Style Narratives
Identity through Style: Crisis and Transformation in The Marvelous Mrs.
Maisel
Ylenia Swierk
Research Master Thesis Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Dr. Esther Peeren
University of Amsterdam
table of contents
introduction 3
chapter I | dress 11
chapter II | accessories 20
chapter III | color 32
conclusion 43
To my family, who always encouraged me to follow my dreams and demanded I enjoy the process.
To my friends, who supported me and cheered me on every step of the way.
To Dr. Esther Peeren, I could not have dreamed of a better person to accompany me on this journey.
introduction | style
“Long before I am near enough to talk to you on the street, in a meeting, or at a party, you announce your sex, age and class to me through what you are wearing—and very possibly give me important information (or misinformation) as to your occupation, origin, personality, opinions, tastes, sexual desires and current mood.”
- Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes
The image on the cover of this thesis depicts what appears to be a cheerful-looking upper-class woman in her mid to late twenties. Her name is Midge and she is the protagonist of the Amazon television series The
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the first season of which premiered on November 29,
2017. In the still from the series, she is coming out of a butcher shop wearing a pink coat, magenta dress and burgundy accessories. The hues and style of her outfit place her in the 1950s and her body language suggests openness and happiness. A lot more could be inferred by simply looking at what she is wearing. In this thesis, I ask what exactly can be deduced from someone's dress style and how the concept of style relates to identity (trans)formation, particularly in relation to gender roles. Taking Lurie’s statement quoted above as an inspiration and starting point, I will investigate the relationship between style and gender identity through a close analysis of changes in Midge's clothes, accessories and their color throughout the series. But first, it is necessary to delve deeper into the concept of style.
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines style as “a distinctive manner of expression… of behaving or conducting oneself; a particular manner or technique by which something is done, created, or performed.” If this were all, however, this thesis would have no reason to be. Style is indeed a distinctive or particular manner of doing something; however, when thus put, it may seem that style intrinsically holds the idea of uniqueness. That is not the case, though. As Georg Simmel puts it in his article “The Problem of Style,” “style is a principle of generality which either mixes with the principle of individuality, displaces it or represents it” (65). That is, although the concept of style plays on the idea of individuality, it is actually a concept
meant to generalize and encapsulate various individualities into broader
styles. Therefore, the word ‘distinctive’ in the dictionary entry, as related to
style, is to be read as a collective distinctiveness rather than a unique characteristic.
To complicate things further, style does not mean the same thing across disciplines. The variations are slight when analyzing this concept in related disciplines such as film and television studies, yet they get more significant when doing a comparison of style as used in fashion and in poetics. Through a survey of the concept’s development across disparate fields and a combination of different points of view on style, it is possible to develop new avenues for analysis.
Andrew Benjamin dedicates about half of his book Style and Time to discussing architecture. Starting from Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades
Project (written between 1927 and 1940) and his musings on Jugendstil to an
analysis of Hübsch’s 1828 pamphlet “In What Style Ought We to Build?”
Style and Time focuses on the meaning of style as a philosophical and
sociological concept, and on its close relation to time (as the book’s title suggests) but also space. In fact, in his introduction, Benjamin writes: “Style operates as an appearance precisely because of its connection to recognition. In raising the question of recognition, any appearance automatically brings the site of recognition into play” (xi). That is, for him, the site of recognition, the place in which a certain style dwells, is as much part of what defines style as time and tradition are. Going back and forth on the question of appearance, and having it interact with concepts of modernity, internationalization and cosmopolitanism, Benjamin tries to trace the genealogy of style and define its characteristics. This exploration of philosophy, art and architecture helps to understand the defining features of style. These features can be boiled down to a concise statement: style “has ubiquity, rather than specificity” (Benjamin 87). While seemingly contradicting the dictionary entry for style, Benjamin’s remarks on the ubiquitous nature of style — especially when in reference to the modern, international, cosmopolitan world we currently live in — make sense. That is,
the unique or the extremely specific is just that, singular. Style requires a multiplicity of particulars, ubiquitous enough to be recognized and given a collective name.
The trend or concept of “Fashion Types” with roots in the 1930s, as outlined by Sarah Berry in her book Screen style: Fashion and femininity in
1930s Hollywood, is a good example of style’s necessary ubiquity. The use of
fashion types was in fact born as a merchandising strategy, “whereby clothing was categorized according to certain kinds of feminine personality” (Berry 6). That is, in that period there existed guides that “offered chapters on matching clothing to one's desired personality, and identified the designs and colors that corresponded to a taxonomy of personality types” (Berry 10). Though it is, arguably, a common idea that each individual is unique and possesses a specific combination of traits rendering their personality distinctive and special, guides and, today, online tests exist to categorize those traits and assign to the individual a style label. Similarly, when discussing the impact of 1930s Hollywood cinema on (women’s) fashion, Andrea Weiss has said that “the rise of the cinema and especially the Hollywood star system promoted the idea that different roles and styles could be adopted by spectators as well as by actors and actresses, and could signal changeable personalities, multiple identities” (Weiss qtd. in Berry 185). This challenges the idea of style as assigned based on intrinsic personality traits by suggesting that style can be adopted, changed and played with to create a specific identity and to portray characteristics that are not necessarily idiosyncratic.
“It is perhaps this tension between seeing fashion as an individual phenomenon or as a more collective one,” writes Tim Edwards in his introduction to Fashion in Focus, “that informs questions and understandings of the most complex term of all, style. Style may simultaneously refer to the ‘what’ and the ‘way’ of fashion – its design and how it is worn. This is at once collective… and individual” (3). Joanne Entwistle expresses a similar sentiment when she writes that fashion satisfies “a simultaneous desire for uniformity and difference, allowing people to express their individuality
whilst remaining part of the crowd” (61). They both seem to agree with Simmel, Benjamin and Berry in positing that although style indeed has an individual component, it is not purely so. Instead, it has collective qualities; it is generalizing and generalizable. Moreover, fashion scholars often view style as performative and closely related to the expression of one’s identity. One’s identity, though, does not precede its expression; rather, identity is constructed by expressing it. On this topic, Jennifer Craik, fashion scholar, writes: “individuals perform their identities and social roles through their
choice and mode of wearing clothes and accessories. This is the act of
performativity, or the ways in which the body assumes a sense of self by creating a recognizable identity through the way the body is clothed, gestures, expressions, and movement” (3, italics in original).
