Session 8b: Evil Goes Shopping!

12th Global Conference

Thursday 17th March – Saturday 19th March 2011
Prague, Czech Republic

Shopaholics and the (Female) Vice of Over-Consumption in Ancient Rome
Linda McGuire
Independent Researcher

Roman writers tended to portray women and their activities as symbols of either virtue or vice. For them, as for many ancient and some modern cultures, chastity was the most highly valued quality in a woman, making adultery or sexual promiscuity the worst vices any freeborn woman could commit. Promiscuity was often associated with another behavioural trait – uncontrolled spending. The sexually loose woman was also the unrestrained consumer who lusted after luxury goods.

Satirists poked fun at the new extravagance that led Romans in the early Empire to squander upwards of 100m sesterces each year on pearls and perfumes from India, not by any means the only costly items that Romans indulged in (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 12.84). This behaviour is the mirror opposite of the Roman ideal of self-restraint. In his novel The Satyricon, Petronius portrays women at a dinner party trying to outdo each other with their expensive clothing and gold adornments. Their husbands compare the ruinous expense of the items and one claims that the purchase of gold earrings for his wife virtually bankrupted him.
It is easy for us to read this scene at face value because the wife as a spendthrift shopper is a popular stereotype in modern western society. This leads us to ask several questions. Are we interpreting this text using modern ideas – a trap that ancient historians try so hard to avoid? Did the Romans perceive overconsumption as a particularly female vice? And does this scene reflect the reality of day to day life in Rome as far as we understand it from other sources? Looking at the writings of Roman moralists, laws surrounding Roman marriage and literary stereotypes of women, this paper will argue that the interpretation of Petronius’ passage lies elsewhere.

Her Husband’s Goods: Women, Shopping, and Evil in the Later Middle Ages
Hannah Priest
University of Manchester

In fourteenth-century Britain, a number of vernacular conduct texts aimed at the middle classes appeared. Several of these texts were designed to teach the correct manner in which to conduct a marriage. In ‘How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter’ and ‘How the Good Man Taught His Son’, advice is offered on how to correctly bring up children, and among the many lessons offered is condemnation of extravagant spending and shopping on the part of women. The use of phrases in conduct literature such as ‘her husband’s goods’ and ‘her husband’s wares’ shows that shopping is associated with women’s appropriation of wealth that rightly belongs to her husband. Sometimes this is handled comically – and we find texts that resemble a sort of medieval ‘Sex and the City’. Spendthrift and superficial women are something that men need to be wary of. However other contemporaneous texts point to a deeper anxiety about women’s shopping habits. The desire to spend money on ostentatious and non-functional items is associated with the mortal sins of pride and avarice in religious texts. At the same time as these texts are being produced, dramatizations and performances of the story of Adam and Eve were popular entertainment, and this period saw arguably the most sustained development of the narrative of original sin, as well as the growth of urban centres and early ‘commercial’ endeavours. This combination of proto-capitalism and codification of gender divisions results in an association of women with frivolous and dangerous shopping habits. Not only does shopping come to be presented as an inherent part of women’s nature, it also poses a very real threat to men. Women are a threat to men’s wallets, but also to men’s souls.

Consuming Evil: Fashion and the Glamour of Evil
Lorraine Warde
Nottingham Trent University

This paper looks at the various images of cruelty and evil which have manifested themselves through fashion and examines the role of the predatory clown and the femme fatale. From Alexander McQueen’s savage and avant-garde catwalk shows to Nick Knight’s sinister and nightmarish visions, both the clown and the femme fatale have long been recurring themes in Western fashion culture. Glossy editorials continue to feature models in frightening and unnerving scenes depicting a certain kind of dark and hedonistic glamour which appears to be bewitching rather than reassuring. The femme fatale is no longer depicted as an object of fear; rather, she has become a frightening subject (Evans, 2007). Nevertheless, this imagery has proved successful with the modern consumer. The clown has also run the gamut from scapegoat to psycho killer and indeed both the clown and the femme fatale appear to inhabit a place between perceived opposites: good and evil, reason and madness, frivolity and death. In this respect they have some striking commonalties with fashion more generally which also embodies a noticeable ambivalent quality; something that Elizabeth Wilson (1985) suggests is fashion’s ‘double face’. Fashion can forge and convey new forms of consciousness and in doing so reflects both the celebratory and buoyant side of modernism and also its more melancholic themes of alienation and death. Like these two characters, fashion oscillates between pleasure and terror; polarized into gleeful superficiality and the horrors of destitution. As Baudrillard once said ‘imagine a thing of beauty that has absorbed all the energy of the ugly: that’s fashion’ (1990:9).