Victorian New Woman: Shaw's Views

Victiorian New Woman

In their analysis of the 'sexualized visions of change and exchange' which mark the end of the nineteenth century (Smith, Marshall University) 1 and the uncertain formation of the twentieth, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar read the leitmotif of the late-Victorian New Woman as one fantasy among many, part of a sequence of imaginative literary extremes that reflects the changing stakes in an escalating war between the sexes. As Gilbert and Gubar understand this sequence, the New Woman emerges against palette of other phantasmagoric images-most notably, the femme fatale, who, in Swinburne's words, incarnates male anxieties about that 'silent anger against God and man' which 'burns, white and repressed, through her clear features.' Like the femme fatale, the New Woman is also commonly read as an image of hyperbolic female ascendancy. In fact, both images seem to answer the narrative of the...
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