Women at Odds

Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature

Riya Das

• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780814215722
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814283684
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Women at Odds, Riya Das demonstrates the limitations of female solidarity for the New Woman in Victorian society. On the one hand, feminist antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways, and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, the urban professional New Woman's rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically—what Das terms "retro-progressively"—into the labor pool of the British empire.

While foregrounding the figure of the New Woman as a white imperialist reformer, Das illustrates how the New Woman movement detaches itself from the domestic politics of female friendship. In works by George Eliot, George Gissing, Olive Schreiner, Bram Stoker, and others, antagonism and indifference enable the fin de siècle New Woman to transcend traditionally defined roles and fashion social progress for herself at the expense of femininities she excludes as "other." By contesting the critical notion of solidarity as the only force that brings Victorian women's narratives to fruition, Women at Odds reveals the troubled but effective role of antagonistic and indifferent reformist politics in loosening rigid social structures for privileged populations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Wives and Daughters Leaving Home: Indifferent and Antagonistic New Women
• Chapter 1 An Unsympathetic Network: Female Defiance as Narrative Force in Daniel Deronda
• Chapter 2 Antagonistic Boundaries: The Woman Professional’s Retro-Progress in The Odd Women
• Chapter 3 Settler Colonial Feminism: Unsustainable Indifference and Antagonism in The Story of an African Farm
• Chapter 4 In Solidarity with Empire: The Professional Wife and Mother in Dracula
• Conclusion Antagonism and Indifference: Twenty-First-Century Affordances
• Works Cited
• Index