Emma Dent, "*Mad Men*’s 'Maidenform': Shaping Narrative through Shapewear’s Commercial History"

The exacting attention to detail of Mad Men’s showrunner Matthew Weiner has crystallized into near legend over the course of the series’ almost seven-season run.  Because of Weiner’s well-known perfectionism, Mad Men’s fidelity, or lack thereof, to period accuracy inevitably enters into both critical and popular writings about the series.  There is an especially strong impulse among fans to “expose” Mad Men’s historical anachronisms.  These revelations often seem to render the show criminal, convicting it of the felony of being a work of fiction and not, say, documentary.  Episodes that center on advertising campaigns for real-life brands like Maidenform and Playtex are ripe for such dialogue, given that audiences are easily able to compare the creative work of the true “mad men” (and women) of the period with Sterling Cooper’s fictional output.  While popular, is this kind of comparison productive to a critical understanding of the series?  As an art historian invested in visual culture, I would argue yes, but not if it produces a reductive good versus bad reading of the fictional advertisements and their period counterparts.              

Advertising, as Lauren Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing, explain in their introduction to Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, operates in complex, and often specific, narrative ways throughout the series.  As they argue, the show uses advertising as “a structure for exploring the moralquandaries of a corrupting world.”  According with this description, the sixth episode of Mad Men’s sophomore season, “Maidenform,” transforms a commercial turf war between two lingerie brands – Playtex and Maidenform – into a broader meditation on female sexuality, objectification, and the limited models available to women of the 1960s.  Although victorious in the sales race, Sterling Cooper’s client, Playtex, lacks the sex appeal of competitor Maidenform and its popular “I dreamed…” campaign.  “Maidenform is a dream, but Playtex is a bra,” Don exasperatedly remarks at the episode’s opening, evidently hesitant to abandon what has heretofore been a successful strategy.  Don’s irritation notwithstanding, he and his team begin to develop a new idea that will place Playtex more in line with its rival.  Partly the brainchild of Paul Kinsey, the resulting advertisement plays upon two models of female celebrity: blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe and elegant First Lady and mother Jacqueline Kennedy. 

The new campaign’s underlying assumption is that every woman models herself after one or the other.  Pitching the idea to Playtex executives, Don confidently declares, “Women have feelings about these women because men do.  Because we want both, they want to be both.  It's about how they want to be seen by us, their husbands, their boyfriends, their friends' husbands.”  According to both Don and the new advertisement, the question is not one of either Marilyn or Jackie; instead, every woman allegedly seeks to channel both sex and grace. 

As Don makes clear, this revised campaign for Playtex is designed to move the brand into

“Maidenform’s neighborhood.”  A careful consideration of actual advertisements from Playtex’s challenger Maidenform in relation to the work produced by Mad Men’s fictional agency, however, reveals the extent to which the show selectively focuses on a certain type of Maidenform “I dreamed…” advertisement--one not necessarily representative of the brand’s broader, twenty-year-long campaign.  In the first few minutes of the episode, Duck Philips slaps a magazine onto Don’s desk, its pages opened to reveal a Maidenform advertisement featuring a coiffed brunette standing before a steaming, jet-black locomotive.  Echoing the train’s crimson accents, she wears rouge-hued fringed pants and matching pumps, and grasps a scarf of the same color in her left hand.  Apart from the white brassiere she sports, the woman is outfitted not unlike a matador before a bull.  Below the image appears one of the brand’s signature slogans, “I dreamed I stopped them in their tracks with my Maidenform bra.”  The advertisement’s caption, therefore, suggests that this Maidenform matador captured the attention not of the male bull, but of men in general, with her bra.  In her essay “Maidenform: Masculinity as Masquerade,” Lilya Kaganovsky writes that Maidenform advertisements like this one are “aimed at the gaze of the other” (Kaganovsky’s emphasis).  Indeed, with her arms proudly outstretched, the woman seen in this advertisement is clearly on visual display.  Moreover, her intended audience is as much male as it is female, a point emphasized by Ken Cosgrove’s quip that he had four such advertisements posted on the walls of his dorm room while in college.

