New Woman Ecologies

From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond

Alicia Carroll

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780813942834
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

A transatlantic phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the "New Woman" broke away from many of the constraints of the Victorian era to enjoy a greater freedom of movement in the social, physical, and intellectual realms. As Alicia Carroll reveals, the New Woman also played a significant role in environmental awareness and action.

From the Arts and Crafts period, to before, during, and after the Great War, the iconic figure of the New Woman accompanied and informed historical women's responses to the keen environmental issues of their day, including familiar concerns about air and water quality as well as critiques of Victorian floral ecologies, extinction narratives, land use, local food shortages, biodiversity decline, and food importation. As the Land Question intersected with the Woman Question, women contributed to a transformative early green culture, extolling the benefits of going back to the land themselves, as "England should feed her own people." Carroll traces the convergence of this work and a self-realization articulated by Mona Caird's 1888 demand for the "acknowledgement of the obvious right of the woman to possess herself body and soul."

By the early twentieth century, a thriving community of New Woman authors, gardeners, artists, and land workers had emerged and created a vibrant discussion. Exploring the early green culture of Arts and Crafts to women's formation of rural utopian communities, the Women's Land Army, and herbalists of the Great War and beyond, New Woman Ecologies shows how women established both their own autonomy and the viability of an ecological modernity.

1

Elemental Ecologies

Arts and Crafts Women and Early Green Thought

The tales of Mary De Morgan are a prime example of the intersection between New Woman literature and the transformative early green culture of the Arts and Crafts movement. Easily fitting the image of the New Woman herself, De Morgan was a member of the Women’s Suffrage League, an author, a journalist, an embroiderer, a typist, a secretary, an East End volunteer, and a prison reformer.1 Through her skill at storytelling and embroidery, she lived and worked at the heart of the Arts and Crafts movement, becoming close to the Morris and Burne-Jones families. One of her four collections of fairy tales is dedicated to the grandchildren of the latter, and each collection is lavishly illustrated by central figures within the movement: her brother, William De Morgan, Walter Crane, and Olive Cockerell. Like the fairy-tale collections of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, the four collections were published as Christmas gift books and were once considered by reviewers to be among the most “original” and “most elegant giftbooks” they had ever seen.2 Welcomed as “real treasure[s]” or “gem[s]” in journals like Punch, De Morgan’s tales are now beginning to be recognized as innovative narratives that utilize the strategies of the New Woman writer to critique both the subjection of women under Victorian marriage laws and industrialized capitalism.3 Hybrid objects of both New Woman and Arts and Crafts culture, De Morgan’s books combine the former’s performative narratives and visual strategies, her avowed feminist politics, and the deliberate archaisms and early green sentiments of Arts and Crafts. The mixture brings a number of vital bodies into view in unexpected ways, resulting in “beautiful and wicked princess[es],” terrifying enchanted rosebushes, and elemental dancers constructed of wind and rain.4 Such beings strike a keynote for New Woman ecologies. They disrupt the Victorian ecological paradigm of the garden queen in the flower garden and create a strategic alliance between the mobile image of the New Woman and a vibrant elemental ecology.

De Morgan’s affinity for the elements greens the anarchic mobility of the New Woman and genders the early green ideology of Arts and Crafts. In tales such as “The Windfairies,” “The Toy Princess,” and “The Rain Maiden,” De Morgan naturalizes women’s bodily autonomy and artistic integrity while she critiques the joint commodification of women on the marriage market and industrialist-capitalist projects such as mass production and mechanism. Alternatively, in tales like “Handa and Siegfried” she models cooperative labor and artisanship in the tradition of the early greens, such as her close associate William Morris and his colleague the anarcho-communist alternative agriculturalist Peter Kropotkin, about whom she wrote in the articles “Co-operation in England” (1890) and “The New Trades-Unionism and Socialism in England” (1891). There she considers anarchist communes as alternatives to commodity culture and lauds the ideal of people “shar[ing] the result of their labor.”5 The latter ideal, she writes, although difficult to achieve in practice, “gains dignity by having for its leader Prince Peter Kropotkin.”6 He “must in every way command respect . . . in his private and public character, as a scientific man.”7 De Morgan’s praise references Kropotkin’s reenvisioning of Darwin’s political and ecological legacy. While many had naturalized capitalism via Darwin’s emphasis on competition and struggle in The Origin of the Species, Kropotkin would ultimately naturalize communism through Darwin’s equally compelling vision of mutualism. The latter became an important component of late Victorian and early twentieth-century thought, evident in New Life utopian experiments in communal living.8 De Morgan too seems intrigued by the idea of mutualism, cooperation across and between ontological categories. But her interest in the transformative culture of the early greens is made her own in her imaginative tales. In these fictions, her critique of competition and industrialization is matched by the power of more-than-human things, especially as they aid creativity in the tradition of Arts and Crafts.

