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BOOK REVIEW

Alexandra Gray. Self-Harm in New Woman Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. 224pp. ISBN: 9781474417686, £75.00 Hbk.

Reviewed by Mariam Zarif.

Because of the caricatures or stereotypes of and satirical responses to the New Woman, it is easy to forget that there was certainly more to the “desexualized half-man” (Stutfield 1895). The relationship between the Woman Question, late-Victorian feminism, and the female body has long been established in New Woman studies. When the New Woman arrived on the literary scene, writers registered and reacted to her transgressive and transcending persona, and many New Women writers complicated the rigid gender categories. The New Woman, therefore, has a particular correlation to tropes of improper femininity, with its attending bodily associations of masculinity, gender fluidity, and progression. Thus, any discussion on the New Woman is itself an expression of transformation by which categories of gender are contested.

In her introductory chapter of Self-Harm in New Woman Writing, Alexandra Gray posits a clear purpose: she “demonstrates the ways in which New Woman authorship both disrupted and manifested the failed narrative project of women’s inclusion in the literary canon” (3). By using a trans-disciplinary approach towards Victorian literature, culture, and medicine, the book traces the recurrent trope of self-harm in writings by both canonized and lesser-known writers. Gray aims to incorporate New Woman writing into the canon of self-harm and wound culture: first, by locating the different fictional acts of self-harm in writings about the New Woman, offering readings of individual novels in relation to the specific circumstances of their production; and second, by bringing these textual moments together for comparative analysis and situating them in contemporary discourses on gender and the Woman Question. The novelty of Gray’s approach lies in her selection of six women writers who were progressive thinkers and ethnically diverse: Mona Caird, Victoria Cross, Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Mary Angela Dickens, and Amy Levy. These New Woman writers demonstrated the unfixing of gender categories which began in the last decade of the nineteenth century, deployed through the available literary genres of their periods – novels (particularly the triple-decker form), short stories, and poems.

The book confronts the deeper ideologies underpinning the fictional acts of self-harm by women in literature. Gray opens her study with an extremely useful survey of recent theories concerning self-harm and the female body, and New Woman’s writing in particular. She draws on Mark Seltzer’s conceptualization of a Victorian “wound culture” to emphasize her argument that the New Woman used the female body “as an object of display and desire” (3). Focusing on self-starvation, excessive drinking, and self-mutilation, each chapter reinstates the narrative of female resistance to Victorian patriarchy.  As a result, Gray makes an in-depth and more serious analysis than other works on the New Woman. Gray describes the “damaged body as text,” using Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, to extend the claims of the narrative bodies. Treating both genre and gender as “subject to the heteronormative project of dominant Christian culture” (17), Gray reads the damaged bodies in literary representations of the New Woman as forums which reflected “the organizing structures of dominant discourse largely positioning women as objects of desire and men as entitled to the epistemic perspective” (16).

The first chapter, “Saintly Self-Harm: The Victorian Religious Context,” proposes that New Woman writers “exploited growing religious dissent, problematizing the theologies that underpropped women’s self-negating response to a variety of patriarchal brutalities” (39). In readings of Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889) and The Daughters of Danaus (1894), Gray demonstrates how Caird connects Christianity and sacrifice to images of martyrdom and tortured bodies of female “victim-characters” (55) in order to expose the oppressed internal conflict between religion and social expectations, in addition to women’s desires. The section on Victoria Cross’s novels The Woman Who Didn’t (1894) and Anna Lombard (1901), follows an argument of the blurred gender, race, and class boundaries. Gray argues that Cross debunks the generic ideology of gender binaries, and, in doing so, critiques the social and sexual freedoms of Victorian women. For this reviewer, the most illuminating aspect of this first chapter relates to the configuration of Christianity and Gray’s comparative analysis of these two writers.

The chapter on “Self Starvation in the New Woman Novel” discusses Sarah Grand’s representation of the New Women who starved themselves to protest oppressive “separate sphere ideology” (79). Examining the behaviors of heroines from three of Grand’s novels – Ideala: A Study from Life (1888), The Heavenly Twins (1893), and The Beth Book (1897) – Gray argues that the New Woman novels and the authors who wrote them “rejected the female body through self-starvation, attempting to make their own meaning in a culture that should make their bodies its semantic bearers” (82). Noting Anna Silver’s use of the key term “anorexia” in her useful study Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body, Gray pursues her argument that self-starvation in women’s writing in the late nineteenth century “consider[s] food-starving as performative in nature, as an enactment of both identity and protest and a dichotomy of rebellion and submission within a culture of clearly defined and inflexible gender expectations” (85). The chapter closes by drawing together Grand’s novels to articulate the complex and dynamic ways the terms “self-harm,” “anorexia,” and “starving bodies” challenged the gender double standards of the Victorian society.

In “Drunken Bodies in New Woman Fiction” Gray seeks to illuminate the impact of excessive drinking and the female body, and how the drunken heroine of New Woman fiction “demands to be seen (and heard) through acts of bodily display that contest the strict gender dictates” (124). Her suggestion that excessive drinking should be seen as a practice to escape the “repetitive mundanity of a machine culture” (120) is brought vividly to the fore in her explications of short stories by George Egerton and Mary Angela Dickens.  Her readings of these texts detail how both writers responded and undermined the strict moral codes. Dickens’s characters in particular, Gray argues, fail to adhere to the ideologies of a “gendered Christian tradition” (155). The chapter does not simply set up parallels between the two writers, but seeks to demonstrate the ways in which New Woman writers fictionalized the “female drunk” with demonstrate self-harming female bodies, and how alcohol became a form of escape from the rigid realities of a “limiting world” (156).

The value of women’s agency through the trope of self-harm is strikingly apparent in the final chapter, “Damaging the Body Politic: Self-Mutilation as Spectacle.” Gray effectively demonstrates the significance of poetry as feminine discourse used by writers like Amy Levy to “subvert the notion of female inferiority and exclusion” (171). In this chapter Gray explores Levy’s use of the verse form to reflect the “instabilities of sexual identities” (176). One very interesting section analyses the way that the New Woman’s hands connote her transgression.  Levy’s use of hands, for instance, highlights both the significance of “women’s cultural production” and the “financial difficulties faced by women writers” (175). In addition, Gray’s reading of Levy’s poetry illuminates the trope of self-destruction and alludes to the double marginalization of the “non-white” and “non-English woman poet” Levy’s poems address (176). This chapter certainly demonstrates strands of original research and makes convincing assertions about both Levy’s and Egerton’s short stories in relation to the rhetoric of self-mutilation.

To this day, new research concerning the New Woman challenges scholars to revisit how we understand this cultural and literary phenomenon, and Gray’s book more than proves the value in understanding the intricate social and cultural significance maintained by New Woman texts. Gray’s study convincingly argues the significance of self-harm as a trope in New Woman writing. In considering the complex set of ideas around the New Woman and the female body at the fin-de-siècle, Gray’s book makes an effective and lasting contribution.

Mariam Zarif is a doctoral candidate in English, nineteenth-century literature, and journalism at King’s College, London. Her work focuses on New Woman fiction by male writers and the intersections between gender, sexuality, and authorial disguise in the fin-de-siècle. She recently organized the first conference on “Women in Punch 1841-1920” at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, in November 2017. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Still Point Journal, a literary journal for Arts and Humanities researchers in London, established in 2014.