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summary: =A good lesson in how the average scholar transitions from diss to first book= Basic Ideas – Uses variety of sources: newspaper, music hall, . . .

A good lesson in how the average scholar transitions from diss to first book

Basic Ideas

• Uses variety of sources: newspaper, music hall, films, stores’ archives, union journals, and fiction
  • Main text: penny periodicals
    • Weekly newspapers
    • Magazines: serialized fragments of novels (potentially utopian and radical)
    • Novelettes: whole stories in one book, plus advertisements and advice (more about standard wish fulfillment, about discipline)
  • Main genre: the romance
    • The standard social mobility story of poor shopgirl rising to marry the shopowner or his son, also securing better conditions for former fellow workers
    • Primal scene of going back as a shopper to where you once were a worker
  • Films: early film audiences are chaotic, distracted, communal
    • Paradox: private consumption of film in public
• Early UK shops all about utility and thrift until influenced by French and American stores to be all about luxury, leisure, and abundance
• Mode of consumption of stories: vacillation between absorption and distraction
  • Absorption: the complete novelette
    • Mostly romance, escapist, unreal setting
  • Distraction: the serial magazine
    • Variety of types of writing (advice, fiction, ads, editorials)
    • Miscellany, incomplete, ephemeral, silly, discontinuous
    • Mostly lifelike
• Anxieties about reading: lower class could get fancy ideas and revolt, esp shopgirls
  • Also, novels make girls and young women unhappy with their limited lots

Interesting Assertions

• In these novelettes and serialized stories, the variable and the formulaic appear in tandem (189)
• Fantasy permeates real life in and through serial fiction
  • There is no real separation!
  • Hence utopian possibilities for consuming these fictions
  • Fantasy is the first step to real change (10), even while it creates desire for commodities
• Taylorism of working bodies (ultra efficient) counteracted by romance of shopgirl
  • A general swarm of cultural assumptions and fears about consumer capitalism rest around the shopgirl
• Shopgirls reveal that class identity is performed, not inherent (112)

References

• Laplanche and Pontalism: each fantasy has multiple points of entry, many people to identify with in turn and incompletely, thus liberatory
• Siegfried Kracauer, early 20th c sociologist, Mass Ornament
• Erika Rappaport Shopping for Pleasure (2000)
• Harriet Martineau “Female Industry” (1859)
• Margaret Llewelyn Davies “Life as We Have Known It” (1931)
• Mark Seltzer Bodies and Machines
• Rosalind Williams Dream Worlds
• Anne Friedburg Window Shopping
• Films: It (1927), with Clara Bow; The Woman (1939), with Joan Crawford
• Lit: Mansfield’s “Tiredness of Rosabel,” Zola’s Au bonheur des dames, Cicely Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s (play), Gissing’s The Odd Women and In the Year of Jubilee, Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, and Wells’ Kipps (1905)