Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 28

Another way of analysing the flapper’s new body shape is by using Lacan’s psychoanalytical visual
approach to consider her silhouette. To do so his ideas in ‘The Mirror Stage’ (1949) can be adopted, though
not explicitly relating to a silhouette in its original developmental–psychology iteration, this theory can be
adapted and utilised to do so. The Mirror Stage refers to the moment an infant identifies oneself in the
mirror as both an instance of identification and alienation – as the mirror image is replaced with the idea
of the self and the ego emerges. Moreover, the mirror image constitutes the properties of an image, and
the “ego is based on an illusionary image of wholeness”. In addition to one’s own sense, however, is the
reliance on the other’s recognition, with the integrity of the self inextricably “mediated by the gaze of the
other”.
The theorist Jean-Louis Beaudry subsequently applied Lacan’s Mirror Stage to cinematography.
He believed that the “significance […] of film does not lie in the content of the story presented but rather
in the whole set up of cinematic spectatorship”. As a result, in the same way that the individual’s
phantasmatic consistency is understood with reference to the gaze, photographs and cinema rely on a
spectator to illicit meaning; to again be mediated by the gaze of the other. From this the flapper’s
silhouette can be perceived as broadly equivalent to the mirror image; upon the cover of a magazine she
is not real, but illusionary, and relies on the gaze of another to be interpreted as the modern woman or
as a sign of modernity. Moreover, Homer highlights Laura Mulvey’s (1975) argument that the cinematic
gaze is always a ‘male gaze’; the film is spectated from a male protagonist’s perspective, and the female
remains an object of spectacle. What is interesting about this concept of the gaze, however, is how
it opens up the possibility for the rewriting of women’s identity, and for women to see themselves as
occupying public spaces, with the ability to drive, and be a sign of independence in a world that wished to
control them. On the other hand, the ability to project an identity onto the flapper’s silhouette gives the
opportunity for patriarchal capitalism to rewrite the identity of women.
Beauvoir and Becoming a Woman
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) can be useful to understand the possibilities women possess
for constructing identities and thinking critically about their ability to do so. Beauvoir’s statement that,
“one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” can be viewed as propounding a view that women’s sense
of self is constructed outside of her. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex asks ‘how’ a woman becomes rather
than ‘what’ is a woman, reinstating her existential-phenomenological framework. Beauvoir’s
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