"Why not make one's own fashions?": Examining cultures of femininity and material-discursive fashion/aesthetics in The Age of Innocence & Gossip Girl.
详细信息
文摘
Though Edith Wharton became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence (1920),early-twentieth century critics relegated her to the place of a minor author. Interest in Wharton's oeuvre reemerged in the 1970s and has since developed in such a manner that the author wields unprecedented cachet in fin-de-siecle America. However,neither the rise of feminist criticism,nor her compelling authorship,adequately accounts for this cultural phenomenon. This thesis establishes Wharton's present-day eminence as a consequence of her novel's marked postmodern ethos,evidenced in its proleptic account of performative female gendered and aesthetic expression,and its intervention in the literary tropology of the woman's body as spectacle. To this end,the study reveals the aesthetic lateness or postmodernist attributes in Wharton's text such as historiographic metafictionality,parodic intertextuality,and the prescient use of fashion as a vital agent in the constitution of feminine and styled bodies and identities. It draws upon Linda Hutcheon and Laura Mulvey's scholarship in literary and media studies,and Emily Orlando's treatise on ekphrasis in the novel. Further,the project examines the legacy of Wharton's tale through: (1) its most successful parody Gossip Girl- Cecily von Ziegesar's novel series (2002-2013) and Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage's corresponding television show (2007-2012)； (2) Martin Scorsese's acclaimed,eponymous film adaptation (1993) of Wharton's novel. Finally,the study furthers Ilya Parkins' cross-disciplinary approach,combining theories of gender performativity (Judith Butler) and agential realism (Karen Barad),to posit a hypothesis for the praxis of producing cultures of femininity through the fashion apparatus in Wharton's novel and the postmodern age.