Mary Louise Roberts offers a wide-ranging and insightful assessment of recent historical studies of gender and consumerism in Western Europe, particularly France, North America, and Africa. A double relationship lies at the heart of her analysis. According to Roberts, the prostitute and the kleptomaniac – two figures that dominate the nineteenth-century Western landscape of female depravity – encapsulate the double relationship that women held to the new consumer culture of the modern era. In the “specularized” urban culture of arcades, boulevards, and department stories, woman was inscribed both as consumer and commodity, purchaser and purchase. From this analytical perspective, Roberts cautions historians to think carefully about the ways that they use relatively new forms of evidence, such as advertisements, pornography, and other products of visual culture. She also urges us to rethink the connections between gender, consumerism, and power. By enlarging our notion of the power operative in commodities beyond just the “power of the purse,” Roberts asserts that historians can explore a fuller range of ways that they shaped subjectivity and experience. Equally important, she explains why examinations of consumerism should not be confined to the literal act of consumption. Instead, she argues that commodity culture had a destabilizing effect on notions of identity and encouraged women to act out the instability of gender identity, and thus to refashion themselves as women. Her review essay is not only a compelling critique of the recent literature on consumption, it is also a perceptive analysis on modes of explanation in cultural studies and cultural history.
