism, Pykett (1990) The Improper
Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, Miller (1994) Rebel Women:
Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel.
6 See Ledger (2007) and more recent work by Ann Heilmann (2004) and Angelique Richardson (2008) for
discussion of the failure of New Women to agree on key issues.
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held very traditional views on the sanctity of marriage and motherhood.7 Her novels and
political writings reveal her to be a staunch social purist, whose faith in the potential for
good in marriage remained unwavering despite her critique of ill-advised or genetically
unsuitable unions.8 Conversely, her contemporary Mona Caird viewed marital and
maternal obligations as forms of bondage from which women needed to free themselves
before they could gain equality with men.9 Despite this, Caird’s fiction often represented
female sexual liberation as morally questionable, and her heroines are usually punished
severely for desiring men to whom they are not married, despite the unhappiness of their
own legal unions.10 The writings of George Egerton and Victoria Cross campaigned for
women’s sexual and maternal freedoms, representing the horrible consequences of
enforced marriage and motherhood. While both writers dramatise relationships in which
marriage is secondary to motherhood and sexual fulfilment, these relationships tend to
conform to normative heterosexual structures which in some ways reversed, yet ultimately
reinforced traditional gender dictates.
The works of previously forgotten writers such as these have been made increasingly
available through collections such as Showalter’s and Nelson’s as well as those published
as part of the Late Victorian and Early Modernist Writers series. These include: Sally
Ledger’s edited collection of Egerton’s Keynotes and Discords, Elisabeth Jay’s edition of
the allegories of Olive Schreiner entitled Dreams, and Dreams Visions and Realities, a
selection of New Woman short stories edited by Stephanie Forward, all published in 2003.
Collections by New Woman writers whose work had largely gone out of print – such as
Ella Hepworth Dixon and Victoria Cross – can now be ordered through the British
Library’s print to order service, making them easier to access than they have been for
decades. Additionally, scholarly and biographical works and academic readers on key New
Woman figures are now widely available and include: Cherry Clayton’s Olive Schreiner

7 See Grand’s essay on ‘The Modern Girl’ published in the North American Review in 1894, in which she
outlines the need for education for young girls in order to defend themselves against unworthy men. Yet, in
the same essay, Grand suggests that marriage is not itself a problem, and that the blame is on the parents
(specifically the mother) of young girls (reproduced in Forward and Heilmann 2000).
8 See Grand’s novel The Heavenly Twins (1893),in which two young women approach the selection of a
husband very differently. Edith Beale chooses unwisely and is infected with syphilis, while Evadne Frayling
refuses to consummate her marriage to her potentially syphilitic husband.
9 See Caird’s essay ‘A Defence of the “Wild Women”’(1892) in which she compares motherhood to military
service (Caird 2010: 73) and her 1888 article in the Westminster Review in which she calls marriage a
‘vexatious failure’ (Caird, 1888: 86).
10 Both Viola Sedley in Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889) and Hadria Fullerton in The Daughters of Danaus
(1894) are tempted to initiate sexual relationships with men other than their husbands. Both heroines
ultimately choose to remain faithful. Hadria discovers her lover’s prior sexual misconduct and puts an end to
their relationship, and Viola commits suicide before she can run away with Harry Lancaster.