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Introduction: Danger, Delight, andVictorian Women’s Shopping . Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard Nemesvari (Peterborough, ON: Broadview , ), . All references in my text are to this edition and will be indicated parenthetically. . On the racialized implications of Rochester’s “Eastern allusion,” see Joyce Zonana , “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre,” in Revising the Word and the World: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Vévé A. Clark, Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres, and Madelon Sprengnether (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, ), especially –. . John Ruskin, UntoThis Last, in TheWorks of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and AlexanderWedderburn (London: George Allen, ), :. . Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” The Stones of Venice: Vol. II, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, ), :. . Nancy Armstrong, “The Occidental Alice,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies , no. (): . In my study, I favor the term consumer culture over commodity culture. Jonathan Freedman prefers the latter and writes that it refers to “the supply side, as it were, of the industrial revolution. . . . [A] consumer economy is one whose cultural apparatus . . . has been . . . transformed . . . because it has become an essential part of the process of selling consumer goods.” See Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), n. While I agree with Erika Rappaport that neither term should be deployed as though it could “signify a ‘coherent’ discourse,” I suggest that commodity culture can refer to the symbolic constitution of objects that are valued for their exchangeability , whereas consumer culture refers to a range of cultural practices in which subjects engage and through which they are ideologically produced. See Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), . . Jane Austen, Emma, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. . Armstrong, “Occidental Alice,” . . Armstrong, “Occidental Alice,” . .These literary studies come in the wake of social history of recent decades, during which consumer culture emerged as an important locus of analysis, one that, far from trivial, constitutes an ideological formation through which cultural values are produced and contested. (See note for this chapter.)The shift from an almost exclusive analysis of models of production to ones that included the sphere of consumption in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship was prompted by such reassessments of traditional Marxism as Jean Baudrillard’s. In The Mirror of Production, trans. with an intro. by Mark Poster (St. Louis:Telos, ), Baudrillard charges that Marxism works as the mirror of production to dismiss the possibilities of consumption as a space of resistance. Based on the value of human labor, a productivist ideology , he argues, is not sufficient to the task of interpreting the consumption of the sign that characterizes the symbolic economies of late capitalism. . Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections: Essays , Aphorisms, AutobiographicalWritings:Walter Benjamin, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ), . . Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, with an intro. by Ernest Mandel (London: Penguin, ), :. Originally published in as Das Kapital. . Thomas Richards’s Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, – (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ) addresses the Great Exhibition of , along with other historic moments such as the Jubilee, which linked capital to spectacle and produced the public as a new consumer class. Although Richards alludes to “a specifically female consuming subjectivity” (), his most sustained considerations of women and commodity culture, such as images of the “seaside girl” in popular advertisements, tend to locate women’s consumption in the iconic, where it “remains bracketed within male production and consumption as women become the go-betweens mediating men and their particular desires” (). In Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), Andrew H. Miller takes the introduction of new glass-making technologies of the s as his point of departure to consider how “[t]he display windows in this nation of shopkeepers thus served as emblems of an economic dynamic which was also simultaneously libidinal . . . , epistemological . . . , and social” (). Considering the “impact of this increased exhibition value on the realistic novel” (), Miller argues that the novel registers theVictorians’ “anxiety . . . that their social and moral...
