Marianne Moore and the Arcadian Pleasures of Shopping

When R. P. Blackmur declared in 1935 of Marianne Moore that 'no poet has ever been so chaste',he was deploying a gendered critical language describing Moore's work as ideologically pure, untainted by the commercialism of capital; at the same time, he was carefully demarcating the boundaries between high culture and mass culture (Blackmur 1935:206). However, while Moore's status as an exemplary modernist has secured her a place in the modernist canon, this has inevitably led to readings that marginalize aspects of the poet's work that declare an interest and textual investment in mass culture. Moreover, interpreted within these narrow critical parameters, Moore's verse has been effectively transformed into what Randall Jarrell called one of the 'nicer animals': it has been declawed and tamed, divested of its more radical properties in order to reinforce a self-sufficient and autonomous modernist aesthetic. While it is undoubtedly important to recognize the ways in which modernist women writers have contributed to forms of avant-garde culture, those forms should be identified, in Rita Felski's words, as 'only one of a continuum of cultural practices' rather than as the dominant model for critical investigation (Felski 1994:191-208). Tracing the relation between Moore's poetry and the discourses of fashion, advertising and consumerism is an attempt to resist reproducing what Andreas Huyssens has referred to as 'the great divide' reinforcing modernism's cultural hegemony. The philosophical frames of modernity, particularly as it has been theorized by Walter Benjamin, provide the discursive context for making visible and valuable Moore's preoccupation with aspects of her own contemporary popular culture. Furthermore, by gendering this modernity, by recognizing the ways in which the formations of capital produce and consume 'woman' as discursive subject, Moore's poetic shopping sprees reveal the difference gender makes to our understanding of modernity and its relation to modernism. Moore's work, as illustrated by archival material based at the Rosenbach Museum and Library as well as her poems and her critical essays, is as much constructed out of the arcadian pleasures of modernity as it is the expression of the poetics of high art. With its investment in the aesthetics of display, the discourses of advertising and the pleasures of consumption, Moore's poetry offers a model for reading a gendered modernism in the context of modernity. The poem, 'When I Buy Pictures' (1921) will provide the focus for this discussion as it suggests not only how the aesthetic is related to consumer culture but it also reveals the textual traces of a debate taking place in the visual arts in the United States concerning the nature, value and function of 'pictures' as cultural signs. However, before looking more closely at the poem, it might be worth reconceptualizing Moore's writing in relation to some of the recurrent 'motifs' of modernity.     

Fashioning Readers: The avant garde and British Vogue , 1920-9

Mahood explores both the work of modern writers and work about modern writers as published in British Vogue during the 1920s. She demonstrates how a familiarity with trends in modern literature was presented as but one of the de rigeueur activities of the modern woman au fait with contemporary tastes. In doing so, the role of non-literary, or non-specialist, magazines in contributing to the rise of a common reader familiar with the practitioners and practices of modernist art is examined. Furthermore, she shows how the perceived 'restricted' value (or appeal) of modernism, in addition to the movement's palpable concern with modernity, became the very means by which modernism entered into the literary and cultural mainstream during the 1920s.     

Religion and modernity: Gender and identity politics in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh as in other Muslim majority societies, Islamist forces have emphasized the importance of women adopting traditional religious practices, such as wearing “the veil”, as a cultural symbol and a weapon in the movement of Islamization against Western Modernization. On the question of modernity although some Islamic groups hold extreme attitudes of imagining it as ‘immoral’ and ‘dangerous’, there are other activists who negotiate to engage modernity by controlling its negative impacts through reinventing Islamic tradition. The discursive shift is mainly towards establishing modern civil society based, middle class led and urban organizations. In reaction to the image of commodification of the woman's body in Western modernity, they construct women wearing hijab in the public space as an image of “Modern Muslim Women”. This article explores how women negotiate modernist and Islamist discourses and thereby engage in the politics of everyday living. It argues that woman's agency moves beyond analysis of women as mere victims of ideological constructions.     

Religion for the Modern Girl: Maude Royden in Australia, 1928

When the feminist preacher Maude Royden (1876–1956) toured Australia in 1928, she promoted modern religion for modern women. This article examines the Australian press coverage of Royden’s visit to shed light on the complex relationships between religion, modernity and the female body as they were constituted in Australia in the 1920s. In doing so, this article contributes to growing historiographic debate concerning the intersections of modernity and religion and serves to disrupt further those narratives which have presumed processes of modernisation and secularisation to be running in parallel. Australian newspapers eagerly spread the news of Royden assuming the previously masculine space of the pulpit and they promoted her new form of Christianity as scientifically credible and suited to modern Australia women’s lives. In advancing my analysis, I also compare Royden’s press reception in Australia to that of her contemporary, Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944). McPherson likewise also offered a religious response to modernity and a new religious femininity, but the Australian media showed comparatively little interest in her visit. I argue that although religious femininities were being recrafted for modernity in the pages of Australian newspapers, only certain expressions of religiosity and modern femininity were considered compatible.     

