Modernism and the Marketplace

Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen

Alissa G. Karl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415981415
• eBook ISBN: 9781136094743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Though the relationship of modernist writers and artists to mass-marketplaces and popular cultural forms is often understood as one of ambivalence if not antagonism, Modernism and the Marketplace redirects this established line of inquiry, considering the practical and conceptual interfaces between literary practice and dominant economic institutions and ideas.

1 “Just the sensation of spending, that’s the point”:
Jean Rhys’ Marketplaces of Discipline and Desire

In an issue of Vogue magazine a few years back, fashion writer Joan Juliet Buck described her former schoolmate Jane, whose “retro heroine look” made her stand out from the rest of Buck’s London classmates in the 1960s. It wasn’t just that Jane could wear vintage hats from the 1920s and 30s with a unique flair, or that she knew all the latest makeup tips from Paris. Describing “Jane’s pale, pale hands clutching her coat closed at the throat, her Gitanes, her foreign lovers, her reliance on the Café Flore and red wine,” Buck recalls Jane as a woman of “tragic glamour…like a Jean Rhys heroine.” Buck goes on to wax nostalgic about the way that Jane wore her hats, and how eventually big fashion names caught on: “Whether it was Jane influencing people with her look or evidence of a need to connect with tragedy to attain the full force of fashion I don’t know. But it worked, and then it vanished.”¹

That Jane fades into obscurity along with her “tragic glamour” seems almost fitting given that fashion remembers her as the “Jean Rhys heroine” of the 1960s. Equally fitting is how Buck links Jane’s adventurous marginal- ity (she shuttled back and forth between London and Paris, lost her virginity at fifteen to a nameless French bohemian, and eventually ended up with a Turkish actor who left her for a movie star’s daughter) with a distinct commodity fetish—Jane’s hats. Jane scoured Portobello Road for hats, knitted and sold them herself, and even inspired an Yves Saint Laurent version. Most of all, though, Jane didn’t buy and wear a hat on impulse or in a “moment of gullibility,” like those women who Buck claims “don’t have the faith or the romance or the slight madness to believe the story their hat is telling them. They believed that what you see is what you see; Jane believed the rest of the story.” “The rest of the story,” when it comes to Rhys’ novels from the 1920s and 30s, is that her shopper-heroines of indeterminate origins do believe the stories their hats are telling them, though their investments in commodity and consumer cultures are as ambivalent as their places in metropolitan life. In Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight, the marketplace’s tropes constitute the modern shopper-heroine and oversee her circulation in the metropolis—even as these tropes are exposed as games of appearances, and even as the marketplace frequently exceeds its own disciplinary effects. As a conceptual logic and a literal site, the marketplace becomes a mechanism through which social, cultural, sexual, national and racial identities are practiced and made intelligible and through which the power of such regimes can be contested. In particular, consumerism’s implication in the management of colonial and foreign subjects, which can be traced in all of Rhys’ novels examined here, casts it as an emergent manifestation of imperialism that is inscribed in the terrain and relationships of the metropolitan center. And herein lies the difference between Vogue’s Jane and Jean—Rhys’ metrocolonial status and the national, racial and situational politics of her texts demand that we consider how consumer capitalism and the modernist novel through which it is documented are coordinated with imperial politics and histories.

That “the rest of the story”—the story of pervasive consumerism that both Jane and Jean live inside of—may prove “tragic” is, I will argue, a function of the ways in which the contradictions of the marketplace are lived simultaneously by Rhys’ heroines. Rhys’ texts can thus be read as original economic commentaries, situated as her heroines are among distinct economic phenomenon: the rapid growth of mass consumerism; evolutions in retailing and fashion, from chain stores to ready-to-wear to the interwar boom in cheap luxuries; the stagnation and beginnings of decline of European empires; the migration of people and goods across borders. Within these frames, Rhys’ novels register how consumerism links the evolving strategies of actual colonization (economic, military, political) with those of the metaphorical (but no less material or real) colonization of women’s bodies through commodification, fetishization, and visual appropriation.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON WOMEN AND CONSUMERISM

Much of the scholarly work on the politics of consumerism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has focused on the new locations that women come to inhabit in consumer culture; Rhys’ novels contribute to this historical project as they trace and critique the social mandates and hierarchies that are produced by consumption in the interwar period. I will briefly review some of the historical perspectives and arguments on women and consumer culture in order to situate Rhys’ texts within their urban European contexts, and to lay some groundwork for thinking about consumerism in the texts at hand. The massive department stores of cities like Paris, London and New York re-shaped the urban consumer landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this movement toward large, centralized retail outlets for the mass consumption of mass-produced goods accelerated in the interwar period. The growth of mass consumerism gets articulated, in Britain among other places, as a general rise in the standard of living.² Once a predominately upper- and middle-class activity, shopping as entertainment and pleasure also extends through the class spectrum in the interwar period, as the masses are invited to participate via the expansion of retail outlets (such as chain stores), and through the proliferation of cheaper mass-produced goods marketed to them.³

