Tales of the working girl

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Talia Schaffer

"Most critics of aestheticism focus on the Yellow Book, the glossy Victorian journal with the shocking yellow cover that counted among its contributors Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm. But one of the best-known aesthetes, Oscar Wilde, launched his own magazine, the Woman's World. The audience for Wilde's magazine reveals another side of the aesthetic movement that has been largely forgotten. Every now-canonical male aesthete once competed with what Talia Schaffer calls the female aesthetes, whose critical and popular success made them formidable contemporaries. Not only did these women make significant contributions to the development of feminist ideologies; they pioneered new literary strategies that were incorporated by their canonical successors. Schaffer analyzes writers who have never been considered together, including Lucas Malet (Mary Harrison), Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), Alice Meynell, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Una Ashworth Taylor, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Mary and Jane Findlater, and John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Craigie). These women used aestheticism to forge a compromise between the two models of female identity available to them--the New Woman and the Angel in the House. They developed plots, ideas, and styles that would later be adopted, parodied, or revised by canonical writers such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. They used the "pretty" language of aestheticism as a strategic cover behind which they could attempt radical experiments, many of which prefigure modernist innovations."--Pub. desc.

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Kathy Peiss

Drawing on a wealth of archival sources - beauty guides and advice manuals, women's letters and diaries, advertisements and rare market research - historian Kathy Peiss traces our modern beauty culture from the buttermilk and rice powder recommended by Victorian recipe books to the mass-produced products emblematic of contemporary consumer culture. Today cosmetics are synonymous with the exploitation of women's anxieties, but Peiss looks back to uncover a vivid history in which women, far from being pawns and victims, used makeup to declare their freedom, identity, and sexual allure. Peiss highlights the leading role of white and black women - Helena Rubinstein and Annie Turnbo Malone, Elizabeth Arden and Madam C. J. Walker - in shaping an industry unique in the business world. Relying less on advertising than on women's customs of visiting and conversation, these beauty entrepreneurs wove their trade into the fabric of women's everyday lives, creating a kind of "sociable commerce" in which salesmanship blended with "women helping women" and door-to-door canvassing ("Avon calling") built on habits of neighborliness. From exclusive hair salons to straightening parlors, Peiss depicts the parallel but segregated beauty trades that thrived until the 1920s, when corporations run by men entered the lucrative field, creating a mass consumer culture that codified modern femininity.

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Desmond F. McCarthy

The prevalence of alternative families in contemporary American fiction is significant given the concern and confusion precipitated by the decline in traditional nuclear families in recent decades. John Irving's The World According to Garp, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime contain compelling utopian depictions of alternative families that are more egalitarian than traditional nuclear families. John Updike's Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux are interesting counterpoints to the optimistic novels of Irving, Walker, and Doctorow. Although Updike depicts the traditional nuclear family as the site of considerable ennui and unhappiness, attempts to flee or reconstruct the family in his novels are staggeringly destructive.

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Dorothy Stringer

"Not Even Past highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is "not even past," narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail.^ Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works constitute not an expounded or avowed but an interstitial trauma theory, which finds its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Their works parallel important essays by psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era, including Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin, and their joint explication of relationships among psyche, history, and race offers important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today. Despite their analytic acuity, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also themselves carry the traumatic past forward into the future. Indeed, the two novelists' tragic depictions of a triumphant color line and the photographer's insistence on an idiom of black primitivism lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth century. Yet even in their very failure, three U.S.^ modernists tell us that it is not enough simply to exercise critical acuity on the marks of past violence. Reading, however masterly, cannot interrupt a history in the midst of repeating itself; it can only itself reiterate the disaster." --Publisher description.