<em>Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing</em>, by Krista Lysack

Abstract

Reviewed by: Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing Lise Shapiro Sanders (bio) Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing, by Krista Lysack; pp. x + 238. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008, $49.95, $26.95 paper, £44.95, £24.50 paper. In Come Buy, Come Buy, Krista Lysack offers a fresh perspective on the study of consumer culture in Victorian England, examining the significance of shopping through the lens of women's desire and pleasure. Analyzing sources ranging from novels and poetry written by women to a prominent suffrage journal, Lysack argues that these texts represent the woman shopper "going to market on her own, not as an object of exchange but as a subject" and that the emergent discourse of women's consumer agency enabled new and "dissident" forms of identity (12). Each of the five chapters incorporates a historicizing approach to primary sources, a thorough account of recent criticism, and original readings of both canonical and lesser-known literary texts. Thus Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862), often read as a narrative of female homosocial desire and self-sacrifice against the backdrop of a dangerous male marketplace, becomes an examination of women's participation in imperialism, whether as consumers of "Eastern" goods distributed by Liberty's and other department stores of the period, or as the poem's own "poachers" of exotic fruits foreign to English soil, sold by racialized "goblin men." According to this reading, Lizzie transgresses the bounds of proper consumer practice through "visual tactics" (48), looking but refusing to buy on the market's terms. Similarly, the eponymous heroine of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) offers another form of transgression in her status as a "disorderly" consumer (58)—a version of the pathological shopper who formed the subject of much mid-century anxiety over the dangers of consumption—whose very identity reveals the artificiality of Victorian femininity. In a chapter on Middlemarch (1871–72), Lysack contrasts Rosamond's class-conscious domestic expenditure with Dorothea's thrift, arguing that both women trade against the future in a way that distinguishes their consumption from traditional forms of domestic economy. Although these texts have been much analyzed in Victorian studies, Lysack succeeds in persuading her readers to think differently about the gendered politics of consumption in each case. The focus of the remaining two chapters and a brief afterword on fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century writing implicitly reorients the terrain of the Victorian to address, to use Rita Felski's phrase, the gender of modernity. Turning to the poetry of Michael Field, Lysack argues that Field's woman-centered lyrics alter the masculine dynamics of the gaze, substituting an alternative method of consumption based on female same-sex desire. For Lysack, Sight and Song (1892) is an example of a reconfigured literary aestheticism based on connoisseurship, which rejects the logic of possession and exchange for a new economy of pleasure shared between women. Lysack concludes her study with an analysis of Votes for Women (1907–18), the organ of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), and details the journal's coverage of shops designed to sell suffrage in the form of pamphlets, buttons, scarves, and related ephemera. This chapter reads the WSPU's use of consumer culture as a tactical engagement with the public sphere in which women's practice of "shopping for the vote" becomes an act of claiming citizenship on their own terms. In her afterword, Lysack considers Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as another depiction of the female [End Page 765] shopper, focusing not on Clarissa but on her daughter Elizabeth, whose meandering path through the West End suggests a new set of possibilities for the modern woman. Lysack ultimately locates Victorian women's agency in their resistance to being coded as objects of exchange and their active pursuit of pleasure through shopping. For theoretical support, she turns to Michel de Certeau, who offers "poaching" as an alternative consumer practice (or "antidiscipline"), and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose model of "becoming-woman" reconfigures desire as plenitude rather...