Consuming Traditions: Modernism, Modernity, andthe CommodifledAuthentic. Elizabeth Outka (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009) xiii pp.

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1 Consuming Traditions: Modernism, Modernity, andthe CommodifledAuthentic. Elizabeth Outka (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009) xiii pp. In Consuming Traditions: Modernism, Modernity, and the Commodifled Authentic, the inaugural publication of Oxford's Modemist Literature & Culture series, Elizabeth Outka enters into the longstanding debate over the relationship between British literary modemism and popular culture. The "great divide" that Andreas Huyssen described as separating elite modemists from the masses has been challenged on various fronts in recent years. Nonetheless, it remains a source of contention for literary scholars, as definitions of the modemist movement grow increasingly hard to pin down. Outka does not attempt to further this debunking, but rather to reframe the discussion in a more radical way. The overarching argument of her book is that contradictory desires among the tum-of-the-century British public for the "new" promised by modernity and for the "authentic" comforts associated with the 19"'-century past (or with a non-commercial, upperclass luxury), led to the birth of a commercial culture that did its best to offer its customers both. Affordable, mass-produced goods, which nonetheless had the veneer of authenticity about them, became the order of the day. Everything from cocoa and soap to houses and towns was made to fit the bill and marketed to a middle-class customer base not on the grounds of its intrinsic value, but of its more ineffable qualities. This large-scale recalibration of consumerism, which Outka terms "commodified authenticity," and which is still with us today in the lifestyle marketing so ubiquitous we hardly notice it in our daily lives (the clothing catalogs that promise glamour, romance, and model-like attractiveness for the price of a sweater; the coffee commercials that suggest your Folgers comes with a leisurely Sunday moming included), permeated not only the act of consumption, Outka maintains, but the literature that emerged at the same time. Consequently, she insists, we are oversimplifying both when we assert that modemists remained aloof from the marketplace, and when we indignantly accuse these writers of complicity in commercial matters. Instead, it is the tension between the two positions (i.e., a commitment to the non-commercial authentic and a rejection ofthat authentic in favor of new, "modem" reproductions) and modem attempts to occupy both simultaneously that captivates Outka, as she sees this paradox driving not only scholarly debate but much of the modemist work we admire: The very idea of the commodified authentic that one might unite desires for permanence, or commercial purity, or for the absolute original, with the promise that despite appearances such things might be endlessly remade, constructed, reproduced, and exchanged was an astonishingly powerful paradox; efforts to align modernism or modernity with only one side of

2 REVIEWS Saloman 207 the equation (with, say, the desire to "make it new") miss how the paradox itself, with its heady promise to sustain the contradiction, functioned as a critical tool within the culture. (5) Outka focuses her attention mainly on literary works written in the late 19*- and early 20*-centuries. This brief but distinct period, disowned by modemists and Victorianists alike, is a literaty moment too often ignored. Many, many valuable Edwardian works have fallen into this abyss. While Outka has chosen only relatively (or very) well-known texts to examine here, it is my hope that her book is indicative of an increased critical interest in this period. Consuming Traditions covers an impressive amount of ground, as Outka deftly reads E. M. Forster's Howards End, along with George Bemard Shav/'s John Bull's Island and Major Barbara, in light ofthe "model towns and commercial Utopias" represented by the Cadbury Brothers' Boumeville and Lever's Port Sunlight, and Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, Henry James's "The Great Good Place," and H.G. Wells's Tono Bungay in relation to the window displays and innovative sales techniques adopted by Selfridges department store. I admit that I was skeptical when I saw that Outka's longest chapter ("The Past is a Present Country: Model Towns and Commercial Utopias") was a historical account ofthe company towns built by Lever and Cadbury, a subject that did not immediately pique my interest or announce its own relevance to the matter at hand. Yet while I suspect that Outka could have made her literary claims just as effectively while presenting less of her archival evidence, the materials she shares here (including original advertisements for Cadbury's cocoa and Lever's soap and pictures of the companies' respective planned communities) are so undeniably and so unexpectedly fascinating that it is hard to begmdge them the substantial portion ofthe book that they occupy, except insofar as 1 would have liked to see in-depth readings of even more writers and more novels. While Outka has constructed a new paradigm for reading modem works in this book, her own interpretations are never formulaic or predictable. One can guess which aspects of a given work would draw her attention, but it is not by any means obvious what her interpretive account ofthat particular text would look like. The conclusion ofthe book suggests what a more widespread application of Outka's ideas might produce, as it offers brief readings of three high modemist texts Woolfs To the Lighthouse, Joyce's Ulysses, and Lawrence's Women in Love but it really only whets the appetite in so doing. This is, of course, a testament to Outka's argument, as well as to her writing and her literary sensibilities. Her close readings are exquisite and would in and of themselves justify her work. Outka's thoughtful and original readings ofthe two novels at the center of her study (Howards End and Night and Day) offer even the most jaded reader of Forster or Woolf the opportunity to pause over previously unnoticed moments in

