The affective power of the novel's close demonstrates the metonymic potency of material objects, which is inseparable from their potency to convey the realism of the novelistic universe, not just in the work of Charles Dickens or Honoré de Balzac, say, but also in experimental fiction. Woolf came to believe that the birth of the novel as we know it, Robinson Crusoe, must be thought through the re of the "large earthenware pot" that she posits as an emblem of Daniel Defoe's authority, which is fiction's authority to overwhelm the reader with the wholeness of an imagined world, and to interrupt romantic fantasy with novelistic fact. "By believing fixedly in the solidity of the pot and its earthiness, he has subdued every other element to his design; he has roped the universe into a harmony." 34 In the power of the earthenware pot as Woolf imagines it, which is Defoe's capacity to novelize the universe, there is something of Stevens's jar on a hill in Tennessee, transforming the landscape around it, if not something of Heidegger's jug, the thing that things the world. 35 When solid objects become the explicit object of Woolf's address, however, the coherence of the solid object that makes the world cohere gives way to the solidity of fragments; there is no earthenware pot, but simply "a piece of china of the most remarkable shape . . . shaped, or broken accidentally, into five irregular but unmistakable points" (HH, 83). Though the emphasis on the accidental shape of the china fragment might be said to ally the story with the dadaist and surrealist faith in the irrational and the contingent, the point is more that reevaluating the material world seems to depend on its re-use and on some violence that violates the coherence of the object. Whereas John imagines this violence as the act of an angry woman (hurling a "jar or a pot" out the window), the violence that the story nowhere imagines but everywhere intimates is the violence of war.
* * *
As John hunts in "the neighborhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away," and then comes to "haunt the places which are most prolific of broken china, such as pieces of waste land between railway lines, sites of demolished houses, and commons in the neighborhood of London," it is hard not to envision him as a character roaming the city streets and rat's alley of The Waste Land, the poem the Woolfs would publish two years later (HH, 82, 83-4; 1). But such a convergence, itself part of a more widespread representation of postwar London as the unreal city, foregrounds a crucial contrast. 36 In place of the dolorous voice of The Waste Land, shoring cultural fragments against the spiritual ruin of the cityscape, John serendipitously accretes material fragments within which he finds all the spirit he needs.
If war-traumatized London makes sense as the (underspecified) setting for the story, that trauma would seem to be specifically material, not spiritual. Though Woolf could dismiss the war as "remote and meaningless," she also lamented that "one has come to notice the war everywhere," meaning that "everything is skimped," that butcher shops are closed, that cards are required for "most foods," that other shops display "tins, or cardboard boxes" that are empty (D, 100). 37 Given the facts of wartime scarcity, the point is less that her diaries seem so evacuated of material objects and more that the world they describe has been so evacuated: "If you see a plum, it is invariably a decoy plum" (D, 112). Though the accounts of the raids on London, the mattresses dragged to the cellar, are the more obvious reminder of the presence of the war in her diaries and letters, there is a subtler but ubiquitous sense of how the things of the world, such as paper and paint, have become the materials of war. In this context, then, the intermittent material fascinations of her 1918 summer diary attain more significance: "I think it was on Friday that I was given my green glass jar by the chemist--for nothing! It's a jar I've always coveted; since glass is the best of all decorations, holding the light & changing it" (D, 170). 38
If Woolf's pleasure in this green glass jar resurfaces in John's pleasure in the green lump of glass found on the beach, it does so embedded in a culture of scarcity that precipitates a different quality of cathexis. Glass had become the focus of national concern as glass manufacturers transformed major plants into munitions factories. 39 Moreover, the arrested import of Jena glass from Germany and Austria and of chemical glass from Bohemia had created a so-called glass-famine in Britain, especially severe in the production of microscopic and photographic lenses. 40 As the Geographic Journal explained in its review of the reports from the Ministry of Munitions, there was hope that "British glass sands" would support domestic production needs. But if to the ministry it seemed as though these sands had sufficient silica content and the right grain, in fact the postwar search for the best sand led British crystal manufacturers back to Fontainebleau and to Loch Aline, Scotland. 41 For the iron in the English sand gave indigenous glass a green hue; it was verre de fougère. 42 The image of John "burrowing his fingers down, down, into the sand" and discovering there "a large irregular lump" of green glass might thus be read as an image less of discovery than of productivity, a production of glass out of the domestic glass sands of Britain and a recognition of its particular beauty. Still, it is not material as such (neither the sand nor the glass), but the whole process of retrieving and reanimating the ambiguous remnant that catalyzes John's fascination.
Between 1912 and 1930 Francis Bakley published some six books and dozens of articles on English glass; in retrospect, this looks like an act of mourning, composed as it was in the midst of general doubts about the longevity of the English production. The problem was not simply that glass manufacturers had been making light bulbs, rods, and tubes for wartime industry, but also that free trade made cheap imports a perpetual threat to the financial success of domestic stemware once the war was over. The Society for Glass Technology was organized in 1916, as was a Department of Glass Technology at Sheffield, in the specific effort to sustain the nation's importance in the history of glass manufacture, but by 1924, seventy percent of the British market was supplied by imports, factories closed, and glassmakers were left unemployed in the face of continental competition. 43
If the wartime and postwar history of glass in Britain can help to reframe "Solid Objects" as a story about the modern fate of materials, then the history of iron intensifies the same point. The history of iron and glass, as instantiated by the Crystal Palace, chronicled the serial and international prospects of modernity ( 2). 44 Still, the story of Great Britain's iron trade was perpetually felt as a national tragedy, a narrative of decline from the industrial revolution and the thriving Imperial economy. In standard histories, the vast iron and coal resources of England were understood as the necessary condition of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. As Leonard Woolf revised this history, the industrial revolution and empire converged as an "intense preoccupation with material things," a demand for raw materials, coupled with production technologies, that resulted in "the whole world [being] ransacked for mines and metals," and in international competition for the control of resources. 45 The globalization that culminates in war, and in the compression of time and space that has been said to constitute modernity, originates with what we might call a passion for materials. When Virginia Woolf begins to write a story about accumulating materials in the month of the war's close, she thus writes an allegory of that war's origin, but an allegory with a difference--the difference marked by the bricoleur's confusion of ends and means, by an alternative economy where value results from a noninstrumental passion for things.
During the war, the need for scrap in the production of bombs led the military to search the English countryside and to return to major battlefields to recover metal. 46 The imperial passion for materials had become a warring Europe's obsession with iron and steel. In an article on "Coal and Iron in War," The Fortnightly Review stressed the industrial, economic rationale of Germany's aggression by publishing excerpts of a confidential memorandum, submitted to the Chancellor from leading industrial and agriculture societies in May 1915, that underscored the importance of the long-term weakening of enemy nations, using iron as a case in point. The Review itself proclaimed that the current British supply of pig iron and steel was utterly "inadequate to our needs." 47 The problem of this war of attrition, as we have come to call it, was understood to have boiled down to the "essential question," in Sir John French's words, of "munitions, more munitions, always more munitions," and after a Ministry of Munitions was organized (with Lloyd George appointed Minister), the Ministry took over such crucial production centers as the Cumberland and Lancashire Iron mines. 48
In the history of English iron, 1882 marks the record year for exports, dominated by the sale of railroad iron to colonial markets. By the close of the century, exacerbated by the McKinley tariff of 1890 and the British policy of free trade, Great Britain lost those markets (the U.S. supplying Canada with seventy percent of its iron and steel requirements) and had its domestic market flooded with "iron dumping" from Belgium, Germany, and the U.S. 49 Though the war secured the domestic market for British manufacturers, other nations increased their own producing capacity, making 1921-1931 the "Black Decade" of the British iron industry. 50 While the price of bar iron had been controlled during the war, the control was removed in 1919; by 1921 the price of such rudimentary objects as nuts and bolts had risen to five times that before the war. 51 When in his obsessive search John discovers "a very remarkable piece of iron" under a furze bush, he encounters the element that had become the focus of national and international obsession.
All this is to say that if John's "serious ambitions" are met with a "lack of understanding" that is repeated in the critical consensus about the story, we might nonetheless begin to understand his behavior as an alternative mode of experiencing scarcity (HH, 85). In Europe, more so than in the U.S., the war intensified a Taylorist horror of waste, not just of time but of substances. This was the war in which all citizens were summoned to participate as national subjects, "each one of us"--"you and each one of you." 52 In their effort to involve civilians in the military project, governments took out ads and relied on posters as the new medium for communicating with the masses, for bringing the war into the civilian everyday ( 3). Saving fat for use in explosives, collecting the metal needed for scrap in the making of bombs--these activities comprised a new kind of materialism, a requisite bricolage, a recognition that the materials of everyday objects could have another life (4). As Aragon came to put it, "Aha! that tinkling silver-plating was false / The teaspoons are made of lead just like those bullets." 53
Indeed, if the engagement Woolf narrates in "Solid Objects" can be understood as registering and aestheticizing, however inversely or perversely, the newly stipulated attention to materials throughout Europe, then the story can grant us a different access to familiar accounts of modernism and the object. Whether one assumes that the readymade was meant to attack the world of art, to foreground the role of the artist, or to dislodge common objects from the tyranny of use, Duchamp first promoted his readymades when the making of any common object--a urinal, a bottle rack, a snow shovel--was threatened all over Europe by the requirements of martial manufacturing. The various governmental demands to rethink the material world, and to revise the notion of waste toward a notion of recomposition, might lurk behind what Benjamin called the "materialistic, anthropological inspiration" that provoked the surrealists to discover some revolutionary potential in discarded objects. 54 As for anthropological inspiration as such, we can describe the fetishism Woolf portrays as an alternative economy, an intensely private and privatizing reorientation of value, that offers a specular image of the alternative economies that anthropologists made visible in the 1920s. In Argonauts of the Pacific, based on fieldwork done in New Guinea and North Melanesia during the war, Bronislaw Malinowski introduces "law and order into what seemed chaotic and freakish" by describing the function of apparently meaningless objects in the Kula. 55 When Marcel Mauss revises those conclusions to emphasize the irrationality of such practices, he deliberately juxtaposes "irrational expenditure" to the Western image of homo oeconomicus as "a calculating machine" devoted to "frigid utilitarian calculation. 56 Though Georges Bataille would go on to celebrate various modes of dépense as such, Mauss's own ethical conclusions, argued in explicit relation to the European war, emphasize how a stable sociality, a kind of solidarity that depends on competition, can emerge out of the respect and reciprocity of "the gift." The intense isolation of the individual in "Solid Objects" would be anathema to Mauss. But Woolf's image of reappropriating, valorizing, and aestheticizing waste, no less than his image of wasting valuable property, is underwritten by the sense that the economic reason of the West has been exhausted. 57 Which is to say that the history of objects as we know it (the history of objects as we know them) will never challenge the Enlightenment's history of itself. The challenge comes from the history of things, and from the histories in them.
* * *
"Solid Objects" begins with a narratorial consciousness that registers, as though through binoculars or through a zoom lens, a barely perceptible detail that slowly comes into focus as two human bodies. Woolf thus manages to record, in this gradually clarifying perception, something like the momentary development of sensation into perception: 58
The only thing that moved upon the vast semicircle of the beach was one small black dot. As it came nearer to the ribs and spine of the stranded pilchard boat, it became apparent from a certain tenuity in its blackness that this spot possessed four legs. . . . [The] mouths, noses, chins, and check stockings of the two speakers became clearer and clearer; the smoke of their pipes went up into the air; nothing was so solid, so living, so hard, red, hirsute and virile as these two bodies for miles and miles of sea and sandhill. [HH, 79]
These bodies, rendered as body parts and as parts that help designate the form of the pilchard boat, achieve their solidity in the context of the seascape. But once they settle into their wholeness (once they assume, let us say, the phantasmatic image of the coherent human body) the "only thing" that can mark such solidity is some other thing. As he burrows into the sand, John's fingers finally curl "round something hard--a full drop of solid matter," which turns out to be a "green tint," a lump of glass, smoothed by the water into a veritable green gem (HH, 80). "It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore" (HH, 81). The definiteness of the solid object seems rather to expose the vagueness of politics ("Politics be damned!"), pushing politics into the background, as objects sometimes do in Woolf's diary: "I have bought another glass jar for 2/-. These things are in the foreground. It is partly due to them . . . that I don't write first & foremost of the German offer of peace" (D, 199). If we grant "Solid Objects" a (specifically) peripheral place in the British literature of World War I, and even grant Virginia Woolf's shortest fiction some relation to Leonard Woolf's tireless work on behalf of The League of Nations, then this story will assume a very different role--to demonstrate how utterly pedestrian passions can be understood as a longing for the fragments of the West not to be reassembled as they previously had been.
