A Place to Hang Your Hat

Through the “meaning-making process” of commodity consumption working class women were not merely the passive peons of the capitalist and the bourgeois housewife, rather they found autonomous agency through the subjectivities formed in their relationship to commodities. In other words, consumerism was not a sign of women’s mass deception.
According to Nan Enstad’s Ladies of Labor, commodities offered women an empowering “new range of representations, symbols, activities, and spaces with which to create class gender and ethnic identities.” Enstad attempts to disprove that a coherent subject is at the root of political action. Constantly citing Judith Butler, she argues that identity categories are necessarily based on exclusions that carry an inherent tyranny; for, “labels shape identities and experiences” – in the case of Enstad’s study, those oppressive classifications are “worker” and “woman.”
The attack on women’s popular culture activities by privileging representations of the “rational,” “serious girl striker” (both during the 19th century and in our modern historical narratives) undermines the critical process of shaping the female worker identity. “Working women’s version of ladyhood differed greatly from middle-class ideals: it challenged middle-class perceptions of labor as degrading to femininity and created a utopian language or entitlement rooted in workplace experiences.” Likewise, “Their style was not an imitation of middle class identity but an appropriation of a valued set of codes.” Through ready-made evening gowns, silk underwear, and “Peg O’ the Movies” the working-class women stood outside the dominant middle-class discourse of film and fashion and part-took in a culture of inherent resistance.
Liberal critic Thomas Frank has drawn a parallel between the emerging consensus of the 1980s “New Economy” and the widespread acceptance of commodity consumption as a means of asserting agency. Frank is dumbfounded by the absence of analysis of American business culture (the defining landscape of the 1990s), never mind dissent from the academy regarding corporate interests. He satirically writes, “Cultural Studies was teeming with stories of aesthetic hierarchies rudely overturned; with subversive mallwalkers dauntlessly using up the mall’s air-conditioning.” By casting the caricature of the “elitists” critic (unhappy with the shift toward cultural democracy, desperately clinging to the mass culture critique) as the villain, “cult studs” got in line with the myriad of journalists, politicians, and media monguls relentlessly celebrating the revolutionary power of popular culture. Cultural studies trademark language of audience agency and subversive text mirrored all too perfectly the anti-elitist, anti-hierarchical rhetoric pouring forth from the conservative populist movement and boardrooms alike. Ultimately, Thomas Frank charges the “cult studs” academic radicalism with being an indistinguishable hegemonic function of the market.
Of course, Frank is driven by the question that has motivated many of the cultural critics we have looked at this semester: What is the best way to subvert the system? How can we overturn unjust capitalism? This is where I see Enstand’s critique diverge. Her work is not propelled by the proposition of a radical new order. She represents a history of how a group achieves some freedom, some decency, and a place to hang their hats within the existing system. In this way, citing the desire for silk underwear as a distinct political act, a form of agency that operates outside bourgeois epistemology, mirrors the theoretical foundation and implicit ambition of Enstad’s project. “Thus silk underwear signaled the invisible interior ladyhood, similar to that promised by the dime novels, to which working women laid claim”(82). Enstad successfully marries politics and culture because of the way she defines political action. Acute policy change, a shifting of the cultural terrain to the interests of an oppressed group, dignity through identity formation, these are significant forms of political action to Enstad, and it seems that an investment in this kind of political action is best expressed through Cultural Studies.


Other thoughts:
-Veblen, can imitation can be radical?
-Ironically, Enstad priviledges a distinct female working class narrative. For example, in New York City at the end of the Civil War there were upwards of six hundred brothels. In 1846 a police source estimated the number of prostitutes in New York City to be 7,000 (10% of young females) while an alderman and minster source estimated the number to be 20,000 (28% of young girls). Regardless of the exact figure, these staggering official approximations indicate prostitution’s unavoidable physical and social presence. In 1855 tailor shops had the highest cash value, $7,592,696, of manufactured articles/goods in New York City. Tailor shops were followed by prostitution which brought in an estimated $6,350,760 in 1855. While prostitution did not involve the production of goods, it became a highly visible and exceptionally lucrative business.
Why is prostitution so clearly excluded from a historical narrative to which is belongs (even on page 28 the citation of the “Bowery Ghals” speaks to the significant presence of the brothel culture).
- Funny to see one of T.S. Eliots most significant arguments regarding culture, “cultural consumption without taste will lead to moral fall,” was originally championed by the indistinct body of middle class women.
-Dime novels about working class girl marrying millionaires, etc. seriously discredits Langland’s argument.

Working Class People as People

Brit
As I was reading Race Rebels, I was struck by the fact that it seems as though the author grew up in working class conditions, although I couldn't verify it.  This seems important because he understands working class conditions because he lived them.  As I was reading the introduction I was struck by this paragraph:

“Like most working class people throughout the world, my fellow employees at Mickey D’s were neither total victims of routinization, exploitation, sexism, and racism, nor were they “rational” economic beings driven by the most base utilitarian concerns.  Their lives and struggles were so much more complicated.  If we are to make meaning of these kinds of actions rather than dismiss them as manifestations of immaturity, false consciousness, or primitive rebellion, we must begin to dig beneath the surface of trade union pronouncements, political institutions, and organized social movements, deep into the daily lives, cultures, and communities which make the working classes much more than people at work.  We have to step into the complicated maze of experience that renders “ordinary” folks so extraordinarily multifaceted, diverse, and complicated” (3-4). 

The reason this paragraph seemed so pertinent, besides the fact that in many ways it outlines the author’s main points, is that the author understands what working class people are going through.  If he grew up in that situation, then he is coming from a point a view that we cannot grasp in the same way.  I liked that he acknowledged that if we are to get to know working class culture/movements/struggles better, we have to get to know the people.  We have to understand what their daily lives entail to better understand what is important to them as well as how they approach their work.  It seems so obvious, but many times I feel like we categorize the working class solely on their work, and often overlook many other factors that may affect/determine how they go about social movements, or how they try to create a better work environment. 

            

retail empowerment

i also really enjoyed Enstad's discussion of the ways in which working-class women harnessed fashion as a means of empowerment. i loved that these women striked out of a desire for, among other things of course, a place to hang their hats. since my final research project is on fashion and consumerism, this struck a chord with me especially because i often think, as Enstad is also refuting, that fashion is seen as another example of women's "frivolity." fashion doesn't matter, because it is what women are primarily concerned with. but as Enstad argues so undeniably, fashion is an extension of political, social, and individual values.

the hat, the French heels, the cheap dresses–while they are symbols of the poor quality of clothes allocated to working women, they are conversely symbols of the way in which working women expected to be treated. clothing has always been steeped in purpose since the beginning of human history, and today whether or not we believe we are fashion-conscious, we always are nevertheless very socially conscious of what we put on our bodies every day, and of what we expect from others based on what we wear. you don't wear your tuxedo to class without at least understanding that someone, somewhere, is going to look at you differently. these women struggled against a division of clothing-construction that sought to keep them from elevating themselves to the status of the middle class; and yet they used these same cheap items as very powerful tools for advocating for their status as ladies. the poorly made shoes and hats that the middle class declared were evidence of their vulgarity and impurity, became part of the visual discourse that working-class women created to advocate for themselves.

i was also struck by the fact that buying hats and shoes was a way that women demonstrated the value of their own labor. as Enstad points out, the traditional–and respected–icon of the worker was male, skilled, and probably wearing some boots. the pride of a young working-class man was that he could have enough leftover money to buy himself some finery. the yield from a woman's labor, however, was seen as the property of her father, or if she were married, of her husband. what women produced was not only considered less valuable, but it wasn't even considered their labor at all (bet those families would notice the difference in income of the "non-labor" were that girl to lose her job, however). consequently the wearing of hats and shoes was a major statement for women to visibly demonstrate their own sense of self-worth. one of my proudest moments of high school was taking the money i had earned from the first paycheck of my first job, and buying myself an expensive and pretty roxy wristwatch from the jewelry store in my town. i still wear that watch.

Micro-politics of Resistance

What I found interesting in both Kelly's Race Rebels and Enstad's Ladies of Labour is the idea of working class identity and modes of resistance to exploitation as heterogenous and contingent. Further, their analysis reveals that political action doesn't always have to take prescribed paths (such as strikes or revolution) for it to become meaningful. Kelly notes how the forms of resistance that African American and Chicano workers practiced at Mickey D are culturally and context specific and a set of every day practices, rather than organized political action. But, Kelly argues that these actions were significant for the workers as a way of countering exploitation and authority and informing their sense of self.

Enstad's contention that the identity performed by working class women is outside of the normative construction of the 'worker' - 'white male worker' - points to the heterogeneity and the complexity of identity formation of workers along the axes of gender (and race). While the more institutionalized labour organizations attempted to impose a monolithic identity of a 'worker,' these women were able to form an alternative identity via their consumer habits and tastes. This resonates with the study on female garment factory workers in Sri Lanka, which I read for the book review. It indicates how female garment factory workers consciously attempted to signal their difference from "respectable" middle class women by wearing flashy clothing, an excess of jewelry and make up or openly flirting with men in public spaces. Although these acts are carried within a capitalist consumerist logic, it enabled the female workers to develop an oppositional consciousness in constructing an identity that is different from both other women and male industrial workers.

Thus, all the workers don't develop a political consciousness as workers in a prescribed or monolithic way and their resistance to exploitation can take different forms. What is important to note is that these acts are capable of making some sort of a difference in the absence organized political action.

Mystifying Oppression

In Nan Enstad’s Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure I really appreciate the way she moves from close readings of various representations (films, periodicals, clothing), to people’s interpretations at the time, to commenting on the general practices of these representations, grounding them in larger historical and theoretical contexts. Her analysis of the New York hat in the intro provides a good example of this. She emphasizes the importance of going beyond audience response in order to understand, “how products are shaped and imbued with meanings at various points of production and consumption” (12).

One of the conclusions Enstad reaches, that is of special interest to me, is when she states: “capitalist production mystified the labor process and presented commodities seemingly devoid of meanings stemming from production” (25). I don’t think this mystification could have happened without the proper ad campaign, and this came in the form of the “new middle-class women’s magazines of the 1840s” that “disseminated information about fashion and played a key role in the formation of new meanings of commodities” by obscuring the “classed nature of their [magazine’s] ideology” (25-6). This classed nature was replaced instead by taste and moral value (27). Here Enstad provides a very specific instance of a process that I have been grappling with: how injustices seem to disappear and then reappear in a neutralized form.

Contributing to Oppresion

Edwin

In the reading for this week Enstad puts forth an interesting argument concerning the radicalization of popular culture. Her focus on fashion in the beginning of the book was for me the more interesting part of the argument. Eliciting a movement of increasing egalitarianism and democratization and a moment of identity formation from fashion is a difficult argument to organize but Enstad puts forth her case well. However, there were a few issues I had with the fashion argument. Enstad argues that these women were working in factories, slaving over the very goods that at the same time were empowering them. They were working for companies that saw them as dispensable and at the end of the day, were returning their wages to them. This idea seems fairly counter-intuitive to me. Inside the factory, women worked under horrible conditions and were treated as insignificant, yet when they left the factory and bought the goods they were producing the become empowered? Whatever empowerment they felt from wearing clothes which helped establish their “ladyness,” pales when presented with the fact that they were contributing to a system which was oppressing them.

