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Shopping Like a Satyr, Styling like a Nymph: Towards a History of Classical Reception in Consumption

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Abstract

This essay argues that consumer culture is a medium through which the classical tradition becomes incorporated into everyday experience. It does this through a close examination of the Broadway musical The Pink Lady (1911), which plays with the theme of nymphs and satyrs and is set in a variety of commercial environments. This theme has been mediated by earlier responses to classical culture, and its reimagining in the production design has been particularly influenced by the Rococo period. However, this art-historical context has been transformed by new cultures of celebrity and mass media. Using a range of contemporary sociological responses to consumption, as well as later scholarship on the topic, I demonstrate that classical antiquity made an excellent source for modern commodification. Consumer culture has a substantial impact on people’s sense of social identity and the way in which the public sphere is constructed. The Pink Lady makes links between ancient nymphs and satyrs on the one hand and contemporary fashion and sexual mores on the other. Through analysis of this production, I explore the role classically inflected modes of consumption play in the overlapping phenomena of sexual expression, social identity and the cultivation of discernment. The classical tradition was shaped as much by the apparently democratizing impulse of modern consumption as it was by fantasies of aristocratic idleness.

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Notes

  1. The activities of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama have been crucial to the development of this field, informing, among many others, works such as: R. Bryant Davies, Victorian Epic Burlesques: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Entertainments after Homer, London, 2018; C. Foster, ‘“A Very British Greek Play”: A Critical Investigation of The Origins And Tradition Of Greek Plays In Greek In England, 1880-1921’ , PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2014; E. Hall and F. Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914, Oxford, 2005; The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World, ed. F. Macintosh, Oxford, 2010; L. Monrós-Gaspar, Victorian Classical Burlesques: A Critical Anthology, London and Oxford, 2015.

  2. F. Trentmann, ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Handbook to the History of Consumption, ed. F. Trentmann, Oxford, 2012, pp. 1–22 (3).

  3. J. Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880–1980, London and New York, 1994, p. 72.

  4. V. de Grazia, ‘Establishing the Consumer Household: Introduction’, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. V. de Grazia and E. Furlough, Berkeley, 1996, pp. 151–62.

  5. D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars, Oxford, 1988, pp. 1–90.

  6. A fascinating and important study on this phenomenon is E. D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, Princeton and Oxford, 2000.

  7. K. Peiss, ‘Making Up, Making Over: Cosmetics, Consumer Culture and Women’s Identity’, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. V. de Grazia and E. Furlough, Berkeley, 1996, pp. 311–36.

  8. Benson, Rise of Consumer Society (n. 3 above), p. 181.

  9. P. Lunt and S. Livingstone, Mass Consumption and Personal Identity: Everyday Economic Experience, Buckingham, 1992, p. 24.

  10. De Grazia, 'Establishing the Consumer Household' (n. 4 above), p. 153.

  11. L. Shapiro Sanders, Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure and the London Shopgirl, 1880–1920, Columbus OH, 2006, chaps 4 and 5.

  12. T. C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914, Cambridge, 2000; J. H. Kaplan and S. Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 115–51; B. Macpherson, Cultural Identity in British Musical Theatre, 1890–1939, London, 2018, pp. 66–75; L. Platt, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890–1939, Basingstoke and New York, 2004; Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure (n. 6 above).

  13. R. Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society, Chicago and London, 2000, p. 10.

  14. R. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public, Stanford CA, 1986; P. L. Fortunato, ‘Wildean Philosophy with a Needle and Thread: Consumer Fashion at the Origins of Modernist Aesthetics’, College Literature, 34, 2007, pp. 37–53.

  15. C. Martindale, ‘Performance, Reception, Aesthetics: Or Why Reception Studies Need Kant’, in Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, ed. E. Hall and S. Harrop, London and New York, 2010, pp. 71–84; S. Goldhill, ‘Cultural History and Aesthetics: Why Kant Is No Place to Start Reception Studies’, in Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, ed. E. Hall and S. Harrop, London and New York, 2010, pp. 56–70.

