| Cultural narratives of the Gilded Age reflect changing ideals of bourgeois individuality and gender relations. With the expansion of the mass market, consumption appears as a prominent mode of self-representation. With widened public access to art, the function of art also changes in social totality and everyday lives of individuals. As literary aestheticism transforms into cultural aestheticism based on particular modes of consumption, art and commodities overlap under the rubric of "taste," and the ideological autonomy of art masks the commercialized character of bourgeois artistic practice.;My dissertation examines cultural etiology of aestheticism in the age of conspicuous consumption and the polymorphous cultural valuation of woman and art in it. One of the era's representative images is the beautifully adorned female body, surrounded with the questions of fashion, feminine spectacle, artistry and performance. The cultural ethos of the time is often dubbed "feminine" and "feminizing." But the discourse that identifies woman as the overpowering agent of decadent consumerist culture overlooks the cultural objectification of woman as one of its most prized commodities, along with art.;In Chapter One, I use Thorstein Veblen's critique of the leisure class and the cultural position of woman as the entry point into the thematic nexus of culture-woman-art-commodity. Then I turn to Henry James' texts for instances of aestheticized femininity. James's representation of the cultural exchangeability of women and the bourgeois aestheticization of woman differentiates him from the realist tradition in which a woman is often a narrative medium that registers and relays the capitalist impulses. In Chapter Two, through The American and The Awkward Age I examine James's critical reaction to masculine consciousness that reifies the commodification of woman in the marriage market. Chapter Three explores, in the Pygmalion myth, The Portrait of a Lady and The Tragic Muse, the gendered agency of aesthetic practice and the possibility of subverting the hegemony of male agency. Chapter Four examines James's own artistic practice as an author and the aestheticized position of woman in it, as manifest in The Speeches and Manners of American Women, his critical essays and prefaces, and The Aspern Papers. |