At the same time Enstad’s examples of cheap clothing as a crack in class walls seems feasible. One look at the business world and it is easy to observe how clothing can bring forth favorable judgment, no matter who is the wearer. On pages 26-29 Enstad gives examples of individuals who could no longer tell ones class by examining clothing. What I find difficult in this section of the argument, is that even through wearing middle class cloth one is still acknowledging that these distinctions matter. For me, this fact puts the rising democratization that Enstad was arguing in question. After all there was likely a large amount of women who could not afford to buy even these cheaper imitations of high class clothing. Those who could and did buy these imitations were contributing to these class distinctions which were still enforced on the fashionably less fortunate.

The Politics of Loud Music

After reading the introduction of Kelley' Race Rebels, I began to think of various ways that power has been and is undermined by small dissonant gestures. In the intro, Kelley discusses the anthropologist James C. Scott's study on the political culture of oppressed peoples in South Asia, that found that "oppressed groups challenge those in power by constructing a 'hidden transcript,' a dissedent political culture that manifests itself in daily conversations, folklore, jokes, songs, and other cultural practices," creating what Scott calls "infrapolitics" (8). This infrapolitics, according to Kelley, is the only way to understand the "policies, strategies, or symbolic representations of those in power" (9). In short, Kelley wants to look at the forms of African American subversion through small, defiant, symbolic gestures that occur routinely. Two things immediately sprung to my mind as potential examples of the practice of infrapolitics: loud, base-oriented music from passing vehicles and sagging pants. In fact, it made me think twice about these seemingly nonpolitical yet sometimes annoying--especially the loud music--acts. I think that the next time I hear a base thumping from a subwoofer in the back of a car, I won't grit my teeth or cover my ears but appreciate as a small but potentially effective subversive and perhaps even progressive act.

But I also found myself wondering what this revealed about those in power. That they like the quiet? That they want psychically foreclose upon the plight of huge numbers of African Americans in the U.S.? That they are secretly afraid of the power invoked by the music?

I also found myself thinking about what happens when these acts are appropriated by other groups? Is it a good thing that white teenagers perform the same acts or do they drain the acts of their viability?

Ladies of Labor, Race Rebels, and Fashion - Jennifer

I was very excited to read about the references to fashion mainly in Enstad's Ladies of Labor book but also in Kelley's Race Rebels. Enstad's introduction was very unique in its connection of her research and the content of her book to women's connection with French heels at the turn of the century. This historical additive to her introduction, I think, really helped show the direction she wanted to take her book and showed the connection between upper and lower class women of the time. What Enstad does is not graze over what many other scholars would deem frivolous, such as fashion, but intertwines it within her book. She discusses fashions connections to race and class by saying "When an immigrant woman bought a fashionable hat and put it on at home, then, she created herself as a "woman" and as an "American." The "hat" becomes a symbol throughout her book, as did the French heels to begin Ladies of Labor. While the first chapter really contextualizes what fashion did for the women Enstad represents in Ladies of Labor, fashion is present throughout the book, not just in the first chapter. My favorite recollection of fashion comes about when Enstad discusses the strikes at the factories and how fashion is connected to these. What Enstad is telling us is that fashion is a larger part of our cultural and social history than we probably have thought, and to me that is the unique and essential part of her work.

Although Kelley does not spend as much time on fashion it is a part of his book. Fashion is first introduced in his introduction when he and the other McDonald's workers tried to reinvent their uniforms to become cooler and more individualized at their jobs. Fashion becomes an important aspect of his Kickin' Reality, Kickin' Ballistics chapter when he describes the outfits commonly associated with rebel identity and the significance of a Raiders hat or starter jacket. What I think needs to be taken from these books is the social context of fashion that is usually overlooked in historical and social works. We know from history classes and even our discussions this semester that at times what someone did or did not wear was important, such as what servants wore as to not disturb the complex master/servant relationship of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At other times fashion may not be so pivotal, but in either case I like that it is addressed, especially in Enstad's book, as being a large part of the social context both Erstad and Kelley are writing about.

Lady Gaga's of Labor

Nan Enstad has an interesting and productive take on consumer culture, showing the ways in which people adapt the tools at hand to radical means. The women striking in New York took common themes and stock characters and used them to model brave and virtuous behavior on the picket line. I was especially excited by Enstad's argument that the chastity of working girls in fiction helped them form an early resistance to sexual harassment in the work place (around p 141). Although a contemporary reader might see these books as sexually conservative, they provided a model for standing up to corrupt managers at a time when mentioning sexual activity made a woman complicit in it.

Enstad gives us a model of social activity that revises the traditional narrative (young Jewish socialists instigating labor strikes), while at the same time it appeals to common sense. Naturally, people have to work with the forms they have. While these narratives are not totally radical and were commercial products, these women adapted generic forms to their needs at the time. I'm glad that Enstad carefully avoids claims that popular culture and fashion radicalized these women, instead giving the women credit for using fashion and novels for radical means. In a way, she provides a great argument against Adorno's thoughts on consumer culture as a dehumanizing and dominating horror show that no one can resist. Enstad points out how popular culture can be used as a tool for many purposes.

