Henry James, Veblen and Adorno: The Crisis of the Modern Self

Abstract

I hope to redeem the banality of the second half of my title by immediately particularizing the modern self of which I speak. Forced into high heels, skirts, and corsets, women suffer what Veblen calls “mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work.” Writing eight years after Veblen, Henry James inThe Amerian Scene, his account of his 1904 travels in America, finds that the American woman “in her manner of embodying or representing her sex” has become “a new human convenience, not unlike the ingenious mechanical appliances.” In 1947 inDialectic of EnlightenmentAdorno and Horkheimer speak of the manner in which a teenage American girl keeps “the obligatory date, the inflection on the telephone or in the most intimate situation…” as bearing witness to “man's attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus…personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions.” One thread connecting these images is the commodity status of women under late capitalism. All three moments can be said to register the depleted subjectivity of those who, in Adorno's words, “have escaped the sphere of production only to be absorbed all the more entirely by the sphere of consumption.” But this convergence should not obscure significant differences among all three writers, especially between Veblen on the one hand and James and Adorno on the other.