New Woman Hybridities

Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930

MARGARET BEETHAM, Ann Heilmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134422692
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the 1970s, the literary and cultural politics of the turn-of-the-century New Woman have received increasing academic attention. Whether she is seen as the emblem of sexual anarchy, an agent of mediation between mass market and modernist cultures, or as a symptom of the consolidation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century political liberation movements, the New Woman represents a site of cultural and socio-political contestation and acts as a marker of modernity. This book explores the diversity of meanings ascribed to the New Woman in the context of cultural debates conducted within and across a wide range of national frameworks including the UK, Canada, North America, Europe, and Japan. The key concept of 'hybridities' is used to elucidate the national and ethnic multiplicity of the 'modern woman' as well as to locate this figure both within international consumer culture and within feminist writing.

The book is structured around four key themes. 'Hybridities' examines the instabilities of New Woman identities and discourses in relation to both national/ethnic contexts and the textual parameters of New Woman writings. 'Through the (Periodical) Looking Glass' is concerned with the periodical press and its production and circulation of New Woman images. 'Feminist Counter Cultures?' interrogates feminist efforts to influence and shape this process by mimicking or subverting dominant models of representation and by establishing alternative spaces for the articulation of New Woman subjectivities. 'Race and the New Woman' inspects white New Women's investment in hegemonic racial discourses, looking at the way in which black and non-Western women inserted liberationist discourses into the New Woman debate. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of American Studies, Women's Studies, and Women's History.

Part 1

Hybridities

1 Bertha Thomas
The New Woman and ‘Anglo-Welsh’ hybridity

Kirsti Bohata

The New Woman, and her associations with the English middle and upper classes, may at first appear to be a difficult figure to place in a Welsh context. Binary constructions of national identity in Wales – where Welsh identity is constructed in opposition to ‘Englishness’ so that one’s ‘Welshness’ is eroded in more or less direct proportion to the degree one becomes anglicized – have led to the problematic marginalization of a rather anglicized Welsh middle class, and especially middle-class women, in literary and historical accounts of the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find a number of active and politically committed ‘feminist forerunners’ operating through the media of Welsh and English whom we may confidently label as Welsh New Women, including Ellen Hughes, who wrote a feminist article entitled ‘Y Ddynes Newydd’ (‘The New Woman’) in Y Gymraes (1896/7).¹ Indeed, such women have been described, in Welsh-language criticism, as ‘[C]ymraes Newydd’ (Aaron 1998: 211) – literally ‘New Welshwoman’ – a term which confers a distinctly Welsh cultural authenticity upon these feminist forerunners. Attempting to ‘place’ those English-language, or ‘Anglo-Welsh’,² New Women who do not have the marker of language or who do not provide an explicit declaration of national allegiance as ‘proof’ of nationality and who often moved between England and Wales is, however, more complex.³ Within the narratives of anglocentric British feminist histories, and in relation to the cultural and literary canons of Welsh-language writing, Anglo-Welsh women writers tend to be marginal-ized or else their complex cultural and literary allegiances are obscured. This chapter will suggest that theories of cultural hybridity – and specifically the figure of the hybrid individual – may offer new ways for us to approach (Anglo-) Welsh women who have been overlooked, excluded or misrepresented by narrow assumptions about their class and perceived national identities or affiliations as well as being further marginalized by their gender. Focusing on Bertha Thomas (1845–1918) – novelist, short-story writer, satirist, feminist, biographer of George Sand – this chapter will address some of the problems of ‘placing’ this unjustly ignored ‘New Woman’ writer.

Hybridity is one of the most important and versatile concepts to emerge from post-colonial and cultural studies, yet what we may inferfrom its coupling with the New Woman may not, at first, be obvious. What is a hybrid New Woman? What, for that matter, is a non-hybrid New Woman? Of course, this second question is inseparable from the first – one of the implications of discussing cultural or other hybridities is to invoke and perhaps reinforce the idea of an essentialized cultural authenticity.⁴ That is, to invoke the possibility of hybrid New Women, one inevitably bolsters the stereotype of the New Woman – the (upper) middle-class, bicycle-riding, androgynous (or ultrafeminine), feminist writer, speaker and political campaigner. This iconic, if multiple coded, figure (Heilmann 2000: 44; Ledger and Luckhurst 2000: xvii) is both reinforced and complicated by recent academic research, as critics and historians look beyond the central suffrage campaigns and ‘canonical’ writers to consider differences in class and allegiances to other local or national causes, as well as lesser-known authors. In its discussion of New Woman hybridities, this chapter inevitably and self-consciously makes use of what is essentially a stereotype (a variously coded but clearly recognisable image) of the New Woman in order to consider how Bertha Thomas’s fascinating writing might be illuminated by paradigms of hybridity and ambivalence.

