James Prior's Forest Folk: A Novel Construction of the New Woman and the New Man: Introduction

Introduction  

The novelist James Prior was born James Prior Kirk in Mapperley Road, Nottingham in 1851 to Sarah and James Kirk, his father having a millinery concern in the city of Nottingham. He went to a preparatory school run by the Goodalls before going to a school run by a man named Porter for ten years, and then began working for a solicitor: his father intended him to join the legal profession, but instead Prior spent a great deal of time studying languages and literature. He left the legal profession following a major argument with his father, but his intention to pursue a career in writing initially proved fruitless. He taught for a short time, attempted a degree, but problems with his eyes, including intervals of temporary blindness, put paid to any future career prospects.¹

Prior was under thirty when his father died in 1880, and after continuing the family business for a year left for Uppingham, Rutland, to help an uncle in difficulties with his farm, but in the process Prior lost a considerable amount of money, presumably inherited from his father. By the time of his permanent move to the small Nottinghamshire market town of Bingham with his wife Lily and two daughters in the early 1890s, he had already written a book of short stories – Three Shots from a Popgun (1880) – and three plays – Don Pedro the Cruel (1882) and John Smith of London and Live and Let Live (both published in one volume in 1883).² All failed to bring Prior any commercial success or critical acclaim. It was not until after his first two novels, Renie (1895) and Ripple and Flood (1897), that he began to gain recognition.³ He published four more novels: Forest Folk (1901), Hyssop (1904), A Walking Gentleman (1907) and Fortuna Chance (1910).³

All of the published novels are set in the East Midlands, predominantly in Nottinghamshire, and reveal a considerable interest in and knowledge of local history and local working-class characters. Forest Folk, his most well-known book, was a modest success and is a good example of Prior's use of the Nottinghamshire dialect and of the countryside. It is set in the early nineteenth century when Luddism was at its height, and takes place in and around the Nottinghamshire village of Blidworth. But Fortuna Chance was the last book of Prior's to be published: two later novels – 'November' and 'Loosestrife' – remained in manuscript stage.⁵

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¹ Jean Anabel–Cooper, 'James Prior – An Appreciation', Nottinghamshire Countryside Volume 26, No. 1, 1965, pp. 23– 25.

² James Prior, Three Shots from a Popgun (London: Remington, 1880)
–––––, Don Pedro the Cruel: A Historical Tragedy (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1882);
–––––, John Smith of London: A Comedy in Five Acts and Live and Let Live: A Comedy in One Act (Nottingham: James Prior, 1883).

³ James Prior, Renie (London: Hutchinson, 1895);
–––––, Ripple and Flood (London: Hutchinson, 1897).

⁴ James Prior, Forest Folk (London: Heinemann, 1901; repr. Nottingham: The Bromley Press, 1946);
–––––, Hyssop (London: Heinemann, 1904);
–––––, A Walking Gentleman: A Novel (London: Constable, 1907);
–––––, Fortuna Chance (London: Constable, 1910).

⁵ Ivory Buchan, 'James Prior: An Appreciation', Nottinghamshire Countryside, July 1941, pp. 8–9.

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Prior may in large part have lived for his pen, but he certainly did not live by it. Census returns for 1891 (a short time before his move to Bingham) show him living with his wife and two baby daughters in the neighbouring village of Radcliffe on Trent. He is listed as 'living on his own means', although these means inevitably began to dwindle. Perhaps an indication of this is in his poem 'Girl and Woman', written in 1914 in the unpublished 'Canticles by Vacuus' shortly after the death of his wife, where the dead narrator Lily speaks of 'giving cheerfully out of a scanty store'.⁶ For his contributions to literature Prior was given a small civil pension, but a mixture of circumstances conspired to destin him to oblivion. He was shy and retiring and a strong indication of his nature is revealed in a letter of 1919 declining an invitation to give a talk on an unspecified subject. Writing to W. A. Briscoe, he first thanks him for his 'attack upon the lethargy' of his publishers and then exclaims: 'But to lecture! even "talk" publicly! A mild-mannered man like myself, only accustomed to raise my voice authoritatively in the bosom of his complaisant family!'. He continues to give his self-effacing excuses:

'I simply shouldn't know how to do it. I know that you will say I should only have to stand & stutter, but I should not be sure of the stutter; & as for the standing, probably in my blind eagerness [...] I should plunge straight down among the audience.'⁷

There is more than a hint of Prior's sense of humour in the letter, indicating a spontaneity that some critics have suggested is lacking in his narrators. Although the local dialect of his characters' dialogues sparkle with wit and energy in the novels, his narrative style perhaps bears too much of a strained formality out of keeping with the new century. Prior said that his writing probably came from his father, who had 'a gravely exact way of expressing himself with a pen'.⁷ Publishers were no longer interested. The James Prior Memorial Committee was set up shortly after his death and such writers as J. M. Barrie, John Buchan and Eden Phillpotts lavished great praises on his work. Despite the irony of Prior being a teetotal Methodist, the Forest Folk pub was built in Blidworth, incorporating a memorial room with a stained glass window in his honour.⁸ But his books have remained out of print for many years. Prior is now unknown apart from among a few regional novel enthusiasts and local historians, and there is almost no critical work on him.

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⁶ James Prior, Nottinghamshire Archives Office, M263, 17 November 1919.

⁷ S[tephen] Fisher, James Prior (Nottingham: James Prior Memorial Committee, [1917(?)]), p. 3.

⁸ Gordon Wright and Brian J. Curtis, The Inns and Pubs of Nottinghamshire: The Stories Behind the Names (West Bridgford: Nottinghamshire County Council, 1995), p. 16.

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Moving to the dissertation itself, my principal intention is to show that there are correspondences between James Prior's novel Forest Folk, and New Woman and New Man representations at the fin de siècle and beyond. The dissertation is divided into three chapters.

In Chapter One, 'The Fin-de-Siècle New Woman in Context', I shall begin by exploring the nature of representations of the New Woman both during and after this period. I shall make use of several secondary works which provide information on the fictional construct that is the New Woman. Jenni Calder's Women and Marriage in Victorian Britain shows the changing roles of women throughout the Victorian era, commenting on events leading up to and including the New Woman. Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy and Sally Ledger's The New Woman both give further focuses on the time before and during Prior's books, indicating exactly what the 'anarchy' consisted of and how it manifested itself. Both books examine specific texts relating to the New Woman. Elaine Marks's Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers focuses on the stereotyping of the New Woman in the media. The series of essays in Angelique Robinson and Chris Willis's The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact provide the most recent research in the field. All of these secondary works give a different idea of the various forms the New Woman took, and so help towards establishing a definition. With the information in these secondary texts I then draw on a number of primary texts which incorporate representations of the New Woman and the New Man. These include novels which feature different aspects of the New Woman question, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, George Gissing's The Odd Women, Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage, and Ménie Muriel Dowie's Gallia. Because of her particular similarities to Prior's work, Olive Schreiner's extended essay Woman and Labour forms a common thread throughout the three chapters. Gender inversion and androgyny were predominant in New Woman novels and I draw a parallel between them and those in Prior's work, although I go on to suggest that Prior's New Woman is very different from conventional New Woman representations. It is the similarities and the differences that are important to this dissertation.

Chapter Two is called 'Prior's New Woman', where I shall look at Forest Folk in some detail, examining the correspondences between working-class Nell Rideout and representations of the New Woman in literature in and around that period, notably in that of George Egerton and Olive Schreiner. Here I make clear that such anarchy as was seen in Chapter One is very much in the foreground of Prior's novels, and examples from Forest Folk underline this. My argument, as already stated, is that Prior introduces a very different New Woman. Whereas conventional New Woman representations of the time are middle class, Prior's are working class, sometimes with gipsy blood, or having the qualities of benign witches, as is the case with Nell. Under the influence of Borrow in particular, Prior transforms the mannish Girton girl of so many fin de siècle Punch caricatures of the New Woman into a timeless young woman with a broad Nottinghamshire accent and with 'masculine' behaviour. There is an obvious parallel with this behaviour and that of her counterpart in conventional New Woman fiction. Prior welcomes the gipsy and the witch as the embodiment of his understanding of bisexuality and almost seems to suggest that they should be seen as the saviours of mankind.

