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  • Empire of Ennui
  • Eric Rauchway (bio)
Kristin L. Hoganson. Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920. 416 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

In Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel Main Street, Carol Kennicott decides, upon her exile to Gopher Prairie, to redecorate her house, her neighbors, and herself in an Oriental style. She chooses Japanese furnishings for the front room and Chinese costumes for her housewarming party. “[P]lease forget that you are Minnesotans,” she instructs her guests, “turn into mandarins and coolies and—and samurai (isn’t it?), and anything else you can think of.”1 For the crushingly bored Carol, it didn’t matter what you became, so long as you stopped—for a just a minute—being a Midwesterner. Lewis’s indiscriminately Orientalist fictional protagonist had real-life cousins in every main street of the nation, Kristin Hoganson says: the cozy domestic life of Americans, as organized principally by the women of middle-class American houses, implicated everyone in the colonial projects of the era. Moving “beyond Main Street,” she finds explores the effect of the Americans who looked at the world and asked, “What’s in it for me” (p. 199)?

“[T]he United States,” Hoganson says, “should be seen as a consumers’ imperium.” Which means looking for an American empire not in the “outward thrust of American power” but in the receptive accommodation of American households to foreign influences. “Beyond reflecting larger relations of power, each purchase helped sustain a particular international political economy. . . . Given that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a heyday of empire, purchasing imports in this period can be seen as an act of imperial buy-in” (pp. 10–1). Hoganson finds ample evidence of this political purchase in the parlors, larders, wardrobes, and itineraries of middle-class Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.

A woman’s house was herself, Hoganson says—or so Americans assured each other in the prescriptive press. What a woman put in her home gave evidence of the contents of her head and her soul. In dressing her house with the goods of the earth, she “strove to convey a cosmopolitan ethos—meaning a geographically expansive outlook that demonstrated a familiarity with [End Page 218] the wider world” (p. 14). Americans traveled abroad, brought home bibelots and tales of those foreign lands and peoples they had seen. Not neutrally cosmopolitan, they “strove to seem European” (p. 35). If they collected and exhibited the artifacts of African or Asian peoples, they did it in the spirit of the colonizing nations, appropriating the exotic for the benefit of the metropolis and constructing “a cultural manifestation of imperial politics” (p. 50).

Much the same went for the decoration of women’s persons: Americans, Hoganson says, “fabricated” nationalism via “imagined communities of dress” (pp. 57–8). Rich American women watched and bought Paris fashions. Poorer American women emulated them so far as their incomes permitted. At the same time, Americans enjoyed more cosmopolitan couture at home, owing to the immigration of Russian Jews ambitious to build careers for themselves in the U.S. garment industry (p. 62). With fashion came taste—and, asks Hoganson, ”what was taste” (p. 65)? Taste is what grown-ups have instead of high school: the instrument with which we draw circles including some and excluding others. Taste lets us justify our own wise purchases and condemn the extravagance of others. It lets us explain the indubitable superiority of our preferences to theirs. We have couture; they have folk costume.

This fascination with constructing identity through taste and consumption extends naturally to literal taste and consumption: cookery and dining. International trade in foodstuffs made exotic foods and spices available even to Anglo-Saxon Americans daring enough to try a dash of seasoning. Through the language and ingredients of the kitchen, American women learned a “popular geography,” Hoganson says (p. 111). With the gut as with the gown, variety represented an enviable cosmopolitan sensibility. And it opened opportunities apparently closed to women: “Through cooking ‘foreign’ dishes, middle-class women could become like wealthy globe-trotters and male restaurant goers. . . . The belief that spicy food...

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