After World War I, however, what women were doing with their increased buying power and expanded consumer choices was just as significant, and attracted just as much attention, as these expanded possibilities themselves. The now-iconographic short hair, short dresses and boyish or unisex fashions of the 1920s (and their ready availability through developments in retailing, distribution, and mass production of clothing—like ready-to-wear and rayon) were politically significant because they broached and merged the touchy subjects of gender identity and national politics after the war. Susan Kingsley Kent and Mary Louise Roberts separately note how, in British and French contexts respectively, women were negotiating their femininity and their “emancipation”—how they lived, what they wore, and what demands they made of male-run political establishments—simultaneously at the level of politics and fashion. For example, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge wrote in 1940 that “short hair and short skirts were the outward sign of [female independence]”, but they also link bobbed hair and unisex garments with the immediate postwar struggle of removing women from formerly male workplaces and sending them back into the home.⁴ A woman’s decisions about what to wear, whether or not to cut her hair, or how to agitate for equal rights, were deeply implicated in the processes of national reconstruction after the First World War.⁵ But much of this work on gender, consumerism and politics considers women who are unambiguously national citizens, “belonging” to and reaping benefits from the supposedly democratic nations in which they struggle for full enfranchisement. Rhys’ novels tell another kind of woman’s consumer story, where locating oneself in national spaces is complicated by legacies of imperialism, transnational mobility, and a nuanced and revised classed structure that is in many ways engendered by both of the former.

In the case of Rhys and her liminal heroines, consumerism becomes the means by which national culture is accessible in the first place; it is worth noting that some scholars of consumer culture have argued that this is the case for most women advanced in capitalist economies. Even the woman who didn’t transform herself into a “modern girl” by shortening her skirt or cutting her hair was still integrated into the mass marketplace on a daily basis as she ran a household or shopped for personal items.⁶ Rachel Bowlby argues that the connection of woman to consumerism is both a function of existent social expectations and a motive for the continued expansion of the consumer address towards women. Bowlby contends that while woman is simultaneously aided in and “emancipated” from her domestic tasks by household gadgets, the making of women into avid consumers fits comfortably into a story of male seduction of women where women are understood as compliant with the men who dictate their desires to them. ⁷

Historical and critical accounts of women and consumer culture generally fit into one of two models, and tend to either endorse women’s acts of consumption by citing the increased opportunities that consumerism affords, or to critique the ways that consumerism disciplines women—or helps women to discipline themselves—by creating newer, sleeker and shinier mechanisms by which woman is kept in her place.⁸ Class is also a key consideration in this critical and historical scholarship: women are read as being subject to varying forms of address and designation dependent upon class positioning, and scholarship has addressed the ways in which the categories of woman and class are renovated in the consumer context.⁹ Rhys’ novels conceptualize how class is produced in the consumer marketplace, given that her heroines are not readily located within traditional Western classed categories. While class is marked through and along with colonial, racial and sexual status, in the novels at hand consumerism functions (though not always successfully) to mask the material realities of such designations. Rhys’ texts feature a pervasive ideology of the commodity that attempts to obscure the mechanisms of domination, violence, and mandatory compliance, by offering commodity tropes like display, desire, and flow in their place.¹⁰

This is not to deny the disciplinary force of class in consumer capital; ultimately, the economic logic of the marketplace emerges in Rhys’ novels as the vehicle for generating and enforcing social designations. This analysis extends to other forms of social and self- discipline, as well: for example, some scholarship has focused on the interior architecture and arrangement of early twentieth century shopping spaces that channel feminist impulses into the confines of home-making.¹¹ The thinking goes that desires can be manipulated such that the subject will effectively discipline herself—and supposedly she won’t really mind.

The broader political questions that underlie the conversations mentioned above—is consumerism a revelation in women’s lives, or yet another means of domination?—clearly depend on how one perceives the terrain that surrounds women consumers and the ways they are theorized. For example, are the enabling structures of women’s participation in urban spaces and public life (shopping in department and chain stores, working in factories and shops, and so on) forms of containment by the institutions of capital that enforce how women should behave, desire and circulate in those spaces (what to buy, how much they’re paid, who watches them, etc.)? Or is it enough to say that all women are enabled and liberated in a consumer context because they undoubtedly have more choices than ever before (more things to buy, another choice of occupation, more places to go)?¹² However, to show my hand to the reader (given what Victoria de Gra- zia has called the “ferocity” of the debate over the meanings of women in consumer culture¹³), I contend that the institutions of consumerism as they appear in Rhys’ texts reproduce uneven global conditions within localized marketplaces. Rhys’ texts theorize consumer capital’s implication in interlocking regimes of the nation, empire and male domination.

