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Shopping Pleasure

Victorian Studies’ review essay by Richard L Stein

• Part of the wave of books reevaluating Victorian/Modernist city (Writing the Urban Jungle, Imperial Cities, Streetwalking the Metropolis)
  • More specifically, on the end of the “particularism” studies
• Topic: West End and its “department stores, window displays, clubs, and public entertainments” 1850s-1914
• Themes: work/leisure; morality/consumption; women’s relationship to law, merchants, popular press, feminists, music hall; all of these relations show an intricate dialectic of linked cultural formations within and out of urban development
• Specific Thesis: Shopping gives women “new roles” with reason to get out on the streets
  • “Shopping became one of the primary fault lines in Victorian and Edwardian culture because it challenged received notions of stable class and gender identities and clearly demarcated physical spaces” (Rappaport 221)
• “Identified consumption with modernity” due to the consumption palaces of folks like William Whitely and Gordon Selfridge
  • But doesn’t try to be heavy-handed and admits that the stage of gender and class was wider than Selfridge’s
• Chapters
  • “The Politics of Plate Glass:” shows how politics and consumption came together in West End; how Pankhurst is in essence a good saleswoman; how consumption can be political
  • “The Trials of Consumption:” getting women’s debts paid by husbands; discounted goods for “ready money”
  • “Resting Places for Women:” growth of women’s clubs inextricable from shopping

Politics of Plate Glass

• Friday, March 1, 1912: almost 400 shop windows in West End, and then proceeded to protest, still in West End, WSPU
• “shopper-turned-terrorist” looked like irony “siege” “City of broken glass”
• “commercial and political realms overlapped”
  • feminism developed within new types of spaces, mass spaces like department stores, women’s clubs, teashops and restaurants, ultimately b/c middle class women were now entering public sphere: used their “urban knowledge” to make militant strategies work
  • see also how W S P U “Branded” their cause just like a store; people have compared Christabel Pankhurst to a saleswoman or advertising agent
• feminism used the tools of commercial culture as well as supported consumer culture (the feminist publications incl info about shopping in London), and capitalists commercialized them back, selling suffragist paraphernalia
  • shop owners were mad about window smashing but then settled down, said Pankhurst, even advertising in their publications still
• feminists in early 20th c weren’t the only ones to make this connex: since mid 19th century is was common knowledge about “female independence in the public realm” to say that women in public aren’t fallen women
• feminism and businesses were in the years preceding WWI using the same tactics of advertising, branding, and spectacle
• Why was shopping available for politics? was an “important fault line” in “received notions of stable class and gender identities and clearly demarcated physical spaces” 221
  • when you talk about shopping, you’re talking about urbanization, industrialization, and mass culture and modernity
• Bourgeois women in West End 1850-1914: shopping, pleasure seeker, but not frivolous or inconsequential. Women “occupied and constructed urban space” and “defined or rejected individual or familial identities”
  • as shoppers “central actors in the English economy; the altered the city and ideals of bourgeois femininity; they inhabited and built the public spaces of the modern metropolis”
  • “The public was therefore never a unitary or an autonomous masculine metropolis.” Victorian and Edwardian women in it

Stuff

• Lucy Snowe found pleasure wandering in London alone: elated, freedom
• West End as “pleasurable” place for bourgeois women; was mass entertainment and consumption center from midcentury on
  • qtd: “smart women would never dream of shopping elsewhere”
  • people regularly said back then that it had a special, mysterious air of its own
• She says the pleasure she means is Foucaultian, related to “enforcing and evading power”
• What happened in the West End? Creation of new discourses: of desire, gender,
  • “PUBLIC SPACE AND GENDER IDENTITIES WERE, IN ESSENCE, PRODUCED TOGETHER”
    • shopping as “natural” female pastime
    • shopping as spatial: “a day in Town” involving maybe lunching out, having tea out, seeing a show, going to club or museum…not just about buying
• Victorians: both elated and disturbed by the new shopping crowd: could ruin your family’s respectability, or it’s dangerous
  • after midcentury, bourgeois women goin’ out of the house (parks, museums, local gov, causes and charities and reform)
• de Certeau and Lefebvre (L: city is “a space which is fashioned, shaped, and invested by social activities during a finite historical period”) (de C: “a space is a practiced place”)
  • shopping “creates new attitudes about the city” 6 (but of course somewhat within the limitations of the past and present)
• what types of writing affect understanding of shopping? novels, magazines, newspapers, guidebooks, theater
• West End: for luxuries, seeing and being seen; after midcentury, to bourgeois not just about aristocracy; where mass culture met elite culture and oppositional culture sometimes: it was a balancing act with “no single West End” 9
  • Bond Street had been assoc w/masculine culture (early Victorian women would wait in their carriages b/c women of easy virtue were usually the women assoc w/west end) but this changes by midcentury
• Her position w/in department store studies
  • She says she doesn’t want to take entrepreneurial rhetoric on its own word but situated it w/in larger gender debates
  • shows how entrepreneurs deliberately aligned themselves w/new gender roles: “Civic development and female emancipation”
  • and she wants to look at other public institutions: teashops, restaurants, clubs
  • Says Bowlby and Richards have used Debord’s sense of shopping: “as a matter not of basic items bought for definite needs, but of visual fascination and remarkable sights of things”
    • Richards: comes from Great Exhibition, advertising, illustrated press
    • Bowlby: literary marketplace (Gissing, Zola, Dreiser)
  • She also recognizes that some people don’t say Victorians invented it, ie Mc Kendrick?, Brewer and Plumb’s 18th c study of rise of consumer culture
  • Says that most people have concentrated on the “retailing revolution” when shops expanded, rationalized, innovated
  • Davidoff and Hall have talked about how b/c production distribution and consumption are all related, shopping reveals a lot about bourgeois culture
    • but what she wants to say is that “gender was produced in public” not just private sphere
• Baudrillard, consumption: “the virtual totality of all products and messages constituted in a more or less coherent discourse” (she objects to this “coherent” as I do)
• Her Project: “how gendered identities and physical spaces were were constructed through narratives about consumption” (narratives: incl advertisements, editorials, social crit, legislation, protests)
  • We shouldn’t just ACCEPT nineteenth century discourses about gender (for example, if you use metaphor of seduction for shopping, you reproduced the aggressive male victimizing passive woman; and for example if you take the entrepreneur’s arguments about women’s lib in their spaces, you forget that women were still oppressed in specific ways in consumer societies): people FOUGHT about things THROUGH constructing the shopping woman as something or other.
    • and usually she’s either emancipated or a victim. either or. She follows Victoria de Grazia in saying that instead of accepting that women were either emancipated or oppressed by it, you need to look at “how consumer culture constructed gender roles and power relations” 13
  • Also against Habermas, who sees in the rise of the consumer culture an end of the “true” sphere of rational public discourse. She says that doesn’t describe women’s experiences and “inadvertently” assumes that when women show up in the public space, it is therefore corrupted