ABSTRACT
Chapter 5, “Fashioning Class: Creating Canonical Costume” looks deeply at class as not simply an article of wealth or taste, but as a canonical position, with the highbrow literary status identified by Lawrence Levine stimulating lowbrow attempts to pass. The chapter extends the analysis of middle-class white hegemony from skin color to status. The trope of class-passing found a wealth of social fascination during the Great Depression, and Anzia Yezierska, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston utilized the transforming power of fashion to analyze the limited power many faced when confronting white privilege. Modernism’s troubled engagement with class provided that white femininity, the middle class, and the lure of consumption combined to formulate class-passing. Adding to this were protagonists who pass up or down through the social identity of marriage. Yet, Edith Wharton was as aware of class and status as were her naturalistic contemporaries Jack London and Theodore Dreiser, and Truman Capote’s postmodern Breakfast at Tiffany’s argues for economic ambivalence in status (166).
