The “New Woman” Fiction and Fin‐de‐Sièck Feminism

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with a popular fin‐de‐sièck genre which reflected and fictionalized contemporary debates on the New Woman. In reclaiming the much‐berated notion of propaganda literature, I argue that in its most typical form New Woman fiction was a female‐authored and feminist genre. It was produced by and for women, and proved immensely successful as a means of promoting and popularizing the main concerns of the nineteeth‐century women's movement. In defining the characteristics of the genre, I discuss the marked differences between feminist and anti‐feminist writing of the fin de siecle. While ant‐ifeminist works tended to be aesthetically one‐dimensional, feminists wrote at the intersection of a number of textual traditions, such as the social document, the political pamphlet, auto/biography, and fiction. Male writers who concerned themselves with the New Woman colonized the genre in order to attack feminism and to explore misogynist sexual fantasies; femal anti‐feminist novels were riddled with contradictions which reveal the ideological inconsistencies in their writers’ lives. Neither group produced definitive New Woman fiction which was a committed feminist genre.