Chapter Three is entitled 'Prior's New Man' and directly follows on from the word of the last paragraph because mankind, rather than womankind, is where Prior believes the problem lies. In Prior's novels there is also some psychological evolution on the part of the male towards the 'New Man', a term about which there has been very little written and which I shall define and investigate here. Patricia Marks gives examples of satirical representations of the New Man in periodicals in the years leading up to the close of the nineteenth century. But it is probably Olive Schreiner who named him as a phenomenon to be taken seriously in the later Woman and Labour (1911), indicating an ideal, equal partner. This New Man not only closely resembles Prior's New Man but also our own contemporary understanding of the term. George Egerton's characters from Keynotes and Discords also serve as similar parallels. Prior's gipsies – along with the 'witch' Nell in Forest Folk – represent a fusion of male and female which Prior sees as necessary to a civilisation in which man and woman should cohabit as friends and partners. My argument is that it is the male in particular who has not discovered the key to free himself from his prison of gender consciousness, although the New Woman has the key: her teaching can unlock him from the prison. Equally important for Prior, though, is a harmonious relationship between not only man and woman but also working class and middle class, symbolised here by Nell and Arthur, and Lois and Tant. And as dialect in Forest Folk is such an important part in the definition of what it is to be working class, I stress the importance of it.

My Conclusion attempts to set Forest Folk in context, sum up Prior's achievements in it, and also suggests the principal reason for Prior's present obscurity.

In the New Woman, Ledger adopts Michel Foucault's brief use of the expressions 'dominant discourse' and 'reverse discourse' to explore the warring patriarchal and New Woman discourses. I borrow this usage in Chapter One because the labels act as a convenient, albeit rather inexact, generalization over a number of diverse texts: the New Woman, however different in her various guises, was still a force against the dominant patriarchy. However, when discussing Forest Folk in the following two chapters, I find it more appropriate to be more specific about the several principal discourses present in the book: it is far more coherent to deal with several discourses in a single text than in a number of texts. And certainly the reality of discourse, as Foucault says, is rather more complicated:

'There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses witin the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.⁹

It is by examining the various conflicting discourses in Forest Folk that I intend to arrive at a fuller understanding of the text, of what Prior is saying.

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⁹ Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality: Volume I (as The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction (London: Lane, 1979; repr. Penguin, 1998), pp. 101–02.

My James Prior posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Introduction
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter One
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Two
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Three
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Conclusion
James Prior (1851–1922) in Bingham
James Prior's Parents' Grave, Nottingham
James Prior: Three Shots from a Popgun (1880)
The Forest Folk memorial window
James Prior plaque, Blidworth

James Prior's Forest Folk: A Novel Construction of the New Woman and the New Man: Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
The Fin-de-Siècle New Woman in context Broadly speaking, the 'woman question' was concerned with the rights of women in society, although there was no consensus about the exact nature of the question. As Claire Buck claims:

'No single cultural myth prevailed, and the idea of "Woman"; her "mission", her "sphere" and her "influence" became a site of struggle where competing ideologies strove for dominance. Some commentators challenged the constraints placed upon middle-class women's loves and argued for greater vocational and educational opportunity; others argued passionately that women and men should operate in separate spheres of existence.'¹

In 1792, in the seminal feminist work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about marriage, and the limits of women's education and work. These subjects and others were to be addressed later in the next century. The 'woman question' grew more important as the nineteenth century wore on and became the theme of two important poems: Alfred Tennyson's The Princess of 1847 (education) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh of 1857 (women's independence). Martha Vicinus says that 'job opportunities, marriage laws, female emigration, and education were only some of the issues debated at the time'.² The 1851 census shows that there were 400,000 more women in the population than men – and this number was to increase over the years, with obvious implications for power relations if the franchise was extended to both sexes.

Then the fin de siècle brought the New Woman, also described by other writers as a vague concept: Peter Keating says 'New Woman novelists did not constitute a school of writers in any formal sense', and Lyn Pykett describes her as 'a Protean figure', going on to claim:  'The [i.e. the real] New Woman did not exist.'³ She was a constantly shifting, literary and journalistic construct as distinct from a wholly coherent reality. But she was also an increasingly acknowledged, and increasingly threatening, part of the female Zeitgeist, dangerous enough to be seen as 'a threat to the status quo', and a threat to marriage in particular.⁴ Along with the issues that Vicinus cites above, other questions raised by the New Woman argument included the extension of the franchise, sexual autonomy, and independent (i.e. unchaperoned) mobility. In George Meredith's The Egoist (1879) 'the classic Victorian male image of the word' is evident when Sir Willoughby imagines Clara waiting at home for him to return from his 'masculine pursuits'.⁵ It was viewpoints like this that the New Woman discourse seriously attacked. However multi-faceted the New Woman might be, she was questioning the raison d'être of the patriarchal order. Emboldened women writers even dared to make a 'frank depiction of issues relating to sexuality, including venereal disease, the sexual double standard, and the dire consequences of women's ignorance about sexual issues before marriage'.⁶

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¹ Claire Buck, ed., Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), p. 1146.

² Martha Vicinus, ed., A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles for Victorian Women (London: Century, 1990), p. ix.

³ Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), p. 189;
Lyn Pykett, Foreword, in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. xi–xii (p. xi).

⁴ Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 11. (All below references to this book simply refer to 'Ledger'.)

⁵ Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), p. 184.

⁶ Carolyn Christensen Nelson, British Women Fiction Writers of the 1890s, ed. by Herbert Sussman, English Authors Series, 533 (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 4.

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As I stated in the Introduction, a convenient way to view the situation here is to see the traditional patriarchal (and predominantly middle-class) argument as the 'dominant discourse', and the modern fin-de-siècle voice of the New Woman as a 'reverse discourse' fighting the dominant. Eliza Lynn Linton's was one of the strongest voices against the reverse discourse, exaggeratedly describing a 'Wild Woman' who, Ledger states, 'opposed marriage, who vociferously demanded political rights, and who sought "absolutely personal independence coupled with supreme power over men"'.⁷ In 1887 the New Woman 'type' was seen as a 'feminine Frankenstein'.⁸ However, it is important to note that the expression 'New Woman' was not actually used until 1894 – first by Sarah Grand (without the capital letters), and then several times a few months later by Ouida (with the vital identifying capitals).⁹

It is perhaps easy to understand the fears. Elaine Showalter quotes Gissing's observation that sexual codes in the 1880s and 1890s were falling apart, and also quotes Karl Miller's assertion that 'men became women. Women became men. Gender and country were put in doubt. The single life was found to harbour two sexes and two nations.'¹⁰ It was this perceived gender anarchy which periodicals, particularly via cartoons, attacked in their representations of the New Woman. To the patiarchal world of Punch and the like, the New Woman was certainly real enough to threaten the dominant discourse. One strategy of this discourse is to attempt to negate the reverse discourse by satire, but paradoxically the reinforcement of identifiers such as 'New Woman' has the effect of reification.

The satirical representations of the New Woman in Punch are typical of the time in their depictions of gender reversal: in one cartoon, two confident young women wearing ties and other rather 'masculine' clothes sit in the foreground smoking cigarettes. One says to a timid-looking man reaching for the door-knob: 'You're not leaving us, Jack! tea will be here directly!', to which Jack retorts that he is having tea with the servants, because he is missing female company.¹¹ Elsewhere, there are many other cartoons of the 1890s showing middle-class women riding bicycles and wearing 'rational dress' such as knickerbockers or split skirts. The periodials fed the fear among the Old Men that women were becoming masculinized in their strivings towards equality.

The cigarettes in the cartoon are also highly significant because the cigarette was at once a symbol of the liberated woman and of the gender malaise, a fact borne out by the prominent one maladroitly lit at both ends in Albert George Morrow's poster depicting a liberated young woman for Sidney Grundy's play The New Woman.¹² Further proof of the cigarette as symbol is shown – somewhat more bizarrely – in the behaviour of Grand's doting companion, Gladys Singers-Bigger, who meticulously labelled and dated the ends of Grand's discarded cigarettes and saved them for posterity.¹³

Also worthy of note here, before I deal with Prior's constructions of the New Woman in Chapter Two, is the fact that it is the middle class in which the New Woman is almost invariably found: Ledger, for example, notes that New Woman representations are 'rarely working class'.¹⁴ The servants are not seen as stricken be the wildness Linton mentions: the threat to the dominant discourse is working from within.

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⁷ Ledger, p. 12.

⁸ Calder, p. 164.

⁹ Ellen Jordan, 'The Christening of the New Woman: May 1894', Victorian Newsletter, 63 (1983), 19–21 (p. 20).

¹⁰ Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), p. 3.

¹¹ Ledger, p. 98.

