ABSTRACT
Feminist women writers have often approached the subject of mass commercial or commodity culture with skepticism, distrust, and anger.1 Our most basic instincts have sometimes been to distance ourselves from or alternately to rage against the machinery of a culture that has seemed to promise infinite variations on the same old thing (gender hierarchy, female masochism, male supremacy, and so on).2 Indeed, many of us might take Virginia Woolf's depiction of the quintessential Hollywood stunt-a "film actress" who was "lowered from a peak in California and hung suspended in mid-air"-as a fitting image of the kind of power a commercial culture gives to women (Room 33).