The engagement with hybridity functions on a number of levels in this chapter, and I will suggest that hybridity offers useful models both in terms of locating, or rather making a space for, Bertha Thomas within contemporary academic discourses and also, in a different way, in the interpretation of her fiction. With reference to the former intervention, we might conveniently understand the theoretical use of hybridity as a strategic model which resists narrow and exclusive categorizations. With reference to the second approach, an awareness of the discourses of hybridity allows us to focus on Thomas’s sustained interest in the outsider, the alien, the criss-crossing of boundaries of culture, nationality and language as well as those of class and gender. For the purposes of this chapter, I will concentrate on Thomas’s short stories, of which she published two volumes: Camera Lucida; or, Strange Passages in Common Life (1897) and Picture Tales from Welsh Hills (1912), and specifically on those stories set in Wales, although I also consider how the themes identified therein may be traced through her other writing, fiction and non-fiction.

Before going on to discuss Thomas as a New Woman and an Anglo- Welsh writer, it is necessary briefly to outline the theoretical background which informs this chapter. Elements of Homi K. Bhabha’s work which highlight the centrality of hybridity in terms of cultural production, where it is ‘the inbetween space’ which ‘carries the burden of the meaning of culture’, are of course crucial (Bhabha 1994: 38). However, more recent work by Charlotte Williams offers an equally complex but rather more accessible means of understanding the fluidity of culture. Williams’s work is also particularly relevant here as she writes with direct reference to Wales and Welsh culture. Williams is a mixed-race academic – the daugh- ter of a white Welsh (and Welsh-speaking) mother and a black Guyanese father – whose own experiences of growing up in Wales informs her work in this area; indeed, some of her writing might best be described as ‘bio-textual’.⁵ In her essay ‘“I going away, I going home”: Mixed-“Race”, Movement and Identity’, Williams stresses the problems of narrow constructions of cultural authenticity, especially in Wales, and shows identity to be ‘a process of becoming as a perpetual movement, rather than any singular or static statement of being’ (Williams 2000: 179). Drawing on the work of Wilfred Cartney and fiction of Pauline Melville, Williams creates a space for her own mixed-race, culturally marginalized identity by adopting the idea of

moving away and moving back as a continual process of border crossing [which] allows for a recognition of multiple points of identification.
. . . This positioning also acts as a counter-discourse to depictions of home and belonging that posit rootedness in specific locations and places and times. So the art of negotiating self lies in managing this dynamic where there is a constant mixing of heritage and traditions and a constant movement towards their identification and reformulation. It is within the remix that the spaces open up for the claiming and negotiation of multiple identities.

(Ibid.: 180, my emphasis)

Williams’s negotiation of her experience of cultural hybridity and of multiple belongings (and unbelongings) highlights the centrality of ‘instability, shifts, repositionings, loss, ambivalence and movement’ (ibid.: 182) in the process of constantly ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’ (ibid.: 183). She makes effective use of an image from one of Pauline Melville’s short stories, where the narrator’s British–Caribbean identity is expressed through dreams of criss-crossing the Atlantic, or more precisely of being suspended between the two places:

Once . . . [she] dreamed she returned by walking in the manner of a high-wire artist, arms outstretched, across a frail spider’s thread suspended sixty feet over the Atlantic attached to Big Ben at one end and St. George’s Cathedral, Demerara, at the other.

(Melville 2000: 193)

This sense of being constantly in-between reveals a very real and lived appreciation of Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as ‘a passage between fixed identifications’ (Bhabha 1994: 4).

