Liminal London: Gender and threshold spaces in narratives of urban modernity

This dissertation examines intersections of gender, space, and modernity in literary representations of women in London between the 1880s and 1930s. I argue that during this period of social transition, middle-class women's emergence in London became emblematic of the promises and threats of the modern age. Focusing on writing of George Gissing, Henry James, Amy Levy, Dorothy Richardson, H.G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf, I show that these authors and their contemporaries try to make sense of the modern city through examination of locations that provided new urban experiences for women and epitomized changing gender roles and ideologies. I treat a range of sites that were forums for contests of power, identity, and ways of understanding the city: shops and department stores; women's clubs; and streets and vehicles of transportation. Located on the threshold between public and private spheres, these are sites beyond the home where middle-class women's new presence challenged lingering Victorian associations of sexual availability with unchaperoned women in public space. On the shifting border between respectable and disreputable, these locations are transitional and experimental venues that often involved new relationships between classes and sexes. Arenas in which commodities change hands, spectacles are produced and consumed, and ideas and bodies circulate, these liminal locals express the ambiguous and evolving characters of both women and modernity. The New Public Woman, a term I employ to signal this figure's relationship with the transgressive New Woman, but with an emphasis on her overdetermined public presence, is a key figure in narratives of modern London. From the early 1880s to the late 1930s, women experienced an uneven but indisputable opening up of opportunities in the city, but, even as confident spectators of the urban scene, they continued to negotiate their inevitable status as spectacles. Drawing upon historical research and theories of spatial practice from the fields of narrative studies, feminist criticism, geography, and cultural studies, I show how liminal locations provided new possibilities for social relations and narrative forms.