Taste and Power: furnishing modern France 9780320213654

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Representation, Style, and Taste: The Politics of Everyday Life
Part One: The Paradox of Absolutism: The Power of the Monarch's Limit
1. The Courtly Stylistic Regime: Representation and Power under Absolutism
2. Negotiating Absolute Power: City, Crown, and Church
3. Fathers, Masters, and Kings: Mirroring Monarchical Power
Part Two: From Style to Taste: Transitions to the Bourgeois Stylistic Regime
4. Revolutionary Transformation: The Demise of the Culture of Production and of the Courtly Stylistic Regime
5. The New Politics of the Everyday: Making Class through Taste and Knowledge
6. The Separation of Aesthetics and Productive Labor
Part Three: The Bourgeois Stylistic Regime: Representation, Nation, State, and the Everyday
7. The Bourgeoisie as Consumers: Social Representation and Power in the Third Republic
8. Style in the New Commercial World
Missing page 322-323
7. The Bourgeoisie as Consumers: Social Representation and Power in the Third Republic
10. Style, the Nation, and the Market: The Paradoxes of Representation in a Capitalist Republic
Epilogue: Toward a Mass Stylistic Regime: The Citizen-Consumer
Bibliography
General Index
Index of Names

Citation preview

Taste and Power

STUDIES ON THE HISTORY OF SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Vtctona E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Editors i. Politics. Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, by Lynn Hunt 2. The People of Parts: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century, by Daniel Roche 3. Pont-St-Pierre. 1398-1789: Lordship, Community, and Capitalism in Early Modem France, by Jonathan Dewald 4. The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual. Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania, by Gail Kligman 5. Students. Professors, and the State in Tsanst Russia, by Samuel D. Kassow 6. The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt 7. Art Nouveau in Fm-de-Siecle France: Politics. Psychology, and Style. by Debora L. Silverman 8. Histones of a Plague Year: The Social and the Imaginary in Baroque Florence, by Giulia Calvi 9. Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia, by Lynn Maliy 10. Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921, by Lars T. Lih 11. Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble, by Keith P. Luria 12. Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810, bv Carla Hesse 13. Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England, by Sonya O. Rose 14. Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907. by Mark Steinberg 15. Bolshevik Festivals. 1917-1920. by James von Geldem 16. Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City, by John Martin 17. Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria, by Philip M. Soergcl 18. Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Pre-Revolutionary France, by Sarah Maza 19. Hooliganism: Crime. Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1014. by Joan Neuberger 20. Possessing Nature: Museums. Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, by Paula Findlen 21. Listening in Pans: A Cultural History, by James H. Johnson 22. The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain. 1640-1914, by Richard Biernacki 23. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, by Anna Clark 24 Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France, by Leora Auslandci

Taste and Power Furnishing Modern France LEORA AUSLANDER

.24591 I h tn JV'

University of California Press BERKELEY

LOS ANGELES

LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press. Ltd London. England

C 1996 by the Regents of the University of California An earlier version of part of chapter 6 of this book appeared in "Perceptions of Beauty and the Problem of Consciousness Parisian Furniture Makers." in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, cd. Lenard Berlanstein (Urbana and Chicago- University of Illinois Press. 1993). Part of chapter 7 appeared in "After the Revolution Recycling Ancien Regime Style in the Nineteenth Century," m Re-creating Authority m Revolutionary France, ed. Bryant T. Ragan and Elizabeth Williams (New Brunswick N.I.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Library of Congress Catalogmg-in-Publication Dau

Auslandcr. Leers. Taste and power Auslandcr

furnishing modem France / Leoni

p. cm.—(Studies on the history of society and culture; 24) Includes bibliographical references and index

ISBN 978-0320-21365-4 (pbk alk paper) 1. France—Civilization. 2 Furniture—France—StylesSocial aspects. 3 Social change—France. 4. Politics and culture—France 5. France—Politics and government— 1789I. Title. II Senes. DC33 A87 *996 944—dezo 95 5 *7 CIP

Panted in the United States of Amenca

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The piper used in this publication meet * the minimum

*requirement of ansi/niso Z39 48-1992 (a 1997) I Permanence of Paper)

To my mother, Bernice Liberman Auslandcr, and to the memory of my father, Maurice Auslandcr

This publication has been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, independent federal agency.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix ••• Xlll

INTRODUCTION

Representation, Style, and Taste: The Politics of Everyday Life PART ONE

The Paradox of Absolutism: The Power of the Monarch's Limits 1. 2. 3.

