Visual Style and the Looking Subject: Nell Brinkley’s Illustrations of Modern Womanhood

Abstract

Comics artist Nell Brinkley's early twentieth-century line drawings engage provocative themes related to emerging expressions of and questions about modern womanhood. Brinkley's visually complex rhetorical techniques (strategic juxtaposition, visual chiasmus, inversion, and motif) create a space for audience contemplation, and her use of the female “looking subject” produces a meta-discourse on the gendered politics of looking. This article examines these stylistic and thematic choices through a feminist visual rhetorical analytic lens.

Keywords:

• aesthetic techniques
• comics
• feminist art
• visuality
• visual rhetoric
• working-class women

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank editor Joan Faber McAlister, Anne Demo, an anonymous reviewer, Cheryl Glenn, Michelle Smith, and Ersula Ore for giving valuable feedback during various stages of this project's development. A previous version of this manuscript was presented at the Rhetoric Society of America conference.

Notes

Comics scholar Robert C. Harvey describes pictorial expositions as hybrid verbal and visual texts that need not be sequential. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics remains the germinal text in the study of comics, despite McCloud's emphasis on comics' sequentiality. I prefer to use Harvey's terminology because it accounts for single-panel art, which has a long history and might serve as an antecedent to contemporary graphic works in their many forms.

I borrow these two areas of focus from Foss's “Theory of Visual Rhetoric.”

As I will discuss in greater detail, my use of “refigured” relies on Joan Faber McAlister's discussion of figuration and refiguration in “Figural Materialism: Renovating Marriage Through the American Family Home.”

The University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center provides an overview of Hearst's Journal newspapers in its New York Journal–American Photographic Morgue Web site (http://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/nyjadc/).

Circulation figures were sometimes included on the newspaper's masthead. For example, the circulation on June 9, 1915, was 854,858. And according to historian Kenneth Whyte, by the late 1920s one in four Americans were thought to have gotten their news from Hearst publications (464).

Comics artist and writer Trina Robbins and independent historians Loise E. Collins and Tom J. Collins have been largely responsible for preserving Brinkley's work.

Robbins's Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early 20th Century is an exception to this claim, as it features reproductions of a selection of Brinkley's line drawings. To find Brinkley's work, I searched available microfilmed copies of the New York Evening Journal. Some issues are missing and many are damaged, likely due to the high acidity and low durability of newsprint.

These microfilmed issues of the New York Evening Journal are available at the New York Public Library.

Victoria Gallagher and Kenneth S. Zagacki use the term establish visibility to explain an artist's ability to “make visible people, attitudes, and ideas” in their analysis of Norman Rockwell's civil rights paintings. Their analysis suggests that images that establish visibility are rhetorical in their ability to “invoke self-awareness about the conscious lived experience of the other” (182).

For example, another one of Brinkley's illustrations from 1915 depicts a woman flanked by two fawning men—a rich serenader with a bag of gold and a poor man with only his heart to give.

Here I refer to Thorstein Veblen's idea of spending money to display one's wealth and be seen as wealthy (49–69).

It is also worth acknowledging that Brinkley calls upon audiences experientially in much the same way that Berger later does in his influential Ways of Seeing, a collection of essays that includes some solely pictorial compositions.

My use of the term invitational is based on Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin's concept of invitational rhetoric. Foss and Griffin suggest that rhetoric can be understood as “an invitation to understanding” that cultivates “relationship[s] rooted in equality, immanent value, and self-determination” in addition to more competitive and exclusionary notions of persuasion (5).