Book Review

Canada and the United States

Although the assertion on this book's cover that it represents the "first cultural history of the aesthetic movement in the United States" is vastly overstated, Mary Warner Blanchard does offer valuable new material on some of the highways and byways of aestheticism during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. Blanchard begins her narrative with Oscar Wilde's tour of America in 1882, when he told the natives they had "too many white walls" and tried to convince them of the charms of artifice; it ends shortly after the Spanish-American War of 1898, when, under the influence of Theodore Roosevelt and others, more traditional models of the soldier hero were coming back into vogue. Blanchard has some interesting things to say about Wilde, particularly the extent to which he was received as an embodiment of masculinity in the Western states. She also convincingly links his persona in America with the challenges to conventional definitions of masculinity during the 1880s, noting how "the urban homosexual world . . . was, in fact, commonly acknowledged in straight society" at this time (p. 13). The book's real claim to originality, however, lies in its discussion of what the author calls "female aesthetic visionaries" (p. xv): Candace Wheeler, who contested the masculine imperatives of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis in the interests of promoting American folk culture; Celia Thaxter, a painter and poet who became the focal point of an intellectual community on Appledore Island, off the coast of New Hampshire; Mary Louise McLaughlin, a fashioner of domestic objects who founded the Cincinatti Pottery Club; and Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, who wrote on medieval architecture and helped to establish the popularity of Catholic iconography in late-nineteenth-century America.

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