Looking beyond and extrapolating from Rhys’ novels, the fact that only certain women can purchase and own many products (not just luxuries, but often food, clothing, shelter and other necessities), exposes the dis- enfranchisement of women outside of the shopping classes as well as the uneven conditions under which production and consumption are carried out. It can be argued that opening up choice for a set of relatively privileged consumers limits freedoms for those who, literally, produce those choices. Overall, I am wary of the privileging “choice” in and of itself as a means of emancipation (an issue that is discussed in further detail in chapter four of this book). On the one hand, such a position fails to acknowledge how choices are crafted by certain supervisory regimes of capital (such as corporate power, advertising and the control of public deliberation, and government intervention); on the other hand, “choice” can be read as one of the tantalizing narratives of consumer capitalism itself—that more is always better. Rhys’ novels both theorize and powerfully dramatize these very dilemmas.

THE IDEOLOGY OF THE COMMODITY

In his 1904 essay entitled “Fashion,” German sociologist Georg Simmel characterizes this most fickle of cultural obsessions as a material and psychological form that visually distinguishes and maintains class hierarchies at the same time that it holds out the promise of individuation through personalized, creative uses.¹⁴ For Simmel, fashion is a characteristic of industrialized societies under capital (what he calls “highly civilized nations”) where “[s]egregation by means of clothing, manners, tastes, etc. is expedient … where the danger of absorption and obliteration exists” (“Fashion,” 546). Fashion is thus part of the constant (re)making of the modern state of mind—a strategy for identifying and fixing oneself in the rapid flows of commercialized and mechanized life.¹⁵ Simmel also tries to understand how the ever-expanding address of capital at the turn of the century maintains individual identity (what he calls “the individual soul”) in the face of these economic formations. If, as I emphasize in the readings of Rhys that follow, fashion cultivates an orientation toward commodities characterized by regulated desires, emphasized display, and socially mandated forms of circulation, Simmel names fashion as a critical mediator among capital and identity. I contend that we can read Rhys as engaging in a similar explanatory project that brings geopolitical and gendered histories to bear upon Simmel’s model. Given the intimacy of subjectivity, emotional life and economic mandates in Rhys’ novels, a kind of ideology of the commodity emerges, wherein the articulation of self, as well as the designation of that self in national contexts, is carried out via prominent strategies of capital—specifically, the recurrent tropes of desire, circulation and visual display deployed in the commodity marketplace.¹⁶

A similar scenario, where modern, capitalist societies are understood and evaluated via the mechanisms of capital itself, emerges where Simmel names the dynamic of social “unity” and personal “individuation” as the critical dilemma of life in modern societies and names fashion as an expression of the modern imperative for “the new.” Defined as it is by perpetual change, fashion embodies modernization itself,¹⁷ and is the framework for creating the modern individual: “[fashion] has overstepped the bounds of its original domain, which comprised only personal externals, and has acquired an increasing influence over taste, over theoretical convictions, and even over the moral foundations of life” (“Fashion,” 548). Here Sim- mel reads the modern individual as developing in concert with the economic procedures of capitalist societies. But he also resists this economic ideology of self by privileging the “individual souls” who use fashion as a defense or “mask” against the quantifying tendencies of modern life:

It is therefore a feeling of modesty and reserve which causes many a delicate nature to seek refuge in the leveling cloak of fashion; such individuals do not care to resort to a peculiarity in externals for fear of perhaps betraying a peculiarity of their innermost soul. We have here a triumph of the soul over the actual circumstances of existence, which must be considered one of the highest and finest victories … for the reasons that the enemy himself is transformed into a servant (“Fashion,” 552).

What is problematic about Simmel’s insistence upon the “individual soul’s” capacity for “victory” over fashion (and, by extension, over modern capital’s influence u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Uneven Marketplace of Modernism and Consumer Capitalism
• 1 "Just the sensation of spending, that's the point": Jean Rhys' Marketplaces of Discipline and Desire
• 2 Consumerism and the Imperial Nation in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway
• 3 The Enterprising Modernisms of Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach
• 4 Consumerism, Race and Rationalization in Nella Larsen's Quicksand
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index