Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Centur ...

Authors like Grant Allen, she observed, were really quite misogynist in their treatment of their female characters (and of course, she has a point). The “women who didn’t” (write new women, that is), however, were for Heilmann simply “schizophrenic” (209)—consumed by false consciousness as they wrote about submissive women who were nothing like themselves. She also claimed that feminist “propaganda literature” was aesthetically superior to what she called “antifeminist writing” of the same period:

Heilmann not only wanted to rehabilitate propaganda literature, she wanted to do it by new critical, belles-lettristic aesthetic standards—complexity, intertextuality. She also wanted to penalise any literature that is not New Woman (or not New Woman enough): New Women writers were pleasingly complex, whereas antifeminist women authors were ineffectively self-contradictory. As Talia Schaffer argued in 2005, in a talk that advocated and celebrated a wider view of fin de siècle women’s writing, “in a sense, the popularity of ‘New Women’ has created its own problem. It gives the impression that we have already dug up all the interesting women writers of the period, and, remarkably enough, they were all writing admirably feminist manifestos” (“Reading” 13). Part of this tendency in our work was, of course, the exigencies of the scholarship of the day. But part, I suspect, is because we were approaching authors with a litmus test that was not very sensitive to begin with. Victorian authors are complicated, self-contradictory, smart, resistant to ideology and complicit with it by turns or simultaneously.