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Chapter 7 Private Femininity, Public Femininity: Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film Samiha Matin As early as the 1930s, critics categorized the costume film as “feminine,” because it focused on the emotional subject of love in contrast to historical bio-pics that were deemed “masculine” by tending to political topics (Robe 2009, 71). While the distinctions between types of historical films are neither absolute nor exclusive, costume films give primacy not just to romance but also to female protagonists while highlighting the visual drama of private life through costume and interiors. Though a prevalent genre in the 1930s and 1940s, costume films declined in the postwar years until the late 1980s and 1990s, when a new cycle emerged, buttressed by BBC period drama serials broadcast in America on public television. The distinctiveness of the costume film lies in drawing together history and the private sphere to investigate femininity, a project that relies heavily upon the nineteenth-century organization of separate gendered spheres, making the feminine private and masculine public easily legible. The instant “women’s world” that the separate spheres formation provides also comes with social protocols that inhibit sexual relations between men and women, thus creating conditions for romance and emotionality to flourish. Because the domestic novel contributed to naturalizing divisions of public and private and offered representations of the psychologically interiorized self, costume films characteristically draw on literary sources as channels for gender history. While the gendered spheres structure has receded, it produced images and concepts that continue to resonate for many men and women, since women still take primary responsibility for children and home management even though working outside the home. Given that costume films have often been viewed through the lens of British heritage critiques that subordinate questions about gender, it is important to rethink these films through the rubric of genre, for this refocuses narrative and aesthetic elements as registering cultural changes, particularly shifting ini -xii_1-262_Gled.indd 96 12/13/11 11:17 AM Private Femininity, Public Femininity 97 vestments in femininity that feed back into social imaginaries. This approach examines femininity as an identity style influenced by broader experiences of private and public. As historical setting and romantic plots are elements shared with other genres, differentiating their deployment in the costume film can tell us about the resonance of the genre as well as about cultural demands on narratives of femininity. Arguably, the contemporary costume film responds to a pervasive perception that social changes wrought by the rising profile of women’s careers, digital media, and intensifying commercialization of femininity have increased publicness for women while the private grows less accessible. Losing some of its practical ground, femininity in the postfeminist era “goes public”—where its ties to privacy are simultaneously romanticized and reimagined. These films access privacy as a “structure of feeling,” defined by Raymond Williams as “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” (1977, 132). Based in affective knowledge, these are unprocessed ways of understanding social vicissitudes. The costume film articulates privacy as a structure of feeling through dilemmas of feminine behavior, in order to realign the private sphere with autonomy or, conversely, to find meaning in publicness for women. This chapter examines the contemporary costume film’s unique interrelationship of femininity and privacy by focusing on how the historical constraints of privacy force the postfeminist heroine to make herself anew as a feminine subject. I use the two poles of privacy and publicness to organize relationships between gender, feeling, time, aesthetics, and identity, worked through and re-envisioned by costume films for present-day viewers. By these means, the values of privacy and publicness are recalibrated to accommodate a mutable femininity that uses aesthetics and feeling as creative methods of adaptation. The heroine’s process of identity construction consists of tests, experiments, and play with self-presentation to find and utilize the sanctioned meanings and covert privileges afforded by femininity. In reassembling elements of gender and galvanizing their force to new ends, spaces for covert resistance and pressure-release emerge. This course is one of “tactical aesthetics,” or the deployment of style to access power which makes use of gendered acts, expressions, dress, and etiquette to design new advantages. To explore this concept, I analyze two films, Elizabeth (1997) and Marie Antoinette (2006), as divergent visions of femininity. Costume films often use the figure of the queen (Elizabeth, Mrs. Brown [1997], Marie Antoinette, The Other Boleyn Girl [2008], The Duchess, The Young Victoria [2009]) to position a...

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