¹² Jean Chothia, ed., The New Woman and Other Emancipated Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), front cover illustration.

¹³ Elaine Showalter, 'Smoking Room', TLS, 16 June 1995, p. 12.

¹⁴ Ledger, p. 160.

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But the New Woman representatives in the literature that purveyed the subversive ideas of the reverse discourse were far from these facile reductions to clearly visible (and movable) female types. The New Woman was an intellectual, pluralistic entity, with perhaps her only two common denominators being a strong desire both for independence and for equal rights with men. But these things did not of course mean the same thing to all New Women. There were more than one hundred New Woman novels written between 1883 and 1900, although it is unclear if this includes the New Woman detective sub-genre described by Willis.¹⁵ But the figure obviously excludes drama, and therefore Henrik Ibsen, said to be the virtual inventor of the New Woman.¹⁶ A 1913 issue of The Bookman also cites Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) as an early member of the New Woman genre.¹⁷ The above period – 1883 to 1900 – can perhaps be described as the 'high' New Woman era, although the first wave continued beyond the Edwardian period and extended to other countries.

The subject matter of New Woman literature, then, was diverse and often one author's aims conflicted with another's. Some New Woman literature, such as Elizabeth Robin's play Votes for Women! and its novel counterpart The Convert – both from 1907 – are unequivocally proselytizing, demanding political change and the right of women to a positive independent voice. Marriage is a major theme in New Woman literature, and is typically seen as a mental and physical prison: in Votes for Women!, the unmarried Vida Levering says 'the only difference between me and thousands of women with husbands and babies is that I'm free to say what I think. They aren't'.¹⁸ Calder finds that Meredith's views strongly concur:

'Meredith was perhaps unique in explicitly exposing the situation of women as the key to a critique of society. He saw marriage as an instrument of restraint. It stifled women, limited men, reinforced class barriers, and inhibited freedom of thought and action. In all his best fiction these destructive operations are at work.'¹⁹

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¹⁵ Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, Introduction, in Richardson and Willis, pp. 1–38 (p. 1);
Chris Willis, '"Heaven defend me from political or highly-educated women!": Packaging the New Woman for Mass Consumption', in Richardson and Willis, pp. 53–65.

¹⁶ Sally Ledger, 'Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress', in Richardson and Willis, pp. 79–93 (p. 79).

¹⁷ Ledger, p. 2.

¹⁸ Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women!, in Chothia, pp. 135–210 (p. 198).

¹⁹ Calder, p. 170.

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Alternatives to marriage are common in New Woman literature, although they frequently end in misery. In From Man to Man (1911), Schreiner suggests that virtually the only recourse for the 'fallen woman' is prostitution, incidentally a word which for Schreiner includes consent to sexual relations in an unhappy marriage. Hermione Barton in Grant Alllen's The Woman Who Did (1895) is the mother of a child whose father she has refused to marry; she kills herself in the end to save her daughter's reputation. The 'free union' is also discussed in Gissing's The Odd Women (1893), although the Rhoda Nun/Everard Barfoot partnership is aborted before it really begins. If we incorporate Jane and Mary Findlater's Crossriggs (1908) into the New Woman genre – and there is no reason why we should not – Alexandra Hope's choice of spinsterhood as opposed to an unhappy marriage seems a prime example of another such alternative.²⁰ Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) explores woman's usually repressed sexual desires; the protagonist Edna Pontellier leaves her husband and has a sexual relationship with the local Lothario, although at the end she commits suicide. At the time, of course, the reason for any failure to find an alternative to marriage was the power of the dominant discourse rejecting any other discourse. All was not misery, though, and I shall turn to some perhaps more positive texts.

Before moving to a few texts in which the idea of the couple is paramount, though – as of course it is in Prior's work – there are two significant New Woman texts that challenge the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attitudes to gender. In 1893 Ménie Muriel Dowie wrote Women Adventurers, which according to Helen Small is 'a collection of biographical studies of women cross-dressers, travellers, explorers and fighters.'²¹ But it probably gave no idea of what to expect from Gallia, which exploded on Victorian sensibilities in 1895. In this novel the eponymous New Woman makes a conventional decision but does so in a highly unusual – and also highly subversive – manner. Gallia chooses to marry Mark Gurgon purely because she wants to be a mother. She says, 'I want you to be my husband – or rather, the father of my child.'²²

'Gallia' as a forename is unusual. In her Notes on Dowie's novel, Small suggests, although not altogether convincingly, that it is 'apparently a feminine form of "Gallio"', this being Seneca's brother whose 'name became a byword for indifference to public opinion.'²³ More interestingly, and perhaps more credibly, it could also suggest the word 'gallinaceous', or the Latin gallina – meaning 'hen-like' or 'hen', an animal usually associated with birth and nurture. Albert Dauzet's Dictionnaire étymologique lists first names beginning with the prefix galli-, and notes that this written form for this species of bird is of Corsican or Italian origin.²⁴

But although Gallia may to some extent have opted for the traditional human mother hen role, she transgresses traditional gender codes in other ways. She is not in love with Gurdon, but delighted that he had a mistress whom he has made pregnant. The mistress is a half-gipsy, someone at the time perceived as racially and socially inferior, albeit sexually useful to unattached young men. This knowledge to Gallia merely serves to attest Gurdon's ability to give her a child: she is mainly interested in his fertility. In this marriage, it is certain who will rule the roost.

And in Gallia, as so often in New Woman literature – and as opposed to the popular press of the day – it is the traditional male who is lampooned. When Gallia reveals not only her awareness of Gurdon's mistress, but also of her 'illness' (an abortion) he is understandably dumbstruck by Gallia's indifference. Instead of the man manipulating the woman to serve his ends, and unlike the exploited gipsy, Gallia is in fact sexually exploiting him. He is indeed, as Gail Cunningham comments, 'hoist [...] with his own petard'.²⁵ But the most withering attack on men in the book comes from Miss Janikon, who, in a statement about men bragging about their sexual conquests, says:

'Men are like children who have come home from the seashore. [...] They have to tell about how they paddled, and just how deep they went in, and all about the queer things they fished out, and about the crabs that caught hold of their toes. [...] And all the time you see how awfully frightened at the crabs they have been.'²⁶

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²⁰ Jane and Mary Findlater, Crossriggs (London: Smith, Elder, 1908; repr. London: Virago, 1986).

²¹ Ménie Muriel Dowie, Gallia (London: Methuen, 1895; repr. London: Dent, 1995), p. xxix.

²² Dowie, p. 191.

²³ Dowie, pp. 205–06.

²⁴ Albert Dauzet, Dictionnaire étymologique des noms de famille et prénoms de France (Paris: Larousse, 1951), p. 276.

²⁵ Gail Cunningham '"He-Notes": Reconstructing Masculinity', in Richardson and Willis, pp.94–106 (p. 97).

²⁶ Dowie, pp. 198–99.

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However, the following novel shows a movement towards a reconciliation of the sexes after the women have given the men an education in gender. Gilman's Herland adopts a more balanced approach to the issue, although in an unconventional way. Herland was first published serially in 1915 – five years after Prior's last published work – and is a Utopian novel largely set in an imaginary country consisting of only women. Gilman uses the term 'bi-sexual' to describe a society inhabited by both sexes. The Herlander Somel carves through the gender constructs when she tells the explorers Terry, Jeff, and Vandyck, all of whom are from a bi-sexual country, although from the narrative the men and women might be from different planets: 'We can quite see that we do not seem like women – to you. [...] But surely there are chacteristics enough which belong to People, aren't there?'.²⁷ The male narrator notes that the long absence of a history of gender in Herland means that the women have no concept of what is 'manly' or 'womanly'.

