Vike Martina Plock’s chapter examines the interplay between medical science and humanist learning in Joyce’s writing. It is well known that Joyce had a life-long interest in medicine. His works resonate with descriptions of bodies in various stages of (ill-)health, and in recent years critics such as John Gordon, Vike Martina Plock, and Martin Bock have shown his responsiveness to a number of medical theories and interventions crucial to his time. As these studies illustrate, Joyce is often extremely critical of modern medicine’s merits, seeing it as yet another regulatory system that has the potential to organize and coerce. This chapter proposes to use debates and theories that have emerged in recent years in the Medical Humanities to investigate how Joyce’s texts reject the proposal to narrativize patients’ case histories. Critics such as Angela Woods have particularly challenged the role of realism in contemporary accounts of health and illness. Joyce, as this chapter argues, deliberately uses experimental narrative techniques to defy medicine’s urge to classify individuals according to pre-existing pathological labels. The representation of bodies in Joyce’s texts offer new ways of understanding cultures of medicine, disability studies, communities in crisis, bioethics, and public health.

On Monday, 9 October 1936 Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), attended a luncheon organised by a group of local businessmen at the Grand Hotel in Birmingham. According to the Report of the Birmingham City Police Investigation Department, Sir Oswald rose to his feet after the meal to address the assembled crowd. This time, he said, it was ‘not his intention to give a generalised speech on such subjects as foreign affairs or the broad policy of the British Union of Fascists’. Instead, the BUF leader used the occasion to discuss new government legislation passed earlier in the same year: the Public Order Act that aimed to curb the spread of extremist political parties and movements by banning the public wearing of uniforms during rallies and meetings. ‘As usual’, Sir Oswald contended confidently in response to this governmental attempt to dissolve his party, ‘our opponents were two years too late with their legislation.’ In his view, ‘the banning of the blackshirts at this stage would not make the slightest difference to the organisation’ because a ‘flame had been lit which would not be quenched by such legislation…. The time to have attacked the blackshirt uniform’, he concluded, ‘was two years ago, but now the uniform had achieved its object’ (KV2/884). If Mosley was to be believed, the rise of the fascist world order could, in 1936, no longer be prevented. The black uniform had played its part in organising the movement in its infancy but had become obsolete precisely at the time when the BUF had turned into a recognisable feature of Britain's political landscape.

Although its expendability was publicly announced by the BUF leader in 1936, it must be said that the blackshirt uniform had, during its short history as the party's official garb, obtained a significant reputation. While the party's official publications aped Mosley in stressing the uniform's significance in attempts to unite a disparate party base, it had also become synonymous – in the public imagination – with scenes of organised violence and brutal brawls, finding the most extreme expression in the aftermath of the notorious Olympia rally in 1934. The ban of the black uniform, it was hoped by many, would put an end to such politically motivated mass scuffles and riots.

This chapter concentrates on Elizabeth Bowen and continues the investigation into the organisation of the interwar literary field by showing how a woman novelist, who assisted in shaping modernism's critical afterlife from the very beginning, coordinated her engagement with the sartorial and the literary fashions of her time. Like Lehmann, it needs to be remembered, Bowen was inspired by modernist writers such as Woolf, who is commonly regarded as her ‘friend, mentor and, in some ways, her model as modern, professional female author’ (Bennett 2009: 29). But Bowen was, unlike Lehmann, also very keen to develop her literary reputation as a serious novelist in response to a market that favoured the mass production of fiction that ‘is written to formula’ and ‘created’, as Bowen explained in 1950 in one of her reflections on contemporary publishing practices, to accommodate ‘the wish of the public to be told, yet once again, what it knows already, or to have the same tune played, with slight variation, on a range of feelings of which it is already aware’ (Bowen 1952b: 152).

Here I suggest that Bowen tried to safeguard her reputation as a highbrow writer precisely at the time when her work was beginning to become ‘a prestige commodity’ on the early 1930s literary marketplace (Glendinning 1978: 98). In doing this, I shall further suggest, she indirectly engaged with two programmatic concerns commonly associated with modernist experimentation. In the first place, she developed epistemological considerations of intersubjectivity and of subject-object relations that challenged modernism's conceptual focus on interiority. For Bowen, I will argue in the following pages, fashion proved to be such a rewarding topic because her critical engagement with its social causalities advanced her thinking about the construction of interpersonal relations in twentieth-century mass market economies. As we shall see, Bowen's writing consistently associates objects such as dresses with the quick pace of modern fashion and its insistence on seasonal renewal. These sartorial items obtain more agency than the characters who wear them.