 

In the episode, this specific Maidenform advertisement comes to epitomize the brand’s entire campaign and the “neighborhood” into which Sterling Cooper’s client Playtex seeks to relocate.  Sterling Cooper responds by generating a concept that repeats the Maidenform advertisement’s emphasis on the “woman-as-object” or “woman-as-image.”  The dark-haired “Jackie” and platinum “Marilyn” versions of the same model stare invitingly at the audience.  Although each holds a beverage – coffee/tea for the more proper “Jackie,” champagne for “Marilyn” – these libations are nothing more than props.  The two women are occupied not with sipping their respective drinks, but with presenting themselves for the audience’s visual consumption.  The spare black and white backgrounds that frame “Jackie” and “Marilyn,” respectively, further highlight their status as images/objects and affords them no real three-dimensional space in which to exist.  Unlike the locomotive that vies with the Maidenform model for our attention, little remains to distract viewers from fixating on the leading ladies in Sterling Cooper’s Playtex advertisement.   

Due to the very nature of the “I dreamed…” campaign’s design, and of lingerie promotion in general, nearly all of Maidenform’s advertisements objectify their models in some basic manner.  The specific Maidenform example that Mad Men chooses to focus on in this episode, however, performs this objectification to an elevated degree.  Other Maidenform examples from the period, like the black-and-white advertisement that appeared in Life magazine’s April 11, 1960 issue, present a slightly more complicated vision.  Here, four bra-clad women sit before a stage curtain playing a variety of string and wind instruments, including a harp, flute, cello, and trumpet.  The advertisement’s tagline reads, “I dreamed I played in an all-girl orchestra...”  In contrast to Sterling Cooper’s fictional Playtex advertisement, or even Maidenform’s own  “I dreamed I stopped them in their tracks…,” this Maidenform advertisement presents women engaged in an activity beyond that of standing and modeling.  Unlike the women depicted in each of the aforementioned advertisements, this female quartet scarcely registers the audience.  Each member of the ensemble is instead absorbed in her own music making.

 

Many of the Maidenform advertisements that appeared during the 1960’s in both general

interest publications like Life and women’s magazines like Mademoiselle and McCall’s arguably follow templates more akin to the “I dreamed I stopped them in their tracks…” example than the “all-female ensemble” case.  Yet even in the advertisements that appear to most overtly objectify their female subjects, the women are given at least a spark of agency through activity.  Playing upon another timeworn saying, the “I dreamed I painted the town red…” advertisement appeared in the pages of Life magazine at least once on November 29, 1963.  In this entry, animated, blonde-bobbed woman looks directly at the audience while leaning dangerously from a metal scaffold.  Sporting matching chambray cap and capri pants, the woman is in the process of covering over the brick building’s drab, chalky exterior with vibrant red paint.  Details like the paintbrush clutched in her gloved right hand, as well as the pail dripping with pigment that rests on the scaffold’s platform, serve to emphasize her efforts.  When discussing the “I dreamed I stopped them in their tracks…” image, Kaganovsky calls attention to the inclusion of the possessive “their” in its tagline.  In Kaganovsky’s reading of this advertisement, “their” affirms that the woman’s identity is not developed from within, but instead predicated on the gazes of others.  Sterling Cooper’s reinvented Playtex strategy picks up on the gendered textual overtones of this particular Maidenform advertisement and arguably exaggerates them.  Regardless of the scenarios depicted, each of the Maidenform “I dreamed…” advertisements feature the pronoun “I.”  In doing so, Maidenform’s advertisements at least offer the women a limited capacity to speak.  On the other hand, Sterling Cooper’s Playtex tagline reads, “Nothing fits both sides of a woman better than Playtex.”  The caption strips “Jackie” and “Marilyn” of any voice, reducing each to the general category of “woman.”  The fictive Playtex advertisement thus magnifies the female objectification hinted at in Maidenform’s copy.

In contrast to both the Playtex and train-centric Maidenform advertisements, Maidenform’s “I dreamed I painted the town red…” tagline focuses instead on the action of the woman depicted in the advertisement.  Arguably, she offers herself up as much for visual consumption as the woman who stops the train in its tracks.  However, the caption accompanying her image leaves room for multiple interpretations.  The text suggests that the woman is active and allows us to regard her activity as more than a mere performance designed for viewing.

