Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature

FAIN: HB-281426-22

Riya Das
Prairie View A & M University (Prairie View, TX 77445-6850)

Research and writing leading to a book reassessing female solidarity in the Victorian novel.

My monograph project challenges traditional accounts of female solidarity as a driver of narrative and social success for women. By contrast, my project shows that in prominent novels of the late nineteenth century, antagonism and indifference are surprisingly effective tools for women looking to break out of traditionally defined roles. On the one hand, this antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways—a patriarchal society that has come to expect solidarity between women finds it difficult to deal with female competition—and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, in the effort to achieve gender equality, the professional New Woman’s rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist mid-Victorian conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically into the labor pool of the British empire, even as they resist patriarchal institutions.

Media Coverage

19 Cents Q&A Interview, Riya Das (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Christa Dimarco
Publication: Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, 19 Cents
Date: 2/7/2022
Abstract: Interview of Riya Das about her research (including NEH-funded book project) and teaching by the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.
URL: https://ncsaweb.net/2022/02/07/riya-das/

Associated Products

Wives and Daughters Leaving Home: The Antagonistic New Woman in Late Victorian Fiction (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Wives and Daughters Leaving Home: The Antagonistic New Woman in Late Victorian Fiction
Author: Riya Das
Abstract: This paper examines the troubled-yet-effective power of antagonism in loosening gender structures in fin-de-siècle New Woman novels. Das suggests that the New Woman entered the professional world of the British Empire by rejecting the domestic ideal of the sympathetic, friendly woman. The New Woman desired intellectual freedom and financial security beyond the Victorian tradition of marriage and motherhood, and consequently ended up antagonizing both conventional gender norms and women from the laboring class. Hadria, the artistically inclined heroine in Mona Caird’s novel The Daughters of Danaus (1894), for instance, abandons her children to pursue music, and Rhoda Nunn, in George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) categorically refuses to help working-class women. Exploring these narratives along with social commentary on gender in the British Imperial context by John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin, Das demonstrates the antagonistic self-fashioning of the New Woman.
Date: 1/8/2023
Primary URL: http://https://mla.confex.com/mla/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/20300
Conference Name: Modern Language Association Annual Convention 2023

Antagonistic boundaries: the professional New Woman’s retro-progress in The Odd Women (Article)
Title: Antagonistic boundaries: the professional New Woman’s retro-progress in The Odd Women
Author: Riya Das
Abstract: This article explores the establishment of the elite female professional class in fin-de-siècle England and argues that female indifference and antagonism, rather than friendship, acted as useful tools for middle-class Englishwomen interested in maintaining their new professional status. The elite, middle-class New Woman, represented by characters such as Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot in George Gissing’s novel The Odd Women (1893), employs what I call retro-progress—a dialectical feminist vision that recycles mid-Victorian notions of female morality—to empower herself. Extolling the virtues of sexually chaste, educated women who are interested in vocational pursuits, she forms small communities of middle-class women whose training in secretarial professions offers them an alternative to marriage and domesticity. But the New Woman’s pursuit of financial independence and intellectual fulfillment outside the home is often reliant upon her indifference toward women she categorizes as too immoral or uneducated to participate in her brand of female progress. This article suggests, that despite the interpretive fecundity of the ideal of the New Woman, which has variously been read as imperial and eugenic or socialist and reformist, the vital role of class and morality-based indifference and antagonism in the elite New Woman’s self-fashioning has been largely overlooked. With its analysis of Gissing’s novel alongside other New Woman narratives and recent critical works on late-Victorian fiction, this article demonstrates that the professional New Woman creates new socio-economic realities for herself while leaving working-class and fallen women behind.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2241990
Secondary URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08905495.2023.2241990
Format: Journal
Publisher: Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Taylor & Francis)

