4 - Orientalist Consumption of Pearls and Blue Chinese Porcelain in Wharton and Larsen

Summary

“To have things had always seemed to her the first essential of existence, and as she listened to him the vision of the things he could have unrolled itself before her like the long triumph of an Asiatic conqueror” (Wharton, The Custom of the Country 329).

“She took to luxury as the proverbial duck to water … Always she had wanted, not money, but the things which money could give, leisure, attention, beautiful surroundings. Things. Things. Things” (Larsen, Quicksand 67).

Nella Larsen's repetition quoted above aptly captures the consumerist concerns that structure many novels at the turn of the twentieth century: “Things. Things. Things.” During this era of increasingly widely available consumer goods, women's material desires forcefully drive the plots of novels by female writers. Although fantasies of consumption took root in much earlier fiction—such as Meg March's coveting of expensive violet silk in Little Women—in early twentieth- century works by Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen characters’ material ambitions are essential rather than incidental to each novel's action. And as evidenced by the vision of the “Asiatic conqueror” imagined by Wharton's character Undine Spragg in the epigraph, the discourse of consumption was often a vehicle for symbolically flaunting ownership over the riches of other regions.

Wharton and Larsen's obsession with things has not gone unnoticed; scholars have discussed their responses to shifting standards of fashion in an era of mass production, often focusing on the way in which gender inflects the issues of consumption, commodification, taste, and display tackled in their novels. Women in the early twentieth century were active consumers of goods that in turn amplified their own commodification, like clothes and jewelry, contributing to what Lori Merish describes as women's “unstable construction as both subjects and objects of exchange.” She elaborates that “this instability is especially apparent in the fashion system, a symbolic structure that historically has entangled signs of liberation and oppression—of feminine pleasure and autonomy, and masculine power and domination—within the image of the fashionable female body” (“Engendering Naturalism” 322).

Tracing the material history of the fashion system that Merish describes can lend further complexity to early twentieth-century American women's efforts toward economic liberation and self-actualization.