by Min Young Park, PhD Candidate, Department of English
Nella Larsen’s Quicksand opens with a vivid portrait of Helga Crane’s room. It is brimming with furniture and garments of her “rare and intensely personal taste” (1). The emphasis on the privacy of her taste is easily overlooked as it is soon followed by a disturbing remark by a white priest who claims that “Naxos Negroes…had good taste” because “[t]hey knew enough to stay in their place” (3). As taste, to draw from Sara Ahmed, is not an apolitical preference but a predilection by the dominating powers, “good taste” points to a socially enforced idea of what is desirable. Helga’s appearance, namely her choices of clothes, is constantly judged and violated by different people who claim to have “good taste” until she is forced to lose her own taste and turn moribund (Larsen 3).
The politics of taste artfully exposes and blurs the boundaries between the private and the public by reinforcing its links with value, money, and power, particularly in the realms of art, fashion, and food. These traditionally feminized and undervalued cultural sectors have been rediscovered within Western literary traditions in the 19th century with the rise of modernism. Moving on to the 20th century, leading intellectual minds soon identified the cultures with modernity, elucidating how details on those cultures can be read as modernist symbols that reflect, reinforce, or protest against social systems, often in ways that still exclude women.
The issue of women is deeply confounded within the discourses of art, fashion, and food that both identify with and ostracize women. Growing scholarship on late modernism brings to attention how established museums and publishers that vowed to lead the “taste” of the time equaled authority, elitism, and masculinity, and how the art and literary movements that claimed to break free from such authorities were not much different. Women were considered more muses than great artists. Not surprisingly, seminal histories often lack records of female artists despite their active participation in avant-garde movements.
Exploring women writers’ artistic experimentations that ponder on this complex power dynamics is my dissertation, “Tempting Bad Taste: Unreading the Failure of Art, Fashion, and Food in Late Modernist Novels,” which invests in rediscovering moments of erratic artworks, fashion, and eating habits in late modernist novels that offer more than clear-cut metaphors of something bad or unappealing. Drawing from works by Jean Rhys, Mina Loy, and Virginia Woolf, my work problematizes how such judgmental reading marginalizes individuals as failures based on their conspicuous personal taste and argues for a reconsideration of such “failures” by attending to how the texts emphasize the seemingly contradictory allures of their tastes.
For example, my project focuses on the contradiction between how Rhys’s protagonist in Good Morning Midnight is judged by others as a wealthy, freewheeling woman due to her exotic fake fur coat while she is struggling inside. Her feelings that pertain to yet contradict her outstanding fashion, often captured through her times in fitting rooms and lavatories, set a stark contrast to her continuous efforts to meet the fashion standards in modern Paris, further complicating the reading of her. Another example is how Loy’s protagonist/narrator/art dealer in Insel holds on to her belief in the curiously alluring artistic potential she discovers in Insel, the horrifying starving artist, and his works even after dismissing him because he fails to produce profitable art. Her narration lingers in a way that encourages readers to realize how the artist’s very disgustingness has more to offer.
Instead of concluding that one’s taste precludes, stereotypes, or transforms identities, I argue that taste, particularly seemingly bad ones, is the language through which readers can acknowledge the confluences and inconsistencies of an individual that cannot be confined or supported by dominating social systems. Ultimately, my project contributes to the discourse of new modernist studies that concurrently endorse inclusive reading practices and the outward turn to materialism. My interdisciplinary project stands at the intersection of literary studies, fashion theory, gastronomy, art history, feminist scholarship, and affect studies.
With the support from CSWS, I presented the first chapter of my work, “The Unfitting Room: Out of Fashion, Date, and Place in Good Morning, Midnight,” at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in October 2024, and the second chapter, “An Undiminishable Steak”: Taste, Success, and Female Art Dealer in Mina Loy’s Insel,” at the NeMLA Conference in March 2024, where I gained invaluable feedback that encouraged me to commit to further research on taste, power, and perspectives. My future project will continue to foster self-reflective reading processes that interrogate prevailing viewpoints, particularly in this time of fast-paced technology that urges a reconsideration of anthropocentric thinking.
—Min Young Park received a 2023 CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant for this project.
Works Cited
Larson, Nella. Quicksand. Dover, 2006.
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010.
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Picador, 1996.