Beyond Necessity: The Consumption of Class, the Production of Status, and the Persistence of Inequality

I read recently that chocolate was destined to become like coffee or wine, marketed to discriminating consumers according to its place of origin. Then, the other day, my companion handed me what looked to be a handsome metal cigarette case. "They're chocolates," she said. "Cindy brought them back from Milan." Cindy is my companion's secretary--imagine a character from The Carol Burnett Show, middle-aged, a gum-chewing bleached blonde, fond of cheap perfume and brightly painted nails--and she travelled to Milan with her husband, a businessman who was in "It-ly" on business. Cindy works for what once was called pin money, but Cindy's "pins" are rather more extravagant than grandmother's were: surgery to replace the knees of her aging toy poodle, or driving her LeBaron convertible in the deepest of the summer's humidity with the top down and the air conditioning on.

Did I have in my hands, then, what might be for chocolate the equivalent of coffee from Jamaica's Blue Mountains? Turning over the box, I opened it to discover eighteen one-inch squares, wafer thin, each wrapped in gold foil and covered again by well designed printed paper. I discovered, too, a description in four languages of what the squares contained:

This chocolate square, made from "Caraibe"--the Valrhona 66% cocoa couverture--is the first chocolate to merit the appellation "Pure Caribbean Trinitario". For an appropriate tasting, first discover its exceptionnally [sic] fine bouquet with its tobacco tones overlaying a woody background, an aroma which is so close to the rich fragrances of the Caribbean cocoa-beans. Its rich colour, a blend of purple and deep mahogany, is the patent hallmark of a first-ranking "Grand Cru". As it melts in your mouth, its fruity and only mildly sweet taste is a blend of vanilla, almonds, and roasted coffee-beans.

The puffery notwithstanding, the chocolates were exquisite, unlike even the European chocolates we are used to--smoother, mellower, and yet with a complex flavor that lingers in the mouth and in the brain. The next night, my companion remarked that earlier in the day, "when I thanked her for the wonderful chocolates, Cindy said, 'I'm glad you liked the candy.'" With a sparkle in her eye, my companion added, "It's all candy to her."

In this post-Marxist and post-Fordist moment, we seem able to consume anything and everything we desire. Not only the upper-middle class, though perhaps especially the upper-middle class, but all socioeconomic classes increasingly reveal omnivorous tastes in consumption: candy, chocolates, corn chips; ballet, football, frisbee golf; Wal-Mart, the local boutique, Hammacher Schlemmer. Such omnivorousness, it is said, affirms that people have been freed from the demands of taste hierarchies and thereby enabled to fashion individualized identities through consumption. ¹ One conclusion drawn from this oft-noted fact--and drawn by everyone from famous French theorists of postmodernity to near-anonymous social scientists in the business schools--is that "consumption patterns are no longer consequential to class reproduction." ² In postmodernity, that is, we have consumed class as well. When your secretary goes to Milan, a city you have never seen, and brings you a gift of designer chocolates that she calls candy, what can you say about the class positions of either of you?

This essay attempts to answer that question, and will do so by reference to E. M. Forster's Howards End and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which flesh out social theory by Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu, and Randall Collins. Forster and Woolf demonstrate what the social theorists argue: that inequality is not only a matter of class defined in terms of one's relationship to production but also a matter of status, of prestige, defined largely in terms of one's relationship to consumption, that is, in terms of...