PART TWO

The Courtly Stylistic Regime: Representation and Power under Absolutism

35

Negotiating Absolute Power: City, Crown, and Church

75

Fathers, Masters, and Kings: Mirroring Monarchical Power

110

From Style to Taste: Transitions to the Bourgeois Stylistic Regime 4.

5. 6.

29

141

Revolutionary Transformation: The Demise of the Culture of Production and of the Courtly Stylistic Regime

147

The New Politics of the Everyday: Making Class through Taste and Knowledge

186

The Separation of Aesthetics and Productive Labor

22s

part three

The Bourgeois Stylistic Regime: Representation, Nation, State, and the Everyday 255 7.

The Bourgeoisie as Consumers: Social Representation and Power in the Third Republic

8.

Style in the New Commercial World

9.

After the Culture of Production: The Paradox of Labor and Citizenship

10. Style, the Nation, and the Market: The Paradoxes of Representation in a Capitalist Republic

261 306

351

377

EPILOGUE

Toward a Mass Stylistic Regime: The Citizen-Consumer

415

Bibliography

427

General Index

469

Index of Names

493

Illustrations

Print of Marie-Antoinette Buffet, first half of sixteenth century The king's bedroom in the Grand Trianon at Versailles Cabinet on stand, Paris, ca. 1675-80, attributed to Andre-Charles Boulle 5. Writing and toilet table, Paris, ca. 1750, attributed to Jean-Frangois Oeben 6. Commode, Paris, Pierre II Migeon 7. Center table, Paris, ca. 1745 8. Table, probably Paris, ca. 1700-30 9. Commode, Paris, 1769, Gilles Joubert 10. Watteau de Lille, Le depart du volontaire 11. Anon., late eighteenth century, Sacrifice a la patrie 12. Small writing table, Paris, Cramer 13. Cabinet, Paris, ca. 1785, attributed to Philippe-Claude Montigny 14. Andre-Jacob Roubo, L'art du menuisier-ebeniste 15. Writing table (detail), late eighteenth century, Bernard Molitor 16. Andre-Jacob Roubo, L'art du menuisier-ebeniste 17. Agricol Perdiguier, Le livre du compagnonnage 18. Charles Percier, sketchbook 19. Andre-Charles Boulle, engravings 20. Andre-Jacob Roubo, L'art du menuisier-ebeniste 21. Masterpiece: model of a secretaire, Louis XVI 22. Wooden-shoe tree: compagnon's masterpiece 23. "Trembleur": compagnon's masterpiece 24. Armoire, probably Paris, end of eighteenth century (detail)

i. 2. 3. 4.

36 42 44 46

55

56 57 58 69 71 72. 73

*

74 80

81 83 113 114 115 117 127 134 136

149 ix

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I

Illustrations

25. Commode, probably Paris, during the Revolution 26. Commode, Paris, First Empire 27. Chest of drawers, ca. 1800 28. Small tier table, Paris, ca. 1800, Jean-Baptiste Gamichon 29. Cabinet, Paris, Restoration, Jacob-Desmalter's shop 30. Secretaire, Paris, ca. 1824, attributed to Alexandre-Louis Bellange 31. Table, Paris, 1830, Louis Francois Puteaux 32. Gothic-style chairs, Paris, 1830s 33. Chauffeuse, Paris, 1850s or 1860s, in the style of Louis XV 34. Armchair, Paris, ca. 1735-40 35. Lauteuil a gondole, Paris, 1850s or 1860s 36. Meuble d'appui, Paris, 1850s or 1860s 37. Chair: compagnon's masterpiece 38. Chairs exhibited at 1889 Universal Exhibition 39. Assorted buffets from the maison Krieger 40. Meuble d'appui, Paris, ca. 1880, Beurdeley 41. Cabinet, Paris, 1788, Guillaume Benneman 42. Desk, Paris, late eighteenth century, Adam Weisweiler 43. Small writing table, probably mid-nineteenth century 44. Petite-bourgeoise's interior. Photograph by Eugene Atget 45. Shopclerk's interior. Photograph by Eugene Atget 46. Financier's interior. Photograph by Eugene Atget 47. Assorted chairs, Louis XHI-style, from Le carnet du vieux bois 48. Louis XIV and Louis XVI canapes, from L'ameublement 49. Henri II—style dining room, Paris, early twentieth century 50. Grand salon of Lucie Dekerm 51. Young girl's bedroom, maison Roll 52. Two bedroom sets, maison Krieger 53. Armoire, Paris, 1900, Guimard 54. Shelf unit in the style of Louis XIII, Le carnet du vieux bois 55. Advertisement for C. Balny 56. Advertisement for Dufayel 57. Advertisement for Dufayel 58. Bedroom furniture in varnished pine, maison Krieger 59. Bedroom, Louis XVI-style, maison Schmit 60. Advertising photograph of a salon, maison Schmit

