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Full Description
The mid-twentieth-century woman was stereotypically seen as a housewife and mother, who shopped. But whether as purchaser, parent or professional, women's defining identities have been transformed, with a loosening of seemingly stone-set gender divisions and a feminist emphasis on expanding choices and different stories. Looking especially at consumer culture and parenthood, this book delves into some of the mutations involved. Here are marketing manuals and newspaper stories, as well as novels and tragedies, from Austen to Aeschylus. Unexpected Items is in part a plea for the uses and pleasures of critical reading of all kinds of text as a historical method, showing how meanings move on in the light of new contexts and questions, and also how looking close up at the way the words work can itself be a source of new thinking. The woman, the mother, the consumer, the parent all human characters clash and change, and so do their likely stories.
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction: Unexpected Items
Part I: Parenthood
1. Generations
2. A Tale of Two Parents: Dickens's Great Expectations
3. Finding a Life: Eliot's Silas Marner
4. How Not to Be Parented: New Men in Pamela and Pride and Prejudice
Part II: Consumer Culture
5. Soft Sell: Marketing Rhetoric in Feminist Criticism
6. Make up Your Mind: Scenes from the Psychology of Selling and Consumption
7. The Uses of Shopping: Richard Hoggart Goes to Woolworth's
8. Scenes of Shopping
9. Buying the Baby, Growing Your Own
Part III: Feminist Directions
10. Fifty Fifty: Female Subjectivity and the Danaids
11. Domestication
12. 'We're Getting There': Woolf and Feminist Criticism
13. Untold Stories in Mrs Dalloway
14. 'I Had Barbara': Women's Ties and Wharton's 'Roman Fever'
Acknowledgements
Index