At this point, three distinct arguments can be made about style. First, style, as suggested by Simmel, Benjamin, Berry, Edwards and Entwistle, is not individual but collective and generalizable. Second, style is not necessarily fixed; both Weiss and Berry point to a certain flexibility of style. Third, style is performative; it creates an identity rather than expressing a pre-existing one.
As Carol Tulloch argues with regard to the third argument, the everyday style decisions people make are “part of the process of self-telling, that is, [of] expound[ing] an aspect of autobiography of oneself through the clothing choices an individual makes” (276). Tulloch writes specifically about the performance of blackness through dress, and she quotes Shirley Anne Tate, who believes that being black “occurs when one accepts and identifies with racializing Black anti-racist movements' beauty philosophies … and their race-ing stylizations and accompanying technologies as the norm” (Tate qtd. in Tulloch 282). Therefore, not only already acquired personality traits or the ones desired influence style and the stylization of the individual’s body, as Berry argues, but cultural aspects and the desire or need to identify and belong to a community also play a role in the adoption of a certain style.
So far, then, style seems to have a generalizing quality, yet it tends to imply if not uniqueness then at least some sort of peculiarity and a degree of
flexibility. Style defines categories but not individuals. It can incite aspirational feelings yet adopting a style – and being seen to do this in an appropriate manner (belonging to the style) – is not always voluntary. Going back to Tulloch’s argument about blackness, it is important to note that in order to adopt black style one needs, first of all, to be black. Anyone else attempting a black stylization would be engaging in cultural appropriation.1 Therefore, though, as mentioned earlier, style has a certain degree of flexibility, it also has a normative and sometimes constrictive aspect. Through style one can try to become someone else, but not necessarily anyone else, at least not in a way that would be recognized by others, which brings the discussion back to Benjamin’s point about the link between style and recognition.
Generally, the concept of style seems to be closely related to creativity and art, politics and identity. Style in relation to identity (trans)formation is particularly important in this thesis. In fact, though both style and identity allow for some flexibility, they cannot necessarily be changed completely. Both the body and the mind are shaped into an identity through styles, be they styles of language, dress, gesture or posture; such styles are not costumes that can be put on and taken off at will. Style involves a certain amount of conscious and unconscious negotiation on the part of the individual. Exploring this complex dynamic will be at the heart of this thesis.
There is still more to style, though. As shown, for example, by the smooth interconnection between Berry’s and Tulloch’s work, closely related fields often appear to have overlapping definitions of style. One might expect things to get a little more complicated when looking at conceptions of style in unrelated fields or disciplines. Interestingly enough, though, the idea of ‘type’ mentioned by Berry in relation to fashion types comes back in discussions of stylistics in literature. With regards to the stylistic treatment of utterances or speech in novels, Mikhail Bakhtin writes: “The hero’s discourse is treated precisely as someone else’s discourse, as discourse 1 See, for instance, the controversial case involving Rachel Dolezal (1977), who, for years, identified as a black woman even though her parents are both white (Pérez-Peña).
belonging to some specific characterological profile or type” (187). In other words, the hero does not have a unique voice, but speaks a language that is collective, that is spoken by a group of people forming a type. When creating a character and having that character “speak” in written dialogue, an author will show what kind of type the character is by having him speak in a certain style. Thus, style allows authors to speak in a voice that is not necessarily their own but that is known to them because of the ubiquity (to return to Benjamin’s definition of style) of a certain type of people displaying this style. From the generic type, the author is able to create a specific hero, who remains recognizable as a ‘type’ yet also has distinct characteristics. This happens because “[s]omeone else’s words introduced into our own speech inevitably assume a new (our own) interpretation and become subject to our evaluation of them; that is, they become double-voiced” through a process of stylization, which implies that a certain distance is maintained between someone else’s words (the style associated with a social type) and one’s evaluation of these words (Bakhtin 195). When a total merging of the author’s and the character’s voices occurs, “[t]he distance between the two is lost; stylization become style” (Bakhtin 198). Here, the double-voicedness that signals the stylization of style (its susceptibility to change) is once more reduced to the single-voicedness of style as indicating a type rather than the evaluation of type.
Significantly, the discourse surrounding television style and aesthetics seems to make a similar contention about authorial and intrinsic style. Jeremy G. Butler, in his Television Style, contends that “[a]uteurism, shot through with romantic notions of the artist, views style as a manifestation of the individual's unique ‘vision’” (2). That is, authorists cannot conceive of style without an author, who, in film, is generally the director. Television, however, very seldom has a single director. Butler cites this as one of the reasons why the concept of style has been, so far, rarely associated with television. To fill this gap, he writes a comprehensive television stylistics book, which distinguishes four strains of stylistics: descriptive, analytic, evaluative and historical (J.G. Butler 3). Descriptive stylistics is, effectively,
just the first step for analysis or the ability to describe style through semiotics (J.G. Butler 4). That is, putting into words the style that could otherwise be only visually observed. Both analytic and evaluative stylistics are based first on the descriptive strain, with the analytic referring to interpretation and the descriptive being about aesthetics (J.G. Butler 11; 16). Therefore, after having put into words the visual elements those are then interpreted and analyzed as well as assessed based on principles of art and beauty. Finally, historical stylistics, as the word suggests, places “individual programs into larger contexts of television-style history” (J.G. Butler 19). A combination of these approaches, particularly the first three, will be used throughout this thesis to analyze The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Butler also defines what style can do in and for television. According to him and other television styliticians he mentions, style can denote, express, symbolize, decorate, persuade, hail or interpellate, differentiate and signify liveness (J.G. Butler 11). Film style’s denotative function controls “the description of settings and characters, the account given of their motives, the presentation of dialogue and movement” (Bordwell qtd. in J.G. Butler 12). Film and television’s expressive function is to both stylistically portray and stir (viewers’) emotions, while their symbolic attribute is given by their ability to “yield more abstract, conceptual meanings” (J.G. Butler 12; Bordwell qtd. in J.G. Butler 12). The final property of film and television style is decoration, a more aesthetic characteristic described as “style for style’s sake” and inspired by Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival in that it “is essentially liberating, acting as an empowering language for the subordinate” (J.G. Butler 13; Fiske qtd. in J.G. Butler 13).
