Modernism à la Mode

Fashion and the Ends of Literature

Elizabeth M. Sheehan

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501728167
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

Modernism à la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to understand what their own stylized works could do in the context of global capital, systemic violence, and social transformation. Modernists engage with fashion as a mood, a set of material objects, and a target of critique, and, in doing so, anticipate and address contemporary debates centered on the uses of literature and literary criticism amidst the supposed crisis in the humanities. A modernist affect with a purpose, no less.

By engaging modernism à la mode—that is, contingently, contextually, and in light of contemporary concerns—this book offers an alternative to the often-untenable distinctions between strong or weak, suspicious or reparative, and politically activist or quietist approaches to literature, which frame current debates about literary methodology. As fashion helps us to describe what modernist texts do, it enables us to do more with modernism as a form of inquiry, perception, and critique. Fashion and modernism are interwoven forms of inquiry, perception, and critique, writes Sheehan. It is fashion that puts the work of early twentieth-century writers in conversation with twenty-first century theories of emotion, materiality, animality, beauty, and history.

1 : MOODS, MODES, MODERNISM

READING FASHIONABLY WITH VIRGINIA WOOLF

Mood work takes shape as a form that is similarly used or co-recognised between agents in a shared scene, a sense that something is happening and an attachment, however inchoate, to sensing out what that something is. The world composed comes apart all the time and at the same time something is (always) coming, and coming together.

—JENNIFER D. CARLSON AND KATHLEEN C. STEWART, “The Legibilities of Mood Work”

But my present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness &c. The fashion world at the Becks—Mrs. Garland was there superintending a display—is certainly one; where people secrete an envelope which connects them & protects them from others, like myself, who am outside the envelope, foreign bodies. These states are very difficult (obviously I grope for words) but I’m always coming back to it. The party consciousness, for example: Sybil’s consciousness. You must not break it. It is something real. You must keep it up—conspire together. Still I cannot get at what I mean.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF, Diary

For anthropologists Jennifer D. Carlson and Kathleen C. Stewart, “mood work” refers to the individual and collective labor of “sens[ing] out what is actual and potential in an historical moment or a situation.”¹ This process is both subject and method for Carlson and Stewart. As they seek to make legible “emergent patterns of everyday life and their poetic force,” their technique brings together ordinary and scholarly ways of reading, as well as literary, literary critical, and social scientific modes of inquiry.² Such an approach draws from a tradition of affectively attuned cultural studies epitomized by Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling,” which he defines as the “set” of “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone” in a given time and place.³ Williams compares changes in structures of feeling over time to the changes in language captured by “the literary term ‘style’ ” and indicates that “similar kinds of change can be observed in manners, dress, buildings, and other similar forms of social life.”⁴ Yet, whereas Williams offers an analogy between feelings, literary style, manners, and dress, mood can be conceived more capaciously. In the introduction of the special issue of New Formations in which Carlson and Stewart’s essay appears, Ben Highmore and Julie Bourne Taylor propose that mood “incorporates the entire situation as well as the ‘players’ within it” and “is made up of individual and collective feelings, organic and inorganic elements, as well as contingent, historical and slow changing conditions.”⁵ Like Virginia Woolf’s reflections on “frock consciousness,” such an understanding of mood foregrounds how seemingly personal feelings are formed with and through objects, bodies, thoughts, experiences, beliefs, and historical conditions.⁶

This approach to mood offers a number of benefits. It shifts us away from an account of feelings as possessions that may pass between individuals toward an understanding of how emotions are produced by contact between objects, bodies, behaviors, and atmospheres.⁷ An understanding of mood as made up of multiple “players” also offers a way for theorists of emotion and affect to avoid untenable distinctions between a bodily or “affective-corporeal” realm and one of ideology and history.⁸ For example, Carlson and Stewart’s mood work, like many of Woolf’s texts, attends to how subjects negotiate the political ideas and forces that are woven into the texture and feeling of the everyday, thereby tracing connections between corporeal, affective, aesthetic, and political dimensions of mundane experience. In turn, Stewart suggests that close readings of everyday life may better equip us to grasp possibilities for social and political transformation than do more sweeping accounts of socioeconomic systems.⁹ She joins scholars such as Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed whose efforts to trace contemporary affective forms and dynamics offer ways of grappling with the possibilities and limitations of the present.¹⁰ Mood provides a particularly powerful tool for doing such work because it enables us to connect and contrast different scales of reading and representation. A mood can characterize a fleeting everyday scene as well as a global affective-material system (as for example in an economic depression). Moods thus offer ways of discussing how and why such temporal, spatial, and conceptual shifts occur. At the same time, mood work involves being attuned to how things might be otherwise or how they may already take unexpected forms. Thus mood work keeps in view questions about what the knowledge it produces does, and how.

