The New Woman and The Yellow Book: Commercializing The Female Body

Women in the 1890s

Women were the inspiration and guardians for civilization in 1890s Victorian England. With the female body as the symbol for a successful domestic sphere and procreation, women were idealized in the home as “Angels of the House”. This image of the Angel of the House antagonized women’s existence within the public sphere of Victorian society.

Since bourgeois femininity was defined in relation to private spaces, women who sought enjoyment outside of the home were problematic to proper bourgeois customs. Public women were dislocated and seen as without the prescribed domestic duty that characterized socially-acceptable femininity in the 1890s. The image of women in the 1890s, and particularly women in public en masse, was shaped by male anxiety.

The New Woman and the Male Gaze

Male readers and critics considered the New Woman as an imposing figure infringing on the solidarity of Victorian societal structure. The New Woman’s attempt to overcome established sexual constructs for femininity and women’s rights created the fear of a sexless society for male critics. The mainstream press assisted to create the negative reception of the New Woman by bringing her to national attention as a negative icon within popular culture. Mainstream press considered her as the dystopian emblem of the Victorian female. She was formed as a symbol of a sexless, rebellious world and deployed in images that represented her as a mannish brute intent on abolishing femininity.

The New Woman jeopardized the survival of the race through what critics feared was a rejection of procreative sex because of her perceived desire to integrate into the patriarchal public sphere of Victorian society. Victorian male critics worried that the New Woman’s egoism would result in voluntary sterility since they assumed that the New Woman could only achieve sexual equality by controlling her fertility through modes like abortion and infanticide. The New Woman became a sign of the negative progression of the female sex that would abolish her essential role as a wife and mother and ultimately lead humanity into racial extinction. Instead of children and other symbols of the domestic sphere, the New Woman was depicted as surrounding herself with literature that challenged her subordinate role within the Victorian patriarchy. The mainstream press created portraits of masculine women who rejected their natural maternal role and sought existence outside of the domestic sphere.

The New Woman and the Female Gaze

Women writers and critics first invented the New Woman as a fictional icon in order to represent the political woman of the coming century. The New Woman figure who was popularized in novels and mainstream periodicals by women in the 1890s was intended as a respectable symbol of a new female political identity that vied to improve and reform English society: she represented feminists’ utopian vision of the model social reformer. Women writers and critics centered the New Woman’s interest in the body politic and social justice as an extension of her domestic duties as opposed to a challenge of her role within the domestic sphere. For the women who published journals that included the New Woman, she was by extension a domestic manager who was able to take her domestic skills into the public life for the betterment of English society. This representation of the New Woman allowed feminists to claim a special role for their sex within the public sphere that was not in opposition to women’s traditional maternal role.

A vital part of traditional womanhood was represented in depictions of women’s dedication to domestic duties and motherhood. Women writing in the women’s press in the 1890s advocated fulfilling employment only for unmarried women while ultimately encouraging women to seek joy through marriage and motherhood. The New Woman’s proclaimed commitment to the home and British nation was a defense against the charges of the mainstream press. The incorporation of images of respectability was central to the women’s press where image became essential to gathering support from an often-condescending patriarchal public.

Aubrey Beardsley’s “Night Piece”: The Public Woman

Beardsley’s “Night Piece” is resemblant of the male anxiety surrounding the New Woman in the 1890s. Women walking the street at night, even the New Woman, were considered prostitutes. Thus, Beardsley’s piece has a vulnerability attached to the female subject because she risks losing the value of her purity through this connection to a prostitute. The woman alone at night equates her to a prostitute in Victorian society, but her asserting an independence by choosing to walk the street at night also shows her as exercising an autonomy in the public sphere. Nonetheless, the woman’s assertion of her autonomy in a patriarchal sphere comes with the cost of her substituting her purity for independence.

The male gaze subverts the woman by using anxiety to shape her independence in the public sphere as a threat to Victorian patriarchal structure. The woman in the image becomes a controversial figure that demonstrates the New Woman’s ability to exercise an autonomy outside of domesticity while also endorsing female stereotypes.

The New Woman’s body in “Night Piece” stimulates this controversy in order to market The Yellow Book and the image itself to the dichotic views of the public. The autonomy of the woman in Beardsley’s piece is able to create value for those who support the New Woman figure and those who oppose based on the value and interpretation attributed to the image as a result of the observer’s preference.

The front cover and title page for volume one and volume three, respectively, for The Yellow Book offer a dichotic representation of the New Woman that is able to create debate and controversy. Placing these dichotic figures on the initial page of The Yellow Book is a successful marketing tactic by the contributors to accumulate popularity through controversy. The magazine is able to play into the Victorian stereotypes of the New Woman on the initial pages to invigorate consumers into purchasing the volumes. Consequently, the female body, especially the New Woman’s body, attains a commercial value and is perverted via feminine and New Woman stereotypes. By placing these dichotic, debatable figures on the volume’s covers, contributors are marketing the New Woman figure and her body in order to monopolize on her controversial reception in the public sphere.

The dichotomy portrayed in these images allows the New Woman to be simultaneously feminine and masculine, hence “New”. The figures’ allusion to both masculine and feminine characteristics are the qualities that promote and antagonize the New Woman. The woman in volume one is afforded feminine characteristics and dress, but she is masked as another masked figure looms behind her. Her concealed identity and the ambiguity of the figure behind her creates controversy around the female figure. With a candle alight, she illuminates a dark room with a formidable figure. The image is shrouded in a darkness suggestive of night, further insinuating that the woman is alone at night with a stranger. This suggestion, although not spoken, creates the controversy that The Yellow Book placed a prostitute on the front cover of their first volume.

As for the title page of volume three, a starker dichotomy is depicted. Two women are shown in both feminine and masculine dress. The woman on the left conforms to the feminine ideal for dress while the woman on the right is dressed in masculine attire and conceals her identity with a mask. Both the woman on the front cover of volume one and the title page of volume three emblematize an ambiguity of identity by wearing a mask. While the woman on the left of the title page of volume three is able to reveal her identity because of her conformance to the feminine, the woman in volume one and the masculinized woman in volume three must conceal their identity. The concealment of the identity of two women operating against the societal constructs of femininity invigorates the stereotype of the New Woman as a figure who is in opposition to Victorian society. By highlighting this controversy, The Yellow Book is able to add commercial value to the periodical by using the New Woman’s body as a controversial object for marketability.

Afterword

With controversy as its selling point, The Yellow Book was able to successfully market the female body via dichotic depictions of the New Woman. The New Woman was a marketing tool for the magazine that accumulated controversy through forward-thinking, critical, and scrutinizing images of her that expressed both the antagonism from the male gaze and the idealized servitude of the female gaze. The Yellow Book was able to maintain their selling point of controversy by manipulating the New Woman’s body via images that idealized and antagonized her as a figure. Contributors of the magazine strategically prostituted the New Woman figure by making her image debatable, thus conforming to the preference of the observer and enabling the magazine to appeal to a spectrum of consumers.