Sacramental Shopping: Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism

1. Raising Virtuous Shoppers

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” complains Jo March in Little Women’s famous opening line. Her older sister Meg follows with a similar lament: “It’s dreadful to be poor!” And the youngest sister Amy, with “an injured sniff,” chimes in, “I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have lots of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all.” Only the third daughter, Beth, resists judging her condition according to her material possessions: “We’ve got father and mother,and each other,anyhow”(7).Beth’s comment shifts the other girls’ attention from material goods to emotional attachments. It is this divided allegiance that will shape the drama to come. Although critics have frequently observed that Louisa May Alcott’s enormously popular Little Women (1868) is a novel of moral education, they have not addressed how, in an increasingly materialistic age, this is necessarily also a consumer education.1 This chapter argues that Little Women engages the temptations posed by the emerging “spirit of modern consumerism” through traditional moral discourse, particularly Protestantism and its romantic/sentimental descendants.2 With the possible exception of Beth, each of the four March sisters responds powerfully to the promises of wealth, material goods, and social status (defined in Jo’s case as literary celebrity). Each is drawn by the ideologies of an emerging Gilded Age capitalism whose seductive appeal continually threatens to alienate them from the more wholesome pleasures of home and family. However, as close attention to key passages in the novel will show,Mr.and Mrs.March fight these influences by helping their daughters recognize the true sources of personal identity and fulfillment: in other words, by teaching them how to shop for happiness. rg Little Women’s first chapter, “Playing Pilgrims,” sets up the book’s central para­ digm of Bunyan’s Puritan narrative and demonstrates how these very modern xz chapter 1 Raising Virtuous Shoppers Little Women and the Marketplace of Morality rg 18 } sacramental shopping young women’s lives can be read according to its vision of Protestant salvation.3 Moreover, chapter 1 displays how this drama, now secularized, plays itself out in relation to consumer goods and the Victorian marketplace. To return to the opening scene, the sisters’ faces brighten once Beth reminds them of their­ parental and sisterly bonds and they consider this emotional wealth, but then darken as they remember that the wealth is jeopardized by their father’s service as chaplain at the battlefront of the Civil War. After a moment of silence, Meg, “in an altered tone,” tries to redirect her desire and dissatisfaction: “You know the reason mother proposed not having any presents this Christmas, was­because it’s going to be a hard winter for every one; and she thinks we ought not to spend money for pleasure, when our men are suffering so in the army.” As Meg, prompted by the memory of her family ties, tries to repress her consumer desire,she also confronts the stubbornness of her own will: “We can’t do much, but can make our little sacrifices, and ought to do it gladly. But I am afraid I don’t” (7–8). The rest of this opening chapter follows each girl’s struggle with this moral conflict. Each has a dollar to spend. Meg wants “pretty things,” Jo an edition of “Undine and Sintram,” Beth some new sheet music, and Amy some Faber’s drawing pencils. As they defensively proclaim their right to indulge themselves, they begin to quarrel and pick at each other. Their assertion of individualism seems to unleash a restlessness and irritability,and renders their sisterly loyalties fragile and unstable. Luckily, the hour comes for their mother’s return. As Beth puts out a pair of slippers, “the sight of the old shoes” calms and brightens the girls, just as the memory of their father had earlier. Moreover, it strengthens the nascent altruism which had momentarily lost its hold on their wills. Seeing how worn the slippers are, Beth, always the least selfish, volunteers to use her dollar to buy new ones. Now all four compete to see who shall have the honor, and Beth again makes peace by suggesting that each of them use her dollar for their mother. In the midst of this, Alcott’s narrator stops the action momentarily to paint a picture of each girl, then adds, “What the characters of the four sisters were, we will leave to be found out...