Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing

Introduction DANGER, DELIGHT, AND VICTORIAN WOMEN’S SHOPPING

Introduction , ,   ’  hen Rochester takes Jane Eyre to a silk warehouse in Millcote and insists that she select six boldly colored dresses for her trousseau, his governess proves an unwilling and resistant shopper. Refusing the “brilliant amethyst dye, and a superb pink satin” he would foist upon her, Jane persuades Rochester to accept her choice of a more understated palette of “a sober black satin and pearl-grey silk.”1 The shopping excursion does not end here, however. It continues at the local jeweler’s shop, where Rochester continues to ply Jane with purchases she does not want. “[H]arassing” rather than leisurely, this morning of shopping is also an affront to Jane’s quest for autonomy. “It would, indeed, be a relief,” she thinks, “if I had ever so small an independency ; I never can bear being dressed like a doll by Mr. Rochester.” When her protestations are met with Rochester’s sultanlike smile, a smile like that of a master for his slave, Jane threatens to wear gingham for her wedding. His rejoinder—that he still would not  W 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. exchange Jane “for the grandTurk’s whole seraglio” ()—provokes more de- fiant words from his fiancée. Refusing the implicit terms of possession that the harem signifies to her, Jane replies that she would “stir up mutiny” among any other “inmates” that Rochester might similarly buy and confine ().2 The shopping expedition in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre () suggests that the struggle for female autonomy and independence, a motif in muchVictorian domestic fiction, is a very economic matter. Shopping at Millcote is not merely an anecdotal moment in the novel, a momentary diversion from the main interests of the plot, but a significant scene wherein the material nature of sexual politics is staged. The dictates of fashion are in this instance maleauthored , and marriage, cast here as another form of commercial and imperial exchange, conceals the ways in which men may come to regard women as commodities. In the face of Rochester’s insistence, the novel’s protofeminist heroine seems to garner her agency through forms of renunciation; his apparent generosity is that which Jane must refuse. Rochester’s aggressive attentions cast shopping as a scene of temptation, as this dangerously enticing figure threatens to subsume Jane to his vision of what she should desire. While Rochester is the object of Jane’s own libidinal interests, he is also a force that Jane must carefully manage precisely because he is so seductive. Jane’s cautious negotiation of the commercial sphere is emblematic of the vexed condition of the woman shopper who goes to market only to risk becoming an object of exchange herself. Set in a provincial town in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the episode anticipates the ways in which the dangers and delights of women’s consumerism would become amplified through a new metropolitan experience that was to unfold in Britain by the s, when shopping emerged as a fully articulated form of middle-class women’s leisure. This midcentury historical moment, one that marked Britain’s revolution in retailing, has often been formulated as one that also ushered in cultural anxieties about the woman shopper’s relationship to the vicissitudes of consumer appetite. Increasingly figured as a particularly female pursuit, shopping could be associated with idleness on the one hand and compulsion on the other, forms of excess that were best managed through careful self-regulation. In Unto This Last (), for example, John Ruskin suggests that consumption has its proper place when he links the economic clout of Britain with the buying power of its citizens, a balance between supply and demand and between production and consumption. “[T]he wealth of a nation,” he writes, “is only to  introduction 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. be estimated by what it consumes”; such wealth “is finally measured by the mouth.”3 While Ruskin thus acknowledges a legitimate role for a consumer class, he is troubled by what he sees as the excessive appetites...