Abstract
This chapter surveys gazing throughout American fiction since the early nineteenth century and focuses on work by Washington Irving Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, James Baldwin, Gertdue Stein, and Tim O’Brien. Subheadings: The Farmer’s Daughter, The Seamstress and the Papist; From Not Pretty to Pretty; Women Kept and Unkept; Let Gertrude Stein Call You Sweetheart; Beauty Out of Place—Gazing Across the Color Line; Struggles Continue; Body Shopping; Letting Go; “Unaesthetic.”
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Notes
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Jean–Léon Gérôme, Phryne In Front of the Judges. http://www.shafe.uk/wp-content/uploads/gerome_phryne_in_front_of_the_judges_1861.jpg.
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“Now! Elect Miss Rheingold 1953” poster. https://ephemeralnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/missrheingold1953.jpg.
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The Miss Rheingold contest ended in the mid-1960s because of what we now call “identity politics,” when Liebmann Breweries, owners of the Rheingold brand, designated an African American Miss Rheingold instead of allowing the public to choose the winner as they had done in past years. Liebmann, which had been the first brewer to sponsor TV shows featuring black entertainers such as Nat King Cole, realized that integrating or diversifying the Miss Rheingold pool was a lose-lose proposition because it would diminish market share among alienated white ethnics, their traditional customers, while failing to become more inclusive would limit sales to the New York area’s growing African-American and Latino populations:
Rheingold was after the Harlem market ... By the mid-60s, six lily-white girls no longer reflected the ethnic mix of the city. Rheingold found itself in a no-win situation: Keeping the status quo would anger the black and Hispanic communities, but adding nonwhite candidates might lose the blue-collar white males who bought the beer. (Diehl 2000)
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Bloom, J.D. (2017). American Fiction: Gaze Canon. In: Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59945-8_3
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