But although they do appear to the male strangers as devoid of what their society would consider 'feminine', all three – perhaps a little improbably, although with varying success – soon find partners. The narrator arrives at an enlightening thought: the qualities that he and his society had hitherto considered 'feminine' are in effect 'not feminine at all, but merely reflected masculinity – developed to please us because they had to please us'.²⁸ We seem to be shifting steadily towards an ideology of androgyny – if in fact that has any meaning in this context – although in her Introduction, Ann J. Lane is quick to emphasize Gilman's conventional ideas concerning 'the nuclear family or monogamous marriage'.²⁹

But it is in earlier literature emphasizing the importance of the couple that the New Man is found, so I now turn to this phenomenon. Peter Schwenger quotes Annette Lolodny: 'If we insist on discovering something we can clearly label as a "feminine mode," then we are honor-bound, also, to delineate its counterpart, the "masculine mode."³⁰ Following this logic, it seems clear that a New Woman should automatically suggest a New Man, the existence of whom was first mentioned at the fin de siècle. As well as being the New Woman's partner, the New Man in a sense follows on from the Foulcauldian idea of a reverse discourse, although perhaps it would be more accurate here to call it a reverse discourse support, or an extension of the New Woman reverse discourse. In jest, Max Beerbohm refers to 'the amalgamation of the sexes' as 'one of the chief planks of the decadent platform'.³¹

However, the association of the New Man with the decadent movement does not concern me here, as Prior's fiction involves more a mixture of male and female within both sexes in a purely hererosexual context. At the fin de siècle there was certainly an interest in androgny that extended far beyond the decadent movement. The New Man, apart from the homosexual/decadent, or the satirized variety, is in fiction not usually allowed a separate existence outside that of the New Woman – he is defined by her and exists for her, and in the light of fictional representaton would surely not be fully coherent in his own right.

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²⁷ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (Forerunner, 1915; repr. London: The Women's Press, 1979), p.89.

²⁸ Herland, p. 59.

²⁹ The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader: The Yellow Wallpaper & Other Fiction, ed. by Ann J. Lane (London: The Woman's Press, 1981), pp. [ix]–xlii (p. xxviii).

³⁰ Peter Schwenger, 'The Masculine Mode', in Speaking of Gender, ed. by Elaine Showalter (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 101–12 (p.101).

³¹ Ledger, p. 96.

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Perhaps inevitably, the earliest references to the New Man were in jokes in the press: Marks (whose Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers is dedicated to 'To the [present?] New Man') reveals that Punch showed the New Man 'as an effeminate creation of his club-going [but not wielding] wife'.³² And the following verse, printed in the coincidentally appropriately named Pick-Me-Up in 1896, depicts gender inversion in its full satirical glory with rampant young amazons chasing a sexually timid man:

'School-girls with satchels of wild oats
Have come to make mankind their prey;
And some have dofft their petticoats
As being rather in the way.
To prove that they are frank and free,
Lord knows what else they would not doff;
But voila! [sic] When they turn to see –
The Newest man is making off!'³³

In general, though, New Woman fiction's New Men are not of the effeminate or timid kind. They very much tend to resemble our present-day understanding of the term, believing in equality with women in a hererosexual relationship. In Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage (1899), though, the new New Man never has the opportunity to put his ideas into practice. Hugh Scarlett (the scarlet New Man?) has had an affair with Lady Newhaven. After drawing the shorter straw with Lord Newhaven, Scarlett must now do the honourable thing and kill himself, although he finally turns coward and Lord Newhaven kills himself instead. Scarlett continues to deceive the New Woman figure, Rachel West, with whom he is in love and who is largely cognizant of the details of the 'gentleman's agreement' although not of the result. But towards the end of the book, after all evidence of the agreement has been destroyed, Scarlett confesses his dishonourable action. For Rachel though, it is too late, and she rejects him. It is left to her friend the bishop to rebuke her:

'[A]t last, in a moment, when you showed your full trust and confidence in him, he shook off for an instant the clogs of the nature which he brought into the world, and rose to what he had never been before – your equal.'³⁴

Scarlett may now be on his way to a pointless death, but at least he has become, amidst a mass of villains in New Woman literature's back pages, one of the most shining examples of a New Man in the whole genre. The bishop makes a few interesting points here to aid the reader's identification of him: 'the clogs of the nature which he brought into the world' in part refers to original sin, but the bishop is in addition referring to the extreme effort Scarlett has made to build himself into a New Man. Unlike becoming a New Woman, which usually seems far more 'natural' in the genre, it appears that becoming a New Man is a part of social evolution. And the bishop also stresses equality here, which is a vital component in the relationship between the New Woman and the New Man.

Turning to Olive Schreiner's view of the New Man, at the end of The Story of an African Farm (1883) Gregory Rose becomes a transvestite nurse who lovingly looks after the New Woman Lyndall. Ledger describes him as 'a species of "New Man"', although she admits that '[Schreiner's] sympathies appear [...] to lie more readily with the type of "new manhood" embodied by the intellectual dreamer, Waldo Farber'.³⁵ In the unfinished Man to Man (finally published posthumously in 1927), Drummond has also been identified by some critics as another specimen of the New Man breed. Buck, for instance, says that 'this story ends with Rebekah's deepening friendship with Mr Drummond, a friendship which signifies the gender equality Schreiner's writing so constantly and so hopelessly drives toward.'³⁶

But there is too little information for the reader to judge: Drummond only appears towards the end to the book, and the events are too inconclusive for the reader to decide if the relationship concerns gender equality or just intellectual and temperamental equality. But Schreiner is probably the first person to mention the New Man in a serious context, and Schreiner's New Man, as I shall demonstrate in Chapter Three, strongly appears to resemble Prior's.

At the end of Woman and Labour (1911), Schreiner spends almost thirty pages discussing her New Man. She introduces the idea of an ideal partner – someone, Brandon argues, that she did not find in Havelock Ellis, Karl Pearson, or her husband Cron Cronwright, although ironically she may to some extent have found him in the homosexual Edward Carpenter.³⁷

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³² Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1990), p. 133.

³³ Marks, pp. 33–40.

³⁴ Mary Cholmondeley, Red Pottage (London: Arnold, 1899; repr. London: Virago, 1985), p. 356.

³⁵ Ledger, p. 83.

³⁶ Buck, p. 563.

³⁷ Ruth Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990), p.90;

Ruth First and Anne Scott, Olive Schreiner: A Biography (London: Deutsch, 1990; repr. The Women's Press, 1989), p.217.

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In a long, rambling sentence that builds to a dramatic italicized crescendo, the second half of which I quote below, Schreiner says her ideal man is:

'[N]ew in the sense in which [the New Woman] is new, in that he is an adaptation to material and social conditions which have no exact counterpart in the past; more diverse from his immediate progenitors, than even the woman is from hers, side by side with her to-day in every society and in every class in which she is found, stands – the New Man!'³⁸

The sentence is highly significant. From this powerful trumpeting of the new breed, Schreiner goes on to discuss the nature of this wonderful creature. But it is quite clear from the above that the New Man, like the New Woman, fits tidily into Schreiner's evolutionary thinking, which was influenced by Spencer and Emerson. It is also clear from the expression 'side by side' – a repetition of the first words of the sentence as well as an integral part of the reader's understanding of the end of it – that Schreiner is giving emphasis to the equal nature of this perfect, and ipso facto Utopian, evolutionary partnership. She calls the woman's movement

'[A] part of a great movement of the sexes towards each other, a movement towards common occupations, common interests, common ideals, and towards an emotional sympathy between the sexes more deeply founded and more indestructible than any the world has yet seen.'³⁹

Schreiner's language is co-operative rather than confrontational. In her widened sphere, the New Woman will work on an equal basis with the New Man. Throughout Woman and Labour, her argument is that men and women have over the centuries lost a kind of Edenic state. They have become separated from each other, and she looks forward to a future – typically seen in evolutionary terms as a caterpillar changing into a chrysallis before the imago – when man will flap his wings with woman in the sunshine of togetherness.⁴⁰ This idealistic state appears to be not unlike that represented by the principal couple in Forest Folk.
Schreiner would easily fit into Gilbert and Gubar's 'gradualist' camp. Here the authors describe the approach of later – albeit considerably diverse – theorists such as Beauvoir, Freidan, and Greer, who sought changes within the existing social structure itself. They 'implicitly defined a redeemed future populated by New Women, New Men, mother-men, and androgynes'.⁴¹ At the fin de siècle, Calder rather optimistically sees evidence outside the conservative press arena of a widespread acceptance of the need for women's increasing independence.⁴²

But certain central issues, such as the extension of the franchise, or woman's status in the workplace at home, needed to be seriously addressed. Nevertheless, the publicity the women's movement had gained meant that everyone was aware of its presence, and this is evident in Prior's Forest Folk, where he creates his own idiosyncratic version of the New Woman and the New Man described in the following chapters.

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³⁸ Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (London: Unwin, 1911), pp. 253–54.

³⁹ Woman and Labour, p. 259.

⁴⁰ Woman and Labour, p. 281.

⁴¹ Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–94), III: Letters to the Front, 369.

⁴² Calder, p. 164–66.

