| Fashion influenced how early twentieth-century authors portrayed race, class and gender in their fiction, particularly in new ways that involved sartorial display. Because fashion was prevalent in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual culture, it factored largely in the gender performance, social class dynamics and racial passing characteristic of the time---all of which were sartorially mediated. Fiction written by canonical writers such as Jean Rhys, Ernest Hemingway, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen and F. Scott Fitzgerald explores how sartorial practices like shopping contributed to the commodification of identity, which contributed greatly to the fragmentation and alienation characteristic of modernist experience. In short, modernist writers used clothing's ability to be multiply-significant to illustrate the complexity and multifaceted nature of modern identity. Novels in which both women and men engaged in consumption practices and sartorial activities offered critical responses to the fashioning and marketing of normative racial, class and gender identities in hetero-normative, capitalist society that began around the middle of the nineteenth century and continues to this day. |