The persuasive power of television mainly comes from commercials, in which a stylistic approach serves a propagandistic purpose. Proper to television is the capacity to hail or interpellate, and style participates in “this interpellation as the device through which hailing was accomplished, but it also hailed viewers in a narrower sense - calling to them to watch the television now… and entreating them not to interrupt the now by changing to… other channels… Once a viewer has been hailed, been enticed to view a
particular program, style is then used to help differentiate brand identities” (J.G. Butler 14). Finally, Butler mentions several scholars who have posited that viewers perceive TV as live and that, if we accept this contention, “we must look to television style for the signifiers of that liveness,” which are not simple announcements of live broadcasting but rather “stylistic elements such as haphazard framing and ‘bad’ audio recording” (15). It is important to note at this point that Butler advocates “for an understanding of style as any patterning of sound-image technique that serves a function within the television text” (15). This signals that his approach and analysis, while employing a broad definition of style, remain quite technical and mostly take into account the ‘making of’ and ‘receiving of’ television, or what happens outside of the world depicted within the television broadcast. In contrast, this thesis aims to look at style in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel through a diegetic approach.
John Thornton Caldwell, author of Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and
Authority in American Television, stresses the importance of style when
discussing television. In his introduction, he writes that “style, long seen as a mere signifier and vessel for content, issues, and ideas, has now itself become one of television's most privileged and showcased signifieds” (5). Thus, studies on televisual style seem to focus mostly on what happens ‘behind the scenes,’ on style in the making (and reception) of television rather than style on the visual and narrative level of specific television programs. This thesis, will focus on this (apparently no longer fashionable) aspect: style in a televisual narrative. As Jacobs and Peacock write on the first page of their book Television Aesthetics and Style: “A ... worrying and widespread trend in TV Studies is the lack of attention to style. As the discipline shifts away from the broad overviews often offered in Media and Cultural Studies, a promising focus on the particular has emerged” (1). It is the aim of this thesis to focus on style as a generalized particular, as individual and collective, entrenched and flexible. By looking at the television series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel I will explore how style is related to questions of (gender) identity formation and transformation, in particular in
times of crisis and change. The series, which premiered end of November 2017 on Amazon Prime and won two Golden Globes Awards for Best Television Series and Best Actress in the comedy category, is set in the 1950s and revolves around the character of Miriam “Midge” Maisel. The show follows the fashion-aware protagonist as she goes through an unexpected separation from her husband and consequently discovers her talent for stand-up comedy. Because of the particular attention given to how the protagonist dresses or styles herself, this television series is particularly suitable to investigate the role of style in relation to identity (trans)formation.
By reading the narrative and visual elements of this particular television series through the concept of style I will attempt to understand what function style performs in TV series, particularly in relation to identity development, and how what I call style narratives are expressed through dress, accessories and color. The first chapter focuses on Midge’s dress style and how, in the first episode of the series, it initially signifies her belonging to a particular type, but is thrown into crisis – together with her identity - as her husband unexpectedly leaves her. Chapter two revolves around some important episodes in the middle part of the series, which show Midge’s identity gradually changing from that of a normative 1950s housewife. Although she continues to wear very similar clothes, her daring use of accessories signals that her identity is slowly shifting to a new type. Finally, chapter three, while mainly focusing on the last episode of the series, will also provide an overview of Midge’s transformation through an analysis of the colors she sports throughout the series, which clearly mark an evolution and change in how she relates to prevailing gender norms. The conclusion will summarize the findings and elaborate on the link between the use of style in The
chapter I | dress
“I had everything I'd always wanted, and now it's all falling apart.” - Miriam “Midge” Maisel
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - Season 1, Episode 1
Set in late 1950s New York City, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel tells the story of Miriam “Midge” Maisel, a cheerful, witty, Jewish woman who had her life entirely figured out by the age of 13: she would study Russian literature in college, get married, have children and throw the best Jewish holiday dinner parties in town. Her dream life fulfilled, Midge, in her mid-twenties, leads a happy life with her husband Joel and two children in Manhattan’s posh Upper West Side. With her charming ways, she supports her husband’s passion for stand-up comedy, until one night, after a particularly unsuccessful performance at the Gaslight comedy club, and the night before a big Yom Kippur breakfast party that Midge had been trying to make happen for four years, Joel announces that he does not like his life anymore and leaves his wife for his secretary.
Midge is the type of 1950s American housewife who, after wishing her husband goodnight and making sure he has fallen asleep, gets up again to put in hair rolls, remove her make-up and fake eyelashes, and put on night cream, only to wake up before the alarm goes off in the morning to remove the hair rolls and comb her hair, wash off the face cream, apply make-up and return to bed to fake sleep until her husband, none the wiser, gets up. She is the type of woman who, in sheer black tights and a black bodysuit, takes the measuring tape and measures herself: her ankles, calves, thighs, hips, waist and bust. She has her friend Imogene write down her inches, and matter-of-factly admits that she has been measuring her body every day for ten years. If, as Judith Butler has famously argued, gender is “an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized
repetition of acts,” then Midge’s repetition of her night and morning
performance of her gender identity (Gender Trouble 179, italics in original). She is performing her gender in a way that aspires to replicate the ‘perfect’ image of the wife and mother. An image, that is, of a woman fitting in with her own, her mother’s and society’s expectations of what a ‘perfect’ housewife looks like. This carefully performed outward appearance initially seems to be all she is. Her quirky personality and sunny disposition go unnoticed by most around her, her jokes often fall flat or are brushed over, yet her body is recognized as that of a proper housewife. The fact that it takes much of her attention and time to maintain this proportional and perfect-looking body signals that it – and the ideal-image it embodies – is not natural, but a partly conscious and partly unconscious stylization following a particular generalizable model.
The first episode of the series, spanning several days, shows Midge wearing a different dress each day. She runs errands and cooks in a dark magenta knee-length sheath dress, picks up her children from her parents’ house in a lavender halter dress, and feeds (and measures the forehead of) her baby girl in an Aegean blue peter pan collared dress. In contrast, when she visits the comedy club to watch her husband perform there, she wears the same outfit over and over again, and pants no less! In fact, when at the Gaslight,2 she is always seen wearing black Capri pants, a black blouse and a camel coat. This shows a certain style sensitivity on her part, an understanding of what is the appropriate attire for a particular situation. Though strict with her body, Midge is flexible with her style and able to conform to the unwritten rules of underground fashion. That is, until she storms into the club one night wearing a pale blue, lace-trimmed nightgown and a pink overcoat, soaking wet from the pouring rain.
