Sociology: Anne McClintock - Soft-Soaping Empire

By the late 19th century Britain’s Industrial power was growing and its empire expanding.
Advertisers saw this as an opportunity for marketing their products to be a part of Britain’s
‘imperialist image’ and the consumer capitalist culture was developed through colonial practices, the
rising of middle classes and racial/gendered advertising. The commodity became not just a
‘fundamental form of a new industrial economy’ but also a ‘new cultural system for representing
social value’. Critic Karl Marx called this “commodity fetishism”, a process where humans give a
commodity a new social meaning or value rather than simply being an object. His example is how
workers turn wood (a product of nature) into a table (a commodity) and give this table a new social
meaning such as food, family meals and community. It becomes a “trivial thing”, a little more than a
‘mundane object to be brought and used’.

In the 18th century, only the higher class had the luxury of objects such as soap however these
commodities became accessible to a mass audience of middle-class people, causing advertisers to
advertise their products to a more heavily growing middle class. Middle class domestic spaces were
now ‘crammed as never before with furniture, clocks, mirrors, paintings’ and thus the ‘mass
consumption of the commodity spectacle was born’. Economic competition from countries such as
the US created the need for the advertising of British products and advertising ‘took scenes of
empire into every corner of the home’. It was the advertisements of Soap however that flourished.
At the beginning of the century soap and washing was a ‘cursory activity at best’, Queen Elizabeth
once stated that she washed “regularly every month whether she needed to or not”. However, by
the late 1800’s Victorians were consuming 260,000 tons of soap a year and soap became a symbol of
middle-class values, class control, ‘the imperial civilizing mission’ and Britain’s superiority. Never the
less, Soap advertisements such as Pear’s and Monkey Brand, promoted Britain’s imperialist agenda
that discriminated against people of colour. Advertisers could ‘package, market, and distribute
evolutionary racism on a hitherto unimagined scale’ and brainwash consumers about racial
difference.

For instance, the famous advertisement for Pear’s soap about ‘racial cleanliness’ highlights how
advertising strategies were racially motivated. It shows a black and white child together in the
bathroom, as McClintock points out the Victorian bathroom can be seen as the ‘innermost sanctuary
of domestic hygiene and a temple of public regeneration’. This suggests that the young black boy is
there to be regenerated or reborn and purified by the soap. The image reinforces the stereotype
that black skin is dirty and undesirable while white skin is clean, superior and pure. In the top image
the black boy is sitting in the bath staring at the water ‘as if into a foreign element’, it is as though he
has never been cleaned before which reflects the Victorian attitudes towards coloured people
during the 1800’s. The white boy who is symbolically dressed in white can be seen as a symbol of
purity and cleanliness; he is stood over the black boy which suggests he is superior to him because of
his race.

In the second picture the black boy’s body is magically transformed into gleaming white and he has
been cleaned and washed of his ‘blackness’. Therefore, soap is being used as a symbol of social
purification, ‘washing from the skin the very stigma of racial and class degeneration’. The black boys
face however remains dark, which suggests that no matter what the outcome his white brother will
remain the ‘male heir to progress’. In conclusion, this example of commodity racism and imperial
advertising emerged during a time of ‘impending crisis and social calamity’ and it can be argued that
they were there to preserve ‘the uncertain boundaries of class, gender and race identity in a social
order felt to be threatened’. Soap was merely used as a reminder that the white race was superior.