Fashionable ‘Formation’: Reclaiming the Sartorial Politics of Josephine Baker

ABSTRACT

This article historicises Josephine Baker’s use of fashion in terms of contemporary black stage performers, particularly Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s evolving black feminist politics. It examines Beyoncé’s references to Baker as an inspiration for her own black feminist art and argues that they offer an opportunity to re-examine Baker’s legacy in our own contemporary moment. Using Beyoncé’s arguments about Baker as a starting point, the article examines Baker’s fashions and costumes and argues that she used them to manipulate her relationship to the models of white supremacy that attempted to structure her identity and relationship to the public sphere. Using contemporary black feminist criticisms of respectability politics, it argues that Baker’s fashions produced a politics of disrespectability, where clothing and body worked together to carve out space for black feminist experimentation. By constantly changing the terms through which her audiences and the public read her, Baker carved out a subjective space where she could become in relation to her clothes without restraining herself to the identity categories normatively allotted to black women.     

The Artist is Present: performing the icon

This article considers the work of performance artist Marina Abramovi?, focusing on the use of reperformance, the practice of hiring others to recreate historical performance works, in her 2010 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, The Artist is Present. Brawner utilizes Abramovi?'s artistic work with iconography and icon making and draws on her own experience as one of the retrospective's reperformers to highlight both the affective work that went into the creation of the show as well as its function as a religiously inflected meditation of celebrity and art stardom. The artist's work is explored through sources including New York Times art critic Holland Carter's turn of phrase “diva hokum,” a pejorative here reclaimed to mean the process of one's own icon making, a control of image and message that becomes integral to the structure of the work, and a balancing act between the performance and its afterlife.     

Eve Drewelowe: feminist identity in American art

Eve Drewelowe (1899–1988) was an American artist who attended the University of Iowa, where she received a BA in Graphic and Plastic Arts in 1923. During these early years when university art programs were being established, Drewelowe became the first person to receive an MA in art from the University of Iowa; one of the first people to receive such a degree in the United States. Drewelowe reinvented herself throughout her life and her artwork reflects a current knowledge of modern styles that emerged in the twentieth century. Drewelowe exhibited under the name Eve Drewelowe Van Ek shortly after her marriage in 1924 until the early 1950s, when she chose to resume using only her own surname. During the three intervening decades, her signature varies from one artwork to the next. In some instances, the artist later rubbed out or painted over the ‘Van Ek’ with little attempt to conceal the change, leaving a visual indicator of the artist's identity struggles. Her personal papers also reflect the challenges she faced reconciling public expectations of her role as the wife of a university dean with her profession as an artist. This essay considers the ways Drewelowe performed her identity as an artist in order to maintain her personal autonomy against the backdrop of the male dominated social and artistic world.     

Divining Psychoanalysis: Melancholia,Dostoevsky and Kristeva

Julia Kristeva has recently depicted Melanie Klein as a female genius in divining and bringing to life her analytic patients' psyche, by identifying with them and projecting her fantasies into them, as Kristeva says mothers do in transforming the proto-fantasies constituted by their infants' object-oriented bodily drives into semiotic and symbolic meaning. In explaining how Kristeva arrives at this account of psychoanalysis Sayers discusses her previous work on melancholia, and the accounts by Freud and particularly by women psychoanalysts--notably Joan Riviere, Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal--of melancholia as a defence against loss and guilt over the hateful destruction of others through thing-like self-division of hate and love. She also explores the religious and psychoanalytic theories of William James and Wilfred Bion. Most of all, however, she illustrates Kristeva's approach to melancholia, as Kristeva does herself, by using the example of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , in which Sonia identifies with the arguably melancholic Raskolnikov and thereby resurrects him to psychological life. Sonia, however, is a fiction. Kristeva, by contrast, in describing Melanie Klein as a female genius in transforming psychoanalysis into a species of divination, presents such ideals and fictions about women and femininity as fact.     

Reviews

Ways of Seeing Red

Mary Joannou, ’Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows’: Women's Writing, Feminist Consciousness and Social Change 1918–38, Oxford: Berg, 1995, £14.95.