Which leads me to a question that I've been thinking about: can we radicalize popular culture, or will we radicalize it only when the shit hits the fan? Working women at the turn of the century were already radicalized by the extreme exploitation they faced in the work place, which led to their use of popular culture as a model for strong behavior. What narratives and forms will be most productive in future political movements? Unfortunately, we have a lot fewer media representations of working class women comparable to working girl fiction. The closest might be strong female country singers (like Reba McEntire and Dolly Parton), but that still constitutes a niche market. But maybe, Lady Gaga will lead the revolution:

Cotton...The Fabric of Our Lives

Rachael

How do we define levels of class? In the twenty-first century, it seems that you can tell a lot about a person by the clothes they wear. Though some will not admit it, many people have pride in the “level” of store they shop in. Like the girl quoted at the beginning of Enstad’s first chapter, who wished to wear the Wanamaker label on the front of her clothing, people are proud of the labels they wear and carry. Yet this is not purely a modern phenomenon.

In her book, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, Nan Enstad is able to draw on the fashion trends and availabilities in order to garner a better understanding of the workingwoman. A large determinant of these distinctions was created by the industrialization of the garment industry, not simply through labor concerns, but clothing now available to many levels of society. Enstad writes, “with the implementation of the mechanized loom, the prices of all cloth, including fine cloth, dropped dramatically. This expanded the market of people who could afford tailor-made clothing.” (22)

The notion of fashion and class status is apparent in my own work for the semester with Gaskell’s North and South. When walking in the streets of her new home, Margaret reflects, “People thronged the footpaths, most of them well-dressed as regarded the material, but with a slovenly looseness which struck Margaret as different from the shabby, threadbare smartness of a similar class in London.” Although they would appear to be members of the same class, as an outside observer, Margaret sees differences in dress based on their geographical position.

The main labor dispute within the novel focuses around the cotton mills in the city of Milton. While discussing the industry on the train ride to their new home, Mrs. Hale exclaims, “but these factory people, who on earth wears cotton that can afford linen?” The question of “who wears cotton” pops up frequently within the novel and becomes a topic of contention between Mr. Thornton and Margaret. It comes down to Mr. Thornton to explain to her that mechanization, combined with the new abundant availability of cotton fabric meant that more people could afford new clothing. He is even one to point out that the industry sees great sales in the colonies and America, as the heat and number of industrial workers makes cheaper clothing a necessity.

Frick mansion tour of the "working class" aspect of the home

Hey everyone, I saw this article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette this morning and instantly thought of our class. Even if we can't all go together for "All the Ladies of the House" Tour I thought some of us may be interested in it!

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11082/1133905-51.stm

The Loss of a "Smoking Gun"

I find myself perpetually weary of what I have observed as the all too common trap of the middle-class Marxist critic: a view of the working class that is stifled by pity for the betrayed and debased worker, whose faults are almost entirely a consequence of the system which he inhabits met by a reverence and nostalgia for the noble savage and the dregs of his rural folk-art or genuinely popular urban art.
I was happy to see that Denning escaped this stifling trap.
Denning argues that the history of the dime novel is not merely a history of a culture industry, but a history of their place in working class culture and their distinct role in the struggle to reform that culture. As he convinced me through extensive research, “ workers made up the bulk of the dime novel public,” therefore “their concerns and accents are inscribed in cheap stories” (“concerns and accents” that can be determined through their allegorical inscription and an understanding of the working-class reading practice which involved consumption as well as interpretation). In other words, the 19th century American worker was not a victim of a culture industry rooted in capitalist self-interest and bourgeois hegemony. The dime novel was a “contested terrain, a field of cultural conflict where signs with wide appeal and resonance take on contradictory disguises and are spoken in contrary actions,” a place where the often divergent working-class attitudes found expression.
One of the arguments in Mechanic Accents that seems to reflect Denning’s larger theoretical investment is the explanation of the “fiction question,” “the debates, moral panics, and attempt to regulate production that marked the nineteenth-century reaction to the flood of cheap stories and the marked increase in working-class reading.” The fiction question and consequent reform of the dime novel is not a pure symptom of “the genteel” vs “the sensational” (the middle class vs the lower class). Denning argues that even the labor papers simultaneously critiqued and appropriated “trashy” fiction, indicating ambivalence on the part of working-class leaders regarding the emergence of this mass literary culture in the nineteenth century. In this way, the working and bourgeois classes shared in a fundamental dialogue: the relationship between culture and society.
Does the transformation and critical positioning of the dime novel in the wake of 1890 mark a silencing of the class conflicts of the gilded age? Through what mediums do today’s working class engage in discussions of culture and society?

-( Also, quite literally...)Denning possesses a “smoking gun” in the form of short life histories of 'undistinguished Americans' published in the The Independent that make references to dime fiction reading. Moreover, the autobiographies of immigrants, laborers, and factory workers – littered with insights regarding how the working class understood and interpreted sensational fiction – are explicit testaments to the relationship between culture and historical consciousness. Lucky Denning.

Public Libraries

What I found interesting in Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents is his description of public libraries which were established in industrial communities in the late nineteenth century as a contested terrain. He notes that it is a "ground on which issues of class access to information and recreation and of class control of that information and recreation were fought out" (48). Public library was viewed by the capitalists who endowed it as a way of "extending genteel culture" to workers and their children. For instance, in Pittsburgh and Homestead, the library was regarded as a "tool of socialization and social control, shaping habits and values, and regulating reading and recreation" (48). While public libraries sought to reform and control working class reading habits, it is interesting to note their resistance to such control. "Mill workers were suspicious of Carnegie's library, and in 1890, in Allegheny, 'working men and their representatives ... raised serious questions about who would control the library which Carnegie has offered the city'" (50).

