"The Real You"
“The Real You” is a romantic short story about Jody, a single young woman who works for a woman’s magazine and meets David, an up-and-coming psychiatrist, at a party. Right away, we learn that Jody is pretty and possesses an active imagination. In particular, Jody invests magical powers in a pair of impractically stylish shoes she wears to a friend’s party. She hopes that her impractical party shoes will lead her into romantic adventure. When she meets David, a psychiatrist, she attributes her good fortune to her “magic slippers.” Eager to make a good impression, she recalls an advice column that exhorts her to be “The Real You.” For Jody, this means being quirky and fanciful – characteristics that David finds enchanting. He also admires her appearance. Referring to Jody’s job working for the food editor of a woman’s magazine, David tells her, “It’s criminal to put a beautiful girl like you out of sight in the kitchen.” The evening goes well, but trouble ensues when Jody consults a psychiatry book and changes her behavior to be more “normal” when she is with David. Only at the story’s end, as their budding romance is on the verge of failure, does Jody resume wearing her magic slippers, confess her brief flirtation with popular psychology, and revert to the quirkier “real” self that David loves.
As with other elements in Ladies Home Journal, the story thus celebrates feminine beauty, on the one hand, and the role of both women’s magazines and the consumer goods and beauty tips they advertise in the construction of an appealing female self. Jody’s impractically fashionable footwear, which she regards as magical, symbolize the transformational possibilities of consumer goods. Throughout the story, Jody attends carefully to her hair and overall appearance. Significantly, while Jody is “beautiful,” David is not; he has a “craggy face” that is “trustworthy” but not “handsome.” Moreover, Jody might be clever and fanciful, but she is also well versed in home economics and could “whip up a Bavarian-cream Charlotte quicker than you could say ‘almond extract.’”
“The Real You” thus dramatizes the challenges that Ladies Home Journal readers confronted in their pursuit of romance and marriage, in their efforts to be charming and domestically competent, and in their efforts to seem exceptional and enchanting while remaining safely within conventional (but not too conventional) parameters of womanly comportment.
Several ads that appear in the same issue of Ladies Home Journal accentuate the story’s message [see Ladies Home Journal, October 1954.]