Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sadaka, George

Titel

Cosmetics as Tools of Resistance and Survival in Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Ist Teil von

• College literature, 2024-03, Vol.51 (2), p.266-285

Ort / Verlag

West Chester: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Quelle

Project MUSE: Universal journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Wearing makeup may not be merely a perfunctory beauty ritual in The Sheltering Sky and Nineteen Eighty-Four . This essay reads it as an act of defiance and emancipation that begins with the woman's face, using the very objects that putatively contribute to the objectification of women. In these novels—written by western white men in 1949—the restorative properties of makeup enunciate Kit and Julia's desire to restore their own existential image in a world that oppresses and dehumanizes women. Employing Lacan's gaze theory as its primary methodology, this study sheds light on how cosmetics are portrayed as front-line defenses of feminine identity—especially needed in hard times and dystopian contexts.