By Kathleen Stone

In this book, Wendy Steiner argues that if we don’t waste, it is very likely that we do not really want.

The Beauty of Choice: On Women, Art, and Freedom by Wendy Steiner. Columbia University Press, 288 pages,$35.

Imagine you are a college freshman, newly arrived on campus, eager to dive into an array of intellectual stimulation. You see an announcement for a lecture series to be delivered by a professor well known for her work on art and feminism. Perfect, you think. Subjects I care about, to be considered at a high level.

You attend the first few lectures and are perplexed. The professor jumps around, refers to more sources than you can count, and it’s a struggle to decipher her points. You gather, at least, that she likes the Wife of Bath, Chaucer’s creation, and Sei Shōnagon, a Japanese court lady from a thousand years ago who made lists of things she liked. The professor throws shade at Immanuel Kant, T.S. Eliot, Barnett Newman, and the fictional characters of Ayn Rand. After a few lectures, things start to pick up when she talks about evolutionary biology, citing Charles Darwin and Richard Prum, who teaches Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale. Biologists, she says, have established that females of a species are responsible for mate selection, and their choices are based on aesthetics — whatever delights and attracts the female. Among birds, a male sporting colorful feathers will get attention. And the choice of mate has long term implications for the species. The chosen male’s genetic characteristics, at least some of them, are passed to the offspring, as are some of hers, including her preference in male ornamentation. When it’s time for her female offspring to find their mates, they, and later their descendants, will favor the same ornamentation she did. Interesting, you think, but it leaves you wondering how closely a peacock’s life resembles your own.

The rest of the lectures touch on Picasso, contemporary artists Barbara MacCallum, Marlene Dumas and Kristen Beeler, ways to think about paintings of nude women, and a controversial memorial to women in Kosovo. In the final session, the professor posits that female aesthetic choices have shaped liberal democracy. You exit the lecture hall relieved that there is no exam.

Now let’s step away from this fictive world. I am not a college freshman. Nor, I’m guessing, are you. But Wendy Steiner’s book, The Beauty of Choice: On Women, Art, and Freedom reads like a disconnected series of lectures by a professor out to dazzle an audience. Steiner is undoubtedly an accomplished individual, the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of numerous books and an opera librettist. Yet I found this, her latest book, fractured and quixotic.

I’ll take the chapter titled “Waste Not, Want Not: The Extravagance of Beauty” as an example. (Any other chapter would be equally exemplary.) It starts by laying into the adage “waste not, want not,” which Steiner calls chipper, smug, old (italics hers), and representative of prissy virtue. By contrast, she celebrates Jack Gladney, the protagonist in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. She zeroes in on Gladney shopping at a suburban mall, unable to decide which of two shirts he wants. His family convinces him to buy both. At the food court, he eats with abandon — pretzels, beer, souvlaki. The whole experience elates him: “I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake. . . I began to grow in value and self-regard. . . Brightness settled around me. . .I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed.”

Gladney’s boundless consumption is glorified, even to the point of equating his waste of money with “the release of an excess stored within it — limitless happiness.” Tellingly, the chapter scarcely considers the question of whether self-regard rooted in consumption is truly satisfying. Same for DeLillo’s very deliberate exploitation of irony. Instead, Gladney is compared, favorably, to patients who, because of prefrontal brain damage, are unable to partake in the thrill of buying a lot of stuff at a suburban mall.

The chapter’s other examples of exuberance include films made by Runa Islam and Pipilotti Rist, whose characters find the destruction of property intoxicating, especially when it’s teacups and car windows. As Steiner writes, “To waste or lay waste with impunity is a rare and exhilarating freedom, especially when property laws and ladylike china are being trashed in the process.” Environmental concerns, she concedes, lead some people to be more abstemious. “Such meanness has its pleasures no doubt, but they are far from the bliss of heedless, self-expressive waste.” According to Steiner, if we don’t waste, it is very likely that we do not really want. But what about those who genuinely prefer Jil Sander’s style to the Met Gala? Or would rather listen to Bill Evans than Oscar Peterson? Or find power in self-restraint?

The chapter then takes a feminist turn. “Predictably, beauty’s waste incriminates women most of all. . . Aligned with abandon, fecundity, and excess, beauty in patriarchal eyes is femininity-as-waste.” Plato is said to have derided democracy because it was too reliant on easy promises, similar to a robe whose gaudy embroidery appeals to women and children. “Against the soft sell of feminine democracy, Plato promoted the austerity of masculine authoritarianism,” the text reads. But before accepting Plato is a political villain, this reader, at least, needs to get more than a few breezy sentences dismissing his theory of government.

The chapter continues with feminist-sounding rhetoric, warning that the patriarchy has always been determined to take down such feminine attributes as voluptuousness, exuberance, profligacy, and coquetry. These traits, at best, describe a limited concept of femininity.

To support her points, Steiner gestures to a wide array of touchstones. In addition to Jack Gladney and people who enjoy destroying property, we are given a succession of names and titles: a character from one of Elizabeth Strout’s novels, fashion scholar Rhonda Garelick, Scarlett O’Hara, The Rape of the Lock, aesthetician Kuki Shūzō, The Handmaid’s Tale, John Keats, William Blake, Paul Rudnick, John Locke, C.B. Macpherson, the Declaration of Independence, Lolita, Nancy Bentley, William James, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, The Waste Land, Jessie Weston, Sisyphus, Walter Benjamin, John Berger, NFTs, The Sot-Weed Factor, The Crying of Lot 49, Underworld, and The Overstory. The barrage of references, more than twenty-seven over twenty-one pages, smothers her thesis in name-dropping and inhibits persuasive development.

The chapter ends with the declaration that the human brain, as complex and extravagant as it is, is the aesthetic fruit of female choice. Maybe an evolutionary biologist would agree. But, as much as I tried to follow Steiner’s breadcrumbs, I could not discern a trail that got me from Gladney’s shopping expedition to this overweening conclusion.

This particular chapter, like much of The Beauty of Choice as a whole, drops hints of interesting and tempting ideas. If only this cultural study had supplied a cogent narrative thread, a logical path for its ambitious argument. But its tantalizing suggestions quickly come and just as quickly go.

Kathleen Stone is a writer and a lawyer. Her first book, They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men, was published by Cynren Press in 2022. She is currently working on a book about women in the manual trades. Her website is www.kathleencstone.com.