SELCS

The Rise of the New Woman

Course code: ELCS6044
Tutor: Dr N Mercuri
Level: Intermediate
Assessment: 2 assessed essays of 2000 words each
Term: Taught in term 2

Course Description:
The works studied in this seminar 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. These works 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 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 England and America, the new prospects education and training open to women towards the end of the 19th century and the new ways of being, epitomized by the ‘New Woman’ avatar, that becomes possible for women.

Primary sources:

Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did, (any edition)

George Eliot, Middlemarch (any edition)

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Rosmersholm, Ghosts (any English edition)

GB Shaw, Mrs Warren's Profession (any edition)

Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree (any edition)

HG Wells, Ann Veronica (any edition)

Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (any edition)

Topic
1. Feminism in the Age of Reform: Mary Wollstonecraft to John Stuart Mill
2. Middlemarch
3. Middlemarch
4. The Fruit of the Tree
5. The Fruit of the Tree
READING WEEK
6.Themes in A Doll’s House, Rosmersholm and Ghosts
7. Ibsen and the London scene
8. Survey of New Woman literature
9. The Woman Who Did
10. Ann Veronica