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The links below are to the posts I've made on James Prior:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Introduction
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter One
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Two
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Three
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Conclusion
The Grave of James Prior (1851–1922) in Bingham
James Prior's Parents' Grave, Nottingham
James Prior: Three Shots from a Popgun (1880)

James Prior's Forest Folk: A Novel Construction of the New Woman and the New Man: Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE
Prior's New Man
In Daughters of Decadence Showalter states that 'on the whole, [...] New Women writers were pessimistic about their chances of finding New Men to share their lives'.¹ Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, New Woman literature is frequently filled with villains. This chapter, on the other hand, is in part designed to show how closely James Prior's New Man and New Woman share the views of the more optimistic New Woman writers. One of the key New Woman writers of the fin de siècle was Sarah Grand, whose particularly important earlier books are interesting in their depiction of villainous men. But Grand could be optimistic as well as pessimistic, and the views of her New Women often echo the co-operative ideas of Prior:

'That is the right new spirit! Let us help one another. Any attempt to separate the interests of the sexes [...] is fatal to the welfare of the whole race. The efforts of foolish people to divide men and women make me writhe – as if we were not utterly bound up in one another, and destined to rise or fall together!'²

These are the words of Angelica Gilroy, one of several New Women in Grand's loose trilogy, of which this – the largely autobiographical The Beth Book – is the final volume. Angelica is speaking about the future accomplishments of the Women's Movement, which she believes had an important role in the evolution of both women and men: 'It is an effort of the race to raise itself a step higher in the scale of being.'³ Where this language differs from the ideas expressed in Prior's novels is in the presence here of the historical and political context of the fin-de-siècle New Woman, but what makes it similar is its emphasis on the co-operative imperative: men and women have to work together on equal terms. This is the major defining characteristic of Prior's New Man, although it does not come naturally to him – he must be taught to develop it. A number of canonic New Woman novels which include the New Man share this idea of the necessity for teaching him.

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¹ Elaine Showalter, ed., Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de siècle (London: Virago, 1993, p. xvi.

² Sarah Grand, The Beth Book: Being a Study from the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure: A Woman of Genius (London: Heinmann, 1898 [1897], p. 412.

³ The Beth Book, p. 413.

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The central character in The Beth Book is Beth Maclure, who walks out on her husband, a doctor who runs a Lock hospital and who once, without his wife's knowledge at the time, brought his mistress to live in the marital home. Grand also features New Men in her work, of whom Beth later meets an example. What amazes her, as she nurses her sick fellow tenant Arthur Brock in the cheap lodgings she had taken, is that Brock appears to be a different kind of man from those she had known in the past: 'She had never before realized that there could be such men, so heroic in suffering, so unselfish, and so good.'⁴

However, partly to buy medicine for the invalid, the destitute Beth is forced to sell her hair. When he discovers this, Brock, in an allusion to the androgynous New Woman stereotypes, exclaims '[a]re you going to join the unsexed crew that shriek on platforms?' This is an obvious reference to the 'shrieking sisterhood', another expression used by Linton of the 'wild women' briefly mentioned in Chapter One.⁵ Beth retorts that she is surprised that Brock is 'taking the tone of cheap journalism. There has been nothing in the woman movement to unsex women except the brutalities of the men who expose them'.⁶ Arthur shuts up and stares at the fire: he has been given a lesson in the dynamics of the New Woman and the developing New Man, as Arthur Skrene and Tant will be too. As Angelica has previously told Beth: 'Man [...] has his faults, you know, but he must be educated; that is all he wants.'⁷

No doubt, but initially, Arthur Brock's unthinking comment separates the couple, although in their later reunion he becomes a knight from Camelot in Beth's imagination: hardly fin-de-siècle sexual equality, but the transformation at least makes a point about the New Woman's power vis-à-vis the New Man. Prior's books also contain positive transformations of men, although perhaps not quite as dramatic as the one seen by Beth.

In Forest Folk, outside the ideal world of the New Woman and the New Man there is a great deal of general antagonism between the sexes. I have already dealt in Chapter Two with the domestication – even partial feminization – of Tant, but the first time he appears in the book is when he comes home drunk and Nell thrashes him with her hunting crop. Male and female working-class discourses are at loggerheads, and this is a common theme in Prior's work. In a belittling remark about Tant's Luddite activities and at the same time an allusion to the cheap broadsheets of the day, Nell says that his speech on the scaffold will be 'bought for a penny'. The befuddled Tant counters, 'I wain't mek no speech; I'll die like a man' (p. 28). Throughout the book, references such as this are made about the stereotypical garrulous woman and as in this instance are generally sympathetic to the female working-class discourse.

Occasionally, though, this is not the case at all and the narrative discourse appears to be subverted by the male working-class discourse. As Tant watches over the Foats before secretly terrorizing them again with eerie noises as they try to go to sleep, the narrator says 'on the rack men have been known to sleep, even under a wife's tongue' (p. 227). If this is an attempt to introduce humour into the narrative, it is a joke lost on twenty-first century sensibilities; if the reader is to understand that the thoughts of Ben Foat, representative of the male working class, are being voiced through the narrator, Prior is far from successful in conveying the idea. The narrative discourse seems to reveal conflicting loyalties, the kind of 'different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy' of which Foucault speaks.⁸

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⁴ The Beth Book, p. 505.

⁵ Sexual Anarchy, p. 24.

⁶ The Beth Book, p. 509.

⁷ The Beth Book, pp. 411–12.

⁸ Foucault, p. 102.

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But although Forest Folk begins with male–female conflicts, there is a gradual movement away from antagonism and towards enlightenment, tolerance and mutual understanding. Soon after the fight between Nell and Arthur 'Arthur took up the swaling lantern and returned to the place where he and she – terrible pronouns! – had encountered', the narrator is expressing Arthur's horror at hitting a woman (p. 62). But there is perhaps also a hint that the words 'he' and 'she' are'terrible pronouns' because they represent two warring factions that for Prior should be a harmonious whole. This harmony is clearly seen in the two main couples who slowly come together towards the end of the novel.

There are two New Men as well as two New Women figures in Forest Folk and I begin with Tant and Lois, although Lois is rather less satisfactory as a New Woman figure, or at least she is certainly too middle class for a New Woman of Prior's. She is also too dependent on her brother, frightened of many things, including cows – and on the journey to Nottingham with the Rideout sisters she is almost treated as a child: hardly the stuff of which either the conventional, or even Prior's more off-beat, New Woman is made.

Nevertheless Lois is capable of moments of surprising boldness in relation to Tant and seems to possess the primordial force with which the New Woman is associated, and she deals the ox-like Tant, who has just beaten up Arthur, a hefty blow merely by looking at him:

'Tant trembled before [Lois's gaze] as he had not trembled before her brother's; he shrank again as at the touch of magic from the fighting man into the mere lout (p. 75).'

Tant's reaction to the power of woman is later echoed by Spettigrew, who says: 'I'd sooner be fisted by a man any day nor tongue-battled by a woman' (p. 86). This is of course yet another example of female stereotyping, but of interest in Tant's above sentence is the word 'magic', which again associates the New Woman with the supernatural world. Like Arthur, Tant is becoming bewitched: he may be a fearless fighter who has given Arthur a boxing lesson, but it is Lois who is giving Tant a moral education in New Manhood. Initially, though, Tant is frightened of the unknown power which Lois represents and attempts an alcoholic antidote. But in the following chapter – 'As Others See Us' – he staggers out of the last pub into Lois's gaze again. The female working- and middle-class discourses are for the moment mortified by each other, and then Tant flees. Bizarrely, Lois at the same time pleads for help from Josh Towers, one of the greatest drunkards in the village. His verdict on Tant is male and working class, although Josh seems to be a little starstruck by the middle-class discourse, and uses an unnecessary aitch for the occasion: 'It's Sunday, you see, an 'huz working-men had to mek the best on't' (p. 79). Tant, however, has made the worst of it, and he feels as though he is going insane. He is distressed that he should have such an effect on people, particularly Lois, and the questions pile up as he struggles to make sense of the situation:

'Surely he had not been born so? When had the changes come upon him? During his late drunkeness? or at the moment of his sudden awakening from it? [...] Could it be that yesterday he was a man among other men, negligent, manly, selfish, well enough liked? (p. 83).

