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LECTURE 3McClintock
What were the contexts (political, economic, cultural) within which
Victorian soap advertising came out?
There was a new economy creating an uproar not only of things, but also of
signs. If all these new commodities were to be managed, a unified system of
representation had to be found. Also the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace
served as a monument for the new form of consumption; it showed that the
capitalist system created a dominant form of exchange AND a dominant for of
representation to go with it (voyeuristic panorama).
Soap did not have a particular history, thus it had to be created. It started with to
accept the erasure of women’s domestic value under imperial capitalism. Soap
reveals fetishism as central to industrial modernity and mediating the uncertain
threshold between domesticity, industry, metropolis and empire.
Advertising at that moment of time (around 1850) became the central cultural
form of commodity capitalism. Soap manufacturers began the pioneer the use of
pictorial advertising as a central part of business policy. There was a surplus of
cheap cotton goods, alongside with the growing buying power of a middle class
that could afford to consume such goods in large quantities.
Economic competition with the US and Germany created the need for more
aggressive promotion of British products that led to the first real innovations in
advertising. In 1844, the first name brand soap bar was sold. This signified a
major transformation in capitalism, as imperial competition gave rise to the
creation of monopolies.
How did the contexts shape the ideas and values encoded in soap
advertising?
Advertising took the intimate signs of domesticity into the public realm and
meanwhile taking scenes from the empire into every corner of the home. Soap
flourished due to the fact that it was a cheap and portable domestic commodity.
It could persuade people of racial hygiene and imperial process. Commodity
racism became distinct from scientific racism in its capacity to expand beyond
the literate elite since the imperial kitsch as consumer spectacle could package,
market and distribute evolutionary racism on a massive scale.
Soap was credited not only with bringing moral and economic salvation to the
British great unwashed, but also embodying the spiritual ingredient of the
imperial mission itself.
The obsession with cleanliness and cotton was not just a reaction to the surplus,
the Victorians were fascinated with clean, white bodies and clean white clothing.
It offered the promise of spiritual salvation and regeneration through commodity
consumption.
A dark skin was stained by outdoor manual work was the visible stigma not only
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LECTURE 3
, of a class obliged to work under the element for a living, but also of god’s
disfavour.
Whose ideas and values were encoded?
The ideas and values of the elites are encoded in order to get this type of
thinking in the working class. This dominant class shows the mass of people how
to think. They make it seem normal, as if they represent the ideas of ordinary
people who in the end come to agree with it: they don’t see it as equality
anymore.
What do monkeys and mirrors in soap advertising signify?
The bathroom signifies domestic hygiene and the private temple of public
regeneration.
Soap offers a reformation allegory by which the purification of the domestic body
becomes a metaphor for the regeneration of the body politic.
The white apron serves as a fetish of domestic purity that protects from the dirt.
The white child is figured as the agent of history and the male heir to progress,
reflecting his lesser brother in the European mirror of self-consciousness.
In the Victorian mirror, the black child witnesses his imperial metamorphosis but
remains a passive racial hybrid, brought to the brink of socialization by both soap
and the mirror.
Hybrids portray the Victorian view on women: angel in the drawing room,
monkey in the bedroom.
The monkey
The monkey is also a hybrid: part ape, part human, part street beggar, part
gentleman, part artist, part advertiser. The creature inhabits the border of the
jungle and the city, private and public, domestic and commercial. The monkey is
eloquent of a crisis in value and anxiety at possible boundary breakdown. They
signify to people they would look like this if they do not use soap and thus
become a primate. The primate body became a symbolic space for reordering
and polishing boundaries between human and nature, woman and men, family
and politics, empire and metropolis. Monkeys were associated with dangerous
classes. The monkey was an icon of metamorphism. The monkey is
contradictory, embodying the hope of imperial progress through commerce while
rendering Victorian fears of urban militancy and colonial misrule.
The mirror
It expresses a crisis which can’t be resolved, like all the other fetishes. It erases
both the signs of domestic labour and the industrial origins of domestic
commodities. In the domestic world of mirrors, objects multiply without human
intervention, in an economy of self-generation.
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LECTURE 3
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