scholarly journals Beth Caldwell's Reading Experience

Spectrum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelby Elizabeth Haber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Personal Engagement

Near the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Grand coined the phrase "New Woman," which was influential throughout the first wave of the feminist movement. This paper examines how Sarah Grand's representation of Beth Caldwell's reading habits in her novel The Beth Book acts as a metaphor for the subversive femininity of the New Woman. My project explores the ways in which Grand's feminist ideals are reflected in The Beth Book through the scenes when Beth is reading. I suggest that Beth's atypical engagement with books as textual and physical objects can be equated to social dissent. However, Grand also portrays Beth reading within educational and marital institutions. These experiences lead Beth's engagement with the text to become similar to common nineteenth-century reading practices. I conclude with the argument that Grand represents any personal engagement with a book, even if it is not especially radical, as capable of re-evaluating systemically-enforced interpretations.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

scholarly journals ”Warum noch länger die demütige Magd, die ihrem Herrn die Füße wäscht?“

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Viktorija Bilic
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
German Language ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Male Supremacy ◽  
Traditional Norms ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The U.S

Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817-1884) was one of few women who have shaped German immigrant life in America during the second half of the 19th century. The Forty-Eighter, writer, and educator founded the first German-language Frauenzeitung in the U.S., and her network of correspondents included Susan B. Anthony.   The article sheds light on Mathilde Anneke as a “new woman” who broke with traditional norms of gender and sexuality. She divorced her first and abusive husband at the age of 20, raising her daughter alone before marrying Fritz Anneke with whom she had more children. This paper focuses on Mathilde's feminist essay Das Weib im Conflict mit den socialen Verhältnissen (1847). This text is a testament to her ideals and values, most of all her life-long fight for women’s rights. In this manifest, Mathilde envisions the “new woman” who would break out of the cage of male supremacy and demand equal rights. While Mathilde Anneke did not live to see the suffragist movement succeed, she made significant contributions to the early feminist movement, and she did so through her writing.

Fallen Corpses and Rising Cities: The Bell Jar and the Making of the New Woman

Novel Shocks ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 104-124
Author(s):  
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
East Side ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The New Woman

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar centers on two shock-fueled transformations: New York’s transformation from the nineteenth-century industrial city of slums, tenements, and factories to a shiny new metropolis and Esther’s transformation from an anxious, sick, and needy tenderfoot into a seemingly independent, liberated, and autonomous subject. Reading Esther’s psychic transformation against its geopolitical and spatial markers of renewal—the slumified lower east side of the Rosenbergs, the newly built glass-sheeted office buildings where the protagonist Esther works, and the newly constructed UN headquarters that hangs in Esther’s hotel window—the chapter challenges dominant readings of the novel, which often forefront how the double bind of consumer mass culture and patriarchal 1950s values trap and confine women. The chapter suggests the novel is less about the entrapment of women than it is about the formation of the woman we assume to be trapped. Specifically, it argues that the novel’s celebrated critique of the repressive, patriarchal state ultimately leads not to a more progressive position, but rather to the formation of a lactified, suburbanized, and entrepreneurial female subjectivity.

The New Woman

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Z. Zrakowski
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
New Women ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Female Consciousness ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Modernist Fiction ◽  
Ubiquitous Presence

A historical figure as well as a literary phenomenon, the New Woman was named in 1894 in an exchange between ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée) and Sarah Grand in the pages of the New American Review. The New Woman was a ubiquitous presence in fin-de-siècle literature and journalism concerned with debates about the ‘woman question’, and influenced twentieth-century ideas about feminism and gender. The New Woman novel, with its mapping of female psychological space and emphasis on female consciousness, shaped modernist fiction. New Women were often political activists as well as writers, and agitated for reform on political and domestic questions. Most New Woman fiction rejects aestheticism in favor of realism; it deals with sexuality with a frankness that departed from Victorian codes of propriety and takes up issues such as suffrage, marriage, domestic violence, and the emancipation of women. In its realism, New Woman fiction departs from the aestheticism of the period, although some writers, like George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), used the techniques of aestheticism to examine women’s experience.

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