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Modernism/Modernity 9.3 (2002) 524



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Book Review

Living up to the Ads:
Gender Fictions of the 1920s


Living up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s. Simone Weil Davis. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. 248. $49.95 (cloth); 17.95 (paper).

Living up to the Ads is an informative analysis of the various constructions of gendered subjectivity produced by the North American advertising industry of the 1920s. Weil Davis's focus can be found in her book's subtitle, or rather, in the main title's verb more than its noun. For while several advertisements of the 1920s feature as "texts" in this study—especially in so far as they pertain to the predominantly female consumer population—her interest does not reside in an analysis of this era's actual ads, nor in the system of their design and distribution. Rather, she charts the tension that arose in American modernity between representative individualized experiences of consumerist society and the ad world's perceptions of itself and its ability to steer the public toward consumerism. With reference to P. T. Barnum's understanding of a necessary irony in advertising ("the incorporated snicker") as well as to Roland Marchand's and Jackson Lears's historical readings of modern consumerism, Weil Davis delineates the ways in which the psychology of advertising's "male-coded production ethos" continually slipped from its official, "civilizing" stance toward the supposedly more passive, "shameful" predicament of the feminized public as consumer.

For Weil Davis, these fissures and "phenomenological links" between what advertising tells its audience it is saying and what it really says are wholly involved in gendered identities. She investigates the breaks between these narratives with consistent hermeneutical finesse by probing the discourses of both ad-men and, more intriguingly, ad-women in the 1920s. This endeavor is continued on the level of modernist fiction's depictions of "advertising" men (such as Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and Bruce Barton's Christ), as well as the more tragic figures of "consuming" women—specifically, the transformations of Nella Larsen's Helga in Quicksand (1928), and Zelda Fitzgerald's Alabama in Save Me the Walz (1932). In these chapters, Weil Davis effectively and critically applies I. A. Richards's reading of the linguistic "vehicle" to the period's artifice-filled roles for the New Woman. In a double vehicular capacity, this figure of the New Woman was both the presenter of the commodity in the ad and the commodity's potential purchaser. These roles prove devastating for Fitzgerald's and Larsen's protagonists, as Weil Davis amply demonstrates. However, despite such a sympathetic rendering of the advertising industry's commodification of modern female consciousness, Living up to the Ads is not at all predictable in its judgments concerning gender constructions. Indeed, the book displays an entirely realistic approach concerning the conundrum of a scholar wanting to bring forth a feminist consciousness in places where it did not, unfortunately, always exist. Where a liberating attitude toward women can not be demonstrated as a latent or indeed conscious phenomenon in the discourses that she surveys (such as those of the female copywriters), Weil Davis does not unduly attempt to find one in their words.

An overreliance on too few archival resources (specifically, the archives of the J. Walter Thompson advertising company) limits the reach of the analysis and underscores a lack of geographical comparative data on the phenomena under consideration. Additionally, closer attention to what made advertising in the 1920s so stylistically unique might have helped rechannel this book's otherwise convincing insights into gender roles toward a stronger engagement with the ad-world's actual media, visual or otherwise.

 



Janet Ward, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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