Jane Nicholas. The Modern Girl

A moment that descriptively encapsulates changing modern conventions of looking appears in Jane Nicholas’s recent study of the Modern Girl in Canada. Nicholas notes in her engrossing chapter on the Canadian National Exhibition of 1927—a national scandal surrounding the display of nudes that depicted Modern Girls—that a line between flesh and canvas had been broached by these images. The impact of such imagery on female viewers fed much of the print-propelled fracas. Women wrote to newspapers complaining of feeling exposed themselves by the nudes, intimating that they did not feel they could return the gaze. The paintings compounded feelings of being under surveillance, and the need to “perform their bodies with that in mind” (179). The intensifying relationship between women and representations is the subject of Nicholas’s The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, the Body, and Commodities in the 1920s, which distills, refines, and amplifies recent scholarship on the Modern Girl over the last decade and more. For Nicholas, the Modern Girl offers a “foil against better studied masculine elements of modernity” (16). The manner in which her performance as spectacle designated her identity as modern is the focus of this study, which gratifyingly draws on concepts developed in The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (2004), such as feminine visibility, the modern and associated “scenes” (as concentrated on the visual), women’s occupation of imagery, and techniques of appearing.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Exhibition · Feeling · Girl · Literature · Modern art · Modernity · New Woman · Painting · Performance art · Scholarship · Spectacle · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology