A history of envy in consumer society: Middle class aspirations, social mobility, and morality in America, 1890-1930

This dissertation examines the nature and perceptions of envy among middle-class Americans in a burgeoning consumer economy. Focusing on the period 1890-1930, and drawing on popular literature, sermons, memoirs, psychological and sociological studies, it explores how unprecedented material abundance transformed the experience of envy and responses to it.; Between 1890 and 1930, the bourgeoisie tried to achieve social mobility by emulating upper-class consumer styles. Urban women, eager for social advancement, tried to improve their positions through the strategic display of fashions and furnishings. Their husbands holding white-collar jobs used similar strategies to attain social and occupational mobility. As corporate capitalism began to stifle economic individualism, men learned to repress their envy and competitive instincts in the workplace and to channel them into the consumer marketplace. Rural men and women were equally intent on social advancement yet enjoyed little access to the consumer goods so necessary to fashion an urban, upper-class image. Frustration with the dearth of consumer goods in the countryside and envy of the cities' alluring bounty often led rural-dwellers to leave the farm.; The aspirations and actions of middle-class adults provided a powerful model for succeeding generations. Children, envious and aware of status distinctions, learned from their parents and imparted to their own children a strong faith in the power of material goods to transform social identities.; As the consumer economy developed, the marketplace became secularized. Between 1890 and 1915, moralists attempted to control envy and emulation in order to preserve a moral economy and a conservative, hierarchical social order. They praised the virtue of contentment, which they considered envy's opposite, and told the bourgeoisie to be contented with their circumstances instead of yearning for their neighbors' possessions and privileges. After 1915 a new generation of influential secular leaders repudiated the doctrine of contentment, rejecting the notion that there were divinely ordained limits on what each class should possess. They encouraged all to pursue what they desired. Envy was no longer a sin, but rather a valuable economic stimulant.; As it examines middle-class envy, the dissertation challenges recent interpretations of consumer society. It recovers forgotten traditions of protest against consumerism, questions the nature of community and class identity in the new order, and outlines the bourgeoisie's role in the creation of a consumerist ideology.