Situated at the crossroads of feminist accounts of gender formation and Marxist accounts of the rise of mass culture, Kathy Alexis Psomiades's Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism seeks to draw these histories more closely together by focusing on "how Art comes to wear a feminine face in the painting, poetry, and prose of nineteenth-century British aestheticism" (1). Psomiades contends that neither feminism nor Marxism has adequately explained the beautiful women who preside over Aestheticist works: where Marxism ignores gender (tending to see the figure of the beautiful woman as a symbol for Art), feminism has tended to focus on femininity to the exclusion of everything else (often reading beautiful women as allegories for the artist's sense of his own feminization). The result: two equally lopsided histories, one oblivious to gender, the other oblivious to everything but gender. Beauty's Body writes a more balanced history by treating Aestheticism's beautiful bodies not as ends in themselves (whether as signs of professional emasculation or emblems of art's gorgeous essence), but as what materially enables Aestheticism to come into being. Femininity is not simply in the work of Swinburne, Tennyson, the Rossettis, and others, Psomiades contends; rather, it is essential to the Aesthetic success of these works. According to Psomiades, Aestheticism depends on a tactical aphasia: while it is utterly dependent on the marketplace (writers and artists could not, after all, stay in business unless they sold their work), it is also deeply invested in the notion of art as an essentially separate sphere, a pure realm beyond the corrupt, corrupting world of commerce. Aestheticism can only come into being if it manages somehow not to know its economic underpinnings for what they are, and it is the beautiful woman -- herself the embodiment of similar tensions between public and private space -- who makes such knowing ignorance possible.

Beauty's Body begins by showing how Victorian gender ideology enabled an increasingly commercialized art to see itself as essentially separate from the marketplace. Through striking readings of Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" (1832, 1842), Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Jenny" (1870), and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (1862), Chapter One argues that the feminine icons in these works allow them both to know art as a public, commercial venture and to defer the consequences of that knowledge indefinitely. By embodying the aesthetic in the image of a beautiful woman, mid-Victorian poetry casts ideological contradictions as artistic paradoxes, and so paves the way for the commodification of art that took place during the latter half of the century. Chapter Two balances the claims of Chapter One, analyzing how Swinburne's perversely sexual image of beauty produces a resolutely resistant idea of art. Where Tennyson and the Rossettis cast the beautiful woman as the image of an art forced into public against its will, Swinburne's twisted beauties represent the experience of privacy as an aesthetic and erotic transformation: people lured out of public life by the likes of Sappho, Venus, and Lucretia Borgia are forever after unfit to return to it.

The next two chapters shift away from Aestheticism's self-representation to a broader consideration of the place of the feminine art object within Victorian culture. Chapter Three studies the relationship between patronage and artistic production, tracing the theme of circulation in poems by the Rossettis and Swinburne, and tracking the actual circulation of Dante Gabriel Rossettis painting Lady Lilith (1864-73) in order to dramatize how the image of a beautiful woman both covers over the very real economic contingencies of Aestheticist art (beauty alone makes this art worthy), and becomes the basis for assessing that art's market value (some things are more beautiful than others). Chapter Four concentrates on the commodification of aestheticism during the Aesthetic Craze of the 1870s and 1880s, showing how the mass production of beautiful women in cartoons, fashion manuals, journalism, and theater worked to set new, confused standards of decorum and taste: just as the beautiful woman was the proper subject for Aestheticist art, so the woman who dressed to look like a painting was becoming the scene of heated debates about the nature of art, woman, and the proper relation between the two. The final chapter brings the beautiful woman into the 1890s, concluding the book with an examination of how Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and others made beauty's body into an ironic commentary on the mass culture she was helping to create.

This is a dense, rich, detailed book, rife with astute readings and intensely alive to both the historical and theoretical dimensions of its subject. Moving easily between intricate readings and provocative synthesis, Beauty's Body contains some remarkable set pieces -- a reading of the drawing room of Rossetti's patron, Frederick Leyland; an analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) as a conceptual offshoot of Vernon Lee's Miss Brown(1884); a demonstration of how Herbert Marcuse's portrait of nineteenth-century culture recycles the very beautiful woman that circulates in such famously conservative Victorian texts as Sarah Stickney Ellis's The Daughters of England (1843). Ranging widely over time and space, Beauty's Body makes familiar works seem new while at the same time showing how lesser-known texts such as Vernon Lee's Miss Brown might be seen as landmarks in Aestheticist representation. In so doing, Psomiades offers an important corrective to both current accounts of Victorian aesthetics and twentieth-century theories of the aesthetic, showing not only how gender underwrote Aestheticism, but also how contemporary Marxist accounts of aesthetics have inherited beauty's body: like Aestheticism, it, too, depends heavily on the image of a beautiful woman to conceal its conceptual rifts.

Beauty's Body is thus finally an argument for the self-conscious use of critical terms. The book dramatizes how failure to historicize analytical models leads us to reinscribe the patterns we seek to critique (or, as Psomiades puts it, permits aestheticizing to pass for theorizing). The book also reveals how allowing materials and methods to speak through each other yields a more complex and more accurate portrait of both past and present. There is only one flaw in this otherwise elegant argument. Given her emphasis on the importance of critical self-consciousness, it comes as a surprise that Psomiades does not scrutinize feminism with the same sort of care she gives to Marxism. In Beauty's Body, feminist theory occasions a welcome revision of Marxist approaches to the aesthetic, but Marxism is never allowed to read femininity -- let alone feminism -- back against itself. Where Psomiades does a wonderful job of drawing out continuities between Victorian paradigms of beauty and twentieth-century Marxist tropes, she does not attend to analogous links between contemporary theories of gender and beauty's Victorian body. Instead, feminist theory stands as beauty's final and most fitting frame, an analytical tool that is somehow outside the history it helps to portray.