Gen Doy, Seeing and Consciousness: Studies in Women, Class and Representation, Oxford: Berg, 1995, £14.95.

A Fragile Space

Gill Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant‐Garde: Modernism and ‘Feminine’ Art, 1900 to the late 1920s, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, £45, £16.99 (pbk.).

Poetic Dissent

William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (eds.), The Poems of Anna Letetia Barbauld, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Fictional and Actual Nobodies

Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670–1820, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, £25.

Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women's Fiction in England 1790–1820, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, £35.     

Bedtime

In a review of the responses to British artist Tracey Emin's exhibition of her own bed as an artwork nominated for the 1999 Turner Prize, Merck considers it as a figure of the personal trauma said to be constitutive of subjectivity in the decade. Reviewing theorists of the period including Hal Foster, Marc Augé and Wendy Brown, she considers the artist's work as an illustration of individual isolation assuaged by narcissism. Must the woman artist function as the victim of her own cult of celebrity? In the ensuing months since her nomination, Emin's changing circumstances suggest that other fates- and other histories- may be possible.     

‘This Spider Web of Woman's Life’: Private Space and Community Life in Peter Abelard

This essay explores such complex and ambiguous presentation of convent life in Helen Waddell's novel Peter Abelard (1933), considering Heloise's fear of women's communities as expression of concerns central to women's writing published in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Waddell uses Peter Abelard to intervene in these contemporary debates about private and public spaces. The dislike which her Heloise expresses for women's communities may, given the text's feminist ideology, seem surprising, but, as discussed, similar anxieties are voiced in texts by several of Waddell's contemporaries, and the novel is shaped by this tension between private, autonomous individual and shared public space. Peter Abelard is read in relation to selected journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (late 1920s), Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1928) and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935).     

Feminist utopias and questions of liberty: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as critique of second wave feminism

Taking her cue from the recent Cindy Sherman exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York, 'New Photographic Work 2000', Meagher considers the ways in which feminist art critics have analysed Sherman's work since it was first 'discovered' by Douglas Crimp in 1979. Her claim is that analyses of Sherman's work are involved in a debate about whether the images are useful or destructive to feminist politics. More importantly, what has come to be known as Sherman Studies places an emphasis not upon Sherman's art, but rather upon the identify of the artist. Instead of enquiring into the political status of the art works (are they feminist?), critics often end up asking after the political status of the artist herself (is she feminist?). Meagher's essay is in four sections: 'Encounters' traces the critical reaction to Sherman's work; 'In or Out of the Picture' considers the critical tendency to impose a narrative upon the work and the simultaneous insistence that this narrative is informed by the artist's feminist intent; 'New Photographic Work 2000' looks at the most recent reactions to Sherman'swork and prepares for the final section, 'Feminist Occasions', in which Meagher draws upon Nancy Miller and considers the relationship between feminist critics and their resistant celebrity.     

The mother's house of the San Francisco Zoo: the art of engendering space in the modern city

The Mother's House of the San Francisco Zoo opened in 1925 as a sanctuary for women visiting the grounds, and in the 1930s, was ornamented through an ambitious decorative program sponsored by the Public Works of Art Project. The program consists of long-overlooked murals painted by Helen Forbes (1891–1945) and Dorothy Pucinelli (1901–1974), and large-scale mosaics executed by the Bruton sisters—Margaret (1894–1983), Esther (1896–1992), and Helen (1898–1985). While the Mother's House could be interpreted as symbolizing a gilded cage that restricted woman's agency within the modern city, it can also be read as expanding women's roles in the public sphere. My article examines the Mother's House as a case study of the gendering of space wherein the site served not to inhibit woman's movement and participation in the modern city, but rather expanded the feminine realm beyond the domestic sphere, as well as supported the professionalization of women as public artists.     

Creating a (gendered?) military identity: the Women's auxiliary air force in Great Gritain in the second world war

The resistance of women to the vote is often regarded as a form of anti-feminism, particularly when it has its roots in an attachment to gender roles. However, the arguments of the women of the Radical Right who opposed the franchise at the beginning of the twentieth century not only contributed to the public debate on woman's role in society but also unmistakably evoked some of the teachings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which, far from challenging the patriarchal ideology of the separate spheres, celebrated domestic virtues and invited the ‘Sex’ to regard the private world as its natural preserve. By appropriating a Wollstonecraftian kind of citizenship, based on the belief that woman's natural sphere was the home and maternity her true vocation, the Antis emerge paradoxically in the history of the cause more as the heiresses of the mother of feminism herself than as her fundamental opponents.     