Though the solidity of human bodies in the story gives way to the solidity of glass, solidity as such certainly gives way to a kind of fluidity--"the green thinned and thickened slightly as it was held against the sky or against the body" (HH, 81)--just as it gives way to elaborate fantasy: "Perhaps after all it was really a gem; something worn by a dark Princess trailing her finger in the water as she sat in the stern of the boat and listened to the slaves singing as they rowed her across the Bay" (HH, 80-1). What prevents solidity from becoming the point, what capacitates the imaginative encounter, is the incoherence of the fragment. John does not quite succumb to what Simmel described as the "the present vividly felt charm of the fragment" that distances us "from things" because "reality is touched not with direct confidence but with fingertips that are immediately withdrawn" (PM, 474). Rather, John's tactile engagement gives him license to explore some other unhuman reality: "John turned it in his hands; he held it to the light; he held it so that its irregular mass blotted out the body and extended right arm of his friend" (HH, 81). The fragment appears in "Solid Objects" as the re of the material metonym whose metonymic function has been arrested--the unconsummated metonym, as it were. The unconsummated metonym is the re, or the conceptual image, that Woolf offers us to think the object/thing dialectic, to think the world anew. John collects broken parts that are not really parts of anything determinable: "it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler, or window-pane; it was nothing but glass." His materialism, where parts are related not to wholes but to other parts, enacts a kind of redemption that refuses the (Heideggerian) temporality of recuperation.
John's fetishism does not depend on substitution, but merely dynamizes the excess that characterizes any object, even the paper clip, the rubber band, the empty glass. If the recent work on objects (consumer objects, museal objects, ethnographic objects) "responds to the imperative to know about material needs, wants, and desires," then work on things should assume the task of discovering, in the history of objects, material desires, or the desire for material, that will forever be lost in the histories of consumer society or ethnographies of cultural exchange. At the very close of the story, John's friend Charles, depressed by the disarray of the room and utterly confused by his friend, asks "What made you give it up," meaning to ask just what prevented John from pursuing his political career. When John answers "I've not given it up," he means that he has not abandoned his search (HH, 85). He could hardly give it up because his passion has become irrepressible. In addition, he refuses to feel guilt about his new pleasure because rather than discovering one solid object or another, he in fact discovers some other desire. The desire to historicize this desire can not help limiting its potential to overcome affectively the specificities of time and of place, its potential to sense multiple histories materialized in (or by) the discarded remnant, the curious remainder. The war precipitated a national fixation on materials that enabled Woolf to imagine some more challenging, exhilarating material fixations. But we repeat the error she remonstrates against if, accumulating bits and pieces of this history, we believe that they form the whole story.
Bill Brown is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. He has published The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play, and Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Novels. He is currently at work on The Meaning of Things: Literary Objects in America.
* This essay was first delivered as a talk at the "Aesthetic Subjects" conference sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Group for Humanities Studies, Texas A&M University, March 1998. I would like to thank the conference participants--and especially David McWhirter, Martin Jay, and Robert Kaufman--for their responses. Noel Jackson assisted me with the research that helped to transform the talk into an essay. As always, I owe an immeasurable debt to patient and generous readers and friends: Homi Bhabha, Jessica Burstein, James Chandler, Miriam Hansen, Elizabeth Helsinger, W. J. T. Mitchell, Janel Mueller, Lesley Stern.
1. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Phillip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski (New York: Semiotext[e], 1990), 111-13.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1997), 140, 193, 185; hereafter abbreviated ND. At the close of his career Adorno writes an impassioned plea on behalf of the fullness of the "somatic moment" that grants us access to things (ND, 193).
3. See Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 57; and Victoria de Grazia, "Introduction," in de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 10.
4. See Martin Heidegger, "The Thing," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 163-86; Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1996), 85-106; and The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 19-86. Nonetheless, in Lacan's "fable" of Jacques Prévert's collecting impulse, he anticipates much of my point. Prévert's empty matchboxes, threaded together by displacing the drawer of one box into the cavity of the contiguous box, ran in a line over the mantle and across a wall. As Lacan understands it, the exhibit enables the matchboxes to transcend their status as objects, to show "the Thing that subsists in a match box." This "arrangement demonstrated that a match box isn't simply something that has a certain utility . . . that the match box all by itself is a thing with all its coherence of being" . This thingness, however, is precisely not the Thing that ultimately concerns Lacan--the Thing that names the unsymbolizable Real in its totality (as interiority and exteriority).
5. Tristan Tzara, "Highway Single Sun," trans. Charles Simic and Michael Benedikt, in The Poetry of Surrealism: An Anthology, ed. Benedikt (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 92; Louis Aragon, "Tercet," trans. Michael Benedikt, in Benedikt, Poetry of Surrealism, 155. In the literary history of surrealism, one could do worse than isolate the theory and poetry of Francis Ponge as the clearest celebratory encounter with material objects, culminating in Le Parti pris des choses (1942 [Taking the side of things]). In "Plus-que-raisons" (1930 [More than reasons]), he had argued that there is "No possible compromise between taking the side of ideas or things to be described, and taking the side of words. Given the singular power of words, the absolute power of the established order, only one attitude is possible: taking the side of things all the way" (Ponge, Nouveau recueil [Paris: Gallimard, 1967 (New collection)], 32; quoted and translated by Beth Archer, "Introduction," in Archer, ed., Francis Ponge: The Voice of Things [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972], 5). The history of such claims in their relation to the dicta of Ezra Pound (the "direct treatment of the thing") and William Carlos Williams ("no ideas but in things") has yet to be written. The standard account of the postromantic, Anglo-American effort to disclose the sensuous proximity of the material world outside the subject/opposition remains J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).
6. Virginia Woolf, "Solid Objects," in A Haunted House and Other Stories, collected by Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944), 82; hereafter abbreviated HH.
7. See for instance Robert A. Watson, "'Solid Objects' as Allegory," Virginia Woolf Miscellany 16 (spring 1981): 3-4; Dean R. Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 19-20; Panthea Reid, Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: Oxford, 1996), 241; and Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Knopf, 1997), 370. Thanks to his having generously sent me page proofs, I can add that Douglas Mao interrupts this consensus in a chapter on Woolf that reads the story in order to introduce a wide-ranging account of Woolf's place in the genealogy of Victorian, aestheticist, and modernist attention to material objects. See Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 26-89.
8. Clive Bell, "Art and Politics," in Since Cézanne (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922), 198. The topic of "things," when it comes to Woolf's fiction, has traditionally been rendered as the topic of "things in themselves," and has been pursued foremost through The Waves. See, for instance, Frank D. McConnell, "'Death Among the Apple Trees': The Waves and the World of Things," Bucknell Review 16 (December 1968): 23-39; and Igor Webb, "'Things in Themselves': Virginia Woolf's The Waves," Modern Fiction Studies 17 (winter 1971-2): 570-3.
9. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 1:173; hereafter abbreviated D.
10. Bell, "Art and Politics," 198.
11. Miriam Hansen, "T. E. Hulme, Mercenary of Modernism, or, Fragments of Avantgarde Sensibility in Pre-World War I Britain," ELH 47 (summer 1980): 379. Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 120-23, traces the schism between Bloomsbury and the movements with which Hulme's ideas are associated, futurism and vorticism. If in the following pages I seem to imply that within Woolf's story we can detect some transcendence of that schism, I hardly mean to suggest that this is anything but inadvertent, and my use of William James, Georg Simmel, Benjamin, and Adorno is meant to avoid domesticating Woolf's text too readily.
12. On the distinction between the souvenir and the collection, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 132-69.
13. Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 17 January 1918, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 2:210; hereafter abbreviated L.
14. William James, Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 891; hereafter abbreviated P. One could homologize this claim to the idea that regulative discursive iteration effects materiality, but part of my point in this essay, of course, is to begin elsewhere, to suppose that there is an elsewhere that can regulate or interrupt discourse.
15. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 21, 36. By quoting this use of the kaleidoscope image I mean, further, to intimate just how prevalent glass has been in the modern imaginary. In "Between Walls," William Carlos Williams shows how the particular quality of glass allows a broken object--"the broken / pieces of a green / bottle"--to assume greater luminosity than a whole one (The Collected Earlier Poems [New York: New Directions, 1966], 381).
16. Otto Wagner, Moderne Architektur, quoted in Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941), 318; Donald Judd, "Specific Objects," in Complete Writings 1959-1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 187. For a discussion of Marinetti (and indeed an invaluable account of the materials of modernism and modernity), see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "The Fabric of Modern Times," Critical Inquiry 24 (autumn 1997): 191-245. See also Jessica Burstein, "Prosthetic Fictions: Cold Modernism in Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, and Evelyn Waugh" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1998); and, for an overview of the visual arts, see Ellen H. Johnson, Modern Art and the Object (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
17. Roger Fry, "Wedgwood China" , in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 192.
18. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956), 208, 232-3; hereafter abbreviated O.
19. Roger Fry, "The Ottoman and the Whatnot," Athenaeum, 27 June 1919, 529-30. To specify further the difference between "social emotions" and "aesthetic feelings," Fry developed the notion of the "opifact," an object meant to gratify certain social desires (in Thorstein Veblen's sense) that falls short of being an art object. See Roger Fry, Art and Commerce (London: Hogarth Press, 1926), 8.
20. Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 148.
21. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849; New York: Dover, 1989), 56.
22. On such temporal structures in historiography, see Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (Princeton, N.J.: Marcus Wiener, 1995), 139. The topic is of course central in the work of Benjamin. See, for instance, Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
23. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 92; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 72; Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street," trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1:449-50. For a sense of Heidegger's Being and Time as a response to Lukács, see Lucien Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, trans. William Q. Boelhower (London: Routledge, 1977).
24. Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism," Reflections, 181; idem, "Traumkitsch," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 2:620. For their translation of this essay I would like to thank Temby Caprio and Michael Latham. On Benjamin's sense of the possible mimetic appropriation of the material world, which he called "innervation," see Miriam Bratu Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street," Critical Inquiry 25 (winter 1999): 306-43. Elsewhere I have focused on scenes of children engaging playthings: see my "How to Do Things With Things (A Toy Story)," Critical Inquiry 24 (summer 1998): 935-64; and my The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 167-98.
25. Roger Fry, "The Artist's Vision," Athenaeum, 11 July 1919, 594.
26. Ibid.
27. Virginia Woolf, "The Cinema," in Collected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), 2:268. Woolf's point about the cinema is that the temporality it offers might enable the English to engage a reality "more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life," but she goes on to imagine the surreal possibility that the cinema will offer "abstractions," "visual emotions," some way of visualizing "thought in its wildness" . In "Solid Objects" John's tactile engagement with material is coupled with a new sensitivity to abstract form: "he was often astonished, as he came to go into the question more deeply, by the immense variety of shapes to be found in London alone" (HH, 84).
28. Benjamin, "Paris," 155.
29. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1990), 460; hereafter abbreviated PM.
30. Woolf, "The Lady in the Looking Glass," in Haunted House, 89.
31. Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920), 22; idem, Between the Acts (1941; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 70.
32. Virginia Woolf, "Street Haunting: A London Adventure," in Collected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967), 4:155-6.
33. Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room and The Waves (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 9, 10; hereafter abbreviated JR.
34. Virginia Woolf, "Robinson Crusoe," in Collected Essays, 1:75. For the best discussion of Woolf's essay, see Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (London: Routledge, 1990), 141-8. For an account of Woolf's novel in the context of object relations theory, see Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For a discussion of objects in Woolf's novels that emphasizes how they "hang loose" without ever comprising a "whole world of which the objects are parts" (in other words, performing an antithetical function to the pot in Robinson Crusoe), see Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 117-27. For an account of how the subjective apperception of objects in Woolf's novels corresponds with G. E. Moore's psychology, see Harvena Richter, Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 67-9. For an account of Woolf's most explicit engagement with Hume's questions about the separation of subject and object, see Gillian Beer, "Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse," in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 29-47. For an account, prefaced with a reading of Woolf's essay, of Defoe in relation to the eighteenth-century china trade, see Lydia H. Liu, "Robinson Crusoe's Earthenware Pot," Critical Inquiry 25 (summer 1999).
