Henry James and the Culture of Consumption by Miranda El-Rayess

Abstract

Reviewed by: Henry James and the Culture of Consumption by Miranda El-Rayess Natalie Roxburgh Miranda El-Rayess. Henry James and the Culture of Consumption. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 233 pp. £67.00 (Hardback). Among the scholarly works that investigate Henry James's attitude toward and understanding of the socio-economic developments and transformations of his time, Miranda El-Rayess's Henry James and the Culture of Consumption collects and illuminates the many references to consumption in the novels, short stories, and essays. It pays specific attention to the growing presence of new kinds of shoppers as well as mechanisms of advertising in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This monograph provides fresh readings of The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors, and many of the short stories. Detailed and erudite, Henry James and the Culture of Consumption is undoubtedly a groundbreaking dissertation. As a book, however, the reader finds missing a few key structural elements, such as a satisfying introduction and conclusion, rendering it somewhat cumbersome to read. This is a pity because the work contributes to a still all-too-meager body of economic criticism on the James oeuvre. Nonetheless, the insights that this monograph provides entice readers to consider the relative newness of consumption as a bourgeois norm in James's time. From the perspective of the neoliberal present, in which nearly every surface is commercialized, encouraging consumption at every turn, it is perhaps easy to overlook the degree to which James's writings responded to a cultural phenomenon that was still quite nascent. Consumption and the gradual emergence of the ideology that goes along with it—consumerism, or to use El-Rayess's preferred term, "consumer culture"—have been represented in works of Anglophone fiction since the eighteenth century. One notes ostentatious or even conspicuous consumption in, for example, the novels of Frances Burney in the 1770s and 1780s. Burney's protagonists are often faced with a conflict arising from traditional genteel social mores clashing with ways of demonstrating social superiority through the buying of commodities. The question is: What has changed in James's time? Further, what renders certain practices of consumption a consumer culture as such? Differentiating El-Rayess's work from other studies is an emphasis on shops and retail culture, which are markers of both novelty and ambivalence. One might formulate the newness of consumer culture in James's time as follows: Everyone consumes, so how is it that people distinguish and register their own and each other's social status? This line of thought evokes an argument made as early as Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), a title mentioned briefly on page 29, but which might have been better used to frame the discussion and develop the introduction and conclusion. Consumption is highly ambivalent, and James's works register this ambivalence in many ways: most notably by contrasting American characters [End Page E-11] to European counterparts. James's unique perspective as an American abroad, having registered the uneven progress of a transatlantic consumer culture, meant that he often compared questions of American social status with the silent, impenetrable hierarchies of Europe. As El-Rayess points out, what many of James's texts have in common is that objects of consumption are caught in a tension between "the sanctified domain of fine art and high culture" and the "superficial world of fashion and commodity culture" (47). The prevalence of consumption—and the ascendency of a consumer culture—has implications for James's style, a point noted several times in Henry James and the Culture of Consumption (90). The way buying commodities transforms what it means for objects to be aesthetically pleasing—and being called upon to buy commodities from an ever-growing number of retail shops and display windows—is a central part of a growing scholarly picture of what James found so fascinating about his time. One of the most important insights in the monograph is that attitudes toward consumption and advertising can be distinguished by gender, and this is reflected throughout the James oeuvre. Stereotypes about women develop in the period, as consumer culture affords women more...