Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1840-1914
Michelle Smith
Published:
2022
Online ISBN:
9781474470117
Print ISBN:
9781474470094
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Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1840-1914
Michelle Smith
Chapter
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Michelle Smith
Pages
54–80
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Published:
July 2022
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Smith, Michelle, 'The Dark Side of Beauty: Cosmetics, Artifice and Danger', Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1840-1914 (
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Abstract
This chapter examines the ways in which beauty was connected with danger in the Victorian period in three diverse kinds of print: the beauty manual, the periodical press and the novel. While magazine advertising increasingly featured beauty products, the harmfulness of dangerous cosmetics to health and the potential damage to natural features from cosmetic usage were routinely emphasised in non- fiction, leaving the woman reader torn between competing ideals. Fictional depictions of cosmeticians extrapolated the dangers associated with cosmetics to harm and crimes that far exceeded deceptive products and treatments, as in L. T. Meade’s The Sorceress of the Strand (1902). More frequently, however, Victorian fiction depicted natural beauty itself as a danger for young women, with its sexual implications being sufficient to lead to a tragic downfall and death in numerous novels, including Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1862) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). These novels are representative of the enduring and pervasive association of beauty with sexuality and thereby the potential of a girl or woman’s downfall.
Keywords: advertisem*nts, artifice, cosmetics, East Lynne, Lola Montez, Madame Rachel, Woman, Queen, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Sorceress of the Stand
Subject
Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
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