Page 66 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

60 CULTURAL STUDIES

Following Henrik Ibsen she sometimes calls it a Vital lie’ told by society to
itself. Using the work of psychologist Daniel Goleman, she talks about
‘necessary fictions’ and ‘social fictions that masqueraded as natural
components’. The title of the book, in a modulation of Betty Friedan’s famous
title, calls it the beauty myth. And, in the least precise formulation of all, when
she claims that the beauty backlash does not require a conspiracy, she qualifies it
by adding ‘merely an atmosphere’ (1991:18).
But having removed all trace of malicious conspiratorial agents in these careful
circumlocutions of what—if this were not a book directed towards the American
popular market—might be termed ideology, patriarchy or hegemony, Wolf then
describes how ‘the resulting hallucination materializes’. At the very moment of
insistence on materiality, then, literal conspirators give way to figurative ones, as
the text becomes crowded with prosopopeia. ‘No longer just an idea,’ Wolf
continues, ‘it becomes three-dimensional, incorporating within itself how women
live and how they do not live.’ The verb forms once again are active, conjuring
up the spectre of a meta-conspiracy, an ideology with a human face, as we hear
how ‘it [the contemporary backlash] has grown stronger to take over the work of
social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and
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passivity, no longer can manage’. In the tone of Senator McCarthy sounding the
alarm about a personified version of the communist peril infiltrating America,
Wolf goes on to tell how ‘it is seeking right now to undo psychologically and
covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly’.
But just at the end of the Introduction this rhetorical return of the disavowed
trope of prosopopeia is itself inverted, in a move invoking what can now only be
described as a meta-meta-conspiracy. In a reversion to a sinisterly anonymous
passive verb form, Wolf explains how ‘after the success of the women’s
movement’s second wave, the beauty myth was perfected to checkmate power at
every level in individual women’s lives’. But by whom was it perfected? Just
when we had a grip on the Beauty Myth (to capitalize it in the same way that Wolf
capitalizes Friedan’s phrase, the ‘Feminine Mystique’) as a Frankenstein’s
monster, a fabricated mishmash of cultural attitudes and images at once
grotesque and desirable, so now we need to be on the look out for the shadowy
scientist himself, malevolently fulfilling his conspiratorial projects through the
cunning manipulation of the poor dumb monster of the Beauty Myth. In this
way, each repudiation of a conspiratorial mode of analysis only seems to restore
an even more paranoid formulation, as each abstraction of agency is refigured
into an act of deliberate contrivance by shadowy agents.

The conspiracy of theory
The reason The Beauty Myth manifests such anxiety about figuration in general,
and the figure of conspiracy in particular, is doubtless due in part to Wolf’s self-
conscious rewriting of The Feminine Mystique, which, as we have seen, likewise
exhibits a wariness about identifying its argument as a conspiracy theory. And,