Abstract
This thesis seeks to examine how twenty-first-century British female-authored advice
on beauty either challenges or reinforces performative cultural beauty ideals founded
in their historiography. It also explores the ways in which such ideals morph over time:
altering radically, or emboldening preferences, thereby complicating our
understanding of how and why ideals are constructed through contemporary beauty
advice. By evaluating this topic through the lens of feminist and postfeminist theory,
this thesis engages with their debates in relation to notions of female objectification
and gender performativity. This approach also contributes new insights into the
importance of the relatively liminal area of beauty advice literature, both as
postfeminist topic and as an insight into discursive construction of self.
This study’s chosen focus on a handful of key primary contemporary advisory
texts enables their exemplification of central areas of female beauty advice and how
femininity can be constructed through advice on how to performatively self-beautify.
This thereby identifies the key elements of female appearance culturally deemed to
define acceptable aesthetic femininity. The comparative use of cited historical advice
clarifies both changes and consistencies in ideals of beauty and femininity since their
early modern print origins. Judith Butler and Naomi Wolf are this thesis’ key theorists
and their theoretical perspective on (respectively) performativity and beauty are
thereby applied to the contemporary literary texts studied. Whilst the primary study
focus is books, consideration is also given to the influence of women’s magazines in
this genre. The physically performative construction of female self through repeated
acts of beautification, advised by this literary genre, is the focus of exploration for this
thesis. It thereby demonstrates originality in comparative theoretical engagement with
female-authored beauty advice.