Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.

By Eva Illouz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xv plus 371pp.).

Eva Illouz has written a provocative study of romantic love in the United States today. Consuming the Romantic Utopia raises issues and reaches conclusions that any student of modern relationships will find interesting and useful. According to Illouz, romantic love "has been ambiguously incorporated into the culture of consumer capitalism." As one consequence of this, "the inequalities constitutive of the market have been transferred to the romantic bond itself." (p. 22)

Illouz shows that the basic transformation of romantic love occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century. Romance has traditionally appeared as an outlaw emotion, defying social hierarchy and making the desires of individuals more important than the demands of institutions. In the twentieth century, however, the ideal of love has lost many of the religious and tragic implications that it carried in the nineteenth century. By the 1920s, romantic love meant personal happiness and had become a staple in popular fiction, film, and advertising. Romance and the consumer culture merged in what Illouz calls the "political economy of romance." (p. 66) Romance by the 1920s also meant buying certain products (clothing, cosmetics) and enjoying public entertainments to enhance the feelings of closeness with individuals of the opposite sex. As a form of consumption, romance inevitably became unevenly distributed. Romance could be expensive: "if $ 75.30 is a modest New York date," one man complained in 1930, "I'm Santa Claus." (p. 67) Working-class men and women might still date, but they could not hope to match the images that came to dominate the new mass media.

The transformation of romance in the 1920s and 1930s that Illouz shows in her first two chapters is based largely on secondary materials. These chapters form the historical background to the remaining six chapters of the book. Relying on sociological theory and research, on her own study of contemporary advertising and articles in women's magazines, and on interviews that she conducted with 50 individuals, Illouz shows how the political economy of romance has shaped the experience of romantic love for working- and middle-class women and men in the 1990s. The connection between romance and consumption has persisted, and the division between working- and middle-class access to romance has continued to widen. For instance, Illouz shows that romance has undergone a continuing process of commodification. Romantic moments take place outside the normal routines of work and home, and are enacted by (and give permission for) rituals of liminality. Yet these rituals generally require certain forms of consumption - travel to exotic places, dining out, exchange of gifts, and the use of special cosmetics or dress.

As love has been assimilated to the consumer culture, a split has developed in the view of love. The traditional notion of love as a chaotic force is reflected in magazine articles that treat love as waste, as completely at odds with reasonable behavior and rational choice. At the same time, romance also appears as a product of work, effort, and calculation. The rationality of the market shapes the expression of passion. Illouz suggests that those most likely to favor the former view of love are those who are not pressed by economic necessity, while the ideal of love as work and calculation will attract the upwardly mobile. While this sociological explanation may strike many readers as unsatisfactory, ideas such as these serve to raise important questions about the nature of love today.

Much of Illouz's work deals with the distance between the middle-class and working-class experience of romance. Romance today not only implies certain forms of consumption but also familiarity with, and the manipulation of, cultural images. Working-class respondents were more likely to choose a particular advertising image of love (a couple alone in a boat) from a set shown to all interviewees. Middle-class respondents were likely to view the working-class favorite as too stereotyped. Middle-class respondents, however, chose images of men and women relaxing together in settings of subtle affluence, set apart from everyday life by special locations and commodities. Not surprisingly, the middle-class experience of love far more commonly reflects these images. According to Illouz, middle-class experiences of romance are likely to resemble closely the images of romance in advertising. While they have greater facility at manipulating the images and symbols of culture, middle-class women and men have more completely assimilated cultural ideals about the appropriate time, place, and accessories of love. Working-class respondents also spoke of romantic moments as special, set apart from everyday life, but left out the travel and consumption that more affluent respondents used to create the specialness. While this fits well with Illouz's larger thesis on the inequitable distribution of romance, it also leads to a question of method. Illouz did not use statistical methods or seek an elusive representative sample in her interviews. Her approach was to engage her subjects in deeply probing discussions of their romantic experiences. Yet after income and education, the most striking difference between middle-class (including "cultural specialists") and lower-middle- and working-class respondents is marital status. Of thirty people in the former group, seven were married. In the lower income categories, ten of eighteen were married. Yet Illouz gives little attention to the difference in experience of romance that this difference in marital status might create.

The distinction between working- and middle-class experience also appears in another of Illouz's most important conclusions. Romantic love, Illouz claims, is quintessentially postmodern. Yet, she concludes in her last chapter that the middle class is more likely to realize an "authentic meaning of love." (p. 294) By this she means that middle-class women and men can achieve a "higher self-knowledge" but also that they can more readily "live up to the romantic standards promoted by the media." It is not clear how a postmodern ideal can have an authentic meaning (since authenticity is a modernist term generally scorned in postmodernist work), but the description of authenticity suggested here seems to undermine even the modernist meaning of the term.

Even so, the questions that Illouz leaves us with are as important as the conclusions she reaches. Her work helps to deepen our understanding of contemporary romance.

John C. Spurlock Seton Hill College