Eustace Tilley Takes a Sniff

The Feminization of Smell Culture

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I finally drifted away from The New Yorker. It was always in our house when I was a kid, and I subscribed in the first flush of my young adult career. I enjoyed John McPhee’s essays on geology and some of the golf coverage, but the anaesthetized fiction never engaged me. Same with the cartoons.

In reviewing a collection of New Yorker short stories by the magazine’s current fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, Bruce Bawer provides a handy timeline of the magazine’s evolution:

The New Yorker has continued to stay afloat, transmogrifying, over its hundred-year history, from Harold Ross’s little humor weekly for young urbanites (1925–51) to the soi-disant pillar of high culture for suburban hausfraus edited by William Shawn (1951–87) and largely maintained intact by Robert Gottlieb (1987–92), to the glitzier, more celebrity-focused glossy edited by Tina Brown (1992–98), formerly of Vanity Fair, to the current incarnation under David Remnick, Barack Obama’s biographer, who has turned The New Yorker, in large part, into a fiercely progressive political journal for the New York Times crowd and who began the practice of endorsing presidential candidates. (So far, it has endorsed six Democrats and no Republicans.)

I’d say my interest waned during the Tina Brown years and vanished completely with the advent of David Remnick. Then last week an old pal sent me a New Yorker piece by Margaret Talbot called “Remembrance of Scents Past.” And before I had time to bite into my madeleine, I knew the piece would cite the bogus phenomenon of Proustian Smell Memory. (I was right.)

Talbot’s essay carries the overwrought subtitle “At museums, curators are incorporating smells that can transport visitors to a different time.” Among the exhibits she focuses on is “Marie Antoinette Style” which will debut at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, and a show at the British Library featuring De Ornatu Mulierum, a medieval “compendium of beauty and hygiene advice for women.”

Talbot’s story quotes a lot of people. Among them are Tasha Marks, the scent designer for an exhibit at the British Library, Eleanor Jackson, the show’s lead curator, publicist Freya Barry, Angela Stavrevska, a perfumer with CPL Aromas, smell scientist Rachel Herz, art historian Caro Verbeek, smell “artist” Sissel Tolaas, Claire Dobbin, curator of the scented Docklands exhibit, Cecilia Bembibre who studies ‘heritage smells’, Vita Sackville-West and her lesbian lover Virginia Woolf, Julian of Norwich, a female medieval mystic, Gwerful Mechain a 15^th C. Welsh woman and author of “Ode to the Vagina,” museum and gallery publicist Fiona Russell who is the wife of Tasha Marks, and finally Talbot’s mother.

Are you getting the drift?

Sure, men make a few appearances: AromaPrime perfumer Liam Finley, Dickens critic John Mullan, and historians Mark M. Smith and Will Tullett. There are also historical references to the work of perfumer Ernest Daltroff (1867-1941), pop artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987), and French historian Alain Corbin (b. 1936). But Talbot’s focus is overwhelmingly gynecocentric, both in its sourcing and content.

Is that a problem? It depends.

Plenty of men have created or hosted scented art. Two of them are right in New York: perfumer Christophe Laudamiel who did the scent libretto for a musical performance at the Guggenheim Museum called “Green Aria,” and Andreas Keller, a dual-Ph.D. who operates the Olfactory Art Keller exhibit space on the Lower East Side. Then there is Chandler Burr, who curated the fragrance displays for The Art of Scent 1889-2012 at the Museum of Arts and Design.

Judging by the articles listed on her website, Talbot’s thematic focus is women and women’s issues. That’s her choice, of course, and it seems to have paid off handsomely, career-wise. It makes her a good fit for The New Yorker where “not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction.”

But suppose the selection of exhibits and interviewees in Remembrances of Scents Past reflects the field at large. That raises a question: why have historical scent research and scented museum exhibits been dominated by women exploring female themes?

It could be another case of the patriarchy ghettoizing women into obscure career paths. Yet perfumery, fragrance chemistry, and curatorial positions have lots of male participation. And as Talbot has documented, these shows are hardly obscure—they are being hosted at major venues where they get lots of attention.

Perhaps men are not interested in history. Try telling that to the guys obsessed with sports statistics, hot rods, or the Roman Empire.

Perhaps men are oblivious to smell culture. While it is hard to imagine them being drawn to the scented world of a medieval female mystic, one can imagine themes that would draw lots of men:

Your Drink is Being Made—a tour of the olfactory stages in the creation of fermented beverages including whiskey, wine, and beer.

Down on Pit Row—a century of motor fuel, motor oil, and tire composition featuring the smells of race car shops and track pit stops. Bonus section on aviation fuels and leaded vs unleaded gas.

Greasy Kid Stuff—an olfactory retrospective of men’s grooming products from antiquity to the present, from bear grease to Brylcreem.

Keeping the Lights On—the smells of indoor illumination from past to present, beeswax vs tallow candles, lamp fuels from olive oil to whale oil to kerosene.

Need a scent curator? Hit me up.