Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature 9780822377962

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SENTIMENTAL MATERIALISM

NEW AMERICANISTS

A series edited by Donald E. Pease

SENTIMENTA.L MATERIALISM Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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Lori Merish

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London 2000

©

Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Typeset in Baskerville by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Portions of chapters 2 and 3 are revised versions of previously published articles: " 'The Hand of Revised Taste' in the Frontier Landscape: Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow? and the Feminization of American Consumerism," American Qy-arterly 45, no. 4 (Dec. 1993): 485-523 (reprinted with permission), and "Sentimental Consumption: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Aesthetics of Middle-Class Ownership," American Literary Histlffy8 (Spring 1996): 1-33 (reprinted with permission). 2000

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

INTRODUCTION: The Forms of Cultured Feeling

1 Embodying Gender: Sentimental Materialism in the New Republic 29

2 Gender, Domesticity, and Consumption in the 1830s: Caroline Kirkland, Catharine Sedgwick, and the Feminization of American Consumerism 88

3 Sentimental Consumption: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Aesthetics of Middle-Class Ownership 135

4 Domesticating "Blackness": HarrietJacobs, Sojourner Truth, and the Decommodification of the Black Female Body 191

5 Fashioning a Free Self: Consumption, Politics, and Power in the Writings of Elizabeth Keckley and Frances Harper 229

6 Not "Just a Cigar": Commodity Culture and the Construction ofImperial Manhood 270 CONCLUSION

304

Notes 315 Works Cited 365 Index 383

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes much to the assistance and generosity of countless colleagues, friends, and teachers, and I wish to thank some of them here. This project began as a dissertation, and the guidance and support I received at Berkeley while writing it, as well as the intellectual community there, nourished my thinking from the outset. My intellectual and personal debts at Berkeley are numerous; the greatest is to my dissertation director, Carolyn Porter, whose scholarly example, intellectual passions, and abiding and generous belief in the project have been a fundamental source of sustenance. Carolyn has inspired and encouraged me over the years in more ways than she can know. Dell Upton's challenging criticisms and extensive knowledge of material culture studies and American studies scholarship contributed much to this project; his humor and steady encouragement smoothed its course. The late jenny Franchot was an exceptionally generous and gifted second reader; her capacious and vibrant intellect, careful readings, and advice benefited this project in countless ways. jenny's intellectual generosity and engagement and her unflagging commitment to this project immeasurably enriched it, as her friendship enriched my life. Completing the book without her has been a bittersweet accomplishment. Other teachers at Berkeley provided invaluable support and encouragement. I especially wish to thank Alex Zwerdling, Don Friedman, Sam Otter, janet Adelman, Sue Schweik, and Elizabeth Abel. Still others generously read and commented on the project in those early stages: I am grateful to Cathy Gallagher, Tom Laqueur, and especially Mitch Breitwieser, who read the manuscript in its entirety and whose thoughtful criticisms and ongoing belief in the project have at crucial points invigorated me.

The English Deparunent at Miami University has been a vital, sustaining, supportive intellectual environment in which to revise and complete the manuscript. I am grateful to former chair C. Barry Chabot and our current chair, Dianne Sadoff, for their efforts toward creating and fostering such an environment. The intellectual wealth of a lively community of friends and colleagues at Miami has enriched my work: thanks to Alice Adams, Susan Jarratt, Tim Melley, Carolyn Haynes, Fran Dolan, Edgar Tidwell, FrankJordan, Sheila Croucher, Mary Frederickson, Kim Dillon, Susan Morgan, Kate Rousmaniere, Mary Cayton, Keith Tuma, Laura Mandell, Kerry Powell, Scott Shershow, Cheryl Johnson, Vicki Smith, Jim Creech, and, most especially, Mary Jean Corbett and Kate McCullough for comraderie, inspiring conversation, and friendship. Former and current graduate students at Miami-especially Jill Swiencicki, Jennifer Thorington-Springer, Cara Ungar, and Malea Powellhave challenged me to refine and clarify my arguments. For their comments on portions or all of the manuscript I wish to thank Mary Jean Corbett, Scott Dykstra, Bruce Burgett, Glenn Hendler, Ann Cvetkovich, Jay Fliegelman, Kate McCullough, Anne Goldman, Barry Chabot, Karen Jacobs, Laura Mandell, Elizabeth Young, Gordon Hutner, Annmarie Adams, Richard Hardack, Liza Kramer,Judith Rosen, Cynthia Schrager, Mary Caraway,Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Margit Stange, and Cindy Weinstein, and my Miami reading group, Susan Jarratt, Vicki Smith, and Alice Adams. Dana Nelson and Lynn Wardley, my readers at Duke University Press, balanced astute criticisms and suggestions with warm support for the project and to both of them I am deeply grateful. My appreciation extends as well to my wonderful editors at Duke, Ken Wissoker and Katie Courtland, for their abiding support, professionalism, and good humor in coaxing the manuscript into printed shape. During those seemingly endless final stretches in that process, conversations with Mary Jean Corbett, Ann Cvetkovich, Lori Varlotta, Glenn Hendler, Lynn Wardley, and Bruce Burgett encouraged and challenged me and ultimately helped me see my way. Family and friends, especially my mother, Elsie Riccardi Merish, my sister, Nancy Merish, Phil Soules, Julie Buckner, Mike Morris, Bob Gomez, Cay Lang, Yvonne Vowels, Debby Heim, Gloria Esenwein, and Beth Franks resourcefully supplied muchneeded distractions and helped me keep the work in perspective. Lastly, I wish to thank Charles Rose, whose companionship and daily inspirations translate endings into beginnings. For material support at various stages of the writing and revision process, I am grateful to the following: the Woodrow Wilson Foundation