These and other questions – involving madness, heredity and male stereotyping – continue until Tant is forced to question his very existence in the world. Living for a long time without parents, he has had few checks put upon his excesses: 'the early removal of a father's restraint had been detrimental' (p. 30). He has sought a retreat into the substitute womb of the public bar with its heady mix of easy cameraderie and alcoholic oblivion. But the time has come for him to sever the umbilical cord that links him to the irresponsible and destructive male working-class discourse. He is undergoing a variation of Jaques Lacan's 'mirror stage' and he rushes home to gaze at his likeness. He throws the mirror outside, his ego shattered. A young child might look into the glass and see itself as a unity, but for the drunken Tant there is not even an illusory unity – only the horror of a fractured self and Other too horrifying to be accepted as an image of himself. It is left to Lois to repair his self-image, serve as his superego, and work towards making him whole.

And she, or rather Tant's image of her, is very effective. When Nell is busy nursing her ailing great-grandmother, Tant had become a new man – although certainly not yet a New Man. He works tirelessly at the harvest now and is even considering renouncing his Luddite activities, although he 'could not do enough between dawn and dark to tire his remorse. The lady's face, disgusted, horrified, was always before him' (p. 110). He continues to go badger-baiting at the roughest pub in Blidworth, but as Nell remarks, is 'as sober as rent day' (p. 112). Tant tells a representation of the real Nottingham Luddite James Towle that he has not been drunk for months: 'It's wunnerful what a difference that meks to the colour o' things' (p. 118). But as Tant appears to have been drugged by Towle and cajoled into joining in with the destructive activities, the colour of things soon loose their difference. Tant's brute force is needed by the Luddites, although in a revenge attack on the Skrene farm the same night Tant meets Lois again and regains full consciousness. He turns from her and fights back against his former friends the attackers. At great risk to his own life Tant saves hers.

In an action that will find a parallel in the story of Arthur and Nell, just as Tant has saved Lois's life so Lois will save his. She testifies before the court in Nottingham that Tant fought against his own friends to save her. Furthermore, Lois again saves Tant, as mentioned in the previous chapter. When the treacherous Ben Foat accuses Tant of machine breaking some months previously, Lois makes a kind of citizen's arrest and hides him from the police in a locked room in Arthur's farmhouse. In performing this action she is of course switching discourse allegiances, and at the same time she is doing so with the complicity of Arthur, who has thrown away the warrant for Tant's arrest and pretends to ignore his sister's intrigues. For a moment here – and there seems to be a strong suggestion that this is a special moment – there appear to be only two discourses: the dominant (represented not only by the rather stupid and almost voiceless but ever-present police, but also the indifferent lawyers), and the reverse (now represented by Nell and Tant, but also Arthur and Lois, supported by the narrator and Prior).

Tant makes progress at Arthur's farm. The budding New Man must learn like a child, and the giant Tant soon adopts a subservient position in relation to the tiny Lois. His housework is improving, as shown when the couple are for a time alone together at High Farm house: 'they removed dish and platter together, he carrying not at all clumsily, like most men-folk, she doing little beyond directing where and how to place' (p. 235). Again we see the narrator siding with women against men, and again lapsing into gender stereotyping. If the female working-class discourse is preferred by the narrator, the middle-class discourse expressed by the woman seems to be superior to the male working-class discourse. Any female discourse civilizes the male of any class, Prior seems to be saying. Traditional gender roles have been reversed and Lois remarks that Tant's bedroom is in perfect order. She calls him a 'strangely unequal man' (p. 237).

But Tant decides that no matter how much progress he is making towards New Manhood, it is still not enough. Near the end of the book he opts for the discourse defended by the middle class and chooses to fight in the Peninsular War. The narrative discourse, on the other hand, does not seem completely convinced about the wisdom of his action, and nor does Tant: 'he showed no sign in partaking on the hop-hip-hurraing patriotism of the day, either before or after he had taken the King's shilling' (p. 297). Lois is distressed that Tant has enlisted and asks him why he has done so. He replies: 'It gies me a chance to come back sommat different. I ayther come back different or I stay there' (p. 303). So speaks the existential male, but what Tant fails to realize is that the change has already taken effect: he has already become a different person.

Enlisting at the same time as Tant are Jack Whitehead and Nommer Brooks, men whose behaviour can hardly be more different from that of the reformed Tant, and whose clear function is to show how far Tant has come in his education by Lois. The two men spend their time 'guzzling gratuitous beer and admiration by illustrating by turns each of the various valorous moods between half tipsy and dead drunk' (p. 298). Shortly before he leaves for the Iberian Peninsula, Tant does not even consider going into the pub but instead joins Lois in church. Both of them sing hymns in perfect harmony, a symbolic – though rather trite – manifestation of their short union.

Lois briefly experiences a kind of pantheistic mysticism, a brief surrender to the cosmos. In church with her New Man 'She saw through the window in the roof, she regarded neither the past nor the future; she was as God is, who has only a present' (pp. 306–07). In contrast to Tant's present self, Whitehead and Brooks have to be almost carried out of the pub and when Tant sees them as he leaves Blidworth he wishes he were back in church with Lois. And a little later he dies in combat, fighting for the dominant British discourse. Lois goes onto mourning. The relationship has come to an end due to the external political situation, and although Schreiner wrote the comment below about evolutionary sexual politics, it is nonetheless relevant to Tant and Lois:

'I know that the loveliest thing that has blossomed on the earth is the binding of man and woman in one body, one fellowship, and I know all the failures are only the broken steps which Humanity builds in stairs she is shaping for herself to climb by, which she will have to rebuild in the future'.⁹

Social Darwinists may have emphasized competition and violent struggle, but Joyce Berkman says Schreiner 'concluded that species evolution was contingent no less upon cooperative and mutually protective behaviour.¹⁰ Later, Berkman devotessic] was one of the most original and subversive features of her social thought'.¹¹

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⁹ From Man to man, p. 297.

¹⁰ Joyce Avrech Berkman, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts, 1989), p. 78.

¹¹ Berkman, pp. 140–49 (p. 142).

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I now move to the New Woman/New Man relationship that is Nell and Arthur. Arthur's confrontations with Nell are at first always the middle- against the working-class discourse, and perhaps in no clearer way does this manifest itself than in the conflict between the languages they use. The working-class characters present an undiluted Nottinghamshire dialect and seem completely at ease with it – after all, Prior made a great study of it. But Arthur is a southern snob and hates the way Nottinghamshire people speak. He admires Nell, but, for instance, 'at the same time [...] regret[s] that she should say 'yo' when she might have said "you" (p. 95). Prior (or the narrative discourse at least) is again taking sides, and it is clear that the reader should feel unsympathetic to Arthur's prejudices. The scene between Nell and Arthur standing outside the Methodist chapel marks the beginning of Arthur's journey towards becoming a New Man, a person of understanding and tolerance as opposed to one of petty prejudices. Most of this early nineteenth century congregation is illiterate, but it is clear where the narrator's – and Prior's – allegances lie:

'We may have better psalmody now-a-days, irreproachably unemotional and empty, from our Mus.B's and D.'s, [but] we have no such singers as those lusty enthusiasts who made the windows of that humble little meeting-house tremble' (p. 100).

The narrator seems to be looking bck with nostalgia to a no doubt illusory golden age, but he is certainly siding with the working class. Arthur, on the other hand, objects to a preacher attaching superfluous aitches to his words and hates the general anarchy of the service. He complains to Nell about the 'ignorant' preacher and wonders why 'anybody can prefer such minstration to that of an educated and properly ordained gentleman' (p. 106). Nell rebukes the priggish Arthur for criticizing the language of the service and for his generally supercilious manner: 'Yo're allus of hoss-back. Coom down a bit, do' (p. 107). She is affected by the service in a similar pantheistic way to Lois, and implores Arthur to calm himself into the world of nature, the hawthorn and the song of the blackbird. This encounter is significant in several ways. It reaffirms the relationship between the New Woman and the natural world, it is a direct confrontation between the female working-class discourse and the middle-clas discourse, and it shows Nell preaching class tolerance to a future New Man. Prior's New Woman has teeth, and the New Man is beginning to feel bitten: 'The sky was still luminous but the discoloration of the earth had begun. He felt a change too in the values of his judgment' (p. 107). The beginning of Arthur's conversion is not so much of the earth but spiritual. Enlightenment is on the horizon with a loss of materialistic middle-class values, or 'frippery' as Arthur will later call it.

