Consumerism and the Archive Krista Lysack’s Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0821418109. Price: US$49.95) Brent Shannon’s The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860-1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0821417027. Price: US$49.95)

In The Cut of His Coat, Brent Shannon has written a compelling and delightful book on how much Victorian men liked to shop for clothes. Commodity consumption constituted men as much as women then as now, he demonstrates, and nowhere more saliently than through the fashions they chose to wear. Our assumption that only women, gay men, or aristocrats were caught up in dress and buying takes at face value the “ideological wishful thinking” (16) that the Victorians needed to propagate about themselves—such unthinking acceptance on our part “replicates rather than analyzes,” as Shannon puts it (9). Indeed, when we consider the ordinary Victorian man “‘as consumer,’ [we find] a man dependent on the purchase of a combination of goods out of which he assembles and displays his social status and masculinity” (198). “[M]en’s direct relationship with shopping was not as socially stigmatized” as we thought, “nor were men’s sartorial codes nearly as static, uniform, and unchanging as fashion historians have claimed” (9). Commodity culture was intrinsic to ideas of normative masculinity and was helping to shift them dramatically at this time, Shannon argues, especially when it came to heterosexual, middle-class manhood. Understanding the various and conflicting Victorian notions regarding men’s relation to shopping and dress helps us, therefore, to understand those changes. Buying clothes actually educated men in the norms of masculinity, Shannon tells us. It taught them how to be heterosexual and middle-class. Middle-class men used their attire paradoxically: on the one hand, department store ready-to-wear made supposedly effete dandyism or upper-class foppery available to any bourgeois. Mass-produced fashion’s easy mimicry of upper-class dress blurred class distinctions by revealing their artificiality. At the same time, however, middle-class men also asserted different class values by adopting their own “sartorial and consumer aesthetic” (171). In patronizing department stores rather than tailors, they abandoned custom-fitted frock- and tail-coats in favor of the more unconstructed and easily mass-producible three-piece “lounge suit” we still recognize as the business suit of today. This all-purpose, more comfortable attire was at odds with fussy, ornamented, occasion-specific, and impractical upper-class dress and the leisure and excess for which that costume stood (10). Shannon asks scholars to attend carefully to the specific and contrary practices that a genealogy of the lounge suit, for instance, provides in order to modify our current reductive understanding of the nineteenth century. By apprehending Victorian men’s fashion consumption in its complexity, we can also understand it more fully as the origin of goods, practices, and gender assumptions enduring to our own time and still constituting us. Shannon applies the methods of historians of women such as Erika Rappaport to complicate, if not overturn, modern preconceptions about past material practices of gender. In Come Buy, Come Buy, so does Krista Lysack. Her persuasive and thoughtful study considers how those late-nineteenth-century women we so comfortably suppose to be the first dupes of shopping were actually constituted through it in much more creative and resistant ways than we credit. Lysack takes the title of Rappaport’s Shopping for Pleasure seriously: she asserts that, for Victorian women shoppers, “pleasure is constituted as a value in itself” that helped women radically exceed “the cultural script” curtailing them (10). Women’s shopping is for Lysack predicated “not only on the dangers but also the delights” of desiring (19). Because “the commodity, like a fetish, is a contradiction that allows for alternative modes of desire” (19), shopping has the potential to disrupt usual economies of the self and of gender. Lysack argues that desire “does not proceed from lack, or the need to fill some void at the heart of being, …