viii Acknowledgments

for a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship; the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at Berkeley for a Dissertation Fellowship; the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust; Miami University, for a semester research leave; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a postdoctoral fellowship in the English Department at Stanford.

Acknowledgments

IX

INTRODUCTION: THE FORMS OF CULTURED FEELING

• A

far-off friend familiar with my research project recently sent me a token of encouragement. A postcard, it pictures a gray, grainy photo of a woman's hand, fingers curved around a placard. Emblazoned in white on the red placard is the sentence, "I shop therefore I am." As though ironically endorsing the postcard's suggestion of an essential, metaphysical link between consumption and femininity, my friend added no words of her own, only signing its reverse side with an uncharacteristic flourish. I begin with this reference to contemporary artist Barbara Kruger's well-known piece, parodying the Cartesian cogito, because it wittily invokes the gendered economy of subjectivity central to this book. Until recently, capitalism has usually been studied as a system of production: reflecting a bias in political economy and classical Marxism, economic historians have focused on the development and impact of capitalist production and the history oflabor while ignoring "the demand side" of the "supply-demand equation."! Max Weber's Protestant ethic thesis, which has powerfully shaped subsequent studies of bourgeois ideology (and which Weber understood as especially relevant to American capitalism), defines the "spirit of capitalism" from the point of view of capitalist producer, bound by the pathology of capitalism to the severe requirements of reinvestment and accumulation. But such studies of economic processes and the subjects they constitute and engender are, as Kruger hints, invariably incomplete. Scholarly attention has turned to the demand side in recent decades, following the groundbreaking theoretical work of the Frankfurt School. Cultural and social historians have provided comprehensive accounts of the birth and historical development of an American con-

sumer culture, while materialist and postmodern critics have provided compelling theoretical analyses of its contemporary social forms. Sentimental Materialism builds on as well as revises this body of scholarship. Contemporary cultural historians locate the emergence of mass consumption in late-nineteenth-century America, while social historians point to the "feminization" of middle-class consumerism by the midnineteenth century. Investigating cultural representations of an "ethic" offeminine consumption by the late eighteenth century, SentimentalMaterialism identifies the discourses that promoted these historical developments and their inseparability from emerging, historically specific forms of gender. 2 Materialist and postmodern theorists examine the complexities of consumer subjectivities and practices: identifying diverse consumer styles and subcultures in contemporary consumer culture, they describe modes of resistance (as well as complicity) available to the postmodern consumer. Providing a prehistory of consumer subjectivity and agency, this book maps the discursive processes through which commodities first became identified as privileged vehicles of subjective expression and civic identification. 3 Sentimental Materialism demonstrates that the feminization of consumption in the late eighteenth century partook of new ideas, derived from eighteenth-century pietistic Protestantism and the emerging political discourse of liberalism, about gender, women's role in the public sphere, and the "civilizing" power of an array of mediating material forms - including luxury commodities and the bodies of "refined" and gracious women. 4 My thesis, concisely put, is that the sentimental discourses of consumption studied here instated a particular form ofliberal "political subjectivity" and an identificatory logic interior to that subjectivity that is played out, rather than analyzed, in contemporary criticism about sentimental literature. 5 To unpack that logic of sentimental identification, I trace discursive processes through which middle-class consumption was produced in tandem with a new ideal of domestic womanhood. My analysis focuses on the affiliated emergence of an ethic of feminine consumption and the literary genre of domestic fiction, in which domestic material culture is often depicted in great detail, and in which personal possessions are endowed with characterological import. Part of the cultural work of domestic fiction, I demonstrate, was to construct equivalences between material and subjective "refinement"between commodity and psychological forms-while suppressing the marketplace orientation of "private" life, often by advertising a distinction between home and market. Reinventing capitalist economic and commodity structures as the forms of interiority proper to "private," 2