150

*55 156 *57 161

162 163 166

280 281 282 283 286 288

Illustrations 61. Drawing of an armoire, maison Schmit 62. Advertisement forMallet freres 63. Advertisement for"Le Precieux" 64. Advertisement fora convertible chair-bidet 65. Advertisement forMercier 66. Advertisement forMercier 67. Advertisement for maison Roll 68. Advertisement for maison Barabas

I

xi 338 343 346 347 394 395 396 397

Acknowledgments

Friends in Paris and the United States have sustained me and this work over the years it has traveled with me. I am delighted to be able to give them the finished product at last. Fran^oise Basch has been an example of in­ tellectual accomplishment and chutzpah, political commitment, and great generosity in friendship. Marie-Noelle Bourguet's warmth, welcome, and gifts as a historian have meant a great deal to me. Jacqueline Feldman has watched the unfolding of this book in Paris, in Normandy, and finally in Auvergne where a crucial draft was finished. Our conversations about feminism, science, and relativism have much enriched this work. I talked through many of the manuscript's initial stages with Maurizio Gribaudi and learned much from his intellectual curiosity and rigor. Cathy Kudlick's integrity, intelligence, and humor have been a great pleasure. While she has not read much of this book, our many conversations about the doing of history have made it different. Margaret Nickels and Moishe Postone have been great friends and intellectual comrades. Besides the good times, they were both very much "there" at a critical and difficult moment; without their friendship the book might not have seen the light of day. Tip Ragan has been a steady friend and colleague; his comments on the section dealing with the Old Regime and on an article that became part of part 3 were invaluable. Emily Stone has known me since before this book ever started. She has been enthusiastic about a project whose point must have often seemed rather mysterious. Annette Wilson has also known me forever and often wondered what I was doing—she will be glad to know that it's done. Marty Ward has been a good colleague, critic, swimming companion, and friend over the last few years. Her criticisms on the manuscript were most helpful. With Michelle Zancarini-Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini 1 have shared many evenings of riotous laughter, intense political and intellectual discussion, and encounters with goats. Their thoughts on the meaning of nations and nationalism in France have changed this book.

xiv

/

Acknowledgments

To my friends, colleagues, and students at the University of Chicago I owe a debt of gratitude. George Chauncey, Kathy Conzen, Norma Field, Michael Geyer, Jan Goldstein, James Grossman, Harry Harootunian, Linda Kerber, Peter Novick, and Bill Sewell, especially have provided consistent support and encouragement, even when this project caused me to disappear from circulation. Colin Lucas kindly read the first part and helped save me from egregious error. The men with whom I worked at F. W. Dixon in Woburn, Massachu­ setts, and my grandmothers, Rose and Ida, provided the original impulse for this book. If they were to read it, I hope they all would find it interesting. Lenard Berlanstein, Geoffrey Crossick, Victoria de Grazia, Gerhard Haupt, Yves Lequin, Philip Nord, and Michelle Perrot all gave crucial help and support at various moments, in various ways, to this project. I thank them all. Karl Bahm, Robert Beachy, Louis Beilin, Paul Betts, Kate Chavigny, Allan Christy, Alex Dracobly, Jim Miller, Lisa Moses, Wendy Norris, Hannah Rosen, Carol Scherer, and Stephanie Whitlock all contributed invaluable research assistance to this book. Katie Crawford and Elisa Camiscioli did a heroic job of tracing down photographs in Paris. I would like also to express my heartfelt thanks to Lynn Hunt, Tom Laqueur, Patricia Mainardi, William Reddy, Donald Reid, and to the three other (anonymous) readers of this manuscript. I was blessed with eight helpful critical reads of this book. It is much better for them. Thanks also to Sheila Levine at the University of California Press who believed in this book before it existed. Also at the press, Tony Hicks has helpfully shep­ herded the book through the production process and Edith Gladstone has done much to lighten and streamline my prose. A School of Social Sciences7 fellowship, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, allowed me a crucial year of extraordinary calm at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I am deeply grateful for the gift of that time. Jacques Revel made possible a month-long stay at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris where I tested very early versions of some of the ideas that ended up in this book. My thanks. The Council for European Studies, Fulbright Foundation, FrancoAmerican Foundation, Bourse Chateaubriand, Social Science Research Council, and the Tocqueville Foundation all provided funding for the initial research for this project. Without that generous support this book would not exist. The Social Sciences Division of the University of Chicago has also provided crucial funding for some of the research in this book.