As the classical and early modern elements of earth, wind, fire, and water are the “animated materialities with and through which life thrives,” they became the very stuff of that movement’s deliberately archaic techniques.9 Pots and tiles were “fired,” paints were composed of precious metals from the earth, air was crucial to a just working environment, and artisans hammered iron into useful and beautiful things. De Morgan the writer works in that tradition too, exploring the rich materiality of the elements. Animating the air through the characters of “The Windfairies,” or water through the figure of “The Rain Maiden,” De Morgan establishes an intimacy and interdependence between human and more-than-human things that fosters mutual respect rather than an anthropocentric ethic of stewardship. Her early critique of plant collection, “The Pool and the Tree,” for example, creates water as a willful, desirous, and mobile thing, while the human plant collectors and gardeners in the tale are characterized as thieves and fools. De Morgan then constructs horizontal relationships in which humans, rain, wind, and clouds come into being through each other. Interdependence and cooperation, or what Peter Kropotkin described as “mutual aid,” among living things rather than competition is the theme of these tales.10 Dancers in “The Windfairies” and “The Rain Maiden” form strategic alliances with the elements in De Morgan’s ecology, naturalizing the New Woman themes of mobility, sexual and artistic integrity, and vocation itself. They come to recognize, in the process, the sometimes volatile generative powers and exuberance of the elements in narratives that stand quite apart from the more familiar Victorian fairy-tale fare. Ultimately De Morgan explores the intrinsic value of living things—women, plants, rain, clouds, and wind—resisting their commodification on the market or their instrumentalization in industry. This insight follows her analysis of a less appealing feature of Arts and Crafts culture: its near-obsession with the gendered ecological paradigm of the garden.11 De Morgan begins a powerful critique of this paradigm early on with the dark tale “The Seeds of Love,” a thorough and damning critique of what Amy King terms the “botanical vernacular” in which “blooming and marriageability coalesce.”12 This narrative is endemic to the realist novel, the visual culture of Arts and Crafts, and mainstream Victorian culture itself. The fairy-tale form, then, allows a less “decorous” treatment of that discourse, exposing its hidden violence and objectification of women.13

Damned to Garden: “The Seeds of Love”

In “The Seeds of Love,” from her second collection On a Pincushion and Other Tales, De Morgan critiques the appeal of the garden and the familiar, domesticating discourse of the garden queen.14 She knew these discourses in her very hands as an embroiderer. In that craft as well as in the artwork of Arts and Crafts, the garden epitomized the movement’s concept of a green utopia often problematically inhabited by an objectified woman. The latter intersection is clear in the consistent objectification of De Morgan’s friend Jane Morris in floral paintings like The Day Dream (1880). As Jan Marsh aptly notes, this painting is not a portrait; rather, Morris’s very identity is subsumed in the work “into the spirit of Nature.”15 Through his considerable skill with composition, brush strokes, and color, Dante Gabriel Rossetti successfully blends the human woman with the goddess Flora and conflates both with the tree, the flower she holds, and the season. The ephemeral quality of each is accented by the glow of the red-tongued honeysuckle bloom at the center of the painting that seems to express Morris’s “bloom” or her perceived sexual availability itself.16