When Maidenform debuted its “I dreamed…” campaign in 1949, the company was run by the husband-and-wife team of William and Ida Rosenthal.  Contrary to expectation, it was Ida who steered the business’s financial and commercial development, while her husband designed its undergarments.  Not unlike Mad Men’s Peggy Olson, a New York-based femalecopywriter named Mary Filius dreamt up the campaign’s soon-to-be famous slogan,writing “I dreamed I went shopping in my Maidenform bra.”  Throughout itstwo-decade run, the campaign set Filius’s caption in dialogue with a range ofscenarios.  Some, like the “I dreamed I stopped them in their tracks…” example, more evidently position the brand’s models as just that: models, objects to be looked at for their aesthetic appeal.  It is this kind of Maidenform advertisement to which Sterling Cooper’s Playtex concept responds.  If advertising indeed acts as “a structure for exploring the moral quandaries of a corrupting world” in the show, then Mad Men draws out certain qualities of the real-life Maidenform campaign so as to more compelling advance its own narrative agenda.  Peggy does not relate to the two feminine ideals society presents to her.  Neither a Marilyn nor a Jackie, she is also not content to be an object put on display.  Intensifying the shades of female objectification present in the Maidenform campaign in its fictional Playtex mock-up, Mad Men uses advertising’s history as the basis for an altogether new fiction.

Joe Post, "“The Outer World Presses on Me and Narrows the Inward Vision”: Interiority and Exteriority, Place and Character in *Daniel Deronda*"

As Book V of Daniel Deronda opens, George Eliot describes the wintery scene at Topping Abbey. A “splendid fall of snow” had just blanketed Sir Hugo’s residence just days after Christmas.* The guests and inhabitants of the Abbey, eager to take in the architecture of building, set out on a walk through the grounds. When they come upon the stables, the narrative pace slows, offering an expansive description of the choir-turned-stables. With its broken limestone and “touches of snow…on every ledge,” the exterior of the stables gives a “startling effect” to the interior (419). Inside, “each finely-arched chapel was turned into a stall,” light falling inside and shining upon the many faces of the horses. Gwendolen’s response to the scene bursts out, “Oh, this is glorious!” The stables caused Gwendolen to forget “everything but the immediate impressions, and she promptly regrets having voiced her preference for the Abbey’s stables over those she has at Diplow.

This singular moment, leaving so strong an impact on Gwendolen, paints the portrait of an antique building re-appropriated for a use far different from its original purpose. A blending of interior and exterior gives the stables the forcible impression that prompts Gwendolen’s outburst. Throughout the novel, setting often has more force than mere background. If the “discrete representation of any specific individual is intertwined with the narrative’s continual apportioning of attention to different characters who jostle for limited space within the same fictive universe” (Woloch 13), then the literal space these characters occupy must similarly “jostle” for attention within this fictional space. Gwendolen’s response to physical space does not comprise the only interaction between characters and place. The fitting comparisons of Gwendolen’s and Daniel’s lives continue in comparing their interaction with and occupation of spaces within the novel. Daniel’s penchant for rowing brings him into contact with important epoch-shaping moments in his life.

The  tendency toward reading setting as “mere backdrop for the human drama that really count[s]” can sometimes distract from the way that place shapes the unfolding of a character (Buell 3).** Gwendolen herself exhibits this tendency when she first arrives at Offendene. While Eliot’s narrator offers a detailed physiognomy of Offendene a few pages earlier, Gwendolen reduces the estate to a backdrop: she says that it is “charming” and a “romantic place; anything delightful may happen in it; it would be a good background for anything” (26). Gwendolen offers no agency or influence to place, but as the novel continues, place becomes increasingly important for Gwendolen and Daniel.  