35. It would be possible to call attention to how Woolf's realist mode, with its verisimilar rendering of decor, transforms into a modernist mode where objects no longer have an identifiable relation to humans or to one another. Such schematic narratives, however, as Bowlby suggests, erase the very instability that characterizes Woolf's objectifications even as fictional chronicler. In "Solid Objects," John's relation to the things he collects seems more like the sort of relation described in Leonard Woolf's novelistic account of Hambantota life in Ceylon, The Village in the Jungle , where Silindu's profound intimacy with the jungle provokes his isolation both from his fellow villagers and from the British officials.
36. See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford, 1975), 325-6. For discussions of Woolf's novels in relation to war, see the essays collected in Mark Hussey, ed., Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, Myth (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991).
37. Writing to Lytton Strachey before his visit to Asheham, Woolf explains that "you'll have to bring whatever cards for meat, sugar, butter you possess as we are strictly rationed here," or, alternatively, "get your cook at Belsize to get you a week's rations of butter, sugar and meat which you pack in your bag and bring with you" 24 March 1918; 27 March 1918 (L, 227, 228).
38. Woolf's interest in glass extends from the material to the rhetorical. In her Diary, she explains of Electra that "traditional plots which have been made & improved & freed from superfluities by the polish of innumerable actors & authors & critics" become "like a lump of glass worn smooth in the sea" (D, 184). And when Orlando is frustrated by the way familiar metaphors encumber any thought or expression of love, Woolf uses the metaphor of the thing of glass, "Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women" (O, 101).
39. See T. C. Baker, The Glassmakers: Pilkington, the Rise of an International Company 1826-1976 (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1977), 242-7; and Pilkington Brothers, Now Thus--now thus, 1826-1926 (London: Joseph Coaston, 1926), 59-63.
40. "Glass-famine in Britain," The Literary Digest 51 (16 October 1915): 836.
41. See "British Glass-sands," Geographic Journal 51 (May 1918): 335-6; and Great Britain Board of Trade, Hand Blown Domestic Glassware (London: HMSO, 1947), 24.
42. See C. E. N. Bromehead, "Natural Resources in Relation to the Arts," Geographical Journal 63 (June 1914): 488-9.
43. See R. J. Chesterton, English Glass and the Glass Used in England, circa 400-1940 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 230; and Great Britain Board of Trade, Hand Blown Domestic Glassware, 21, 24.
44. As the architect Charles Downes originally emphasized, the construction was modular and the materials were "not of such a nature as to restrict the construction of similar buildings to any particular country" (Charles Downes and Charles Cowper, The Building Erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851 [London: John Weale, 1852], ii).
45. Leonard Woolf, Imperialism and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928), 41, 44. He goes on to specify that the manufacturers, who were "the harbingers of imperialism in the hills and plains of Asia and the forests of Africa," went there to obtain "tin or iron or rubber or tea or coffee" .
46. See D. L. Burn, The Economic History of Steelmaking 1867-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 369.
47. Y., "Coal and Iron in War: The Importance of Alsace and Lorraine," Fortnightly Review 108 (November 1917): 709. The German memorandum reads, for instance, "For cast-iron shells alone, which are an inferior substitute for those in steel, an average production of 4,000 tons of iron per day has been necessary. If the production of pig-iron and steel had not been doubled, the war could not have been continued" .
48. Sir John French, quoted in The Times History of the War, 12 October 1915, 5:309. To track the control of glass and iron production and distribution, see N. B. Dearle, An Economic Chronicle of the Great War for Great Britain and Ireland (London: Oxford University Press, 1929). For a general account of munitions manufacturing, see Sir Llewellyn Woodward, Great Britain and the War of 1914-1918 (London: Methuen, 1967), 453-67.
49. See W. Cunningham, Western Civilization in Its Economic Aspects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 2:227-8; and J. Stephen Jeans, The Iron Trade of Great Britain (London: Methuen, 1940?), 150, 139.
50. See T. H. Burnham and G. O. Hoskins, Iron and Steel in Britain 1870-1930 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943), 46; and D. L. Burn, The Economic History of Steelmaking 1867-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 393-448; hereafter abbreviated EH. For a contemporaneous, international overview, see Edwin C. Eckel, Coal, Iron, and War (New York: Henry Holt, 1920). For details see the Iron and Coal Trades Review (London), an illustrated weekly that began publication in 1866.
51. See Great Britain Board of Trade, Report on Iron and Steel Products (London: HMSO, 1920), 3-5.
52. From a poster quoting Sir Douglas Haig, quoted in The Times History of the War, 14 May 1918, 15:461.
53. Louis Aragon, "Drinking Song," trans. Michael Benedikt, in Benedikt, Poetry of Surrealism, 154. One way to read Woolf's story, then, would be to understand John himself as a militaristic re--increasingly strategic, goal-focused, and obsessive--as someone whose senses have been transformed by war's engulfing transformation, by its capacity to conscript even those who appear uninvolved.
54. Benjamin, "Surrealism," 179. This is hardly to argue that there is not a more explicit, more vibrant, and more politically fraught connection between Benjamin's investment in the surrealists and his depiction of the war. See Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema," 326-8.
55. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Pacific (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1984), 9. The "simple action--this passing from hand to hand of two meaningless and quite useless objects (the arm-shells and necklaces)--has somehow succeeded in becoming the foundation of a big inter-tribal institution" .
56. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967), 74.
57. Thus William Pietz, in his influential history of the concept of fetishism, explains that the "worship of haphazardly chosen material objects" became the "paradigmatic illustration of what was not enlightenment" (William Pietz, "The Problem of Fetish, IIIa: Bosman's Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism," Res 16 [autumn 1988]: 106). See also his "The Problem of the Fetish I," Res 9 (spring 1985): 5-17; "The Problem of the Fetish II: The Origin of the Fetish," Res 13 (spring 1987): 23-45; and "Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx," in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, eds. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 119-151.
58. Woolf narrativizes such a development in "The Mark on the Wall"; the ambiguous, abstract mark turns out to be a snail. Insofar as the story represents an attraction to "the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours," an attraction satisfied by the "solidity" and "reality" of materials ("Wood is a pleasant thing to think about"), "The Mark on the Wall" can be reasonably paired with "Solid Objects" (HH, 45). But the latter utterly differentiates itself by fixating on the fragment, the specifically cultural remainder that will never assume coherence as a familiar object, animate or inanimate.
One of the most startling aspects of the 1936 essay "Bloomsbury" by British modernist Mary Butts is that the piece was originally rejected on the grounds that the Group was not widely known in England. 1 This perspective seems hardly credible today, particularly since the inception of the Group's popularity can be traced to 1920, when the term Bloomsbury began to circulate in newspapers and take on a life of its own. While Butts makes no reference to Bloomsbury's appearance in mass circulation periodicals during this decade, her prescient analysis of the Group speaks directly to the concerns of this essay--Bloomsbury's complicity in its own commodification through its glitzy appearances in British Vogue. Although Butts does not intentionally set out to investigate the Group's role as a mass-market phenomenon, her language inadvertently exposes Bloomsbury's status as a modernist spectacle capable of posing for Vogue and resolutely tied to market concerns. The words that Butts utilizes to discuss the Group's ideological positions--"synthetic" ("B," 37), "papier-maché" ("B," 36), "copies" ("B," 37),"essential fake" ("B," 42)--stem from her conviction that Bloomsbury scorned a belief in "the absolute" and instead embraced a relativist perspective, deifing the simulacrum: "things made of one substance pretending to be things made out of another" ("B," 36). While Butts here reveals her own conservatism by fetishizing the alleged authenticity of the modernist product, her use of the language of artifice and her view that the Group was a "pretty wide corporation" that vigorously sought to "impress itself upon the public mind" simultaneously introduce the idea of reproducibility, a concept that is central to Bloomsbury's position vis-à-vis Vogue ("B," 38). The Group authorized the magazine to circulate its fashionable lifestyle in the commercial marketplace by allowing its "beliefs and opinions [to] filter down . . . to the mass of the people" ("B," 41). Although Butts condemned the Group's modernist assumption that "you could make poetry out of anything," it is precisely this blurring of the boundary between high and low that enabled Bloomsbury to wage a successful self-promotional campaign in Vogue ("B," 41). The magazine capitalized on the view that "as individuals they have justified their fame" by reproducing and circulating Bloomsbury's individual style to a mass audience, marketing the Group's artistic products as commodities for selective consumption ("B," 38).
Despite the lingering view of the Bloomsbury Group as signifiers of high culture's "intellectual elite"--an association premised upon an elision of the marketplace--their splashy appearance in Vogue documents that Bloomsbury was not isolated from the mass culture of the 1920s. My observations are based upon archival research at Colindale, the British Newspaper Library, where I looked at all of the issues of Vogue between the years 1916 (when the magazine was launched in England) and 1941 (the year that Virginia Woolf died). I found that during the 1920s the magazine was a fascinating cultural hybrid, juxtaposing articles on fashion, homemaking, and cosmetics with a huge range of cultural materials that we would today classify as "high brow." In particular, the magazine was a veritable homage to the world of Bloomsbury, publishing book and cultural reviews by, and about, a diverse range of critics and artists associated with the Group: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Vita Sackville West, Harold Nicolson, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, David Garnett, the Sitwells, G. E. Moore, Ottoline Morrell, E. M. Forster, Desmond Mac Carthy, Raymond Mortimer, and John Maynard Keynes. Although the magazine also ran articles by and about other modernists such as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, Bloomsbury was the key vehicle through which the magazine attempted to disseminate cultural elitism to its affluent readership. This essay analyzes how Bloomsbury, in particular the male members of the Group, functioned as champions of English high culture to Vogue's elite female audience; it also seeks to demonstrate how the dual ideologies of nationalism and imperialism intersect with the magazine's popularization of British high culture and marginalization of women's claims to modernity. Vogue in the 1920s invoked imperial rhetoric and the language of avant-garde taste, simultaneously capitalizing on the expansion of leisure industries in Britain (such as the cinema, the wireless, organized sport, and escapist reading) in order to commodify aesthetic value through "the mass popularization of defiantly elite art." 2 Most of the work that has been published on Bloomsbury as a "mass-market phenomenon" has focused on the period since the 1960s; Vogue provides evidence that the "Bloomsbury industry" can be traced to the years of high modernist production. 3 Recognizing that the Group was a marketable commodity, Vogue exploited Bloomsbury's intellectual, upper-class position by showcasing the influence of their cultural views and the imposition of their taste upon England's "national life"; as Jennifer Wicke succinctly puts it "lifestyle is what Bloomsbury was selling." 4
My focus here will be on the representation of Bloomsbury's appearance, as "personalities" as well as contributors, to British Vogue's glossy pages in order to trace this curious intersection between high and mass culture that the popularization of modernism and the commercialization of the Group underscores. This juxtaposition of high and low culture invites us to explore some of the historical and material conditions of the emergence of modernism, particularly in terms of its frequently assumed antagonism to mass culture, allowing us to ask, How do various social and market forces help to shape our perception of Bloomsbury, and what roles do gender and Englishness play in this equation? In his essay "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," Andreas Huyssen has begun to help us answer such a question by charting the male modernist association of mass culture with the feminine and high culture with the masculine. Although this paradigm has been extremely useful, it neglects to take into account the ambivalent position of the woman writer for whom the lure of mass culture was arguably a more complex, if not strictly enabling, historical development, emerging simultaneously with greater economic independence, more educational opportunities, and greater access to the public sphere for women--to name only the most obvious examples. 5 These structural changes in the material conditions of women's lives following World War I coincided in the 1920s with the emergence of a new female audience for mass-market entertainment such as films, best-selling novels, and popular magazines, all of which reflected a preoccupation with the modern woman. Margaret Beetham observes that the periodical, in particular, was at the center of an industry that gave employment to increasing numbers of women. 6 Huyssen's essay, furthermore, does not address modernist women's relation to modernity, nor does it consider the position of the male modernist who does not repudiate mass cultural materials. Within the last decade, several critics have challenged the tenacious myth that modernist writers scorned popular appeal, refused to advertise themselves, and sought refuge from the commercial sphere. 7 This recent proliferation of work demonstrates that, far from being opposed to the economy of production and consumption, canonical modernists such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Joyce and Lawrence were thoroughly preoccupied with marketplace concerns. 8 The evidence that male modernists self-consciously utilized and transformed the meaning of popular elements in their work does not prove that modernism was coopted by commercialism, but it does illustrate the limits of the argument that modernist writers were only contemptuous of popular forms. Such examples also clearly problematize the unequivocal gendering of mass culture as feminine, suggesting that what is needed is not only another way to talk about the canonical status of a male writer like Joyce but also a new means of theorizing the ideological complicities between modernism and popular or mass culture.