The passage from Woolf’s diary entry for April 27, 1925 is also concerned with scale and form. Woolf records her thoughts after a morning spent “sitting to Vogue”—that is, having her picture taken for a feature that would appear in the magazine a month later. Woolf was photographed by Maurice Beck and Helen McGregor at their studio, where the magazine’s assistant editor, Madge Garland, was simultaneously arranging a display. Woolf understands “frock consciousness” as particular to this scene and as a characteristic form or genre of experience. Moreover, her references to the influential British socialite Sybil Colefax and to parties, foreign bodies, and conspiracies invite one to imagine how this “state” might intersect with and translate into other social and political forms and contexts. Woolf’s association between fashion and feeling also points to the connection between mood and la mode. In French, mode means mood and fashion, and it links both to the sense of the “just now” (modo) at the heart of modernity and modernism.¹¹ Accordingly, fashion (understood as a prevailing style of dress) is often said to reflect, express, or capture the characteristic feeling or “spirit” of a given time and place.

In Woolf’s work, moods often are generated or expressed through les modes—ways of dressing and ways of writing (including writing about dress). For example, Woolf’s famous claim that “on or about December 1910, human character changed” describes a change in mood. Woolf illustrates this transformation by asserting that whereas “the Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat.”¹² This epochal shift in mood is experienced as a change in the fashion system, in weather, and in the texture of everyday life, and it necessitates a change in how literature is written. Of course, Woolf’s own modes of representation vary during her career, as she experimented with fictional and nonfictional prose genres and forms. Yet across a range of texts she explores how fabrics and frocks make up the patterns of fiction and everyday life, and how they situate bodies within fashion systems comprising objects, beliefs, desires, corporations, labor, styles, and feelings. If mood helps us to attend to form and to a network of forces, then Woolf’s exploration of mood’s relationship to fabric and fashion links that project to the dynamics of textuality, style, and representation. Woolf’s work shows how mood is inextricable from the terms in which it is expressed, and therefore mood might be imagined and experienced otherwise via writing.

Taking its cue from the idea of “frock consciousness,” this chapter shows how Woolf’s work draws on the relationship between mood and la mode to “sense out,” describe, and give form to what is happening in an unfolding, densely textured scene in which local and global forces converge. In such temporally and generically disparate texts as Mrs. Dalloway and Three Guineas, affectively saturated garments (a green dress, a military uniform) determine “what is actual and potential in a historical moment.” As garments locate people within existing networks of objects, beliefs, and emotions, they make those networks and processes more perceptible. Thus representations of feeling and fashion make clearer how accounts of everyday life can provide tools for understanding broader political and historical forces. In addition to making things legible, the connection between mood and la mode helps Woolf to grapple with what and how things are sensed and known in the first place. Heidegger’s account of Stimmung, which is usually translated as “mood” or “attunement,” reflects this word’s roots as a term for musical tuning. He claims that moods or attunements dictate what “matters to us,” what resonates and claims our attention.¹³ In the case of Woolf’s assertions about 1910, we might note that the cook is not simply different, but nearly indiscernible (“silent, obscure, inscrutable”) to the speaker prior to this transformation. As she attends to shifts in class relations, Woolf highlights mood’s sociopolitical dimensions. Fashion, too, can draw attention to the situated, contingent nature of perception. Think, for example, of how garments can seem to have changed shape and texture when reencountered after the fashions have changed. (We open a box of our old clothes and wonder: Were those pant legs always so wide?) In that sense, fashion is itself a form of attunement that makes certain forms more or less perceptible in a given time and place. If mood is, as Ahmed says, an “affective lens, affecting how we are affected,” then fashion is a formal lens, forming our perception of forms.¹⁴

