Modernism's Cult of Ugliness

ELT 46 : 4 2003 cal contexts into their arguments are by far the most effective. For example "'Will She End Like Me?': Violence and the Uncanny in Wilkie Collins's Man and Wife" the final chapter of the book, begins with a discussion of the 1870 Married Women's Property Act, passed just after the publication of the novel. The argument in this chapter goes on to trace the effects of this particular historical moment on the marriages in the book. Such details only enhance the authors' contention that Hester Dethridge functions as the uncanny throughout the novel and must be silenced for a semblance of resolution to occur. Specifically, the discussion of how Hester cannot seek justice from the magistrate for the abuse she has suffered at the hands of her husband because her scars and bruises are literally not visible to the law effectively demonstrates the importance of cultural context to any psychoanalytic reading. Though Collins deals more explicitly with the state of marriage law than any of the other texts in this study, the other chapters would benefit from such sustained attention to their own specific historical and cultural contexts precisely because those contexts are implicit and silent with the texts themselves, similar to the marginalized violence-marked bodies of women. Thus while this book begins a very useful examination of domestic violence in mid-nineteenth-century literature and the inextricable ties between hegemonic discourse of the bourgeois domestic space and its other, the violence marked bodies of middle-class women, it also points towards the need for a more historically grounded study. LISA HAGER ________________ The University of Florida Modernism's Cult of Ugliness Lesley Higgins. The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. xiii + 312 pp. 6 ills. $59.95 IN THE COURSE of her conversation with the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, Alice in Wonderland expresses her ignorance on the subject matter of "Uglification." The Gryphon gives her a patronising lecture on the topic: "'Never heard of uglifying!' it exclaimed. "You know what to beautify is, I suppose?' Tes,' said Alice doubtfully: 'it means— to—make—anything—prettier.' 'Well, then,' the Gryphon went on, 'if you don't know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.'" Alice's enquiries into the mysteries of "Uglification" are, as may be remembered, silenced after such patriarchal bullying, and she turns to other matters. 428 Book reviews Lesley Higgins might have taken this dialogue as a starting point for her exploration of the modernist "cult of ugliness" since in many ways it epitomizes many of the major themes of her book: the pugnatiousness, the right to be exclusive and control both poetic and critical discourse which characterised the Men of 1914 with their deep roots back to such nineteenth-century voices as Ruskin and Whistler. Indeed, the grotesque Gryphon embodies much of the mid-Victorian male authority which would later develop into the unpleasant misogyny of Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Higgins's study is an explicit and consistent feminist reading of modernism which, despite its theoretical stand points, takes on an impressive bulk of male writers within its slim 312 pages: Poe, Baudelaire, Ruskin, Whistler, Pater, James, Wilde, Eliot, Lewis, Pound, Hulme, Whitman, Williams, McKay, and Hughes. Within the last 20 pages of the book H.D., Marianne Moore and a dozen other female writers are finally allowed to speak out for themselves after all this male ranting. Such predominance given to male canonical writers in a feminist study is, however , only apparently a paradox; Higgins's technique is that of letting the male villains expose themselves and their own ugly cause, and in fact, I think her book would have been strengthened had she chosen to silence women writers altogether. The main body of the book contains fascinating, albeit often unsympathetic, quotations from male writers on art, criticism, modernist fragmentation and distortion and on the modern metropolis, but why do we need a female coda on flowers, gardens , and other pretty female matters? By introducing women poets as a few feeble voices towards the end, and by selecting passages on such traditionally feminine matters, Higgins would...