Beauty’s Price: Femininity as an Aesthetic Commodity in Elizabeth’s von Arnim’s Novels

The article contributes to a largely neglected area of research into Aestheticism: the relationship between Aestheticism and the middlebrow. The satirist Elizabeth von Arnim (1864–1941) has been discussed in the contexts of both Aesthetic (Talia Schaffer) and middlebrow writing (Jennifer Shepherd, Nicola Humble). By looking at several of von Arnim’s novels, the article explores the incorporation of Aesthetic ideals of femininity into middlebrow literature from the turn of the century to the thirties. Von Arnim’s treatment of aesthetic femininity is largely critical. Her female protagonists struggle with both masculine attributions of womanliness as well as their own understanding of an Aesthetic ideal of femininity that collides with their feminist disapproval of gender relations, subjects them to the roles of model and mistress in the production of art and leads to a loss of social status once they have lost their beauty. In her comical portrayal on the effect of Aesthetic femininity on women’s lives, von Arnim dissects the intricate connections between beauty, money, power and love in ways that have lost little of their satirical edge.