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BOOK REVIEW

Lena Wånggren. Gender, Technology and the New Woman. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. 232pp. ISBN: 9781474416269, £75.00 Hbk

Reviewed by Zoe Chadwick.

In Gender, Technology and the New Woman, Lena Wånggren brings into focus the technological advances of the late-nineteenth century and changing notions of the female role within them. Wånggren offers a reading of New Woman texts in relation to technologies and social practices of the time, and, in doing so, highlights how certain technologies helped work towards female emancipation. She outlines her aims carefully and states that, “[t]his book examines the New Woman in the specific technological modernity of the late-nineteenth century, considering the figure as connecting not only contemporary social, political and literary debates, but also technological transformations” (2). Not only does Wånggren offer a well-constructed examination of the New Woman figure’s relationship with nineteenth-century technologies, but she also highlights other female emancipatory issues of the period, such as labor and domestic spaces, female independence, and the medical hierarchy.

Wånggren’s introductory and first chapters establish the defining characteristics of the New Woman figure, “one of the most well-known and debated figures of the fin de siècle,” in both literary and historical contexts, and define the study’s key terms – modernity, technology, and gender (13). She makes a strong case for the cultural work of literature in changing contemporary notions of gender. In addition, Wånggren argues that technology and literature are mere tools of the fin-de-siècle endeavor for female emancipation; they are “meaning-machines that gain import first in relation to their surroundings – be it readers of a text or users of a specific technology” (32).

In the main body chapters, Wånggren covers different facets of these “meaning-machines” in the form of typewriters, the bicycle, female medical staff, and female detectives. Firstly, she addresses the secretarial agency of the New Woman figure. She establishes, through many examples of literary and contemporary journal representations of female typists, the connection between the machine itself and non-domestic female labor. Wånggren then points out that this kind of representation “suggests rather the containment of the threat represented by the New Woman within the safe confines of the female typist, rather than the typewriter being a tool of female emancipation” (40-41). However, she goes on to use Grant Allen’s The Typewriter Girl (1897) and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903) to demonstrate the influence of New Woman literature in the semantic naming debate regarding a typist’s work. She argues that despite the endeavor for female typists to represent containment, actually the New Woman typist is not only copying documents but also "inscribing her corporeal presence into the clerical workplace, that previously exclusively male domain" (60).  

This corporeal approach continues in chapter 3 where Wånggren discusses the “Freedom Machine,” the bicycle, with reference to H. G Well’s The Wheels of Chance (1896) and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventure (1899). She addresses the sexing and unsexing of women through the physical exertion associated with the bicycle and how the two novels do not necessarily support the idea of the bicycle as emancipatory (65). As both novels conclude with a re-establishment of “conventional endings” whilst simultaneously critiquing gender politics, Wånggren argues that “the two novels thus thematize different aspects of the ‘bicycle craze’ of the mid-1890s and serve to complicate any one-sided reading of the New Woman cyclist as either defusing or highlighting the gender politics that the figuration envisioned” (99).

In chapters 4 and 5, whilst addressing medical technologies and the New Woman, Wånggren moves to a more intellectual and less corporeal approach. Using primarily Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade (1900), Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean (1892), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Doctors of Hoyland (1894), Wånggren argues that the New Woman figure embodies a conflict between scientific knowledge and female intuition (120-21). In a step towards understanding female agency in the Victorian medical profession, she points out that “[t]he New Style nurse is at times referred to as a doctor’s tool, but it is also her use of new technologies that forms her professions and legitimates her knowledge” (130). Furthermore, she argues that although the New Style nurse is legitimized by her presence within the medical hierarchy, female doctors are still unsexed, and whilst their existence in the text at all is somewhat radical, “the New Woman doctor in these works must still adhere to late-nineteenth-century notions of femininity in order to be accepted” (163).  

Similarly, in her last chapter, Wånggren also explores the legitimization of female knowledge in detective fiction. In addressing the female detective figure, Wånggren states that, “[t]he emphasis on the ‘ladylike’ behaviour or 'womanly' character of these early female detectives does not have to undercut the importance of portraying women as rational creatures […] decades before women of flesh blood would enter that field” (195).  As with the Victorian medical profession, Wånggren argues that a woman’s presence in the field is in itself a legitimization of her intellect.

Wånggren offers a well-structured and multi-faceted approach to the literary New Woman figure’s interactions, both physical and intellectual, with the technology of the period. She uses a variety of comparative texts to offer different approaches to the New Woman. The texts and journal examples in each chapter also offer insight into the social influence that the combined literary and technological advancements had on the gender politics of the late-Victorian period. Whilst many critics have discussed the New Woman, both as a literary trope and a social stereotype, rarely has the literature’s relationship with technology been discussed to this extent. Wånggren’s research is well-presented and structured making this text accessible to both students and scholars. Although the argument may have benefited from more close readings of the primary texts themselves, this is simply owing to Wånggren’s use of the literature to generate her most original ideas: she has some excellent insights to offer. Overall, Wånggren achieves a well-balanced and considered approach to the use of emancipatory technologies of the time, and links the female/technological debate to the current social climate by reminding her readers that social media can be used “even to start revolutions” (197).

Zoe Chadwick is a doctoral candidate of Newman University in Birmingham. Her research focuses on examining extreme, or non-normative, bodies as manifestations of sexuality and madness in late-Victorian literature. She is also the new Postgraduate Representative for the British Association for Victorian Studies.