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Introduction
- University of New Hampshire Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction sacrament, n. 1. Eccles. a. a visible sign of an inward grace. b. a visible sign instituted by Jesus Christ to symbolize or confer grace. The Random House College Dictionary Consumption is governed by a form of magical thinking . . . a primitive mentality . . . based on a belief in the omnipotence of thoughts (though what we have in this case is a belief in the omnipotence of signs). “Affluence” is, in effect, merely the accumulation of the signs of happiness. jean baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures In Childe Hassam’s 1893 painting, “Street Scene, Christmas Morning,” a lovely well-dressed woman walks toward the viewer.Surrounded by elegant shop windows and snow-filled air,she seems excited and happy,a mood expressed by the brilliant red flowers decorating her rakish black hat with its lacey veil.The scene is rendered with Hassam’s lyrical impressionist brushstrokes, a full spectrum of whites and blues centered on a single object held in the woman’s hands: a blue box tied with white ribbon. This box, the focal point of the painting, is a more arresting blue than all the other blues in the landscape. According to historian H. Barbara Weinberg, Hassam at this time was preoccupied with painting Fifth Avenue and its stylish women.1 Given that this turquoise box matches the wellknown trademark of one of New York’s most prestigious stores, it is more than likely that we are looking at a portrait, not just of a fashionable woman, but also of her fashionable purchase: a Christmas gift from Tiffany’s. By 1893 Tiffany’s blue box was nationally recognized.First introduced in 1837,the store’s packaging was trademarked and the color’s formula carefully-guarded. The box soon became a marketing icon and potent symbol of social distinction and affluence.2 For those privileged enough to receive it, as for those only able to dream of it, the Tiffany box was a coveted sign of happiness, a modern sacrament. In this painting of a joyous Christmas morning we see the eclipse of a traditional reli- 2 } sacramental shopping gious holiday by its emerging secular replacement: a celebration of materialistic hopes and desires.3 rg This book places two classic American novels at this historical intersection of modern consumer culture and older religious discourses on materialism and identity. It begins with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, set during the Civil War and published in 1868 at the onset of the Gilded Age. The second novel, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, appeared a generation later in 1905, when the consumer culture emerging in Alcott’s time had become fully dominant.4 Both novels show their heroines grappling with the values of the elite group Thorstein Veblen named the “leisure class,” defined by its conspicuous consumption and competitive display: Tiffany’s target market.5 Both books also reveal a deep concern with issues of materialism, moral development, and self-construction. And yet these texts, very dissimilar in style, have rarely, if ever, been compared. Little Women is a domestic novel written for children and shaped by an earlier generation of romantic and sentimental writers. The House of Mirth is known primarily as a work of realistic and even naturalistic fiction, influenced by Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Theodore Dreiser. In this study, however, I demonstrate how Wharton, who referred to Alcott in her autobiography as “the great Louisa” (her fastidious upper-class parents only allowed her to read the older writer’s slangy books “because all the other children read them”) drew on Little Women’s core plot and themes for The House of Mirth.6 Moreover, these commonalities help explain the enormous popularity of both books when first published and their continuing appeal to audiences today,as attested by the robust sales of the original texts and their successful adaptations through various plays and films.7 These books still find readers in the twenty-first century because they speak so powerfully to the struggle to define identity and moral values in American consumer culture and, more specifically, because both speak to the especial difficulty of these struggles for women.However , while Alcott offers an idealistic and hopeful vision of how young women like the stylish figure in Hassam’s Christmas painting might resist the seductions of the marketplace, Wharton’s version of this story is more realistic and much darker. Directly addressing the limitations of Alcott’s sentimental idealism in an increasingly materialistic world, Wharton...