Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Women (review)

Personal Property is fundamentally a study of U.S. white slavery literature, a narrative genre popular between 1899 and 1914 that focused luridly and sensationally on the capture and exploitation of young white women (though Stange explains that this literature ultimately elides both race and class). Consumers or would-be consumers themselves, the girl-victims become, in turn, commodities circulating “throughout a series of interlocking markets” before being erased—literally “disappearing,” according to the terms of white slavery discourse.

The white slave scare was, in fact, based on a myth. Criminal investigative agencies found no evidence of a market in white slaves as described by the literature but, Stange summarizes, white slavery literature “combines a reaction to the unsettling expansion of women’s roles with a reaction to the great social changes brought by the growth of the market” (4). Furthermore, Stange points to the agenda of white slavery narratives, as well as to the feminist sociological writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams, to move beyond reductionist Progressive era polemics to reclaim the daughter or wife through renewed familial structures able to accommodate and, in some ways, modify the patriarchal claims of market capitalism.

Although the focus of Stange’s study is on white slavery literature, there are substantial chapters that place Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth within the literary and cultural discourse anticipating Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological study of the exchange of women. In Stange’s reading of The Awakening, Edna Pontellier emerges from her initial subjugation to the prerogatives of male ownership to claim self-ownership; in a paradoxical evocation of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s rhetoric of self-sovereignty, Edna’s refusal to sacrifice herself for her children produces her self-identity: “Edna . . . with[holds] herself from life and thus [gives] herself in a maternal dissolution” (35).

In two impressive chapters on Wharton, Stange addresses Wharton’s concept of the professional author whose achievement is measured through her debasement in the marketplace. Building on Stange’s reading of the female author in The Touchstone, the concepts of authorial debasement and paradoxical redemption receive a more complex treatment in the position of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth: Lily’s subjugation to the marriage-commodity market leads to her textualization in a “scene of publication” (the tableau vivant) that exemplifies “[Lily’s] inexhaustible power to represent” (69).

Although Stange’s work seems to invite a thematic rather than a chronological structure (the discussion of Jane Addam’s social housekeeping theories, for example, appears almost an anticlimactic conclusion), Personal Property represents a valuable and insightful contribution to the study of gender, commodity marketing, and aesthetics, and of their complex interplay during the first two decades in the twentieth-century United States.