  16. I. Woodward, ‘Consumption as Cultural Interpretation: Taste, Performativity and Navigating the Forest of Objects’, in The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. J. C. Alexander, R. N. Jacobs and P. Smith, Oxford, 2012, pp. 671–97 (682–4).

  17. C. Stray, The Living Word: W. H. D. Rouse and the Crisis of Classics in Edwardian England, London, 1992.

  18. L. Hardwick, ‘Thinking with Classical Reception: Critical Distance, Critical Licence, Critical Amnesia?’, in Classics in Extremis, ed. E. Richardson, London, 2019, pp. 13–24.

  19. M. Halbwachs, La Classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie: recherches sur la hiérarchie des besoins dans les sociétés industrielles contemporaines, Paris, 1912, pp. 439–42.

  20. B. Cowan, ‘Public Spaces, Knowledge, and Sociability’, in The Oxford Handbook to the History of Consumption, ed. F. Trentmann, Oxford, 2012, pp. 251–66.

  21. R. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Oxford, 1980, pp. 1–20; P. James, ‘Hercules as a Symbol of Labour: A Nineteenth-Century Class-Conflicted Hero’, in Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform, ed. E. Hall and H. Stead, London and New York, 2015, pp. 138–54.

  22. H. Galoy, ‘Théatres’, Le Courrier Français, 19 September 1907, pp. 2–3.

  23. ‘“The Pink Lady” Gay and Amusing’, New York Times, 14 March 1911.

  24. K. Gänzl, The British Musical Theatre, London, 1986, I: mdcccxcv–mcmxiv, p. 1087.

  25. ‘“The Pink Lady” Captures London; Enthusiasm Is Unusual for the First Night of an American Production’, New York Times, 12 April 1912, p. 4.

  26. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, London and New York, 1890, II, p. 36. For work on Frazer’s intellectual and literary influence, see J. B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of ‘The Golden Bough’, Princeton NJ and Guildford, 1973.

  27. C. Ackermann, ‘Silen, Satyr’, Brill’s New Pauly Supplements I (Brill Online, 2015) <http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-new-pauly-supplements-i-4/silen-satyr-e1112800>. Also relevant is J. Boardman, The Great God Pan: The Survival of an Image, Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures, London, 1997, p. 99.

  28. For a thorough treatment of the term, see A. Viala, La Galanterie: une mythologie française, Paris, 2019. Relevant primary sources are listed here: A. Viala, ‘Mille choses galantes (Dossier A: Corpus)’, Les Dossiers du Grihl, (2019) <https://doi.org/10.4000/dossiersgrihl.7350>. My thanks to Vittoria Fallanca for pointing me in this direction.

  29. S. Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage 1800–1930, Oxford, 2013, p. 81.

  30. C. Hindson, Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-Siècle Popular Stages of London and Paris, Manchester and New York, 2007, p. 14.

  31. P. Bailey, ‘“Hullo, Ragtime!” West End Revue and the Americanisation of Popular Culture in Pre-1914 London’, in Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin 1890 to 1939, ed. L. Platt, T. Becker and D. Linton, Cambridge, 2014, pp. 135–52; B. Macpherson, Cultural Identity in British Musical Theatre, 1890–1939 (n. 12 above), p. 142.

  32. Gänzl, i, mdcccxcv–mcmxiv (n. 24 above), p. 1090; ‘The Pink Lady’, Daily Mail, 13 April 1912, p. 3.

  33. ‘Prince’s Theatre: “The Pink Lady”’, Manchester Guardian, 4 December 1912, p. 16.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage (n. 12 above), p. 360.

  36. Hindson, Female Performance Practice (n. 30 above), p. 44.

  37. S. A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism, Cambridge MA and London, 2000, pp. 174–87.

  38. K. Gänzl, ‘Mitchell, Julian’, The Encyclopaedia of Musical Theatre, New York etc., 2001, pp. 1407–9.

  39. M. A. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Cambridge MA and London, 2002, p. 10. For comments on the rationalisation of the performing body prior to the early twentieth century, see J. R. Roach, ‘Theatre History and the Ideology of the Aesthetic’, Theatre Journal, 41, 1989, pp. 155–68. On Fordism in musical comedy, see L. Platt, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890–1939 (n. 12 above), p. 38.

