The Complicated Joy of Consumerism
When should we buy happiness?
In fall of 2021, I joined the “Great Resignation” and quit my job in book publishing, then took a road trip from Portland, Oregon to Bishop, California. On the way, I stopped in the “Loneliest Town in America” and spent the night in a creaky old inn that brimmed with books, each room named after an author. I chose the Zora Room specifically because, within this room, there was a royal blue chaise longue.
For most of my stay, I lay on that chaise and read. I adored that chaise. I loved its shapeliness, the way the back arched like a sea wave. I reveled in the color: a flaunting, brazen blue. I ran my hands over the plush velvet. Lounging on the chaise made me feel scholastic and sexy, an improbable combination, except there I was, feeling both at once.
When I returned home, I googled “royal blue chaise lounge” (since I didn’t yet know the traditional longue spelling), and it appeared on my screen, available for me to purchase. It was almost too easy—how the object of my desire could be mine, with a couple of clicks and free shipping, for a few hundred dollars.
It wasn’t easy, though. It soon became one of the most tormented purchasing decisions of my life.
To start, I’d just quit my job and was staring down the barrel of a risky freelance writing career pivot. I was in no financial position to make a frivolous purchase on a romantic whim. I told myself I couldn’t afford it, and I tried to push the matter out of mind.
The chaise longue would not stay out of my mind, though. It crept into my thoughts any time I sat in my ratty old reading chair, which was every day. I’d spent the last 16 years sitting there, ever since my mom reupholstered my grandma’s old armchair with soft, forest-green fleece as a gift my freshman year of college. After 16 years of being sat on, the fleece was stained and pilled, the cushions warped to a perfect mold of my butt. It was not a stylish piece of furniture (there is nothing chic about fleece), but it was still perfectly usable, and on principle, I rejected the idea of replacing it with a mass-manufactured vanity piece.
Because who was I kidding? The chaise longue was all about vanity. It was about how I’d felt while lounging on it in that old, bookish inn: like a smart, wealthy seductress. Which is precisely how I was supposed to feel. My infatuation could be easily explained by a multi-century marketing agenda that had turned the chaise longue into a symbol of intellect, affluence, and sex.
The history of the chaise longue as erotic symbol began in 1800, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David painted Madame Récamier, a 23-year-old beauty, reclining on a mustard-colored chaise. In the portrait, she’s wearing an Empire-waist dress, her feet exposed—a shocking image at a time when Parisian women were expected to receive guests with covered feet. The chaise longue was also a private piece of furniture, something concealed behind the door of the boudoir. The image was stirring in its impudent attempt to make the private public. Not long after Portrait of Madame Récamier was painted, the chaise longue worked its way into the lavish living rooms and personal libraries of Victoria-era socialites. It was given the nickname “fainting couch” because it served as a useful landing pad for ladies who suffered dizzy spells from their constricting corsets.
By the 1930s, the chaise longue made its way to the silver screen. Amy Azzarito writes in her book, Elements of a Home: “Any leading lady worth her salt—Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Gloria Swanson—draped herself seductively across one for photos and film shoots, generally clothed in a low-cut, spaghetti-strap satin nightgown. Today, it remains a staple of photo shoots for movie stars, fashion models, and even the occasional business executive looking to infuse femininity into her image.”
All of which is to say, it made perfect sense that the royal blue chaise longue would seduce me as it had. My brain had been programmed to associate such an object with decadence, leisure, temptation. The problem was, I was onto the chaise’s wiles. I thought maybe if the logical part of my brain could contextualize the chaise’s allure—make my want seem less unique—I might be able to override my desire. Still, months passed, and the chaise kept flickering in my mind like a royal blue flame.
I told myself the longue was probably poorly made, without the “good bones” my mom liked to say of the thrifted furniture she restored. I told myself the purchase wouldn’t be worth the fossil fuels expelled to ship it to my doorstep. I told myself to be content with the furniture I had already. “People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented,” writes a sarcastic George Orwell, “and it is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already.”1
My mind kept coming back to Zora Neale Hurston. At the inn, hanging on the opposite wall from the chaise longue had been a large, framed photograph of Hurston, the first professional Black woman writer. In the photo, she’s wearing a fur stole and a fashionable hat with a long feather angled across her forehead. She looks glamorous. The photo made me curious about the kind of life she’d led. Had she indulged in frivolous purchases in the name of luxury despite the monetary constraints of a literary life?
She’d worked odd jobs—nannying, cleaning houses, dressing an opera singer—until she graduated high school at age 28. She was then accepted into Howard University, which was “to the Negro what Harvard is to the whites.” At Howard, she began writing stories and articles, and sent a short story to Opportunity magazine’s literary contest, the journal of the Harlem Renaissance that boosted the careers of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. When the editor of the magazine sent a letter to Hurston asking to see more, she went to New York City “with $1.50, no job, no friends and a lot of hope.”
In 1937, Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, which would become a million-copy seller across high school syllabuses in the decades after her death. The book, however, did not sell many copies during her lifetime. In her later years, she wrote articles and horoscopes to get by. She got behind on rent and tended a vegetable garden to save money on groceries. Her bookshelves were fruit crates. When her health began to fail, she applied for welfare and food subsidies. Her final home in Fort Pierce, Florida was a pea-green, single-story concrete dwelling with a flat tar-and-gravel roof, behind which she liked to grow gardenias. “It must be one of the smallest US National Historic Landmarks,” writes Joanna Biggs in A Life of One’s Own, describing it as “painfully modest.”
Reading about this famous author with her fur stole, stylish hat, and impoverished final years, I felt even worse about my desire to own an unnecessary but sexy piece of furniture. Who knew what financial hardships I would encounter as I ventured into the precarious world of freelance journalism. It would be irresponsible, surely, to spend what little money I had on another surface on which to sit. Still, I kept thinking about Hurston’s fur stole and feathered hat. I pictured her running her fingers over the silky fur, angling her hat just so. I imagined how she’d felt while wearing them: like a smart, wealthy seductress.
In the end, I bought the chaise longue. I hemmed and hawed for a year, then finally gave in. There was no way to rationalize the purchase. By then, I had drained my savings, and on my pittance of a freelance income, I could barely afford it. I felt guilty about the fossil fuels. I felt weak for surrendering my willpower over to the marketing gods that peddle sex and affluence. And yet, when I unboxed the royal blue beauty and placed her in my reading corner, I stood back and sighed with satisfaction. She looked gorgeous.
A few months later, a baby opossum died and began to rot in the folds of my old reading chair (how it got there remains a mystery), and I felt a little better for having already acquired the chair’s replacement. My cat (the possible murderer of the opossum), loved lounging on the chaise. He acted like I’d bought it for him. The chaise is the clear favorite seat for houseguests as well; people pose on it like Hollywood starlets.
No one loves the chaise more than I, though. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stood before it, admiring the way it looks in my house. It’s such a good blue. I love the way morning sunlight drapes over it. I love reading while lounging on it. I love working while lounging on it. I love watching TV while lounging on it. More than anything, before my cat died, I loved lounging with him—the way he would stretch out on my outstretched legs, belly up. We spent so many hours like that. A perfect portrait of pleasure.
When it comes to being a consumer in late-stage capitalism in the midst of climate catastrophe, I’ve started to consider the fur stole and the feathered hat. They represent those bright spots of joy that really can spring from the material world. With so many mounting reasons to scale back our collective consumerism—to downsize, to thrift, to repurpose, to repair, to buy nothing—there are only a few good reasons to go ahead and buy the thing anyway. And one of them is persistent, durable love.
If you haven’t read George Orwell’s “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” you must.
Your writing is such a joy to read. Thank you