Fredric Jameson's influential formulation of the interrelationship between modernist high art and mass culture shifts the perspective away from the conventional opposition in terms that transgress the putative associations between mass culture and femininity, high culture and the masculine. Jameson's reconceptualization of the binary system of value does not address the issue of gender, but his argument that modernism and mass culture represent "dialectically interdependent phenomena" has important implications for feminist analyses of modernist cultural artifacts. 9 His view that all cultural creation in capitalist society is divided against itself, pitting work that is presumed to be timeless, unique, and of high aesthetic value against the degraded status of mass produced objects, is particularly useful in the interpretation of a text like Vogue, which juxtaposes literary reviews of high modernist work by authors such as Stein, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Woolf with ads for commodities such as corsets, chin straps, and antiperspirants. While Vogue does not in every case praise the modernist emphasis on narrative complexity and obscurity--Mary MacCarthy, in a 1929 review, denounces Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle as "a little book of experimental nonsense"--for the most part the magazine is overwhelmingly promodernist throughout the 1920s. 10 Jameson's contention that modernism's most fundamental feature is its "hostility to the market" is complicated by the fact that many modernist writers and artists, both men and women, willingly participated in the selling of high culture to Vogue's elite female audience. 11 In many ways, Vogue's strategy of "marketing modernity" in the 1920s resembles that of another Condé Nast publication, Vanity Fair, which was similarly invested in "popularizing an aesthetic based largely on a demonstrated scorn for popular appeal." 12 Although Vogue is dependent upon the commercialism of the marketplace in order to survive, its editorial content repeatedly reflects an antagonism towards mass cultural markers such as accessibility and universal appeal. We see a prime example of this resistance to absorption by the mainstream in an editorial by Aldous Huxley, the magazine's cultural critic, called "The Perversion of Values," an invective against modern culture. Huxley argues that the "acceptable standards" have been perverted by those who "call things by the wrong names, labeling 'high' what should rightly be low, and 'low' what ought to be high." This attack on society's democratizing impulses and misguided inversion of values speaks to the magazine's tacit objective--to rectify this inverted falsification of standards by isolating and elevating what Huxley calls "the old hierarchy," and what Vogue envisions as an affirmation of British aristocratic values. 13 The magazine achieves this stabilization of "what ought to be high" throughout the 1920s by carving out a privileged cultural domain for modernist writers, artists, and their aesthetic principles. It accomplishes this, however, without publishing any modernist fiction itself, because during this time the space devoted to magazine fiction was in inverse proportion to the class of readers. Only less tony publications printed fiction regularly; Vogue published no modernist stories for its upper-class readers, though an occasional poem by H. D. or Edith Sitwell did appear. 14
Although Vogue specifically targeted a cultivated upper-class readership (Condé Nast is well-known in magazine marketing history for being one of the earliest pioneers of niche marketing) it would be inaccurate to assume that the magazine is therefore not a product of mass culture. Although Vogue never sold as many copies as some other mass circulation women's magazines, it consistently led all of its competitors in advertising revenue throughout the 1920s. 15 Consistent with the unreliability of statistics for British magazines during this period, Caroline Seebohm documents the magazine's circulation in 1928 as 138,783 (MV, 282), and 141,424 (MV, 79). Either way, what is conveyed is that--in contrast to the little magazines of the period, which nurtured literary modernism but whose numbers ranged only from a couple hundred to a high of several thousand subscribers--Vogue's circulation res and revenues clearly situate the periodical as a formidable market force. 16 With five international editions by the mid-1920s--American, French, British, Spanish, and German--the magazine was actively disseminating its most fundamental objective on a global scale: "[to] conspire not only to get all [its] readers from the one particular class to which the magazine is dedicated, but rigorously to exclude all others." 17 However, as Nast envisioned it, Vogue would appeal not only to readers who were exceedingly wealthy but also to those who actively aspired to be members of the upper class. 18 Linking the new consumerist orientation of readers to the notion of imperialist expansion, Vogue's masthead in the period between the wars proclaimed, "VOGUE KNOWS NO FRONTIERS" (MV, 142). By cultivating an international market of "women of breeding," Vogue sought to disseminate a model of femininity in which appearance and taste were central. If, as Melba Cuddy-Keane argues, we define mass culture as a broad communicative system that posits a single speaking voice and a single audience that seeks to elicit and produce a uniform response, it becomes possible to read Vogue as a mass cultural product even though the magazine explicitly resisted the tactics of universal appeal. 19 The magazine, then, helps us to see how modernism was popularly read and legitimated, for this convergence of mass culture and modernist cultural production allows us to explore what Jameson calls the "conditions of possibility," the social and historical circumstances that enabled the phenomenon of the "great moderns." 20
Neither Jameson nor Huyssen, however, addresses the role that nationalism plays in the construction of high or mass culture, nor do they discuss how this collaboration intersects with the representation of gender. John MacKenzie illustrates the degree to which popular cultural elements such as advertising and the cinema continued to be suffused with the ideology of imperialism, even though the idea of official propaganda had to a certain extent been discredited in England after World War I. 21 Vogue participated in the dissemination of a British world view espousing cultural and racial superiority by dividing the globe into "civilized" and "uncivilized" regions; several issues, for example, feature articles on exotic getaways to colonial outposts. Another crucial way that the magazine communicated the idea of national pride was through the representation of Woolf as a great writer and the celebration of Bloomsbury as upholders of England's cultural endowment. 22 The magazine's showcasing of the Bloomsbury Group, I want to suggest, must be read in relation to what MacKenzie argues is the pervasiveness of imperialism as an ideological feature, a constituent part of modern British culture. Vogue is steeped in the discourse of a popularly sanctioned nationalism whose populism nevertheless undergirds class and national hierarchies and that shapes the representations of those who participate and are depicted in the magazine. The periodical, in this sense, can be read as a representative, ethnographic document illustrating the various ways empire is a widely-marketed cultural feature, inseparable from its depiction of gendered and class-specific subjects. In order to clarify the nature of Bloomsbury's presence in Vogue as an index to its relation to mass culture, we must consider the Group's investment in nationalist rhetoric that is inevitably inflected by gender. For Bloomsbury, mass culture is enmeshed in a colonial imagination capable of equating conceptions of lower classes and lower races, both of which are linked in complex ways with femininity. Male Bloomsbury collaborates with Vogue on a range of related constructions of Englishness, civilization, and femininity, demonstrating how the Group's articulation of modernity ultimately fails, as Julie Taddeo has recognized, to incorporate new ideas about and attitudes toward women. 23 Any discussion of Bloomsbury and mass culture must take into account not only the Group's Anglocentrism, but their relation to the structural gender asymmetry that informs a publication like Vogue. My argument is situated, then, within a cultural paradox: Bloomsbury was a modernist elite and officially anti-imperialist, and yet also involved in British popular culture and colonialist rhetoric. Vogue documents this phenomenon and provides a compelling example of how high culture utilizes mass cultural forms to disseminate its values.
This essay seeks to assess the scope of the ideological contradiction that Bloomsbury's appearance represents. As the magazine asked about modernity, do "Feminism, Jazz, Prohibition, Cubism, The League of Nations, Motorcycles, and other enthusiasms" point to cultural disaster or advance? 24 But before looking closely at these different ideological agendas, I first want to give a general sense of what kind of a periodical Vogue was and to consider to whom the magazine appealed and how femininity was represented to assess better what Bloomsbury's participation in this particular commodity form suggests about British high culture in the 1920s. The impetus behind the specific marketing and publicity structures employed by British Vogue during this period was the magazine's "Bloomsbury-ish editor," Dorothy Todd, a woman of distinctly literary, rather than fashionable, leanings (MV, 204). From 1922-1926 Todd commissioned several modernist writers and artists to contribute to the magazine in an effort to elevate its status and expand its scope beyond fashion and beauty. Todd was eventually fired from her editorship in 1926 because she failed to make the magazine sufficiently profitable to its American owners, but during her tenure she succeeded in securing an impressive array of contributors, among them Virginia Woolf, who published five articles in Vogue between 1924 and 1926, as well as several members of Bloomsbury. Although the magazine's profits did flag under Todd's "literary regime," evidence suggests that another factor contributing to the opposition to her leadership was homophobia (MV, 125). The morally rigorous American editor of Vogue, Edna Woolman Chase, strongly disapproved of "Miss Todd's personal proclivities, which were overtly homosexual" (MV, 125). While there is no record of Bloomsbury's response to Todd's lesbianism, we do have ample evidence of Woolf's hostility toward the editor in her diaries and letters from this period. Woolf's repeated references to Todd mark her as lower-class despite the fact that the Vogue establishment regarded her as "too highbrow," and she often moved in the same social circles as Bloomsbury--a culture that was congenial to homosexuality (MV, 127). 25 If we consider Todd's lesbianism alongside Bloomsbury's embrace of bi- and homosexuality, what is striking about their collaboration on Vogue is their silent collusion in the promotion of a heteronormative agenda. Whenever members of the Group are represented, their captions carry the words "wife" or "husband of" to ensure readers of their heterosexuality. Certainly nothing that evinced a homoerotic sensibility (e.g. Duncan Grant's virile male bodies, Lytton Strachey's writings) ever made it onto Vogue's pages, which were silent on the issue of Bloomsbury's self-perceived sexual radicalism.
While the magazine depicts no trace of Bloomsbury's or Todd's homosexuality, there is evidence to suggest that the Group was more emotionally invested in her leadership than Woolf's caustic remarks would allow. Vita Sackville West records Bloomsbury's protest to Todd's firing, writing to Harold Nicolson, "We sat in the meadow [of the Woolf's house in Rodmell] and discussed the future of Miss Todd. . . . This affair has assumed in Bloomsbury the proportions of a political rupture" (MV, 127-8). While on the one hand this crushing response to the demise of the Bloomsbury dynasty in Vogue may be said to illustrate the limits of the Group's vision of political rupture, it also demonstrates their commitment to Todd's high cultural agenda. Bloomsbury colluded with Todd to attract an avant-garde readership, yet the magazine was still a market-driven commodity that explicitly catered to an exclusive English audience. As Cynthia White observes, Vogue "appeal[ed] to those with extravagant tastes and ample resources"; its pages were flanked by sumptuous advertisements featuring a glittering array of luxury goods beyond the reach of all but the most affluent. 26 Despite the general postwar decline in the dominance of "high society" publications and the rise of a group of magazines catering to the middle and lower-middle classes, Vogue was completely unaffected by this profound shift in the women's press. 27 Although as an artist Woolf politically opposed the literary class system, neither she nor other Bloomsbury writers were frequent contributors to these new mass-market women's weeklies, which featured pulp fiction, horoscopes, advice and gossip pages, true-to-life stories, and fortune-telling columns. In contrast to such staples, Vogue offered elements that would appeal to the desires of an upper-class British "lady," for whom aristocratic leisure and the embellishment of the heterosexual body were central concerns.
