Topical Guide 318
Mark Dorset
Literature: Popular Fiction: Its Effect on Impressionable Readers
Media: Popular Magazines: Their Effect on Impressionable Readers
Bertha was nervous. She was dressed in something she had made herself, without benefit of a pattern, after studying an illustration in a magazine. It was meant to be daring, but it had been an act of desperation and it looked it. Over the course of the Babbingtonians’ visit, Bertha had come to feel like a lumpy bumpkin, and she blamed this feeling on Lorna. Bertha was envious, horribly envious. She envied Lorna her legs, her clothes, her baby, her life, her luck, her friends. She didn’t realize that the Babbingtonians weren’t a very sophisticated bunch. Garth seemed to her exactly what he wanted to be taken for: the Arrow collar man. He seemed to live in a world Bertha had inferred from magazines and novels, frightening, possibly evil, immeasurably pleasurable.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 10
Like a blossom at the peak of its perfumed perfection, the American Girl was ripe with heated passion. In a society still influenced by nineteenth-century ideas about women’s inability to control their passions, the American Girl was also at high risk of throwing herself at the first man she met, thereby posing a real danger to the values of American society. She had to be reined in by social conventions. … Warning the girl of the cavalier charmer, the [Ladies’ Home] Journal’s ‘Side Talk with Girls’ advised, ‘Listen to no word of love that is not followed by the suggestion of an early marriage.’ To be the American Girl Bride was the apex of her existence and highly coveted. As such, she was the embodiment of patriotic and patrimonial perfection. … In ‘The Greatest Period in a Girl’s Life’, a 1911 Journal illustration series by Harrison Fisher, the Girl’s life began with ‘The Proposal’ and concluded with her and her husband doting over ‘Their New Love’, a sweet infant. … The Journal’s advice columns and editorials assisted in delineating the American Girl’s expectations and duties to herself, her family and her country. … The Journal’s Girl was a mass cultural identity meant to reassure, and for some, to convince, that America was a superior and united (white) people. The power of magazines and their imagery is in their ability to be seen, shared and experienced by a racially diverse and physically dispersed people—perceivably uniting them into a cohesive and harmonious society. Every publication has a personality and there develops a relationship between the physical magazine and the reader, a shared intimacy when it is brought into the home. … We read magazines not to see what we have but what we can attain; the American Girl read to see not herself, but what she could be.
Cheyanne Cortez, “The American Girl: Ideas of Nationalism and Sexuality as Promoted in the Ladies’ Home Journal during the Early Twentieth Century,” in Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption, via the VDoc eBook Library
I couldn’t find good images of an issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal, so here are some representative pages of an issue of Woman’s Home Companion from October of 1922:
[more to come on Wednesday, August 17, 2022]
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