Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Women in The Yellow Book

by María Del Valle De La Noval Martín

The present project entitled “Women in The Yellow Book” has the objective of studying what impact the short stories written by women and published in the influential fin-de-siècle literary journal The Yellow Book may have had on Victorian society. For that, the context in which the authors wrote these stories will be discussed because it is important to understand the socio-political and cultural movements that arose in this epoch. Moreover, it is also essential to study the concept the “New Woman,” since it is present in these stories. This concept referred to a model of woman that emerged during that period and was characterized by the rejection of the conventional feminine model of the Victorian society. This concept was also used to define a group of women writers who claimed the same socio-political rights between men and women. Apart from analyzing the “New Woman” concept in their fiction and the influence in these women’s lives as a social movement, the theme of marriage will be a key element of analysis common to these authors’ fiction. Marriage as an institution started to be questioned as the only option for women where they had a subordinate role in relation to men. At the same time, feminist movements took place in a society where Victorian values and mores were the basis of marriage. This group of feminists began to champion an equal position between women and men in society. These social changes were reflected in fiction dealing with themes such as “The New Woman Question” or marriage from a negative perspective. Moreover, they created a new model of heroine, a rebel, who rejected the traditional values of marriage. The “American New Woman” is also compared with the British and the European one as a liberal and progressive woman bringing this new ideology to the British Isles and the old continent. The settings where these short stories take place have an important connection with the writers’ biography as well as the themes dealt in them. In addition, it is important to justify the importance and influence of the magazine where these women published. The fact that they published in The Yellow Book was relevant since “it was an avant garde magazine innovative in both form and content and remains central to the study of fin-de-siècle art, literature and society” (Denisoff and Kooistra, The Yellow Nineties Online). From the twentieth century to the present day, it has been almost impossible to write about this period’s major figures, art, print, technology design, innovations, or gender politics without reference to The Yellow Book. In the present project, it is defended the influence of Ella D’Arcy, Evelyn Sharp, George Egerton and Netta Syrett in literature considering the stories they published in The Yellow Book.