Denning's examples show that rather than passively submitting to the ideological, moral, and social control of the dominant classes, workers had attempted to take control of their own cultural consumption, manifesting agency. The resistance of the workers to cultivate "genteel" reading tastes and reform themselves shows that they are, to an extent, actively forging their class identity in opposition to middle and upper classes. This reminded me of Paul Willis' contention in Learning to Labor - how working class youth consciously forge an oppositional class identity in public schools.

Complex Representations

In looking at “genres and formulas,” not only within “an encyclopedic catalog” but “as enactments of social conflicts and cleavages,” Denning provides a useful tool to reveal the borrowed costumes of historical struggles and the disguised social and economic divisions, within “the conventional characters of a society, played out in its popular narratives” (Denning 77). For me this approach helps solve some of the issues I have with representations by keeping in mind the preformative aspect of representation. These issues stem from the difficulty brought on by the realization that these representations are not static or created in a vacuum, but created by other humans who are subject to inconstancy, or are unaware of the issues they represent, or who might even disagree with the representations they are creating.

In my analysis of texts I have often struggled with the process of extracting readings and merely converting the text into representations. Denning appears to offer a diagnosis for this uneasiness in the case of dime novels, which I think might be useful for all popular forms of representation: “The figures and characters one sees in dime novels are perhaps not the self-representation of any class, nor are they the class as represented by another; they are a body of representations that are alternately claimed, rejected, and fought over” (Denning 77).

For me this approach allows for possible solutions to the problems of representation that I have been struggling with. One of them is the problem with readership. For the most part it seems like close-readings and genre studies can often lend themselves to a very closed, and highly specialized interpretation of texts that only exist in an academic setting. For one of my own final projects I am considering a very specific film genre but in order for my analysis to have any kind of pertinence I feel like I need to take into account how people might perceive this genre and how they would be viewing these films. I think these aspects should be considered in order to avoid oversimplifying complex relationships, for these representations are “interpreted and not merely consumed” (Denning 69). While in the end it is impossible and unproductive to take every readers opinion into account, I think there should at the very least be an awareness in these kinds of analysis of what typical readers would take from these representations, in order to keep the analysis in check.

Guilty Pleasures for the Masses

Brit

As I was reading about dime novels, I couldn’t help but think about the kind of fiction available today.  I would compare them to the genres of the mystery novel or sci-fi/fantasy.  Not that they necessarily have the same kind of content or story lines, but rather their reputation has similarities.  There are genres that are generally not at all considered literary, but they are popular, and while these may not be considered “impossible trash,” sometimes, especially in literary circles, these books are looked down upon.  Many times certain genres are considered guilty pleasures, and I also wonder if this can been seen with the rise of reality television.  “Dime novels provided a source of entertainment and diversion for any individual of any social class who sought relief from the anxieties of the age” (28).  This idea of relief or escape is often associated with guilty pleasures.  By no means is there any merit in most reality television, although TLC does have some reality television that tends to be realistic and somewhat informative, but overall, reality T.V. is our generation’s guilty pleasure.  I would say that there are many examples of guilty pleasures from “Jersey Shore” to “Survivor” to “Real Housewives of the O.C.” or “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”  There are literally dozens of shows to choose from, and the genre has become even more popular, which is why there are so many spinoffs of certain shows, aligning this with the idea of the “literary factory” (25).  The production of reality television has become the thing to do in our culture today.

“The readers of the dime novels are farmers, mechanics, workwomen, drummers, boys in shops and factories, and a great many people who are so much appalled by the abuse of the daily press that they do not confess what they have been reading” (29). With popular culture today many people don’t mind admitting that they watch reality television, but there will always be some judgment associated with certain television shows, making people feel embarrassed to watch it and instead keeping that secret to themselves.  It depends on the merits of the show and the type of coverage it receives.  Reality game shows do not (for the most part) have the same reputation as the many ridiculous reality shows about celebrities or “real people.”  Along these same lines, Sarah Palin had a reputation all her own before starting her reality television show.  In many ways I feel like the cheap dime novels of this age are the cheap (cheap more so in the sense of cheap thrills) reality television shows.  I also think of this really only in terms of reputation and general mass appeal, since most reality television does not have any type of moral complexity as many of the dime novels are suggested to have.  

true stories...or unsolved mysteries?

Agatha!

i did indeed enjoy Michael Denning's narrative, as an alternative reviewing of the history of dime novels, and the canon that we've built around them. Denning points out that, as primarily working-class literature, dime novels have historically been viewed as interesting novelties, but never worthy of serious study. i found it fascinating that he sees them as part of a resistance to bourgeois literature and ideology, in viewing them as allegorical texts (72-3). in this sense, the dime novel has a lot of power, as Gramsci points out (though referring to serial novels), in representing the views of the silent majority.

i agree with Luke that it would interesting to see how these narratives would continue today–or perhaps instead, to apply Denning's argument to other forms of narrative that modern culture still largely sees as irrelevant: romance novels (just as disregarded now as in the 19th century, apparently), magazines, comic books, YouTube videos, etc. being in cultural studies obviously makes us naturally jump at the chance to declare that these have cultural value, but how many people outside of this program would agree? why not?

another burning question i kept having was, who is writing these dime novels? Denning says "the commercially produced dime novels were a product of a nascent culture industry, not the creation of workers. whom do they speak for? whom do they represent?" (81) maybe i missed this in Denning's text somehow, but one criticism i'd have for him is that he quotes a lot of people talking about the dime novels and what they signify to class identity, but i get no sense of the identity of the authors themselves. perhaps we don't know. but wouldn't that tell us a great deal about the intentions of class identity in dime novels?

this reminds me of one of Kathy's essays which i found for my bibliography on fashion and consumption, "True Lies: True Story Magazine and Working Class Consumption in Postwar America." Kathy notes that in a magazine, True Story, geared towards working-class families and in particular women, readers were asked to submit "true stories" about their lives, but these stories were never published verbatim; rather they were collected and rewritten by the staff at True Story so that they could fairly represent some values of the working class, but could always add their own moral or 'preferred' ending to the story–reinforcing the immorality of spending beyond one's own means, for example. perhaps these dime novels are of the same vein, but it makes the agency of both working-class genres kind of problematic. hmmm...

