Page 65 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 59

out of old faiths a new one, literally drawing on traditional techniques of
mystification and thought control, to alter women’s minds as sweepingly
as any past evangelical wave.
(1991:88, emphasis in original)

In such passages the author of The Beauty Myth finds herself in the position of
crying wolf: this time, the frenetic italics seem to say, it’s really real, no longer a
false alarm, no longer a metaphor. The movement towards a literalization of the
figurative has pushed the language of her feminism to a crisis point, in which the
more Wolf insists on the non-figural nature of her assertion, the more it draws
attention to its rhetorical status. The more her words slip from control, the louder
she must shout them.
It is therefore extremely significant that the one image which Wolf does not
insist upon is the figure of conspiracy. The Beauty Myth begins with the
following epigraph from Ann Jones:

I notice that it is the fashion…to disclaim any notion of male conspiracy in
the oppression of women…. ‘For my part’, I must say with William Lloyd
Garrison, ‘I am not prepared to respect that philosophy. I believe in sin,
therefore in a sinner; in theft, therefore in a thief; in slavery, therefore in a
slaveholder; in wrong, therefore in a wrongdoer’.
(1991:7) 3
If this passage is quoted approvingly—and Wolf’s page of epigraphs would be a
strange place to introduce such irony if the excerpt is not meant to set the tone
for the coming analysis—then we might expect a book on ‘How Images of
Beauty Are Used Against Women’ to contain much denunciation of ‘male
conspiracy’. Yet, as we saw at the beginning of this article, Wolf’s work exhibits
a self-conscious cautiousness in connection with the term ‘conspiracy’. In the
Introduction Wolf does indeed use the phrase ‘cultural conspiracy’, but places it
in scare quotes. She is prepared to embrace many other extravagant
characterizations of the beauty myth, but feels obliged to signal her distance from
conspiracy theories.
Although conspiracy theories are expressly rejected in The Beauty Myth, the
narrative structure of personification on which they rely makes a return—even in
the very passages in which the repudiations are made. Conspiracy theories allow
the possibility of apportioning blame for what might otherwise appear to be a
series of unconnected and overdetermined events, attitudes and practices. They
betray an attraction to the notion of reading history personally, of seeking a
hidden cause behind every event, and behind every cause an evil conspirator who
deliberately plots those events; in short, of giving a name to the faceless
‘problem’. Wolf begins by pointing out that it is the idea of repressive beauty,
rather than any particular item in the list of guilty industries, that is doing the
damage. What to call this ‘idea’, however, emerges as a problem in her prose.