2.3 (July 2002): 312-317
© 2002 National Communication Association

 
“Who bids abstain?”: On Boycott and Empowerment

Anne-Julia Zwierlein

Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender and British Slavery, 1713-1833. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000; distributed in the UK by Cambridge University Press. 268 pages. $49.50.

This postcolonial and neo-Marxist study of British literature is a very rich, densely documented and carefully argued book. As the title announces, the argument is located at the cross-section of several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political and economic discourses. Analysing boycott as a political tool in the struggle against colonialism and slavery, Sussman expounds the inextricable connection between early modern consumer culture and colonial expansion and traces the formation of the British movement for the abolition of slavery. Finally, an analysis of gender demonstrates to what extent the issues in question permeated both the “female” domestic space and the public sphere of imperial politics. Sussman analyses the convergence of these discourses in a variegated assortment of texts: anti-slavery pamphlets, abolitionist poetry, as well as satires and novels by Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Sophia Lee, and Mary Prince.

   Stimulating and suggestive as all of this is, the book does not, in fact, as Sussman announces, “examine . . . the history of consumer protests against colonialism from 1713 to 1833” (1). Firstly, this is not a systematic “history”: Sussman restricts her few precise dates and identifiable events to short surveys in her introduction and conclusion; here she mentions events such as the Boston Tea Party, the “boycotting” of Charles Cunningham Boycott by Irish tenants, or Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement (although even this juxtaposition of very different political constellations and motivations might strike one as ahistorical). Secondly, Sussman does not provide an analysis of “consumer protests against colonialism”: With the exception of Jonathan Swift’s protest against English colonial policies towards Ireland and his pleas for Irish home consumption, the protests she records throughout are not directed against colonialism but against the violent excesses of the system, particularly, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the slave system. Abolitionism and the protest against Caribbean slavery sought to replace slave exploitation with the paid labour of a free-trade economy; Olaudah Equiano, the slave who buys his own freedom and then proceeds to take part in the capitalist system himself, even including slaves in his own cargo as a merchant, is only one well-known example of the continuing power of the colonialist and commercialist framework. As Sussman herself states about the restricted scope of the protest actions she records, “such mechanisms for social change were limited by their inscription within the structures of a consumerist, capitalist society” (48). Her book, naturally, abounds in such paradoxes, the results of the interplay between subversion and containment, well-rehearsed not only by new historicists. Even the main concern of the book, the idea of boycott, turns out to be predicated on a capitalist logic “that celebrated the individual’s power over the complex dynamics of international markets,” that is, that pretended that consumers have a choice in what they consume (44).

   One problem with discourse analysis is always the lack of quantifiability. Whereas, for instance, Neil McKendrick has been able to present figures pointing to the fifteenfold increase in tea consumption per capita during the eighteenth century in England,[1] there are no figures available for the number of women (or men) who might have voluntarily abstained from either tea or sugar.[2] The protest pamphlets and boycott poems tell us something about changing discursive structures, but they tell us nothing whatsoever about their effect and actual impact. Sussman’s argument, of course, is that “the symbolic manifestations of abstention movements in powerful rhetoric and resonant images were more culturally important than their immediate political effects” (2) —again, “importance” is not quantifiable. The same problem arises with her argument that the “backbone of the antislavery movement was made up not of those fighting for governmental representation but of those by and large excluded from conventional political processes—women, religious dissenters, and slaves themselves” (3-4). This implies quantification without actually offering it; to hint at the expanding print culture of the period is definitely not enough. In the background here are Kathleen Wilson’s arguments about popular conceptions of empire or John Brewer’s and Roy Porter’s about early modern consumption and exoticism.[3] It is therefore not precisely correct that “connections between [consumer culture and European colonialism] have barely begun to be explored” (1).

   The most powerful parts of the book are about the “feminizing of . . .  consumerism during the eighteenth century” (2) and the ways in which colonialism permeated not only the public sphere but also the “seemingly private realms of domesticity and sentiment” (2). Sussman is of course aware of the intense debate among historians such as Eric Williams or David Brion Davis about the motives for abolition; general consensus by now assumes a mixture composed of “moral values,” enlightenment thought, evangelical movements, and, perhaps most prominently, purely economic reasons.[4] Sussman adds to this debate on the side of the “moralists” by introducing the gender aspect: Within the “private space of the home,” middle-class women were able to forge a special authority on moral questions, thus influencing the “masculine public sphere” at least indirectly (7). From Pope’s voracious and exoticism-loving Belinda to Richardson’s virtuous and penurious Pamela, Sussman claims, an idea of virtuous femininity evolved, which became a model for all conscientious consumers henceforth, “a nationalistic, morally careful, sentimental consumer” (19).

