ABSTRACT
Exemplifying the surrealist preoccupation with dreams, the uncanny, and doubling, the photograph evokes both consciousness and unconsciousness, while the Vogue caption’s emphasis on surface, patina, and sheen – “mother-of-pearl” and “ebony” – foregrounds the modernist obsession with pure surface, a phenomenon compellingly analysed in Anne Anlin Cheng’s interdisciplinary study of Josephine Baker and modernism. In 1922, Faure-Favier was on board the first return commercial night flight between Paris and London, and she published a characteristically enthusiastic account in L’Illustration. Journalism allowed the author to develop her passion for aviation and emphasize its specific potential for women, as evident from her articles on the aviatrix Adrienne Bolland. Holmes’s work argues for a middlebrow turn in French scholarship, pointing out that research into the middlebrow has thus far largely been restricted to research into “women’s writing and reading practices in interwar Britain and North America”.
