In 19th-century Britain, women as compared with men, did not have equal professional and educational opportunities; therefore, they were often outside the center of politics and the economy, and were regarded as being subordinate in the household. This Woman Question had been fervently discussed in the press since the 1880s. And it was Ouida who ¡§christened¡¨ the ¡§New Woman¡¨ for this new class of women in 1894 from Sarah Grand¡¦s essay ¡§The New Aspect of the Woman Question.¡¨ The ¡§New Woman¡¨ was abhorred by traditional British society and condemned as a temptress who, so it observed, tended to satisfy her own sexual needs, regardless of social mores and household responsibilities. In contrast to ¡§the good angel in the house¡¨ or ¡§the proper lady,¡¨ the New Woman was accused of neglecting her female virtues of a selfless housewife, wife, mother, and daughter. Traditionally, women were economically dependent, and that was the reason why the grace of a Victorian proper lady lay in her submission to social morality, but not in her assertion of individualism. Since she was only considered part of the family instead of herself, it was important for a woman to be a virgin before marriage in order to guarantee her chastity and loyalty to her husband. According to Mona Caird, the ideal of virginity was worshipped in order to reinforce the idea that women¡¦s virginity belonged to their husbands-to-be instead of to themselves. This ideology satisfied the male possessive attitudes toward their wives. In her essay, ¡§Marriage,¡¨ Caird related virginity to marriage as a historically situated institution, which was temporary and challengeable. So once the gender barrier between the male master and the female housekeeper was questioned and even dismissed, women could claim the same freedom of choice, both of their life and of their bodies. With the intensification of capitalism and the individual economic unit, women seemed to represent men¡¦s property. It was in this skewed relationship between the two sexes that the feminine ideal was erected and institutionalized in order to maintain masculine domination. From a man¡¦s point of view, a modest woman, or a proper lady, should repress her sexual desire so that she would seem to have no desire for men at all. The basic reason for women to suppress their desire was because the Victorians regarded human desire as solely masculine; in other words, they saw women as the objects of desire, not the agents from which the desire originated. Women¡¦s subordinate position constrained their individualism. In this way, women became selfless and functional. The loss of virginity out of wedlock was the primary cause of a woman¡¦s tragedy. This happened to two of Hardy¡¦s ¡§New Woman¡¨ heroines, Tess d¡¦Urbervilles and Sue Bridehead. The two heroines were chosen to represent the New Women because both of them, to a large extent, acted against the decorum of a traditional proper lady. Tess of the d¡¦Urbervilles dealt with the relationship between men and women and the problems in conventional marriage. Presenting the emancipation of the heroine Sue, Jude the Obscure dealt with the inequality women suffered in marriage and the possible solution of ¡§free union¡¨ (couples living together out of wedlock) as an alternative to conventional marriage. ¡§Free union,¡¨ as this novel suggested, was a means of accommodating sexual relations with fairness to both sexes and with a more permanent relationship than traditional marriage. Hence Tess and Jude the Obscure were designated as the New Woman novels whose protagonists--Tess and Sue--illustrated the predicament encountered by the New Woman on her way to emancipation. In order to penetrate into the male psychology toward virginity in the two novels, I will delineate the different attitudes toward female virginity through the seventeenth to the nineteenth century in England to provide a historical perspective. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the legal status of women remained family-oriented, which was based on the precepts of Roman law. The Puritans deplored adultery and further stressed the importance of virginity. Compared with the Puritans, the Evangelicals further idealized female nature as morally more self-restrained than men¡¦s. On a larger social scale, the religious ideals of the Evangelicals helped reinforce the social hierarchy. Because if the poor and women embraced those ideals largely to gain spiritual salvation, their governors could thereby control their labor and productivity by means of propagandizing morality. In the Victorian society, women tended to obey the rigid law and conformed to their narrowly defined domestic roles. To this dogma much had been contributed by the Puritans and the Evangelicals, from whose doctrines the ideal of a dutiful wife arose. The entire social machinery helped promote this censorship on female sexuality and individualism, while consolidating male authority simultaneously. Women, realizing that they could hardly alter the male-centered society, considered the best policy as submission and conformity to the traditional values so as to gain social acknowledgement. Hardy¡¦s presentation of Tess aroused severe criticism, because he refused to condemn her for her misbehavior. Instead of making Tess a completely helpless victim, Hardy endowed her with her own sense of strength to protect herself against the misfortunes. Sue practiced the New Woman ideal of ¡§free union,¡¨ and she herself was a well-learned student of philosophy. Sue felt herself doomed as a fallen woman, with the loss of all her extra-marital children murdered by the legitimate child of her lover. That was the reason why she considered it a compromise with the society to return to her legal husband. New Woman heroines became the scapegoats of the social machinery, in which patriarchal value was the center and women¡¦s rights were cast aside. Hardy reflected this feminist issue on the two different New Woman heroines, especially their relationship with the men around them. Readers might feel ambivalent toward both Tess and Sue, who were far from evil but were degraded. Finally, both of them were executed, Tess physically while Sue mentally. Tess paid her price for love and justice, but Sue gave up love and justice for shelter. In the thesis, I will, first of all, discuss the differences between the so-called New Woman and the proper lady in the context of Hardy¡¦s two novels, Tess and Jude. I will discuss Tess¡¦ and Sue¡¦s desires, centering on their suppressed sexuality. In the first chapter, ¡§¡¦New Women¡¦ in the Victorian Era,¡¨ while examining the function of a proper lady, I will also delineate the origin and exhibit the traits of the so-called New Woman. In the second chapter, ¡§Tess¡¦ Subjectivity and Revenge,¡¨ I shall re-evaluate Tess¡¦ tragedy by focusing on her sense of responsibility and her New Woman subjectivity. In addition, Tess¡¦ murder of Alec will be interpreted as a New Woman¡¦s revenge on male chauvinists. In the third chapter, ¡§Sue¡¦s Experiments of ¡¥Free Union¡¦ and the Final Defeat,¡¨ I will argue that Sue epitomizes a typical New Woman in her advocacy of ¡§free union¡¨ and her subsequent defeat by traditional society. In the conclusion, in addition to my personal feedback on the New Woman issue, I will make comparison between Tess and Sue as the unconventional New Woman heroines and discuss Hardy¡¦s intention in portraying the two heroines the way they are.

