The new woman and decadent gender politics

The New Woman has a complex relationship with Decadence. For some critics, the Decadent movement is inherently misogynistic. In Daughters of Decadence (1993) Showalter argues that Decadence defines itself ‘against the feminine and biological creativity of women … In decadent writing, women are seen as bound to Nature and the material world because they are more physical than men, more body than spirit, they appear as objects of value only when they are aesthetised as corpses or phallicised as femme fatales’.