Feminism and the Scapegoat: Mona Caird, the Anthropology of Sacrifice, and the New Woman Novel of Ideas

This essay treats the essayist and novelist Mona Caird (1854-1932) as a case study in how anthropology informed feminist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries–in particular, in the ways anthropology provided polemical material for the New Woman novel of ideas. Concentrating on her 1897 collection of essays The Morality of Marriage and her 1915 novel The Stones of Sacrifice, I read Caird as a self-conscious practitioner of shock tactics: her essays and fiction draw upon the contemporary anthropology of sacrifice to render feminist arguments in the most inflammatory terms available within the limits of cultured discourse. I also suggest that Caird’s work illustrates some of the aesthetic uses of anthropology for first-wave feminism. Anthropological theories of prehistory and ‘primitive’ humanity lent fresh currency to Gothic tropes and enabled Caird to construct feminism not simply as a rational discourse of rights but as a return to pagan enchantment.