  40. F. Lissarague, La Cité des satyres: une anthropologie ludique, Paris, 2013, p. 71.

  41. MS London, British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Manuscript Collection, LCP 1911/4: C. M. S. McLellan, ‘The Pink Lady’, 1912, p. 29.

  42. (My translation.) G. Berr and M. Guillemaud, ‘Le Satyre’, in Théâtre, Paris, 1913, LXVI, pp. 1–187 (27): ‘…les satyres n’ont plus de jambes de bouc, ils ont suivi la mode’.

  43. J. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, transl. C. Turner, London, 1998, p. 96.

  44. C. P. Hosgood, ‘“Mercantile Monasteries”: Shops, Shop Assistants, and Shop Life in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 38, 1999, pp. 322–52 (336).

  45. Shapiro Sanders, Consuming Fantasies (n. 11 above), p. 84.

  46. Ibid., pp. 28–39.

  47. M. Gill, Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Oxford, 2009, pp. 117–20.

  48. C. Conyers, ‘Courtesans in Dance History: Les Belles de La Belle Époque’, Dance Chronicle, 26, 2003, pp. 219–43. The effect of courtesans’ style on other women is remarked on in Granville Barker’s The Madras House (1910): S. Eltis, ‘The Fallen Woman on Stage’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. K. Powell, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 222–36 (233).

  49. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), p. 38.

  50. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), p. 132.

  51. Helpful here was Davidson’s discussion of the ambiguity of a courtesan’s status through the receiving of gifts over money in Athens: J. Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes, London, 1997, p. 112.

  52. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), p. 55.

  53. R. Warren, Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition, London and New York, 2018. It is worth noting here that, while this is presented as something new, the movement had been around for over two decades by this point.

  54. T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, New York and London, 1915, pp. 45, 160–62.

  55. P. Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece, transl. K. Atlass and J. Redfield, Chicago and London, 1988, p. 70.

  56. C. Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in London, 1800–1910, Chicago and London, 2008, p. 50.

  57. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), p. 6.

  58. E. Berenson and E. Giloi, ‘Introduction’, in Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. E. Berenson and E. Giloi, New York and Oxford, 2010, pp. 1–17 (6).

  59. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), p. 6.

  60. Ibid., p. 9.

  61. (My translation.) J. Rennes, ‘Cochères parisiennes, le risque en spectacle’, Travail, genre et sociétés, 36, 2016, pp. 37–59 (51): ‘l’un des types érotiques de l’époque: celui de la «jeune aguicheuse», consentant aux dangers sexuels qui l’attendent.’

  62. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), p. 6.

  63. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society (n. 43 above), pp. 87–90.

  64. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), pp. 86–8.

  65. Dufallo’s discussion of the literary relationship between citation and ‘staging of the classical past’ has some interesting overlap here, although, necessarily, the mode of production of Catullus’s text does not lend itself to quite the same arguments I am interested in making about modernity. See B. Dufallo, ‘Reception and Receptivity in Catullus 64’, Cultural Critique, 74, 2010, pp. 98–113.

  66. The script has this down as the Tabarin restaurant but ephemera refer to the venue as the Café Les Satyres: Victoria and Albert Museum, Theatre and Performance Archives, ‘the Pink Lady’ production file, ‘Programme for “The Pink Lady”’, 1912.

  67. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), p. 111.

  68. K. McConkey, ‘A Walk in the Park: Memory and Rococo Revivalism in 1890s’, in English Art, 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity, ed. D. P. Corbett and L. Perry, Manchester, 2000, pp. 100–13 (112).

  69. Images of these paintings are available on the websites of the galleries where they are displayed: The National Library of Scotland <https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/5560/f%C3%AAtes-v%C3%A9nitiennes-1718-1719> [accessed: 26/10/17] and the Dulwich Picture Gallery <http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/explore-the-collection/151-200/les-plaisirs-du-bal/> [accessed: 26/10/2017].

