Disruptive Acts

The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France

Mary Louise Roberts

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226721255, 9780226721248
• eBook ISBN: 9780226360751
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Social Sciences

In fin-de-siècle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home.

Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper La Fronde; the journalists Séverine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of La Fronde itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men—even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for La Fronde put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny.

Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, Disruptive Acts will be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.

Chapter 1

The New Woman

À la Femme nouvelle

Dans le passé profond, barbare et ténébreux,

Tu fus tout pitié, Femme, et tout esclavage

Ton grand coeur ruissela sous le viril outrage

Comme sous le pressoir un fruit délicieux

Nous sommes enivrés du vin de ta souffrance

Nous, les hommes nouveau, où palpite ton sang

Nous te voulons, ô soeur enfin libre, pressant

Entre tes bras pensifs les fruits de conscience!

—Jules Bois¹

WHO WAS THE New Woman? In October of 1901, Jane Misme, the drama critic of the women’s daily La Fronde, tried to answer that question. “Of the many things disrupting contemporary society,” she wrote, “perhaps the most important is the transformation in the lives of women. They, who have remained the same for centuries and centuries, across all civilizations, are now in the process of no longer being the same. While the traditional woman has not yet disappeared, she has been challenged by another, baptized the New Woman. The two are in conflict and the world is fighting over them.”² The past was vanishing like a point on a horizon, but the future remained no more than a dim light. Misme was aware that she lived in an era of change, but the question of how exactly women were different eluded her. She knew only that “they were in the process of no longer being the same.”

Misme’s comment came in a survey of the “conception of woman in French theater” for La Revue d’art dramatique. As a drama critic, she was fascinated by the meeting point between “life” and “culture.” Viewing theater as a “reflection of the reality surrounding it,” she presented herself as a watchdog of the “new woman of reality,” whom dramatists had tended “to betray, by their portrayal.” At the same time, like many of her contemporaries, Misme saw the stage as a progressive influence—an agent, as well as a mirror, of change.³ “In its role as a revolutionary artistic force,” she argued, the theater “is, without question, on the side of today’s woman. It shows us the alternative only to bury it.” Despite her displeasure with the dramatic portrayal of the New Woman, Misme firmly believed that the stage could provide new models of womanhood. “Before she attains total perfection,” she wrote of the new woman, “the theater, where miracles come easy, will have shown us the absolute ideal.”⁴

As Misme intuited, the theater acted as a “revolutionary” force in fin-de-siècle France because change was easy to imagine there. That ease, in turn, arose from both the unlimited and limited parameters in which it operated. On the one hand, as a world of artifice, the theater represented boundless opportunities in terms of what it could dream up and materialize on stage. But on the other hand, theatrical conventions delimited drama as a “mere” act of the imagination. As the philosopher Judith Butler has argued, “performance” is less regulated by social convention in a theatrical context. “The sight of a transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and applause,” she argues, “while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence.” Theatrical conventions “de-realize the act” in a way that is not as threatening to our assumptions about gender roles. In the theater, then, the audience is able to draw comforting distinctions between the performance and “real life.” Inhabiting that small space of difference away from the “real,” the theater is given license to play with more daring plots, roles, and identities.⁵ Significantly, the French verb “jouer” means both to “act” on stage and to “play,” just as our word “play” is the same as “drama.”

How, then, did the fin-de-siècle theater “play” with female identity? In its role as both “mirror” and “force” of change, what can it tell us about the two-way discursive traffic between the New Woman and new women? How, in short, can it help us to understand the New Woman as a problem of cultural change—what Misme called “the process of no longer being the same”?

New and Imported Womanhood

To understand the stage image of the New Woman, we have to travel beyond French borders to where her story began. Like many of her contemporaries, Misme saw the New Woman as an alien import challenging French moeurs. Michelle Perrot has argued that “on the eve of the twentieth century, the image of the New Woman was widespread in Europe, from Vienna to London, from Munich and Heidelberg to Brussels and Paris.”⁶ The origins of the neologism lay not in continental Europe, however, but in England and America, where new women emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, partly in the context of feminist activism but also in conjunction with bohemian artistic circles and the rise of women’s colleges.⁷

The vague perception in these years that women were “in the process of no longer being the same” was given sudden, sharp focus by the British journalist Sarah Grand, who christened them New Women in an 1894 article for North American Review.⁸ In fact, Grand’s neologism had as much to do with race as with gender, as she used it to push for female sexual purity and eugenics as guarantors of the Empire’s future.⁹ In any case, Grand’s coinage helped to make the New Woman a popular focus of magazines like Punch and Yellow Book; likewise, her American counterpart began to show up in such journals as Puck, Judge, Life, and Chic.¹⁰ Because of the New Woman’s constant reiteration in the press, it was not long before she became reified in the public imagination, assuming a stock appearance, a fixed set of behaviors, and a cultural weight all her own. Be-speckled, bookish, and austere in dress, the New Woman combined a Jane Eyre–like plainness with dandy-ish habits such as cigarette smoking. Garbed in bloomers, she was frequently depicted riding a bicycle, the new plaything of the leisured middle classes. A product of the late-nineteenth-century explosion in reading matter, she soon also made her appearance in Anglo-American novels, most notably Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did, both published amid great controversy in 1895.¹¹ Likewise, in America, there were the spunky heroines of Henry James’s novels, as well as the mutinous Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899).

