Lesson Plan – the New Woman.
Outline:
1. Quiz.
2. Literature, The New Woman, and Modernism – the question of this class is: what does
modernism have to do with feminism?
3.Catch up – need to discuss Rebecca West’s “Indissoluble Matrimony”
4. Presentation from Jessica – Feminist Manifesto
Q&A for Jessica and discussion of Feminist Manifesto
5. Presentation from Amanda – Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own” +Q&A.
6. Comparison of A Room of One’s Own to Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
7. Why is The Garden Party a Feminist Text.
Compare to Indissoluble Matrimony.
8. General discussion: what does modernism have to do with feminism?
What does modernism have to do with the margins more generally? Other margins?
------1. Quiz.
2. Literature and women – what are some feminist novels? Do they still get written?
3. For our purposes, feminist fiction and fiction asking the “woman question” began in the 19th
C. George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss (1860), Flaubert – Madame Bovary (1856), Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina (1873-77).
Also in American writing:
Edith Wharton, “Age of Innocence”, “House of Mirth”
Henry James “Daisy Miller” and “Portrait of a Lady”
Kate Chopin, “The Awakening”
How do all of these texts end?
Tragically. – what happens? What’s the general pattern?
Woman seeks autonomy, goes outside her ordinary (domestic) sphere, her boldness is either
noticed and punished by patriarchal society, or the woman unwittingly brings disaster upon
herself.
In what way are these books feminist?
New Woman = a term popularized by Henry James in 1878-1882 in two novels.
What are the three waves of feminism?
1st wave = suffrage. 1890s-1960s. When did women get the vote? (Feb. 1918 in England, August
18th 1920 USA)
2nd wave = 1960s-80s. Less clearly political issues. Role of the family, roles of representation.
The canon in literature. Rights to speak.
3rd wave = non white woman, the queer, denial of biological difference between men and
women. postcolonial feminism = expansion into new fields.
What happens at the turn of the century?
New attitudes towards sex – Freud, Wilde etc. New openness in talking about sex.
New militancy on behalf of women.
Suffragettes and suffragists become violent, vandals, activists. = First Generation Feminism.
Little magazines and radical publishing venues play into this.
Emily Davison throws herslf under the king’s horse at the Derby.
-violence lost public support
them against society
during the war… they stopped it.
And partly as a result, gained the vote on Feb. 6th 1918.
BUT here’s my claim – that modernism has more to do with feminism than merely being the
literary equivalent of its first wave. It anticipates the major debates of the second and thrid waves
as well.
What are the 2nd an 3rd waves of the feminist movement about?
2nd wave = 1960s -1980s.
One other change – feminism becomes theoretical in a new way. The question of womanhood,
the difference between the sexes, etc. these become issues for philosophical debate. Otto
Weininger etc. 1903.
3rd wave = conjunction of other margins in the feminist agenda – well, I think we can see how
modernism does this by looking at Indissoluble Matrimony.
-------------------Look at Indissoluble Matrimony.
Page 98. What happens?
Go through – create summary.
Why is it called indissoluble matrimony?
--against marriage, but is this explicitly feminist?
how is Evadne represented?
Close reading of description of her P1+2.
Politics – is there a more obvious engagement here?
Style – step back from the political issue. How does this fit with BLAST?
How is it innovative?
How does the innovation help to represent a radical feminist undertext?
----------------------------
Jessica’s presentation.
and Q&A.
Questions: we tend to disagree with eugenics today. Is there any value left to this manifesto?
How does it relate to the SCUM manifesto?
Has anything really changed?
-----------------------Amanda’s Presentation on Selections from A Room of One’s Own
What is she saying about the canon?
What is the canon?
PATRIARCHAL.
What does she say about the role of the war?
Close reading P2 and the last paragraph.
Compare to Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
What are her main points?
or what are three points that she makes?
------------------------Katherine Mansfield – b. New Zealand 1888
moved to London when she was 19 (c. 1907?),
felt disillusioned with New Zealand and particularly with the treatment of Maori people.