  70. Theatres Trust, ‘Gielgud Theatre’ <http://www.theatrestrust.org.uk/resources/theatres/show/680-gielgud> [accessed 16 March 2017].

  71. R. Easterbrook, ‘Merrie Arcadia: Staging the Pastoral in the Age of the Clarion Socialist Movement’, Classical Receptions Journal, 11, 2019, pp. 256–73; E. Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic, Oxford, 2008.

  72. A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York and Oxford, 1995, pp. 207–31.

  73. See The History of Advertising Trust digital archive, HAT62/7/1206 and HAT62/7/1212.

  74. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society (n. 43 above), pp. 100–102.

  75. Lunt and Livingstone, Mass Consumption (n. 9 above), p. 21.

  76. S. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York, 2001, p. 16.

  77. M. A. Katritzky, ‘Images of the Commedia Dell’Arte’, in The Routledge Companion to Commedia Dell’Arte, ed. J. Chaffee and O. Crick, London and New York, 2015, pp. 284–99; M. Perlman, ‘Reading and Interpreting the Capitano’s Multiple Mask-Shapes’, in The Routledge Companion to Commedia Dell’Arte, ed. J. Chaffee and O. Crick, London and New York, 2015, pp. 82–90.

  78. C. Seerveld, ‘Telltale Statues in Watteau’s Painting’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 14, 1980, pp. 151–80.

  79. A. E. MacNeil, ‘Celestial Sirens of the Commedia Dell’Arte Stage’, in The Routledge Companion to Commedia Dell’Arte, ed. J. Chaffee and O. Crick, London and New York, 2015, pp. 246–54 (247).

  80. L. Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor for Modernity, New York, 1994, pp. 38–9.

  81. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), p. 123.

  82. Ibid., p. 137.

  83. Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece (n. 55 above), pp. 77–8.

  84. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), pp. 139-40.

  85. J. Malnig, ‘Athena Meets Venus: Visions of Women in Social Dance in the Teens and Early Twenties’, Dance Research Journal, 31, 1999, pp. 34–62 (37, 48).

  86. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), p. 121.

  87. Warren, Art Nouveau (n. 53 above), p. 118.

  88. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure (n. 6 above), p. 181.

  89. See also: D. Reside, ‘Musical of the Month: The Pink Lady’, The New York Public Library <http://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/04/23/musical-month-pink-lady> [accessed 27 April 2016].

  90. ‘Programme for “The Pink Lady”’.

  91. J. R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Chicago, 1992, pp. 48–9.

  92. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society (n. 43 above), pp. 57–9.

  93. McLellan, The Pink Lady (n. 41 above), p. 147.

  94. Agamben calls the always-amorous nymph ‘the image of the image’. The women here participate in the tradition of image-making of the nymph. See G. Agamben, Nymphae, transl. A. Minervini, London etc., 2013, p. 57.

Acknowledgements

This work started life as part of a PhD thesis before being revised for the ‘Democratising Classics’ panel at the Celtic Conference in Classics 2018 and again while undertaking a fellowship at Oxford. I would like to thank my supervisors, Pantelis Michelakis and Catherine Hindson, and my examiners, Fiona Macintosh and Elaine McGirr for all their support and input, as well as my fellow CCC panellists for their questions and comments. I am grateful to Women in the Humanities at the University of Oxford for supporting this work and am indebted to Sophie Hatchwell for prompting my investigation into the rococo and to Charlotte Faucher for reading and commenting on a draft of this article. A grant from the Society for Theatre Research enabled me to undertake archival research in the Victoria and Albert Museum theatre archive. Lastly, I extend my gratitude to the reviewers for their pertinent insights and the editor for her flexibility during the pandemic.

Funding

Received a small Grant from the Society for Theatre Research.

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    Rhiannon Easterbrook

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Easterbrook, R. Shopping Like a Satyr, Styling like a Nymph: Towards a History of Classical Reception in Consumption. Int class trad 29, 24–49 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-020-00587-8

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