Time is of the essence : temporality, gender, and the new woman
"In Time Is of the Essence, Patricia Murphy argues that the Victorian debate on the Woman Question was informed by a crucial but as yet unexplored element at the fin de siecle: the cultural construction of time. Victorians were obsessed with time in this century of incessant change, responding to such diverse developments as Darwinism, a newfound faith in progress, an unprecedented fascination with history and origins, and the nascent discipline of evolutionary psychology. The works examined here - novels by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard, Sarah Grand, and Mona Caird - manipulate prevalent discourses on time to convey anxieties over gender, which intensified in the century's final decades with the appearance of the rebellious New Woman
Print Book, English, ©2001
State University of New York Press, Albany, ©2001
Criticism, interpretation, etc
ix, 291 pages ; 23 cm.
9780791451106, 9780791451090, 0791451100, 0791451097
45636904
Introduction: Victorian temporality and the new woman
Buttressing the binary: temporal dichotomies in She
Trapping the female in time: history and aesthetics in Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Reinterpreting evolutionary development: feminine psychology in The Beth book and The Heavenly twins
Controlling women's time: regulatory days and historical determinism in The daughters of Danaus
Dissolving the boundaries: temporal subversion in The story of an African farm
Afterword: Pointing the way to modernist time