Rosbottom, Ronald C.

English

Kosmopolis

Studies in Visual Communication 
Volume 5 
Issue 2 Spring 1979 Article 6 
1978 
Wylie and Stafford: Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk 
Ronald C. Rosbottom 
Ohio State University 
Recommended Citation 
Rosbottom, R. C. (1979). Wylie and Stafford: Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk. 5 (2), 136-137. 
Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/svc/vol5/iss2/6 
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/svc/vol5/iss2/6 
For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu. 
Wylie and Stafford: Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk 
This reviews and discussion is available in Studies in Visual Communication: https://repository.upenn.edu/svc/vol5/
iss2/6 
Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk. Laurence 
Wylie and Rick Stafford. Cambridge, MA: The Un-
dergraduate Press, 1977. xiv + 79 pp., photographs. 
$8.95 (cloth). 
Reviewed by Ronald C. Rosbottom 
Ohio State University 
This is one of the most useful-and amusing-
books I have seen on an aspect of a foreign culture, in 
this case French "body talk." The French concept of 
the beau geste reveals a culture which puts as much 
emphasis on form and style as it does on content: it 
refers to a beautiful, and therefore good, altruistic 
deed or action. French literature and film are filled 
with examples of those who sacrifice all-family, 
riches, perhaps even reputation-with a beau geste. 
Laurence Wylie, one of the world's most knowledge-
able scholars of French manners and customs (his 
Village in the Vaucluse is a text much admired by 
humanists and social scientists), has compiled a re-
spectful, yet witty series of gestures (a term I prefer to 
"body talk") derived from his familiarity with French 
culture, and he has published them (with the help of 
the collection's photographer, Rick Stafford) under a 
tongue-in-cheek title which only tentatively under-
mines the seriousness of the enterprise. 
It is this serious aspect of Wylie's effort that must 
not be ignored, no matter how amusing his com-
mentary and exposition. The book's jacket has a pic-
ture of Wylie making the gesture called /e pied de 
nez, which "indicates a feeling of defiance, express-
ing delight in another person's qiscomfiture." The 
last picture of the book shows the most famous of 
European gestures-les bras d'honneur-called "the 
shaft" (or, less elegantly, "up yours") in English. Yet 
this intentional mockery of his enterprise and his be-
mused readers should not detract from the fact that 
Wylie knows that to speak a foreign language is only 
the first of several steps toward total expressivity in a 
foreign culture. I do not exaggerate when I submit 
that every instructor of beginning, intermediate, and 
advanced French should provide his or her students 
with a copy of this book. It is only after reading 
Wylie's deceptively simple commentary and seeing 
these telling photographs that one realizes that a very 
important dimension of language instruction is 
scarcely available to American students. I wonder, 
too, if some of the inveterate opposition on the part 
of our students to language learning in general could 
not be undermined if we made our course "live" 
through teaching such "body language" along with 
the past subjunctive and irregular verbs. 
Wylie's introduction begins: "Words are so essen-
tial in conversation that we exaggerate their impor-
tance and overlook other signals" (p. vii). He does not 
offer any new theories on the relationship between 
verbal and nonverbal communication, nor does he 
cite the scholars who have done work on this con-
nection. However, it is obvious from his remarks that 
he is aware of the traditions and assumptions of non-
verbal communication. He warns his readers that the 
incorrect gesture can be just as inappropriate as the 
incorrect word; the book and its photographs, in 
other words, should be used with caution. The seri-
ousness of his enterprise is brought to our attention 
when Wylie explains that he honed his skills at ges-
turing (all the photographs, by the way, are of Wylie, 
dressed simply in a dark turtleneck against a gray or 
black background, without props of any kind) at the 
jacques Lecoq School in Paris for Mime-Mouvement-
The~tre, where he "spent the year 1972-1973 study-
ing cultural differences in body movement and non-
verbal communication" (p. ix). 
