Civic fantasy: New Woman fiction, citizenship, and the limits of the aesthetic

This dissertation examines the relationship between narrative and politics in late-Victorian “New Woman” fiction, looking specifically at how the structural features of the genre reflect and reiterate the aesthetic dynamic implicit in the ritual gestures of modern citizenship. At the cusp of two important moments in feminist political history-namely, the nineteenth-century women's movement and early twentieth-century militant suffragism—New Woman fiction makes visible its own generic disorder and thus offers a direct challenge to both the historicity of politics and the transcendance of aesthetics. Significantly, this disorder presents itself as something of an aesthetic perversion, but a perversion, nonetheless, that invites the reader to indulge in the pleasures of citizenship, or in what I call “civic fantasy.” These pleasures derive in part from the citizen's ongoing attempt to manage the tension between individual and collective interests, between creative self-presentation and progressive but limited forms of social manipulation (philanthropy, for example). This tension emerges explicitly in stories of the New Woman, especially where the heroine's best self, as exemplified in her disruptive dreams and daydreams, is self-consciously mediated by the interminably dour realism of her rhetorical heavy-handedness. Thus it is the dialogic relationship or rhythm established between these two narrative departures that transforms the genre's narrow political interests into culturally durable strivings for the unseen and the unimaginable. The first two chapters use the novels of Mona Caird, Sarah Grand, Mrs. Everard Cotes, and “Iota” first to situate the rhetorical features of New Woman fiction in the context of other propagandistic fiction, and then to reread these narrated moments of political deliberation as formal inversions of a late-Victorian “decadent” aesthetic. Chapters three and four examine the work of George Egerton, Menie Muriel Dowie, Emma Frances Brooke, and Mary Cholmondeley, among others, and show bow several recurrent tropes, including childhood, cross-dressing, and women's friendship, work as paradigms for a highly politicized form of wishful thinking.