Acknowledgments

xv

I he Maison Rinck was generous enough to allow me to forage through it*, records. The Schmit company let me take away a small portion of its l the tasteful. My maternal grandparents maintained the taste of their youth throughout their lifetimes. Each apartment was furnished with .1 white "French Provincial" bedroom set, formica kitchen table and chairs, mahogany veneer living-room furniture in an "English" style, convertible sofa bed, a lazy-boy, and a TV. Despite the putative class status achieved through my grandfather's job as a professor, they continued to live with aesthetic norms that would probably be described by a sociologist as working-class. Critical to their senses of self, and to the selves they created and represented through their furnishings, were their religious identities, their geographic stability, their interpretation of gender roles, and the constii ution of their social world. Rose and Sam were orthodox Jews and did not leave the city of their youth until they retired to a microcosm of it in Florida. They participated in Jewish social organizations and lived essen­ tially among other Jews who were from similar backgrounds. My grand­ lather talked little about domestic things; my grandmother had a more elaborated discourse about what she was buying and why. Dominating her conversation were references to what her friends and relations had bought and where. Rose bragged about getting "good value" on something and was ashamed of expensive purchases. To her, they were admissions of weak­ ness. Discoveries of bargains she shared with her friends, and possessing exactly the same thing as her neighbor was more than acceptable—it was a pleasure. Thus Rose used furniture, clothing, and food to anchor herself and her family firmly in the social context into which she and many of her generation had moved in her young adulthood during the 1920s. They had escaped from poverty and their children would, to their parents' pride, establish themselves firmly in the middle class. My maternal grandparents themselves, however, were committed to the maintenance of the commu­ nity of their youth, a community that had started as working-class and now cut across class differences. They used goods far more in the hopes of resembling their neighbors than in the hopes of differentiating themselves from them. Consumer solidarity was highly prized, and competition through goods frowned upon.

Introduction

My paternal grandparents, in contrast, broke with the aesthetic of their youth and created a new definition of the tasteful. Their dwellings could not have looked less like those of my mother's family. Ida and Charles moved to Philadelphia and established a "modern" household. By the 1950s, they had acquired a house combining Danish modern with American "contemporary" furniture and even included a few custom pieces. The dining room was furnished with a matching contemporary pearwood set— table, chairs, sideboard, breakfront—in a moderately ornate design. The living room had carefully unmatched upholstered furniture with solid wood legs and arms, a glass and metal coffee table, and custom veneer cubes and display cabinets for some of their favorite crystal sculptures. Their bedroom was in Danish satinwood veneer, and the guestroom had also been purchased at Scandinavian Design. Furthermore, the basement housed a small dancing studio, with a hardwood floor and a very sophisticated sound system. Any adequate explanation for my paternal grandparents' taste would have to include my grandmother's unusual role in taking over her father's business (and debts), the subsequent move from New York, their relative financial ease, their secularism, my grandfather's intellectual ambitions, and their love of dancing. On first glance, it would appear that they were trying to assimilate. They stopped practicing their religion, they bought international-style furniture, they had non-Jewish friends. But that is too simple; they did not want to be absorbed into WASP culture. Rather, they wanted to distinguish themselves from others for whom they might be mistaken (like my maternal grandparents). My grandmother appropriated from the dominant (i.e., middle-class WASP) culture its words of aesthetic praise—simplicity, elegance, quality, purity of line, originality—but gave different meanings to those words.21 Anything "simple" was beautiful, anything "gaudy" was ugly. (She deemed most of what Rose bought gaudy.) Judgments with which most members of the dominant classes would be in agreement, until they saw the objects in question. Ida took immense pride in her house and garden and was quick to point out the uniqueness, cost, and specialness of her acquisitions and interior design. Like Rose, Ida sought to use goods to create and consolidate social ties. But, unlike Rose, she chose to weave those ties by differentiating herself from the others, highlighting her individuality.