Up until that moment, each of her outfits had seemed carefully picked out and put together in an effort to convey a specific message about who she was as a woman, a wife, a mother and a Jew – all aspects of her identity combined and styled. The message was one of being wealthy, having taste 2 The Gaslight Café is a real New York bar active in the 1950s and 1960s, home to poets and musicians; it is where Bob Dylan, among others, made his debut (Van Laarhoven).
and being properly feminine. Her style embodies these aspects because she has been raised to believe that this is how a woman of a certain class and background should present herself. As Butler puts it, “one can practice styles, but the styles that become available to you are not entirely a matter of choice” (Gender Trouble xviii). Midge was never completely free to follow whatever style she wanted but had a limited array of possibilities dictated by her upbringing, her social class, her religion, her sex and her personality. Her quasi-obsessive attention to detail that characterizes her style borders on a performance. Interestingly, though, for Butler gender performativity is not an act of feigning, in that “performance as bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’” (Bodies that
Matter 234). That is, for Butler, gender performativity is a constant and
unconscious process. However, Midge’s daily efforts in styling and caring for her body can hardly be seen as fully unconscious; they more closely resemble the act of a habitual performance. Habit in fashion, deriving from Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, “enables the reproduction of class (and gender) through the active embodiment of individuals who are structured by it, as opposed to the passive inscription of power relations onto the body” (Entwistle 50, italics in original). That is, habit is active and structured; it is, in some ways, malleable and adaptable; it is “the product of explicit training, imitation, and absorption” (Craik 137). For Midge, going from one phase in her life to another, from daughter, to college student, to wife, to mother has been structured and studied; habits were installed and a routine followed. Until the nightgown incident, that is, which signifies Midge’s undoing and consequent reconstruction or, in Bakhtin’s terms, renewed stylization.
The tipping point, the reason for her undoing, is her husband leaving her. Joel has an office job, a good one apparently, given that he is said to be the vice-president of some department, and a passion for stand-up comedy. He wishes to be a comedian, to make a career out of stand-up. To get there, he performs at the Gaslight club wearing a black turtleneck sweater. To be
allowed to perform there, he has Midge bribe the owner with briskets and other Jewish home-cooked delicacies. Moreover, unbeknownst to Midge, he steals and performs the act of another comedian. In the meantime, she takes notes, writes original jokes and keeps count of the laughs received by Joel’s act in a small red leather-bound quilted notebook. Upon discovering the intellectual theft, Midge confronts her husband and tries to stir him in a more creative direction, suggesting he writes or improvises an original opening based on himself and his life. The occasion presents itself when, in the presence of a couple of friends, Imogene and her husband, who came for the sole purpose of supporting and enjoying Joel’s comedy, he decides to awkwardly joke about the holes in the sweater he is wearing, and flops. Obviously devoid of any creative talent for stand-up, Joel is frustrated and, once home, he packs a bag (incidentally, Midge’s suitcase) and leaves. He laments the lack of happiness in his life, the lack of understanding from his wife, who, in his view, thought comedy was just for fun and, finally, admits he has been having an affair with his secretary.
As Joel leaves the house, Midge, already in her nightgown, runs to her parents, who live in the same building, looking for comforting words and advice. They are revealed to be less than supportive though; as her mother cries, her father tells her Joel was not a good choice of husband and proceeds to tell her to wear a nice dress and do her best to get him back, completely ignoring the way Midge feels about her husband’s betrayal. Desperate, she grabs a bottle of wine from the already set table for the Yom Kippur breakfast, which is to take place the following day, starts drinking and goes out in the pouring rain, still wearing her nightgown and an overcoat, the bottle in her hand. The way Midge is dressed plays an important role in this scene, highlighting the issues at stake in the narrative. As she leaves the house, Midge is wearing a long pale blue nightgown with white lacey trims on the deep V-neck décolletage, a darker blue bow cinching her right under the chest, empire style, and a long pink overcoat, with her only accessory being the bottle of red wine in her right hand. A subway ride later, Midge stumbles into the Gaslight bar.
She only puts down the wine bottle once it is empty, inside the bar, thus getting rid of her only accessory. When the stage clears and the next stand-up act scheduled to perform fails to show, Midge curiously approaches and eventually climbs onto the stage. Wondering to herself, out loud, “So this is it, huh? This is the dream, standing up here on this filthy, sticky stage all alone. Couldn't have that, you didn't want me. Was that it, Joel?” Mistaking her for a stand-up comedian, a woman sitting close to the stage asks who Joel is and someone else sitting further away complains that he cannot hear her. At which point Midge approaches the microphone and starts telling everyone about her husband, his 21-year-old assistant-turned-lover, and her own feelings about the whole situation; she spices up her tirade-turned-act with comments about the audience, with which she interacts and which she makes fun of, with wit and a true comedic attitude exuding from her. As she rants, she also proceeds to remove layers of clothing: first, she takes off her coat and eventually she slips down, though not completely removes, her nightgown. The undressing of the body accompanies the unloading of her troubles. As she gains confidence on stage and, most importantly, as she wonders, motioning at her body, “who wouldn't want to come home to this every night?” she removes her clothes. Her husband leaving her has, understandably, made her feel insecure and she is looking for admiration and appreciation from the crowd at the bar. From the sparse audience at the Gaslight, Midge is seeking approval of her desirability as a woman and sex object. Her identity shaken, her habitual performance as woman and wife deemed unsatisfactory by the person she chose as her life partner, despite her efforts to keep her inches in check, her hair combed, her face made up and her clothes always appropriately feminine. Midge now finds herself in a crisis. A crisis not only due to the societal and religious judgment cast upon divorcées, seen as unable to keep their husbands, but also, and most importantly, a crisis of identity. With her ‘good wife’ persona dismantled, Midge no longer abides by the socially imposed rules of womanly conduct and style.
The absence of style, or rather the absence of Midge’s particular and careful take on style, in the nightgown scene is precisely what reinforces the concept of style as revealing something about identity. In this instance, its absence signifies a crisis of identity. In fact, the wearing of the nightgown, supposed to be worn only in the private realm of the home, outside the house and in the comedy club, and the fact that she eventually (almost) pulls it down, is the clearest marker in the scene that Midge is going through a crisis that will see her cross several borders, from married to single, from ‘private’ to ‘public’ (with the private, symbolized by the nightgown, spilling over into the public), and from wife to potential lover. The nightgown also points to a new take on Midge’s attitude to issues of femininity, sexuality and desire. Until now, she has behaved in a traditional and demure way, but now she flashes her breasts to the audience during her act. Significantly, this is an act that, in the world of the series, is not supposed to be thought of as a scripted performance but as the improvised drunken venting of an upset woman who has just been dumped for a younger and less intelligent secretary. A performance within a performance, then, improvised, originated casually and
without intentionality, lacking in style, by a Midge who is almost literally beside herself. What is being performed is not the self she had been until that moment and not yet the self she will create by adopting a new style. The pivotal moment in this young woman’s life is thus quite neatly represented by the messy style of her clothes and improvised comedic act.
