The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (review)

As historians widely recognize, a modern aesthetic of pure visuality began to structure European urban spaces in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Impressionists such as Claude Monet, naturalists such as Emile Zola, and voyeurs such as Marcel Proust all relied on an aesthetic that privileged observation of the visual surface. Mass cultural practices also produced the world as an image or picture. The transformation of daily life into spectacle revealed itself in the world exhibition, the popular boulevard practice of flânerie, the creation of the cinema, the unprecedented popularity of the theater, and the journalistic fad of "faits divers," based on the public display of private life. Cities such as London or Paris became less a meeting ground for coherent social groups, where the cultural signs of gender and class were well understood, and more a series of images arbitrarily consumed in public spaces designed precisely for that purpose.¹

Liz Conor's The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s adds immeasurably to our understanding of this urban transformation by examining its effects on gender images, and most importantly, female subjectivity. Conor's premise is that the new visual technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—popular cinema, professional and domestic photography, print media, as well as the display strategies implicit in commodity culture—constructed a new female type, often called the "Modern Woman." While this spectacularization of the feminine has already been explored by such scholars as Christine Stansell, Judith Walkowitz, and the "Modern Girl Around the World" group, among others, Conor takes her analysis one step further, to examine not only how visual culture constitutes new meanings of femininity, but also how it makes possible the production of new female subjectivities, in particular what she calls "the appearing woman."² Drawing on theories of identity elaborated by Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan, Conor conceptualizes "appearing" as a gendered scene of performativity in which women, far from being simply objectified, construct their own representations of visibility, and become (more or less strategically) spectacles of their own making. As Conor eloquently puts it,

for perhaps the first time in the West, modern women understood self-display to be part of the quest for mobility, self-determination and sexual identity. This dramatic shift from inciting modesty to inciting display, from self-effacement to self-articulation, is the point where feminine visibility began to be productive of women's modern subjectivities.

(29)

Conor's center of attention is Australia in the 1920s, although her consideration of such transnational forces as mass media and commodity capital make her geographical focus seem much greater. The study is divided into several Australian visual scenes—the urban street, the silver screen, the shop window, the beauty contest—from which new female "types" were constituted. In these scenes, "feminine visibility became subject to the logic of typing, itself a response to the anonymous metropolitan crowd and the fleeting, transient gaze that oversaw its every movement" (17–18). Hence, there was the city girl, the screen star, the mannequin, the beauty contestant, and most famously perhaps, the flapper—all new female "types" appearing mostly in cartoons, advertisements, and photographs. Conor presents a fabulously rich stock of them, and does them justice with deft, sophisticated visual analysis. By creating an inventory of types, she argues, 1920s contemporaries attempted to "contain and order the increasingly 'unfixed' and mutable meanings of modern femininity" (75). At the same time, she maintains, women learned to imitate such types, exploiting self-display for their own advantage. Her analysis of the mannequin is particularly evocative of this argument. Through cartoons and photographs, she convincingly shows how the mannequin not only gave women something to look at, but invited women "to make themselves modern in its image," by offering them "new viewing positions within culture," as well as a "self-reflexivity that helped to produce their subjectivities as consumers" (106, 128).

Conor's study continues the...