The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch

The Stuff of Dreams

Sensations of a New Age 191 The new cadet found the process of being transformed into a component of the military machine excruciatingly painful, but also immensely satisfying. “I began to notice my body stiffening, my posture gaining in confidence,” he noted.“It had become quite impossible to move with anything but dignity.On the rare occasions when a senseless desire for freedom surfaced it invariably shattered against a new determination and will.”After the harsh and relentless discipline of the academy, young Ernst found home life unbearably soft and engulfing: “I found any kind of solicitous care quite intolerable,and the broad stream of my mother’s empathy only made me wish to breathe the harsher air of the corps again” (cited byTheweleit 2005: 184). If his mother had followed the child care regime propounded by Dr. Schreber and his disciples, far from feeling overwhelmed by maternal warmth when he returned home from the academy, Ernst might have felt right at home. The Stuff of Dreams Many of the goods on display within the mid-nineteenth-century home came from an important new commercial and cultural venue: the department store. The great stores of the nineteenth century—Le Bon Marché in Paris, Harrod’s in London,Marshall Field’s in Chicago,among others—were a dominant feature of the urban environment of modernity.As their owners boasted,these immense shopping complexes contained “a city within a store,” a private, enclosed city with its own sensory and social ambience. Department stores were distinguished by the vast array of goods contained within their cavernous premises, including textiles, furniture, hardware, books, toys and even food.The growth of urban populations and the expansion of public transportation ensured a sufficient clientele for these large-scale shops.Trade and industrial production provided the goods with which to stock the shelves. The profusion of merchandise within the store helped to create an atmosphere of abundance and sensuous luxury. In Au bonheur des dames Emile Zola described a fictional department store that overwhelmed shoppers with “piles of ribbons,” “clouds of lace,” and “palpatations of muslin”:“There were silks of a cloudy fineness , surahs lighter than the down falling from the trees, satined pekins soft and supple as a Chinese virgin’s skin”(1886:222,224).The ultimate touch of luxury is provided by velvet-covered handrails that caress the hands of shoppers as they make their way from floor to floor. Walking through the store’s seemingly endless number of departments,Zola’s customer feels the “slow exhaustion of her strength amidst the inexhaustible treasures displayed on every side”(230).This was quite a change from older-style shops that kept much of their goods out of sight and touch behind counters and in store rooms. Somewhat overstating the case, one pioneer in the new marketClassen_Text .indd 191 3/15/12 2:48 PM 192 chapter eight ing methods recalled,“On entering a [traditional] dry goods store . . .one found long stretches of bare counters with clerks standing at attention behind them. . . .The customers were expected to make their wants known. . . .There was no such thing as‘counter display’” (F.W.Woolworth 1954: 9). Just as significant as the abundance of goods on display in the department store were the new techniques of marketing employed.The relatively novel practice of fixed pricing eliminated the age-old practice of bargaining, reducing tensions between client and sales clerk,and facilitating a quick turnover of goods.The sales clerks themselves were trained to conform to a norm of neatness,respectability, and courteous demeanor—a departure from the situation in many smaller stores in which the staff might well be rude or overbearing.It was now possible to enter a store and just look—without having to ask for anything, without a particular purchase in mind, and without being subject to a continuous sales patter.This silencing of clerks made it easier to walk around a store and examine the goods in peace, but it also contributed to a demise of shopping as a dynamic social interaction between buyers and sellers. To attract more customers to the store and keep them within the store once there, department stores offered a range of services, such as a restaurant, a post office, a beauty salon, and perhaps a concert hall as well. Le Bon Marché in Paris had a reading room and an art gallery, as well as a buffet, on its second floor.The British Selfridge’s housed a library,an exchange...