   The analysis of Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker in this context is suggestive and entirely convincing; Sussman sees the novel as expressing nationalist anxiety over the dissolution through colonial trade of English domestic self-sufficiency. Most prominently, she emphasizes the opposition between Smollett’s Bath, as a place where social classes are mixing indiscriminately in a metaphorical “tide of luxury,” and Smollett’s Brambleton Hall as a self-sufficient pastoral utopia. Here the nationalistic discourse of purification (keeping the “national body” pure by rejecting exotic products) seems indeed congruous with the construction of the “sympathetic female consumer” who, by boycotting colonial products, supervises the purity of her domestic space. This “feminizing” of consumption is thus mainly a textual process; Sussman analyses the change in sensibilities via discursive shifts and metaphoric or metonymic juxtapositions, “the continuities between the rhetoric and imagery found in eighteenth-century literature and in the language of consumer protest” (3). The impulse for female boycott arguably derived from textual representations of the cruelties of the colonial slave system and was connected with the epoch’s new culture of sentimental reading among white, leisured, middle-class women.[5]  These pastime reading activities, again, usefully combined moral sentiment with the passivity that eighteenth-century gender identity prescribed for women; reading, according to Sussman and many others, signified “the domestic woman’s removal from the scene of labor” and “placed her firmly in the role of consumer rather than producer” (133).[6]

   Here another fiendish paradox sets in: While clamouring for the liberation of slaves, the texts that Sussman examines also reified them, metonymically aligning the slaves with their own bodily fluids such as tears, sweat, and blood. The drastic depiction in abolitionist pamphleteering and poetry of sugared tea as blood-stained or of the colonial ground as drenched with blood, while designed to excite the reader’s sympathy with the slaves, her “fellow creatures,” at the same time objectified them and deprived them of agency. In fact, as Sussman reminds us once again, in substituting the relationship to commodities (food) for the relationship to colonial laborers, eighteenth-century abstention movements, “despite their progressive ideals and humanitarian aims,  . . . remained inside the structure of commodification” (18). At the same time, middle-class white women campaigners for abolition saw themselves as vastly superior to their beneficiaries, imagined as passive victims.

   While the consumption of colonial products was being replaced, in the realm of domesticity, by the “sentimental consumption of texts depicting colonial suffering” (19), paradoxically the sentimental gaze upon the slave was not very different in nature from the controlling and objectifying gaze of the plantation manager (160), as Sussman convincingly demonstrates in her analyses. Another, even more striking paradox is the anxiety revealed by many of these texts that exposure to scenes of colonial violence would not, in fact, trigger but rather suppress female compassion. The abhorred antithesis to the angelic and domestic woman was the female colonial overseer cherishing sadistic and voyeuristic pleasures; writings from Coleridge to Charlotte Smith demonstrate the currency of this feared figure in textual constructions. Therefore, as Sussman pointedly concludes, “the absence of the abolitionist sympathizer from the scene she abhorred was crucial; her sentiments had to be mediated, through reading or other forms of representation, by idealized images of domestic virtue in distress.” (186)

   On the whole, Sussman’s is an important and rewarding study, which opens up new dimensions in many respects; but what is announced as a “history of boycott” is so, in fact, only at a metaphorical level: Her grand récit constructs the eighteenth-century consumption of texts as a replacement for the consumption of colonial products. The “conclusion” offers a brief outlook on the biological racism that in the nineteenth century came to replace the eighteenth century’s sentimental philanthropy and universalist optimism about class mobility and individual progress. Thus Sussman ends with yet another paradox: The abolitionists’ sentimentalist accounts of cultural difference, intended to liberate slaves from exploitation, may have locked them into another, even more rigid system—an essentialist concept of race. The ubiquitous paradoxes and aporias expounded in this study may, of course, be the foreseeable results of every (especially neo-Marxist) discourse analysis: Wherever you start the discussion, either as a producer or as a consumer of texts, the sinister workings of capitalist power will always already be there.

Anne-Julia Zwierlein is assistant professor at the Centre for British Studies, University of Bamberg, Germany.