Sentimental Materialism

domestic life, these novels helped write into existence a modern consumer psychology in which individuals "express themselves" through consumption and "identify" with personal possessions. Recovering these affinities between market laws and middle-class personal life and tracing their political effects, Sentimental Materialism addresses persistent critical questions about the politics of nineteenthcentury women's fiction. To anticipate a complicated argument developed throughout this book, sentimental narratives engender feelings of power as well as submission endemic to liberal political culture; they thus instantiate a particular form ofliberal political subjedion, in which agency and subordination are intertwined. 6 Specifically, as codified within eighteenth-century sentimental historical narratives and nineteenthcentury domestic fictions, sentimental sympathy prescribed forms of paternalism - specifically, of "benevolent" caretaking and "willing" dependency - suited to a liberal-capitalist social order that privileged individual autonomy and, especially, private property ownership. A particular reformulation of traditional models of political organicism within an individualist social framework, one that recast interdependency in psychological, affective terms, sentimental sympathy encompassed both a recognition of social hierarchy and a sense of spontaneous, heartfelt assent to power, thus reinventing political hierarchy as psychological norms reproduced within the intimate recesses of the desiring subject. 7 Critics of sentimental literature have often pointed out that sympathy conventionally operates across a status divide: typical objects of sympathy in these narratives are children, slaves, the poor, the disabled; and in sentimental narratives, it is the sympathy of the empowered for the disempowered, the "strong" for the "weak," the fully human for the dehumanized, that is enlisted as socially and ethically salient. (The "weak" in sentimental texts have ethical primacy through their intimate knowledge of suffering, a sign of Christ-like authenticity, but they have nothing politically useful to learn from the "strong"; becoming "civilized" in these texts entails a willing renunciation of power over others, cast in bodily terms, and marks the sublimation of aggression into sympathetic desire.) Sentimental narratives present a deeply conservative, paranoid view of power: power is figured as dangerous and intrusive, its effects uncertain and perhaps uncontrollable (power can hurt); satisfaction and ethical value lie in the voluntary, unregulated, deeply felt exchanges of interpersonal life. As a particular code of identification, sentimental sympathy can seem to neutralize the relations of political inequality it upholds; indeed, inequities structured into sympathetic identification are rendered invisible in theological and philosophical texts where symIntroduction

3

pathy is elevated into an inherent moral good. Similarly, the social, structural determinants of the bonds of sympathy and sentimental caretaking - the social, civil production of the "strong," the designation of some individuals as politically and economically empowered and capable of remedying the pain of others-are rendered invisible by the construction of sympathy as a spontaneously experienced emotion.8 I argue below that sentimental sympathy promotes a deeply felt psychic investment in proprietary power over, and control of, objects of love, that I call "sentimental ownership." Constructed as an autonomous emotional response, sen timen tal ownership is a fantasy of in timate possession that is in factlike the "free market" itself-produced and sustained by laws and economic policies. In a sense, sentimental ownership fosters those unspoken but deeply felt feelings of entitlement within liberal society-of male privilege, white privilege, middle-class privilege - that are both naturalized and envisioned as in the best interests of all. It represents both an enactmen t and a disavowal of proprietary desire in the social realm. Sentimental sympathy, in this reading, is not a moral value; it is a significant element in those "affect reforms" through which the requirements of a capitalist market society were reproduced within individuals as the very stuff of subjectivity, and a means through which middle-class political hegemony was secured. I argue below that sentimental narratives themselves helped promote the emotional norms, and helped constitute the forms of subjectivity that they envision as the psychological basis of civil society. Extending Michel Foucault's analysis of how discourses of sexuality at once produce and regulate sexual desires and identifications, I envision sentimental ownership as a particular inscription of emotion, an eroticized formation of proprietary and political desire that sentimental narratives both describe and constitute.9 Supplying the passional, erotic basis for both market society and what historians call the "companionate family," sentimental historical and literary fictions construct market capitalism and middle-class personal life as mutually determining spheres, each dependent on the other, and they inscribe sympathy as the spontaneous emotional faculty that enables the flourishing of both. Delineating a psychology of caretaking and sentimental cherishing, narrative inscriptions of sentimental ownership promote a passional investment in property, ascribing the accumulation of goods ethical value and marking as socially "progressive" a transition from a subsistence to a capitalist market economy. Specifically, sentimental ownership subtends a psychology of the "family wage," in which power is exclusively defined as the power of ownership (of labor and

