ESC: English Studies in Canada

Newly published in paperback, Edith Snook's study of early modern English beauty culture offers a thoughtful, nuanced consideration of the ways in which gender, race, economic station, and politics can converge in self-presentation. Of course, there is a long literary history of men praising women's beauty, the men often describing their love objects in recognizably Petrarchan terms. Snook shifts her focus from men's depictions of beauty to those found in texts written by women, and she agrees with the assessment of other critics that "early modern women did not devise an alternative canon of male beauties to stand as objects of female desire"; [End Page 212] rather, women tended to produce texts that put women on display, even if they did so in slightly unique ways (2). Turning to women's written treatments of beauty, Snook notes that women often make use of established beauty traditions, but they also account for their own routines and recipes, making women's treatments of beauty culture both ideologically invested and practical. Even when these women debate or critique aspects of beauty, they never entirely reject the standards. Instead, beauty often becomes a mechanism to differentiate and create racialized, classed, or other hierarchies in the texts.

Snook's decision to separate her book into sections on cosmetics, clothing, and hair feels at once cheeky and entirely sensible: the sections immediately call to mind the vapid adolescent girl obsessed with her looks, but they also draw the reader into a sensitive examination of three enduring mechanisms for inculcation and what can be, at times, forms of agency. Chapter 1 takes up recipes for skin products aimed at improving the complexion and suggests that, when women were scolded for including mercury in their recipes, at least some of the resistance to their concoctions came down to pushback from male medical authorities who saw the use of mercury (and complexion creams generally) as intrusions into established discourses on health. Snook builds productively on feminist analyses by Kim F. Hall, Frances Dolan, and Patricia Phillippy, examining in more detail how women presented cosmetics in their own writing. Having consulted an impressive range of domestic manuscripts and early printed books, Snook contends that early modern Englishwomen did not simply capitulate to patriarchal constructions of beauty, nor did male writers simply critique their capitulation as vain; rather, women no doubt participated in the repetition of beauty standards, but they also used skin care as an opportunity to stake their claim in medical practice and writing about health, even as male authorities resisted these intrusions. Both areas of participation—beauty and health—operated within larger systems of power, of course, but Snook allows the reader to see power operating in a previously unconsidered manner.

Chapter 2 develops the connection between health and beauty, examining the English preference for fair skin and tying this standard to early modern understandings of race, economic station, and political power. Snook focuses on three mid- and later-seventeenth-century texts, including Salmacida Spolia (1639–1640) and The Queens Closet Opened (1655), which were both produced with at least some involvement by Queen Henrietta Maria. The masque Salmacida Spolia is discussed in light of the tradition's larger interests in whiteness and presentations of morality [End Page 213] and political virtue, and Snook also connects this production to larger understandings of fair skin, good health, and—given that the masque presents Henrietta Maria as an Amazon woman—women's political power once "made English" (46). This conflation of white skin, good health, and imperial power continues in The Queens Closet Opened, which presents a collection of recipes circulated at Henrietta Maria's court, furthering a sense of the queen as producer of domestic knowledge and authority on good health. The collection also aids in a sense of Royalist nostalgia, given its publication in the middle of the interregnum.

Snook continues to strengthen her presentation of beauty as situated in a nexus of power...