Little Orphan Annie Oakley

Michael Denning's argument for the working class expressions of dime novels holds up well as an excellent cultural analysis. He excellently defends the need for analysis of the content of cultural artifacts, pushing cultural historians away from the distance reading that they sometimes fall into. Close reading allows us to understand plot, genre and convention as a sort of technology, a type of media through which cultural forms move, and through which ideologies are reproduced. By close reading these narratives, Denning can extract the tangled web of popular myth in order to show how these technologies have been deployed.

I know this is totally outside of the scope of the book, but I would have loved to see how these narratives have evolved and continue to impact present media tales. Denning writes that evaluating the past "represent the engagement of the present with the past, the construction and appropriation of a period with its generic and aesthetic systems" (207). Many of the stories that Denning references seem to have a great deal of resonance after 1900, such as the figure of Little Orphan Annie, which revived the figure of the honest, hardworking orphan girl who suddenly falls into wealth. Begun in 1924, the story evolved into Broadway productions, television shows and film adaptations. Additionally, I see resonances of the western outlaw in current action heroes and heroines. The detective story continues to be a popular format, reincarnated in the urban police drama, like SVU. It would be interesting to see whether or not these genre adaptations and evolutions carry similar class distinctions as their dime novel predecessors, of if they have been appropriated into capitalist discourse. These technologies continue to be used, but does Little Orphan Annie still carry the politics of working girl narratives? Does Buffy the Vampire Slayer carry the radical anti-establishment implications of Annie Oakley? And what does it mean when these narratives are combined into the pastiche of post-modernity? For example, Scooby-Doo's mystery solving teens don't seem to carry the same weight as Pinkerton detectives.

The Fifteen Dollar Dime Novel or the Sensational Imaginary Community

Having read the selections of Denning's study of the American "dime novel," I've been trying to think of contemporary cultural forms that might correlate to them somewhat. I think maybe that going to the movies during the 1930s might be similar to dime novels, especially in light of the ability of both to remain sustainable and increasingly popular during hard economic times. But going to the movies today does not seem like a very affordable option with ticket prices at 9 to ten bucks, and in some cases even more! Would romance novels be a correlate to dime store novels? Maybe, but romance novels only appeal to a certain minority of readers. What kind of stories would others read? Maybe popular mass market paperback novels like those written by the Cusslers, Pattersons, and Balduccis. But glancing over their books on Amazon, I found out that they were like $15 each! Is there such a thing as the dime novel, or something close to it in either purpose or relative price, in 2011? Or is the dime novel a particular cultural and economic phenomenon of 19th century America? Are our dime novels pirated music and dvds where it cost about a dime for the disc to burn them on?

Something else struck me during and after reading Denning for this week. Did dime novels participate in the sort of nation constructing that Benedict Anderson sees advances in print-language causing? Denning does observe that dime novels could be moralistic and in some cases didactic. Were they used to some extent to inculcate immigrant workers with practices and values considered American at the time? And in doing so, did they ever have contradictory effects: like making a laborer, immigrant or not, see stated American democratic values not actually put into social practice?

What Exactly Is Sensation Fiction? - Jennifer

I thought Michael Denning did a very efficient job of not only discussing the history of the dime novel but showing us, his readers, many different cases of dime novels in existence throughout working class America at the turn of the century. My main question, however, was why he kept referencing dime novels as sensation fiction. I think he was very thorough with all of his explanations of terms and ideas, yet this is the one that escaped. I'm confused because I have always associated sensation novels with British literature a few decades before American dime novels are being discussed by Denning, much well known to be the masterwork of Wilkie Collins and to a lesser extent Lady Elizabeth Braddon among others who adopted the sensation novel and its characteristics to use in their works. I have always known sensation novels and sensation fiction to involve mysterious plots, some sort of murder or kidnapping involving poisons or opiates, as well as contrasting female characters, an intermingling of middle and upper class characters, and even sometimes the aspects of the country verses the city. As we have all read the description of the dime novel or the American sensation novel is quite different mostly involving working class and sometimes middle class characters and the events and excitement revolve around working class events.

I would have liked to have known where Denning decided to call American dime novels sensation fiction or seen him explain why he uses the term when it was coined before dime novels and was coined for a British genre of literature. I think when looking at the term "sensation" it refers much more to the British genre because of the sensational plot twists and sensational characters of the novels. I even looked up American sensation fiction and was confronted with the works of Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, not the works of the dime novelists which just simply leads me to wonder why Denning continues to use the terms dime novel and sensation fiction as interchangeable in his book. The use of sensation fiction in American literature characterizes many of the same plot themes as the British and notes that the scandalous and mosterous events of the story were what made these works sensation novels. The one common denominator between sensation fiction as characterized by Denning and by what I have read is George Lippard who is well documented by Denning. Lippard's dime novels are of the few in Denning's book that fall into the time frame for what is considered sensation fiction. The Quaker City, Lippard's novel, and his other novels seem to have many of the aspects we would associate with sensation fiction such as a large manor house, an intricate inheritance plot, and seduction. In this case Denning classifies Lippard's novels as dime because they deal with the urban plot setting, but I do not necessarily see the connection between these sensation novels and the later dime novels most prevalent in Denning's book.

