ABSTRACT
Chapter Five examines a sample of cases in which respectability appeared in performative discourses in nineteenth-century European and North American public spheres. Several of these concerned consumption. After a general treatment of the role of respectability in nineteenth-century aspects of modernity that we today call “consumer culture,” “consumer society,” and the “consumer economy,” the discussion turns to two specific commodities which displayed significant connections to respectability: men’s trousers and women’s bicycles. These provide a context for considering respectability’s role in marketing and fashion and the relationship of that role to gender and class. The transition between consumption and the next topic, respectable discourse in the performance of rituals, is afforded by an analysis of “English” tea (the meal), which became throughout Europe a means of signifying a family’s respectability and in North America a symbol of gentility as well. This leads to a discussion of the relationship between gentility and respectability, and also of the function of images of British society and culture in the international adoption of respectability. Also examined briefly is the impact of respectability on practices of worship across a broad religious spectrum, on political assemblies, and on public executions. The principal category of performative discourse examined in Chapter Five is manners. The nature and meaning of respectable manners, their relationships to the varied types of manners verbally associated with gentility, and their connections to perceived changes in modern society are pursued in three texts: the chapter on manners in Catharine Beecher’s The American Woman’s Home (1869), an extended series of articles from the 1860s on manners published in Harper’s Bazaar, and Frances Trollope’s ferociously critical The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). The chapter ends with a treatment of professionalism, one of the most characteristic cultural elements of modernity, as a performative discourse in which respectability was (and remains) overtly central.
