of exchange value. For Tom, women are merely
something to be “owned.” In a different yet similar
manner, Jay Gatsby also views Daisy as a commodity.
While both Miller and Fitzgerald examined the
commodification of ideas and ideals, Don DeLillo
focuses not only on ideas, but also provides a strong
critique of the culture industry in his postmodern
novel white noise. Within this novel, DeLillo
examines modern suburban life. From the opening
paragraph, the reader is bombarded with lists of
goods being moved into college dormitories: “stereo
sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators
and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records
and cassettes; the hair dryers and styling irons; the
tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse
sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances,
the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still
in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho
thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms,
fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum
pops, the Mystic mints” (1). By presenting us
with such an exhaustive list, we are immediately
submerged into a materialist and image-conscious
society—a society that has a department of Hitler
Studies, taught by Jack Gladney, a professor who
does not speak German and who is helping a friend
establish a department of Elvis Studies; a society
where the children are often more mature than the
adults, where drugs are exchanged for sex, where
the rearrangement of the supermarket is profoundly
disorienting to the people of the community, and
where the omnipresent television chatters in the
background.
Other literary works address commodification
in different and interesting ways. Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451, for example, asks about the rela-
tionship between the use value and the exchange
value of books and knowledge. In catch-22, Joseph
Heller presents an absurdist narrative of war
within which soldiers and prostitutes alike are
viewed as disposable commodities. In beLoved,
Toni Morrison examines how human beings can
be commodified, largely through the portrayal of
characters who were born into slavery and who are
not viewed as subjects but as objects or commodi-
ties. A good example of self-commodification can
be seen in the character of Joshua, who changes his
name to Stamp Paid after he “handed his wife over
to his master’s son” (124) in order to “buy” his life,
and later his freedom. Stamp Paid spends the rest of
the novel questioning notions of identity, obligation,
and community.
Commodification and the culture industry are
part of modern-day society; they are built into our
political, economic, and entertainment industries.
While commodification can be difficult to identify,
it is worthwhile to consider its role in everyday life.
How does commodification change (for better or
worse) how we see the world? How does it change
how we view ideas and products? Most important,
how does it change how we view each other? Lit-
erature, it seems, remains one of our best means of
asking—and answering—these questions.
See also Defoe, Daniel: MoLL FLanders;
Dinesen, Isak: out oF aFrica; Erdrich, Lou-
ise: binGo paLace, the; Hawthorne, Nathan-
iel: house oF the seven GabLes, the; Huxley,
Aldous: brave new worLd; Kincaid, Jamaica
sMaLL pLace, a; Kingston, Maxine Hong: trip-
Master Monkey: his Fake book; Lawrence D.
H.: rainbow, the; woMen in Love; Melville,
Herman: “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story
of Wall Street”; O’Connor, Flannery: wise
bLood; Pope, Alexander: rape oF the Lock, the;
Roy, Arundhati: God oF sMaLL thinGs, the;
Steinbeck, John: Grapes oF wrath, the; Swift,
Jonathan: Modest proposaL, a; Tolkien, J. R. R.:
hobbit, the; Twain, Mark: connecticut yankee
in kinG arthur’s court, a; Updike, John: “A &
P”; Wharton, Edith: house oF Mirth.
FURTHER READING
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1984,
1985.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York:
Scribner, 1999.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist
Manifesto. Center for Digital Discourse and
Culture. Available online. URL: http://eprints.
cddc.vt.edu/Marxists/archive/marx/works/1848/
communist-manifesto/ch01.htm. Accessed January
22, 2010.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.18 commodification/commercialization