"Just Looking": Class, Desire, and the Consuming Vision in T.S. Eliot's "In the Department Store"

   In the Department Store The lady of the porcelain department Smiles at the world through a set of false teeth. She is business-like and keeps a pencil in her hair

But behind her sharpened eyes take flight The summer evenings in the park And heated nights in second story dance halls.

Man’s life is powerless and brief and dark It is not possible for me to make her happy.

With Christopher Ricks’ recent edition of T.S. Eliot’s notebook, Inventions of the March Hare, many of Eliot’s early poems and verse sketches prior to 1917 have at last become texts for scholarly consideration. This archive of work, previously unavailable, opens rewarding new lines of investigation into Eliot’s developing poetic concerns, particularly ways in which his early pieces incorporate and mirror issues in his own life and his perceptions of rapidly changing social mores of the early twentieth century. The short poem “In the Department Store,” presumed to have been written in 1915, ¹ is a particularly arresting piece, both for its mature precision and economy of imagery and for the way it shapes and transforms contemporary social, economic, and psychosexual contexts. By situating the poem within its matrix of historical, literary and cultural references, we may discover a text resonant with motifs of class, desire, consumption, and the multivalent connotations of spectatorship and vision in a new age of commodity consciousness.

At first glance, the poem stands as a spare and sharp rendering of a failed human encounter. With Imagistic precision, Eliot confronts both narrator and reader with the apparition of this saleslady, at once generic and unforgettable—her slightly sinister false teeth, her intimidatingly “business-like” manner which hides her (perhaps even more intimidating) concupiscience. Images of her summer evenings and “heated” dance hall nights evoke scenes of sexual license, echoed in Prufrock’s “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels,” infusing the poem with an ambivalence of desire and disdain. Indeed, the poem might almost be a condensed version of the 1911 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for at the end the narrator confesses a near-metaphysical impotence in the face of such womanhood—a sexual anxiety similar to that of Prufrock, who fears both being chosen and not being chosen, the eternal dilemma that resigns him ultimately to failure.

Read as such, the poem is a succinct—if less engaged—reworking of motifs general to Eliot’s writing: themes of inter-personal failure, sexual anxiety, the sterility and anomie haunting the modern sensibility. It seems to reflect the classic pattern of Eliot’s “negative way” as seen in other early poems, a pattern that Eloise Hay might summarize as “the diffident man confronted with a social crisis—expressed in terms of a nameless woman’s unstated demands upon him—whose failure to solve the problem leads to an act of self-nullification.” ² Eliot’s choice of title, however, and the controversial novelty of his setting indicate that the poem contains layers of class commentary and historical relevance unique among Eliot’s early works; they demonstrate as well that Eliot’s poetic temperament is both rooted and grown in the particular soil of material culture at this time. By locating this encounter in the modern department store, Eliot draws on a whole constellation of issues and implications surrounding these new, extravagant emporia of commodified display and so widens the dimensions of our understanding of those personal themes so familiar from the other early poems.

H.G. Wells points out the relative novelty of the department store to Eliot’s generation, as late as 1910 defining it for his readers as “. . . one of those large, rather low-class establishments which sell everything from pianos and furniture to books and millinery—a department store.” ³ The principles of the department store—a high turnover of elaborately displayed, shopper-accessible goods organized into “departments” under one roof—can be seen in America as early as 1846, when A.T. Stewart’s four-story “Marble Palace” dry goods store went up...