Aubrey Beardsley's illustration for the magazine cover of The Yellow Book is from 1890s London. The graphic's primary elements--the book-shop window, the fashionable shopper, the street lamp--all evoke an urban individual in a cosmopolitan cityscape, a mode of life and consciousness which is not only "modernist" in the early-twentieth-century sense, but characteristic of an older historical phase of modernity that had been current in London since the 18th century. The solitary browser in the city suggests an individual who presumably is not bound by local provincialism (the circulating library or the traditional domestic bookshelf), but who is free to choose among alternatives in this open marketplace of ideas and tastes.

In contradiction, however, to the norms of nineteenth-century representation, which would have invited readers to infer that any woman alone at night in the street was a prostitute, Beardsley's browser is obviously a well-to-do woman. The image itself suggests a conflict between the post-Renaissance sense of modernity personified by the caricatured, capitalist proprietor/Pierrot blocking the doorway and the consciously iconoclastic, fin de siècle modernism represented by the emancipated woman customer. Indeed, Beardsley's rendering makes the attitude of the woman toward the books she finds there ambiguous (her fingers are both extended toward and withheld back from the bin), as is the gaze (forbidding? anxious? surprised?) of the Pierrot figure toward the woman and his stock

This image, therefore, performs the cultural work of recognizing these new norms in female behavior made necessary by broad transformations in economic and technological in Western culture. The image participates in the process of "normalizing" these new structures of feeling/thinking/acting for the audience of the 1890s.