There are only nineteen pages "'of text; the remain-
der of the book is taken up with about eighty photo-
graphs. These photographs, all graphic but not 
exaggerated, are divided into eight thematic groups 
ranging from "Boredom, Indecision, and Rejection 
(Le }emenfoutisme )" through "Sex (Sex)" to "Threat 
and Mayhem (Fais Gaffe)." Wylie is not timid about 
using those expressions that make explicit reference 
to sexual and other biological impulses. My favorite 
among these latter (and one which shows how a con-
cept can mean one thing in one culture and some-
thing else entirely in another) is the explicit if a du cui 
("he has some ass" [I would be even more explicit 
here than Wylie!]) to mean not a negative but a posi-
tive "he's really lucky." Another interesting cultural 
aspect is what Wylie refers to as /e jemenfoutisme 
(derived from the verb "foutre," which means, in the 
most gracious sense, "to screw") . Wylie translates it 
as "Who cares" or "I don't give a damn," which obvi-
ously is a sentiment we all express from time to time. 
Wylie's point, however, is that the attitude is so deep-
ly rooted in France's collective consciousness that 
there is "a long list of gestures indicating a rejection 
of responsibility, the belittling of one's errors , the 
affectation of indifference" (p. 23). Obviously a gen-
erality, this observation nonetheless pinpoints an at-
titude that only a series of courses in recent French 
history and political science would reveal to the stu-
dent who has not spent more than a couple of weeks 
in that country. 
One more such observation should be cited as an 
example of the potential that such studies would have 
for those learning how to live and communicate when 
in France. In the chapter entitled "Problems and 
Weaknesses (Les Petites Miseres), " Wylie observes: 
This category, which deals with the petty weaknesses of human-
ity, could easily be used to analyze the French value system . .. . I 
do not believe that the French are more rational than other 
people, but they certainly have the most exaggerated concern 
for man 's reason. All sorts of hand and finger movements 
around the top of the head serve to call attention to the mal-
function ing of someone's brain (p. 35). 
Such an observation-though, again, obviously 
superficial-shows how rich a rhetoric of gestures can 
be for anyone who studies a language with the ulti-
mate goal of understanding a culture. And this is, I 
believe, the most felicitous message that comes from 
136 STUDIES IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION 
Wylie's book, namely, that learning to speak 
French-or Italian or German or Russian-is but a first 
step to learning the idiosyncrasies which define a 
culture and which define that culture through the 
maintenance of differences. I am convinced that the 
appropriation of Wylie's model would not only make 
language-learning more fun for American students, 
but also that it would make language-teaching more 
successful and, in the end, more pertinent to cultural 
and ethnic realities. 
I enthusiastically commend Professor Wylie and 
Rick Stafford for having taken the initiative in creating 
this marvelous book, as well as their publishers for 
having printed it. I urge the latter to make it available 
in a paperback format so that it will reach the widest 
possible audience. 
Hearth and Home: /mages of Women in the Mass 
Media. Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and 
james Benet, eds. New York: Oxford University 
Press, 1978. xi + 333 pp. $3.00 (paper). 
Reviewed by Michael Morgan 
University of Pennsylvania 
Save for some predictably defensive network 
spokespersons, one would be hard pressed to find 
disagreement about the presentation of women by 
the mass media: in a word, it stinks. This book man-
ages to express that contention, in tones ranging from 
livid through sagacious to silly, far more times than 
need be counted. Yet, it remains a valuable, usually 
readable, and even important document of one of the 
worst media crimes of the century. The crime, the 
editors tell us superabundantly (and borrowing from 
Gerbner), is the "symbolic annihilation" of women by 
television, newspapers, and magazines. 
Hearth and Home is an exploration and elaboration 
of this phenomenon and also something called the 
"reflection hypothesis." Briefly, symbolic annihila-
tion sums up both the underrepresentation of women 
in media and their trivialization into sex objects, 
"child-like adornments," passive male adjuncts, and 
so on. The reflection hypothesis holds that, owing to 
television's need to attract the largest possible audi-
ence and because of its corporate structure, its con-
tent reflects dominant social and cultural ideals and 
values (as opposed to "reality"). According to Gaye 
Tuchman (p. 17), the result of these two factors is that 
"the preschool girl, the school girl, the adolescent 
female, and the woman" learn from TV that 
[women] are not important in American society, except perhaps 
within the home. And even within the home, men know 
best. ... To be a woman is to have a limited life divorced from 
the economic productivity of the labor force. 
