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Carried Away
The Invention of Modern Shopping
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by Rachel Bowlby
Columbia University Press
Due/Published
March 2001, 256 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0231122748
Asserting that a history of shopping was, until recently, a history of women, Bowlby examines here the evolution of the modern shopper. She uses a blend of history, literary analysis, and cultural criticism to explore the rise of department stores and supermarkets of the United States, France, and Great Britain. Bowlby first recalls the early days of these institutions. In the mid-nineteenth century, when department stores first developed, their fabulous new buildings brought middle-class women into town, where they could indulge in what was then a new activity: a day´s shopping. The stores offered luxury, flattering women into believing that they belonged in a beautiful environment. It is here, Bowlby argues, that the idea of the modern woman´s passion for fashion and shopping took hold. Developed in the twentieth century, supermarkets took an opposite tack: they offered functionality, standardization, and cheapness. However, Bowlby claims, despite their differences, the two institutions belong together as emblematic of their respective eras´ social developments: the department store with the growth of cities, the supermarket with the proliferation of suburbs. With their dazzling lights and displays, both supermarkets and department stores were thought to produce in females an enhanced or trance-like state of mind. "Rachel Bowlby is a scintillating analyst of the hidden meanings of that activity which so pre-eminently defines our culture - shopping.Carried Away traces the transformations in the shopper from the days of the glamorous department store to our own functionalist superstores and tells us not a little about the changing roles of women and men along the way. It's a 'must read' for our consuming culture."--Lisa Appignanesi |
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Review
Notions of the consumer, Bowlby astutely points out, are split along two different lines: the gullible zombified shopper seduced and tricked into desiring and then buying products thrust upon them, and the savvy purchaser, a rational planner who enjoys shopping and might even see it as an expression of his or her personality. These “supermarket selves,” as Bowlby terms them, are the results of how advertisers, stores, and shoppers have shaped the idea of the consumer. Bowlby begins with a discussion of the shift from the department store to the supermarket as the prime shopping locale. While the department store promised entry into a world of luxury and comfort, the supermarket was about thrift and functionality. Carried Away proceeds to recover the initial significances of developments in the history of the supermarket from the new intimate relationship between product and consumer as a result of all goods being within easy reach of the shopper to changes in package design. Bowlby also analyzes the shifts in perceptions of the consumer, from the ladylike figure of the Victorian late nineteenth century to the mindless suburban housewife of the 1950s to the more pragmatic and not necessarily female shopper of the late twentieth century. Carried Away is a lot of fun to read and it is clear that Bowlby is having a good time as she analyzes supermarket trade publications, old marketing manuals, as well as descriptions of shopping in literature and theoretical writings from England, the United States, and France. Her study is also a brilliant cultural history that casts a familiar activity in a new light and explores what it can tell us about capitalist culture and perceptions of gender roles. Also of Interest: |
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