"Preposterous and Parallel": Realist Disorientation in Mona Caird's "The Daughters of Danaus".

Most scholarly attention to Mona Caird has focused entirely on Caird's feminist politics, particularly her views on marriage. Although laying the groundwork for feminist readings of Caird's novels, this criticism has ignored Caird's particular role in shaping fin-de-siecle realism. I argue that Mona Caird's novel The Daughters of Danaus (1894) employs a narrative strategy of realist disorientation that radically reorients readers to the interiority of the novel's heroine. As the heroine fails to actualize any of her proto-feminist desires, readers are meant to empathize with her struggle to escape traditional women's narratives. The emotionality of this novel, and its effect upon the reader, constitute its political agenda: The Daughters of Danaus seeks to change readers' opinions of women in hopes that a change in public sentiment will lead to changes in women's political and legal positions in society.