Title: Victorian Contexts: Failed Gentlemen and New Women
Abstract: The roots of the Female Gentleman stretch back at least as far as Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist theorists who followed her in criticizing the idea that men and women were essentially different beings, to be held to different standards. The most important precursor of the Female Gentleman, to which writers of the 1920s and 1930s were responding most directly, was the New Woman of the 1890s. The ideals lived by the protagonists of Female Gentleman novels are very similar to those of New Women, but the later characters were allowed by their authors to be more successful than the earlier ones ever were. In that sense, the 1920s saw the first period in which the theoretical ideals of feminism had an optimistic manifestation in literature, rather than leading only to suicide, madness, or disillusioned retreat. This contrast goes a long way toward explaining why Female Gentleman novels are still popular today, when New Woman novels are forgotten by all but specialist scholars; but it also cuts against the grain of most New Woman criticism, which tends to paint New Woman novels as the direct precursor of the Women's Liberation fiction of 'second wave' feminism, and which gives short shrift to the decades between. In fact, although the period from 1930 to 1960 might have been a 'trough' between waves of feminism in social and political history, the novels I am examining are ironically more successful at advocating certain feminist ideals. Their absence from histories of feminist fiction distorts the picture, especially because Female Gentleman novels are still read by current generations.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot