The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (review)

Reviews Daniel L. Purdy. The Tyranny ofElegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. 301 + xvpp. ISBN 0-8018-5847-7. This is a fascinating, though sometimes frustrating, book. Daniel L. Purdy concentrates on the rhetoric or discourses of fashion in the later eighteenth century, particularly in Germany. He wants to show that the language of fashion, like the language ofthe sentimental novel, helpedformthe modern German bourgeois subject : clothes "represented a fundamental shift in the epistemology of the subject and the body" (p. xv). Analysing in particular Friedrich Bertuch's Mode Journal (1786-1 827), he claims that"dress culture" became amediumthrough which bourgeois consumers not only kept up with their neighbours and foreign fashions, but also formed themselves. This argument is interesting in part because it runs against some of our current understandings of this complex self-fashioning. Unlike Foucault, Purdy emphasizes the role of pleasure and comfort—instead of coercion and surveillance—in the formation of the subject. He also stresses Bertuch's free-market assumption that discourse (the discourse of fashion, for example) can create demand and production . Like John Bender in Imagining the Penitentiary, he argues that cultural changes can precede and determine larger social and economic changes; unlike Bender, he focuses not so much on novels as on other contemporary discourses. The only novel, in fact, that Purdy discusses in any detail is Goethe's Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). He often makes statements like this: "Sentimental novels served as guides on how to dress, act, speak, feel, and think, instituting an 'apparatus of identification' that created and arranged psychic realities unknown and unavailable to the courtly regime" (p. 23). But, though he occasionally mentions novels such as Sophie von la Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim in passing, he never shows exactly how this "apparatus of identification " might work. (As I have argued elsewhere, the reader of the sentimental novel EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 1, October 1999 104 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:1 is often forced to oscillate between identification and critical distance.) Though Purdy acknowledges the continuing controversy about Goethe's own attitude towards his hero, the possibility of "misreading" the text, and the paradoxes of reaching "authenticity" through imitation, he focuses on the widespread adoption of Werther's blue coat and yellow vest and the repetition of his words and actions that "made a new type of feeling subject intelligible to a broad class of readers" (p. 150). Here clothes almost literally make the man, transforming the courtly subject into an independent bourgeois thinker. Werther's simple country costume, originally a sign of rebellion against decorum and class distinction, becomes a sign of the emergence of a new class and a new kind of masculinity . (Purdy seems far more interested in men's dress than women's—perhaps because, like Habermas, he seems to think of the bourgeois subject as male.) Throughout the book Purdy asserts that fashion journals had a special role in Germany, since German consumers did not have direct access to the material objects that would have been available in London or Paris: "The eighteenth-century German experienced foreign commodities primarily as textually generated objects and only secondarily as material things" (p. 22). But, as he admits, illustrated fashion journals began to be produced in France and Britain at about the same time. Why is this so, if hats and dresses and shoes were more readily available in Paris and London? Could it be that these magazines had the same function for provincial consumers all over Europe? Is there really anything particularly "German" about the phenomenon? In spite of his insistence on reading material objects such as hats and shoes "in their immediacy" (p. 225), Purdy never pays much attention to the material shape of these journals, or to what Roger Chartier would call their "mise en page." He reproduces a number of illustrations, but only as clips—apparently never thinking much about what a full page looked like, or what technological advances made their production possible. (At one point he says that the illustrations were "hand-colored lithographs," but in 1786 lithography had not yet been...