Published in the UF Journal of Undergraduate Research in November 2020.

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Abstract:

This article traces concepts of the “unfeminine” in Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White (1860) and Victoria Cross’s New Woman fiction, Six Chapters of a Man’s Life (1903). Both texts feature female characters who defy Victorian standards of femininity: Marian Halcombe of The Woman in White and Theodora Dudley of Six Chapters of a Man’s Life. Despite their unfeminine physical and mental characteristics, both women are regarded as striking models of their sex by their male narrators. I examine these characters’ unfeminine appearances and heightened intelligence in terms of arguments made by Victorian physiognomists and sexologists to suggest that the biological and intellectual parallels between Marian and Theodora establish a pointed resistance to Victorian ideals of “womanhood.” I argue that in Sensation and New Woman fiction, we see the emergence of the “unfeminine” woman as the embodiment of a radical desire for defiance during a transformative age.