Mansfield had two lesbian relationships that are notable for their pre-eminence in her journal entries. She continued
to have male lovers, and attempted to repress her feelings at certain times. [1] Her first lesbian relationship was with
Maata Mahupuku (sometimes known as Martha Grace), a wealthy young Māori woman whom she had first met at
Miss Swainson's school in Wellington, and then again in London in 1906. In June 1907 she wrote: "I want Maata—I
want her as I have had her—terribly. This is unclean I know but true." She often referred to Maata as Carlotta. She
wrote about Maata in several short stories. Maata married in 1907 but it is claimed that she sent money to Mansfield
in London.[7] The second relationship, with Edith Kathleen Bendall, took place from 1906 to 1908. Mansfield also
professed her adoration for her in her journals.[8]
Return to London
Back in London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into a bohemian way of life. She published only one story and one
poem during her first 15 months there.[5] Mansfield sought out the Trowell family for companionship, and while
Arnold was involved with another woman Mansfield embarked on a passionate affair with his brother, Garnet. [6] By
early 1909 she had become pregnant by Garnet, though Trowell's parents disapproved of the relationship and the
two broke up. She hastily entered into a marriage with George Bowden, a singing teacher 11 years older than her; [9]
they were married on 2 March, but she left him the same evening, before the marriage could be consummated. [6]
After a brief reunion with Garnet, Mansfield's mother, Annie Beauchamp, arrived in 1909. She blamed the
breakdown of the marriage to Bowden on a lesbian relationship between Mansfield and Baker, and she quickly had
her daughter despatched to the spa town of Bad Wörishofen in Bavaria, Germany. Mansfield miscarried after
attempting to lift a suitcase on top of a cupboard. It is not known whether her mother knew of this miscarriage when
she left shortly after arriving in Germany, but she cut Mansfield out of her will. [6]
Mansfield's time in Bavaria had a significant effect on her literary outlook. In particular, she was introduced to the
works of Anton Chekhov. She returned to London in January 1910. She then published more than a dozen articles in
A.R. Orage's socialist magazine The New Age, and became a friend and lover of Beatrice Hastings, who lived with
Orage.[10] Her experiences of Germany formed the foundation of her first published collection, In a German
Pension,[6] (1911), which she later described as "immature".[5]
friends with V Woolf and DH Lawrence (big influence here)
Died at 34.
Back to the question of the quiz: what is feminist about the Garden Party?
Summarize – what happens – go through page by page.
Need to talk about the importance in criticism of modernism of the margins…
Modernism as created by exiles and émigrés.
Joyce in Ireland…
Langston Hughes.
What is it about the kind of modernism that we’ve looked at so far that makes its literature
particularly well-adapted for these causes?
Mention Rita Felski’s Book “The Gender of Modernism” (1990) and Bonnie Scott Kime, Gender
and Modernism (80s collection):
Read this. Marianne Dekoven writes:
“Shifts in gender relations at the turn of the century were a key factor in the emergence of Modernism. The period
from 1880 to 1920, within which Modernism emerged and rose to preeminence as the dominant art form in the West
(it remained dominant until the end of World War II), was also the heyday of the first wave of feminism,
consolidated in the women suffrage movement. The protagonist of this movement was known as the “New
Woman”: independent, educated, (relatively) sexually liberated, oriented toward more productive life I the public
sphere than toward reproductive life in the home.” (“Modernism and Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Modernism, p. 174)
But more abstract reasons as well: the history of how we read modernism and understand it is necessarily gendered
as well; style of high modernism often seen as typically masculine and male-authored (difficult, experimental,
learned, progressive), so women have traditionally been excluded or marginalized in discussions of modernism
(seen as tied to tradition, nature, conservatism), with exception of Virginia Woolf; masculine high culture versus
female low/mass culture. Again, see Marianne Dekoven:
“Despite the powerful presence of women writers at the founding of Modernism and throughout its history and
despite the near-obsessive preoccupation with femininity in all modernist writing, the reactive misogyny so apparent
in much male-authored Modernism continues in many quarters to produce a sense of Modernism as a masculinist
movement.” (176) “However, a closer look at Modernism through its complex deployments of gender reveals not
only the centrality of femininity, but also, again, an irresolvable ambivalence toward radical cultural change at the
heart of modernist formal innovation in the works of both male and female writers.” (175) “Modernism had mothers
as well as fathers.” (ibid.)