The “New Woman” was a harshly controversial figure throughout the beginning of modern feminism and took many different contending forms. Young, English, author Amy Levy wrote her own way to the New Woman in her 1889 novel The Romance of a Shop. The story explores the relationships between four young sisters as they engage with the world for the first time – each sister takes on a definitive aspect of femininity, and the women are given barely any depth. Through the usage of archetypal understandings of feminism, Amy Levy explores women’s roles in marriage and how it engages with ideas of society and class during the nineteenth century. Because Gertrude Lorimer feels especially trapped by her own propriety and the expectations set for her by herself and society, she is able to grapple with her femininity in a way previously unexplored.
As the most functional eldest sister Gertrude Lorimer is expected to fix her sister’s mistakes and clean up their messes. She feels the enormous weight of this responsibility and yet is unable to escape it because she feels bound to her duty as the provider. Gertrude must assume “the role of a man” because of the lack of masculinity within the girls’ lives making her a “fountainhead of wisdom” and “a tower of strength” compared to her sisters (Levy 119). Gertrude is constantly being upheld to this standard, and eventually feels trapped by the responsibility she has accumulated. With the end of the novel comes the untimely death of young, beautiful, Phyllis due to an affair, causing her sin to consume her. Out of the tragedy, Gertrude finds herself newly alone and craving external, romantic, love. In a moment of solitude, Gertrude experiences a kind of nervous break, understanding life and love in a new way. The strong, formiddle Gertrude is temporarily disarmed and replaced by the vulnerable young girl she truly is. Dejected by life and consumed by sadness, Gertrude declares that Lord Watergate might have “loved her more if he respected her less” and she begs that he could “understand her, to see how weak she was, for all her struggles to be strong” (Levy 191). Gertrude is desperate for comfort and crumbles within her previously hard shell, no longer able to uphold the expectations of strength, knowledge, and bravery and longs for a man to take those typically masculine responsibilities away from her.
Amy Levy traps Gertrude in a bubble between her understandings of femininity and masculinity which eventually causes Gertrude to break. Throughout the novel Gertrude assumes responsibilities, negotiates and socializes, all new areas for women at the time. Although Gertrude is exposed to the world of new womanhood, she rejects independence and instead chooses to rely on a man to assume her responsibilities. Gertrude Lorimer is a complicated image for the beginning of feminism, because she is a woman who understands what it means to be independent and yet still chooses to find her worth through a man. The breakdown of Gertrude Lorimer is a representational of a woman’s deepest wish, to get married conjoined with the feeling of a lost independence. Gertrude ends the book engaged, fulfilling one wish and ignoring another, which creates the dichotomy of issues the New Woman is made of.