Dime Novel Theater

Rachael

I find it quite interesting that Denning can find a connection between the proliferation of the dime novel and the stratification of American theater, in both literal and metaphorical tendencies. Some plots were taken from theatrical performances and remediated into the serial form, which alluded to a common ground between the audiences of the two forms. Denning uses this serialization process to open the question of class-consciousness to further theatrical embodiment: “after 1850, the melodrama and the dime novel increasingly found a predominantly working class audience. Moreover, the narrativization of stage productions indicates a new mode or character in the reading of dime novels and story papers; reading became a way of preserving and recapturing a public moment or a favorite performance.” (25) Denning also points to the Astor Place Riot as a touchstone for the end of a “theater that united different classes.”

There are several theories as to the cause of the riots on May 10, 1849, including causes linked to class distinctions. Up to this point in the nineteenth century, the theater had been a place where all levels of class could come together to enjoy a performance. There were usually several aspects of a night’s performance: a tragedy, comedy or farce, and musical interludes. There was then always something to satisfy different tastes. Trouble began with the construction of the Astor Place Opera House, an exclusive upper-class facility in a predominantly lower-class neighborhood, the Bowery. The riot, which left 20 people dead and over a hundred injured, was said to be the “beginning of the end of theater in the United States as a conglomerate entertainment for a heterogeneous audience. ‘The Astor Place Riot intimated that this union was no longer possible,’ writes theater historian David Grimsted. ‘The country had grown up, and grown apart. The theater after midcentury followed this development. It expanded and divided – into legitimate drama, foreign-language, farce, vaudeville, circus, burlesque, minstrelsy, opera, symphony – each with its separate theater and separate audience.’” (Stempel, Showtime, 33) It was these divisions, a fine-tuning of cultural entertainment, which created a niche for the dime novel and its audience.

Langland's Domestic Angles

Pavithra

Langland argues that intermarriages between working class women and upper class men have become non-narratable in nineteenth century fiction. In her view, it is a result of women functioning as signifiers of class identity. They had an important role to play in "consolidating the genteel middle class, as opposed to both the working class and the petite bourgeoise" (p.11). Further, she claims that the myth of the Angle in the House that we encounter in nineteenth century narratives effectively masks the more critical managerial role that a middle-class Victorian woman was expected play within the household to manage their class status.

While her argument is interesting and important in that it exposes the complex and agentive role that middle-class women performed within their households in the formation of class identities, without reducing them to passive repositories of cultural meanings, I found her textual analysis to be problematic and reductive at times. Langland attempts to assimilate these rich and ambiguous narratives, which, as she acknowledges, are discursive constructions, too rigidly to fit her own argument. For instance, in her analysis of Dickens David Copperfield, Langland discusses the ways in which Dora's incompetence and failures as a household manager interfere with David's upward mobility. However, it is possible to argue that it is precisely such failures in Dora's part that qualifies her for the role of an angle, as she is referred to by David, in keeping with the images of vulnerable and frail Victorian upper-class women that are deployed in nineteenth century narratives. While her death enabled David to marry a more pragmatic and capable woman, she is presented as nothing but a domestic or domesticated angel. It is Dora's inability to mould herself to this pragmatic ideal of the "Angle of the House" and the refusal to manage her servants that makes her interesting and subversive.

Chase But Don't Discover What Matters

Michael

From what I have read in Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels, it would appear that she agrees with the Habermasian notion that, “although there may have been a desire to perceive the sphere of the family circle as independent, as cut off from all connection with society, and as the domain of pure humanity, it was, of course, dependent on the sphere of labor and of the commodity exchange” (Public Sphere 46). I think this justifies a need to place an equal importance on “networks of representations” as is placed on “financial resources,” as Langland states: “My perspective emphasizes the close imbrications of economic conditions with cultural constructions, where financial resources cannot position individuals more irrevocably than do the networks of representations through which they negotiate their daily lives” (7). I think this move provides a useful way to approach class problems in our current society where there is a heavy emphasis on suppressing issues of poverty, out of sight out of mind. I think that there is a definite conditioning process that encourages us to think that poverty only happens in third world countries. This conveniently lets us ignore our civic responsibilities at home, allowing us to believe in the principles of dog-eat-dog competition in order to dissuade a questioning of the system’s core values.

I think in our time visual representations work just like the placement of kitchens and dinning rooms, and the maids invisible chamber cleanings that characterize the Victorian Age: “Like kitchen odors, bodily evidences were not to intrude upon refined senses” (44). In my project I would like to look at visual representations to discover how “plots are informed by a culture’s ideologies, its assessment of value and meaning and possibility” (4).

Right now a Chase commercial (I think, I’m going off memory here) comes to mind, where there is a black couple expecting a baby. After the couple purchases baby gear they realize they need to get more because they are expecting triplets. When most people might walk away from this commercial feeling a progressive sense of pride that an attractive, middle class, black couple is being represented on television, I of course have a different take: “Oh great, now black people are being actively encouraged to drown in debt as well.” In an astoundingly subtle way, this commercial trivializes both representations of black people and our nations economic problems.

However, I am willing to admit that the real problem with popular visual representations is not this literal translation that I bring out, but the general subconscious acceptance of credit card companies. It is because they are visually represented everywhere that they can blend in with the landscape, or as Langland says about representations: “Such signifying practices, then, formulate, transmit, and reproduce the ideologies of a culture through the production of subjects. This is the process through which particular and local beliefs of a group become naturalized as truth” (4). Yet what is at risk in these truths? What problems do these truths purposely conceal?

living with the better chromosome...just kidding

Agatha

i always get a bit annoyed every time i read that women represent society, are the "evolving signifiers of bourgeois identity" (25). and this is something i've heard again and again, not only in Victorian texts, but in my global women's writing course, where we've so far studied the veil (women cannot take off the veil or society will collapse, but men can change the way they dress without catastrophic results), besides many other contexts.