4

Sentimental Materialism

property), and in which female economic "agency" as market subjects (as consumers) is tied to the agency of the male "breadwinner" and located within the constraints of the what one legal scholar terms "possessive domesticity"; while sympathy diffuses the inequities of economic dependency through norms of emotional interdependency.lO SignifYing "care" of an object in both the ethical and aesthetic senses of the term, "taste" thus constitutes in these texts a sign of civility and socialized desire. In my reading, these narratives define a psychology of ownership that is both conservative and defensive: the desire for control over, and psychic investment in, domestic possessions is an index of a psychic sense of futility in the larger social realm, and the intensified affective investment in "possessive domesticity" marks a corresponding reduction in the sphere of effective social power and agency. Sentimental caretaking can thus be seen as a civil(izing) ritual in which feelings of political powerlessness are both enacted and held at bay; it thus both performs, and aims to redress, what Wendy Brown has termed the "woundedness" of the liberal subject. l l Exhibiting while managing the dynamic ofliberal political subjection, sentimental ownership can contain feelings of dependency, and promote feelings of agency, in liberal political subjects, modulating the emotions of interpersonal life in a social realm where sites of power are diffused and multiple. Gender is a crucial political category in sentimental texts and in the production of sentimental ownership as the felt content of liberal agency: the political inscription of sentimental ownership depends on, and is inseparable from, a specific, and racialized, ideology of gender. Although it upholds male power and authority, sentimental ownership, or "taste," is envisioned in these texts as the natural property of women, spontaneously originating in the natural love and caretaking of the mother-child bond - a construction with complex political and social effects. The tie between sentimental ownership and reproduction is crucial, and clarifies the inextricability of the sentimental history of taste from the history of sexuality: the proprietary, domestic construction of sympathy discussed above regulates "taste" in accord with the demands of domesticity and middle-class intimacy, social forms (like the family wage) under contest in the revolutionary era and consolidated by the 1830s. What constituted in Hannah Foster's late-eighteenth-century novel, The Coquette, discussed in chapter 1, a didactic warning against its protagonist's "promiscuous" investment in (multiple and varied) objects of desire, a warning cast partly in political and social terms, would become, in the sentimental writings from the 1830S discussed in chapter 2,

Introduction

5

an investment in sentimental cherishing of domestic "objects" cast in a wholly different, moral and psychological, register. 12 In eighteenthcentury Scottish writings, sentimental, domestic ownership regulates the male homoerotics of the market and the proliferation of market tastes, while by the 1830s, sentimental ownership helped regulate the erotics of the wage labor market, sanitizing labor of the obligations of interpersonal intimacy and differentiating the contracts and bodily claims of wage work from the eroticized contractual bonds of domestic life. 13 The erotics and bonds of wage labor were also managed by the emerging, ideologically freighted distinction between "public" and "private," which served as a prophylactic between forms of intimate bondage and the purported, public rationality of liberal political and economic subjects. (It is precisely this [ideological] distinction between erotic bondage and "free labor" that Marx challenged in his well-known assertion that "prostitution is only a specijicexpression ofthe general prostitution of the laborer.") 14 Finally, as I emphasize below and throughout this project, the intimate bonds produced by sentimental ownership were also naturalized and managed through a symbolics of racial difference, which helped distinguish the bonds of free labor from enslavement and feminine domestic dependency from female sexual slavery. As a code signifying both identification and desire, sentimental ownership helped constitute and circulate particular forms of desire within liberal society: specifically, it regulates the historically shifting distinction between being and wanting, the desire to be and the desire to possess, by at once facilitating social identifications and producing social differences-all the while obscuring its own role in the production of erotic norms byappealing to sympathy as a form of spontaneous recognition. In the chapters that follow, I chart out the contested domestication of feminine taste and the corollary construction of the feminine consumer as a new civic identity for women and site of sentimental identification, a discursive process with important consequences for the emergence and ideological justification of commercial society, and for the expansion and feminization of consumption. Inscribing these new constructions of feminine consumption and taste and at times revealing their ideological contradictions, domestic fictions played a key role in the formation and dissemination of capitalist norms of personal life, facilitating those processes through which, in Judith Williamson's words, people's "wants and needs" were "translated into the form[s] of consumption."15 But first, I will situate my argument in contemporary theoretical debates about the politics of feminine consuming, in order to draw out some additional implications of my analysis. 6