Midge’s act comes to an abrupt end when, after flashing her bare breasts, the police storms in and takes her away, amid protests from the audience (“Come back next week”) and from the patron of the bar, Susie, who argues with the police and tells them: “This is not what you think. She's a housewife. She doesn't know the rules.” Midge does not, in fact, know the rules, at least not the rules of performing a stand-up comedy act in a bar in New York City’s sleazy Village neighborhood. Before this night, she knew that, as an audience member in the bar, wearing pants and sober hues like black and camel would be preferable to wearing the pastel colored full-skirted dresses she wore the rest of the time. By showing up in a baby blue negligée instead, she sexualizes and exposes herself in her quest to feel accepted and desired again. Worthy of note is that, throughout her onstage outburst, she does not refer to her attire. She mentions her face being puffy from crying and her belly being swollen from the wine she has drunk, but her inappropriate clothing is never referred to, neither by herself nor by anybody else. An earlier scene wordlessly depicts the Village neighborhood and its inhabitants as artistic, eclectic and carefree. It is possible, then, that to everybody else frequenting the club, her pale blue nightdress appears as nothing more than exuberant self-expression. She herself only comments on her body in her attempt to draw attention and appreciation; desiring to belong to the ‘sexy woman’ image she presumes her husband has been seduced by, she overdoes it with a flash of naked breasts, leading to her arrest and showing that she has not yet styled (in the sense of habituated) herself to fully belong at the Gaslight.
Susie, however, is in the know; she is not a housewife and she knows the rules of the bar because she is at home in it. She wears gray heavy-duty slacks, leather suspenders, a striped crewneck t-shirt, a fiddler cap and keys
on a long chain hanging around her neck. Her overall style and vibe is boyish, so much so that in an earlier scene Joel refers to her as a ‘he,’ a case of misgendering repeated, presumably for laughs, at other points throughout the series. Susie is pretty much the polar opposite of Midge in terms of style. This is not to say that to belong in a pub in the Village one needs to necessarily be butch, but that presenting a highly sexualized feminine body is hardly conducive to finding a place in the edgy nightlife comedy environment. Susie is able to function in the Gaslight space and the late-night clubs environment precisely because she does not style herself as sexy. The first, awkward and unplanned, attempt of Midge to belong in the context of the club is thus merely that, a first, failed attempt, a singular performance rather than a sustained performative. Nevertheless, it is a step towards a new life. To truly live this new life, Midge will have to learn a whole new language, adopt new habits and create a new style in order to reconstruct herself and fashion a new identity. Midge is still a mother, a Jew and a woman, but it is suggested in the nightgown scene that she is on her way to being something else as well.
The first episode of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel closes on Midge toying with the idea of actually attempting a stand-up comedy career. When Susie bails her out of jail after the nightgown/breast-baring incident, she tells Midge she has talent and should consider performing at other, bigger venues. Midge initially brushes her off with an “I am a mother” retort, as if mothers could never be comedians. She then rushes off when she remembers, after having a few peanuts, that it is the night before Yom Kippur and she should be fasting before breaking fast at the big, fancy event with the rabbi she has been planning for four years. Her booze-induced stunt already appears a faint memory in the face of who she believes she should be: a mother and a Jewish homemaker. However, while hailing a taxi and rummaging through her pockets for cab money she finds, instead of dollar bills, her red notebook and reads one of the original jokes she had thought of for Joel’s opening. At that point, she goes back to the Gaslight, where a man is performing the act Joel stole. Later, she is seen at a gathering of intellectuals, all chatting and
reading books, and finally she goes to find Susie and asks to meet her the next day to discuss the possibility of doing stand-up. As she leaves Susie’s place, she is seen dancing and laughing in the street, writing in her red notebook and laughing on the subway, excited and happy about the new prospects ahead.
The following morning, wearing a bright green taffeta short-sleeved dress, she bails Lenny Bruce,3 whom she met in the police car when she was taken away from the Gaslight, out of jail. The green dress is similar in shape to those she was wearing prior to the nightgown incident, yet the fabric is shinier and the color much brighter, much less muted and subdued than her previous garments. This signals that her style is changing, but not completely. Midge takes the opportunity of a moment alone with the famous comedian to ask him, with regard to his craft, “Do you love it?” to which he gives a long rambling response: “If there was anything else in the entire world that I could possibly do to earn a living, I would… It's a terrible, terrible job. It should not exist, like cancer and God.” “But do you love it?” insists Midge, to which Bruce, as he is leaving, in guise of an answer, turns around, opens his arms and raises his shoulders, in an overemphatic ‘I do not know’ gesture, and then he smiles, a big, mischievous smile. “Yeah, he loves it,” she mutters to herself.
More than the applauses and laughs received during her improvised performance at the Gaslight; more than the experience of being arrested; more than her husband cheating, both on the integrity of stand-up comedy by performing stolen acts and on her by leaving with his ‘half-wit’ secretary; more than Susie, an apparent expert on the nightclub scene, telling her she has raw talent; more than everything else that has happened so far, it is Lenny Bruce’s naughty smile in answer to the question of whether he loved his job that really changes something for Midge. After working all her life towards defined goals, a degree, a husband, children, a home, fancy Jewish parties with the rabbi in attendance, she had finally arrived. She had fulfilled all her lifelong dreams, only to have them crushed by one of the neatly laid down pieces of her dream-life puzzle suddenly bailing on her, going missing. After her moment of crisis, she picks herself back up and decides she only wants one thing from life now, to do things she loves, to be happy. Could comedy make her happy? Lenny Bruce seems to think so.
