A New Woman’s Experiment on the Novel: Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael

This article aims to examine Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889), not merely as an extension of her argument of the essay “Marriage”(1888) on Westminster Review which ignited a firestorm of controversy on ‘modern’ marriage, but also as an experiment on various devices of the contemporary fiction―Bildungsroman, domestic novel with a marriage plot, and the murderess of the late-Victorian Sensation Fiction. Viola Sedley finds herself trapped in oppressive relationships among her family and harassed by Sir Philip Dendraith and his son (whose name is also Philip). Her growth as a human being is seriously distorted and stunted, which characterizes Viola’s adolescence as ‘anti-Bildung’. Her family members force her to marry Philip to avert their financial ruin. Viola soon discovers that her married life is a “living-hell”, because of Philip’s gaslighting and stone-cold abuses including marital rapes, rarely portrayed in fiction during the Victorian era. While dreaming of escape with Harry Lancaster, she stabs Philip to death, to avoid the immediate rape. However, Caird does describe Viola neither as an adulteress-murderess of a Sensation Fiction, nor as a tragic heroine like Thomas Hardy’s Tess. As an early ‘New Woman’ novelist, Caird not only covers various topics surrounding the debate over the Victorian marriage, but also appropriates several novelistic devices and conventions to dramatize the typically thwarted progress of a Victorian woman’s life.