Luxury, Consumption and Desire: Theorizing the Petimetra

Luxury, Consumption and Desire: Theorizing the Petimetra Rebecca Haidt is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Ohio State University. She has a book forthcoming on Fray Gerundio de Campazas; and her book Embodying Enlightenment : Knowing the Body in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature and Culture (St. Martin's Press, 1998) was awarded the MLA's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for outstanding book in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures. The present study is part of a L·rger project on petimetras and cultures of luxury consumption in eighteenth -century Madrid. In the second half of the eighteenth century, as Spanish royal administrations increasingly offered protections and subsidies to domestic manufacturers, educated thinkers debated themes—such as imports and internal trade—which they saw as linked vitally to the spread of luxury. "Luxury," notes Berg, "once associated with the preservation of social hierarchies, and its limitations with Christian economic ethics , became associated [in the eighteenth century] with the expansion of markets, wealth and economic growth" (68). Accordingly, in eighteenth-century Spain the problem of el lujo (defined by the Diccionario de Autoridades as "exceso y demasÃ-a en la pompa y regalo") held both moral and economic implications: though Spanish critiques associated luxury's excesses with a variety of ills ranging from economic decline to imbalance of trade to depopulation, "todos los escritos, en mayor o menor medida, se refieren a las graves consecuencias que tiene [el lujo] en el orden moral" (MartÃ-nez Chacón 36). Economic works of the 1770s to 1790s urged both targeted investment in industry and labor, and condemnation of the social repercussions of spending on imported luxury goods. ' In fact, the growth of industry and trade increased the availability of domestic and imported goods, and (especially in urban centers such as Madrid and Barcelona) fostered consumer awareness of a burgeoning marketplace in luxury items such as fans, ribbons, fabrics and feathers—wares desired chiefly by women. Indeed, numerous contributions to the debates on luxury targeted women's spending on imported fashions and "frivolous" accoutrements (such as ribbons) as Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 3, 1999 34 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies particularly deleterious to the economic health of the nation. Period critiques of women's spending frequently featured the petimetra, a satirical figure that "simbolizaba en diversos sentidos la amenaza que el lujo no controlado hacÃ-a pesar sobre el orden social" (Bolufer 186). The petimetra was a fashion-crazed female resistant to norms of thrift, diligence and modesty prescribed for persons gendered "feminine." At the beginning of the century the figure was aristocratic (Martin Gaite 88-89); but as the century progressed petimetras often were depicted (in theatrical pieces such as tonadillas and saÃ-netes) as criadas and laborers' wives. Whether upper- or lower-class, however, die petimetra is much more dian a vain female. This becomes apparent when one situates the figure in the context of material culture and eighteenth-century cultures of consumption .2 In my reading, I have found diat most texts "about" petimetras are also texts "about" women desiring to buy things. That is, the petimetra is indeed vain, but she is a vain consumer who seeks fashionable items in a marketplace of luxury goods. Her ability to appear what she is not through cultivation of an artificial and purchased exterior references period tensions generated by fashion's capacity to blur established boundaries of class and gender. In this essay I want to theorize aie petimetra as figurative of cultural anxiety around female agency in the eighteenth-century urban luxury marketplace .3 In particular, I will argue that the problem represented by the petimetra in eighteenth-century Spanish texts is that of the female consumer whose primping and spending (that is, whose purchases and coordination of shoes, frills, fans) amount to unlicensed decisions about the use of resources —a husband's money, her physical energy, the time she should devote to housework —and thereby threaten the stability and conformations of families, communities and nation. Thus at the close of his 1762 play La petimetra, Nicolás Fernández de MoratÃ-n literally strips aie petimetra of her carefullyconstructed exterior when the petimetra Jerónima, who has...