Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1840–1914 by Michelle J. Smith (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1840–1914 by Michelle J. Smith
In Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1840–1914, Michelle J. Smith lucidly traces a major cultural shift in discourses surrounding female beauty in nineteenth-century British print culture and posits a growing consumer culture as catalyst for this change. Analyzing a wide variety of primary sources—including beauty manuals, periodical articles, editorials, advertisements, and novels—and building on the work of earlier scholars of beauty and fashion, such as Jessica Clark, Christine Bayles Korstch, Martin Morag, Galia Ofek, Aileen Ribeiro, Valerie Steele, and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Smith meticulously argues that concepts of female beauty shifted significantly between 1840 and 1914. During this period, beauty writers moved from a valorization of natural beauty and fear of the artificial to a normalization of female beauty grounded in daily regimens, commercial beauty products, and cosmetics. In this monograph, Smith offers the reader a compelling "narrative of the interrelationship of female beauty with the development of the modern, female consumer" (2).
Part 1, "Nature vs Artifice," lays out a foundational understanding of the discourses of female beauty in nineteenth-century print culture, including periodical print. In the first chapter, "The Impossible Ideal: Beauty, Health and Character," Smith considers medical perspectives on health and beauty as manifested in D. G. Brinton and George Napheys's Personal Beauty (1870), advice manuals from cosmeticians exemplified by Madame Bayard's Toilet Hints (ca. 1883), and representations of beauty in fiction using the examples of George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) and Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady (originally serialized in weekly installments in the Graphic from September 1874 to March 1875). The detailed close reading of each source reveals a unique perspective on beauty that aligns [End Page 321] with the positionality of the author, while also supporting a sense of shared values. What emerges is a "Victorian beauty ideal . . . tied to expectations of the natural and healthful" (51). The second chapter in this section, "The Dark Side of Beauty: Cosmetics, Artifice, and Danger," amplifies the underside of the Victorian ideal and addresses threats posed by beauty. Beauty manuals from the 1830s and 1850s by Mrs. A. Walker and dancer and courtesan Lola Montez underscore the harmfulness of artificial cosmetics. Similarly, women's magazines ranging from Queen (1861–1958) to Woman (1890–1912) critiqued cosmetics and instead advocated a model of beauty based on health and hygiene (63). Extending the analysis, novels of the period, including L. T. Meade's The Sorceress of the Strand (1902), link cosmetics and crime through characters inspired by the infamous criminal cosmetician Madame Rachel (68). Even natural beauty can be dangerous, as Smith shows in her analysis of the aptly named Isabel Vane in Mrs. Henry Wood's New Monthly Magazine sensation novel East Lynne (1861–62).
In part 2, Smith considers conceptions of female beauty in relation to age. Chapter 3, "Beauty and Girlhood," examines articles from the Girl's Own Paper (1880–1914), advice from the Girl's Own Book of Health and Beauty (1891?), and two serialized novels, Juliana Horatia Ewing's Six to Sixteen from the early 1870s and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, published from November 1910 to August 1911 in the American Magazine. In these examples of print culture for young girls, outward beauty is described as a manifestation of health and good character. Accordingly, "the only acceptable path of action for the girl who wishes to be beautiful is the pursuit of health" (95). Chapter 4, "Beauty and Ageing," examines a shifting rhetoric for older women who are encouraged to fight ageing "by all reasonable means" (111). Advertisements for soap and other cosmetics, articles in women's periodicals, and manuals such as Beauty: How to Get It and How to Keep It (1885) and Lady Jane's Beauty as a Fine Art (1885) urge women to preserve their looks in order to preserve their power (124). While the print culture discourse "offered hope for lifelong beauty," Smith asserts...
