For my research paper, I will be exploring the topics of consumerism and identity. Ruth’s essay Dressed to Kill really intrigued me. I was very interested in the background information for his argument. He wrote heavily about the change in individuals as mass production of commodities increased. I have always heard about the rise of consumerism in the Roaring Twenties but I had not heard much about the individual aspect of this change. For example, Ruth writes that “mass-produced goods paradoxically promised distinctiveness and identity”. This search for identity is contextualized as having come from the change in American society as middle-class families adapted to new jobs and manufacturers shifted from fact-based advertising to emotion-based advertising.
So far, my research topic is still very broad. The keyterms of mass consumption, consumerism, and identity pull a large number of sources which may stray away from what I want to write about. I would like to find more sources that, similarly to Ruth, explore consumerism in the 1920s. From these sources, some might address the aspect of identity, which could help narrow specifically into an argument. There are various perspectives that could be explored in this topic. For instance, the rise of consumerism could be viewed through how the general population embraced leisure and luxury post-WWI. Another possible perspective could be exploring the intentions of the advertisers and manufacturers of the time and how they appealed to consumer emotions and wants to raise their sales. I will be researching more before the annotated bibliography workshop and over the weekend to attempt to find sources that line up together and could suggest a particular focus of consumerism and identity.