Designing women: modernist mass culture and the formation of the female body

ABSTRACT

This essay argues for charm as feminist heuristic through which we may re-examine contemporary theories of gendered embodiment. Charm as a form of bodily habitation for women in modernity seems to be another facet of cultural or sociopolitical control over female subjects. However, this is not the entire picture. I argue that charm denotes a superficiality or refusal of depth in female embodiment that interrupts, yet also acknowledges, the physiological marks inscribed upon socially written bodies by addressing theories of the body. I then locate these interruptions in the early experimental poetry of Gertrude Stein and in selected works of mass culture including magazines, beauty pamphlets, and self-help books. Ultimately, by looking to Stein and these cultural texts, I find that women's charm exhibited by their bodies is not what it seems. There is both a seem and a seam to women's bodies, a fissure or stitching that appears when we examine how bodies are formed. This occurs through a repetition that – in contrast to contemporary theories of gendered embodiment by Judith Butler, bodily biopower by Michel Foucault, or bodily mattering in feminist new materialism – presents the body as a styled set of desires.

KEYWORDS:

• Gertrude Stein
• feminist theories of the body
• desire
• fashion
• modernist mass culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Kara Watts is completing her PhD in English at the University of Rhode Island. She researches aesthetics, gender and sexuality, and social formations in twentieth-century literature. Her dissertation, Charmed Modernisms: Fantasies of Sociality and Difference in Twentieth-Century Literature, examines how twentieth-century writers proposed new forms of social relations based in the affective-aesthetic category, charm. She is currently editing a volume on modernism and the body, Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature (The University Press of Florida, May 2019), and has previously published work in The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness (2017) and in The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies.

Notes

1. Turello, “Women, Fashion, and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde.” Insights: Scholarly Work at the John W. Kluge Center. September 24, 2014. https://blogs.loc.gov/kluge/2014/09/fashion-in-the-1920s/

2. O’Connor and Cummings, qtd. in Forgosh Louis Bamberger: Department Store Innovator and Philanthropist, 88.

3. Oliver, “1920s Women’s Magazines and Writers.”

4. The magazine was bought out in the 1940s, to then be revamped in the 1950s by what would become Glamour. The magazine in the 1940s was (tellingly) originally subtitled, “The Magazine for the BG” – an asterisk on the “BG” cheekily clarifies that it is an acronym for “Business Girl.” This later was changed in the magazine’s 1950s relaunch to “Women Who Work,” but the infantilization this subtitle boasts by deeming their women audience as “girls,” and the market typification of the slangy codeswitch “BG,” reveals the magazine’s mixed allegiances to women’s equality and women as market.

5. Garrity, Step-Daughters of England, 53.

6. “charm, n.1.” OED Online. 12 June 2015.

7. Alaimo and Hekman, “Introduction,” 1.

8. Cheng, Second Skin, 25. While Cheng does not explicitly note this here, echoes of the era’s eugenicist rhetoric of racial purity can be added easily to this list.

9. Cheng, Second Skin, 25.

10. Ibid., 1.

11. Ibid., 33.

12. In his edited collection, The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London and NY: Routledge, 1994), Moe Meyer makes a similar turn with “camp,” recognizing camp as a style that refuses the depth-surface model. Though commonly perceived as “merely an aestheticized sensibility characterized by triviality and lack of content, or simply an operation of taste,” camp is “a suppressed and denied oppositional critique embodied in the signifying practices that processually constitute queer identities” (5, 1). In his article in the same volume, “Under the Sign of Wilde: An Archeology of Posing,” Gregory Bredbeck adds to this formulation the significance of gestures, specifically, the “pose.” The pose also originates in systems of bodily mechanics such as Delsarte and Mensendieck, which this essay later discusses. Many thanks to one of this essay’s reviewers for rightly noting Meyer and Bredbeck’s work as key theoretical predecessors to my arguments on charm.

13. Stein, Selected Writings, 147.

14. Perlow, “Editor’s note,” 90.

15. Spahr, “Afterword,” in Tender Buttons, 111.

16. Perloff, Poetic License, 158.

17. Mitrano, “Linguistic Exoticism and Literary Alienation,” 87.

18. Mellow, Charmed Circle, 164.

19. Dodge, qtd. in Mellow, Charmed Circle, 170.

20. Stein, Tender Buttons, 15.

21. Ibid., 75.

22. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, 2.