Daniel’s river excursions offer the setting for two important moments in his interaction with Mirah and Mordecai. Both of these moments depend on Daniel’s poetic sensibilities, his “fervor which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life.” While rowing on the Thames in Book II, Daniel first sees Mirah on the riverbanks, but it is only later that evening, on his return trip, that he engages with Mirah. With the approach of Daniel’s “favorite hour— with its deepening stillness and darkening masses of tree and building between the double glow of the sky and the river,” Daniel settles down in his boat to watch the water.  He places himself in such a way that none but the nearest passerby could observe him looking out. While thus reclined, he sees Mirah preparing her coat as a “drowning shroud.” Yet does the setting merely remain as setting? Does this twilight hour have any deeper significance within the narrative of Daniel’s character? Later, at the close of Book V, Daniel again rows along the Thames, this time encountering Mordecai near a different bridge. As Daniel rows,

the gray day was dying gloriously, its western clouds all broken into narrowing purple strata before a wide-spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental calm, but on the river, with its changing objects, was reflected as a luminous movement, the alternate flash of ripples or currents, the sudden glow of the brown sail, the passage of laden barges from blackness into color, making an active response to that brooding glory.

The juxtaposition of sky and water, of calm and movement offers a tension that leads naturally into Daniel’s unexpected meeting with Mordecai. When they seek a place to converse, Mordecai worries that finding some unfamiliar spot will hamper his prophetic mind, admitting that “In new places the outer world presses on me and narrows the inward vision.” Gwendolen’s experience at the Abbey’s stables shows a clear moment of the outer world overpowering the inward vision, whereas Daniel’s poetic sensibilities open himself up to receive what interpretations the world around him may offer for understanding the many figures that populate those spaces.

Setting and place within Daniel Deronda offers fertile ground for literary interpretation. The cultivated natural spaces of Offendene, Diplow, and Topping Abbey function in direct relation to those more constructed spaces within built places. The Abbey’s library in which Gwendolen seeks Daniel’s advice, the “new and striking scene” of the Philosophers club in which Daniel sees Mordecai preach to unreceptive ears, even the Meyrick’s home bedecked with images and portraits represent spaces that function as more than “mere backdrops” for “human drama.” The ebb and flow between characters and place extend the connections made between the interiority and exteriority of individual characters. So much of the novel concerns itself with showing what characters are thinking and feeling while exposing the inability of others to accurately interpret that interiority. In much the same way, setting enters the novel with an irrelevant degree of what Woloch calls “minorness,” functioning as much as a character through which to see into central figures as any other “minor” character within the novel.

*Perhaps contemporary readers of the novel’s serialization had to make an imaginative leap, as this installment appeared in June 1876.

** While Buell may argue for even greater agency and centrality of setting and environment within ecocritical readings of texts, I focus here on developing an awareness of how place and setting may inform interpretations of characters.

Kyle Johnston, "The Proprieties of Literature and Practical Life: The Realism of Books 3 & 4 of Daniel Deronda"

In her first conversation with Gwendolen at Quetcham Hall, Mrs. Arrowpoint, establishing her position as an authority on literary sentiment, insists on both the imaginative originality and truthfulness of her writing: “So many, you know, have written about Tasso; but they are all wrong. As to the particular nature of his madness, and his feelings for Leonora, and the real cause of his imprisonment, and the character of Leonora, who, in my opinion, was a cold-hearted woman, else she would have married him in spite of her brother—they are all wrong. I differ from everybody” (46). Torquato Tasso, a sixteenth-century Italian poet and dramatist, was imprisoned by his patron, the duke Alphonso II of Este, from 1579-1586 for madness, although legend held that it was actually to end an affair between Tasso and the princess Leonora d’Este (Oxford Reference, Wikipedia). Mrs. Arrowpoint’s study constructs the historical figure Tasso’s life “as a sort of romance” of which “there is so much that must be true” (47). Indeed, Mrs. Arrowpoint thus imagines her work as fulfilling a dual, seemingly paradoxical purpose of both creating a sustained constructed fantasy, and revealing through excavation a hidden, historical truth. Though the narrator tells us Gwendolen does not understand the meaning of her words, she is entirely correct in paraphrasing Mrs. Arrowpoint’s thoughts on the function of literature as “Imagination is often truer than fact” (47).

