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Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century

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This slim and accessible book is a study of the ideological construction of modern female subjectivity in relation to the emergence of consumer culture. Wallace argues that the relationship between the world of women and the world of goods can be understood by semiotic connections. She employs a symbolic approach and a scholarly popular concept of Micheal Foucault's discursive discipline to examine "three cultural movements" surrounding the tea table, shopping, and business. The book can be counted an interdisciplinary study which applies a range of feminist, linguistic, and historicist strategies, it can be seen as a good example of literary analysis. Wallace's investigation of female subjectivity as consumer and commodity in relation to consumerism places strong emphasis on the interpretation of the eighteenth-century literature. Therefore, the book will be more comprehensible if the reader has some background in the study of eighteenth-century literature and likes to read an academic style which leans more to literary than historical analysis.