Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing

Afterword BECOMING ELIZABETH DALLOWAY

Afterword    The Future of Shopping n the course of this study, a shopping excursion of one kind or another has formed the introduction or conclusion to most of the chapters. These anecdotes have ranged from Jane Eyre’s anxious deliberations in a silk warehouse to Christina Rossetti’s predicament in an artist’s studio and have extended to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s and George Eliot’s bold forays into the publishing marketplace . They have included Aubrey Beardsley’s aesthetic bookbrowser and Michael Field’s art heist and have finally been punctuated by the sound of shattering glass as suffragettes such as Una Blockley applied their hammers to hundreds of West End shopwindows. What these scenes encode ultimately is a shopper who is never fully consolidated but only fleetingly glimpsed from moment to moment, as she turns over the merchandise, as she considers the goods, as she perhaps even enters the marketplace as a writer. In and through such encounters, we briefly catch sight of the shopper in her tactical engagements with the marketplace,  I You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. never a fixed object of perception but a site of contestation and negotiation between self and world. These chapters have thus dealt with a series of liminal spaces and practices, with the in-betweens that both divide and join the domestic and public spheres, or the managements of the Angel in the House in Middlemarch with the political engagements of suffragettes in Votes for Women. They have noted the slide between merely looking at the goods in Goblin Market and handling or even secreting them away in Lady Audley’s Secret. They have also seen the confluence between consumption and production—what links the zeal to consume or acquire for its own sake to the production of literature as commodity, as with Michael Field at the Bodley Head. As women’s consumer practices proliferated between the s and the First World War, shopping was not simply being institutionalized for women but being formed equally by them through their incursions into the marketplace. Thus, what made Victorian and Edwardian shopping modern is not that it anticipated a consumer culture still to come in the twentieth century, one that would usher in ever more massproduced goods, but that it inaugurated forms of identity that were premised on a version of selfhood as that which is always in process, that is always becoming and unbecoming in the same moment. To these shopping trips we might add one more, that of Elizabeth Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway (), for it is in the West End sojourn of Clarissa’s daughter that we see Virginia Woolf’s articulation of a form of subjectivity that does not produce a fixed subject position so much as imagine identity as practice.With Elizabeth, there is no determinate self as she wanders through London; instead, there is a practice that is never reified into a figure of a singular woman shopper.Whereas Clarissa’s shopping trip to Bond Street to “buy the flowers herself” for her party connects her to a sense of the linked possibilities of the past and present, a relationship that guarantees her ongoing sense of the mystery of being in the world, Elizabeth’s excursion suggests the future of shopping.1 Writing and rewriting the lines of her mother’s incursions into the marketplace , Elizabeth’s shopping constitutes a most errant form of urban strolling , inscribing a subjectivity of becoming that defies prescribed femininity. Whereas Clarissa’s walk is organized around a particular shopping errand, to buy flowers, Elizabeth’s journey down the Strand one day in June  is a spontaneous act that follows from her time with Miss Kilman at the Army   You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. and Navy Stores.That trip to the stores to help her tutor buy petticoats is the launching point for Elizabeth’s formation as an urban subject. Elizabeth, who enjoys but does not feel compelled to buy anything at the stores, seamlessly conflates the pleasures of window-shopping with movement...