Female Antagonism from Imperial Margins: The Colonial Odd Woman in The Story of an African Farm (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Female Antagonism from Imperial Margins: The Colonial Odd Woman in The Story of an African Farm
Author: Riya Das
Abstract: Olive Schreiner’s novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), has received considerable critical attention for its unconventional form and controversial content. Some scholars have pointed out the novel’s situation in various genres ranging from female Bildungsroman to New Woman fiction. Others have noted its depiction of colonized women of color, keeping in mind Schreiner’s own complex identity as an English/white South African. However, the portrayal of female antagonism in the novel, especially that in the margins of the British Empire, has been largely overlooked. The novel’s white woman protagonist, Lyndall, desires to transcend the socio-economic obstacles she faces in South Africa. Lyndall’s fin-de-siècle English New Woman contemporaries, such as London-based Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot in George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), blatantly exclude working class and immoral women from their feminist professional circle with strategic antagonism. However, such antagonism toward “other” women beyond the pale of class-based or moral norms proves fatal for Lyndall. Her marginalized status as a white woman in a British colony turns her individual pursuit of freedom into purposeless hedonism. My paper will examine how Lyndall, in her western feminist quest for individual freedom, fails to acknowledge the power she wields over other women in South Africa, including colonized women of color. Her antagonism toward “other” women truly isolates her as a colonized white woman instead of enabling her to build niche professional spaces with like-minded middle-class Englishwomen. Therefore, my paper will demonstrate the limits of strategic female antagonism in the colonial context, further solidifying the effectiveness of antagonism as a white feminist tool within the national boundaries of Britain.
Date: 10/15/2022
Primary URL: https://vi2022.wordpress.com/conference-program/
Conference Name: Victorians Institute Conference 2022

A New Woman’s Right to Choose: Borders of Progressive Femininity in The Story of a Modern Woman (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: A New Woman’s Right to Choose: Borders of Progressive Femininity in The Story of a Modern Woman
Author: Riya Das
Abstract: Considerable critical attention has been paid to the productive role of female solidarity in the Victorian marriage plot, especially since Sharon Marcus’s landmark Between Women (2007), Scholars have also focused on female friendship in narratives beyond the traditional mid-century novel, such as Ella Hepworth Dixon’s fin-de-siècle New Woman novel, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894). In Dixon’s novel, the female protagonist Mary Erle chooses her professional career as a journalist and declines the romantic advances of the unhappily married Vincent Hemming. Critics have widely interpreted Mary’s decision as a prime example of Victorian female solidarity. This interpretation, I contend, overlooks the significant role of strategic pragmatism employed by the professional Englishwoman at the turn of the century, with a remarkable interest in her own well being. My paper examines the moral, social, and cultural borders the English New Woman erected around her brand of progressive femininity in order to transcend domesticity and achieve professional success. Mary in Dixon’s novel, I argue, exercises her Eurocentric childhood education and keen awareness of fin-de-siècle English feminist ideals to select professional independence over an inadequate male partner. Vincent, a promising English bachelor in the beginning of the narrative, is a professional and domestic failure by the end, with neither a successful family nor political career. Thus, more important than the existence of his discontented family, is his utter socio-political inferiority to Mary, who, in the end, pragmatically chooses her own career as a morally superior single woman. Thus, I distinguish between the role of female friendship in domestic marriage plots and female pragmatic decision making in New Woman narratives. Consequently, my paper also sheds light on the notable social and political demarcations between the English New Woman’s niche feminist project and working-class and non-white women's issues.
Date: 5/20/2022
Primary URL: http://https://sites.baylor.edu/bwwc2022/schedule/program/
Conference Name: British Women Writers Conference 2022

Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature (Book)
Title: Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature
Author: Riya Das
Abstract: In Women at Odds, Riya Das demonstrates the limitations of female solidarity for the New Woman in Victorian society. On the one hand, feminist antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways, and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, the urban professional New Woman’s rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically—what Das terms “retro-progressively”—into the labor pool of the British empire. While foregrounding the figure of the New Woman as a white imperialist reformer, Das illustrates how the New Woman movement detaches itself from the domestic politics of female friendship. In works by George Eliot, George Gissing, Olive Schreiner, Bram Stoker, and others, antagonism and indifference enable the fin de siècle New Woman to transcend traditionally defined roles and fashion social progress for herself at the expense of femininities she excludes as “other.” By contesting the critical notion of solidarity as the only force that brings Victorian women’s narratives to fruition, Women at Odds reveals the troubled but effective role of antagonistic and indifferent reformist politics in loosening rigid social structures for privileged populations.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215722.html
Primary URL Description: Link to the book on the publisher's website.
Publisher: The Ohio State University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780814215722
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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