The Rise of Female Consciousness in George Egerton's Selected Short Stories Within the Concept of the New Woman

Abstract

With the Industrial Revolution, remarkable social, literary, and economic changes and evolutions emerged in Britain. The condition of women was one of the most important one. Regardless of their class and social positions, most British women, willingly or unwillingly, had to accept their subservient roles which had been imposed on them by the patriarchal rules of the society in which they had been living. It was a constructed and accepted thought at that time that provided women who asked for equal rights and positions with men in society, it would result with either their masculinization, that was not supported, or marginalization. Furthermore, similarly, when women entered into men’s domain to supply for labour force, they could not achieve equal payment and rights with men. When they began to work and earn their own money and achieved their economic freedom, they demanded equality which was the result of women’s realization of their own capacities. As a consequence of this realization, ‘the New Woman’ concept emerged in the nineteenth century. This ‘New Woman’ was more able, more extrovert, and thereby freer than her antecedents. As a reflection of this concept, a new literary movement emerged under the same umbrella term ‘the New Woman’. Writers of this movement created their characters from middle class or working class women. In their works, they presented female heroines and the fight of those heroines against traditional gender roles. George Egerton (1859-1945) is also one of the representatives of ‘the New Woman’. Having lived in different parts of Britain and its colonies and also in other European countries, she reflects different conditions of Victorian women in her works. The argument here is that the female protagonists of Egerton challenged the Victorian view of gender roles and female sexuality, and while they are challenging, they also lead the reader to question the artificiality of these gender roles. Accordingly, the major aim of this thesis is to introduce the concept of the New Woman in relation to the social and political background of Victorian Britain, and to analyse the representation of “New Woman” in George Egerton’s selected short stories: “The Marriage of Mary Ascension: A Millstreet Love Story,” “An Empty Frame,” “Now Spring Has Come,” “A Cross Line,” “At the Heart of the Apple” and “The Regeneration of Two.”