‘you like to mix things up on purpose …? hoy,what are you trying to prove?’: representations of recent (hi)stories in Jessica Hagedorn's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Gangster of Love</Emphasis>

This paper examines how The Gangster of Love (1996), the second novel by Filipino American artist and writer Jessica Hagedorn, dismantles ready-made assumptions about the construction of minority and mainstream cultures. Spanning the period from the 1970s to the early 1990s, Gangster depicts the life of Rocky Rivera, a Filipina American young artist. As it portrays Rocky's family and friends, the novel examines the drastic re-articulation of the US’s self-image brought about by Filipino Americans and other groups marginalized as minorities by virtue of their ethnic, socio-cultural, and/or sexual identities. The narrative challenges dominant notions of who and what makes history, juxtaposing historical references with fictionalizations of real episodes and completely fictional incidents, and making a constant use of parody, irony, jokes and clichés. This paper studies Rocky's reworks of her multiple ethnic and socio-cultural allegiances in connection with her passion for music and popular culture, placing these reworks in the context of the Philippines’ colonial and neo-colonial background and multi-cultural US history. It also considers succinctly how Gangster's postcolonial dimensions intersect with a feminist and postmodern consciousness in a gendered strategy of socio-cultural resistance and critique.     

Jesusa Rodriguez: An inconvenient woman

For the symposium “Where Is Ana Mendieta,” I discussed and projected PowerPoint images, starting with my 1963 Eye Body – 36 Transformative Actions as a precedent for the explicit, artist body as both image and image-maker. This work, as well as Body Collage, Water Light/Water Needle and Meat Joy, provided a practice for Ana's intensive submersion with her body as subject. Images of our parallel affinities within natural forms and materials were shown, establishing our urgent permissions to regard the sensory, psychic realms in which our bodies manifested energy against cultural constrictions and prohibitions. Also shown was my homage Hand/Heart for Ana Mendieta inspired by a dream instruction sent by Ana shortly after her death.     

Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism

“Spaces of self-consciousness” examines three environments created by the Italian artist Carla Accardi in light of an emerging feminist politics. Though better known as a painter, Accardi created these three-dimensional works during an era of political and social upheaval in which her own commitment to the Italian feminist movement began to take shape. Her environments were deeply imbricated both with her own experience of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, as well as with radical design proposals that rejected the current state of civilization. This article examines how these environments functioned as prototypes of the transient, anti-institutional spaces that she would later create as co-founder of Rivolta femminile, a historic Italian feminist collective, and examines a previously obscure moment in Carla Accardi's career.     

The Subversive Stitch: Female craft,culture, and ecriture

By making an embroiderer her central narrative voice and embroidery both the structural and the thematic focus of her most recent novel (Le Passé empiété [The Back Stitch]), Marie Cardinal complements Rozsika Parker's efforts (The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine) to trace the parallel histories of embroidery and femininity through the novel. For both Parker and Cardinal, embroidery figures the creative tension between conformity and subversion that Cardinal posits as common to all women and that results in Le Passe empiete in a complex reevaluation not only of the female artist herself but of both the traditional and the feminist critical context within which she currently creates. In particular, Cardinal explores the relationship between women's traditional domestic tasks and their artistic production, and she uses the specific qualities of embroidery to rethink common assumptions about literary influence and authority, the writing process, and the mythic tradition.     

The sacred may not be the same as the religious: Angela Carter's ‘Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene’ and ‘Black Venus’

John Everett Millais's painting The Bridesmaid (1851) depicts a young woman, on the evening of a wedding, attempting to conjure up a vision of her own future husband. This work has been linked to a number of others by Millais dealing with marriage, and has been seen as an articulation of 'matrimonial ideology'. Brown sets the picture in the context of the widespread, though clandestine, practice of fortune-telling, through which women in particular attempted to foreknow, and thus control, the central event of their lives. One of the most frequent questions asked of fortune-tellers was 'whom shall I marry?', the question the girl in the painting has herself asked. However, drawing on recent critical work on 'proposal composition' pictures, Bown argues that men, too, faced great uncertainty on the brink of marriage, and that artists repeatedly explored this uncertainty through attempts to represent a complex female subjectivity in their works. In The Bridesmaid Millais (who was thinking about marriage in the early 1850s) depicts a woman telling her fortune, but he also seeks to represent her as full of thoughts and feelings. The artist, and the viewer of the painting, then, engages in an act of divination in which he tries to discover the mysterious secrets of female subjectivity.