Cultural Geography

18 HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

difficult to imagine why. In late nineteenth-century New York City, middle- and upper-class

women were the most visible symbols of the excesses of consumer culture, and they inhabited

its landscape – as they shopped for and wore fashionable clothing and jewellery, attended to

social events, promenaded along Broadway. But perhaps even more importantly, because women

in nineteenth-century society were seen as embodying its moral centre, any deviance from that

position caused great anxiety. The ideology of separate spheres positioned women as its saints,

that is, as the providers of moral guidance. To see women corrupted by fashion threatened there-

fore the very basis of a controlled society. As Halttunen argues, during this period many people

‘feared above all fashion’s power to transform women into hypocrites and thus undermine their

moral influence over the larger society’. As a result, fashionable women, and the landscapes of

consumption that they inhabited, were scorned and feared. A general societal anxiety over the

rise of consumer culture was displaced onto the figure of the fashionable woman, and into the

landscapes she inhabited – her home and the public consumer spaces of the city.

In the late nineteenth-century, then, women’s morality was meant to moderate the

tension between artifice and authenticity – between the look of spaces and things, and their

meanings. This gave women some authority, but also positioned them to take the blame when

artifice went wrong. In the twentieth century, bureaucratic institutions, corporations and

experts wrested control over spaces and their designated meanings from women, but left them

to bear the weight of a potentially malignant artifice. Edith Wharton, sensitive to the dangers

of bad design and what it could say about the moral character of women, became an ‘expert’

herself, cowriting a book in 1897 called The Decoration of Housesthat gave direct aesthetic

advice about how best to design and decorate spaces so as to shape and reflect correct gen-

der roles and a family’s position in society. If The House of Mirthcan be read as a warning

of what can happen where there is a slippage between artifice and authenticity, then, the ideas

expressed in The Decoration of Housesis meant as a corrective.

That slippage was readily apparent in late nineteenth-century New York City, with its dis-

plays of consumer culture set loose for all to see on the streets and in the shops of the city. For

many, the fashionable women of the city, those not abiding by their proper roles as moderators

of morality, were to blame for the excesses and potential moral dangers of overconsumption.

For others, like Wharton, the blame lay elsewhere – in a time and a place that valued appear-

ance over character. In either case, women bore the costs – both social and psychic. As The

House of Mirthreminds us, understanding the anxiety-inducing relationship between land-

scape and identity is far from a trifling matter. For Lily Bart, what was at stake was nothing

less than her life. Tracing the gendered (and, in other cases, the racialized and sexualized)

geographies of cultural anxiety seems a task well worth pursuing.

Post-humanist geographies

Kay Anderson

Few events perform so ritualistically the triumphal narrative of human ingenuity and agency

over the natural world as those mundane displays of produce and machines known as ‘agri-

cultural shows’. From Boston to Sydney, to Auckland and Toronto, to imperial London as well –

those liminal forms of Herefords, harvesters, honey and the like, that spill over the cate-gories

we think of as culture and nature, have been assembled since colonial times. Such events,

typically staged in cities, engage the interest of the cultural geographer for many

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