Quote: “O pedants of these later days, who go on undiscerning,/ To overload a woman’s brain and cram our girls with learning,/ You’ll make a woman half a man, the souls of parents vexing,/ To find that all the gentle sex this process is unsexing./ Leave one or two nice girls before the sex your system smothers,/ Or what on earth will poor men do for sweethearts, wives, and mothers?” (lines 25-30). 

Comment: What immediately sparked my interest at the end of this poem, which calls into question the very idea of this “new woman” that we have discussed in class, is the fact that regardless of how much people might have liked the concept of women branching out educationally, at the end of the day, the role they were still supposed to play was the “sweethearts, wives, and mothers”. Connecting this to Grant Allan’s The Type-Writer Girl, I thought that the effort to make Juliet find her Romeo and ultimately lose him – partly due to her agency over the situation – can highlight this critique of what this poem refers to. Juliet is strong-willed, educated, intelligent, and adventurous but could be viewed as acquiring ‘masculine’ qualities. However, Allan makes it clear that she can love, be romantic and want the same idealized notions of the past, yet it is not the thing her worth is inextricably linked to and the cause of her ruin if it is not obtained. 

Question: I’m not sure if this poem’s notion of the “new woman” could play into some of the themes and symbolic nature evident in the painting The Awakening Conscience, but I do think there might be something to be said about the power in framing the woman as the decision maker over her own affairs, whether that is literally a romantic/adulterous affair or just the way she wants her adult life to play out. I wonder whether or not the work of West might be able to fit in here with the idea of how many new topics challenge cannons and established rhetorics, much like the new woman at the turn of the century and perhaps the law and literature movement in the 1970s and especially in the more progressive ideas of today surrounding CRT, intersectionality, etc. 

Dictionary of Victorian London Primary Text and Visual

Textual: A Poem “The Woman of the Future” (1884)

In line with our discussions of Education Acts and the essay by Cobbe as well as the novel The Type-Writer Girl, this piece seems to highlight the anxieties and uncertainties of the “new woman” phenomenon but also a deeper jab at the education of women in general. While reading, I found many exact references in the Allan novel, such as Homer, Girton College, Stuart Mills, and the types of conversations educated women have at dinner. The idea also plays into how worried the greater society was if women were to take on masculine qualities and the concept of “unsexing” if priorities shift from solely domestic to the outside world. I felt it illustrates the very idea that Allan was trying to showcase with his heroine Juliet and the dispelling of these negative connotations with a well-liked, reflective, and optimistic woman like Juliet. 

Visual: “Fallen Woman” depicted in art – The Awakening Conscience – William Holman Hunt 1851-53 (https://victorianweb.org/painting/whh/replete/P10.html) 

Here we see a depiction of an adulterous woman or the mistress to the man in the image rising out of his lap to look out the window with this very mesmerized look on her face. With religious themes, she realizes the errors of her ways, so I felt this connected to our class’s novel Ruth. In Ruth, the moral and religious sentiments throughout made the ideas of how to seek a new form of justice for the ‘fallen woman’ – one of self-redemption, mercy, and kindness seem achievable. This painting, in contrast to some of the other visual depictions of the fallen woman being kicked out of her home, desolate on the street, or even, in some cases, committed suicide, feels apt to promote the same kind of reconceptualization evident in Gaskell’s novel. One other point that stuck out to me was the emphasis on the woman seeking her own ‘awakening’ and having the agency to act on her own moral or ethical views – to be able to leave a relationship with a typically very stark power dynamic of the mistress holding none and start anew.