Sex and the City: Metropolitan Modernities in English History

Abstract

Despite the enduring popular identification of Victorianism with sexual prudery, a cloying domesticity, and adherence to rigid social conventions, late-nineteenth-century British culture now boasts an impressive (and increasing) association in scholarly literature with the erotic, the spectacular, and the modern. In literary and historical studies alike, the past decade has seen the publication of an array of works in which the Victorian era figures not as a bulwark of conservative repression but rather as an age of social, sexual, and spatial emancipation. New understandings of gender and urban consumer culture have played a key part in this shift in representation, and the department store has in this context gained an almost totemic status as the quintessential symbol of Victorian modernity. Thus for Mica Nava, "shopping and the emergence of the department store" represent "key iconic aspects of modern urban society," and late-Victorian women's participation in "the exploding culture of consumption and spectacle" is the arena in which "the everyday lives of large numbers of ordinary women were most deeply affected by the process of modernity" (38, 46). In this prevailing view, department stores and shopping were instrumental to Victorian women's liberation from the domestic circle and their entry into the public sphere. Judith Walkowitz argues that "[m]iddle-class women first established their urban beachheads around West End shopping," which "emerged as a newly elaborated female activity in the 1870s" (46-47); in a similar vein, Erika Rappaport details how later Victorian entrepreneurs and journalists represented the department store as "the agent of female emancipation and pleasure and the symbol of the modern metropolis" (144). Lynn Walker's analysis of department stores as "the most significant symbol of the many pleasures of the modern city open to women" captures the essential features of this ostensibly new metropolitan modernity, finding in the department store "a setting [. . .] which for the first time gave [End Page 25] women [. . .] a feeling of being at home in the public sphere, which only men had previously experienced" (79).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.