Embodying Beauty

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