“Disposed to Daring Innovation”: New Modernism, New Woman Fiction, and New Motherhood

This chapter examines representations of mothering in New Woman fiction through a new modernist lens. Reflective of how the New Woman was an iconic rebellious figure of late Victorianism, New Woman writers upended convention, presenting protagonists like the career-driven, single, or unhappily married mother who challenge and critique ideologies of patriarchal motherhood. Drawing on scholars like Ann Ardis and others who profess that New Woman stories are central, not marginal as traditionally held, to the genesis of modernist prose, this chapter argues that Ezra Pound’s edict in the 1920s to “make it new” was already heralded in nineteenth-century New Woman texts where motherhood itself was becoming “new”. This chapter elucidates these claims through two novels: The Daughters of Danaus (1894) by Scottish writer Mona Caird and The Home-Maker (1924) by American Dorothy Canfield, focusing on the exilic mother who flees imprisoning wifehood, domesticity, and maternity. In so doing, it theorizes motherhood as a newly vital thematic within new modernist studies and brings texts from the fin de siècle and early-to-mid-twentieth-century into dialogue with one another.