 Mrs. Arrowpoint’s ideas about literature return some two hundred pages later in Chapter 22 when Catherine Arrowpoint asserts her intention to marry Herr Klesmer. In her book, Mrs. Arrowpoint condemns the figure of Leonora, that “cold-hearted woman,” for submitting to the duties of her family and class and refusing her artist lover, and yet, faced with the same situation in her own life, she cannot accept Catherine’s love of Klesmer, for “it would be too hard—impossible—you could not carry it through” (245).  Mrs. Arrowpoint does not seem to feel the contradiction between her life and her study of Tasso's life. It is the narrator who, characteristically, notes the contradiction but asks the reader not to judge Mrs. Arrowpoint's flaws too harshly and, in so doing, establishes an opposing theory of literature’s relationship to reality: “It is hard for us to live up to our own eloquence, and keep pace with our winged words, while we are treading the solid earth and are liable to heavy dining. Besides, it has long been understood that the proprieties of literature are not those of practical life” (245). Winged words are opposed to solid earth. What happens in literature cannot always happen in lived experience. The epigraph of the chapter reads

We please our fancy with ideal webs

Of innovation, but our life meanwhile

Is in the loom, where busy passion plies

The shuttle to and fro, and gives our deeds

The accustomed pattern. (237)

Literature becomes an “ideal web” for acting out desires—the desire to marry outside of class obligations, for example—that the deterministic machinery of lived experience would reproduce into “accustomed patterns.” Literature opens a space where what cannot be imagined in lived experience can be imagined; it can hold the germ of an ideal that would be “too hard—impossible” to live.

Read in this way, Daniel Deronda’s mode of realism is not metonymic but metaphoric, not the naturalist “imitation of the everyday,” as Auerbach describes Madame Bovary, but a push toward something larger than what it refers to, a seeking of a kind of redemption or ideal in a larger system of meaning, similar to what Peter Brooks identifies in The Melodramatic Imagination as the “moral occult,” which the melodramatic mode, in the hands of novelists like Balzac and Henry James, draws on to create a sense of moral weight. Brooks finds in Balzac and James a repeatedly signified larger struggle between good and evil. The struggle in Daniel Deronda is epistemological—do we know things individually and abstractly, or contingently within a larger whole?—and reconciling these questions seems to carry an untold spiritual and moral weight. Daniel himself wants

some way of keeping emotion and its progeny of sentiments—which make the savours of life—substantial and strong in the face of a reflectiveness that threatened to nullify all differences. To pound the objects of sentiment into small dust, yet keep sentiment alive and active, was something like the famous recipe for making cannon—to first take a round hole and then enclose it with iron; whatever you do keeping fast hold of your round hole. Yet how distinguish what our will may wisely save in its completeness, from the heaping of cat-mummies and the expensive cult of enshrined putrefactions? (365)

He struggles to reconcile sentiment and reflection, to not lose his attachment to individual things in spite of a historical awareness that pounds those things into an undifferentiated dust. How to retain an individual meaning which is apparently absent, a lack, the “round hole” of a cannon, in spite of an understanding which sees all particular meanings as arising from the same processes?

            

A bit later, Daniel experiences a feeling of sublime transcendence listening to the Hebrew liturgy at a synagogue. His lack of knowledge of Hebrew effaces all the differences of the service into one meaning: “all were blent for him as one expression of a binding history, tragic and yet glorious. He wondered at the strength of his own feeling; it seemed beyond the occasion—what one might imagine to be a divine influx in the darkness, before there was any vision to interpret” (368). Daniel experiences something beyond the occasion in which all of its particular meanings are merged together to create a surplus of meaning too strong to contain. This surplus of meaning carries over to the reader as well. There is something sublimely important about this moment which suggests a universal human spiritual connection.

            

This chapter immediately follows Gwendolen’s last chapter in Book IV. Entering her room at Ryelands for the first time, Gwendolen sees “herself repeated in glass panels” (358), recognizes in the images herself as Mrs. Grandcourt, before the housekeeper delivers her a package containing the diamonds and letter from Lydia Glasher. After reading the letter, Gwendolen has a “spasm of terror” (359):

She could not see the reflections of herself then: they were like so many women petrified white; but coming near herself you might have seen the tremor in her lips and hands. She sat so for a long while, knowing little more than that she was feeling ill, and that those written words kept repeating themselves in her. (359)