My dissertation examines the unacknowledged role of negative female models from traditional literature in constructing the modern woman in China. It draws upon literary and historical sources to examine how modern cultural figures resuscitated and even redeemed qualities associated with traditional shrews in their perceptions and constructions of the new woman across the first half of the twentieth century. By linking the literary trope of the shrew, associated with imperial China, with the twentieth-century figure of the new woman, my work bridges the transition from the late-imperial to the modern era and foregrounds the late-imperial roots of Chinese modernization. The scope of my dissertation includes depictions of shrews/new women in literary texts, the press, theater, and public discourses from the Republican to the Socialist period. Although there exists a rich body of work on both traditional shrew literature and the new woman narrative, no one has addressed the confluence of the two in Chinese modernity. Scholars of late imperial Chinese literature have claimed that shrew literature disappeared when China entered the modern age. Studies on the new woman focus on specific social and cultural contexts during the different periods of modernizing China; few scholars have traced the effects that previous female types had on the new woman. My research reveals the importance of the traditional shrew in contributing to the construction and reception of the new woman, despite the radically changing ideologies of the twentieth century. As I argue, the feisty, rebellious modern women in her many guises as suffragette, sexual independent, and gender radical are female types grafted onto the violent, sexualized, and transgressive typologies of the traditional shrew. My research contributes to the studies of Chinese modernity and the representations of Chinese women. First, it bridges the artificial divide between modern and traditional studies of China and expands the debates about the nature of Chinese modernity. Second, it brings to light the underexamined constructions of the new woman as an empowered social actor through her genealogical connections to the traditional shrew. Third, it provides a methodology for rethinking the contested depiction of women in Chinese modernity.

This thesis treats the interrelation between gender and technology at the Victorian fin de siècle, focusing on the figure of the New Woman. It aims to offer a reexamination of this figure of early feminism in relation to the technologies and techniques of the time, suggesting the simultaneously abstract and material concept of technology as a way to more fully understand the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman; her emergence as both a discursive figure in literature and as a set of social practices. Major authors include Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, and H. G. Wells, examined in the larger context of late-Victorian and fin de siècle popular and New Woman fiction. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical and methodological premises of the thesis. Locating a specific problematic in the ‘semi-fictionality’ of the New Woman, it draws upon wider discussions within gender and feminist theory to consider this central concern in New Woman criticism. Criticising gynocritical assumptions, the chapter offers a way of reading New Woman literature without relying on the gender of the author – taking Grant Allen’s (in)famous New Woman novel The Woman Who Did as a case in point. It concludes by suggesting technology as a way of examining the figure of the New Woman in its historiospecific and material context. Chapter 2 establishes the typewriter as a case in point for examining the interrelation between gender and technology at the fin de siècle. Through reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys, it examines the semantic ambiguity of the term ‘typewriter’ to demonstrate the sexual ambiguity of the New Woman and also the mutual interaction between individual agency and technology. Chapter 3 examines the technology most associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. Through reading H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures, it considers how the social practice of bicycling comes to be associated with concepts of female freedom, problematising the notion of the bicycle as a technology of democratisation. Chapter 4 discusses the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the Nightingale New Style nurse. Examining the emergence of the clinical hospital, it places the New Woman nurse in a context of medical modernity. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, it explores the institutional technology of the hospital in the formation of notions of gender.