Sentimental Materialism

The Politics ofFeminine Consumption

For the past three decades, Marxist and materialist feminists have reevaluated the political and economic stakes of feminine consumer desires and practices. In an important early example of this reassessment, Ellen Willis took issue with what was, by 1970, a familiar analysis of consumers as unwitting victims prone to the psychological manipulations of advertisers. Willis identifies what would become the most significant areas of contemporary theoretical debate. Questioning the "popular theory of consumerism" -namely, the leftist theory of commodity consumption as mass manipulation - Willis challenges the class elitism and sexism it implies, charging that "its basic function is to defend ... the class, sexual and racial privileges" of its white middle-class male adherents. Noting that a primary assumption of this theory is that "the society defines women as consumers, and the purpose of the prevailing media image of women as passive sexual objects is to sell products," Willis makes three important counterclaims. First, she reminds her readers that the locus of oppression resides in the production process, emphasizing that "people have no control over which commodities are produced (or services performed), under what conditions, or how these commodities are distributed." Anticipating a line of analysis pursued by critics such as Janice Radway, she contends that the denigration of consumption as brainwashing denies the real (psychic) needs consumption fulfills, claiming that while the "profusion of commodities" is indeed a "bribe," it constitutes "a genuine and powerful compensation for oppression." Finally, identifying a central concern of Marxist feminist~, Willis asserts that the theory of commodity capitalism as the root of women's oppression elides the role of patriarchy-and elite white men's stake in that system. According to Willis, "Consumerism as applied to women is blatantly sexist. The pervasive image of the empty-headed female consumer constantly trying her husband's patience with her extravagant purchases contributes to the myth of male superiority: we are incapable of spending money rationally; all we need to make us happy is a new hat now and then." She shrewdly notes that "there is an analogous racial stereotype - the black with his Cadillac and his magenta shirts." 16 As Willis indicates, much anticonsumption discourse - from the left and the right - has been sexist and moralistic, informed as often by residual theological values as by a progressive political agenda. The extent to which critiques of consumerism have constituted a gendered discourse is itself telling, suggesting the inextricability of the discursive production of gender from discourses of consumption. A central claim of this study

Introduction

7

is that discourses about consumer culture are always discourses about female desire: since at least the late eighteenth century, consumerism has constituted a principal arena in which forms of female subjectivity and desire have been mapped out, articulated, and contested. As feminist critics of contemporary consumer culture insist, consumerism is a primary site in which femininity is imposed and enforced, and forms of femininity produced; this was no less true for the nineteenth century. In Sentimental Materialism, I demonstrate that the new consumer subject was inseparable from an emerging ideal of ("unproductive") domestic womanhood, and helped uphold the Victorian sex-gender system and its binary classification of sexed beings. Indeed, the production/ consumption dichotomy has historically corresponded with male and female "separate spheres" and has helped constitute those historically specific forms of gender. Since the late eighteenth century, I will show, discourses about the social and political value of consumption have focused on gender as a primary analytic: consumer goods were widely depicted as "feminizing" material forms, instrumental in the production and representation of gendered forms of subjectivity and especially in what one critic calls the "feminization ofwomen."17 One consequence of this binaristic construction of consumption (consuming woman/ productive man) is the tendency of contemporary theoretical and critical analyses to replicate it, focusing on sexual and gender difference as definitive categories of analysis while failing to historicize those very categories. Universalizing historically specific desires, material practices, and privileges (those of "first world," middle-class voluntaristic consumers), studies of consumerism that uncritically recycle this gender binary erase a range of race, class, sexual, and national differences among women, while rendering invisible those women who are not consumers. Informed by the work of feminist theorists, Sentimental Materialism problematizes "woman" as an obvious and homogeneous empirical category to explore how "woman" as discursive category is historically constructed and traversed by more than one axis of difference. IS At the same time, this book insists on interconnections between the discursively constituted forms of gender and their material loci in the densely mediated material practices of industrial and consumer capitalism. It thus calls attention to the systems of value, divisions of labor, and allocations of resources that the social construction of difference helps determine. As Willis indicates, critics of consumer culture of varied political stripes have denounced consumption in part because of its association with the feminine and the private life of the family. As defined within the bourgeois gender hierarchy of public and private, consumption has 8

