In their analysis of the 'sexualized visions of change and Exchange' which mark the end of the nineteenth century (Smith, Marshall University) 1 and the uncertain formation of the twentieth, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar read the leitmotif of the late-Victorian New Woman as one fantasy among many, part of a sequence of imaginative literary extremes that reflects the changing stakes in an escalating war between the sexes. As Gilbert and Gubar understand this sequence, the New Woman emerges against a palette of other phantasmagoric images-most notably, the femme fatale, who, in Swinburne's words, incarnates male anxieties about that 'silent anger against God and man' which 'burns, white and repressed, through her clear features.'