Although Vogue at times celebrates the modern woman's greater possibilities, publishing an anonymous editorial on "Women and Education" that urges readers to make endowments to women's colleges, the magazine more often invokes antiquated models of femininity. Vogue acknowledges "these times of 'equal pay for equal work,'" but it bemoans the fact that "household science [has] lost its prestige," and longs for the traditional man who will be "the protector and provider" for his spouse. 28 An article on "Modern Womanhood" informs women that if they "wish to be adored, they must return to the tricks and manners they have abandoned," namely, "the flutters, the vapour . . . a tremulous lip," any device that might restore men's "former prestige" and make them "feel more masculine." The magazine celebrates artifice as an essential accessory for the modern woman, but it utilizes the rhetoric of progress (one caption reads, "A Career for Women: Being Beautiful") to instill this idea in its readers. 29 Thus the article "Woman Decides to Support Herself" is not about economic freedom, but corsets; the headline "Woman Claims a Masculine Prerogative" leads into an article on stylish women and walking sticks, not professionalism. 30 An editorial by Huxley on "The Battle of the Sexes" conveys the cultural anxiety surrounding the disruption of established attitudes about femininity by critiquing the modern woman who, having secured the vote, now recklessly seeks to "refute all the old traditions." Huxley denounces this "excessive ardour" as a feverish form of "feminine patriotism," claiming that it reflects women's recourse to "their lower selves." 31 Vogue does not unequivocally support a reactionary perspective on sex roles--indeed, it publishes Dorothy Richardson's meditation on men's disconcertion with the modern woman, "Women and the Future," in 1924--but it does participate in a broad apprehensiveness regarding women's cultural transformation by producing a model of femininity that is both restrictive and progressive. In either case, its representation of women is ultimately nonthreatening to men. Vogue reflects the contradictory meanings of the female body in the 1920s at the same time that it popularizes an aristocratic model of femininity that assumes an identification between femininity and Englishness. In "The Quintessence of the Exquisite" (early July 1921), the magazine celebrates Englishwomen as the "justification of our civilization," making explicit the relationship between middle-class femininity and national identity. The magazine's representation of Bloomsbury women perfectly corresponds to this equation of femininity with civilization, a conjunction that is consistent with the magazine's use of nationalist and racist rhetoric to construct women as the moral centers of the nation, "vital to the very existence of the race." 32
Several different articles in the 1920s anticipate the concerns of the Englishwoman who wants to voyage to the colonies, but fears the barbarism of the non-European world. Vogue participates in the construction, as well as the displacement, of this fear. An editorial, "My Cook Was an African," warns readers that servants in tropical Africa sooner or later take to drink, but the magazine also works to reassure women of "the essential Negro cheerfulness" of the native population. 33 One article in particular, on Jamaica, argues for the prudence of the Englishwoman's wariness, "where the veneer of civilization lies thickest . . . you may encounter the real Unknown, bottled-up, seething, dangerously suppressed." 34 The magazine cannibalizes native cultures for the English observer, inscribing the civilized/primitive dichotomy, but it also works to allay the tourist's fears by reassuring her that there are pockets of civilization everywhere. An article on travel in India foregrounds the excellence of Indian servants, and another on safaris in Kenya cheerfully reports that "facilities for hairdressing in Nairobi are just as up to date and good as in London." 35 Vogue reassures travelers that they will never be far from other Englishwomen of their social class--in Egypt they can be received by the wife of the British High Commissioner, in Kenya by the wife of the Commander of the Colony--nor need they be out of the cultural loop: a subscription to the Anglo-weekly, The Sphinx, will keep them posted of all "civilized" activities in Cairo. By advising readers on what to expect ("native boys cannot press pleats") the magazine constructs an image of the Englishwoman that asserts her ascendancy in a normative hierarchy, equating her with moral superiority, racial supremacy, and progressive ideals. 36 One editorial in particular, on travel in Java, illustrates the insidiousness of the magazine's sacralization of the Englishwoman. 37 The author here argues that the "antiquated ideas" of "the brown women of Java" would surely "make a few of their white sisters scream with horror," namely, "that a woman's chief role in the world is to perpetuate the human race." The writer, a woman, recalls photographing a group of "four brown and smiling little Eves" who happily display their nakedness to the camera. The ideological effect of the essay is to present the Javanese women as exotic contrasts to the world of the photographer whose technology captures their backward quaintness. The essay ends with a reassertion of the British author's moral superiority: "Happy unsophisticated country!" 38 What this and other articles repeatedly demonstrate is the veracity of Raymond Mortimer's assertion, uttered within the context of a review of Eliza Fay's Original Letters from India (1779-1815), that the "indominatable spirit of such Englishwomen has done much to make our Empire what it is." 39
Vogue provides us with an invaluable example of mass culture's role in producing British high culture at the same time that it illustrates how the denunciation of low culture is a prerequisite for the establishment of such claims. For example, given Vogue's frequent contempt for best-selling authors, it is arguably significant that when Woolf was showcased by the magazine in the mid-1920s, she was still an emerging highbrow writer. Even though Vogue helped to construct Woolf as a literary icon, it is an important feature of her desirability that during this time she was not yet the best-selling author whose face would grace the American cover of Time magazine in 1937. Aldous Huxley's editorials frequently convey Vogue's resistance to popular "prejudice," and its desire to cast itself as an exemplar of elite opinion. Writing for the magazine in late September 1924, Huxley attempts to unravel the "mystery of the best-seller" by arguing that the popular writer harbors "just the right sort of vulgar mind" and adequate talent to produce books that are devoid of intellect but overflowing with emotion and the "primary instincts," namely, "reproduction, self preservation, and gregariousness." 40 Disdain for the unmediated body is another index of Vogue's high cultural tastes; the magazine is reticent on such bodily female matters as menstruation, contraception, pregnancy, and menopause, and instead focuses on the female body as a vehicle for inner and outer transcendence. 41 Contradictory messages to women are characteristic of the magazine, which operates simultaneously on literal and imaginative planes, addressing itself both to blue-bloods with a disposable income and to those who are only able to reimagine themselves as select members of a genteel class. Another article by Huxley, on "The Vulgarity of Modern Life," crystallizes this double movement; here the author argues that "some human beings are naturally superior to others," but he qualifies his preference for "natural aristocrats" by claiming that their pre-eminence is not based upon birth or wealth, but rather on some elusive quality he terms "vitality." 42 Huxley's remarks speak to the magazine's interest in cultivating a reader base that privileges refinement, whatever its actual income, while the language he invokes--"natural hierarchy," "essentially vulgar," "natural commoners"--works to stabilize the dichotomy he seeks to deconstruct. Although several of Vogue's articles convey the view that an abstract love of gracious living (not dependent upon income) is one form of indulgence, the magazine's preoccupation with the upper crust is based upon the necessity of the reader's literal consumption. The ads for indulgences such as the Elizabeth Arden salon, Parisian cosmetics, Rolls-Royces, and exotic vacations all confirm that Vogue's target audience is people with money.
Huxley's discussion of "natural aristocrats" intertwines British upper-class values with an idea of high culture, a move that is recapitulated and amplified in Vogue's representation of the Bloomsbury Group. Bloomsbury's contributions to the magazine illustrate the degree to which the male members of the Group, as transmitters of high culture, are complicit in the magazine's dissemination of Englishness and the marginalization of femininity. While there is still considerable debate regarding the status and social significance of Bloomsbury, Raymond Williams's contention that the group was at once against the "dominant ideas and values" of the English upper class and "still willingly, in all immediate ways, part of it" is evidenced by the group's appearance in Vogue. 43 Jennifer Wicke's interpretation of Bloomsbury as an "experiment in coterie consumption" is useful here since her analysis speaks both to the group's consumption of artistic products as well as "the marketing and consumption of their [own] art . . . and lifestyle." 44 Roger Fry's establishment of the Omega Workshop, an artists' collective that produced decorative objects, illustrates this point, but Bloomsbury's public display in Vogue--and its advertising of Omega products in the magazine's pages--are perhaps the best examples of what Wicke suggests are their calculated self-promotion and exposure. 45 Omega's bold colors and dynamic designs that invoked the style of Matisse and Kandinsky were a jarring intrusion upon Vogue's representation of English prettiness and harmony, but despite Fry's desire to revolutionize English interiors, the decorations were primarily purchased by a select and relatively wealthy group of patrons. Often flanked by Omega products, members of Bloomsbury on several different occasions allowed their private world to be commercialized: an early July, 1923 article on the home of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville West features a photograph of the couple among their sixteenth-century English antiques; the November 1924 issue treats readers to a photo spread of the interior of "Mrs. Woolf's house in Tavistock square," featuring elaborate designs by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Another layout, early March 1925, highlights the "Cambridge Rooms of Maynard Keynes," the influential Bloomsbury economist who believed in the Arnoldian doctrine of high culture, again spotlighting Grant's and Bell's decorative artwork. 46 Vogue reproduced two of the eight life-size allegorical res (symbolic of the Arts and Sciences) that circled Keynes's room at King's College, referring to Grant's and Bell's execution as "the most successful that has been carried out in England during this century." 47 In contrast to the pervasive critical disaffection for English art during this period, Vogue consistently upheld the value of what Patrick Brantlinger calls Bloomsbury's "aesthetic ethics or ethical aestheticism." 48
In addition to these photo spreads, Vogue gave ample space to Bloomsbury's written work; Vita Sackville West was a regular contributor, publishing several essays on contemporary writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Elizabeth Bowen. In an article entitled "What Do Women Want From Books?" Sackville West concludes that women are "born romantics" who lack "that peculiarly male instinct for the classical tradition." 49 Although, like other Vogue critics, Sackville West refuses to equate women's cultural production as equal to that of male artists, maintaining that women's emotive literary work "should be better corseted," she still functions as a popularizer of high modernism for her lay audience, effectively supplying Vogue consumers with the basics in literary criticism, "The story must no longer be like a picture in a frame, neat, complete, self-sufficient, entire; it must be a broken thing." 50 At the same time that she is an enthusiastic advocate of literary modernism, popularizing the idea that hierarchical cultural boundaries must be maintained, she herself visually functions as a signifier of aristocratic culture. The late July 1927 issue features a photograph of Sackville West's regal profile, celebrating her recent award of the Hawthornden Prize for her long poem, "The Land." Elsewhere, within the context of an article that showcases media-constructed taste--"Some of the Most Interesting Books of the Day" (early October 1923)--the magazine reproduces a painting by the late William Strang that captures Sackville West's striking stature and celebrates her unique ability to capture "the spirit of place" in her fiction. Vita's "place," of course, was Knole and Sissinghurst, a fact that Vogue later exploits when it publishes her article on "The Edwardians Below Stairs." This examination of the utility of household servants concludes, "The house held them bound within a small patriotism . . . the whole system was feudal. . . . But it brought also its pride, its piety, its fulfilment." 51 This sense of national entitlement and class privilege recalls Clive Bell's remarks in Civilization that some people are "willing servants," ready to "make sacrifices for an ideal," and it also dovetails with Vogue's assertion that "luxury is the toy of the modern Englishwoman." 52 By utilizing Bloomsbury as the face of refinement and good taste, the magazine capitalizes on the Arnoldian idea that culture is the best that has been thought and said. Toward this end, Vogue published art and cultural criticism by Roger Fry, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and Clive Bell (plus critiques of their publications), as well as reviews of books by Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and David Garnett. Like Vita Sackville West, several of these Bloomsberries also were featured as celebrity tastemakers, allowing their photographs to be mass-marketed to Vogue's readership. 53 Although, like Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group appeared several times in the magazine throughout the 1920s, Vogue illustrates the degree to which gender is a determining factor in the construction and circulation of one's mass-produced image. 54