It is 1956, the height of the Cold War. The year will end in the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Uprising. Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf have both been dead for a while, Jean Rhys is all but forgotten and Rosamond Lehmann's career as a novelist is on the wane.1 Elizabeth Bowen, now in her late fifties, is an acclaimed author and sought-after lecturer, who received a CBE in 1948 and who has just been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. She is deeply immersed in her travelogue, A Time in Rome (1960), and also in her 15-year-long love affair with the diplomat Charles Ritchie. In July, she publishes an essay on individuality and subjectivity, ‘How to Be Yourself – And Not Eccentric’, in Vogue to return to a topic that has been occupying her for more than two decades. ‘Does fashion help’, she had asked in 1937 in a book review when discussing the difficult task of identity formation (Bowen 1950: 113). The Vogue piece, published in a politically fraught climate marked by uprisings and suppression of dissident voices, similarly addresses the relationship between conformity and self-assertion and it also discusses fashion's contributions to the complex processes that structure the subject's conflicting desires to conform and dissent.

Indeed, the older Bowen here seems to answer her earlier question by acknowledging her contemporaries’ tendency to toe the line: ‘on the whole’, she observes, ‘we dress, behave, run our homes, and conduct our outside existences in the accepted manner – to do otherwise could involve us in needless trouble, or cause us to rile or perplex our neighbours’ (2008: 412). But, she interposes, if ‘individuality is threatened’, if acceptance of norms and social protocols endangers individuation, identity nonetheless seeks an outlet, and it is out of this tension between assimilation and the relational need for self-expression that ‘the best of the world we live in’ eventually arises (2008: 413). Out of this conflict between the self and the world, that is, emerges something beneficial, something that is constructive for both the individual and the community.

Although aspects of this chapter assess, like the previous one, fashion's impact on female identity formation through standardisation and typecasting, its focus is different in that Jean Rhys was, unlike Wharton, not only a consumer but through her work as a fashion model in several Parisian couture houses also a participatory agent in an emerging industry that brought into circulation images of desirable femininity. Surviving photographs of the young Rhys depict a woman who is exceptionally conscious of her good looks, who poses comfortably for the camera and who seems happy to accept the necessity to conform to contemporary beauty standards in exchange for social approval. To claim that she had a critical attitude towards fashion might therefore sound controversial. On the face of it, this young, bohemian woman, who regarded exquisite clothes, fashionable accessories and make-up as constitutive for female identity formation, is positioned – more than any of the other women writers discussed in this study – in a very obvious psychological and professional proximity to the fashionable circuits of her time. Moreover, in terms of her development as a writer, Rhys's willingness to publish her short story cycle The Left Bank (1927) and her first novel Quartet (1928) under the patronage of Ford Madox Ford associated her, right from the beginning of her career, with those literary circles that would eventually become known as the modernist avant-garde. Personally and professionally, Rhys, at the end of the 1920s, seemed to have embodied the image of fashionable femininity and of modernist authorship as it was constructed by contemporaries.

Yet, it is precisely this suggestion – that Rhys's fiction contains a far from subtle critique of the modern fashion industry and its impact on young women who had to earn their living – that I intend to develop in this chapter. Although her writing resonates with images of alluring garments and fashionably dressed women, I will suggest that it also unmasks as prohibitive illusions some of fashion's instructive propositions on how to cultivate images of modern, successful and desirable femininity in the interwar years. On closer scrutiny, it becomes obvious that Rhys's ‘Left Bank’ fiction of the 1920s and 1930s registers the complications and sacrifices involved in living up to the beauty standards devised and disseminated by contemporary fashion lore.

The Edith Wharton Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University contains, among its vast holdings, a torn-out yet carefully preserved newspaper clipping, advertising, in 1913, the imminent publication of Laddie: A True Blue Story, sixth novel of the bestselling romance author Gene Stratton-Porter (Figure 1). Natural imagery, birds and thorny branches, frame the ad, while the accompanying blurb ecstatically celebrates the novel's commercial success, calling it ‘a wonderful record for a wonderful book’. Indeed, the ad claims that the first printing of Laddie – 150,000 copies – had already been sold in the ‘two weeks before publication’, and the second printing had sold 50,000 copies just ‘two weeks after publication’. The literary value of Stratton-Porter's work, at least in this particular newspaper ad, is rendered in numerical terms. Commercial success is explicitly associated with writerly talent.

