The Odd Women

Wake is a "yeoman," but makes up racially for what he lacks socially. This will be the race-preserving, the eugenic-the Eugeniac-marriage. Such racially sound marriages should preferably be complemented, as Allen's language suggests and as the conclusion to The Beth Book makes clear, by a mystical union. Mystical-eugenic unions were all very well, but they did presuppose an abundant supply of healthy, strong-willed young men and women. Narratives promoting race preservation had to balance the dream of a New Hedonism against the reality, as it was perceived, of social decrepitude. Whereas the New Woman novelists tended to pair different types of degeneracy-the hoggish and the hysterical, Morlock and Eloi-their successors tended to pair a couple seeking regeneration with a -620- couple or couples doomed to degeneracy. This new pairing emerges tentatively in Gissing's Odd Women (1893) and In the Year of Jubilee (1894), then more strongly in Forster and Lawrence. Forster's Longest Journey (1907) incorporates two separate plots, which just happen to coincide at a place called suburbia ...»