<i>Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature</i> by Riya Das

For the past forty odd years, scholarship on female friendship has flourished in literary studies, represented perhaps most notably by Sharon Marcus’s Between Women. Riya Das, while appreciating this line of work, intervenes by encouraging us to look at the antithesis of female friendship, what she calls female antagonism and indifference. In Women at Odds, she makes the bold and original claim that these negative forms of feminine interaction “disrupt traditional gender structures, and they do so to a greater extent than solidarity does” (3). This is in large part because, as Marcus and others have demonstrated, female friendship often acts as a conduit to marriage, motherhood, and domesticity, roles and forms of narrative closure that can be limited and hegemonic for novels. Female friendship thus maintains normalcy, and in so doing “is not particular useful to the Victorian woman looking to participate in the political realm of citizenship beyond the household” (22). On the other hand, female antagonism and indifference can threaten patriarchal structures by opening up new professional avenues and literary futures for women, though at the cost of competing with, pushing down, or purposefully excluding other women. Das defines indifference as “a politically conscious decision to not intervene in the plight of other women,” calling it “a form of active political disengagement rather than passive disinterest. Indifferent women actively disregard other women’s needs to protect their own” (3). Antagonism takes this a step further, actively and self-servingly working to destroy another woman’s prospects.To explore these literary phenomena, Das turns to New Woman novels, or more accurately, to the figure of the New Woman as she appears in late Victorian fiction. Centering the messy, overdetermined, nebulous character of the New Woman allows Das to grapple with the complexities and hypocrisies of the late Victorian feminist movement, which variously advocated for and condemned marriage/divorce reform, suffrage, women’s employment, sex work regulation, eugenics, and imperial expansion. By examining New Women in late Victorian novels and their indifferent and antagonist actions toward other women, Das powerfully highlights the ways in which the New Woman’s reformist politics “define[d] itself in opposition to clearly demarcated ‘other’ femininities,” including women who were poor, uneducated, sex workers, “fallen,” foreign, and/or nonwhite (13). The New Woman defines herself against these groups, repudiating them in favor of personal advancement, thereby willingly participating in wider projects of elitism, sexism, racism, and, mostly importantly for Das, imperialism.In the first chapter, Das uses Bruno Latour and Caroline Levine’s work on network theory to establish what she calls an “unsympathetic network” of female characters in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Specifically focusing on the antagonistic, zero-sum relationship of Gwendolen Harleth and Lydia Glasher, she argues that while defiant female individualism defines much of the novel, an unexpected and forceful network forms wherein female characters can resist patriarchal structures, drive plot, and create open-ended narrative possibilities. The second chapter, on George Gissing’s The Odd Women, theorizes the concept of “retro-progress,” a dialectical feminist combination that recycles older ideas of female morality (specifically around class, education, and sexual purity) in the service of professional empowerment. So although Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot are able to achieve professional success, their feminism is openly exclusionary: Rhoda says that fallen women are beyond sympathy and refuses to help those beyond her sphere, choosing to focus only on educated middle-class women.The first two chapters set up key ideas, but it is in the stronger second half of the book where the payoff is greatest, as Das turns to imperialism. Olive Scheiner’s The Story of An African Farm is the basis for the third chapter, in which Das contends that Lyndall’s feminism fails because of her colonial situation—she is indifferent to colonized people around her and never recognizes her own roles as colonizer, yet it is because she is so far removed from the mainstream, white, metropole women’s movement that her feminist project is doomed. Lyndall’s feminist ideals and open sexuality isolate her in the colonial setting, but she makes no attempts to forge solidarity with either her fellow colonial women or the colonized South Africans; instead, she must painfully realize that because New Woman feminism has no interest in anyone in the colonies, she too has been excluded. The final chapter reads Mina Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a New Woman who antagonistically aids in the execution of her erstwhile friend Lucy Westerna (once she has become sexually “fallen” and a vampire) and uses her masculine professional skills in service of the imperial project and the masculine hunt of Dracula. Mina’s allegiance is to heterosexual marriage, traditional sexual purity, and the moral health of the British Empire, all of which supersede her friendship with Lucy, who represents the many women that New Woman feminists willingly left behind to enter the professional sphere.In the conclusion, Das looks to the contemporary affordances of antagonism and indifference, but does not create a compelling case, since her argument for their positive power and relevance is undercut by her accurate example of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, an antagonist movement that points to the ongoing dangers of these types of exclusionary rhetorics. While Women at Odds demonstrates the historical importance of antagonism and indifference, it seems unnecessary to claim that these are still useful tools, since after all, much of the work showcases just how problematic they were even in the nineteenth century. Relatedly, Das seems to have missed a few other key groups excluded by New Women feminists, namely disabled women (eugenics is mentioned, but disabled women are not discussed at length), queer women, and gender-nonconforming individuals who did not fit the typewriter girl mold. For example, Gregory Rose in The Story of African Farm is treated by Das almost exclusively as “cloying” (114, 122), and instead of thinking through Gregory’s potential transfemininity, Das claims Gregory “perpetuates feminine subservience” and with Lyndall offers “dismal versions of nineteenth-century domestic femininity” (123). Likewise, though Das explores male homosociality and homoeroticism in Dracula, she does not give equivalent space to female queerness, which is notable since several of the novels she discusses have quite a bit of sapphic tension, as does the New Woman figure and movement more broadly. In a more structural sense, there is something to be said about the selection of texts; Das notes that scholars have “overlooked the many exceptions” to female friendship narratives, but here offers only four such counterexamples. Additionally, although the book is about New Women fiction, Daniel Deronda is a precursor to the movement, and Das never fully attempts to argue it as a New Woman novel, bringing the total of New Woman novels analyzed down to only three. Because so much of New Woman fiction has been about recovery work, it is slightly disappointing that Das does not include some less canonical texts—like those by Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Mona Caird, George Paston, or Ella Hepworth Dixon—especially since when Das fleetingly mentions some of the writers, the examples help expand the scope beyond already familiar texts.Women at Odds creatively upends traditional wisdom about fin de siècle womanhood, proving that “antagonism and indifference, not friendship, was the strongest aid to the movement of educated British women from the domestic to the professional sphere” (27). This process was achieved only by rejecting nonnormative women (be they lower-class, uneducated, sexualized, foreign, or nonwhite), leading Das to the compelling conclusion that antagonistic and indifferent feminism “dialectically upend[ed] the status quo while serving normative power structures” (166). Women at Odds invites us, therefore, to rethink the progress that New Woman feminism achieved, how they went about getting their professional goals, and who got left behind in the process.