English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Modernity and the Modern Woman

Ed. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer. The Modern Woman Revisited:  Paris Between the Wars. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2003. 320 pp., 74 b&w illus. Paper, $29.00.

By Janine Utell, Widener University

            In The Modern Woman Revisited, Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer reposition the critical discourse surrounding modernist art to account for those women previously unaccounted for: not only expatriates, but lesbians, African American women, artists working in the heady environment of interwar Paris.  This collection of generally excellent essays emerges from a symposium sponsored by the University of California and Stanford University in 2000, occasioned by a retrospective exhibition of the art of Romaine Brooks.  The authors here consider the work of Colette, Tamara de Lempicka, Sonia Delaunay, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and Brooks, and in so doing interrogate the construction of modernism, and, on a larger scale, gendered identity between the wars.

            This collection draws on the work of earlier literary critics like Shari Benstock, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Bonnie Kime Scott, critics who were crucial in refocusing the critical lens on  modernism in order to more clearly understand the role of women and gender identity.  Writings by lesbian theorists such as Terry Castle and Laura Doan also provide the foundation necessary to fill in this gap in the construction of art history of the twentieth century.  Chadwick and Latimer, as they have in their other works on similar issues, have illuminated modernist art and modernist studies by bringing this critical foundation to bear on an area that had neglected the contributions of the figures explored here.  They have also situated their collection within a literature that reads the construction of gendered identity and its relationship to the production of art as crucial to modernism and modernity; a review of this literature, and the place of this collection within it, appears in their helpful and cogent introduction to the book.

            Central to the purpose and argument of the book is that in studying the construction of gender and sexual identity of interwar Paris, we can understand the seismic social changes that were occurring at the time, and thus we can understand the forces that construct identity and the ways in which subjects can manipulate those forces and fashion themselves.  Art, writing, even fashion are crucial tools for this process of self-imaging, of questioning the dominant social codes that are forced on the individual.  Furthermore, these processes enable the subject to address the complex social anxieties surrounding the identity of women.  In France these anxieties were especially pronounced as the role of women was constantly being called into question; in the face of les femmes modernes, les femmes artistes, government officials, natalists, proponents of tradition and the status quo, panicked and sought to redefine female identity.  In response, these women used their sexuality and their identity as artists to map out a vital territory in the modernist project.  Interwar Paris became a crucial site in this project, fluid, in flux, allowing for unimagined freedoms, permitting the creation of the self just as it permitted the creation of art.

            These dual processes of creation are intertwined, an important proposition in recent work on modernist studies; this proposition forms the basis for the first of four parts of Chadwick’s and Latimer’s collection.  Part One, “Imagining Modernity,” considers the shifts in French attitudes towards gender, particularly women’s identity; the movement of expatriates into Paris; and the need to revisit and revise the traditional categories used to describe modernism, a need which arises from precisely those social, cultural, and historical shifts.  Here, again, Chadwick and Latimer provide a valuable orientation to postwar France in their essay “Becoming Modern:  Gender and Sexual Identity after World War I.”  They see the many changes surrounding women at this time as a manifestation of the desire for greater female autonomy, and they envision the “modern woman” as a personification of modernity.

            Part Two, “Modern Modes,” examines further the specific ways the “modern woman” constructed her own identity and through these processes helped to construct the way we view modernity.  Like Bridget Elliott’s essay from Part One, “Deconsecrating Modernism:  Allegories of Regeneration in Brooks and Picasso,” Paula Birnbaum’s essay “Painting the Perverse: Tamara de Lempicka and the Modern Woman Artist” performs the valuable work of placing “les femmes artistes” in dialogue with their male modernist counterparts.  In this way, these authors resist the marginalization of “women artists,” bringing them in from the periphery to the center of the modernist project.  Likewise, by focusing on concerns possibly outside the realm of traditional art history, like fashion, authors such as Mary Louise Roberts, in her essay “Samson and Delilah Revisited:  The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France,” reclaim other forms of expression for modernism.

            The lesbian woman figures prominently in this collection as a figure of modernity; this is articulated most clearly in the essays of the Part Three, “New Identities.”  This section might also be the weakest part of the collection.  It is true that the construction of gender identity, and the processes of self-fashioning undertaken by modernist women, especially lesbians, is a significant aspect of the study of art of the period; however, the arguments are undermined somewhat by the insistence on lesbian genius.  The strongest essays are firmly grounded in close readings of visual and verbal texts and how these two modes can work in dialogue with one another; readers may want to consult in particular Jennifer Shaw’s essay “Singular Plural:  Collaborative Self-Images in Claude Cahun’s Aveux non avenus” and Joe Lucchesi’s “ ‘Something Hidden, Secret, and Eternal’:  Romaine Brooks, Radclyffe Hall, and the Lesbian Image in The Forge.”  Both of these pieces consider the intertexutal nature of the modernist project, and the ways these dialogues contributed to the processes of making meaning and identity.

            Part Four, “Embodying the Modern,” examines the shifting signifier of the body in modernism.  The body itself is subject to multiple forms of representation and interpretation, and in the figures of the model Lee Miller and the performance artist Barbette the body becomes a site of multivalent meanings.  This is a fitting conclusion to the collection in that gender construction is viewed as part of the creation of art and identity, and these final essays reclaim the body for interpretation and resituate it in the history of art.

            Readers of English Studies Forum will find this book useful as an addition to work on modernism and modernity, particularly as it builds on the seminal research of critics and theorists of literature and gender.  It opens the door for further investigation into the intersections of art, sexuality, desire and identity, and brings the reader to a greater understanding that in the reading of the history of art and literature these intersections cannot be ignored.