Sentimental Materialism

been dismissed as apolitical and a form of disparaged women's work - a view that Marxism has done little to dislodge. Emphasizing "productive labor," narrowly defined, as the locus of collective struggle, Marxists often view commodity consumption as outside history, a form of mass distraction that blocks the development of historical consciousness. 19 Marxistfeminists have critiqued both the failure of Marxism to deal adequately with questions of gender and the family, and the bourgeois dismissal of private life as outside politics altogether. In particular, Marxist feminists have contested the privileging of the "narrow, capitalist concept of 'productive labor' " - that is, the wage labor production of surplus for capital- in Marxist analyses of relations of production and exploitation under capitalism, arguing that such a concept ignores women's domestic work and forms of gender inequality (including relations of domestic labor, sexuality, and fertility) essential to the system's operation. 20 As Eli Zaretsky has demonstrated, the construction of the home as a private space segregated from the public, and the confinement of middle-class women to it, was an arrangement produced by capitalism and its social relations of production - as was middle-class subjectivity itself. For Marxist feminists, women's (unpaid) domestic labor, including women's sexual labors (the reproduction of life) and the labor of consumption, are part of the reproduction of labor-power and the creation of surplus value within capitalism. Consumption, therefore, cannot be severed from production: home consumption is part of the production process - part of the reproduction of labor and the class relations that structure capital. Domestic labor (including the labors of consumption) is thus necessary labor; it secures the conditions of existence of capitalism. The (middle-class) feminine consumer charted out in the following chapters marks her distance from material "need" through the display of "taste," signified by fashionable clothing and consumer durables: taste constitutes both an expression of her "subjectivity" and symbolizes her class position and that of her family. From a Marxist feminist perspective, it is clear that part of what domestic consumption reproduces is not merely labor power, but class relations themselves - the social relations of labor, and the unequal allocation of resources, under capitalism. 21 The reevaluations of consumerism by postmodern theorists have several points in common with Marxist feminists' revisionist analyses of women's consumer practices. But the postmodern critique takes the theorization of consumption further, asserting not only the centrality of women's consumption to political and economic life, but the oppositional potential of these practices. This emphasis was implicit in the Frankfurt School's critique: identifying a utopian, liberatory dimension of mass culIntroduction

9

ture, Frankfurt School theorists saw in the commodity form a "utopian wish-image," a clue to the dream-form in which the genuine aspirations of the social collectivity are stored. For example, Theodor Adorno identified the" dual character" ofluxury as its ability to figure social inequities as well as mask class differences. Challenging Thorstein Veblen's dismissal of conspicuous consumption as an expression of ruling-class competition and female domestic enslavement, Adorno contends that "those features ofluxury which Veblen designates as 'invidious,' revealing a bad will, do not only reproduce injustice; they also contain, in distorted form, the appeal to justice." This" dialectic ofluxury" allows consumer culture to be read as its opposite: personal ostentation, seemingly indifferent to the whole of society, can imply a vision of plenitude for everyone, the knowledge that "no individual happiness is possible which does not virtually imply that of society as a whole."22 Similarly, FredricJameson emphasizes the utopian longings in mass cultural forms: "even the most degraded type of mass culture has a [utopian dimension] which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly, critical of the social order from which (as a commodity) it springs." For Jameson, mass culture cannot hope to manipulate the public unless it holds out "some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe. "23 The Frankfurt School's theoretical insights have been taken up by some U.S. critics. Analyzing the appeal of commodity culture for Mrican Americans, Susan Willis argues that Michael jackson's constant makeovers figure a utopian desire for social transformation, narcissistically displaced onto the desire for endless self-transformation. But for the most part, American critics have ignored the social, collective emphasis of the Frankfurt School's critique, embracing the potential of consumerism for individual fan tasy-making and self-fashioning - a tendency that is, I would argue, symptomatic of the sentimental psychologizing of taste, discussed above. 24 Postmodern discourse about consumption as a site of desire and oppositionality often formalizes a notion of voluntaristic consumption that depends on possibilities of consumer "choice" unavailable to most consumers, in the United States and globally, while legitimating the erasure of the production process and the social relations of production from theoretical analysis. As Neil Lazarus argues in his critique ofJean Baudrillard, "Once society is defined exclusively in terms of consumption, those who are not consumers become invisible."25 Whatever the political intentions of their authors, studies that construct consumption as an expression of individual subjectivity and desire formalize the individualist logic of the "free" market, and preclude more comprehensive analyses of the social value, production, and consequences of 10

