Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Merish, Lori

Paperback

Series: New Americanists

EconomicsLiterary CriticismWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 0822325160
ISBN13: 9780822325161
Publisher: Duke Univ Pr
Published: Jun 8 2000
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.34
Height: 1.05 Width: 5.89 Depth: 9.25
Language: English
In Sentimental Materialism Lori Merish considers the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as her starting point a diversity of cultural artifacts-from domestic fiction and philosophical treatises to advice literature and cigars-Merish explores the symbolic functions they served and finds that consumption evolved into a form of personal expressiveness that indicated not only a woman's wealth and taste but also her race, class, morality, and civic values. The discursive production of this new subjectivity-the feminine consumer-was remarkably influential, helping to shape American capitalism, culture, and nation building.

The phenomenon of female consumption was capitalism's complement to male production: It created what Merish calls the Other Protestant Ethic,a feminine and sentimental counterpart to Max Weber's ethic of hard work, economic rationality, and self-control. In addition, driven by the culture's effort to civilize the cannibalistic practices of ethnic, class, and national otherness, appropriate female consumerism, marked by taste and refinement, identified certain women and their families as proper citizens of the United States. The public nature of consumption, however, had curiously conflicting effects: While the achievement of cultured material circumstances facilitated women's civic agency, it also reinforced stereotypes of domestic womanhood.

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