3 208 WOOLF STUDIES ANNUAL Volume 16, 2010 these works and to reassess fixed views. The chapter on Howards End ("Buying Time: E. M. Forster and the Neo-Nostalgic Home") manages to produce suggestive analyses of this much-studied novel (no small feat in writing about a novel with a long and bountiful critical history), particularly in the account of Miss Avery (whose unpacking and arrangement of the Wilcoxes' things at Howards End is a key moment in Outka's reading) and in the apology for Forster's ending, which suggests that the seeming contradiction implicit in the novel's final retreat is actually an attempt on Forster's part to protect not an authentic realify, but "nostalgic desire itself not a place of actual idyllic beaufy, or a space that is actually separate fi-om the commercial, but a place where the desire that these things might be realized can be maintained and protected" (92). Yet it is her chapter on Woolfs Night and Day ('"Lustrous behind Glass': Woolf, Window Shopping, and Authentic Display") that is Outka's real triumph. Her reading of this novel should spark an all-out revaluing and re-imagining of this work. Putting aside traditional accounts of Night and Day, which see it as caught between 19* and 20*-century modes^ and fatally fiawed as a result Outka, reading the novel in light of the development of Selfridges department store that she traces in the previous chapter, again sees the very tension at work in the transition to modemity as the chief point of interest. Not only does this chapter offer new insights into Night and Day, but it underscores the vast potential of Outka's argument for reconsidering many books that have been dismissed on the same erroneous grounds of having not entirely aligned themselves with modemity, of still bearing the vestiges of older literary forms and being thereby insufficiently "modem." The museum-like collection of personal items or "tableau of the dead" that memorializes the Victorian era through Katharine's grandfather is contrasted by Outka (and Woolf) with the department store window displays that offer both figurative and literal light in the modem era, and the idea that authenticify can only be found in what is dead and memorialized (i.e., Katherine's Victorian grandfather) is staunchly rejected. This is a key point, as one of the great dangers of commodified authenticity is an idealization of the past at the expense of the present. As Katharine and Ralph walk the London streets and look in at the store windows, the contrast between the two eras that stand on either side of them is crystallized, and there is much to be said for the present day and the future it promises. Outka's reading of Night and Day as a war novel, "capturing through its later scenes of window shopping the overwhelming urge to preserve the prewar era as an oasis of nostalgic authenticity and security" is a tour-de-force. Notably, Outka shies away from the most obvious application of her argument exploring the marketing and sale of books and authors' attitudes toward their own work and its promotion. Perhaps she feels this is an area that has

4 REVIEWS Saloman 209 already received adequate attention or that it is not as interesting as her other areas of exploration (fair enough), but it would be helpful to know her views in this regard. At points (perhaps because I saw the reasonableness of her claim early on and did not feel the need for constant reiteration), I felt impatient for her to take the next step and make a larger claim about the implications of this "false" devotion to authenticity for modem literature and modemism generally (perhaps even to expand the claims beyond England, considering them in a more cosmopolitan or at least trans-atlantic context what does it mean, for example, that both Henry James and Gordon Selfridge are American by birth?), but overall, this book is worth reading for anyone interested in Woolf or in British modem literature more generally as well as for those interested in the history of consumer culture. Randi Saloman, Cornell University

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