[Vwoolf] Cornflower mystery

[Diane Reynolds]

Elisa,

I looked at several sites about makeup in the 1920s and 1930s and all three confirmed that women did use blue eye shadow, such as http://www.return2style.de/swingstyle/makeup/30amimup.html <http://www.return2style.de/swingstyle/makeup/30amimup.html>

http://hair-and-makeup-artist.com/womens-1920s-makeup/ <http://hair-and-makeup-artist.com/womens-1920s-makeup/> says "Magazine articles from 1926 on mention purple and blue pencils used as eye shadow. There was also brown eye shadow.”

I am interested in the cornflower allusion, as that comes up in a figure in my book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was younger but yet a contemporary of Woolf, and though German, of the same social class. He used the cornflower to describe his (gay) friendship with Eberhard Bethge, likening that kind of friendship—which he celebrated as  a realm of freedom-- to the wild cornflowers that would grow between rows of corn or wheat. The corn symbolized the accepted, rigid social institutions, like marriage, and the cornflowers a beautiful, free arena. I don’t know if cornflowers would have any of the same overtones for Woolf as for Bonhoeffer. Her "cornflower" sounds very rigid!

The cornflowers growing between planted crops revealed yet another sign of the alterity between the pre-war era and today, when pesticides have more or less eradicated would have been the common  sight of cornflowers and other weeds growing in the fields between the rows of crops. I think often—or did when I was writing—about how different, in so many ways, the actual world they saw was compared to our own. 

If you find out more, I would be interested. 

Diane

> On Jan 30, 2018, at 3:22 PM, Elisa Sparks <sparks at clemson.edu> wrote:
> 
> Dear all-
> I am writing currently writing about cornflowers (aka Bachelor Buttons) in Woolf and I have found a passage which makes no sense to me.  On July 21, 1934, Virginia and Leonard went to Cambridge to visit an old friend, Barbara Hutchison, recently married to Victor Rothschild and very pregnant.  After lunch Woolf describes Barbara as sitting “very upright, painted like a cornflower” (D4 228).  I have no idea what this can possibly mean. Anybody else have any ideas?  Could it be a misreading of her handwriting?  Were women wearing vivid blue eye shadow yet?
> 
> Fascinated to hear what you all come up with--
> Elisa 
> 
> 
> 
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