Arts and Crafts women artists themselves were constantly subjected to such visual iconography, which mirrored the “rapprochement between women and flowers” that was rampant in Victorian mainstream culture as well as in bohemian schools.17 In the static portrayals of women in pre-Raphaelite paintings, their mobility is sharply curtailed, reduced to a pose. This is clear in the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, and others. Certainly, this conflation of women and plants or flowers is visible in the embroideries to which De Morgan contributed her labor, executing designs by both Morris and Burne-Jones. In such textiles, images of women harvesting mirror their own fecundity rather than explore their productivity. A famous tapestry of Pomona, for example, shows her holding apples in her lap rather than picking them. This visual culture suggests the extent to which the school of Arts and Crafts accommodated quite standard Victorian gender norms, such as the conventional idea that “the ideal woman is one who is close to nature, practicing her role in life by working with flowers” or fruit.18

Edenic scenes featuring women at this kind of work signal the triumph of the Morrissian postrevolutionary utopian society in which work becomes a pleasure. But this achievement is often signified in visual or literary terms that make women’s reproductive role a given. This has the effect Patricia Murphy identifies in the Victorian period as “trapping the female in time,” always slightly behind the evolution of men.19 In texts and tapestries, women’s time is also undoubtedly heteronormative or straight time; women are represented awaiting what Morris imagines as the ecstatic arrival of “real marriage,” in which women are finally “free” to select a heteronormative partner regardless of financial status and without the tyranny of the period’s marriage laws which deprive women of agency.20 In this new utopia, figures of Pomona or Flora, the goddesses of harvest and spring, offer themselves to the viewer, seeming to speak for all women: “I am the ancient apple queen, as once I was so am I now”; “I am the handmaid of the earth.”21 Such representations of women, as in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, “perpetuate the notion of an unchanging female essence across the ages and negate the possibility of substantive improvement in women’s status.”22 Martin Delvaux notes that Morris “developed Marx’s anti-capitalist critique, linking it to questions of gender and transferring it to an environmental level.”23 However, Jan Marsh notes that “heterosexuality rules”24 in Morris’s utopian garden states and that his stipulation that an authentic marriage is a matter of simple “inclination” between men and women reveals that he can imagine no other alternative sexualities or life partnerships.25 The very basis of Morris’s early green vision of the future as expressed in “The Dawn of a New Epoch” (1886) is of the nation itself as a gendered garden. In News from Nowhere, a transformed London is “running over with flowers” and populated by “young girls” offering Roger and Richard Hammond fruit and blossoms.26 The women who worked for Morris and Co. would have met this reproductive and heteronormative floral discourse as it manifested itself in the Morris house designs that they executed.

Indeed, as embroiderers, De Morgan and May and Jane Morris, were, in a sense, expert gardeners.27 Skilled in the floral vocabulary of Morris’s designs, the three women worked together on the intricate hangings for Morris’s bed at Kelmscott Manor, interweaving native English meadow flowers on the bed’s coverlet and a trellis of roses and birds on the curtains, with the text of Morris’s poetry crowning the top as a border and a ribbon of blue, representing the Thames River, coursing around the bottom of the coverlet.28 The skill of their embroidery is unquestionable; however, it was unsigned and often, although not always, executed men’s designs. As Anthea Callen has written, a “lack of any unselfconscious integration of men and women” emanated from the heart of the Arts and Crafts movement outward to all its levels, compromising its radical aims and becoming “reactionary in its reinforcement of the traditional patriarchal structure which dominated contemporary society.”29 Although the movement believed that self-expression through the making of art and craft was a basic human right, women’s positions in the movement were often subordinate to those of men. The progressive ideology of even Morris’s futurist vision of the nation as a garden state cannot overcome the gendered mythologies of that space. De Morgan was well known to have argued about socialism with William Morris. Although details of these debates are elusive,30 in her published writing, she clearly critiques the sexism of “English socialists,” pointing out that “many of their leaders assum[e] women’s p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1. Elemental Ecologies
• 2. “We Are Two Women”
• 3. The New Life and the New Woman
• 4. “God Speed the Plough and the Woman Who Drives It”
• 5. Working Relationships
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index