Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2006.
Consuming Fantasies Reviews
“This material is excellently handled. … Sanders manages to cover an enormous amount of primary material very efficiently. Her book will be useful to many.”
~ Judith Flanders, The Times Literary Supplement 5388 (July 7, 2006): 32.
“Lise Shapiro Sanders examines another, female, emergent class, like the office clerk uneasily combining low salaries (and education) with white-collar dress and aspirations: the later Victorian shopgirl. Her Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920 [explores] the peculiar contradictions of the shopgirl’s situation as especially fertile ground for fantasies of consumption played out in a variety of cultural media, from fictions intended for their reading to music hall, theater, and early films both about and for these women. Thus she uses the shopgirl as a case study for probing the relations among consumer culture, gender, class, and modernity. Sanders draws on numerous contemporary accounts (including the records of Harrods, novelettes in girls’ and women’s magazines, fiction by Gissing and Somerset Maugham, marriage manuals and books of etiquette, the writings of socialist activists and reformers, and examples of music hall, popular theater, and early cinema) to describe the position of the shopgirl (and middle-class perceptions of her) and to explore their practices of cultural consumption. … Her rich book has much to say about the middle-class critique of pleasure, the practices of reading in which shopgirls engaged (arguing for more permeability between romance narratives and the lives of its readers and flexibility in the conditions of fantasy and consumer identification), and demonstrating the existence of a parallel mode of public, interactive consumption, in theaters and music halls, best understood through a model of distracted (not absorbed) consumption.”
~ Elizabeth Helsinger, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 46.4 (Autumn 2006): 951-952.
“In this well-researched volume, Sanders addresses the relation between fantasy and consumer/consuming desires in the construction of the shopgirl in late-Victorian and Edwardian culture … Sanders acknowledges the influence of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Krakauer, and Georg Simmel … Other critical influences on the author’s understanding of the shopgirl as a new identity category include Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Joan Scott. This excellent book draws on these and other critical predecessors in order to develop its own original argument about women and consumerism at the turn of the century.”
~ Maria Teresa Chialant, Victorian Studies 49.1 (Autumn 2006): 143-144.
“Cultural historians and literary critics have done a truly spectacular job of excavating the history of the shopping lady whose natural habitat was the urban environs of London’s West End. In Consuming Fantasies, Lise Shapiro Sanders takes us around the counter to examine her literal counterpart, the London shop assistant, and her literary analogue, the ‘shopgirl’. … One highlight of these chapters is Sanders’s practice of analyzing fiction and fantasy against the grain of personal memoirs, trade newspapers, and managerial tomes. The effect is one of mutual illumination. … This is a truly interdisciplinary study, both in the sources that it employs and the approach that it adopts. … Sanders’s Consuming Fantasies is an intelligent, original, and interdisciplinary book. It is particularly innovative in its intriguing sources and its creative juxtaposition of them.”
~ Lara Kreigel, H-Albion (September 2007): 1-2.
“Today, reviewers and cultural pundits mock the rise of “chick lit” and “the sex-and-shopping” novel, but Sanders’s monograph indicates these genres have a long historical provenance and are actually significant cultural mechanisms. … [T]his is an important work for literary scholars and cultural critics who will appreciate its engagement with labour, leisure and the single, working woman at the turn of the century.”
~ Maureen Moran, ELT 50.4 (2007): 467.
“In Consuming Fantasies, [Sanders] examines how the shopgirl’s individual and collective identities were shaped and shifted at the turn of the twentieth century. She constructs this shopgirl using some historical, but mostly literary, texts and brings to the fore contemporary anxieties of modernity while contributing to our understanding of women as integral parts of the workforce and as consumers of leisure and material goods.”
~ Carmen M. Mangion, Journal of British Studies 47.1 (January 2008): 240.
“This carefully researched book draws upon a fascinating range of material not only to supplement what Sanders regrets is a paucity of firsthand accounts of the lives and desires of female shop assistants, but also to demonstrate the importance of the shopgirl as subject and audience of a range of cultural forms, including novels, advertisements, musical comedies, and early film…. Consuming Fantasies both revisits canonical novels and opens up a largely forgotten corpus of popular narratives in order to investigate the complex and competing discourses surrounding the transitional identity of the shopgirl and, more broadly, late-Victorian conceptions of class, gender, and sexuality.”
~ Elizabeth F. Evans, Nineteenth Century Literature 63.1 (June 2008): 130.
“Lise Shapiro Sanders’s study of London shopgirls in Victorian and Edwardian England examines how fiction writers, filmmakers, middle-class reformers, and shopgirls grappled with the meaning and repercussions of consumer fantasy itself. … Sanders presents an insightful and theoretically sophisticated analysis of romance novelettes and penny magazines, which gained a devoted readership among shopgirls and other working-class and lower-middle-class women. … Sanders shows how even in the absence of [empirical] data, imaginative readings of cultural texts can illuminate the range of pleasures and psychic compensations cultural fantasy supplies.”
~ Lisa Jacobson, Journal of Women’s History 22.1 (Spring 2010): 178.