Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. by Rosalind H. Williams Review by: Priscilla P.

Clark American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 89, No. 6 (May, 1984), pp. 1478-1480 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2779211 . Accessed: 02/12/2011 03:53
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American Journal of Sociology The stone is like the ultimate substance of positivist sociology-the individual-whose invariant properties and relations are measured antiseptically by methods that presuppose that there is an absolute line of demarcation between the self and other. Wilshire argues that this position assumes that it is possible to sever the moment in which a human phenomenon is objectified (i.e., the objective, third-person perspective) from the moment in which that phenomenon is perceived as meaningful by those who constitute it as a human reality (i.e., the subjective, firstperson perspective). He demonstrates convincingly that this radical separation between the way we know and the way we experience ourselves and others entails a remarkably incoherent social psychology. In a brief but incisive concluding section, Wilshire distinguishes the ideality and fictionality, which are essential to theater, from the self which is always more than its roles in everyday life. The idea of agency and responsibility combined with the indeterminate nature of the consequences of our actions, for ourselves and others, in the boundless time of the world defines the limits of the theatrical metaphor. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. By Rosalind H. Williams. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. Pp. xii+451 + 24 pp. photographs. $29.50. Priscilla P. Clark University of Illinois at Chicago Dream Worlds opens with a striking scene that tells much about the work as a whole: the young provincial, Denise Baudet, freshly arrived in Paris, stands agape in front of Au bonheur des dames, the archetypal department store created by Emile Zola as the "cathedral of modern commerce" (Au bonheur des dames [1883], chap. 9). The abundance of detail, the use of literary examples, the felicitous turns of phrases, all amplify the argument by creating a strong sense of time and place. Not content just to describe the consequences of the consumer revolution, Rosalind H. Williams also describes the contemporary wonder and bewilderment. For, as Denise soon discovers, the kind of consumption on display in the department store bespeaks a new and profoundly unsettling way of life. To correct and complement the more familiar emphasis on the production of material goods, Williams proposes a history of consumption. She takes France as her test case, arguing that French pioneering in advertising and retailing brought mass consumption to Paris (if not to the provinces) sooner than elsewhere and with more immediate effect. In the late 1870s, for example, the Bon Marche, the department store on which Zola based Au bonheur des dames, may well have been the largest retail enterprise in the world (see Michael B. Miller's excellent study, The Bon Marche [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981], p. 40). More important still, the same concentration of resources-technological, eco1478

Book Reviews nomic, and cultural-that made Paris a hothouse for social change also made France a locus of intellectual debate over the problems of mass consumption. The first half of Dream Worlds gives four models of consumption, each elaborated in such vivid detail that, like Denise Baudet entranced by Au bonheur des dames, we are overwhelmed by the sheer materiality of the spectacle. The first model is realized in the closed world of courtly consumption (chap. 2). Under the aegis of their consumer-king, the courtiers at Versailles lived according to Voltaire's dictum, "le superflu, chose tres necessaire." Luxury was indeed a necessity, not least because it manifested what Norbert Elias has called "the civilizing process" (pp. 22-25). By the 19th century this ethos of extravagance had been adopted by newly wealthy, upwardly mobile bourgeois to mark their elite status. Although Williams gives rather short shrift to this bourgeois variant of the original aristocratic model, the case is confirmed by recent work of French historians, in particular, Jean-Paul Aron's analysis of bourgeois gastronomic excess (Le Mangeur du XIXe siecle [Paris: Laffont, 1973]). As Paris-Versailles offered the prototype of aristocratic consumption, so modern Paris set the stage for the competing consumer life-styles and accompanying ideologies that multiplied over the 19th century as discretionary consumption became possible for more than a very few. The second model therefore explores the "dream world" of mass consumption (chap. 3), taking the Salon de l'automobile (1898), the cinema, and especially the Paris exposition of 1900 as "scale models" of the consumer revolution. In horrified reaction to this patent democratization of luxury, dandies like Baudelaire or Des Esseintes (the bizarre protagonist of J.-K. Huysmans' novel, A rebours [1889]) incarnated a third model as they strove to realize a new hyperelitist style of consumption far from the vulgarity of the crowd (chap. 4). Finally, a fourth model shows "democrats" seeking still another alternative to mass consumption in a functionalist, supposedly utilitarian, aesthetic that made use of industrial materials and design (chap. 5). Inevitably, the enterprise of defining modern consumption as such obscures traits specific to a single society. By Williams's own account, "mass consumption" did not reach all that far in the masses. The working classes did not frequent the department store (whose prices remained beyond their reach) as much as the bourgeoisie did. Thus Miller (The Bon Marche, chap. 5) points out the extent to which the Bon Marche owed its phenomenal success to the marketing of stolid bourgeois comfort and respectability, spiced, for the provincials, with a soupcon of Parisian glamour. Here and throughout, closer attention to the particularities of French society might have suggested modifications in the models proposed. Williams has relatively little to say about the possible benefits from mass consumption. In her eyes all these worlds of frenetic consumption are dream worlds, and all are doomed to fail. As the numerous comparisons with the present day make clear, these life-styles, and especially their 1479

American Journal of Sociology failures, are meant to engage us directly. Like Denise Baudet, Williams is a concerned consumer, and that concern informs the entire work. Accordingly, and because these life-styles did not exist in an intellectual vacuum, part 2 of Dream Worlds confronts the consumer revolution with its critics, writers who wrote exposes in order to counter the moral crisis that rampant consumption provoked. This body of critical thought on consumption further justifies making France the paradigmatic society of mass consumption. For these critics were social scientists who also wrote within the very old, very French moraliste tradition and its concern for the ethical implications of social phenomena. Aside from Durkheim and, perhaps, Huysmans, the writers around whom the chapters are organized are not very familiar figures. Few will know much about the advocates-for example, Georges d'Avenel, apostle of consumerism, and Camille Mauclair, exponent of the decorative arts movement (chaps. 3 and 5)-or the critics-the economist Paul LeroyBeaulieu, his brother Anatole, the Le Playist political scientist-or the solidarists (chap. 6)-the economist Charles Gide, who began preaching the cause of consumer cooperatives as early as 1893 (chap. 7), and, most particularly, Gabriel Tarde, who, along with his lifelong adversary, Durkheim, offered the beginnings of a sociology of consumption (chap. 8). Skillfully weaving themes and characters with anecdotes and analysis, Dream Worlds presents the careers and the works of these men in loving detail. Perhaps in too much detail. The arguments could have been made with greater economy, the book shortened by a third. But then we would miss the sympathetic discussions of solidarism (pp. 267-75) and the beginnings of consumerism, the acute analyses of Huysmans' A rebours (pp. 127-51) and Tarde's unfinished utopian novel, Fragments d'histoire future (pp. 379-81). If these works do not quite constitute the alternative mode of social science claimed for them, Williams, in resurrecting the debate prompted by the advent of mass consumption, has nevertheless made a signal contribution to the history of social science. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. By Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen. New York: McGrawHill Book Co., 1982. Pp. xiii+312. $12.05 (cloth); $7.95 (paper). Eric Leed Florida International University This is a very unbalanced and uneven book. The chapters on immigrant women and the movies, fashion and the ready-to-wear clothing industry, and advertising and department stores are substantial and informative. They show in some detail how newly arrived Americans seized on the alternatives offered them by the cornucopia of industrial capitalism to redefine their identities and escape from the rigidities and strictures of their traditional cultures. Those chapters, however, which purport to 1480