The issues are explored both in qualitative, subjec-
tive articles and in studies based on "hard data," with 
the former being generally better. This is due in part 
to a certain redundancy among the latter studies, 
which are largely content analyses of various media 
with similar dimensions of analysis. The redundancy 
is the primary flaw of the book. The same references 
keep popping up. Virtually every article justifies its 
concern with media portrayal of women by reminding 
us that over half of the population arid more than 40 
percent of the labor force are female·s. It may be even 
more important to note that those statistics need not 
be the paramount legitimization for the authors' con-
cerns. 
The economic dysfunctions potentially arising from 
discouraging women from working (and teaching 
them to "direct their hearts to hearth and home") 
may be rivaled by the interpersonal implications. 
These may extend to basic ways in which females re-
late to females; males to males, and each to the other, 
both within and outside of a family context. When 
men's expectations of women are based on notions 
deriving from typical media representations, it is not 
only women who are being hurt. 
The first three parts of the book are titled "Televi-
sion," "Women's Magazines," and "Newspapers and 
Their Women's Pages." A fourth is "Television's Effect 
on Children and Youth." Let's look at the picture the 
book cumulatively reveals. 
Following Gaye Tuchman's introduction, George 
Gerbner opens the section on television by noting the 
"undercutting" of women and their excessive victim-
ization on television. He claims that the media image 
serves to obstruct social change-a "counterattack" 
on, rather than a "reflection" of, the goals of the 
women's movement. judith Lemon finds men 
"dominating" women in far more television interac-
tions than the reverse, particularly in crime dramas. 
Stephen Scheutz and Joyce Sprafkin examine com-
mercials on children's shows, and not surprisingly 
conclude that more men than women appear in them. 
Ads promoting products feature males, while females 
more often appear on public service announcements. 
Finally, Muriel Cantor shows that, although the na-
ture of the stereotyping is different, even on public 
broadcasting "women are not represented as integral 
to American life" (p. 86). 
The section on women's magazines points to a 
slightly different but unambiguous message: 
"women should strive to please others." It begins 
with a very nicely written article by Marjorie Fergu-
son, who extracts this message by dissecting the "im-
agery and ideology" of the covers of several popular 
British women's magazines. E. Barbara Phillips sees it 
in both Ms. and Family Circle, concluding that while 
Ms. is "liberal, not liberated," neither is it "just an-
other member of the Family Circle." Carol Lopate's 
innovative contribution looks at the coverage of 
jackie Onassis in twelve different women's maga-
zines, and indirectly but convincingly reaches the 
same general conclusion. 
The section on newspapers is not as tightly or-
ganized as the first two. Its chapters are a curious 
REVIEWS AND DISCUSSION 137 


Wylie and Stafford: Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk

ScholarlyCommons@Penn

Studies in Visual Communication Volume 5 Issue 2 Spring 1979 Article 6 1978 Wylie and Stafford: Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk Ronald C. Rosbottom Ohio State University Recommended Citation Rosbottom, R. C. (1979). Wylie and Stafford: Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk. 5 (2), 136-137. Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/svc/vol5/iss2/6 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/svc/vol5/iss2/6 For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu. Wylie and Stafford: Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk This reviews and discussion is available in Studies in Visual Communication: https://repository.upenn.edu/svc/vol5/iss2/6 Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk. Laurence Wylie and Rick Stafford. Cambridge, MA: The Un-dergraduate Press, 1977. xiv + 79 pp., photographs. $8.95 (cloth). Reviewed by Ronald C. Rosbottom Ohio State University This is one of the most useful-and amusing-books I have seen on an aspect of a foreign culture, in this case French "body talk." The French concept of the beau geste reveals a culture which puts as much emphasis on form and style as it does on content: it refers to a beautiful, and therefore good, altruistic deed or action. French literature and film are filled with examples of those who sacrifice all-family, riches, perhaps even reputation-with a beau geste. Laurence Wylie, one of the world's most knowledge-able scholars of French manners and customs (his Village in the Vaucluse is a text much admired by humanists and social scientists), has compiled a re-spectful, yet witty series of gestures (a term I prefer to "body talk") derived from his familiarity with French culture, and he has published them (with the help of the collection's photographer, Rick Stafford) under a tongue-in-cheek title which only tentatively under-mines the seriousness of the enterprise. It is this serious aspect of Wylie's effort that must not be ignored, no matter how amusing his com-mentary and exposition. The