‘They Opened up a Whole New World’: Narrative, Text and Image in British Women’s Magazines in the 1930s

Hackney's article untangles the inter-connected relationship between looking, fantasy and memory involved in reading a new style of women’s magazine composed of different orders of juxtaposed image and text, which emerged in the 1930s. The research draws on theories of narrative (Giles, 2002) to interpret reading through women’s words, arguing that magazines function as ‘memory texts’: cultural productions that operate at the intersections between personal memories and public events (Kuhn, 1995). \ud \ud The metaphor of the ‘magazine-as-window’ is used to conceptualise the possibilities for transformation magazines offered, and also the tensions they foregrounded at a time of rapid social, economic and cultural change. Reception theory and Joke Hermes’ (1995) work on ‘reading repertories’ is used to identify a particular emotional economy which characterised women’s magazine reading in these years as both pleasurable and compromised, signalling subjectivities that were at once feminine and modern