The New Woman
The opening paragraph of Grand’s essay, “The New Woman and the Old” continues with the thematic concern of the “Woman Question” by directly challenging the concept at the center of the debate. This would be the idea that a “New Woman” has arrived to supplant what must, by definition, have been the “Old Woman.” The tone of the imagery quick establishes her perspective on this subject:
“Where is this New Woman, this epicene creature, this Gordon set by the snarly who impute to her the faults of both sex while denying her the charm of either—where is she to be found, if she exists at all? For my own part, until I make her acquaintance I shall believe her to be the finest work of the imagination which the newspapers have yet produced.”
The Bawling Brotherhood
In “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” the author arrives at a memorable image to situate the class of men most distinctly opposed to “every attempt on the part of our sex to make the world a pleasanter place to live in.” The Bawling Brotherhood is subdivided into two categories which are given their own separate examples of imagery: those satisfied with the “cow-kind of woman” as most convenient and those so “under the influence of the scum of our sex” that he judges all women by that experience.
I See London
The title character of The Beth Book is filled with descriptive imagery of the world as seen through the perspective of the titular protagonist. One of the simplest examples but in that simplicity also an example of the strength of her use of this literary technique is description of London. London becomes two towns for Beth as a result of how she sees it and how she sees it is notably influenced by whom she is seeing it with:
“Strangely enough, some of the scenes she saw during her rambles in London helped to soften her. While she was under her husband's influence, she saw the evil only, and was filled with bitterness. London meant for her in those days the dirt and squalor of the poor, the depravity of the rich, the fiendish triumph of the lust of man, and the horrible degradation of her own sex”
Ideala
The introduction to the title character of Ideala opens the book. The first lines of the first paragraph on the opening page of Chapter I gives the world Ideala constructed entirely of abstract imagery. The result is the commencement of an impressionist vision of the New Woman in individualize form:
“She came among us without flourish of trumpets. She just slipped into her place, almost unnoticed, but once she was settled there it seemed as if we had got some- thing we had wanted all our lives, and we should have missed her as you would miss the thrushes in the spring, or any other sweet familiar thing. But what the secret of her charm was I cannot say. She was full of inconsistencies.”