Local dialect is seen by both Nell and Prior as part of the timeless existence of the working class, and any attack on it is important. Its significance as the voice of the working class is evident in Tant's long court case in which the narrator ridicules the lawyers. Here, the 'little King's Counsel' criticizes Nell for using dialect, and Nell retorts: 'Did yo mother my tongue? Did yo larn it to talk?' (p. 173) Nell is again defending her discourse as she defended it against Arthur's. And Prior is of course making a strong criticism of the pretensions of the middle-class discourse, represented here by members of the legal profession.

When the gang of Luddites are roaming the countryside, Nell urges Arthur the volunteer policeman not to be too eager with his rifle. With clumsy ambiguity, Arthur replies that he will be so if the priming of his rifle is damp – or because she has requested him to do so. Nell says: 'Do't for your own sake. 'Twill be a more human sort o' reason nor the one and a more accountable sort nor the tother' (p. 130). Teaching is vital to the relationship between the New Woman and the prospective New Man, only Nell's teaching comes more through working-class words (in dialect) than through the horrified middle-class looks of Lois. In Cholmondeley's middle-class world of Red Pottage, Lord Newhaven says of Rachel West and Hugh Scarlett: 'That woman loves him, and if she marries him she will reform him.'¹² Nell reforms Arthur before their marriage. It is evident that the female working-class discourse is having a mellowing effect on the middle-class one. There is less antagonism. Nell begins to eat into Arthur's consciousnes and the New Woman's words have a powerful humanizing and equalizing effect such as that experienced in Grand's 'The Undefinable: A Fantasia'. In this short story a male artist is overcome by the change brought about by the strange 'model' who has invited herself into his house, and significantly he quotes from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound in his comment:

'[E]ven my [...] manservant, to judge by his counternance, felt her effect. Her mere presence seemed to be making him, "the reptile equal" – for the moment in his estimation – "to the god", that is to say, to me. Under the strange, benign influence of her appearance as she stood there, I could see that he had suddenly ceased to be an impassive serving-machine, and had become an emotional human being'.¹³

One point of interest here is the fact that the woman is bringing the working class and the middle class together, as Prior will do in a sexual context. Grand's 'model' (of the New Woman?) later proudly proclaims: 'I am a woman with all the latest improvements. The creature the world wants. Nothing can now be done without me'.¹⁴ The tone seems over-dramatic and hardly sits well with equality, but the general message is plain: the New Woman is essential to the New Man.

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¹² Cholmondeley, p. 223.

¹³ Sarah Grand, 'The Undefinable: A romance', in Daughters of Decadence, pp. 262–87 (p. 277).

¹⁴Daughters of Decadence

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By the time he rescues Nell from the clutches of Spettigrew and his drunken drinking partners who want to murder her for being a witch, Arthur is already bewitched. He saves her life by intervening at the right time, and the voice of Prior's New Man in defence of the female working-class discourse resonates across the countryside: 'If you murder this woman [...] you will also murder me' (p. 324). A week later the couple walk together holding a milk container from which the milk has been spilt – a clear symbol of the new union, although for the present-day reader there is perhaps a little more symbolism than Prior ever intended.

Vicinus states that Egerton's outdoor scenes involve 'men and women who fish meet[ing] as comrade-in-arms, recognising and appreciating each other's skill'.¹⁵ The same of course applies to farmers. When Nell says that Arthur 'has summat to larn about the management of our light forest land', the now humble New Man meekly replies, 'You'll teach me, Nell' (p. 338). The couple now meet on equal ground. Nell even stands in the gutter so they can kiss more comfortably, and she is protective and conciliatory towards her 'little un'. She tells her family: 'Arthur's more nor my match a'ready. And he's a very good height-th, a very good height-th indeed; it's me that's a deal too lanky for a woman' (p. 339). But the most important change Nell has brought about to Arthur has been to make him recognize the unimportancce of external appearances, such as clothes. With Lois, Arthur had laughed at Nell's bizarre clothing, but he now says clothes are mere 'frippery, which anybody's money may buy, with something inside to walk them about'. He touches Nell's 'country-made bodice' and says: 'There's a woman in this [...] and that unpurchasable'. He goes on to say that Nell has taught him that, and adds that she must be an extrordinary teacher because all his years at school have taught him 'nothing in comparison' (p. 346). The match is complete, and so begins a partnership which Schreiner would have recognized, although she of course historicized it in terms of the Women's Movement. She says: '[N]ot only is it not a movement on the part of woman leading to severance and separation between the woman and the man, but [...] it is essentially a movement fo the woman towards the man, of the sexes towards closer union.' (Schreiner's italics.)¹⁶

Ignoring the context, the aim is exactly the same as the narrator is advocating in Forest Folk/ but what Schreiner constructs in Woman and Labour she sees differently. For her, both the New Woman and the New Man have always existed, but over time various factors have intervened to cause them to lose their way. Both must undergo a process of social evolution. Prior's New Woman, however, has never lost her way, but his new man is an existentialist who must create himself with her assistance. However, the goal is the same, according to a typical long sentence of Schreiner's:

'If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal of that which the modern woman desires to be – of a labouring and virile womanhood, free, strong, fearless and tender – it will probably be found imaged in the heart of the New Man; engendered there by his own highest needs and aspirations; and nowhere would the most highly developed modern male find an image of that which forms his idea of the most fully developed manhood, than in the ideal of man which haunts the heart of the New Woman.¹⁷

The sentence is bulky and clumsy but the message is clear and continues the theme of co-operation. Being a New Man, and a New Woman, is about breaking down barriers. For New Woman writers these barriers are largely concerned with sexual inequality. For Prior, there are also barriers between the classes, and not just the physical barriers such as the gates on Arthur's farm to which the working class has been excluded access. There are also, as between the sexes, deep psychological barriers between the classes. which are manifested by the intolerance of many things, an important one for Prior being dialect. Prior seems to want to heal the rift between working and middle class as well as man and woman, and he shows this above all in his New Men and New Women in Forest Folk.

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¹⁵ Egerton, p. xi.

¹⁶ Woman and Labour, p. 252.

¹⁷ Woman and Labour, p. 258.

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My James Prior posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Introduction
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter One
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Two
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Three
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Conclusion
James Prior (1851–1922) in Bingham
James Prior's Parents' Grave, Nottingham
James Prior: Three Shots from a Popgun (1880)
The Forest Folk memorial window
James Prior plaque, Blidworth

James Prior's Forest Folk: A Novel Construction of the New Woman and the New Man: Conclusion and Bibliography

CONCLUSION
The New Woman is written large across fin-de-siècle literature. Stereotypical images of the servile, decorative, and reluctantly inactive woman of the past were being overturned in an attempt to find a new voice for her which would reflect the new mood. Gender reversal was one of the characteristics of the New Woman novel, and she was exaggerated by some sources – notably in periodicals such as Punch – as being too 'masculine'. The bicycle, rational dress and the ubiquitous cigarette just some of the symbols used in these satires, but although the New Woman was a heterogeneous phenomenon, she nevertheless represented a generally concerted effort on the part of women to assert themselves. Of interest here is that in the process they gained not only sympathisers but also converts from the male camp, and in a sense James Prior was one of them. He seemed much more comfortable writing about women, and in an ahistorical way in general sympathy with their cause.

It is unknown which New Woman novels Prior had read, if any at all, although it seems certain that he was not only aware of the genre but also influenced by it. Nell Rideout is an evident New Woman type, although with significant differences. Prior dehistoricizes his New Woman, and therefore uses none of the contemporary allusions present in conventional New Woman fiction: not only is there no talk of social issues such as the Women's Movement, but there are no props such as the cigarette. In Forest Folk, Prior even sets the book outside the fin-de-siècle period as if to escape from contemporary trappings. And instead of the middle-class New Woman in the comfortable fin-de-siècle home, Prior's construction of her in Forest Folk involves converting her into a feisty working-class heroine confidently riding horses, almost always outdoors and speaking about farming or the countryside in general in a proudly expressed, broad Nottingham accent.

What clearly defines Nell as a New Woman and creates correspondences with Prior's ideas and New Woman literature – above all with Egerton's Keynotes and Discords and Schreiner's Woman and Labour – is the necessity for independence and equality. More than any other qualities, these can safely be said to be essential prerequisites of the conventional New Woman. But in a heterosexual context, which Prior's invariably is, there must be a New Man to mirror the New Woman's independence and equality. New Men are also prominent in Egerton's and Schreiner's work, but with an inevitable difference: unlike Prior's – and to a certain extent Egerton's and Schreiner's – New Woman, his New Man is not timeless, but must be taught how to become New. Particularly successful here is the New Woman Nell's Nottinghamshire dialect sparring with the budding New Man Arthur's Received Pronunciation. The conflict between these two discourses shows Prior at his most successful, and Forest Folk earned Prior some critical acclaim. His vision is one of equality, bringing together the sexes and the classes.

