Embodying Beauty
This study argues that twentieth-century American women writers` textual representations of female beauty generally recognize a link between beauty standards and aesthetic ideology, exploring female beauty as a symptom of prevailing ideas about art and esthetics. Female beauty, in their texts, is not merely an issue of whether a female character is pretty or not; it is an expression of the controlling discourses negotiated by character, text, and author. In this study, therefore, the women writers` texts are read after interchapters outlining their key cultural and literary contexts. Revising Paul de Man`s method of exploring scenes of reading , this study focuses on scenes of beauty in which a character, narrator, or speaker negotiates ideas about beauty. The author pairs Euro-American and African American women writers across the century in three generations : H.D. and Zora Neale Hurston; Gwendolyn Brooks and Sylvia Plath; and Toni Morrison and Louis Gluck. As such, this study offers a landmark black/white dialogue on female beauty in twentieth-century American culture and literature. Scenes of beauty in the texts of these writers suggest multiple feminine aesthetics in twentieth-century American writing, unified in their negotiation of the aesthetic ideologies embodied in female beauty.
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