"Information smacks of safe neutrality; it is the simple, helpful heaping up of unassailable facts. In that innocent guise, it is the perfect starting point for a technocratic political agenda that wants as little exposure for its objectives as possible. After all, what can anyone can say against information?"- Theodore Roszak
Originally published in 1891, the advertisement for “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription” – alleged to remedy such feminine “maladies” as “nervous excitability, exhaustion, prostration, hysteria,” as well as imparting “strength to the uterine organs” – shows some surprisingly complex political and cultural undertones. Although it is not specifically noted where this advertisement first appeared, we can assume that an advertisement of this sort would most likely have been published in a journal or magazine marketed exclusively for women. The undercurrents of political and cultural notions arise precisely in regards to its form as a newspaper advertisement and from its content as addressed specifically to women’s interests, which in turn mark it as indoctrinating the patriarchal ideological stances of the particular era.
As Jürgen Habermas
outlines in The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere, the shift from solely private activities to public
discourse amongst a widespread sphere of influence was marked by the rise not
only in public spaces such as coffee-houses but also in the proliferation of
affordable printed materials such as books and newspapers. Furthermore, up
until the eighteenth century, “advertisements occupied only about
one-twentieth” of political or cultural journal space, as most business
communication was conducted either face-to-face or by word-of-mouth (Habermas
190). However, it was around the middle of the nineteenth century that
advertising agencies became solidified business models. As newspaper and
journals increasingly relied on selling advertising space in order to turn a
profit, the publisher’s job was shifted from “a merchant of news to… a dealer
in public opinion” (Habermas 182). Indeed, we can see this manifested in the
advertisement, especially since the name of the product – “Favorite
Prescription” – marks it has having some sort of societal approval and
necessity. By keeping in mind Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notion in Remediation that “no medium [seems to]
function independently and establish its own separate and purified space of
cultural meaning,” to some extent the rhetoric of the printed advertisement
seems to remediate the rhythm and persuasive techniques of the sales pitch of
the door-to-door salesman, albeit in a much more “public” setting, i.e. a
newspaper with a high circulation (55).
One major
criticism of Habermas’s notion of the public sphere is its notable exclusion of
women. Habermas seems to peg this as a result of the “nobility joining the
upper bourgeois stratum [that] still possessed social functions… [of] landed
and moneyed interest”, thus resulting in conversations that included “economic
and political disputes” (33). Evidently, according to Habermas, women would not
be interested in such intellectual pursuits, and thus were neglected in terms
of participation in the public sphere. However, he does note that it was
“female readers… [that] often took a more active part in the literary public
sphere,” constituting a reading public that held some significant economic sway
(Habermas 56). Perhaps then this is the reason that the market for women’s
journals and magazines, aimed at their interests, came about well before equality
for women in the political realm, including the right to vote, which happened
almost thirty years after “Dr. Pierce’s” was published. Furthermore, the
advertisement’s likely publication in a women’s newspaper or journal, itself a form
of media which “developed into a capitalist undertaking… [fueled by] a web of
interests extraneous to business,” particularly shows its primary goal of
selling a product, not necessarily providing women with the tools or
opportunities for rational-critical debate (Habermas 185).
It is at
the intersection of form and content that we can begin to see the underlying
function of such advertising as related to Althusserian notions of ideological
apparatuses, as well as the inherent attitude of the dominant patriarchal
society. By considering Althusser’s thesis that ideology has physical
properties, then we could argue that this particular advertisement, as
published in a newspaper or journal, shows what Habermas sees as the
“psychological manipulation of advertising” (190). As such, the language of the
advertisement is directed to women by appealing to their insecurities. Of
particular notice are the phrases “Many lovers have been separated because the
health of the lady in the case failed” and “No man finds attraction in a woman
who is subject to [the various disorders]”. What is subverted in this
particular advertising technique is the fact that the “sender of the message
hides his business intentions in the role of someone interested in the public
welfare,” in this case, of the individual lady who might be suffering from
these thoroughly Victorian aliments (Habermas 193). Furthermore, the
illustration works to continue the “psychological manipulation” by
characterizing the male gaze. Much like Dürer’s woodcut, here the “desire for
immediacy is evident in [the man’s] clinical gaze, which seems to want to
analyze and control… its female object” (Bolter 79). The man stares at the
woman seated in front of the piano, turning the page of her music notes almost
like an austere school-master. He holds the position of authority, standing
above her, and thus she is regulated to a position of adolescence, fragility
and obedience. Bolter and Grusin later make the argument that the male gaze in
linear perspective “depends on hypermediacy, which is defined as an ‘unnatural’
way of looking at the word” (84). However, Althusser would argue that the
interpellation process so engulfs society in ideological viewpoints that we are
unable to see things any differently. For the women of this time period,
lacking political and social equality, a masculine authority admonishing them
for “undesirable” traits (i.e. the “organic diseases peculiar to women”) might
be enough to persuade them to immediately go out and purchase the advertised
product. Habermas extrapolates this claim by noting that “ideology accommodates
itself to the form of the so-called consumer culture and fulfills… its old
function, exerting pressure toward conformity” (215). It is precisely that
conformity to the patriarchal notions of the differences between the sexes that
is played out through this particular advertisement.
(Word count: 972)
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Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses.” Literary Theory: an
Anthology 2nd Edition. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004. 691 702.
Print.
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000. Print.
Clymer, Floyd. Scrapbook:
Early Advertising Art. New York:
Bonanza Books, 1955. Print.
Habermas, Jürgen. The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry Into a Category of
Bourgeois Society. Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1991. Print.
Webster, Frank. Theories
of the Information Society 3rd
Edition. New York:
Routledge, 2006. Print.
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