1 - Cotton, Carmine, Coal, and Flour: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Consumption in Alcott and Phelps

Summary

“They adopted Jo's plan of dividing the long seams into four parts, and calling the quarters Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and in that way they got on capitally, especially when they talked about the different countries as they stitched their way through them” (Alcott, Little Women 18).

Whether through competition with European powers over trade with Asia, or through debates about tariff policies, or through consumption of imported goods, nineteenth-century Americans could indeed imagine how “capitally” they got on through the economic ties they stitched between different parts of the world. Such globally interconnected economic conditions surface through the commodities represented in postbellum domestic novels by women writers—including the goods I will discuss in this chapter: cotton, carmine dye, coal, wheat, and oranges. By punctuating their novels with allusions to the internationally traded commodities filling their characters’ homes, women writers grapple with the imperial and ethical implications of their consumption, and use allusions to art and artists to self-reflexively consider their own place as writers selling their work in a global marketplace. Looking at Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Story of Avis (1877) as illustrative examples, in this chapter I resituate nineteenth-century domestic fiction in a larger geopolitical context in order to examine how women writers reckon with the surprising and sometimes disturbing intimacies between material objects in the home and transnational flows of capital and trade. Authors like Alcott and Phelps meditate on the United States’ place in a global economy, not through depictions of the men who produce, monopolize, and speculate on commodities such as cotton and wheat (as I will explore in Chapter 3), but rather through the women and households who consume these commodities. Writing through the perspective of artistic heroines—Alcott's writer Jo March and Phelps's painter Avis Dobell—these authors raise questions about the relationship between artistic production and economic consumption, wondering how it is possible to call for reform through one's art when that art is part of the very systems that need reforming.

If nineteenth-century domesticity, as Amy Kaplan has argued, encouraged Americans to perceive the United States as “home” in opposition to a “foreign” outside world, these novels engage with the intrusion of the foreign and geopolitical through the management of household goods—goods that inevitably traversed contested international paths in the process of production, trade, and consumption.