While one might argue that Bloomsbury's contributions to the magazine reflect a democratic impulse, particularly in view of the male fear that participating in mass culture is a form of emasculation, this reading does not take into account the publication's class bias, or how male contributors such as Fry and Bell typically serve as authorities on femininity. This gender asymmetry was a factor in the composition of Bloomsbury from the beginning and is also a reaction against the pervasive assumption that "the feminine" was a pejorative category in art criticism during this period. 55 Although much modernist art criticism regarded Fry's Omega products as purely decorative and therefore denigrated them as effeminate, in Vogue the critic and his objects commanded a level of attention that suggested English art was fueled by a masculine ethos. 56 The clearest example of the institutionalization of male ascendancy in Vogue's pages is the treatment of women artists, particularly Vanessa Bell. 57 Fry celebrates Bell in the February 1926 issue, placing her "in the front rank of British painters of today," but his praise is launched by reference to those skeptics who believe that women are "incapable of first rate creative work in the visual arts." 58 Vogue singles out Bell and Grant as "the two most brilliant" artists of the period, but their work is subjected to differential assessments; only the evaluation of Bell is informed by a larger gender-biased discourse about the inferiority of women painters. 59 Fry's essay is a direct attempt to debunk this myth, but the assertion of binary conrations of value reappear in articles such as Augustus John's "The Woman Artist," where he applauds female painters who produce "honestly feminine" work, not surprisingly, because they threaten "no encroachment on man's domain." 60 Vogue singles out Vanessa Bell and Marie Laurencin as the most important female artists of the day, undoubtedly because both women's work conforms to "feminine" expectations; the magazine reproduces none of Bell's abstract work and instead displays paintings that are of maternal and domestic subjects. Fry acknowledges Bell's double marginality, arguing that her success is all the more remarkable, given the modernist devaluation of English art, because she is "not only a woman, but an Englishwoman." 61 Clive Bell echoes this pronouncement, identifying his wife as the only woman among the seven most important contemporary English painters (Grant and Fry being two others) who are forging an "unmistakably British . . . national tradition." 62
What emerges, as one considers the range of Bloomsbury's contributions to Vogue, in addition to the obvious incestuousness of their self-promotion, is the concerted, if unconscious, effort to put forth the view detected by the reviewer of Leonard Woolf's Hunting the Highbrow: that "the White Hope of England" is the "intellectual highbrow." 63 While Leonard Woolf himself does not utilize this precise phrase, the racialized characterization of the highbrow (and the assumption of a male subject) speaks to the spirit of his volume and, more generally, captures the magazine's representation of the Bloomsbury Group as champions and exemplars of "civilized" English thought and living. In Hunting the Highbrow, Woolf aligns himself with his wife's antipublicity, antibestseller bias, arguing that "the highbrow is genuinely attracted by elements in literature . . . which may conveniently be called aesthetic, and which are not primarily interesting or attractive to the great public." 64 Also like Virginia, he utilizes the language of reproduction to characterize the excesses of the lower class. In contrast to the lowbrow whose senses predominate and who produces book after book that is "comprehensible [and] entertaining" to the "majority of their fellow-countrymen," Woolf claims that the highbrow is characterized by his self-control and literary moderation, "the highbrow is a very slow-breeding animal; he is rarely prolific; he is often in favour of and practices birth control; and there are not very many of him who are actually writing books in any generation. The problems of over-population do not, therefore, apply to highbrow literature" (HH, 25). Woolf is convinced that if only "men would allow intellect and reason rather than passion" to regulate their bodies, "sordid ugliness and misery would disappear from society" (HH, 50). In an interesting juxtaposition, the same Vogue review of Hunting the Highbrow contains a discussion of Robert Graves's volume, Impenetrability, an impassioned defense of the English language and English ways of thought. Yet unlike Woolf, who advocates for the surveillance of popular tastes, Graves argues against the recently formed "Society for Pure English" on the grounds that it is the "literary equivalent of political Fascism." 65 Graves's claim that "at no period have the cultured classes been able to force the habit of tidiness on the nation as whole" (I, 31) contrasts with Woolf's proposal, which favors the dissemination of the English highbrow's standard of "aesthetic merit" (HH, 29). It thus makes sense that an earlier review by Leonard Woolf provides Vogue readers the literary equivalent of what he terms "caviare [for] the twentieth century": a fresh translation of Plato's Symposium, a volume of religious meditations by Francis Bacon, and a new edition of James Boswell's letters. Undaunted by the fact that these books are not likely to be on the shelves of many Vogue readers, Woolf tracks the concept of the "civilized" and urges consumers to partake in the "delicious meal" that these volumes offer. 66
During this interwar period in England, Vogue did indeed seek to enforce "the habit of tidiness on the nation" through its dissemination, to borrow Deirdre Lynch's phrase, of "domestic nationality," the view that the home was a reflection of "little England." 67 Vogue readers would recognize this aestheticization of the private sphere in terms of the love and acquisition of English things such as servants, domestic comfort, luxury objects, manicured gardens, and access to national culture and celebrities. Clive Bell's reference to the consolidation of a "national tradition" asserts the importance of promoting Englishness, an objective consistent with Vogue's mission and particularly evidenced by the magazine's elevation of Bloomsbury as a nationally intelligible referent of high culture. One anonymous 1922 editorial in particular anticipates Q. D. Leavis's attack on mass cultural pursuits in Fiction and the Reading Public . The Vogue editorialist bemoans the democratization of public opinion, attributing what he calls the "tyranny of the masses" to the rise of newspapers, telephones, and the cinema, all of which allegedly have contributed to a general mediocrity and "uniformity of opinion" that is ruining the nation. In contrast, this reviewer asserts, "the English aristocrat [is] the apostle of personal liberty, the sworn enemy to popular prejudice" (Early November 1922). Vogue invites us to read Bloomsbury, prime upholders of individual liberty and antipopular sentiment, as the heirs of this aristocratic tradition. If Aldous Huxley could caution against the dangers of a "consciously cultivated nationalism" in its pages, the magazine could nonetheless capitalize on Bloomsbury's role as promulgators of national culture to individual consumers. 68 In an editorial on "What the English Read," Vogue singles out several members of Bloomsbury (namely Forster, Woolf, Garnett, Nicolson, and Strachey) as the "minute number of the elite" who exhibit "the finest and most exacting taste in the world." Unconcerned about its universalizing claims, the magazine declares that their "influences have been very marked, not only in England," but around the globe. 69 Vogue's perception, as well as construction, of the hegemonic influence of the Group explains why, in April 1941, long after Dorothy Todd's editorship at Vogue had ended, the magazine ran a photograph of Woolf's "bomb-spliced home [with] Duncan Grant's and Vanessa Bell's murals on public view"; the accompanying article bemoans the wartime destruction of these "national treasures," suggesting that with the bombing of the author's private home civilization itself is being threatened. 70
This allusion to "civilization" raises an important issue, particularly within the context of Raymond Williams's contention that Bloomsbury was founded on a belief in the sovereignty of the "civilized individual" and an aversion to "public show" (BF, 165). 71 Williams recognizes Bloomsbury's political engagement and involvement, but he argues that the group's "social conscience, in the end, is to protect the private consciousness" (BF, 167). A remark by Duncan Grant helps us to understand how the group may have reconciled its cultivation of private conscience with its compromised participation in the Englishness of the Vogue agenda. In response to those who opposed the Group's participation in the magazine, Grant maintained "if Bloomsbury has real pearls, they can be scattered anywhere without harm." 72 This statement speaks to the Group's investment in a kind of cultural paternalism that inculcates its value of private sensibility on a national level through the venue of a lady's magazine. Bloomsbury achieved this through its ideological dissociation between the public and private sphere. For example, the Group's hostility to both militarism and imperialism did not prevent their association with a magazine that, in 1924, devoted several pages in two separate issues to the propagandistic British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, which reproduced in miniature the entire resources of the British empire and was intended to foster inter-Imperial trade, open new markets for British products, and demonstrate to the people of Britain their almost illimitable possibilities overseas. 73 Vogue ran many photographs of this colossal 220-acre colonial spectacle--visited by over 26 million people--displaying the Exhibition's palaces of Industry, Architecture, and Engineering, and showcasing the pavilions, among others, of Burma, Nigeria, India, and Hong Kong. Several ethnographic exhibits of "primitive peoples" provided visitors with distractions, such as the recreation of a scene from "native African life . . . in the Gold Coast," which appeared "strange to European eyes," or the West African tableaux that featured a reproduction of reclining "natives at home" armed with "primitive weapons." 74 Some displays actually housed indigenous peoples; as Brian Street observes, the exhibition was understood to have pedagogical value for the English visitor, contrasting a modern, civilized self with a non-European, primitive Other. 75 Vogue's text reveals that visitors to Wembley could tour the "dominions" by sampling "native dishes" in the Exhibition's many restaurants: one could lunch in South Africa, take tea in India, and dine in New Zealand, Australia, or Canada. 76
Virginia Woolf visited the Exhibition with Leonard and even published, though notably not in Vogue, a critical essay that imagined its fantastic destruction, so it is important to clarify that appearing in the magazine does not necessarily imply that one condones or endorses its content. 77 One doubts, for example, that Woolf was consulted in 1927 when the magazine quoted from To the Lighthouse in an article on "Cooking Within the Empire," using Mrs. Ramsay's French stew, improbably, to argue that English cooks should internationalize their kitchens by using colonial products. 78 Appearing in Vogue may not have constituted a clear endorsement of the Empire, but it did put its contributors in a politically precarious position, particularly given the Anglocentric nature of Bloomsbury and its commitment to creating, in Leonard Woolf's words, a new world based upon "rational" and "civilized" relations. 79 Although Leonard himself spent seven years as a district administrator in Ceylon (1904-11), he went on to produce three important anti-imperialist tracts during the 1920s; when Vogue singled him out for its "Hall of Fame" in late January 1924, it did so in part because of his "vast knowledge of imperial politics," though no mention was made of his stocks and shares in "imperial ventures." 80 This kind of contradiction is thrown into relief by Vogue, which documents the fact that despite Bloomsbury's general anti-imperialism the Group was ultimately unfazed by its association with a magazine that consistently represented the British Empire as the best form of internationalism.
Vogue's profiling of Wembley's exoticism is only the most striking example of the magazine's imperial content and its representation of the English encounter with, and appropriation of, the Other. The 1920s was a decade in which Vogue high society embraced a range of non-European materials; the Russian ballet was a tremendous influence in the world of fashion and design; Englishwomen adopted the Oriental look, wearing Turkish trousers, Egyptian turbans, and Japanese kimonos. 81 Everything Black was "the rage," from Josephine Baker--whom the magazine celebrated as "a woman possessed, a savage intoxiated with tom-toms"--to black and white interiors, Babangi masks, African bangles to the elbows, and "all-coloured revues." 82 Vogue's obsession with ethnographic objects extends to the joys of consumer tourism; several articles urge readers to vacation among "simple, primitive" African cultures and to visit the "barbaric splendors" of the Orient. 83 The lure of trips to colonial posts held particular appeal for the English, for as Vogue put it in an article on South Africa, the "prophecies of the early colonists have been more than fulfilled." 84 The travel articles never mention race or indigenous populations, unless it is to stress their exoticism or mark their nonhumanness, and instead the magazine spotlights England's tremendous "civilizing" achievements abroad. One woman offers an account of the difficulty of being the mother of a debutante in an outpost of empire, assuring readers that there will be British ladies "of social standing" to help "guide their daughters through their first season." Elsewhere, a woman on an expedition to Kurdistan advises English visitors to avoid the "smelly and dirty" Kurdish harems, while another, upon learning that girls are put into the harem at age twelve, erupts: "Such is the perversity of the Orient!" As Inderpal Grewel has argued, Englishwomen during this period tended to respond to the harem as a space of not only confinement but inferiority. 85 This perspective is consistently upheld by Vogue's representation of colonial women; the colonies are imaginatively possible as tourist attractions only because England had made them habitable. One essay on South Africa, in particular, clearly demonstrates this view. The author asserts that "no where have the more liberal principles of British Imperialism been so strikingly manifested" than South Africa, boasting that over 800 million pounds of gold and diamonds have been mined, but no mention is made of the exploited indigenous manual labor. 86 Throughout Vogue's pages, the advertisements echo these achievements of empire, promoting the power and influence of Britain through the fetishization of national commodities: consumers can book flights on "Imperial Airways," purchase portable typewriters known as "The Imperial Good Companion" (its parts "made entirely in England"), and drive an expensive Empire Car. As one jingoistic ad for petroleum succinctly puts it, British products are "a guarantee of quality" so "Buy British!"
