Body Image: Fashioning the Postwar American
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt BODY IMAGE: FASHIONING THE POSTWAR AMERICAN By Jill Francesca Dione B. A. English, Smith College, 1996 M. A. English, University of Pittsburgh, 1999 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2009 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Jill Francesca Dione It was defended on July 15, 2009 and approved by Jane Feuer, Professor, English Marianne Novy, Professor, English Carol Stabile, Director, Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon Lucy Fischer: Distinguished Professor, English, and Director of Film Studies Program, University of Pittsburgh ii Copyright © by Jill Francesca Dione 2009 iii BODY IMAGE: FASHIONING THE POSTWAR AMERICAN Jill Francesca Dione, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2009 Chapter 1 “Introduction” sets forth the overarching theme. The United States in the 1950s experienced a reconfiguration of gender roles facilitated by depictions, in Hollywood film and magazine advertisements, of fashionable bodies that would mobilize the corporeal and ideological reconfiguration of emulating viewers. Chapter 2 “Apartment for Peggy: Probing the Postwar Prototype” examines the ways in which the post-World War II battle between the United States and Russia for global dominance gave rise to the glorification of domesticity and to the growth of infrastructures and institutions that supported it. Chapter 3 “Underwear and the Red Scare” examines the way in which film and advertising implicitly posited foundation garments as items of apparel that distinguished the American female from her Russian counterpart; secured her immovably as the faithful, housebound wife; and inscribed her body with national anxieties over communist invasion. Chapter 4 “Playtex, Peroxide, Playmate: Marilyn Monroe and Sexuality, Whiteness, and Class” argues that the transgressively unsealed and un-buttressed body of Marilyn Monroe not only eliminated the perceived female need for post-coital commitment and the humiliating possibility of female refusal in response to sexual overtures from Everyman but also challenged postwar understandings of class, race (including “whiteness” and “blondeness”), gender, and ethnicity. iv Chapter 5 “The Ex-G.I. in the Gray Flannel Suit” examines the way that film and advertising attempted either to recuperate the enervated virility of the corporate conformist or to reeducate the war veteran returning from a military world of male camaraderie and adventure to a civilian world of female demands and domesticity. Chapter 6 “Jimmy Stewart: The Man in the White Playtex Girdle” argues that, in most of his postwar films, Stewart was the actor who most consistently embodied the returning veteran’s wound-incurring struggle to negotiate a reconciliation between conventionally male/female oppositions. Chapter 7 “Conclusion: Into the Sixties” surveys the 50s’ alternatives to gray-flannel conservatism that would set the stage for the protests of the coming decades. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE.................................................................................................................................. VII 1.0 INTRODUCTION: THE BODY AND THE BODY POLITIC............................... 1 2.0 APARTMENT FOR PEGGY: PROBING THE POSTWAR PROTOTYPE......... 9 3.0 UNDERWEAR AND THE RED SCARE................................................................ 46 4.0 PLAYTEX, PEROXIDE, PLAYMATE: MARILYN MONROE AND SEXUALITY, WHITENESS, AND CLASS.................................................................. 88 5.0 THE EX-GI IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT..................................................... 132 6.0 JIMMY STEWART: THE MAN IN THE WHITE PLAYTEX GIRDLE......... 176 7.0 CONCLUSION: GRAY FLANNEL ALTERNATIVES...................................... 228 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................... 236 FILMOGRAPHY...................................................................................................................... 252 vi PREFACE For their contributions, I express my profoundest gratitude to: my loving and supportive family, especially my Mom, Dad, Alfie, Whoopster, Brewster, Marisa, Devon, my godmother Grace Leitao, and my sister Kim and her babies; my loving and supportive friends, especially Laurel Tessmer, Rochelle Levine, Lisa Harris, Judy and Ed Evans, Hope and Emma Peterson, Nancy Glazener, and Paul, David, and Ben Foster; the “individual” enlighteners—Bill Oram, Bruce McConachie, and Rick Hoover; and the individual enlighteners who also worked in concert as my committee—Jane Feuer, Marianne Novy, Carol Stabile, and Lucy Fischer. Thank you all for your patience, generosity, and thoughtfulness. vii 1.0 INTRODUCTION: THE BODY AND THE BODY POLITIC Feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe argues that “[p]ostwar periods are . times . when [both] masculinity and femininity [are] . reconsidered, and perhaps reconstructed.”1 Evidence to support her contention occurs in the decade following World War II, when the United States experienced a significant reconfiguration of gender roles . In considerable numbers, for example, returning G.I.s left foreign battlefields for corporate boardrooms, while Riveting Rosies abandoned factory work for married domesticity and motherhood. These changes in profession and milieu, moreover, required corresponding psychic changes. The corporate employer, for instance, required of its organization man not military aggressiveness but rather other-oriented bonhomie. Similarly, Rosie left the social and financial independence of her factory job in order to devote herself to her suburban household, her optimism-inspiring children, and her corporate- breadwinner/husband. Of course, not everyone conformed to this self-effacing pattern of behavior--indeed, the presence at, participation in, and triumphs of male and female athletes at the 1952 and 1956 Olympic Games represent one of many instances that demonstrate Joanne Meyerowitz’s argument against any monolithic construction of 1950s’ zeitgeist. To the contrary, Meyerowitz cautions that “[postwar] domestic ideals coexisted in ongoing tension with an ethos of individual achievement that celebrated nondomestic activity, individual striving, 1 Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 95‐6. 1 public service, and public success.”2 Nevertheless, many American men and women, by their actions at least, subscribed to the 50s’ ideal of suburban domesticity funded by a corporately- employed male breadwinner. What, then, caused this ideological shift--from venturesome self- reliance to homebound self-effacement--to occur on such a grand scale and in such a concentrated span of time? As the first step in determining a response to this question, Body Image refers to those theories of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu that consider the body as the originary site for the implementation of ideological change. Foucault, for example, describes the body as “docile” and as a “direct locus of social control” regulated by culture.3 Elaborating upon this conflation of body and culture, Bourdieu proposes that “societies . can produce a new man . [or woman] by submitting his [or her] values-given body . [to] the hidden persuasion of implicit pedagogy capable of instilling . a political philosophy through injunctions . regarding dress and bearing.”4 By thus attributing one’s ideological makeover to “injunctions . regarding dress and bearing,” Bourdieu recognizes quite specifically the potentially transformative power of clothing to enable the wearer’s cultural reconfiguration. Consequently, Body Image examines postwar clothing advertisements, since they contain not only images and descriptions of the types of clothing purveyed to postwar consumers but also explicit or implicit “injunctions” regarding the improvement in dress and bearing--and evolution toward the ideological ideal--that the individual achieves as the result of wearing such clothing. Like Bourdieu, Gail Kern Paster also 2 Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 231. 3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), 135. Quoted in Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 165, n. 3. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Transl. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 94. 2 acknowledges the body’s capacity for inscription as a cultural text, referring to it as a “container . subject to social formation”5 Yet while Bourdieu designates societal addresses to the subject as “injunctions,” Paster refers to them as “[s]ociety’s cumulative, continuous interpellation of the subject[--an interpellation that] includes an internal orientation of the physical self within the socially available discourses of the body.”6 Paster’s use of the term “interpellation” refers to Louis Althusser’s notion that ideologies hail an individual in a manner that posits and “recruits” such individual as the ideally receptive subject of their address.7 Thus, in an attempt to account for postwar America’s comparatively rapid