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The protagonists of Comedy: American Style, The Chinaberry Tree, “The Sleeper Wakes,” and Salome of the Tenements revise their identities by becoming designers—and fashion provides a means for exploring racial and ethnic hybridity as well as rebelling against the dominant culture’s definitions of race, gender, and class.
In “‘Be What You Want’: Clothing and Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” Natalie Stillman-Webb analyzes the presentation of American consumerism through references to beauty salons and fashionable clothing in the novel, which is set in the early twentieth century but reveals a postmodern sensibility. While dress can signal race and gender in the text, the performative aspects of vestimentary behavior investigate the limitations that socioeconomic context places on self-fashioning. Ultimately, Stillman-Webb considers Morrison’s sartorial treatment to be political, an intervention in the controversial debates regarding the relationships of African-Americans, subjectivity, and mass culture.
Fashion both reflects and responds to society simultaneously; indeed, it conveys tensions particularly well. In “‘Spiritual Garments’: Fashioning the Victorian Séance in Sarah Waters’ Affinity,” Catherine Spooner explores fashion discourse in the lesbian Gothic novel, where the spiritualist context troubles an easy division between the spiritual and the material. The séance invites construction of resistant identities; costume establishes the tension between the authentic and the fraudulent. Throughout the narrative, dress is ascribed symbolic and political importance, particularly as performative articulation of a liberated identity within Victorian culture.
Cultural identity is also central to “Fabricating Desires: The Transformation of the Quinces Tradition in Multicultural Narratives”; Rafael Miguel Montes proposes that the quinces celebration, a rite of passage portrayed in Nancy Osa’s Cuba 15 and Veronica Chambers’ Quinceañera Means Sweet 15, functions as an important intersection between tradition and socioeconomic aspiration. Montes further demonstrates how mall culture is also invoked through the high-culture examples of quinceañera depicted in these young adult novels.