Conclusion: Assessing the Female Gentleman

Abstract

Mary Challoner’s modernity brings us full circle, then, back to the question of the social value and impact of the ‘Female Gentleman’. Is this a positive feminist ideal, or should a critic place more emphasis on the pessimistic view that middlebrow novelists had contempt for the sex in general and expected very few women to live up to the ideal? Can the gentlemanly ideal be disentangled from its class baggage? What, if any, impact does the model of the Female Gentleman have on twenty-first-century readers of these novels? These questions can be combined into one issue: the extent to which the concept of the ‘Female Gentleman’ might simply be dated beyond usability by its reliance on social distinctions that contemporary Anglophone societies have ostensibly left behind. Can a twenty-first-century woman really adopt as an ideal of behavior the same model theoretically held by Victorian imperialists who expected their wives to be domestic angels? If I am correct about the project that middlebrow writers were undertaking after World War I — freeing the word gentleman from its class and gender restrictions — they had a monumental task to accomplish, and their own attitudes toward class and race were ambiguous enough to give a reader who admires their goals pause. Yet there is value in their conception of feminism that cannot simply be discarded, either.