Charlotte Williams’s project to make a space within (while simultaneously interrogating and deconstructing) Welsh cultural ‘authenticities’ is mirrored in recuperative literary projects which aim to expand the Welsh canon and to challenge narrow and misleadingly exclusive literary and historical constructions of women’s Welsh, Anglo-Welsh and British identities. It is from this critical and theoretical perspective that I approach Bertha Thomas’s writing. Unfortunately, very little is known of the biography of Bertha Thomas. She was born in 1845 to a well connected English mother, Maria Sumner, and a Welsh father, the Reverend John Thomas. On her mother’s side, Bertha Thomas was related to several bishops and her grandfather was John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1848–62, while the founder of the Mother’s Union, Mary Sumner, was her aunt. Her father was from a line of relatively minor Carmarthenshire gentry, although John Thomas’s mother was originally from Gloucester-shire. All of Bertha Thomas’s stories with a Welsh setting reflect the countryside just outside Llandeilo near the Black Mountains, where her grandmother and several maiden aunts ran the family estate. Despite Bertha Thomas’s strong Welsh connections, so evident in her stories, there is no evidence that she ever lived in Wales, her father holding positions in Devon and London during her childhood and becoming canon of Canterbury in 1862 when Bertha Thomas was just seventeen. Nevertheless, as a study of Thomas’s work reveals that there is an important, if ambivalent, connection with (a firmly Welsh-speaking) Wales. Thomas began publishing her work in the early 1870s, and her last volume appeared in 1912. She never married and thus might be categorized as an Odd Woman, but with the significant advantage of being financially independent, she did not have to rely on her writing to earn a living (Blain et al. 1990: 1074). Thomas was at least ten years older than most of the women we would label as New Women writers and all but one of her novels were published before Sarah Grand coined the term ‘New Woman’ in 1894. The figure of the New Woman is nevertheless an important feature of her later work (see below, pp. 25–30), while her committed feminism is evident in her earliest work.

One of her best-known pieces of non-fiction is a satire on the arguments against female suffrage, published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1874. The article is referred to in Charlotte Carmichael Stopes’s 1894 book, British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege, along with John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women, as a milestone in the education of the nation.⁶ ‘Latest Intelligence from the Planet Venus’ describes the struggle of men to gain the vote, on a planet almost identical to our own, and details with sharp wit the reasons why men are unfit to sit in parliament or even to concern themselves with the running of the country: ‘The notion of admitting young cornets, cricketers, and fops of the Dundreary pattern to a share in the legislation, the prospect of Parliamentary benches recruited from the racecourse, the hunting field, and the billiard-room was a picture that proved too much for the gravity of the [all female] Commons’ (Thomas 1874: 763). Although Thomas is all but forgotten today, her novels were popular in her own day and published in multiple editions on both sides of the Atlantic, while several were first serialized in London Society. She also contributed a biography of George Sand to the Eminent Women Series, edited by John Henry Ingram (1842–1916).

In terms of this scant biography, then, we may identify Bertha Thomas as a cultural hybrid. The daughter of a Welsh father and an English mother, Thomas’s ambiguous relation to ‘authentic’ or conventional Welsh culture is further complicated by her father’s religious affiliations – that is as a member of the (established) Anglican Church which was generally viewed as a foreign and imposed institution in an overwhelmingly non-conformist country.⁷ Her class, and indeed her education, further distance Thomas from the majority in Wales. Yet this social and cultural distance from the majority of the Welsh population is not an uncommon feature amongst Welsh women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her introduction to an anthology of short stories by women from Wales, in which one of Bertha Thomas’s stories appears, A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales c.1850–1950, Jane Aaron recognizes the ‘atypicality’ of most women writers of this period. She discusses the economic as well as the social circumstances that prohibited most Welsh women from achieving either a room of their own or three guineas, or, for that matter, the education and confidence required to write. Thus,

those women who did manage to amass the necessary levels of education, leisure and confidence to become writers tended to come from the middle rather than the working class, and consequently – in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – to be more anglicized than the majority.

(Aaron 1999: xi–xii)

Jane Aaron goes on to argue that ‘Their atypicality with regard to the mass of the Welsh population . . . does not of course in itself render their view of Wales inauthentic’ (ibid.: xii).⁸ The retention of the notion of authenticity, albeit one expanded to include such writers, is perhaps problematic – although in this context it is also clearly strategic and invoked in the context of refuting ‘inauthenticity’ as a pejorative label. Charlotte Williams also stresses the problems and narrowness of some Welsh constructions of authenticity, as well as the ‘fragility of many of the exclusionary markers of Welsh ethnicity – the language, accent, locality, name – and the ways in which these categories are constructed to create smaller and smaller sites of authentic identity’ (Williams 2000: 194). Clearly, many if not most of the earlier Welsh women writers of literature in English do not fit easily into any of these exclusive sites of authenticity, although, interestingly, Bertha Thomas shows an acute awareness of what Williams describes as the fragility of these markers and explores the implications of cultural assimilation and hybridity in Wales quite explicitly in her last published work, Picture Tales from Welsh Hills (1912).

In Picture Tales, the figure of the outsider is a significant presence in each of the nine stories – sometimes as the narrator, but also as a more ambiguous, even sinister intruder into the otherwise harmonious Welsh settings. One attribute of the hybrid, and one most disturbing to those concerned with ‘racial’ or cultural purity, is the possibility that he...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Hybridities
• Part 2: Through the (Periodical) Looking Glass
• Part 3: Communities of Women
• Part 4: Race and the New Woman