This chapter explores the literary 1890s as a stage where new character types were established and exploratory formations of narrative emerged. Before the radical turn into modernism, work was already being done to deconstruct nineteenth-century forms of fictional realism, to inflect its shapes and patterns. The work of Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Willa Cather sowed seeds that bore fruit over the next decades. Thus, Chopin was fascinated by the human margin, by varieties of behavior that suggested new configurations of sensuality and transgression. Stephen Crane proffered a purgation of nineteenth-century prose, developing a stripped-down realism that connected “the real” to a documentary discourse. In Cather’s early writing a fascination with female performance was allied to an interest in European movements such as Aestheticism and Symbolism. Linking both subjects, her focus on a sensory writing pointed forward to a modernist fascination with embodiment.

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’