The letter and the “poisoned gems” do nothing more than tell Gwendolen what she already knew, and yet their receipt entirely changes her understanding of herself and her position. It is not that the letter makes Gwendolen question her morals, but that it reorients her from seeing herself as a particular person to one of a type. She can no longer recognize herself in the mirrors: she is one of so many undistinguishable petrified women. She no longer sees herself abstracted as a unique, individual subject, but as one of any number of interchangeable objects occupying the role of Grandcourt’s lover. Her symbolic role is already defined: the written words repeat themselves in her, beyond her control. While Daniel finds in struggling with the contradiction between the particular and the typical a kind of spiritual transcendence, Gwendolen finds a terrific void, an existential emptiness that, like Daniel’s experience, has a surplus of meaning beyond the particular occasion.

Jessica Witte, *Mad Men*'s Impact on the Material Culture of Fashion

The Mad Men-inspired products in popular consumer culture have multiplied since the show’s 2007 debut. The boxed series themselves are works of collectible memorabilia, and fans can read books discussing everything from the food to the ad culture of 1960s New York.  Mattel even designed a line of limited-edition Barbies modeled after Don, Betty, Roger, and Joan.  (Of course, the Barbie set doesn’t include the iconic Sterling Cooper cocktail glasses, but you can buy a set here.)  But Mad Men’s influence in the fashion and design world is arguably its greatest impact on popular culture today.  Fans can buy Mad Men-inspired makeup, nail polish, and even Brooks Brothers suits.  Janie Bryant, the costume designer for the show, collaborated with Banana Republic to create two Mad Men collections.  Bryant also wrote The Fashion File: Advice, Tips, and Inspiration from the Costume Designer of Mad Men, which offers women fashion and beauty advice now that “finally, it’s hip to dress well again.”  Bryant even wants to help men “look a little more Don Draper-dashing.”  As January Jones explains in the introduction to Bryant’s book,

“I think one of the hugest compliments to Janie’s work on Mad Men is how it has inspired modern fashion.  Michael Kors was one of the first to come out with a Mad Men-inspired collection.  We’re suddenly seeing a waistline again and the silhouettes of the ‘50s and early ‘60s.  I’m happily surprised to see women dressing like women again; a feminine tribute through tailoring.” (xi)

Like Jones, the post-World War II fashion world was also eager for a return to traditionally feminine dress.  As Meenasarani Linde Murugan notes in her article “Maidenform: Temporalities of Fashion,”  wartime rationing meant that the “lingerie, corsets, waist cinchers, and girdles” that made a hyper-feminine silhouette possible became “excessive,” and so women’s clothing “stressed simplicity and utility in the silhouette” that was often coded “more ‘masculine’” in style (169).  Furthermore, as Mabel Rosenheck describes in “Swing Skirts and Swinging Singles: Mad Men, Fashion, and Cultural Memory,”

During the Second World War, women went to work alongside men and, at least in heavy industry, adopted male fashions: pants, overalls, and caps (Steele, 80-82).  After 1945, with soldiers returning from overseas, women were supposed to return to the home, give their jobs back to men, resume their unpaid duties as wives and mothers, and refashion themselves in New Look femininity.” (166-167)

This “New Look,” popularized by Christian Dior in 1947, included an “exaggerated hourglass shape and full skirt” that, like Victorian fashions, required “a petticoat, crinoline, and corset,” as Caroline Hamilton discusses in “Seeing the World Second Hand: Mad Men and the Vintage Consumer.”  So, the New Look marked a return to exaggerated, normative gender roles, as shaping undergarments became once again “practical” and necessary to construct the “natural” female form. 