Sentimental Materialism

consumption - be they economic (involving class inequalities or relations of production in global capitalism), political (involving welfarestate policies), or environmental (involving the waste and destructiveness of the "cult of consumption" and its role in such trends as global warming). Sentimental Materialism tracks the emergence of this individualist conception of consumption, as an expression of "subjectivity" (or what the mid-nineteenth-century author A. J. Downing would term "character") , and the social and material forms such a notion had to displace. In general terms, the discourse of "sentimental consumption" decontexualized commodities from politically and economically contested relations of labor and ownership, and rearticulated them as expressions of the formalized desires of individual consumer "subjects." Defining "taste" in a moral and psychological register and lodging these desires within the individual subject, this discourse obscured the complex social relations in which "tastes" emerge and to which they refer. As Antonio Gramsci writes, "food, dress, housing, and reproducing are elements of social life in which ... the whole complex of social relations are most obviously and widely manifested. "26 These social dimensions are effaced in the texts I analyze, which write consumption as and into a specific liberal "identity politics" - an inscription that assigned consumption civic value while assimilating it to the identificatory processes of liberal subjectivity. In particular, this inscription removed consumption from public negotiation of questions of distributive justice and what Nancy Fraser calls "the politics of needs interpretation. "27 Sentimental consumption's ideology of subjective bonding with possessions reinforced the nuclear family as middle-class culture's privileged social form, even while it helped justify an unequal distribution of resources by appealing to the moral claims of ownership by the privileged few. In other words, the sentimental construction of feminine "taste" has operated to articulate the distribution of economic resources in personal and moral, rather than collective and political, terms. The representation of consumer goods as a means of individual expression and "freedom (of choice)" obscures the social, collective processes through which commodities are invested with value, as well as the concrete material positioning of individuals with differing access to such "freedom." Indeed, I will argue that the critical valorization of consumer "choice" replicates a logic of consumer "subjectivity" and "agency" that the sentimental discourses analyzed here helped produce. Recent scholars have examined the fundamental conflict between republican and democratic ideals and the reality of chattel slavery in the Introduction

11

United States, arguing that the constitutional legitimation of slavery warped the republic from its birth, and produced a contradiction in American national identity and collective consciousness - a contradiction registered in literary discourse. 28 In ways entangled with race, class inequity was another such contradiction, one partially evaded through the utopian logic of the American dream and the myth of American "classlessness" first articulated by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. Intensified and insistently racialized with the Jacksonian establishment of "universal" white male suffrage, this contradiction was masked, in part, by the abstractions of liberalism itself: as feminist political theorists have argued, the subject of liberalism was usually defined as rational and disembodied, a construction that enabled the endorsement of formal "equality" at a remove from material conditions and contributed to an erasure of the historical and material specificity of subject-positions and needs.29 Consumerism was a realm of public representation through which the racial and economic contradictions of American class society were both figured and (partially) resolved. Inscribing a realm of "civilized" materiality, consumption has provided a body for the American liberal subject, at once a realm of desire and a site of state representation and regulation. Indeed, while American democracy and capitalism have been reciprocally defined - sutured under the sign of liberalism - commodity capitalism has been identified as a (if not the) principal material expression of American civic culture and "freedom," and has promoted the state's appeal in sensational, bodily terms. The strength of that appeal was fully understood by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who reportedly asserted that if he could place a single American book in the hands of every Russian, his choice would be the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. 30 Numerous immigrant narratives from the early twentieth century register this conflation of consumption and citizenship, figuring the purchase and ownership of goods as a definitive means of Americanization. For Roosevelt as for many others, commodity consumption has served as a primary means through which individuals come to identify as national subjects and learn to "love" America. 3 ! If consumption is a public erotics, it simultaneously incites disciplinary power-a fact particularly evident in Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who 'UFoUow? in which commodities are instruments through which subjects are disciplined and conscripted into the body politic. Kirkland's text shows that consumer goods were positioned within the realm of the "social," a realm of reform that, in the nineteenth century, was thoroughly entangled with the category "women. "32 As the culture's primary language for representing feminine sentiment and locating the female 12

Sentimental Materialism

body within the social, sentimentalism helped inscribe-and was inscribed within - nineteenth-century constructions of gender, subjectivity, and civil society. Discourses of sentimental consumption encode the complexities of consumer culture's configurations of sex, gender, race, nationality, and power, and produced the female body as a central site of political struggle and contestation. In particular, sentimental consumption contributed to what Foucault calls the "hysterization of the female body": it produced an increasingly sexualized female body - one riddled with desires-while simultaneously promoting norms of taste, "proper" affect, and political and economic discipline. 33 In the nineteenth century, consumerism and its discourses established forms of political mediation through which feminine political subjectivities were defined, constituted, and contested.

Consumption and the Politics ofDomesticity Sentimental Materialism can be situated within the body of historical and literary scholarship, begun in the 1960s with the Annales school, that examines the ideological significance of "personal life. " Drawing on the work of social historians, especially Lawrence Stone, Leonore Davidoff, and Catherine Hall, critics such as Nancy Armstrong and Mary Poovey have studied the cultural and political importance of representations of domesticity and the "domestic woman" in establishing and legitimizing bourgeois power and, indeed, in defining the cultural authority of imperial England. These critics show that several discursive traditions in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented gender difference as the dominant form of social difference, and constructed gender in such a way as to manage, symbolically, other, more overtly political, forms of social identity (such as class and race). As Poovey summarizes one version of this argument, representational "deployments" of the domestic ideal in mid-Victorian England "depoliticize[d] class relations" by "translating class differences into psychological or moral difference," by setting limits to competition, and by "helping subsume individuals of different classes into a representative Englishman, with whom everyone could identify, even if one's interests were thereby obliterated and not served."34 Similarly, Mary Ryan and Stuart Blumin have argued that the emergence of a distinct middle class in nineteenth-century America was largely dependent on the development of the domestic ideal. Ryan's studies of the mid-nineteenth-century "woman's sphere" explore how the middle-class family established boundaries between itself and other