New woman, a new word and concept put forth during the New Culture Movement beginning from 1919, when China was in the process of political, economic and cultural transformation which strongly influenced almost every aspect of society, was loaded with nationalistic connotations from the beginning and soon became a public venue to venture various discourses. Much research has been done on this topic, from the historical perspective of women’s emancipation, by studying it in the context of China’s modernization, from the angle of gender norms and sexuality, and so on. What sets my research apart is that I use New Woman--a 1934 film made in Shanghai which is especially dedicated to the image of new woman-- as my primary text and single out major themes in the film, such as “new woman” and nationalism, new woman’s struggles. In my research, I combine fictionalized narratives about new woman in literary works and films with historical discourses on new woman, and real life experiences of new woman such as Qiu Jin and Ruan Lingyu. My particular interest is to grasp the major sentiments expressed in the film and to investigate of the social and cultural context that had given rise to these sentiments. With no intention to be complete or exhaustive, this paper would consider its goal fulfilled by being able to grasp the main sentiments surrounding new woman and her place in Chinese society in the 1920s and 30s.

Critics from Virginia Woolf and David Cecil to Lyn Pykett and U. C. Knoepflmacher, among others, have been mesmerized by the eccentric but transcendent world of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the Gondal poems. Despite allusions and references to various modernist elements in Emily Brontë’s novel and poetry, there has not been extensive analysis of her work in connection to modern writers of the early twentieth century. I believe that a multi-themed analysis of such components is necessary to reassess her position in the canon and establish her as a precursor to the modernists. This dissertation examines Brontë’s deliberate invitation of, and simultaneous resistance to, interpretation—qualities that align her novel and verse more with Modernist literature than that of her contemporaries. I argue that Emily Brontë had an unusual and forward-looking focus that is revealed in her treatment of children, women, and the struggles of isolated beings in the dark, foreboding and often impressionistic world of Gondal and Wuthering Heights. Her elucidation of the gap between the mundane and the spiritual, the use of farcical elements against the sublime are also precursory to modernism. This dissertation assesses the various themes, angles and techniques that Brontë employs in presenting a strange atmosphere that is representative of a future world.

The operas by playwright W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan have been considered some of the most popular and successful pieces of musical theatre in the English language. While their joint creative output neared perfection, Gilbert and Sullivan's working relationship was fraught with conflict. The two men's opposing personalities led them to favor disparate styles and work towards different goals. However, the ability to balance contrasting tones, such as sarcasm and sympathy, resulted in their overwhelming success. I analyze this "winning formula" by looking at the influence of feminism, especially the "New Woman" literary movement, on the works of Gilbert & Sullivan. Gilbert frequently used common female stereotypes and gave his female characters humorous yet demeaning flaws that kept the audience from fully admiring them. Sullivan, on the other hand, countered Gilbert's derisive attitude by composing sophisticated music for the female characters, granting emotional depth and a certain level of respectability. The struggle between Gilbert's mocking tone and Sullivan's empathetic music led to the men's ultimate success. I examine Gilbert's female characters, explore the counteractive effect of Sullivan's music, and analyze Princess Ida—their opera most directly related to the New Woman—in depth.