And so, she embarks on this new adventure, a new project to pick herself back up, reconstructing her identity by reinventing her style. Already in the first episode of the series, style is revealed to be flexible enough for
her to play with it, yet at the same time it retains a collective, habitual aspect that she cannot get away from. Thus, in the case of the green dress, the color and fabric represent a new direction yet the shape remains similar to her pre-crisis style. As Bakhtin argues, “stylization stylizes another’s style in the direction of that style’s own particular tasks” (193). In Midge’s case, her aim is to reinvent herself, to restyle her womanhood in alignment with her new life and goals, but she can only do so on the basis of styles – the one she is working away from, that of the ‘perfect’ 1950s housewife, and the one she is seeking to adopt, that of the successful comedian – that impose their own tasks, not in total freedom: she cannot simply make up her own style. Her established style or authorial voice, as Bakhtin would say, remains hers, as the shape of the dress suggests, yet she has adopted, with regards to herself, as her own author, a new stylization, a shiny fabric in a more daring color borrowed from the brave and hopeful, a bright green well suited to visually imply a new beginning that she will expand upon in the next episodes, as the next chapter, focusing on stylization through accessorizing, will show.
chapter II | accessories
“Because if women don't realize what's going on in the world, they won't step in and fix it. …Because they will fix it. And accessorize it!” - Miriam “Midge” Maisel
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - Season 1, Episode 4
“Everything with Midge starts with an accessory” says Rose, Midge’s mother, in episode two when recounting how Midge had wanted to learn how to drive just because she had found a pair of pink driving gloves to her liking. Rose is talking to her fortune-teller friend, unloading her worries about her daughter’s recent separation, in the hopes of having good fortunes read in her tea leaves. She is very upset about her daughter’s split-up and would love nothing more than for Midge to return to normalcy, which, for Rose, would be a married couple living together with their children, with the man working and earning and the woman taking care of the house and spending.
To understand this perspective, it is relevant to consider the fact that the series is set in America in the nineteen fifties. Reading Betty Friedan’s famous account of gender relations of the time in Feminine Mystique (1973), it is clear that the dominant narrative presented the ideal woman as a housewife, caring for her husband and children, and doing little else. Although scholars such as Meyerowitz have countered the image of the 1950s woman as homebound by analyzing magazines’ disparate portrayals of women outside the home (Meyerowitz, 1460), the idea of women as subordinate to men and expected to express their femininity through marriage and domesticity was nonetheless prevalent. In line with this idea, I want to argue in this chapter that when Midge separates from her husband, she moves from being an accessory for her husband, for whom accessorizing is just an element of that being an accessory, to someone who is her own person and who reframes accessorizing in a political, feminist way. That is, this chapter will look at the role of accessories, mainly taken literally as fashion add-ons used to create or complete a look, but also considered in a
subtler figurative way as describing the ornamental role assigned to women in 1950s, in (trans)forming gender identity.
At the beginning of the second episode, Midge seems to want to forget about ever toying with the idea of becoming a comedian. The episode picks up from where the first one left off, with Midge asking Lenny Bruce if he loves stand-up comedy. She is still in her green dress and wearing gloves. Her husband has only just left her, there is still a chance he will come back, and she still has her children and her fancy apartment. As a result, she feels she might be able to keep up appearances and get things back to normal before word of her separation gets out. That is, until she learns that her apartment is not actually hers but her father-in-law’s and he has decided to take it back. He announces this over dinner, in the presence of Midge, her parents, Joel and his mother. After his demands that Midge and Joel get back together are met less than enthusiastically, he turns to Abraham, Midge’s father, and asks him:
What are you gonna do about it, Abe, hmm? Going to let Miriam here just suddenly drift along without a husband to protect her? She's gonna do what with her life? Sit around all day long eating bon-bons, watching Queen for A Day. Is that what you want for her?
From this man’s patriarchal perspective, a woman without a husband is destined for nothing more than aimless drifting, eating candy and watching TV shows. His tone is derogatory and indicates that this is not the sort of life a woman should aspire to. Significantly, although it was her husband who left her, it is Midge’s lifestyle that is being questioned, her future as a woman without a man taking care of her. Her own father subsequently takes her aside to ask her why she has not tried to get her husband back yet by putting on makeup and a nice dress, and then he hands her some money. He seems to think that, although Midge is a grown woman and a mother, her being left without a husband means that she will now need another man to provide for her; by giving her money he is taking on this role. The dinner comes to a
sudden end when Midge, upset and embarrassed by the way her family and in-laws are pitying and looking down on her, storms off.
She goes to the Gaslight and gets on stage, opening with a Russian sentence that translates to “I live in the large house on the hill.” The house – which, in Midge’s case is a posh apartment – is the ultimate accessory of the well-to-do woman, certifying her status as a successful wife and mother, and is also that of which the woman is, to some extent, herself an accessory, meant to complement the house by her appearance. The large apartment was where Midge would host parties and Yom Kippur breakfasts and dinners, staged by her to convey a message of wealth and well-being. In line with both Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption and fashion’s trickle-down theory4, the way Midge has been living represents the lifestyle of the wealthy elite eager to show off their status as well as to reassure themselves of their social position (Craik 34; Trigg 104). As Andrew Trigg, in his overview article about conspicuous consumption, puts it: “The aesthetic taste of individuals with high cultural capital is used to secure positions of status in the social hierarchy through exercising a mark of distinction” (105). With her ultimate accessory, the apartment, now gone, together with her own role as an accessory to her husband, yet another aspect of her former life shatters and Midge finds her way back to comedy. Once again, she uses the stage to vent about her situation, confiding in a group of strangers. In this second performance at the Gaslight, she wonders why she never thought of asking her husband about the situation she would find herself in if he were to leave, suggesting that the only reason she did not know is because she did not ask. Thus, inadvertently yet sarcastically, she takes the blame for a situation she did not anticipate and over which she had no control.
Midge tellingly blames her not knowing that the apartment she was living in was not hers on accessories. She says: “It's the bras, right? It's the bras. And the girdles and the corsets, all designed to cut off the circulation to your brain, so you walk around on the verge of passing out, and you look at 4 The trickle-down theory is “a vertical model of consumption, where the system of production determines the practices of consumption” (Craik 34, italics in original).
your husband, and he tells you things, and you just believe them.” According to Midge, women are quite literally subordinated not only to their husbands but to their accessories as well. She suggests that, for women, having an appealing body is more important than being comfortable, that it is better to have a tiny corseted waist than to get blood to the brain and be able to think. On the other hand, she also suggests that believing blindly in what men say is not a result of women's inferior intellect but of the fact that they simply cannot pay attention to what men say given that the norms about how they should look literally make this impossible.
This idea comes back when, in episode four, Midge is having a conversation with her father over dinner. As they discuss possible presidential candidates, Abe wonders how she could possibly know so much about politics since the only thing of interest to her in newspapers are the shoe ads. What comes to the fore here is what men think is of interest to women, not what women are actually interested in. At the time, the image of women created by magazines was that of a woman who is “young and frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine; passive; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home,” leading one to wonder, “where is the world of thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit?” (Friedan 30). The fact that Midge knows about politics shows that she is not only interested in the shoe ads but that, after her husband left her, she has broken out of the feminine mystique surrounding the housewife to take an interest in the world at large.
