Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion

Afterword

231 Rita Felski l AFTERWORD While reading through this lucid and engaging group of essays, I was reminded anew of how much has changed in feminist studies and modernist studies over the last two decades.What once seemed outré is now acceptable,even self-evident;what once furrowed eyebrows and engendered looks of consternation is accepted with nary a murmur. When we ponder changes in thinking, our attention is often caught by breaks and ruptures, paradigm shifts, moments of conversion—iconoclasm , after all, makes for a more riveting story.And yet, we surely glean a better sense of how knowledge changes by seeing how once-eccentric ideas are absorbed,internalized,and put to work—allowing us to expend much less effort on defending such ideas and more on using, expanding, and elaborating them. Several essays in this collection,for example,explore the modernity of women’s experience in middle or late-Victorian culture without feeling the need to belabor the ways in which such experience counts as modern .What a difference from the 1980s, when “Victorian” and “modern” were widely taken as antonyms rather than synonyms and the nineteenth century was often condescended to, or even rebuked, for its retrograde realism and hidebound traditionalism. No longer bound to the experimental art of the early to mid-twentieth century,“modern” has acquired for literary critics the amplitude and reach of historical reference that it has long enjoyed elsewhere.This uncoupling of modernity from aesthetic modernism also helps explain the eclectic range of topics explored in this collection, whether Elizabeth Sheehan’s treatment of purportedly conservative works of African-American art, Justine De Young’s analysis of once-notorious French paintings overshadowed by the technical innovations of the Impressionist canon, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman’s survey of responses to the mid-Victorian coquette, or Christina Bates’s account of the social semiotics of nursing uniforms.Taken as a whole, the collection eloquently confirms that when women become central rather than 232 Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion peripheral to theories of modernity, our assumptions about what counts as conservative or modern, traditional or transgressive, are suddenly in flux. While the modern looks quite different than it did two decades ago, feminist thought has also undergone some key changes.The essays in this volume embrace views on agency, culture, and politics far removed from the kinds of arguments that were in vogue when I began thinking about gender and modernity two decades ago.The absolutist tone of either/or thinking is notably absent: the frantic search for a zone of otherness untouched by patriarchal encroachments; the insistence that the masculine structures of modernity—whether linguistic or institutional—will automatically pulverize any attempt at female actualization or expression. Instead of theories of phallocentric structures and occluded female agency, the language of “negotiation” now holds sway, used or implied in the work of virtually all the contributors.The tone is set in the introduction, when Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth Sheehan argue that “fashion enables us to conceptualize modernity not as an imposition,but rather as a negotiation .” In her account of the cultural meanings of British tea gowns and aesthetic dress, Kimberly Wahl comments that,“women actively negotiated the complex terrain of social roles available to them.”Discussing the details of the British secondhand clothing trade, Celia Marshik writes that women “did not so much consume interwar fashion as negotiate it.” And in her description of Fauset’s novels andVanDerZee’s photographs, Sheehan speaks of both “negotiation” and “adaptation,” suggesting that clothing offered various possibilities “for adjusting the norms and practices of race and gender.” What lies behind this shift in terminology and its impact on our ideas about gender, fashion, and modernity? Adorning the title of one of Stephen Greenblatt’s works,Shakespearian Negotiations,and furnishing one of the key terms of New Historicism, the idea of negotiation also has quite an independent genealogy in film theory, cultural studies, and reception aesthetics.As used by Greenblatt,the term has economic resonances,conveying how works of art draw on circulating social energies via various forms of appropriation, acquisition, transaction, and symbolic exchange. More generally, Greenblatt’s notion of self-fashioning has affinities with this collection’s focus on how women used fashion to create themselves as particular kinds of people. Indeed, the popularity of a phrase such as “negotiating gender”—which now adorns a multitude of book and essay subtitles—underscores how feminists are increasingly inclined to conceive the condition of being female or...