Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women.

When examined with skill, advertisements can be fascinating documents that provide historians with unusual access to the aspirations and anxieties of a people. Lori Anne Loeb demonstrates as much in this intriguing analysis of late Victorian culture. The dexterity with which Loeb interprets ads as a type of evidence makes this an important study.

Consuming Angels is a far-ranging cultural history of Victorian England. Loeb explores topics extending from commercial idealizations of the home and gender, to changing conceptions of material and moral progress, to the rearticulation of an ideology of mobility in late-nineteenth-century England, to the increasing inclusiveness of the concept of community that accompanied the evolution of a mass market. Given the breadth of her explorations, one wonders why Loeb chose such a narrow title for her monograph; this is an unusual instance in which a title claims less, rather than more, for the scope of the work that the author has accomplished.

The title reflects Loeb's ability to sort through the shifting dynamics of gender roles as Victorian society embraced an ethos of consumption. She criticizes traditional debates on women's status that assume that "the real measure of a person's importance in society is his or her relationship to the means of production." (p. 33) In a consumer society, Loeb argues, the purchaser for the household is empowered.

Although middle-class women did not earn the family's income, they increasingly determined the manner in which that money was spent. Women gained greater economic control at the same time that they enhanced their influence over cultural and social values through the power of purchasing the commodities that gave material meaning to life. The transformation in women's status is amply illustrated in the ads of the era.

Quite unlike the traditional image of women associated with that day, the advertisements that appeared in the Victorian press depicted females as aggressive, acquisitive, controlling, seductive, and often magical beings. In sharp contrast to the stereotypically submissive, passive, pliant Victorian female portrayed in the other prescriptive literature of the period, the women pictured in ads present a striking alternative. Allowing the reader to follow her analysis with lavish examples of ads, Loeb presents the most compelling argument in the work.

She demonstrates how, at the same time that they championed a universe of unprecedented material choices for females to make, advertisements also muted the more radical implications that attended this vision of empowered womanhood. By using Hellenistic or Elizabethan or Middle Eastern imagery, ads employed both temporal and geographic distance to shield Victorians from a direct attack on their sensibilities. By placing these images of hedonistic, dominating females in either the past or in far-off lands, the ads both proclaimed the possibilities of, and neutralized the threats inherent in, the realignment in gender roles that accompanied the emergence of a consumer society.

Although Loeb's study pertains to nineteenth-century England, those acquainted with the historiography of American advertising will recognize several themes in Loeb's analysis. Both her method and some of her conclusions bear similarities to Marchand's perceptive account of Advertising the American Dream.(1) In particular, she extends our understanding of the parable of the "democracy of goods" and the correlative "democracy of afflictions." This is not meant to imply that her work is derivative; it is Loeb's highly original capacity to decode and decipher advertisements that makes this book such a pleasure to read.

In other instances, Loeb's work sometimes reminds one of Daniel Boorstin's unfortunate description of "consumption communities." These are ostensible "communities" of those who use the same products, whoever and wherever they might be. As Boorstin describes them, "these consumption communities were quick; they were nonideological; they were democratic; they were public, and vague, and rapidly shifting." They were, said Boorstin, "factitious, malleable, and as easily made as they were evanescent."(2)

Loeb also equates the concept of crowd with that of community: "The crowd in the advertisement, far from symbolizing urban alienation, represents a community of consumers." (p. 143) As to its function in the ads, says Loeb, "the commercial crowd expresses the bond of those unknown to each other face-to-face but united by shared experience" of drinking a cup of the same brand of beef extract, or listening to a Gramophone. (pp. 146-147) This interpretation in the process tends to obscure the utility of both "crowd" and "community" as analytical constructs.

One might also take issue with Loeb's cursory references to Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. Because she chooses to frame her chapter on the emulative and egalitarian impulses depicted in ads around it, one anticipates a more careful reading of Veblen than is presented here. His work is far more sophisticated than it is represented to be.(3)

Yet these are quibbles. Consuming Angels is well worth reading. Loeb's study joins the ranks of the more imaginative investigations of advertisements that have appeared in recent years.

Vincent Vinikas University of Arkansas at Little Rock 

ENDNOTES

1. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, 1985).

2. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1973), pp.89-90.

3. Veblen is not cited in the annotations. Loeb instead refers the reader to a secondary literature. Incidentally, the Theory of the Leisure Class first appeared in 1899, not 1908, as Loeb's text and bibliography would have it.