Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing
Krista Lysack's central thesis is that shopping, including a whole range of behaviors from window shopping to shoplifting, provides women with agency and is the impetus for a number of subversive behaviors. Thus, despite the conventional Victorian and to a degree modern conventional wisdom, shopping does not enslave women, but rather offers up opportunities and sites for women to construct subversive identities and to critique dominant ideologies about the nature of identity qua identity. Lysack makes good use of Michel De Certeau's concept of consumer "poaching," wherein rather than being dictated identities and behaviors, consumers invent or construct new identities and alternative behaviors through the creative and subversive use of mass-produced consumer goods.
Only two chapters make extensive use of Victorian periodicals. Scholars and students may be disappointed by Lysack's method in Chapter 2, "Lady Audley's Shopping Disorder," as many of her citations, including ones supporting broad generalizations about the nature of Victorian periodicals and their responses to women shoppers, come secondhand. While many of Lysack's assertions about the ways in which Victorian periodicals characterized women shoppers are not new, her use of secondhand sources calls into question her ability to make such claims and more important does not add anything new to our understanding of Victorian periodicals.
Chapter 5, "Votes for Women and the Tactics of Consumption," provides the most sustained and direct analysis of the role of periodicals in shaping cultural phenomena. Lysack deftly shows how the Women's Social [End Page 336] and Political Union (WSPU) deployed both its periodical Votes for Women (1907-12) and its shops to further the Union's goal of gaining the vote and with it political agency for women. Lysack convincingly argues that by imitating and co-opting the for-profit periodical and shop, the WSPU subverted the idea of shopping as a wholly commercial and possessive endeavor. As the capstone to her argument that women shop not to possess but rather to know others and themselves, to critique the dominant ideology of essential character, or for aesthetic reasons, the chapter on the WSPU and Votes for Women shows how shopping, the owning of shops, and the editorial control of periodicals could be used for subversive political purposes. Lysack argues that Votes for Women became "[a]n extended political advertisement for first-wave feminism" (141). Moreover, the WSPU used advertising in other periodicals and also made advertising space available to outside commercial business to exert influence on what the WSPU saw as important allies: shop owners and other business people.
On the whole, Come Buy, Come Buy provides an interesting and compelling reevaluation of the role of shopping in the Victorian period. Chapter 5, with its excellent use of periodical source material, will be of the most interest to scholars working in periodical studies.
Scott Banville teaches in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of "Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday: The Geography of Class in Late-Victorian Britain," which appeared in VPR in the summer of 2008, as well as other articles and book chapters on Victorian popular culture and the novel. He is currently working on a book on Victorian literary and popular culture representations of the lower middle class.
