The Lady and the Vamp: Exploring Types of New Woman in Rhys and Hemingway

“One needs a lot of courage, to live”, observes Jean Rhys in Good Morning Midnight (1939) (16). It may just be the credo of her protagonist, Sasha Jansen, but could as easily have been that of Lady Brett Ashley in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). In fact, it is the very observation that implies the scorn and ridicule that the modern woman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century faced as she pushed the boundaries of a male-dominated world. The ‘New Woman’, as she was called, spread out from the United Kingdom to Western Europe and the United States and demanded the right to vote, an equal share in jobs and education, and sexual freedom. She drove herself into public visibility and in turn made way for the ‘vamp’ and the ‘flapper’. In this essay I will take a closer look at the New Woman of the twenties and thirties and explore her different types through an analysis of Brett Ashley and Sasha Jansen. In doing so I attempt to determine where the New Woman could...Show more“One needs a lot of courage, to live”, observes Jean Rhys in Good Morning Midnight (1939) (16). It may just be the credo of her protagonist, Sasha Jansen, but could as easily have been that of Lady Brett Ashley in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). In fact, it is the very observation that implies the scorn and ridicule that the modern woman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century faced as she pushed the boundaries of a male-dominated world. The ‘New Woman’, as she was called, spread out from the United Kingdom to Western Europe and the United States and demanded the right to vote, an equal share in jobs and education, and sexual freedom. She drove herself into public visibility and in turn made way for the ‘vamp’ and the ‘flapper’. In this essay I will take a closer look at the New Woman of the twenties and thirties and explore her different types through an analysis of Brett Ashley and Sasha Jansen. In doing so I attempt to determine where the New Woman could flourish and where she could not, what her internal, psychological problems were, which external challenges she met and how the texts represent these matters. Ever since their existence, Brett and Sasha have been critically and often acerbically labelled and categorised. “Bitch woman”, “prostitute” and “failure”, are just a few of a long list of derogatory terms that have been applied by their contemporaries and critics up to date. In this essay I will counteract such descriptions and argue that Brett Ashley and Sasha Jansen are, in fact, each in their own way, a late version of the ‘New Woman’ pushing the limits of their restrictions and struggling with the contemporary difficulties they encountered in this role. While the term New Woman is associated with a more serious and intellectual activist, concerned with education and politics, both the flapper and vamp connote fun. Both types take an aspect of the New Woman’s endeavours and magnify it. For the vamp this is seduction, for the flapper it is post-war hedonism in its broadest sense. It is no coincidence, then, that it is precisely this pursuit of pleasure that connects Brett Ashley and Sasha Jansen. Neither Brett nor Sasha pursues a structured path or noble purpose, neither aspire to a career, both, in fact, do whatever they want, whether society approves or not. However, in doing so Brett and Sasha do contribute to the process of women’s liberation. Not because they participate in feminist campaigns or operations – they don’t – but purely because they live how they choose to live. With their chosen acts both women rebel against male domination in general and the prevailing social norms of their respective decades. For Brett, the norms are a product of Victorian heritage, for Sasha they are the standards of a sober and sensible thirties conservatism.Show less

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The Lady and the Vamp: Exploring Types of New Woman in Rhys and Hemingway