In Control: The Ad Man vs. The Body

IN CONTROL: THE AD MAN VS. THE BODY / Jackson Lears IWANT TO BEGIN in the spirit of advertising, with a startUng revelation about body odor. As late as 1930, deodorant users had to follow a difficult and cumbersome procedure, particularly if they used Odorono, the earUest and up to then the most successful product in the field. They had to apply the ruby red paste to their underarms before going to bed, then hold their arms up for ten minutes or so until the deodorant dried. They had to be careful not to let the deodorant touch their clothing whUe it was still damp, because it would eat away the fabric. This was powerful stuff, as Dr. John B. Watson told a J. Walter Thompson Company staff meeting in 1928. Watson, the "founder" of behaviorism and the first prominent psychologist to work for an advertising agency, advised the company that Odorono (which JWT advertised) was "pretty hard on sensitive skins" and frequently caused "a mUd dermatitis." So we are left with the vision of a young woman, arms aloft, waiting for the Odorono to dry, hoping it won't irritate her skin or eat her slip. For a cultural historian, the image is worth pondering. What made people willing, even eager, to do this to themselves? Had they always been intolerant of body odor, and by the 1920s simply had the technology avaUable to stop it? Or had there been a fundamental reorientation in attitudes toward the body during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a coUective change of mind that was reflected but also reinforced by the rise of national advertising? I want to suggest that this sort of change did in fact occur, though it was halting, uncertain, and impossible to measure. I want further to suggest that by scrutinizing this change in attitudes toward the body, we might be led to rethink some of our most cherished ideas about the "revolution in manners and morals" that occurred as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. The most common interpretation is that this shift was marked by movement from a puritanical vale of tears to a hedonistic consumer culture, from stiff-backed propriety to casual exuberance. Even our most sophisticated cultural historians have accepted this framework. Warren Susman, for example, adducing evidence for the rise of a pleasure-oriented "culture of abundance," notes the changing connotations of the word "comfort": in the mid-nineteenth century, "comfort bags" containing a Bible and a bottle of whiskey were sent to CivU 146 · The Missouri Review War soldiers at the front; a hundred years later, "comfort stations" promised immediate relief to visitors at amusement parks and sports arenas. This is surely a problematic view, describing as a progressive development what could as easUy be merely the trivialization of comfort. But even if one defines comfort in purely behaviorist, physiological terms as release from tension, the evidence suggests that Americans in the 1920s and 1930s were probably no more at ease inside their own skins than their parents or grandparents had been. As we now know, moreover, the Victorians were not as unacquainted with sensual pleasure as their early twentieth-century critics assumed. Nor did the repression that did exist necessarily disappear; it may have merely reappeared in new idioms and cultural forms that were sometimes more subtly coercive than the old moralism had been. Overall, I wish in this essay to call into question the simple model of a passage from puritanism to hedonism, and to suggest some ways in which the transition from Victorian to post-Victorian mores is more complex than we've supposed. My focus will be on advertising and the way it collaborated with other cultural institutions in redefining the body as a universe of discourse—recastingthe waysAmericans conceived ofsensualpleasure, physical attractiveness, and bodily health. One reason to concentrate on the advertising industry is that its leaders claimed to be spearheading a cultural transformation. In a typical pronouncement, the /. Walter Thompson Book asserted in 1909 that Advertising is revolutionary. Its tendency is to overturn preconceived notions, to set new ideas spinning through the reader's brain, to induce something that they [sic] never did before. It is...