Introduction

13

classes through gender construction as well as through the cultural production of specific kinds of psychological bonds and norms.35 In his work on the emergence of an American middle class, Blumin addresses the changing significance of personal life during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blumin argues, "white collar" families began to perceive "their homes and their domestic strategies to be distinct from those of manual workers, as well as from those fashionables who did not ... aspire to the domestic ideal."36 The pervasive ideology of the middle-class woman's sphere, articulated in an array of discourses, conveyed a newly psychologized understanding of the value of personal life as well as forms of cultural knowledge about what it meant to be fully "human." Building on the work of these scholars, Sentimental Materialism considers the role of domestic consumption in the construction of American personal life and a historically specific politics of gender. In doing so, I attempt to reassert "the specificity of the political content of everyday life and of the individual fantasy-experience and to reclaim it from [the] reduction to the merely subjective."37 What Blumin describes above as a model of middle-class self-definition via discursive differentiation is, according to Gramsci, paradigmatic of the hegemonic task in a class society. In Gramsci's account, a class becomes hegemonic by achieving self-conscious awareness of itself as a class - a process that entails distinguishing that class from competing social groups - as well as by representing its specific interests as "natural" and necessary. My understanding of middle-class self-definition is indebted to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's conception of hegemonyas an "articulatory practice" in which contesting forces attempt to appropriate and reconfigure the signs and symbols of a culture. 38 In many of the texts I consider, "virtuous" middle-class women are identified through a class-inflected symbolics of differentiation, and are constructed in opposition to female characters notably lacking in the interior, emotional endowments of domestic womanhood. 39 But if the hegemonic task of the middle class entailed differentiating itself from alternate social groups, it also entailed incorporating idealized attributes of the previously dominant group - the aristocracy - as a means of ideological legitimacy.40 Chapter 1 examines how late-eighteenth-century middle-class conduct books incorporated aristocratic attributes - such as gentility and politesse-into their version of domestic femininity. In these texts, aristocratic attributes were psychologized, privatized, and identified as the bodily signs of sensibility and psychological refinement. Politeness, for example, was often described as a "natural" capacity for spontaneous emotional response rather than a cultivated social code. 14 Sentimental Materialism

Class-specific forms of bodily life were endowed with emotional and moral import, and reconfigured as a semiotics of "civilized" subjectivity. As Armstrong argues, following Foucault, the "political history" of the middle-class subject is organized around just such a semiotics of bodily life, and is inseparable from symbolic practices that affirmed the importance of sexuality and the care of the body - that created, in other words, a " 'class' body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race."41 That " 'class' body" was also endowed with "taste": the political history of the middle class entailed a particular semiotics of private ownership - one articulated through novel constructions of gender and sex. For instance, numerous texts from the period represented mobile property, rather than land, as the basis of civil society, facilitating new forms of civic identification for both men and women. Discourses of luxury played a crucial role in this restructuring of political subjectivities: conventionally described as forms of personal property exceeding "mere" bodily needs for food, clothing, and shelter and thus satisfying aesthetic and ethical ("subjective") rather than physical wants, luxury goods were endowed with emotional import, and were being (re) constructed as signs of a specifically feminine civil subjectivity. Numerous antebellum domestic manuals and novels promoted an ideal of "pious consumption": tasteful domestic objects were frequently described as "spiritualizing," "civilizing," and "humanizing" the self, engaging an individual's sensibilities and "refining" her emotional repertory.42 Overturning traditional Calvinist and civic humanist sanctions against luxury, tastemakers such as A. J. Downing contended that an aesthetically pleasing domestic environment presents an "unfailing barrier against vice, immorality, and bad habits." For Downing, "a good house (and by this I mean a fitting, tasteful, and significant dwelling) is a powerful means of civilization"; it exerts a "moral influence" and "elevates" character, resulting in the "refinement" of sensibility and manners which "distinguishes a civilized from a coarse and brutal people. "43 Pious consumption figured prominently in American nationalist rhetoric as well as discourses of internal and external imperialism. Rhetorics of pious consumption could serve to distinguish the "human" and "civilized" from the "nonhuman" and "savage" (to demarcate the "civilized" American) or justify imperial expansion in the name of maintaining a "humanizing" standard oflivingfor the "civilized" few. In nineteenth- ~1 uli Hurt Ululi "i h t Ntr ly. hu,t( f'nncllintJ

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