ABSTRACT

Focusing on issues such as beauty and ornamental detail, feminist writers such as Wendy Steiner and Naomi Schor have also provided useful insights into the reasoning that led to modernist denunciations of the decorative. In The Trouble with Beauty, Steiner considers how the prevalence of Kantian aesthetics in leading modernist literary and artistic circles meant that the sublime aspirations of art were rigidly separated from the pleasures of feminine allure, charm, comfort and ornament. As Steiner explains, the power of pleasing can arouse distrust: ‘to be “merely ornamental” is purportedly to be useless or without practical effect, and yet the ornamental is also taken as a black magic of utility and power associated with deception and the meretricious’. Even Steiner, who discusses the work of a wide range of twentieth-century women writers and women artists of the late twentieth century, has nothing to say about earlier generations of women artists.