These fictions featured inchoate, but passionately voiced, longings on the part of young women trying to attain moral and economic freedom. While the New Woman often held feminist views, her primary goal was not to gain legal or political rights. Nor did she justify such rights in terms of her moral influence as wife and mother, as did many feminists. Rather, she aimed somehow to matter, as the historian Christine Stansell has put it.¹² Linked to the twentieth-century cult of personality, which swung attention away from moral qualities such as sacrifice, and self-denial, and emphasized instead self-development and self-fulfillment, the New Woman wanted a life of her own beyond traditional domesticity.¹³ In short, the New Woman became a symbol of rebellion against the stale Victorian truisms of bourgeois liberal culture. As a social critic, she reproached the banal hypocrisies of Victorian wedded life, a theme drawing attention to yet another cultural source of the New Woman: the Scandinavian critique of marriage.

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and August Strindberg’s Married (1884–85) struck their blows at liberal culture by portraying implied domestic bliss as infested with cruelty and bad faith. Ibsen’s play, in particular, became famous for its heroine Nora, a young mother who deserts her condescending, tyrannical husband in order to find moral, personal freedom. Although Strindberg was known as a misogynist, and Ibsen a feminist, both men shared a critique of women’s place in bourgeois society that would strongly shape the image of the New Woman. The first commercial production of A Doll’s House, staged in London in 1889, ignited a firestorm of debate; it would continue to be fed over the next decade by growing public attention to “the woman question.”¹⁴ The play also helped to secure the London theater as a key site for exploring increasingly embattled Victorian gender norms. Only a few months after Sarah Grand invented the term, The New Woman by Sydney Grundy was staged at the Comedy Theatre in London and itself inspired a host of other plays, including Arthur Pinero’s The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895), Henry Arthur Jones’s The Case of the Rebellious Susan (1905), and Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1902).¹⁵

Ibsen’s influence on a distinctly French Nouvelle Femme would become all too clear by the end of the 1890s, but the initial performance of A Doll’s House, staged at the Vaudeville in April 1894, was met with a wide yawn.¹⁶ Almost totally absent was the heated discussion about sex roles sparked by the London premiere. Although this difference in reception can be partly explained by the timing and manner of the production, the French saw Nora as a Scandinavian, not a “latin” phenomenon—a foreign curiosity, not a threat.¹⁷ The prominent critic Francisque Sarcey, for example, praised the celebrated actress Réjane in her role of Nora, adding: “Here’s one who is not a Scandinavian. Ah, and we only love her more for that.”¹⁸ Several years later, the critic Valentine de Saint-Point would refer in passing to “the overly-virilized, nordic women of Ibsen.”¹⁹ The quiet Parisian reception of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House suggests that, at least in 1894, concern over the New Woman had not reached the epic proportions in France that it had attained in England.²⁰ The feminist demand for equal rights had been squarely in the French public eye for a decade already, as had such spunky young heroines as Gyp’s Paulette from Autour du mariage (1883) and Étiennette in Marcel Prévost’s Les Demi-Vierges (1894)—young girls who shared the opinion that “it’s horrible for a woman to be dependent on a man.”²¹ By the mid 1890s, the rebellion of the jeune fille against her mother had already become a cliché of the theater.²² But the specific image of the New Woman—and her symbolic challenge to conventionality—was just coming into view. In his review of Sydney Grundy’s New Woman in September 1895, the drama critic for Revue des deux mondes dealt with the neologism as a British “ghost”: much discussed, but never seen.²³

In 1896, however, the specter made more frequent appearances. In early January, the avant-garde La Plume ran a cover drawing on a stock of British stereotypes in its depiction of the New Woman. The cartoon by Henri Boutet showed a woman in bloomers riding recklessly on a bicycle over the body of Cupid (to be specific, his genitals), with the cryptic caption, “THIS WILL KILL THAT.”²⁴ In April, Paris played host to an international feminist congress, which attracted advocates of women’s rights from all over the world.²⁵ The event did not go unnoticed by the Parisian press, who sent reporters over to find out what the ladies were up to. On the nineteenth, the cover of Le Grelot followed La Plume in featuring a woman dressed in the “New” manner already familiar to the British public (fig.1) Cigarette in her mouth, sporting a straw boater, plain-Jane blouse, and squat bloomers, she barks to her husband, “I’m going to the feminist Congress,” and demands dinner for “precisely” eight o’clock.²⁶ Bordering the central caricature is a series of other pictures stereotyping the New Woman, including her penchant for nudity and free love.

In this way, the New Woman entered France on the tailcoats of the feminist, confusing those two figures in the popular imagination. A flood of literature soon followed. Also in 1896, novels with titles like L’Eve nouvelle and La Femme nouvelle began to show up in bookstore windows.²⁷ Readers opening up copies of Revue encyclopédique and La Revue found articles and special issues devoted to the topic....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The New Woman
• 2. Acting Up
• 3. Subversive Copy
• 4. The New Woman and the Jew
• 5. Caught in the Act
• 6. The Fantastic Sarah Bernhardt
• 7. Cabotines to the Core
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index