Sex and the City: Metropolitan Modernities in English History

Abstract

D espite enduring popular identification of Victorianism with sexual prudery, cloying domesticity, and adherence to rigid social conventions, late-nineteenth-century British culture now boasts an impressive (and increasing) association in scholarly literature with erotic, spectacular, and moder. In literary and historical studies alike, past decade has seen publication of an array of works in which Victorian era figures not as bulwark of conservative repression but rather as an age of social, sexual, and spatial emancipation. New understandings of gender and urban consumer culture have played part in this shift in representation, and department has in this context gained an almost totemic status as quintessential symbol of Victorian modernity. Thus for Mica Nava, and emergence of department store represent key iconic aspects of modern urban society, and late-Victorian women's participation in the exploding culture of consumption and spectacle is arena in which the everyday lives of large numbers of ordinary were most deeply affected by process of modernity (38, 46). In this prevailing view, department stores and shopping were instrumental to Victorian women's liberation from domestic circle and their entry into public sphere. Judith Walkowitz argues that [m]iddle-class first established their urban beachheads around West End shopping, which emerged as newly elaborated female activity in 1870s (46-47); in similar vein, Erika Rappaport details how later Victorian entrepreneurs and journalists represented department as the agent of female emancipation and pleasure and symbol of modern metropolis (144). Lynn Walker's analysis of department stores as the most significant symbol of many pleasures of modern city open to women captures essential features of this ostensibly new metropolitan modernity, finding in department a setting [...] which for first time gave