Vogue documents the degree to which the rhetoric of nationalism and colonialism is a central feature of modern British consciousness, illustrating the marketability of "national culture" and the country's investment in "civilizing" and appropriating non-Western cultures. The magazine's representation of Bloomsbury situates the Group at the center of this ideological juncture, demonstrating both their fascination with primitivism and orientalism as art modes, and their contempt for non-Western opinions and values. A range of examples documents Bloomsbury's relation to exoticism. Vogue celebrates "the influence of Negro sculpture" on Duncan Grant's work, showcasing costume designs by the artist for Togo, or the Noble Savage, a ballet danced by Mme. Lopokova at Covent Garden. 87 Edwin Muir reviews David Garnett's The Sailor's Return and wonders whether "the relations between a sailor and a Negress are a fit subject for art; whether the theme is not too fantastic to have universal significance." 88 This is the same decade in which Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven is reviewed, a book that Vogue praises despite its difficulty believing in Harlem's "coloured intelligentsia." 89 Clive Bell, like Huxley, puts out a "plea for No More Jazz" on the grounds that Negro music is monotonous, dull, and stupid, a move that goes against Vogue's popular stance but reflects Bloomsbury's ambivalence toward the elevation of "primitive" objects to high art. 90 In the 1920s Woolf recorded her attendance at "the Niggers' show in Chelsea," an exhibition of "obscene" sculpture from the Ivory Coast and the Congo that generated much interest and controversy (D, 2:30). None of Roger Fry's essays celebrating African art appear in Vogue, but his influence, as well as his ambivalence toward African objects, permeates the magazine's pages. 91 Like other modernists, Fry's praise for the primitive was couched in assumptions about the superiority of western culture; his view that African art is the product of peoples but not "culture in our sense of the word" is a position that Vogue consistently upholds. 92 As pervasive as references to primitivism in the magazine's pages is the deployment of orientalist tropes, what Vogue calls "the mystery, the romance, and the lure of the beautiful, everlasting East." 93 Duncan Grant's painting The Harem, reproduced in an article on the London School, captures the western male fantasy of the fleshy and indolent native woman, but the only reference to the work's content is that it "look[s] well on the page." 94 Vita Sackville West's travel narrative, Passenger to Teheran, is reviewed by Edwin Muir who recommends the book because it exposes English readers to "many strange kinds of life" beyond the outposts of empire. 95 Like the Vogue lipstick ad that seduces Englishwomen with the line, "tatoo your lips with a south sea maiden's lure," the Group provided a tour-guide service for those readers who felt contamination anxiety when faced with non-English materials while it also served as an important model of English modernity for the magazine's xenophobic audience. 96
Cumulatively, what Bloomsbury's appearance in Vogue illustrates is an engagement with "primitive" materials, an intermittent disdain for non-European peoples, and an investment in marketing culture and "civilized living" to a certain class of English individuals. Despite Clive Bell's stated contempt for unabashed consumerism, the congruence between his tracts on civilization and Vogue's own commercial objectives is striking. In Civilization: An Essay, Bell links consumerism with degradation, seeing the two as deplorable markers of a lower-class mentality. In contrast to those who embody a "will to civilization," the average British working class man obsesses about commodities, a result not of economic need but of his ignoble character and lack of ambition (C, 262). 97 Startling about this assessment is not only Bell's classism but also his blindness to his own commodification by Vogue. One of the magazine's objectives under Todd's leadership was to keep its mass upper-class audience up to date on cultural events; more than any other Bloomsberry, Clive Bell serves as the cheerleader and translator of avant-garde aesthetics for a popular audience. Revered by the magazine as a cultural celebrity--the late October 1924 issue celebrates him as "the most remarkable" art critic in Europe--Bell's reviews elevate Vogue's market savvy by packaging and urging the consumption of high art: French paintings at the Tate; designs by English Post-Impressionists at London Galleries; shows by Picasso, Cezanne, Braque, Matisse, and Seurat; and surrealist, futurist, and dadaist exhibitions. Throughout the 1920s he functions as a curator of and guide to modernist art, representing radical modernity in easily consumable bites.
Speaking broadly, both Bell and British Vogue concur that civilization consists in self-expression, good manners, leisure, a discriminating taste for beauty, an appreciation of the arts, and a dislike of vulgarity. Significantly, both assume that strict social stratification between the classes is needed to secure England's civilization. The first of Bell's two books on civilization, On British Freedom, was reviewed by Vogue in the early October 1923 issue, when the author was praised as "a champion of our decaying liberties." 98 Bell's hierarchical theory of civilization stipulates that "no one . . . can become highly civilized without a fair measure of material security" (C, 209), and the only way to ensure this security is through a service class that will maintain "the existence of a leisured class" (C, 210). 99 According to Bell, civilization is by nature an "artificial" construct (C, 173), requiring the existence of a "civilizing elite" because "only a leisured class will produce a highly civilized" society (C, 217). While I do not mean to suggest that Bell's controversial theory of civilization is representative either of Bloomsbury's views as a whole or Woolf's in particular, one might argue that his vision of an insulated, "highly civilized . . . nucleus" (C, 260) of economically privileged individuals who create civility by, literally, "forming groups" (C, 171) sounds a lot like Bloomsbury. 100 Bell's theory is popularly disseminated by Vogue both through its pervasive assumption that its readers constitute a civilizing elite and its message that to be completely civilized one must, as Bell puts it, possess a "taste for excellence," "be free from material cares," and accumulate "some of the superfluities of life" (C, 208, 209, 211). 101 An editorial by Aldous Huxley on "The Dangers of Work" alludes to Bell's theory by passionately arguing for the virtues of a leisured class. Huxley here proposes that the dignity of labor is considerably overrated; he provides a corrective to this model by urging the English public to reinstate an "ideal leisured society" that will "cultivate the graces of the spirit" and protect culture "from the effects of popular prejudice." Like Bell, Huxley believes that leisure enables people to cultivate "good taste and an open mind," and also like Bell, he naturalizes the hierarchy by stipulating that certain people have a "hereditary right" to their leisure-class status. 102 It is crucial to recognize that Bell's theory of civilization does not define itself in terms of the formation of a nation-state but rather through the influence and dissemination of the individual mind. 103 This focus on "private consciousness" recalls Williams's observation that Bloomsbury's ideological commitment was to "the supreme value of the civilized individual whose pluralization, as more and more civilized individuals, was . . . the only acceptable social direction" ("BF," 165). Williams's word here, "pluralization," unintentionally alludes to a crucial aspect of the Group's appearance in Vogue: the multiplication of a culturally produced image of, to use Bell's phrase, "highly civilized men and women" distributed through newsstands and into people's homes through mass circulation (C, 172). Like Bloomsbury, the magazine understood itself to be a civilizing agent, "a living force in all of the civilized corners of the world" (MV, 142).
Neither Bell nor Williams adequately theorizes the gendered aspect of Bloomsbury's social vision, leaving unexamined what the central term, civilization, might mean for women in the Group. 104 Although Woolf was privately critical of Bell's views in her diary, her letters to him reveal a very different response, referring to Civilization as "brilliant, witty and suggestive . . . full of really new and original things" (L, 3:438). Woolf's evaluation of Bell's theory is characterized by ambivalence, a response reflected in her remark about women's relation to civilization in A Room of One's Own, where she refers to women's split-consciousness as occupying a position precariously both in and outside of culture. 105 As Brian Shaeffer recognizes, the widest rift between Bell and Woolf is over the role of women in civilization. Bell writes that he "has heard ladies say that the measure of a people's civility is the position it accords to women," but his tract is an extended argument against this position (C, 24). He sees women as a "means to civility," not its objective, an antifeminist premise that Woolf clearly would have repudiated (C, 238). Like Bell, and Bloomsbury in general, Woolf subscribed to the notion that "civilization is more of an individual than a collective phenomenon," but her feminist critique of empire ultimately positions women as the only truly "civilized" subjects. 106 In contrast, Bell's view that women execute a purely utilitarian cultural function suggests that the only authentically "civilized" subject is male, a perspective that corresponds to Huxley's critique of "women of leisure" in his Vogue essay, "The Dangers of Work." There, Huxley nostalgically bemoans the days when "there were still men of leisure" in society, arguing that "man's real place is in the home . . . [where he can] exercise his native powers of abstraction." The assumption here, of course, is that women have passion only for the concrete, the immediate, and the practical, a view that the magazine upholds through its refusal to level all differences between the sexes and its submission of women's artistic production to masculine standards of value. Vogue illustrates the degree to which popular markers of femininity inform the commodification of the female artist, and it amply demonstrates the complicities between Anglo-modernist practice, mass consumption, and the rhetoric of Englishness.
Raymond Williams's contention that Bloomsbury represented the development of "a new style" is a specific reference to the Group's embrace of frankness, sexual tolerance, and intellectual honesty, in short, classic Enlightenment values ("BF," 165). But the phrase also describes how Bloomsbury, as disseminators of English style, left a profound mark on Vogue throughout the 1920s. The magazine celebrates liberty, the sworn enemy to popular prejudice, as a referent for English high culture, revealing that the Group's celebration of the modern, civilized individual is not separate from the contaminants of capitalism, imperialism, and privileged consumption. Vogue provides us with a prime cultural artifact that documents how, despite Bloomsbury's political involvement and altruistic sympathies with the working class, their real affiliation was with members of their own class. One detail in particular documents this vividly. By sheer chance, Woolf's appearance in the May 1926 issue coincides with the General Strike in England; not coincidental, however, is that the magazine makes no reference to this ten-day conflict or to the ruthless government suppression that ended it. Bloomsbury was certainly not as apolitical as Vogue on the issue of the Strike, but Woolf's comment regarding the return of "social normality" at its conclusion captures the Group's understanding of civility: "We're going to have a strike dinner and drink champagne with Clive, the Frys, and other spirits" (L, 3:262). 107 Bloomsbury's appearance in Vogue provides a frame for this champagne moment, conveying the degree to which the Group's political sympathies are always class inflected and inevitably mediated through the pleasures of consumption and individual refinement. Bloomsbury may never have acknowledged that it marketed "civilized" living, but Vogue testifies to this fact, illustrating the Group's complicity in the popular transmission of British high culture. As Mary Butts so astutely put it over sixty years ago, "Civilization is their business" ("B," 44).
Jane Garrity is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is currently completing a book entitled Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary.
1. See Mary Butts, "Bloomsbury," , 5, no. 2 (April 1998): 32; hereafter abbreviated "B." Butts evaluates Bloomsbury's self-promotion and offers an eyewitness account of the Group from the perspective of one of "the other writers of England" ("B," 34) who was not a member of their "magic ring" ("B," 33). The essay was originally written for Lord Gorell, the editor of The Cornhill, who declined the piece because the Group was not well-known; see Camilla Bragg and Nathalie Blondel, "Editor's Preface," "B," 32. For a discussion of "Bloomsbury," see Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson and Company, 1998), 398-403.
2. Michael Murphy, "'One Hundred Per Cent Bohemia': Pop Decadence and the Aestheticization of Commodity in the Rise of the Slicks," in Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 76. Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914-1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 63-9, tracks the expansion of the leisure industry during the 1920s and 1930s, also discussing the overall slump in magazine sales during this period.
3. Regina Marler, Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 4, 23. Marler tracks the commercialism of the "Bloomsbury boom" to 1920, but her book focuses on the period since 1967.
4. Jennifer Wicke, "Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern Markets," in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 28, no. 1 (fall 1994): 6. Despite Butts's critique of Bloomsbury, she concedes that as individuals they occupy a place of "high distinction . . . in our national life" ("B," 32).
5. For a theoretically informed exploration of the complex intersections between women and modernity, see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
6. See Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman's Magazine, 1800-1914 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 146. Most of the work that has been done on women's periodicals has focused on the pre-1914 period, particularly the Victorian era, or has looked at contemporary magazines. Beetham's bibliography is particularly useful on this account.
7. Two important recent collections, in particular, successfully demonstrate the degree to which Anglo-American modernist writers were complicitous in their own commodification. See Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Steven Watt, eds. Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik, eds. Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (London: Macmillan Press, 1996).
8. In addition to the collections I refer to above, the following authors usefully problematize the notion of the aesthetic purity of the modernist product and challenge the assumed opposition between modernism and consumption: Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); R. B. Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Lawrence S. Rainey, "The Price of Modernism: Reconsidering the Publication of The Waste Land," Yale Review 78 (winter 1989): 279-300; Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and Joyce Piell Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997).
9. Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1, no. 1 (winter 1979): 133. A characteristic example of Vogue's promodernist stance is Edith Sitwell, "The Art of Gertrude Stein," Vogue, early October 1925, which praises Stein as "one of the most important living pioneers" of modernist prose; and Edith Sitwell, review of The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, Vogue, 9 January 1929, where Pound's poetry is deemed "beautiful . . . sharply observed . . . poignant . . . [and] profound."
10. Mary McCarthy, review of Anna Livia Plurabelle by James Joyce, Vogue, 1 May 1929.
11. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 305.
12. Murphy, "One Hundred Percent Bohemia," 64. Condé Nast was an American who began by distributing copies of American Vogue in London in 1912. When sales quadrupled during World War I, Nast decided to launch a British version of the magazine. The first edition appeared on 15 September 1916 and cost one shilling. See Caroline Seebohm, The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast (New York: Viking, 1982), 123-4; hereafter abbreviated MV.
