New Woman in Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway

Essay from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1.0 (A), University of Kent (School of English), course: American Modernism, language: English, abstract: The New Woman came into existence in the second half of the nineteenthcentury, but remained nameless until 1894, when Ouida and Sarah Grand used the termfor the first time in two North American Review articles. Today, the New Woman isgenerally seen as the manifestation of changing gender norms at the fin de siecle. Criticssuch as Sally Ledger and Caroll Smith-Rosenberg differentiate between first andsecond- generation New Women: the first living and writing in the 1880s and 1890s, thesecond in the 1920s and 1930s (Ledger 1). As this quotation shows, the label is mostlyapplied to female authors. However, it can also be used to describe fictional characterssuch as Lena Lingard in Willa Cather s novel My Antonia, Jordan Baker in Fitzgerald sThe Great Gatsby, and Lady Brett Ashley in Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises) by ErnestHemingway. This essay will, first of all, explain what was new about women in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth century and thus attempt to define the term NewWoman. It will determine a number of characteristics that are considered typical of theNew Woman in fiction, and use these as criteria to examine whether the charactersmentioned above can be called New Women. Finally, the essay will compare themanner in which Cather, Fitzgerald and Hemingway present the characters. To begin with, the New Woman can generally be seen as a challenge toconventional gender roles. There are three main areas in which the New Woman differsfrom her predecessors: lifestyle, work and sexuality. That is, her attitude towards thesetopics bears little or no resemblance to the attitude of the early nineteenth-centurywoman.