Beyond the Gibson Girl
Subtitle: reimagining the American new woman, 1895-1915
By: Martha H. Patterson.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 230
ISBN-13: 9780252030178
Subjects: American fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism; Feminist fiction, American -- History and criticism; American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism; American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Feminism and literature -- United States; Women and literature -- United States; African American women in literature; Women in literature
Description: "Challenging monolithic images of the New Woman as white, well educated, and politically progressive, this study focuses on important regional, ethnic, and sociopolitical differences in the use of the New Woman trope at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girls" as a point of departure, Martha H. Patterson explores how writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Margaret Murray Washington, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather challenged and redeployed the New Woman image in light of other "new" conceptions: the "New Negro Woman," the "New Ethics" the "New South," and the "New China."" "As she appears in these writers' works, the New Woman both promises and threatens to effect sociopolitical change as a consumer, an instigator of evolutionary and economic development; and, for writers of color, an icon of successful assimilation into dominant Anglo-American culture. Examining a diverse array of cultural products, Patterson shows how the seemingly celebratory image of the New Woman becomes a trope not only of progressive reform, consumer power, transgressive femininity, and modern energy, but also of racial and ethnic taxonomies, social Darwinist struggle, imperialist ambition, assimilationist pressures, and modern decay."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-220) and index.
Table of contents: title: Selling the American new woman as Gibson Girl; title: Margaret Murray Washington, Pauline Hopkins, and the new Negro woman; title: Incorporating the new woman in Edith Wharton's The custom of the country; title: Sui Sin Far and the wisdom of the new; title: Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, and the evolutionary logic of progressive reform; title: Willa Cather and the fluid mechanics of the new woman.