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Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment and Cultural Consumption in Germany 1780–1830

2007; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mon.2007.0067

1934-2810

Helen G. Morris-Keitel,

Fashion and Cultural Textiles

Reviewed by: Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment and Cultural Consumption in Germany 1780-1830 Helen G. Morris-Keitel Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment and Cultural Consumption in Germany 1780-1830. By Karin Wurst. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2005. xxvi + 485 pages. $59.95. In this ambitious monograph, Karin Wurst's goal is to broaden her readers' understanding of identity formation among members of the upper-middle class in the period between 1780 and 1830. In doing so, she offers a nuanced reading of social structures at the time. Instead of exclusively focusing on reading and the rise of print media and their connection with the Enlightenment ideal of Bildung as the primary source of identity, she analyzes the significance of fashion, music, reading, art, gardens, and travel as items of "cultural consumption" that were, according to her argument, all equally important for the self-identity of this stratum. Furthermore, Wurst stresses that these aspects were not only central to establishing an identity vis-à-vis the nobility, but were also of great significance for intraclass differentiation (cf. 23). The main source for much of Wurst's analysis is Friedrich Johann Justin Bertuch's (1747–1822) Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786–1827) from which she draws support for her theoretical framework as well as using it as the subject of her analysis. A result of her more inclusive approach to identity formation is that she is able to locate the upper-middle class in this period as the site of mediation between "high" and "low" culture, between the domestic sphere of leisure and the public sphere of work, and between the varying goals of the Enlightenment and Idealism. In order to do this, Wurst develops a theoretical framework in the first five chapters that draws heavily on cultural studies, above all on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Key concepts of this framework are pleasure and entertainment, to which she devotes a whole chapter, outlining their meaning in the discourse of the eighteenth century before providing her own definitions. Entertainment encompasses "the varied, deliberately [End Page 413] selected or created occasions, practices, and events that produce the psychological disposition of pleasure" (59). "Pleasure is not a state of being in itself but a certain quality of experience that the individual seeks to repeat as frequently as possible" (59). Pleasure, intertwined with novelty and stimulation, is the "motor" of cultural consumerism that in turn allows the individual to express his or her taste, thereby functioning as a material expression of identity. This framework is then used to analyze cultural objects, e.g. fashion or forms of entertainment such as attitudes or living pictures that became popular in this period. While Wurst's general argument about the interrelatedness of these various aspects of upper-middle-class lifestyle and their role in the process of identity construction is quite compelling, a major tension underlying the entire framework is not totally resolved: this is the question of the relationship between pleasure and the pressure to conform in the dynamic of consumption that she describes. Pleasure is posited as the reason that members of the upper-middle class continually consumed material culture objects because, according to Wurst, this explains "how the [upper-]middle class was induced to spend [its] new wealth, how it was seduced into consumption" and moved away from the "ascetic economic behavior" characteristic of this segment of the population earlier in the eighteenth century. Wurst argues that seminal to this was a "reinterpretation of luxury" (80), moving it away from an association with the decadence of the nobility and recasting it as a "key moral and economic issue" (81). The Journal does precisely this (cf. 81–90) and in its debate on the subject, Wurst finds the link between pleasure and entertainment, on the one hand, and the "economic, [. . .] social, [and] cultural advancement and enrichment of the (middle) class" (84), on the other. However, later in the chapter on fashion, Wurst presents a long quote from a letter that was printed in the Journal from a newlywed daughter. One sentence from this quote is particularly striking: "I have to admit that I find this lifestyle oppressive because it does not allow me to...