13. Aldous Huxley, "The Perversion of Values," Vogue, late October 1926.
14. Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 113, discusses the relation between magazine fiction and the social status of the periodical. Seebohm, summarizing Vogue's strategy, writes, "No fiction ever appeared; publishing it would have been against Nast's policy of restricting circulation, as fiction tended to attract an indiscriminate audience" (MV, 77).
15. See David Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States 1880-1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Reed's meticulously researched book documents the fact that, unlike in the United States where circulation res and advertising revenues were readily available during the early decades of this century, such information was extremely scarce in the United Kingdom. He does provide some statistical res for Vogue: the total net paid circulation of the magazine in 1930 was 133,931 while that of Better Homes and Gardens was 1,390,660; but that year the former took in $3,012,593 from advertisers, while the latter took almost half a million dollars less, $2,515,353 (153-4). Although the Audit Bureau of Circulation was established in Britain in 1931, long after it was accepted in North America, only a few magazines submitted to the independent audit during the 1930s. Reed points out that only in the 1950s and 1960s are British circulation res completely reliable. In writing about the years 1921-1940, he recounts that publishers were very "coy about publishing their advertising rates, let alone their audited circulations. Readership surveys seem to have been regarded as arcane and an unnecessary luxury" . This view is substantiated by Caroline Seebohm, who recounts that in 1920 Condé Nast was told he was "lowering Vogue's dignity" by publishing circulation res (MV, 79).
16. For circulation res for the little magazines, see Lawrence Rainey, "The Price of Modernism," 109-12. Rainey does not categorize Vogue as a mass market publication because it targeted a restricted audience. While this observation is true, it is important to recognize that Condé Nast envisioned--and secured--a global audience of select subscribers.
17. This quote is from a manifesto written by Condé Nast in 1913, entitled "Class Publications," where he spelled out his revolutionary theory on how to cultivate a restricted market, quoted in MV, 80, emphasis in original.
18. Nast's view that cross-identification would compel readership was not only applicable to a certain class. According to Joseph McAleer, although the large majority of readers of popular women's magazines during this period came from the lower-middle and working classes, the periodicals they enjoyed were predominantly "middle-class publications." What this suggests is "a kind of escapism among working-class readers towards a middle-class ideal" (McAleer, Popular Readings, 81).
19. See Melba Cuddy-Keane, "Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality," in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Technology, Mass Culture, and the Arts, ed. Pamela Caughie (New York: Garland Publishing, forthcoming).
20. Jameson, Postmodernism, 306.
21. See John M. MacKenzie, introduction to Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 10.
22. I discuss Woolf's complex involvement with Vogue in my "Virginia Woolf, Intellectual Harlotry, and 1920s British Vogue," in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Pages 2-5 of this essay appear in slightly altered form in my essay on Woolf.
23. See Julie Taddeo, "A Modernist Romance? Lytton Strachey and the Women of Bloomsbury," in Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 134.
24. "Fashions of the Mind," Vogue, early February 1924.
25. For a discussion of the centrality of male homosexuality to Bloomsbury's intellectual life, see Taddeo, "A Modernist Romance?" esp. 137-8. Taddeo argues that despite the Group's bisexual love triangles and candid conversations about sex, they ultimately operated within a Victorian ideological framework of gender difference and patriarchal relations . Interestingly, during her tenure at Vogue, Dorothy Todd was living with Madge Garland, the magazine's fashion editor. Nicola Luckhurst, Bloomsbury in Vogue (London: Cecil Woolf, 1998), 21, discusses Todd's "flamboyant" lesbianism. Vogue surprisingly includes Havelock Ellis in its "Hall of Fame" in the early February 1925 issue, celebrating The Psychology of Sex for being "equally devoted to literature and science," but no explicit reference is made to homosexuality.
26. Cynthia White, Women's Magazines 1693-1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), 94.
27. See Cynthia White, "Growth between the Wars: 1920-1938," in Women's Magazines, esp. 93-4. Vogue's readers were largely untouched by the economic adversity of the war; instead, the magazine benefitted from a new group of subscribers, the newly rich.
28. "Women and Education," Vogue, early February 1921. This editorial anticipates Woolf's own concern for women's intellectual freedom in A Room of One's Own and was timed to coincide with an announcement that the Queen would accept an honorary degree at Oxford. Vogue writes, "The women's part of the university will never possess the spirit which alone justifies Oxford's existence, until it has acquired the same freedom, intellectual as well as social, which characterizes the men's part." It was only in 1919 that the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act was passed, admitting women to many professions, such as the bar. The editorial on education is one of the few that unambiguously praises women's progress in the 1920s. This decade, after all, gave women their sexual freedom through the work of Marie Stopes and her birth control clinics and political freedom through the vote. No article on Stopes's efforts was ever published, nor did the magazine document how the vote put five million more women in a position to help elect the second Labour government, which fought unemployment. For Vogue, the 1920s was not a particularly political decade, despite historian Olive Banks's observation that the 1920s was a period of considerable success for feminists. See Banks, The Politics of British Feminism, 1918-1970 (Brookfield, Vt.: Edward Elgan Publishers, 1993), 96.
29. Sydney Tremayne, "A Career for Women: Being Beautiful," Vogue, early September 1923. Like several others, this article vividly documents the fact that Vogue's feminine ideal is the conventional "English rose": "If the nose shape desired is Grecian and the organ obstinately Hibernian or Semitic, a slight operation may be necessary."
30. For a discussion of magazine advertisers' cooptation of women's political longings, see Jennifer Scanlon, "Stoves for Women, Votes for Men," in Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995). Today the example of Vogue's linkage of women's freedom to consumption pervades women's advertising. The recent Kenneth Cole campaign is but one demonstration of this; in the company's spring 1998 catalogue, an ad for leather purses carries the caption: "We the people . . . know it's a woman's right to choose. After all, she's the one carrying it."
31. Aldous Huxley, "The Battle of the Sexes," Vogue, 27 June 1928.
32. The language here is from an ad for a diuretic tonic, Kruschen Habit, marketed to women as a product that would benefit not only themselves, but posterity; beneath a full-page drawing of a mother and her child, the caption reads, "On the safeguarding of women's health depends the future of our race." This advertisement ran in the late March 1918 issue of Vogue and is consistent with the magazine's rhetoric elsewhere during the war years that equated women's health with the well-being of England. While the rhetoric of nationalism is most blatantly invoked during this period to sell women on both the idea of rationing (the lead for a fashion article is "Why It Is Most Patriotic to Affect the Slim Silhouette") and the concept of economy (one editorial announces "The Newest National Sport, Is Called Conservation"), Vogue inculcates the virtues of national pride well beyond the war years.
33. Vogue, 25 January 1928, from an untitled, anonymous article on resort travel to Jamaica. This is one of the only Vogue articles that engages directly with the issue of racial variation, though its primary purpose is to reassure the reader that she has nothing to fear from such diversity:
There is, of course, a large population of those known as "coloured" people as distinguished from the negro. These are mulattoes, or half-breeds, and all who have obviously some white blood in them. They regard themselves as superior to the pure black and large numbers of them are eager to prove that they are pure white, in spite of very visible evidence to the contrary. Under English rule, which is that usually given to a Crown Colony, they are, take it all round, very fairly contented, in spite of a rebellion or two last century in which a very limited number were engaged.
34. Ibid.
35. The Hon. Lady Grigg, wife of the Commander in Chief of Kenya Colony, "Collecting Kit for Kenya," Vogue, 31 October 1928.
36. Antoinette Burton, "Woman in the Nation," in Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 33-62, discusses the links between female moral superiority and the progress of Britain. Although Burton's book is focused on Anglo-Indian culture, her remarks are extremely useful for thinking about Vogue's representation of the Englishwoman's encounter with the Other.
37. This editorial illustrates the centrality of the photographic image in the construction of a civilized self. The author recalls wandering through magnificent botanical gardens, and recounts this dialogue: "Someone said, 'I imagine the garden of Eden was like this,' and another said, 'Eve will not be very difficult to find. Prepare your cameras.' He went up to a group of pretty girls, spoke to them in Malay, and gave them ten cents each. They straight-away slipped out of their sarongs and four brown and smiling little Eves stood in the sunshine amid the flowers!" (Princess Achille Murat, "A Fortnight in Java," 3 April 1929) A policeman then intrudes upon the scene, but rather than interrupt this exploitative moment, the group "gave him fifty cents and asked him to prevent people from stepping between our cameras and the garden of Eden, which he complied with." Ellen Strain, "Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic Viewing and Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century," Wide Angle 18, no. 2 (April 1996): 70-100, discusses photography's touristic implications, arguing that the western possession of technology helped distinguish the leisured tourist from the commodified Other.
38. Murat, "A Fortnight in Java."
39. Raymond Martimer, "New Books For the Morning-Room Table," review of Original Letters, by Eliza Fay, Piano Quartet, by Edward Sackville West, and The Immortal Girl, by Berta Ruck, Vogue, late June 1925.
40. Aldous Huxley, "Popular Literature: The Mystery of the 'Best Seller,' With a Note on Some of the Indispensable Qualifications of the Popular Author," Vogue, late September 1924.
41. One article advises women on how to eliminate facial lines with new electrical treatments that emanate ozone and transmit ultraviolet rays (see "On Her Dressing Table: To Achieve Beauty Without Make-up by Means of Electricity and Gentle Massage," Vogue, late December 1922), while another maintains that facial wrinkles are merely externalizations of the "wrinkles of the soul," so that real beauty can be achieved through an improved "personal outlook" ("Our Enemy, the Wrinkle," Vogue, early January 1921).
42. Aldous Huxley, "The Vulgarity of Modern Life: Defining Scientifically the Chasm in Taste between the Aristocracy and the Servants' Hall," Vogue, 5 October 1927.
43. Raymond Williams, "The Bloomsbury Fraction," in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, l989), 156; hereafter abbreviated "BF." For a recent overview of the contested meaning of the Bloomsbury Group, see Christopher Reed, "Bloomsbury Bashing: Homophobia and the Politics of Criticism in the Eighties," Genders 11 (fall 1991): 58-80. Brian W. Shaffer, "Civilization in Bloomsbury: Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Bell's 'Theory of Civilization,'" Journal of Modern Literature, 19, no. 1 (summer 1994), 75, n. 12, also discusses the problematics of defining a coherent Bloomsbury Group. See also Shaffer, "Civilization in Post-Great War Bloomsbury: Woolf's 'Twenties' Novels and Bell's Civilization and On British Freedom," in The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).
44. Wicke, "Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market," 6.
45. Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)positionings (New York: Routledge, 1994), 174, n. 15, discuss this point. For an example of Vogue's display of Omega products, see Judith Collins, The Omega Workshops (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), plates 90, 95. Collins's book also contains a press photograph of Vanessa Bell wearing an Omega dress of her own design (plate 55). Bell anticipated that her designs for the Omega Workshop would be a "great success," but this dressmaking scheme never materialized; see Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 174. Woolf's shocked response to her sister's Omega dresses perhaps gives some indication of why the venture was never a success: "My God! What colours you are responsible for! Karin's clothes almost wrenched my eyes from the sockets--a skirt barred with reds and yellows of the vilest kind, and a pea green blouse on top, with a gaudy handkerchief on her head, supposed to be the very boldest taste. I shall retire into dove colour and old lavender, with a lace collar, and lawn wristlets" (Letters 2:111). Despite this evidence of Bell's interest in the marketplace, like her sister, she exhibits considerable professional anxiety about public recognition and retains a belief in the public/private split. Her confession to Duncan Grant--"It's awful selling pictures in person"--situates her in a position analogous to Woolf's own, that is, interested in making money but repulsed by the publicness of that exchange (Letters of Vanessa Bell, 232, emphasis mine).
46. Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 219, discusses Keynes's "anti-utilitarian ideals of the pleasure of human relations and the love of beauty." For another discussion of Keynes's relation to Bloomsbury and consumption, see Wicke, "Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market."
47. "The Cambridge Rooms of Maynard Keynes, An Economist and Modern Art," Vogue, early March 1925, a two-page photo spread of Bloomsbury art by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.
48. Brantlinger, Fictions of State, 220.