21. See the contributions to Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, cds., Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (London, 1976).

Representation, Style, and Taste

Both couples, then, used their material goods as a means of selfrepresentation.22 Beyond the family, the primary audience for their do­ mestic interiors was other Jews, often of similar geographic and class backgrounds. Despite one couple's secularism and the other's piety, both i on pies wanted their children to marry Jews and both wanted to be buried m |ewish cemeteries. Both had explicitly Jewish objects displayed prom­ inently in their homes. My maternal grandmother bought and used things io ci cate solidarity with others with whom she identified and to protect and i cin force those relationships in the face of material difference. My paternal giandmother created an interior that distanced her from those she feared he resembled and sought to flee through an insistence on the values of individuality, originality, modernity, and internationalism. But it was as much a process of differentiation from, as emulation of, the dominant (til lure, and both processes involved a complex use of objects and of the words to describe those objects. My grandmothers' consumer practices did not simply reflect their place in the world; they also defined that world and made that place. Those consumer practices were not limited to the acquisition or ari. mgement of the goods themselves; the uses to which they were discurively put were equally critical. My maternal grandmother was terrified of landing out, of being different, of breaking rank with the friends and relations of her youth. She not only bought the same things they bought, hui she talked about them in the same language and criticized those who deviated from the norm. My paternal grandmother either did not want to, m did not believe she could, be contained within the community in which he had come of age; she found other objects and other words with which io lalk about them. Yet both used the language of taste as a language of ocial judgment, of inclusion and of exclusion. When they grew irritable with each other, their critiques were often in terms of taste. My grandmothers, then, were anything but passive consumers, quietly buying what clever advertisers suggested to them. They were also doing something more complicated than dissolving unobtrusively into. the American melting pot.23 The identities they constructed and expressed 22. For a parallel discussion, but in contemporary Sweden, see Jonas Frykman .md Orvar Lofgren, Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Li/e, trans. Alan Crozier (New Brunswick, 1987), 148-50. 23. Stuart Ewen's discussion of immigrants' uses of goods in All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York, 1988), 76-77, is thus too simple, in its emphasis on assimilation and "passing," because it reduces immigrants to passive recipients of an ill-defined mainstream American culture. For

14

Introduction

through the deployment of furniture in their homes were complex, frac­ tured, and therefore by no means bounded by class, religion, or social or geographic origins. Even as my paternal grandparents described their taste in terms an American bourgeois of longer standing would recognize, they invented a personal and particular aesthetic. My maternal grandparents, seemingly less innovative in their consumer practices, likewise made a choice: not to produce an aesthetic representation of themselves that might distance them from the people they held dear. They chose to opt out of part of the American dream. Equally important—although by now a truism perhaps—is that this social labor was the responsibility of the women. What relevance do observations about my grandparents have to the furniture makers in Woburn or in nineteenth-century Paris? My grand­ parents deployed their furnishings not simply as a source of sensual plea­ sure, but as a means of social differentiation and as the media to commu­ nicate those differences. Generalizing these observations, I began to ask myself if women had always had the final say on aesthetic matters, and whether furnishings had always been put to such uses. Had people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used consumer goods to construct themselves—if they had, which consumer goods, which people, and what does it mean to "construct oneself "? What was to be made of the relation between what people bought and used and how they and other people talked and wrote about it, between the making and selling of goods and their use after purchase? With these questions in mind I turned again to the ex­ perience of scholarship, but this time to texts on the theory and history of consumerism and on identity formation. There is, by now, a rather massive—economic, anthropological, psy­ chological, sociological, and historical—literature on consumption and con­ sumer practices. Theoretical studies, when they try to find the common­ alities in people's use of objects across time and space, I have found of limited use. This work is often much more contextually and historically specific than its authors seem to realize: being a relatively young literature (in its modern form), it tends to start from consumption under late cap­ italism and unconsciously assumes either the uniqueness or the univer-

a very different example than my grandmothers' of consumers' creative use of objects, see Melanie Wallendorf and Michael D. Reilly, "Ethnic Migration, As­ similation, and Consumption," Journal of Consumer Research 10 (December 1983): 292-302.