23. Ibid., 3.

24. Ibid., 3.

25. Ascroft, The Magic Key to Charm, 9.

26. Ibid., 9.

27. Ibid., 19.

28. Ibid., 9–10.

29. Ibid., 11.

30. Ibid., 22.

31. Ibid., 42.

32. Janet, qtd. in Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects, 16.

33. Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects, 17.

34. Ibid., 17.

35. Ibid., 17.

36. Stein, Tender Buttons, 75.

37. Ibid., 13.

38. See Schor, Reading in Detail and Ngai Ugly Feelings, ibid. Schor points out the heightened emphasis on the detail in contemporary thought, citing Barthes, Habermas, and Foucault, the latter of whom once called for the “history of the detail.” Schor argues, however, that “[t]o focus on the detail and more particularly on the detail as negativity is to become aware, as I have discovered, of its participation in the larger semantic network, bounded on the one side by the ornamental, with its traditional connotations of effeminacy and decadence, and on the other, by the everyday, whose ‘prosiness’ is rooted in the domestic sphere of social life presided over by women. In other words, to focus on the place and function of the detail since the mid-eighteenth century is to become aware that the normative aesthetics elaborated and disseminated by the Academy and its members is not sexually neutral; it is an axiology carrying into the field of representation the sexual hierarchies of the phallocentric cultural order. The detail does not occupy a conceptual space beyond the laws of sexual difference: the detail is gendered and doubly gendered as feminine” (4).

39. Stein, Tender Buttons, 24.

40. For this argument, see chapter one “‘Replacing the Noun’: Fetishism, Parody, & Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons” in Elisabeth A. Frost, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2003). Frost’s reading of “A PETTICOAT” begins at 24.

41. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

42. Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions, 5.

43. Woolf, Orlando, 139.

44. For these arguments, see Judith Brown ibid., and Jessica Burstein’s Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (Penn State University Press, 2012), et al.

45. Cheng, Second Skin, 99.

46. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 143.

47. Ibid., 155.

48. Raitt, “The Rhetoric of Efficiency in Early Modernism,” 836.

49. Raitt quotes Arnold Bennett, who was proponent of particularly mental efficiency, which relied on “the disciplined and vigorous condition of the brain,” which must be “put into training.” The full passage utilizes racist language and what Raitt deems the “imperialist roots of the efficiency movement” (837–38).

50. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/taylor/principles/ch02.htm Taylor uses the example of shoveling at the Bethlehem Steel Company that after “thousands of stop-watch observations” made “to study just how quickly a laborer, provided in each case with the proper type of shovel, can push his shovel into the pile of materials and then draw it out properly loaded,” it became “evident that the man who is directing shovelers can first teach them the exact methods which should be employed to use their strength to the very best advantage, and can then assign them daily tasks which are so just that the workman can each day be sure of earning the large bonus which is paid whenever he successfully performs this task” (n.p.).

51. See The Mensendieck System of Functional Exercises. Practitioners of the Mensendieck method were encouraged to work in front of mirrors, preferably, with barely modest or no clothing. In formal practice rooms, the exercises utilized two mirrors in what is now a common dance practice room configuration – one to view the front of one’s body, and another at an angle that allows a view of the back. According to her later instructional text (not yet published at the time of Loy’s pamphlet), The Mensendieck System of Functional Exercises, such an arrangement of mirrors “train the eye to be the guardian which ‘polices’ the body, which locates the truant muscles that habitually shirk their function” (xii).

52. “It is not by cultivating bizarre and exaggerated types of dance movements that bodily perfection is to be attained,” Mensendieck noted, nor through “a so-called ‘expressionism,’ which, through bodily contortions, gives rein to a fancy even less esthetic [sic] than are the movements themselves.” Mensendieck, It’s Up to You, 196, 36–7. (Qtd. in Veder, ibid.)

53. Veder, “The Expressive Efficiencies of American Delsarte and Mensendieck Body Culture,” 820.

54. Loy, “Auto-Facial-Construction,” 165.

55. Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” 304.

56. Butler, Gender Trouble, 68.

57. Riviere, “Womanliness,” 305.

58. Butler, Gender Trouble, 71.

59. Grosz, “Psychoanalysis and the Imaginary Body,” 188.

60. Danius, The Senses of Modernism, 26.

61. Žižek, “Alfred Hitchcock, or, The Form and Its Historical Mediation,” 2.

62. Stein, Tender Buttons, 63.