2 - A Fondness for Supermarkets: Wise Blood and Consumer Culture

Summary

In l951 an analyst of American popular culture described a woman whose legs could be detached for sales purposes. “The Mechanical Bride,” as Marshall McLuhan called her, appeared in an advertisement for Gotham Hosiery. More precisely, her legs appeared by themselves in the advertisement, which placed the limbs “on a Pedestal.” McLuhan criticized this sort of commercial imagery because it encouraged “that strange dissociation of sex not only from the human person but even from the unity of the body.” Ultimately, this sales technique had diminished the selfhood of the target audience:

To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. … As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill work on a car.

In short, “the smartly turned-out girl walks and behaves like a being who sees herself as a slick object rather than is aware of herself as a person” (McLuhan 98, 99).

In 1955 one of McLuhan's readers created a female character with a detachable leg. The portrayal of Joy-Hulga in the short story, “Good Country People,” reveals a strong affinity between Flannery O'Connor and the author of “The Mechanical Bride,” which O'Connor advised a friend to read “completely and slowly” (The Habit of Being [HB] 173). Like McLuhan's “modern girl,” who uses her legs as “date-baited power levers for the management of the male audience” (98), Joy-Hulga knows that her wooden leg impresses the Bible salesman she plans to seduce.