Content area
Full Text
The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siede, by Sally Ledger; pp. vii + 216. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997, L35.00, L12.99 paper, $59.95, $19.95 paper.
Posthumously, the New Woman owes quite a debt to Sally Ledger. First, with Scott McCracken, she co-edited an anthology that enlivens the study of New Woman texts, Cultural Politics at theRn de Si@de (1995). Now her own The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siecle offers the first full-scale investigation of the topic since Ann Ardis's New Women/New Novels (1990). This study locates the novels, short stories, essays, journalism, and political pamphlets preoccupied with the New Woman at a bustling turn-of-the-century crossroads of socialism, imperialism, decadence, lesbianism, urbanity, and mass culture.
In The History of Sexuality (1976) Foucault argues that as emerging discourses define and thereby limit human belief and behavior, these dominant discourses inadvertently call reverse discourses into being. Unfortunately, reverse discourse binds adversaries to the very constructs they resist. Ledger takes this model of cultural formation as the theoretical backbone of her book in part because its constraints help explain why the liberatory ambitions of New Women writers so often faltered. Most of the women writers and political activists associated with this figure found themselves arguing for the reform of marriage, of men, and of motherhood rather than for more radical objectives such as the dismantling of heterosexuality, support for a socialist agenda, or an end to imperialism. In particular, reformulations of maternity-as fatal destiny, as revelation, as missionconfounded their political aspirations. As Ledger explains, "the challenge they posed was self-limiting and this is a classic feature, I would suggest, of reverse...