The New Woman
The symbol most closely identified with Sarah Grand was coined by her in her essay, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question.” What has often been lost over the decades is that Grand presented three different symbolic incarnations of women not just within the same essay, but the same paragraph. The first two—“cow-woman” and “scum-woman” are the types that men are most comfortable discussing because the are within their limited comprehension. The “New Woman” is introduced as a symbol representing the female who “is a little above him” and rejects the “Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere” mentality.
Bawling Brotherhood
It is significant to note Grand does not necessarily lump all men into those who are incapable of understanding the New Woman. In the same essay mentioned above, she coined yet another symbolic phrase to describe this admittedly majority cross-section of the male populace. The Bawling Brotherhood represents that class of male intellect which looks at women with ambition to be more than what men tell them they can be and is moved only to inquire: “If women don’t want to be men, what do they want?”
The Artist and the Model
In Grand’s short story, “The Undefinable: A Fantasia” the narrator is representative of a kind man who is distinct if not separate from the Bawling Brotherhood. He is struggling to transform into the New Man capable of understanding and appreciating the New Woman. This struggle is portrayed symbolically through the model who arrives at his door and whom he at first intends to reject. Instead, he is moved to paint her and in doing so moves forward toward not just becoming a better artist but becoming a better artist by virtue of becoming a better man, one capable of transcending the outmoded male gaze and seeing her as an individual. But she disappears before he can finish either the painting or the transformation and in the doing so it becomes apparent that the symbolism is symbiotic: man evolve beyond the Bawling Brotherhood but such advancement is impossible with the New Woman to help him along.
Syphilis
In her novel The Heavenly Twins, the sexually transmitted disease syphilis becomes a symbol for the sexual double standard which overlooked men having multiple sex partners, but demonized women who did the same. By telling a story in which this moral practice paradoxically punishes an innocent women because of her inexperience sexuality, the disease gets pulled out the confused moral morass to identify the male as the agent of immoral behavior capable of killing wives and deforming babies.
The Silly Set
In “Conversation: Nothing is more Cheering Than Healthy Stimulating” Grand argues that British women of the Victorian Era have become dullards because they lack the ability to carry on conversation. This lack is not due to lack of education but rather an absence of stimulation to be interesting. The result creates a vicious circle in which English women had come to lack the ability to engage in interested conversation because no one sought her out for interesting conversation. So where does the blame for this lie? In that aspect of society which controls manners and etiquette and determines what is proper behavior for young women. This amorphous invisible yet profoundly influential set of misguided influencers burdened with more social sway than collective intellect are given symbolic status by Grand with the comprehensively dismissive term “Silly Set.”
