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DAUGHTERS OF DANAUS AND DAPHNE: WOMEN POETS AND THE MARRIAGE QUESTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2006

Linda K. Hughes
Linda K. Hughes
Affiliation:
Texas Christian University
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Extract

If New Woman writing embraced everything from political reform, sexual freedoms, and economic and social independence to literary publishing, Lucy Bland and other historians have confirmed that New Woman debates often played out in terms of marriage, whether in Mona Caird's path-breaking 1888 essay on “Marriage” or her by-now familiar novel of 1894, The Daughters of Danaus. This title, taken from the myth of women in Hades condemned to haul water in leaky jars after murdering their husbands on their wedding nights, suggests both the futility of life for middle-class Victorian women and the latent, murderous recoil they could harbor. To fall back upon these two Caird works to exemplify New Woman writing, however, is in some ways to perpetuate a generic oversimplification that New Woman writing was a prose medium.

Type
Modern Environments; Contemporary Politics
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , September 2006 , pp. 481 - 493
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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