Understanding how women were portrayed and addressed in the American media at the time is important to grasp the circumstances shaping Midge’s persona, both before and after her separation. In this scene, we discover that she is an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, while on other occasions we learn that she consumes a lot of television and radio as well. There exist conflicting studies of the portrayal of women in advertisements in the 1950s. A study by Courtney and Lockeretz from the early 1970s briefly outlines general trends with regard to the roles taken on by women in magazine advertisements. They outline a number of issues and
summarize them into generic stereotypes. Ads in general magazines such as
Life, Time and The New Yorker show women mostly as non-working, rarely
venturing out of the house, and use them most prominently for the marketing of less expensive items (Courtney and Lockeretz 93). In fact, the product categories most often marketed with pictures of women to women are cleaning products, home appliances, beauty products and clothing. According to this study, the stereotypical messages conveyed by the ads mimic American society’s normative views on the role of women in society (Courtney and Lockeretz 94). Some of those views were that “a woman’s place is in the home” and that “women are dependent and need men’s protection” (Courtney and Lockeretz 95). Catalano, in a more recent article, has endeavored to review Courtney and Lockeretz’s findings and has come to a contrasting conclusion. According to her, it is not true that “women do not make important decisions or do important things” as mentioned by Courtney and Lockeretz; rather, she argues that “on a larger scale, women had the awesome power and responsibility to shape the next generation of Americans and greatly influence the future of American society. To describe this task as anything but 'important' would be a gross understatement" (Catalano 46-47). The contrast between these views is ideological. On the one hand, Courtney and Lockeretz consider being restricted to the house and represented as nothing more than an object to publicize inexpensive items as something not only denigrating for women but also untrue given the multiplicity of roles women played at the time and the participation of a third of American women in the workforce (93). On the other hand, Catalano argues that advertising of the 1950s “did not harm or denigrate women; rather, it portrayed reality,” which, for her, is that most women at the time were focused on homemaking and that advertisers were simply trying to appeal to that majority. Catalano’s conclusion is problematic, because while this may have been true of women of a certain class and race (white, middle- and upper-class women), it certainly did not apply to lower-class and women of color. Moreover, advertisements do not just convey reality, but are also aspirational. By portraying women mainly as homemakers in advertisements,
this became a normative image as well, making women who were not homemakers feel inadequate. The television series, in fact, shows Midge struggling with precisely this idea that to be a housewife is preferable to having to go out and work.
Though contrasting, both studies make valid points, and this duality between outrage at women’s restricted portrayal as homebound and the consideration that this was, in part, an historical reality is mirrored in the development of Midge’s views on the issue. In the series, she goes from acknowledging that women are indeed interested in the marketing and purchasing of accessories to realizing that those interests are keeping women from taking a more active role within society. Midge thus brings together the two divergent arguments exemplifying the struggle between conforming to and resisting existing gender norms; significantly, the main way in which she does this is through her changing style. In fact, her style, while evolving, still resembles her more conformist self. Through the straddling of the different elements that comprise her style, she is growing into a new type of woman without having to leave behind the one she had been so far.
Meanwhile, Joel has realized his mistake and tries to rekindle the relationship, but Midge refuses and moves back to her parents’ house instead. This move seems fairly uncharacteristic not only for the times but also for her, as the daughter of religious and conservative parents who have so often insisted she should do everything in her power to get her husband back, even though they themselves have admitted that he is unsuitable for her. It should be noted, though, that even if it is probably not ideal for her parents to have their daughter move back home, it is probably preferable to her living on her own with the children, which would be even more counter-normative for the times. Midge, however, has come to terms with the idea of rebuilding her life as a single mother and is ready to say goodbye to her previous life as a housewife.
In The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, Friedan memorably compares married life for middle-class American women in the 1950s to a
comfortable concentration camp. She writes: “The comfortable concentration camp that American women have walked into, or have been talked into by others, is just such a reality, a frame of reference that denies woman's adult human identity” (296). Starting from what she calls “the problem that has no name,” Friedan posits that as long as a woman is bound solely to the house and to her housewifely duties, she will be incapable of developing her own identity and living a fulfilling life. Although research conducted at the time shows that men were the main initiators of divorce,5 following Friedan's line of thought it can be said that Midge's husband leaving her and her finding herself in need of finding ways to subsist is actually a salvation and a solution to the unnamed problem afflicting so many 1950s middle-class American housewives. Midge’s reluctance to rekindle her relationship with her husband can be interpreted as an instinct of self-preservation kicking in, while her post-crisis journey may be seen as leading to the discovery of her identity as an adult woman.
Later, in episode four, as she is strolling through Washington Square Park with her son, Midge accidentally finds herself amid a demonstration led by Jane Jacobs6; the women in attendance are protesting against the construction of a road that would destroy the park. After her brief speech, Jacobs invites the protesters to take the stage and calls on Midge to take the microphone. Initially unaware of the reason behind the protest, Midge admits that she, at first, wondered whether all those women were there for a “2 for 1 pantyhose” sale. It is telling that the first reason that comes to her mind to justify finding a crowd of women in the street is the sale of a fashion accessory. This idea, though certainly in line with normative gender roles of the 1950s, where women of a certain class are assumed to be interested in shopping only, sounds quite odd coming from Midge. Both her pre-crisis and post-crisis personas verge on the anti-conformist, with her quick wit and loose tongue giving the impression that, even before her husband leaves her, 5 “Divorce, in America, according to the sociologists, is in almost every instance sought by the husband” (Friedan 261; and William J. Goode, After Divorce. Glencoe, Ill., 1956).
6 Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was a journalist, author and activist, particularly involved in economics, sociology and urban studies. She was opposed to the overhaul of the Greenwich Village neighborhood in New York City.
she is only marginally in line with the commonly accepted gender roles of the time. Yet the statement she makes at the protest shows that even someone like her has internalized stereotypical ideas about women and their interests. This duality is also expressed in her style: as her clothes get brighter and bolder after the separation, they still have the same figure-flattering shapes she has always worn. What this signals is that although her identity and role in society are changing, she has not completely left behind the notion that a woman should care for her appearance before anything else. At the same time, her growing interest in reading newspapers and her involvement in the women’s gathering signal that she is on the verge of a political awakening.