Woolf’s “frock conscious” mode of mood work responds to those dynamics as it offers and endorses what I would describe as fashionable ways of knowing and perceiving. These methods are contextual, contingent, compromised, and materially grounded, as well as textually mediated. In fiction and nonfiction from Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway, and “Modern Fiction” to The Years and Three Guineas, Woolf engages fashion and fabric as heuristic devices to develop affectively attuned and materially grounded modes of describing established, emergent, and potential “patterns of everyday life.” Fashion, fabric, and feeling thus shape what Woolf’s texts attempt to do in the world, and how—that is, what her texts illuminate and how they make an impact. Fashion’s influence on Woolf’s ideas about the form and purpose of her works is also a matter of context. For example, Woolf supported the experiments in dress design undertaken during World War I by the Omega Workshops, an artists’ collective run by members of the Bloomsbury group, including her sister, Vanessa Bell. During the war, the Omega was a center for both design and pacifist activism. But it provides a counterpoint for Woolf’s later thinking about how carefully stylized and intricately textured objects—whether texts or garments—might shift the mood and otherwise make visible and interrupt the functioning of patriarchal imperialist systems. For, as I argue, Woolf comes to distinguish between using dress as a form of political expression and using fashion as a critical mode of perception.

The overlap I perceive between Woolf’s modernism and contemporary cultural work on mood includes not only a mutual interest in shared forms of feeling, thinking, and acting but also a vulnerability to charges of modishness. In Woolf’s era and our own, fashion provides a vocabulary for dismissing certain forms of knowledge. Certainly we can read Woolf’s engagements with the “fashion world” (however ambivalent) as evidence of her complicity with consumer culture. Attending to such connections, many scholars in modernist studies in the last few decades have revitalized the field by demonstrating how various modernist artists and their work at once decry and reinscribe gendered and racialized capitalist and imperialist systems. My emphasis, however, is how modernism and specifically Woolf’s works engage with mood, fabric, and fashion to make visible, grapple with, and attempt to work through the resulting entanglements and impasses. The point is to acknowledge and make use of the resonances between the various combinations of critique and complicity that characterize modernist and contemporary academic methods.

Such a Woolfian approach is apparent in much contemporary scholarship on affect and feeling, including Carlson and Stewart’s essay, which acknowledges the critic’s relation to and implication in the forms they examine, while attempting to offer some critical purchase.¹⁵ Moreover, Woolf’s work responds to many of the same issues that emerge with the recent turn to affect and wider debates about methodology in the humanities and social sciences. These include skepticism about totalizing systems of knowledge, attunement to the limitations of institutionalized critique, and doubts about the capacity of art (and writing about art) to effect political change.¹⁶ Discussions of methodology are also matters of feeling. As Rita Felski observes, the interest in new approaches to literary study can be understood as a desire for a change in mood.¹⁷ After all, calls for alternative forms of scholarly inquiry often involve a critique of what Paul Ricoeur describes as the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—a form of interpretation exemplified by Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche that privileges the work of “unmasking, demystification, or reduction of illusions.”¹⁸ Contemporary debates about methodology raise questions that Woolf’s work addresses via its treatments of mood and mode: Do prevailing affective and material patterns determine what becomes a matter of interest in the first place? How do shared feelings and material practices consolidate or shift in the context of broader networks of power? What groups, individuals, and institutions are positioned to change the mood? This chapter explores how Woolf grapples with these questions across a range of genres and forms. It tracks her fiction’s shifting modes of sensing out and giving shape to the world through mood and mode. Through discussions of “Modern Fiction,” Mrs. Dalloway, “The New Dress,” The Years, Three Guineas, and Roger Fry: A Biography (1940), I describe changes and continuities in Woolf’s method. Certainly, other works by Woolf address these questions and employ these methods. Jacob’s Room and The Waves (1931), for example, investigate the nature of mood and use garments to interrogate distinctions between interior, individual lives and collective and material forces, while Orlando directly addresses the connection between fashion and “the spirit of the age.”¹⁹ Indeed, I focus on Orlando in chapter 4 because its related treatments of periodicity, exemplarity, Orientalism, and celebrity help us to understand Fitzgerald’s and Poiret’s efforts to parlay fashionability into lasting influence. My aim in this first chapter, then, is not to provide an exhaustive account of Woolf’s methods and their relationship to mood and fashion throughout her career. Rather, I highlight intersections between her writing and certain influential contemporary approaches to affect, mood, and critique in literary and cultural studies. Woolf’s engagements with the nexus of mood and la mode clarify the stakes and terms of recent debates about the meth...