Although confusion about the genre of New Woman Ella D'Arcy's only novella has resulted in a lack of scholarship, The Bishop's Dilemma can now be read as a social commentary that reaches beyond the New Woman subversion of the Victorian marriage plot, broadening the gender discussion at the fin-de-siècle. In this essay, I examine how D'Arcy uses Catholicism as a vehicle to create a unique space in the Catholic ritual of the confession that gives her reader privileged access to Victorian manhood. I argue that by placing her examination of masculinity in the context of the Catholic priesthood, D'Arcy renders her protagonist, Herbert Fayler, unable to use the convention of marriage as a means of subjugation or salvation of Dilemma's female characters, removing the marriage plot as a framework for the tension in the text and leaving Fayler's masculinity vulnerable to his own self-censure. I conclude that D'Arcy does not condemn Fayler any more than she blames the New Woman characters of her earlier short stories for their plight, but rather, D'Arcy constructs a figure of masculinity that exposes dangers present when men are groomed in a romanticized world with idealized notions of masculine life.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BGMYU2/oai:scholarsarchive.byu.edu:etd-4042 |
| Date | 06 July 2011 |
| Creators | Christianson, Elizabeth Watson |
| Publisher | BYU ScholarsArchive |
| Source Sets | Brigham Young University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/ |
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