WHY do women always, always "uphold" civilization, but men are never held responsible? is it because we like the beds to be made in the morning? is it because we buy healthy food for the pantry, instead of just meat? just how far back did this history begin?

now i don't want to be judgmental here, but it has come to my attention that the Y chromosome has essentially not evolved since humans first arrived as a species, while the X chromosome has evolved continuously over the centuries. observe the difference:

anyway. very interesting.

the chapter about "calling" rituals and their role in maintaining social connections was really interesting to me. as a girl i loved reading all of those Victorian novels of which "the call" featured so prominently–Little Women, The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, etc., but "the call" always slightly mystified me. they were always having to call on someone or other, and almost invariably no one was looking forward to this call, either the callers or those being called upon, and yet the ritual had to continue, like an awkward family holiday gathering. now it makes sense to understand how important it was to distinguish your own identity by clearly delineating that your formal "acquaintance" was different from those with whom you may happen to interact with from day to day. so you don't have to claim the grocer is your friend–thank God!–even though you are forced to talk to him. otherwise he might feel authorized to present his son to your daughter as a marriage prospect. horror!

i did also like Langland's emphasis on the agency of women at both taking control of these codes of domesticity and womanhood and either turning them to their own use, or else outright reinforcing them. i agree with Luke that when we look back on people actions with the lens of an "ism"–feminism, colonialism, marxism, etc.–we must not limit our understanding by trying to fit human behaviors into entirely political molds. can the actions of these women be political? of course. but behavior is complicated and tied to a manifold of motivations.

i am a graduate student, but i also know that english is the more "traditional" field anyway for young women, so i get the sense when i talk to some people that they don't really see me as breaking the glass ceiling, while my female friends in engineering are either patted on the back, or looked at with disdain (depending on the audience in question) for clearly making a bold statement in their choice of career. never mind that both of us are (at least in our own minds) following a personal passion and are simply not thinking of the larger political, feminist whatever implications of our actions. we're just trying to live.

Women's Roles as Wives

Brit

I found Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels very interesting and useful.  As I was reading it, I kept thinking back to our reading from Veblen, and how they correlate to one another.  According to Veblen, the wife acts more as a servant to her husband, running the estate and taking care of everything.  Life is structured in an important way for the leisure class so as to display their social standing.  The women play a pivotal role in maintaining that social standard, but Veblen dictates the role of the wife to that of a servant, downplaying their role as a whole.  Langland gives women a far more important role in her book, indicating that a woman’s role is just as important as a man’s in maintaining social standing.  “This, the story of the working-class wife for the middle-class man became non-narratable because a mid-Victorian man depended on his wife to perform the ideological work of managing the class question and displaying the signs of middle class status, toward which he contributed a disposable income” (9). 

The importance of women’s roles is furthered in the chapter that focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell.  For example, “The house, as base for social organization, represents not bourgeois woman’s isolation but her class privilege and economic power” (115).  Women held power within their homes, especially because they constructed the importance of their home within society.  The household was the space for women to further their social standing, and it was their job to do so.  Langland also points out that Gaskell “grasped what the political economists failed to see: the way women’s domestic economy—process-oriented and focused on control of social signs and signifiers—intersected with a political and product-oriented economy, focused on controlling the means of production” (132).  Women play an important role in what is purchased and what is used, as a way to emphasize their status in society, which in turn affects production and so forth.  So, although women’s roles are sometimes reduced to that of servants, they play an important role in society as a whole. 

The role of the wife as someone who dictates social standing is also seen through Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, where Mrs. Gibson tries, and succeeds, in positioning her daughters in good marriages.  “This difference is an enormous one, and it reveals how the social importance of the middle-class mother and wife, the semiotician of the middle class, has been consolidated in the fluid and shifting society of Victorian England” (133).  A wife that is able to procure good marriages for her daughters is not only succeeding in furthering the status of her daughters, but she is also furthering the status of her husband.  The wife is creating and maintaining connections that help solidify her family’s role in society, most importantly, her husband’s role in society.  It is through the work of the wife that the husband looks good and is socially respected.  So, despite the fact that women are identified as either wives or daughters in Victorian England (which is better than wife as servant), their importance is demonstrated through their work in maintaining the home and social standing.  

Performative Status Edwin

In the beginning of this week’s reading Langland frequently mentions status as a performative task by the middle class women of Victorian England. This argument initially jumped out at me because of the previous reading we did, Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Both argue that various responsibilities were placed upon women in order to portray a vision of high status to their peers. Veblen spoke of clothing, and Langland appeared to be very interested in the etiquette of women in this period. In both of these discussions of status as performative, I continually wondered whether women in the Victorian era willingly accepted these new responsibilities. Although it must have been gradual in its implementation, this task must have been met by some with confusion or even revulsion.

In thinking of the possibility of discordant Victorian women, Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being comes to mind. In one of the autobiographical essays in that collection, she contemplates the reasons for her past duties as a Victorian woman. She laments the dresses, the parties, the awkwardness, the forced demureness, and the various other trappings that turned her into a trophy several nights a month. Yet, she understands that none of it was for her, it was for her brother who would routinely beg her to come to those stifling functions. Woolf’s brother in many ways proves Langland’s and Veblen’s point that women were relied on to be the face of status. I find it ironic that in a period that was in many ways patriarchal, women were needed in such a way. They acted as pedestals on which their male counterparts stood, in order to elevate them to required social propriety.