book's jacket has a pic-ture of Wylie making the gesture called /e pied de nez, which "indicates a feeling of defiance, express-ing delight in another person's qiscomfiture." The last picture of the book shows the most famous of European gestures-les bras d'honneur-called "the shaft" (or, less elegantly, "up yours") in English. Yet this intentional mockery of his enterprise and his be-mused readers should not detract from the fact that Wylie knows that to speak a foreign language is only the first of several steps toward total expressivity in a foreign culture. I do not exaggerate when I submit that every instructor of beginning, intermediate, and advanced French should provide his or her students with a copy of this book. It is only after reading Wylie's deceptively simple commentary and seeing these telling photographs that one realizes that a very important dimension of language instruction is scarcely available to American students. I wonder, too, if some of the inveterate opposition on the part of our students to language learning in general could not be undermined if we made our course "live" through teaching such "body language" along with the past subjunctive and irregular verbs. Wylie's introduction begins: "Words are so essen-tial in conversation that we exaggerate their impor-tance and overlook other signals" (p. vii). He does not offer any new theories on the relationship between verbal and nonverbal communication, nor does he cite the scholars who have done work on this con-nection. However, it is obvious from his remarks that he is aware of the traditions and assumptions of non-verbal communication. He warns his readers that the incorrect gesture can be just as inappropriate as the incorrect word; the book and its photographs, in other words, should be used with caution. The seri-ousness of his enterprise is brought to our attention when Wylie explains that he honed his skills at ges-turing (all the photographs, by the way, are of Wylie, dressed simply in a dark turtleneck against a gray or black background, without props of any kind) at the jacques Lecoq School in Paris for Mime-Mouvement-The~tre, where he "spent the year 1972-1973 study-ing cultural differences in body movement and non-verbal communication" (p. ix). There are only nineteen pages "'of text; the remain-der of the book is taken up with about eighty photo-graphs. These photographs, all graphic but not exaggerated, are divided into eight thematic groups ranging from "Boredom, Indecision, and Rejection (Le }emenfoutisme )" through "Sex (Sex)" to "Threat and Mayhem (Fais Gaffe)." Wylie is not timid about using those expressions that make explicit reference to sexual and other biological impulses. My favorite among these latter (and one which shows how a con-cept can mean one thing in one culture and some-thing else entirely in another) is the explicit if a du cui ("he has some ass" [I would be even more explicit here than Wylie!]) to mean not a negative but a posi-tive "he's really lucky." Another interesting cultural aspect is what Wylie refers to as /e jemenfoutisme (derived from the verb "foutre," which means, in the most gracious sense, "to screw") . Wylie translates it as "Who cares" or "I don't give a damn," which obvi-ously is a sentiment we all express from time to time. Wylie's point, however, is that the attitude is so deep-ly rooted in France's collective consciousness that there is "a long list of gestures indicating a rejection of responsibility, the belittling of one's errors , the affectation of indifference" (p. 23). Obviously a gen-erality, this observation nonetheless pinpoints an at-titude that only a series of courses in recent French history and political science would reveal to the stu-dent who has not spent more than a couple of weeks in that country. One more such observation should be cited as an example of the potential that such studies would have for those learning how to live and communicate when in France. In the chapter entitled "Problems and Weaknesses (Les Petites Miseres), " Wylie observes: This category, which deals with the petty weaknesses of human-ity, could easily be used to analyze the French value system . .. . I do not believe that the French are more rational than other people, but they certainly have the most exaggerated concern for man 's reason. All sorts of hand and finger movements around the top of the head serve to call attention to the mal-function ing of someone's brain (p. 35). Such an observation-though, again, obviously superficial-shows how rich a rhetoric of gestures can be for anyone who studies a language with the ulti-mate goal of understanding a culture. And this is, I believe, the most felicitous message that comes from 136 STUDIES IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION Wylie's book, namely, that learning to speak French-or Italian or German or Russian-is but a first step to learning the idiosyncrasies which define a culture and which define that culture through the maintenance of differences. I am convinced that the appropriation of Wylie's model would not only make language-learning more fun for American students, but also that it would make language-teaching more successful and, in the end, more pertinent to cultural and ethnic realities. I enthusiastically commend Professor Wylie and Rick Stafford for having taken the initiative in creating this marvelous book, as well as their publishers for having printed it. I urge the latter to make it available in a paperback format so that it will reach the widest possible audience. Hearth and Home: /mages of Women in the Mass Media. Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and james Benet, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. xi + 333 pp. $3.00 (paper). Reviewed by Michael Morgan University of Pennsylvania Save for some predictably defensive network spokespersons, one would be hard pressed to find disagreement about the presentation of women by the mass media: in a word, it stinks. This book man-ages to express that contention, in tones ranging from livid through sagacious to silly, far more times than need be counted. Yet, it remains a valuable, usually readable, and even important document of one of the worst media crimes of the century. The crime, the editors tell us superabundantly (and borrowing from Gerbner), is the "symbolic annihilation" of women by television, newspapers, and magazines. Hearth and Home is an exploration and elaboration of this phenomenon and also something called the "reflection hypothesis." Briefly, symbolic annihila-tion sums up both the underrepresentation of women in media and their trivialization into sex objects, "child-like adornments," passive male adjuncts, and so on. The reflection hypothesis holds that, owing to television's need to attract the largest possible audi-ence and because of its corporate structure, its con-tent reflects dominant social and cultural ideals and values (as opposed to "reality"). According to Gaye Tuchman (p. 17), the result of these two factors is that "the preschool girl, the school girl, the adolescent female, and the woman" learn from TV that [women] are not important in American society, except perhaps within the home. And even within the home, men know best. ... To be a woman is to have a limited life divorced from the economic productivity of the labor force. The issues are explored both in qualitative, subjec-tive articles and in studies based on "hard data," with the former being generally better. This is due in part to a certain redundancy among the latter studies, which are largely content analyses of various media with similar dimensions of analysis. The redundancy is the primary flaw of the book. The same references keep popping up. Virtually every article justifies its concern with media portrayal of women by reminding us that over half of the population arid more than 40 percent of the labor force are female·s. It may be even more important to note that those statistics need not be the paramount legitimization for the authors' con-cerns. The economic dysfunctions potentially arising from discouraging women from working (and teaching them to "direct their hearts to hearth and home") may be rivaled by the interpersonal implications. These may extend to basic ways in which females re-late to females; males to males, and each to the other, both within and outside of a family context. When men's expectations of women are based on notions deriving from typical media representations, it is not only women who are being hurt. The first three parts of the book are titled "Televi-sion," "Women's Magazines," and "Newspapers and Their Women's Pages." A fourth is "Television's Effect on Children and Youth." Let's look at the picture the book cumulatively reveals. Following Gaye Tuchman's introduction, George Gerbner opens the section on television by noting the "undercutting" of women and their excessive victim-ization on television. He claims that the media image serves to obstruct social change-a "counterattack" on, rather than a "reflection" of, the goals of the women's movement. judith Lemon finds men "dominating" women in far more television interac-tions than the reverse, particularly in crime dramas. Stephen Scheutz and Joyce Sprafkin examine com-mercials on children's shows, and not surprisingly conclude that more men than women appear in them. Ads promoting products feature males, while females more often appear on public service announcements. Finally, Muriel Cantor shows that, although the na-ture of the stereotyping is different, even on public broadcasting "women are not represented as integral to American life" (p. 86). The section on women's magazines points to a slightly different but unambiguous message: "women should strive to please others." It begins with a very nicely written article by Marjorie Fergu-son, who extracts this message by dissecting the "im-agery and ideology" of the covers of several popular British women's magazines. E. Barbara Phillips sees it in both Ms. and Family Circle, concluding that while Ms. is "liberal, not liberated," neither is it "just an-other member of the Family Circle." Carol Lopate's innovative contribution looks at the coverage of jackie Onassis in twelve different women's maga-zines, and indirectly but convincingly reaches the same general conclusion. The section on newspapers is not as tightly or-ganized as the first two. Its chapters are a curious REVIEWS AND DISCUSSION 137 

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Wylie and Stafford: Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk

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