            In the early 1960s, the rise of the working woman contributed to the demise of the New Look.  Rosenheck describes how the “tight waist and multiple, full stiff petticoats supporting circle skirts” gave way to more practical “tailored, figure-hugging sheaths” which allowed secretaries to move more freely around offices.  While Joan and the Sterling Cooper secretaries have escaped the petticoat as working women, they have not abandoned shaping undergarments. In her book, Bryant describes how

“The actors saunter into the fitting room wearing contemporary clothes and makeup.  It’s my job to transport these actors back to another era and help them become their characters.  How to turn a fitting room into a time machine?  My secret weapon for the women is a cache of undergarments, from closed-bottom girdles with garters to lacy bullet brassieres.  These foundations affect how the characters walk, sit, and sigh, and the transformation begins with that first breath.” (xiv) 

Christina Hendricks admits that she has “two scars from the rubber where [she attaches her] garters,” and that she “would complain more, but [the garments] make [her] look good.”  For example, the girdle “changed her posture and forced her to walk with more confidence in her stride, making her feel good about how she looks” despite the physical “toll on the body.”  Interestingly, despite today’s focus on comfortable, practical fashion, mid-century styles so dependent on body-shaping undergarments are nevertheless idealized by fashion designers and consumers alike.

            While most of the women in Mad Men wear the 1960s sheath dress, Betty and the other suburban housewives are generally dressed in the New Look.  For example, in Episode 2.3, “The Benefactor,” Jennifer Crane wears a late-50s, full-skirted shirtdress while knitting baby clothes and waiting for her husband to come home.  Although Betty’s riding costume includes pants, boots, and a tweed jacket at the stable, her outfit is still hyper-feminized in comparison to Sara Beth Carson’s. While both women wear red lipstick and pearl earrings--in the clip-on style of the 1960s--Sara Beth’s loose slacks and masculine necktie contrast with Betty’s fitted jodhpurs and bow tie.  And, after riding, Betty immediately goes home to “get cleaned up,” or to return to her New Look femininity. 

            At Lutece with Don and clients, Betty returns wears a girlish bright pink halter dress with a full skirt, which contrasts with Bobbie Barrett’s deep green, fitted frock.  Don has instructed Betty to “be shiny and bright” to please Jimmy, and she succeeds.  However, Betty’s relationship to Don can never be anything more than subordinate.  While Bobbie occupies a modern status as both wife and manager to her husband, Betty describes herself as “a housewife” with two children.  Bobbie’s sheath dress allows her to move fluidly through the public sphere, while Betty’s full skirt and petticoats keep her relegated to the domestic sphere as a visual symbol of postwar femininity. 

           

            

Kyle Johnston, "A Most Unprofitable, Irritating, Unsatisfactory Method of Publication"

In a notice in The Nation, an American weekly, on 24 February 1876, reprinted in David Carroll’s George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (1971), Henry James writes of the first monthly installment of George Eliot’s new novel, Daniel Deronda, a book which “none other at the present time is comparable to,” that

The quality of George Eliot’s work makes acceptable, in this particular case, a manner of publication to which in general we strongly object. It is but just that so fine and rare a pleasure should have a retarding element in it. George Eliot’s writing is so full, so charged with reflection and intellectual experience, that there is surely no arrogance in her giving us a month to think over and digest any given portion of it. (362)

James objects to the serialized method of publication of Daniel Deronda. To James, this method of publication is a “retarding element”; it is only because of the sheer superlativeness of a novelist like Eliot that Daniel Deronda can shine in spite of the deficiencies of its mode of delivery.

James is not alone in his objection to Daniel Deronda’s mode of publication. It is a frequent concern raised in periodicals and newspapers responding to the first book in February 1876. The Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser writes on 7 February that “George Eliot is accused of having brought into the literary world a most unprofitable, irritating, unsatisfactory method of publication—that of a volume at a time—which only serves to stimulate the appetite at the termination of each installment, and deadens it during the interval which must elapse before the appearance of another.” Like James, though, The Freeman notes that in “spite of the scrappy method of its publication it is destined to be the book of the season, and to mark in the literary history of the period.” Similarly, a review in John Bull on 5 February compliments Eliot’s powers while denigrating her work’s serial delivery, writing, “Every reader is aware that a book signed by this remarkable writer will be the matured product of genius, in which not a single line will have been added to fill up necessary space, or in that race with the time which is the cause of so much that is careless and slipshod in our periodical literature.” (As Terence Cave notes in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Eliot “still had several months’ writing ahead of her when the first four monthly parts were sent to the publishers in October 1857”—under a deadline, but not, we would expect, careless and slipshod.) The Aberdeen Journal’s review of “George Eliot’s New Work” on 9 February opens with the lines: “To discuss a work of this kind piecemeal is much like criticising a sample brick of a stately edifice. Nevertheless, we protest that the fault is not with the critics; it is with the author.” But unlike the others, the reviewer for The Aberdeen Journal has to “confess frankly that, so far, we are disappointed.”

