make-up of Jean Rhys's fiction, The

We have triumphed over the abysses of space, with rouge, with powder, with flimsy pocket-handkerchiefs.

-Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)

persona: fr. L. mask

cosmetic:fr. G. kosmetos well-arranged ... fr. kosmos order, ornament, universe

-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language

The cult of female beauty now centres in the female mask.

-Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Word "Woman" (1936)

Not long ago, the familiar rift between academic and grassroots or public feminism was rehearsed once again.1 This time, it took the form of a retort against one strand of postmodernism, that is, a postmodern feminism that Martha Nussbaum critiqued because, in her view, it turns its back on the material ("real") side of life and turns instead, or retreats into, the verbal or symbolic. In Nussbaum's formulation, there is only the "flimsiest of connections" between the verbal and symbolic and the real situation of real women (38). In one swift assertion, Nussbaum seemed to eschew not only postmodern feminism but the whole project of New Historicism and any school of critical thought (marxism, psychoanalysis, structural anthropology) that argues for the connections between the verbal and the symbolic, on the one hand, and the material and real, on the other. Championing "concrete projects" and citing Catherine MacKinnon as an exemplary academic feminist because every one of her pages gets the reader's hands dirty in the "real issues of legal and institutional change," Nussbaum's specific target is Judith Butler. Butler, Nussbaum claims, leads a generation of feminists into a "proud neglect of the material side of life" (43). This is odd, given that Butler's Gender Trouble sets out explicitly to redress a problem especially relevant to movement politics and messy legislatures: the presumption that the term "women" denotes a common identity (Butler 3). Precisely because an essentialist vocabulary won't work-in practical terms-Butler offers a critique of identity politics.2 This is not to retreat from the material, but quite the opposite: it means to offer a view of "gender as a relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts" (Butler 11). Nussbaum's mischaracterization of postmodern feminism as unconcerned with the material brings to mind a certain debate about modernist and postmodernist art.

The vilification of postmodern feminism as the embrace of the merely symbolic sounds like a lament for lost authenticity and a time before when distinctions were neater, or lines of opposition could be drawn more clearly. One of the principle values of modernism, according to one line of thinking, was its genuinely oppositional relationship to the dominant, bourgeois culture. To take Fredric Jameson as one example, there is a distinct lament for the modernist avant-garde's genuine marginality that still had the ability to critique, what Jameson names "irony." These were the formerly subversive styles that Jameson mourns for being absorbed by institutions such as the museum and the academy. By contrast, Jameson's influential "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" views postmodernism as having lost not only the subversiveness of modernist art, but even the striving for subversion. There is no more parody, no more satire, no more critical laughter; there is only "blank" parody, which Jameson names "pastiche." Pastiche is a neutral practice, devoid of critical and destabilizing intentions.3

In defining pastiche, Jameson relies on a significant analogy: "Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse" (114). Pastiche is speech in a dead language, which is like the wearing of a stylistic mask. Both pastiche and parody signal the end of stylistic innovation and originality; there is only quotation and mimicry. The modernists were the last of the stylistic innovators, and in their wake, artists and writers only exist in a kind of imitative limbo. Jameson's analogy assumes that to wear a stylistic mask is necessarily a step away, if not down from, an aesthetic high point and the apex of a major historical shift. What "we" (post-industrial, late-capitalist, consumer society) have lost is the predication of modernism's genuine originality on the invention of a "personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint" (114). In other words, we have shifted from a "fingerprint" (unique) way of understanding ourselves to a "mask" way. The crucial question for Jameson, and it is one that he leaves open, is whether or not the mask can be oppositional and subversive, just as the fingerprint was. Although Jameson acknowledges, indeed touts, the presence of the postmodern in the modernist, he argues that the key distinction of modernist as opposed to postmodern art is its true challenge to the dominant more spontaneous, authentically marginal realm of creativity. Modernism, however, was not simply "marginal." It grew out of as well as apart from certain cultural forces. For Rhys, these forces included the production of women's new looks and performances in the realm of cosmetics, not only an instrument of women's commodification and exploitation, but also, and in complex ways, a realm in which women could express and even empower themselves, both symbolically and materially.