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European Cultural Studies

The Rise of the New Woman

Description:

The three novels studied are all firmly founded on the social settings and recent past of the authors’ countries. They show the self as involved in the social world and inseparable from it. They also show, however, that sometimes social conventions and beliefs thwart individual aspirations. This is particularly true in the case of women, to whom social convention, religion and the law have for centuries denied the possibility of entertaining and fulfilling any aspiration apart from those of becoming wives and mothers. The three novels studied explore several types of marriage; they highlight the way their lack of education fosters in women an idealized or an exploitative view of marriage; they also show that men themselves can be victims of their own and their wives’ unrealistic expectations of marriage; they illustrate how marriage can, for both men and women, lead to the construction or the destruction of the self. The seminar will also deal with the rise of feminism in Europe and America, the new prospects education and training open to women towards the end of the 19th century and the new way of being that becomes possible for women.

Required reading:

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling and Paul de Man, Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 2005

George Eliot, Middlemarch, Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 2nd edition, 2000

Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree, Virago Press, 1984

Sessions:

1 Introduction
2 Emma Bovary as a ‘Female Quixote’
3 Emma Bovary’s ‘androgynism’
4 Rosamond Vincy: the ‘child woman’
5 Dorothea Brooke and the construction of the self
6 READING WEEK
7 Bessy Westmore and the ‘custom of the country’
8 Woman as ‘conspicuous consumer’
9 A new type of woman: Justine Brent
10 Ibsen and the rise of the New Woman
11 The hard job of being a husband: Bovary, Lydgate, Amherst