So to return to Lawrence's question about James Prior: 'Why is he a failure?' It is perhaps Prior's next book which would prove fatal to his continued success as a writer. Ivory Buchan simply call Hyssop Prior's worst book, and 'really so very bad that it needs no further comment'. ¹ Long before Buchan's article, and when Prior was still alive, his friend Stephen Fisher evidently came to the same conclusion, as it is the only one of the six Prior novels that he does not mention at all. Hyssop was Prior's all-important follow-up to Forest Folk, and concerns a young woman suffering from amnesia as a result of a train crash. She even loses all recall of her language and has to be taught how to speak by the middle-class family that adopts her. Only towards the end, where the book for a brief spell almost reaches the wilder excesses of a temperance novel, does the reader learn that Eva was in her former life an alcoholic prostitute in a London slum. Almost the whole book is set inside a middle-class house with dialogue far removed from the lively dialect of Forest Folk, and the language is tortured and artificial. Prior seems to have forgotten, or possibly not realized, his strengths. He has forced himself to be hidebound by the narrative convention he is writing in, and of course his perception of it. It is as though Prior is now writing in an alien language: his father's 'grave and exact way of expressing himself by his pen' is now subverting him, preventing him from expressing himself freely. Prior's characters do not travel well when transposed to exclusively middle-class surroundings: there is no inter-class tension in Hyssop as in Forest Folk in particular. Ivory Buchan sums it up quite well:

'Prior was indeed far more at home in the cottage than in the hall or the self-contained villa. He was not in a position to observe the habits of the high-born, and the middle-class milieu was singularly wanting in the liveliness, poetry and tradition which his nature demanded. And so his best characters are those that speak dialect: sturdy peasants with slow caustic tongues, beggars and wandering gypsies, beside whom the well-spoken seem a little thin. [...] He has a[n] odd stiltedness and slight unreality in "educated" dialogue, and then a sudden grip and ease when it comes to country speech'.

A Walking Gentleman, which followed Hyssop three years later in 1907, was considered by Fisher to be better than Forest Folk, and I'm almost certain that it had an influence on Lawrence's Aaron's Rod, but it was too late: it couldn't undo the damage, the public had not forgiven him for Hyssop, and Fortuna Chance in 1910 was Prior's last published work.

Three years after Prior's death, Rupert Hayra published his first and last book, Amidst Green Pastures. He dedicated it 'To the memory of my dear friend JAMES PRIOR [...] who opened my eyes and enlarged my heart, when together we wandered amidst green pastures.'² Prior's literary contribution should be remembered for its working-class New Woman and Man in the countryside, proclaiming their existence in a broad Nottinghamshire dialect and speaking out against general middle-class intolerance. They are original. As Prior said: 'I have put the best of myself into my books. They are me and nobody else.'

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¹Buchan, p. 8.

²Rupert Haywra, Amidst Green Pastures (London: Daniel, 1925), p. [5].

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ambler, R. W. Ranters, Revivalists and Reformers: Primitive Methodism and Rural Society South Lincolnshire 1817–1875 (Hull: Hull University Press, 1989)

Anabel-Cooper, Jean, 'James Prior – An Appreciation',Nottinghamshire Countryside, Spring 1965

Anonymous, Athenaeum, 'Forest Folk, By James Prior', 3840 (1901)

–––––, Athenaeum, 'A Walking Gentleman, By James Prior', 4168 (1907)

Barrie, J. M., Tommy and Grizel (London: Cassell, 1900)

Berkman, Joyce Avrech, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South Afican Colonialism (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts, 1989)

Brandon, Ruth, The New Woman and the Old Men: Love, Sex, and the Women Question (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990)

Buchan, Ivory, 'James Prior: An Appreciation', Nottinghamshire Countryside, July 1941

Buck, Claire, ed., Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 1992)

Calder, Jenni, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976)

Cholmondeley, Mary, Red Pottage (London: Arnold, 1899; repr. London: Virago, 1985)

Chothia, Jean, ed, The New Woman and Other Emancipated Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Corelli, Marie, The Sorrows of Satan (London: Methuen, 1895; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Dauzat, Albert, Dictionnaire étymologique des noms de famille et prénoms de France (Paris: larousse, 1951)

Dowie, Ménie Muriel, Gallia (London: Methuen, 1895; repr. London: Dent, 1995)

Findlater, Jane and Mary, Crossriggs (London: Smith, Elder, 1908; repr. London: Virago, 1986)

Egerton, George, Keynotes and Discords (London: Mathews & Lane, 1893 (Keynotes, and Lane, 1894 (Discords); repr. London: Virago, 1983)

First, Ruth, and Anne Scott, Olive Schreiner: A Biography (London: Deutsch, 1990; repr. The Women's Press, 1989)

Fisher, S., 'James Prior', Bookman, November 1917; repr. Nottingham: Nottingham James Prior Memorial Committee, [n.d.]

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction (London: Lane, 1979; repr. London: Penguin, 1998)

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–94), III: Letters from the Front

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Herland (Forerunner, 1915; repr. London: The Women's Press, 1979)

Grand, Sarah, The Beth Book: Being a Study from the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure: A Woman of Genius (London Heinemann, 1998 [1897])

Haywra, Rupert, Amidst Green Pastures (London: Daniel, 1925)

Huxley, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1932)

James, Henry, The Bostonians (London: Macmillan, 1886; repr. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1998)

Jordan, Ellen, 'The Christening of the New Woman: May 1894', Victorian Newsletter, 63 (1983)

Keating, Peter The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989)

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds, Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature (New York: Wilson, 1942)

Lane, Ann J., ed., The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader: The Yellow Wallpaper & Other Fictions (London: The Women's Press, 1981)

Lawrence, D. H., The Rainbow (London: Methuen, 1915; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949)

Leach, Maria, ed., Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore Mythology and Legend, 2 vols (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1949–1950), III

Leclaire, Lucien, Le Roman régionaliste dans les Iles britanniques 1800-1950 (Paris, Société d'édition les belles lettres, 1954)

Ledger, Sally, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)

Marks, Patricia, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1990)

Miller, James, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: HarperCollins, 1993)

Nelson, Carolyn Christensen, British Women Fiction Writers of the 1890s (New York: Twaine, 1996)

Opie, Iona, and Moira Tatem, eds, A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford: Oxford Uiversity Press, 1989; repr. 1992)

Prior, James, Three Shots from a Popgun (London: Remington, 1880)

–––––, Don Pedro the Cruel: A Historical Tragedy (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1882)

–––––, John Smith of London: A Comedy in Five Acts and Live and Let Live: A Comedy in One Act (Nottingham: James Prior, 1883)

–––––, Renie (London: Hutchinson, 1895)

–––––, Ripple and Flood (London: Hutchinson, 1897)

–––––, Forest Folk (London: Heinemann, 1901; repr. Nottingham: The Bromley Press, 1946)

–––––, Hyssop (London: Heinemann, 1904)

–––––, A Walking Gentleman: A Novel (London: Constable, 1907)

–––––, Fortuna Chance (London: Constable, 1910)

–––––, 'Canticles by Vacuus', Nottinghamshire Archives Office, M16,206

–––––, Letter to W. A. Briscoe, Nottinghamshire Archives Office, M263, 17 November 1919.

Richardson, Angelique, and Chris Willis, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-siècle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)

Schriener, Olive Woman and Labour (London: Unwin, 1911)

Showalter, Elaine, ed., Speaking of Gender (London: Routledge, 1989)

–––––, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991)

–––––, Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1993)

–––––, 'Smoking Room', TLS, 16 March 1995

Trigg, E. B., Gypsy Demons and Divinities: The Magical and Supernatural Properties of the Gypsies (London: Sheldon Press, 1975)

Vicinus, Martha, ed., A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (London: Century, 1990)

Wright, Gordon, and Brian J. Curtis, The Inns and Pubs of Nottinghamshire: The Stories Behind the Names (West Bridgford: Nottingham County Council), 1995)

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My James Prior posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Introduction
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter One
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Two
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Three
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Conclusion
James Prior (1851–1922) in Bingham
James Prior's Parents' Grave, Nottingham
James Prior: Three Shots from a Popgun (1880)
The Forest Folk memorial window
James Prior plaque, Blidworth