No doubt, Wharton – who kept this ad and underlined in red pen the phrases ‘the three million mark’, ‘vast reading public because it is true to life’ and ‘people who love their homes; who figure neither in newspaper nor divorce court; who are the source of the real vitality of the nation’ – must have regarded Stratton-Porter as a typical case of an American media-made celebrity author, whose readership might have been vast but whose fame was not necessarily matched by artistic ability. ‘Here is a book that every one is talking about’, Wharton had noted dryly ten years earlier in her essay ‘The Vice of Reading’, before concluding that ‘the number of its editions is an almost unanswerable proof of its merit’ (1996: 102). In all likelihood, the ad for Laddie was preserved because it supported Wharton's fear about the decline of artistic standards at the beginning of the twentieth century. If the mass production of literature was responsible for converting readers into unimaginative consumers, blindly following the latest literary trend promoted by publishers’ publicity campaigns, this commercialisation of reading habits was synchronised by what Wharton called the ‘standardization’ of writing practices (1996: 155).

Although her genteel upbringing and socio-economic background differed significantly from the outsider existence taken up and embodied by Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann shared her contemporary's fascination with the modern couture of the interwar period. Her novels as well as her correspondence and autobiographical writing testify to the allure that nice clothes and fashion magazines had for this middle-class British woman with literary aspirations. What distinguished Lehmann from Rhys, however, was the former's interest in using her writing to represent and emphasise the shared components in women's emotional experiences. Where Rhys's fiction focused on social outcasts in her explorations of women's engagements with contemporary sartorial politics, Lehmann's texts attempted to differently negotiate the tension between adaptation and difference brought into play by fashion. Even though her representation of modern fashion is by no means uncritical, this chapter will show that Lehmann's heroines – and her novels – try harder to live up to expectations. They are less interested in stylistic originality and individuality than Rhys's eccentric counterparts. Rather, they are more inclined, as will become apparent, to take up invitations to follow various textile, social and textual patterns available to women at the time Lehmann was writing. Critics of her work might therefore argue that Lehmann's fiction is in danger of being intellectually compromised – that the author's desire to fit in rendered her too susceptible to the pressures of the literary marketplace and made her produce a number of novels too inclined to follow established literary paradigms. And as we shall see, Lehmann's correspondence is certainly supportive of such statements. This writer, who ‘dreamed complacently about poetic fame’ in her youth, never concealed the fact that she hoped to become a successful writer. However, rather than reading her work as its author's obvious submission to market demands, I want to suggest that Lehmann's awareness of, and partial compromise with, existing (sartorial and literary) patterns and her willingness to consider publishing commercially successful work were motivated by her desire to represent communality and solidarity among women as desirable social dynamics.

This book argues that fashion mattered to anglophone women novelists of the interwar period for two distinct yet interrelated reasons. First, it suggests that fashion provided them with a rich conceptual framework for analysing the complex processes of identity formation in a time of significant social and cultural change. Unlike any other social practice, fashion structures the relationship between individuals and between an individual and adjacent collectives. For this reason, it facilitates the analysis of modern subject identity as a psychological composite at once receptive and defensive towards external influences and pressures. Originality in dress can generate admiration in everyday encounters. But as Mabel Waring, the protagonist of Virginia Woolf's short story ‘The New Dress’ (1924), has to learn the hard way, too much extravagance in clothing ostracises. Because group identity is often maintained by a certain degree of uniformity in dress, sartorial conspicuousness can lead to isolation from communities with which the individual seeks affiliation.

This apparent contradiction between individual expression and community building through the use of clothes is a topic to which my chosen novelists consistently return, and it is the first aim of this book to analyse what aspects of fashion's conceptual apparatus they employ to discuss the ways in which their characters position themselves in relation to new and established gender dynamics that were propagated or challenged in the early decades of the twentieth century. During a time when women's clothing underwent radical changes, the rhetoric provided by the fashion discourse offered these writers a particularly relevant set of thematic clusters to analyse the construction of female subjectivity in a world in which people were relentlessly held up for comparison with others but in which individuals also worried about being swallowed up by the crowds populating the vast metropolitan centres that were the setting of so much of modern fiction. In the work of the included women writers, the analysis of this dialectic between assimilation and differentiation, between conformity and rebellion, facilitates discussions about identity politics. Fashion, as these authors noted, was a social practice that could be easily seized for political ends. And it is these politically motivated appropriations of fashion that are comprehensively discussed and often critiqued in their writing.