Cecily Devereux

New Woman, New World: Maternal feminism and the new imperialism in the white settler colonies

Abstract The New Woman, the figure of feminist rebellion who emerged in 1880s and 1890s in English fiction and social commentary, became the focus of a good deal of anxious polemic. In the context of the massive wave of expansionism during these years of the Second British Empire, the New Woman—and feminism, as it appeared to undermine woman’s reproductive “duty”—came to be seen as a sign of imperial decline. It was in response to this view that suffragism undertook to transform the New Woman into the feminist image of the woman as “mother of the race.” In the white settler colonies, this image held a particular iconic value, since both the imperial mother and the “virgin” territories of the New World were configured as the last hope for the Empire. This article traces the analogy of New Woman and New World, and discusses how Anglo-colonial fictions of woman suffrage re-presented the question of white women’s role in the progress of nation and Empire.

“Chosen Representatives in the Field of Shagging”: Bridget Jones, Britishness, and Reproductive Futurism

This article considers Helen Fieldings two Bridget Jones novels as foundational texts in the genre of chick lit as it “produces, disseminates, and proliferates certain feminist and liberal subjectivities” (Butler and Desai 2008, 5). The focus is on tracing in these two novels a racialized, situated, national subject whose narrative leads not simply to romantic union but to reproduction. Engaging with Lee Edelmans important theory of reproductive futurism, this article undertakes to trace and to problematize chick lits narrative with reference to its primary concern with women and maternity in a national context.

Fashioning the Colonial Girl

if woman, as Simone de Beauvoir has famously suggested, is not born but made, the machinery of that construction is arguably rarely more evident than in the making of the white Anglo-colonial girl of the British Empire. Impetuous, adventurous, naturally inclined to mothering, nursing, teaching, and problem solving, plucky, chaste and rosily Anglo-Saxon, this colonial girl sprang from the pages of novels, stories, magazines, catalogues and Anglo-imperial emigrationist propaganda at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In the context of a surge of migration from Britain from the 1880s on, the colonial girl simultaneously indexes thousands of young women circulating in colonial space and represents a cluster of ideas of femininity, race, class and nation that go into her formation on and in paper. On the one hand a crucial part of what Thomas Richards has described as the imperial archive, a ‘paper empire ... built on a series of flimsy pretexts that were always becoming texts’, her representation on paper is also an archive of process — not only of always ‘becoming texts’ but of becoming ‘girl’.1 In fiction and across cultural representations, the Anglo-colonial girl was fashioned as a figure for young women to embody, her image and the ideology she staged in the things she did and the things she wore circulating in and through the paper that carried her around the empire. ‘Made in Britain’, the colonial girl is an agent of empire, an advertisement for and consumer of its products and technologies, and an imperial commodity in circulation in and through the mobilising of her representation in print.

An Adventure in Stageland: Sara Jeannette Duncan, Imperial Burlesque, and the Performance of White Femininity in A Daughter of To-Day

Sara Jeannette Duncan’s 1894 novel, A Daughter of To-Day, is not the only “New Woman” novel of the 90 s in which gender is represented as an impediment to a woman’s success in a “man’s world” and not the only one to set its independent and ambitious heroine on a tragic path to suicide. It is not the only novel of the fin de siècle whose tragic heroine is also a dancer in a burlesque show: Zola’s Nana is an example. But it may well be the only one in which a “New Woman” heroine achieves self-recognition and an affirmation of the terms of ordinary femininity in her performance with a troupe of dancers in a seaside music hall “leg show.” American Elfrida Bell, ambitiously “artistic,” having failed to realize her early promise as a painter in a studio in Paris or as a journalist in London, finds what she describes as “the best” of herself (254) and (while rather late and at enormous cost) what we are told is “a very considerable success” (280) not only in a personal account she writes of women in burlesque culture but in the performance itself. An Adventure in Stageland, published just after Elfrida’s death by her own hand, recounts her experience performing with the “Peach Blossom Company,” a fortymember troupe engaged in a show that is recognizable in the text as a form of latenineteenth-century burlesque. The women appear in the text, “rhythmically advancing and retreating before the footlights, picturesquely habited in a military costume, comprising powdered wigs, three-cornered hats, gold-embroidered blue coats, fleshcoloured tights, and kid top-boots” (205). Not a strip show, the Peach Blossom performance is nonetheless clearly a form of what we now call erotic dance: it is all about the display of “flesh-coloured” bodies. The dancers “s[i]ng as they cross[] their varyingly shapely legs, stamp[] their feet, and form[] into figures no drill-book Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2014 Vol. 36, No. 1, 35–51, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2013.867602