Consumerist Culture and the Commodification of Beauty

The early chapters of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth follow socialite Lily Bart’s exploits among the economic and social elite in New York during the turn of the twentieth century. The novel provides as its setting the critical moment when consumerism in America was rapidly expanding and the pursuit of material goods was less concerned with practicality or necessity and more concerned with personal identity. In an article examining the stages of consumerism, Peter Stearns remarks that “a consumerist society involves large numbers of people staking a real portion of their personal identities and their quest for meaning—even their emotional satisfaction—on the search for and acquisition of goods” (105). In early modern America, accumulating goods meant cultivating a sense of self as well as social status. House of Mirth explores the consequences of this kind of materialism on women in particular. “Women,” Stearns writes, “confined as housewives far more than in the eighteenth century, could see in consumerism a powerful opportunity for expression and for a public life of sorts” (114).

Illustrations of Charles Dana Gibson’s feminine ideal—dubbed the Gibson girl—proliferated throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These images of carefree but carefully composed, clever, romantically-inclined and beautiful women appeared in newspapers and magazines, providing an auspicious representation of women in America. The Gibson girl was fashionable and intellectual, and while she portrayed a playful superiority over her male counterparts, there is no mistaking that the growth of consumerism and the popularity of the Gibson girl were conducive to the commodification of female beauty.

Lily Bart seems the product of Gibson girl iconography… with the added subversion of bachelorette-hood and impending bankruptcy. Her attitude toward materialistic endeavors becomes ambivalent as the novel progresses and she becomes more self-aware of its superficiality. However, Lily seems espoused to the consumerist culture from birth (despite declining finances). The novel is constantly concerned with economy, and chapter 3 demonstrates its protagonist’s early ignorance of the value of money when she requests that the family florist send fresh flowers every day because she “hate[s] to see faded flowers at luncheon.” Lily inherits a hatred of “dinginess” from her mother, and resolves to never resort to “living like a pig.” After her father dies and the family is left nearly destitute by their standards, Lily’s mother says “with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: ‘But you’ll get it all back—you’ll get it all back, with your face.” This dependence on beauty and “good taste” as her only marketable traits seems to Lily a reductive and inescapable fate; however, it is a commodification that she actively participates in. “It was a hateful fate—but how escape from it? What choice had she? To be herself, or a Gerty Farish.”

Stearns, Peter N. “Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization.” Journal of Modern History 69.1 (Spring 1997). PDF file.