At the gathering, Midge proceeds to recount to the protesting women the conversation she had with her father at the dinner table, in which he asserted that women’s interest in newspapers is limited to the advertisements. She posits that shoe ads in newspapers are designed to distract women from real issues, because if only women knew about what was going on in the world they would “step in and fix it. Because they will fix it, and accessorize it.” In this statement, Midge expresses confidence in the ability of women to fix whatever needs fixing, while also adding an additional
flourish, in the form of accessories. It is important that the fixing precedes the accessorizing, with accessorizing being the finishing touch, but not the only touch. While it may look as though housewives are solely busy dressing up and accessorizing themselves and their houses, they are actually working hard to enable the lives of their husbands and children, fixing things for them, and doing it with flair. Raising (men’s) awareness of this unseen labor – described by Silvia Federici as “endless cleaning, always being emotionally available, fucking at command for fear of losing our jobs” (21) – is the first step to gaining more power as women, as Midge is starting to understand in this scene.
From this point on, Midge starts to affirm herself differently and more assertively, as is highlighted when Susie takes Midge out to various comedy clubs to do research on stand-up and to observe the way other (male) comedians structure their acts. After one such act, the comedian who had just finished performing approaches Midge as she is frantically writing down notes and thoughts in her red notebook and he accuses her of trying to steal his act for other comedians. As he is questioning her, he mentions several names of possible mandataries, all male, and insists she is working for one of them. Initially apologetic, Midge becomes infuriated at the fact that he does not even consider the possibility that she could be stealing the act for herself. As the conversation becomes heated, Midge blurts out: “I can do it better, and in heels!” Once again, she reiterates the idea that women are not only capable of doing a man’s job as effectively, but of doing so with style.
Although closely related to the general meaning of style presented in the introduction, the expression ‘with style’ has a slightly different connotation more closely akin to ‘stylish’ and ‘stylishness.’ The Oxford
English Dictionary gives two definitions of stylish: one is the straightforward
“fashionably elegant and sophisticated,” while the other, more apt in this context, is “neat, confident, and skillful.” Doing something with style or in a stylish way, then, does not only refer to doing it in a fashionable way, but also in a confident and, most importantly, skillful way. That is, women’s ability to fix things with style does not just refer to form (elegant, sophisticated, neat),
but also to content (confident, skillful). As Federici also emphasizes, this reveals that style has a substance and, rather than being merely ornamental and of no consequences, is a form of work that produces something: “the attributes of femininity are in effect work functions,” work that benefits the men in women’s lives but also society at large (8).
After the night spent in various comedy clubs, Midge comes home to her parents at two in the morning to find them both awake and waiting for her. They scold her for being late, reinstate curfews and punish her by refusing to get her a television set for her bedroom. This illustrates how she has gone from being her husband’s wife to being her parents’ daughter, again. They have reverted to treating her the way they used to before she got married and actually became a woman; in their eyes, she is now once more a child. Effectively, she has gone from being an accessory to her husband to being one to her father, always subordinated to a man. Upset, she goes to her room and as she is smoking a cigarette on her bedroom’s balcony/fire escape, watching her neighbor’s TV through his open window, Midge mutters to herself that she ought to find a job. And off she goes the next day, to a department store that has an opening for an elevator operator, only to be immediately rebutted because they “usually hire men for that job” as their “lady shoppers prefer men in the position.” However, as she is leaving the store, she finds herself in the makeup department and stops to give advice to a very indecisive woman, closing the sale and thus securing a job for herself. Through her job, she becomes friendly with other make-up counter assistants and starts getting invited to parties. It is at those parties that Midge starts practicing her comedy act, holding conversations and easily becoming the center of attention. She starts viewing those gatherings as gigs and as the real benefit of her make-up counter job.
One afternoon, Midge is getting ready for one of the parties, frantically searching for a look and trying on different dresses. As she is observing herself in the mirror while wearing one of the dress options, her mother Rose compliments her look by saying it is “understated,” something that Midge seems to absolutely abhor, sending her in a frenzy for something that would
make her less understated. Her solution is to add some gloves to give the look some “zazz,” as she calls it. Though the word does not exist in formal English, the Urban Dictionary defines ‘zazz’ as “a quantifiable amount of something special. The higher the amount the more likely it is to be successful and awesome.” The accessory, then, is accorded paramount importance; in her mind, it can not only make or break the look, but, more importantly, it can signify her success or failure as an aspiring comedian. As most other comedians shown in the series are men, Midge seems to understand that making a name for herself as a woman in the field will necessitate something more than mere quick wit. She seems to think that a zazzy look to go with her comic persona will provide her with something special and will give her an advantage on the road to success.
Moreover, while at the beginning of the series Midge and her mother seem to have a lot in common in their ways of perceiving life and the role of women both in society and in the house – they, in fact, share similar taste in clothes, have the same nighttime routine, have similar approaches to child raising and house managing – they increasingly grow apart. On this point, Butler’s theory of gender performativity is illuminating. She posits that “gender is instituted through acts,” that the “constructed [gender] identity”
is “a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (“Performative Acts” 520). This explains why Midge has behaved the way she did for so long; she was essentially imitating her mother (and other examples of “proper” feminine behavior) in the performance of normative womanhood and motherhood. Yet Butler also theorizes that “if the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity” then a transformation might be possible through “a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style” (“Performative Acts” 520). Midge is no longer on the normative path she and her mother had envisaged for her as a woman; instead, she is forging a different path by adjusting her old, acquired style in a subtly subversive manner through the use of accessories. She is now separated, has a job, and goes out most nights to parties and comedy clubs. Her new style is a reflection of those behavioral changes and also what enables these changes. That is, it is not just that her style changes as a result of changes in her life, but also that these changes in her life are enabled by her changes in style. Although the dresses she is trying on are the same ones she has worn many times before, with the added ‘zazz’ they facilitate and signal her new life as a woman who no longer approximates the normative ideal.
Thus, in the television series, accessorizing, while often portrayed as a superficial act, is emblematic of Midge becoming a new person and performatively enacting a new, non-normative femininity. In this regard, it is relevant that the word ‘accessory’ means “an object or device that is not essential in itself but adds to the beauty, convenience, or effectiveness of something else” and that “to accessorize … means to add other things to it in order to make it look more attractive” (Merriam-Webster; Collins). Midge’s need to enhance her outfit when her mother tells her it looks understated
points to the idea of adding to the effectiveness of her new gender performance, as she moves away from repeating the gender norms modeled by her mother. She seems very aware that through relatively small
