Breaking the Ties that Bind: Literary Representations of the New Woman in American Society

The American novel, Leslie Fiedler writes, “is different from its European prototypes, and one of its essential differences arises from its chary treatment of woman and of sex” 31 . Indeed, American fiction written in the nineteenth century demonstrates a bias in favor of things male: in favor of hunting expeditions, whaling ships, and exploits in the wilderness. Ahab shaking his fist at the universe, or Huck, rejecting the corruption which the adult world calls civilization, and “lighting out for the territory” simply have no female counterparts. For American fiction, like American history, grows out of an active, pioneering principle, and if the early decades are replete with examples of female courage and indomitability, by the time of the nineteenth century, the ubiquitous forces of Puritanism, particularly in its pernicious Calvinist form, conspired against the establishment of the self-actualized, fully realized female heroes. Women figures were cast into fixed, self-limiting patterns which became, finally, a fictional typology. These women tend to be externally perceived, rigidly stereotyped, mythopoeic, or, even in the psychologically convincing characterization of Henry James, projections of a wished-for ideal. Even the most memorable among them manifest a disturbing insipidity and evince a neurasthenic rather than a vital response to the world.