Limitation and Overcoming in New Women Literature: Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman

신여성문학의 한계와 극복: 엘라 헵워스 딕슨의 『모던여성의 이야기』

Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman is a pioneering female writer?s important work which was not deeply studied yet very influential in new women literature and its cultural global impact. Although women had been often praised for their beauties specially by romantic poets but their self-realization and innate values were not widely recognized until new women writers advocated their desires and active roles in the society at the end of the $19^{th}$ century. The new women writers including Ella Dixon gained popularity with their professional skills as the journalists or the contributors to the journals which were suddenly popular and actively circulated among Victorian women. From the 1880s to 1920s, in contrast with the traditional images of wives as ?the angel in the house?, these women new women writers broke the yoke of subjugated womanhood and instead tried to freely express their independent spirits and demanded their roles in the society. Although they were criticized sometimes as "the daughter of a new guise" "a lady of restless sex" or "the wild women," new girls? perky images in new women fiction brought into the new cultural phenomenon which led to the ?flapper? girl in the 1920s. Ella Dixon?s protagonist Mary Erle, strikingly similar to author herself, was a representative new woman who displayed a wide range of new cultural perspectives from a feminist?s viewpoint, but her untimely desire in the capitalized society was not fully accomplished, just promising the potentiality of the female solidarity which might be achieved later by her feminist posterity.