Modernism: The Mummie of Them All

BOOK REVIEWS the distinction of a Titianic portrait." Yet equally striking is the synaesthetic effect of turning the dress away from human wear and tear toward the functionlessness of sculpture: not the hem of the gown but the foot, like a pedestal. Marriott Watson does not write of the cloth's cut or of its commodified designer, label, or brand, but might associate it with the timelessness of the mythic Orient: "[The] gown reminds you of Japan, of course, as all good decoration must." Indeed Mariott Watson analyzed the ascesis (the much-praised aesthetic economy of discipline and restraint ) of mourning, no longer the literally appalling "epitome of hypocritical , dutiful, Victorian clothing" but a "poetics of clothing," a Whistlerian palette of black, white, grey, and lavender, which like the rigid forms of the sonnet, simultaneously confined and expressed great feeling. Marriott Watson analyzed formal mourning as "the poetry of sorrow" and embroidered the phrase as "the shadow of consolation in the language of variegated woolens"; "that dawn of comfort (in heliotrope and grey) to which the deep night of sables has perforce to give place." She interpreted broken patterns as expressing emotional fragmentation. As time heals all wounds, we might add the silver-lined bodice to the cloud of black skirt: "better half-mourning has never been designed: the skirt bewailing the relative, the bodice rejoicing in the legacy." As Schaffer merrily points out, Marriott Watson can express laughter between the tears because mourning is not about grief but the performance of grief. We are left to infer that for women there are few performances like those everyday at home. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes has an argument about the repression of a female aesthetic tradition that contributed demonstrably to the better-known tradition of male Decadents and Aesthetes but was written out of epicene modernism, in part because of its very womanliness. The argument is persuasive, but what is memorable is Schaffer's wealth of research displaying the taste that enveloped everyday objects—especially the tedious objects that annoy or irritate women—as the pearl excreted by the oyster enveloped the grain of sand. Regenia Gagnier ______________ University of Exeter Modernism: The Mummie of Them All Nicholas Daly. Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. viii + 220 pp. $59.95 499 ELT 44 : 4 2001 MODERNISM over the last twenty years has been extensively revised , reconstructed and deconstructed; it has also been re-historicised, gendered, pluralised, materialised and generally pulled about. Retrospectively imposed and always problematic, the term "modernism" is vague about its object, its definition and its period. Yet, as Michael Levenson noted in his 1984 study, The Genealogy of Modernism, "Vague terms still signify" and Nicholas Daly makes significant use of the term to frame his collection of essays about male romance at the turn of the century. Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle opens with a fascinating anecdote about The Ghost, a Gothic burlesque written and staged in a Sussex village schoolhouse in December 1899. The authors included Henry James, George Gissing, Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, A. E. W Mason and Stephen Crane. Daly uses this story oÃ- fin-desi ècle collaboration between proto-modernists and popular romancers to launch his thesis that "what we see now as a chasm between two distinct literary cultures, the great divide, was scarcely more than a crack in 1899." Writing for the same magazines, published by the same houses, these writers, he points out, were subject to the same processes of social and cultural modernization—however different their literary responses . One of Daly's key arguments is that "the revival of romance," which began to overwhelm the domestic novel in the 1880s and 1890s, was a distinctively modern phenomenon shaped in the same historical mould as literary modernism. Romance, he claims, in what would once have been an oxymoron, is a form of "popular modernism." For although modernism and mass culture, as Huyssen and others have argued, emerge as two distinct structures at the turn of the century, they are structures which Daly, citing Fredric Jameson, perceives as "dialectically interrelated and...