Student Profiles: Rebecca J. Mueller
My
current research interest resides in the relatively recent discovery of emerging
New Woman writers in the late nineteenth century. The monstrous
role the New Woman personified with her cigarettes, slacks, and bicycle riding
ways add a grim awareness to the nineteenth-century views of women, more specifically
women writers. By reading novels, short stories, and poems by writers
in the 1890s such as Gilman, Gissing, and Hardy, along with more prominent
writers such as G.B. Shaw, a better understanding of the New Woman’s
role and the apprehension she caused is evident. I am intrigued by male
and female writers who produced starkly realistic, multi-dimensional characters. Furthermore,
I am interested in studying recent critics’ work on the New Woman movement
in an attempt to find out what happened to these forgotten texts for nearly
a century.