           

While all these reviews consistently disapprove of Daniel Deronda’s mode of publication, almost all praise the work itself as no less than the apogee of contemporary literature. This raises, in my mind, two questions: 1) What is it about Daniel Deronda’s mode of production that elicits such a reaction? And 2) How can we today imagine what it meant for contemporaries to judge Daniel Deronda as a work of literature divided into eight separate books that were published one month at a time?

           

By 1876, the serialization of novels in the weekly or monthly issues of journals such as the weekly All the Year Round or the monthly Fornightly Review was common. Beginning with Middlemarch in 1871-72, as N. N. Feltes describes it in Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, Eliot and  George Henry Lewes, along with the publisher John Blackwood, devised a new mode of production in which the work was spread out over four volumes, instead of the three that contemporaries associated with triple-decker novels (most of which were first published serially prior to being available in volume form from lending libraries). With the new model, each volume was divided into two books and each book was published monthly and sold for 5s.  In this way the publisher and author eschewed the reliance on lending libraries which the three-decker novel necessitated. The publication of Daniel Deronda followed this Middlemarch model, as did that of Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister which was serialized nearly contemporaneously in eight monthly parts between November 1875 and June 1876 by Chapman and Hall.

It must be this model which The Freeman’s Journal “accuses” Eliot of bringing into the world—but why exactly this model elicits such a strong reaction is unclear when monthly serial publication was not new or uncommon. Perhaps the reaction indicates just how hungry readers were for the new Eliot—avid fans, they wanted to “binge,” and the constant deferral of completion and wholeness frustrated them.

           

What interests me most in these reviews is that the things that are praised in Daniel Deronda are frequently inextricably tied to the experience of serialized reading of which the reviews disapprove. This is most evident—and most eloquently expressed—in James’s review. James sees Daniel Deronda’s “manner of publication” as its one “retarding element.” Yet he also notes that “we must express our pleasure in the prospect of the intellectual luxury of taking up, month after month, the little clear-paged volumes of Daniel Deronda,” and, even more strikingly, adds,

For almost a year to come the lives of appreciative readers will have a sort of lateral extension into another multitudinous world—a world ideal only in the soft, clear light under which it lies, and most real in its close appeal to our curiosity. It is too early to take the measure of the elements which the author has in hand, but the imagination has a confident sense of large and complex unfolding.

What James describes here are two of the most prominent features of the experience of serialized reading: the experience of reading across time and space, of “lateral extension” into other worlds stretched over months, over a year, and the imaginative and social experience of serialized consumption in which the gaps between installments give rise conjecture and discussion—the story goes on, even while the next installment awaits publication. As Jason Mittell writes in “Serial Boxes,” “the gap between installments is the constitutive element of serial fiction, the space between available story units when both writers and readers imagine new possibilities and reflect on old tales.” James—who continues his review by imagining the various “potentialities” of Gwendolen Harleth—gets a large part of the pleasure he takes from Daniel Deronda from his experience of reading it serially.

And James is not alone in indulging in the pleasure of imaginative conjecture and reflection which serialization invites. The reviewer for John Bull dwells on Gwendolen, drawing connections to Felix Holt’s Esther Lyon and then criticizing her as “the incarnation of self-consciousness.” The York Herald is sympathetic to Gwendolen, while Berrow’s Worcester Journal finds that “at present the heroine does not exhibit any of the traits of a St Theresa, but it may be that George Eliot will subject her to a discipline of love which shall transform her nature, and call forth the nobler capabilities of her soul”; The Freeman’s Journal finds her “heartless and imperious, but at the same time too high-spirited to be selfish.” What gives these reviewers such a strong distaste for Daniel Deronda’s mode of publication remains to be seen; what is clear is that they enjoy and actively participate in the communal discourse of reflection and imagination which seriality invites, and that, for Henry James at least, the experience of reading a novel in serialization gives a pleasure unique to itself.