This thesis investigates the cultural politics of a small group of women through their writing and other activities in 1880s London. Focussed on Olive Schreiner, Eleanor Marx and Amy Levy and the connections they had to one another and to other women, such as Henrietta Frances Lord, Clementina Black and Henrietta Müller, it explores key events in their everyday lives, the writings and texts they produced. It analyses a wide selection of textual sources, re-reading these for small details, intertextual connections and points of disjuncture, to allow for different ways of understanding the mechanics of feminist cultural politics as produced and performed by these interconnected women. Small things in texts can be revealing about such women’s everyday lives and connectedly the cultural politics which underpinned their actions, thus contributing to knowledge about how writing was used strategically and imaginatively to challenge, side-step and overcome oppression and inequality, in these years in London and after. Using the term ‘writing’ in a broad sense to include letters and diaries and other archival sources such as newspaper articles, reviews and manuscript drafts, as well as some selected published work and biographies, the thesis is anchored around four event-driven investigations: Olive Schreiner being accosted by a policeman; the first public performance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; the writing of a letter mentioning Eleanor Marx; and, the death of Amy Levy. Relatedly, there are discussions concerning working with historical documents, documenting and archiving the past, researching and representing the past in the present. These investigations allow for the operationalization of a research approach framed by ideas concerning micro, small-scale, everyday life and its qualitative aspects, which together contribute to a re-conceptualisation of a ‘sociology of small things.’ Specifically, it is argued that close and small-scale studies of women’s writing, whether undertaken alone or connected to others, sheds light on the importance of relationship dynamics in connection with writing output, on what writing was produced and what role each text played in larger scale political agendas. Concepts such as palimpsest, liminality and bricolage are interrogated with respect to researching and representing the spatial and temporal interconnectedness of the selected authors and textual sources. And contributions are made to contemporary thinking about epistolarity and social networks, focussing on reciprocity, gift-giving and receiving and notions of ‘letterness,’ along with the defining of boundaries, and the value of determining the nature of ties between women. The thesis also argues that the relationships between intimacy and distance, interiority and exteriority, public and private, are frayed with complicated overlaps.

The changing role of women was arguably the most fundamental area of concern and crisis in the Victorian era. Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the evolving role of women, particularly in regard to the development of the New Woman. I propose that there is an intermediary character type that exists between Coventry Patmore's "angel of the house" and the New Woman of the fin de siecle. I call this character the Wandering Woman. This new archetypal character adheres to the following list of characteristics: she is a literal or figurative orphan, is genteelly poor or of the working class, is pursued by a rogue who offers financial security in return for sexual favors; this sexual liaison, unsanctified by marriage, causes her to be stigmatized in the eyes of society; and her stigmatization results in expulsion from society and enforced wandering through a literal or figurative wilderness. There are three variations of this archetype: the child-woman as represented by the titular heroine of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Little Nell of Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop; the sexual deviant as represented by Miss Wade of Dickens' Little Dorrit; and the fallen woman as represented by the titular heroine of Thomas Hardy' Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hetty Sorrel of George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Lady Dedlock of Dickens' Bleak House. Although the Wandering Woman's journey may resemble a variation of the bildungsroman tradition, it is not, because unlike male characters in this genre, women have limited opportunities. Wandering Women always carry a stigma because of their "illicit" sexual relationship, are isolated because of this, and never experience a sense of fun or adventure during their journey. The Wandering Woman suffers permanent damage to her reputation, as well as to her emotional welfare, because she has been unable to conform to archaic, unrealistic modes of behavior. Her story is not, then, a type of coming of age story, but is, rather, the story of the end of an age.

This thesis is about Thomas Hardy's presentation of marriage and divorce in his last novel Jude the Obscure. It presents how Hardy as a representative of his time reflected important ideologies such as marriage, free union, and divorce.

ABSTRACT MATURATION OF SHAVIAN WOMEN: A STUDY OF THE MATURATION PROCESSES OF FEMALE PRATOGONISTS IN PYGMALION AND MRS. WARREN&#039 / S PROFESSION M.A., Department of English Literature May, 2009, 112 pages George Bernard Shaw is a celebrated playwright for his depiction of emancipated women. His women, regardless of the conditions they are in at the beginning of the play, experience a maturation process in the flow of the events and especially discussions which direct the change in his characters. In this thesis, the maturation processes Vivie Warren and Eliza Doolittle experience are analyzed in the plays Mrs. Warren&#039 / s Profession and Pygmalion, respectively. Vivie is a typical Shavian heroine who is educated and free-spirited even at the beginning of the play. At the end, she chooses to start a professional life breaking with the domestic and social boundaries by rejecting to see her mother or marry Frank. Likewise, Eliza, who is a simple flower girl at the beginning of the play, seems to bear the free spirit Vivie has because she earns her living and makes her own decision of taking phonetics courses, which causes the events in the play to take place. At the end, she rejects marrying to support her life and chooses to pursue phonetics as a profession to earn her living. As a result, her free-spirited personality leads her to her maturation process. In this study, it is concluded that no matter what their starting point is, both Shavian women bear the characteristics of New Woman at the beginning of the play which facilitates their progress into New Women at the end of the plays.