| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Susan J. Matt. Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890–1930. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2003. Pp. 233. $35.00.

Whether in celebration or lament, consumerism is usually associated with the gratification of material desires at the expense of other goals and goods. Yet consumer capitalism, as Susan J. Matt's provocative study of envy reminds us, depends not just on the popular pursuit of commodified happiness but also on the equally widespread experience of relative deprivation. It feeds on frustrated ambitions and unmet expectations, on the pervasive feeling of falling short. Such abiding dissatisfaction, as Matt describes it, created the basic psychic bond uniting the mass consumer society that came of age in the early decades of the twentieth century. Much as the labor market reduced the infinite variety of occupations to the common denominator of money wages, so the burgeoning consumer market converted the jumble of alienation, insecurity, and self-doubt besetting modern Americans into the common coin of envy, the emotional basis of what Thorstein Veblen called "pecuniary emulation."

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