Representation, Style, and Taste

/

•i.ility of that formation.24 Yet some of this work has been extremely useful in calling attention to the communicative capacity of objects, in their • • x< hange and in their use.25 Attempts to analyze consumer practices within .1 given time and space at a high level of abstraction have been more helpful m 11.lining the analysis here.26 This work is, however, most developed for i he contemporary European and American world and is significantly less -.in ccssful for distant times and places.27 Furthermore, both the theoretical .mil empirical work on consumerism tend to come from either a liberal or 11 i'll liberal position, assuming the naturalness of demand, the autonomy of ।In- consumer, and the justice of the market, or from a Marxist or neoM.irxist position that is often too critical of modern consumerism without .11 .ireful enough analysis of its particular historical manifestations.28 I find iiciiher approach fully adequate to the questions that troubled me. More concretely, the historical debate over consumerism has concen11 .iicd on three issues: dating the onset of modern consumer practices; the irlrvance of demand as a causal agent for the first and second industrial । evolutions; and the centrality of consumption to the class formation of the Im>uigeoisie. This literature is very rich but, in the case of work done on I ng,land, flawed for my purposes by the underlying agenda of making hi argument for "home demand" as a catalyst for the first industrial

24. Economists and psychologists, in otherwise subtle analyses are most prone 1.. these assumptions: see J. F. Bernard-Becharies, Le choix de consommation: t at tonalite et realite du comportement du consommateur (Paris, 1970); and Mihaly • 11< .zentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge, 1981). 25. Most salient here is Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of । •oods (New York, 1979). 26. Jean Baudrillard, Le systeme des objets (Tournail, 1975); Le miroir de la I' 1 (/Hi t ion (Paris, 1968); and La societe de consommation; also Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford, 1987). 27. An important exception is Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). 28. Striking examples of the liberal approach are Timothy Breen, '"Baubles • I Britain': The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 119 (1988): 73-104; Neil McKendrick, "Home Demand and I lonomic Growth: A New View of the Role of Women and Children in the Industrial Revolution," in Historical Perspectives, ed. Neil McKendrick (London, u*.•,), 152-210; of the Marxist genre see Ewen, All Consuming Images; Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century Prance iHrikclcy, 1982); Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Ap­ pearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. Robert Bock (Minneapolis, 1986).

16

Introduction

revolution.29 Scholars, caught up in the standard-of-living debate, are eager to demonstrate that the industrial revolution was sparked by demand as much as by transformations in production, and that that demand was in England rather than abroad. These arguments become circular: they as­ sume that all people are inherently prone to consume when they can, that ultimately wage levels determine consumer practices and economic take­ off.30 Because of its divorce of the economic from the political, and its naturalization of demand, this work has little relevance to the social and political meaning of consumption 31 Efforts to think about both production and consumption in relation to the forms of political regime—a crucial linkage to an understanding of either—are few. All of this work, the theoretical and the historical, set in Britain, the United States, and on the continent, did not satisfy my desire to understand what my grandmothers were doing in their homes. So I turned to the last of the scholarly literatures concerned with consumerism, in literary, film, and cultural studies, for analysis not just of what people bought but of what those acquisitions meant. This work, much of it feminist, much of it Gramscian or Lacanian in inspiration, some of it derived from the Frankfurt school cultural theorists, focuses on questions of subjectivity, identity, spectatorship, consumer-use, and resistance.32

29. On the uses of consumption in class formation, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago, 1987); Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991); Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981) are especially impressive examples. 30. On the standard of living see Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (New York, 1988); D. E. C. Everseley, "The Home Market and Economic Growth in England, 1750-1780," in Land, Labor, and Population in the Industrial Revolution, ed. E. L. Jones, and G. E. Mingay (New York, 1967). 31. Important exceptions to this general trend are the work of historian Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, 1986); Peter Borsay in "The English Urban Renaissance: The Development of Provincial Urban Culture, c. 1680-1760," Social History 5 (1977); and, in a very different register, the work of Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (Berkeley, 1988). 32. Most notably Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York, 1985); Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, eds., Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (London, 1990); Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, 1987); and Mica Nava, Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth, and Consumerism (London, 1992).

Representation, Style, and Taste

I

^7

h is a literature I find to be very useful, but with one caveat: in some .1