Mark twain book life on the mississippi6/12/2023 But America was no longer the land in which men and women from the Old World might find political and spiritual freedom to accompany social and economic opportunity. It still affirmed the idea that American life could be perennially renewed and thereby invigorated. By the late nineteenth century, this myth was changing. Acquisition and consumption thus became the means to achieve happiness, purpose, and even salvation.įor centuries, Americans, to say nothing of Europeans, had looked upon the New World as a garden of plenty, a veritable heaven on earth, where all human needs would be fulfilled and all human desires satisfied. The circulation of money and the exchange of goods were at the foundation of its aesthetic and moral sensibilities. Increasingly disconnected from traditional family and community life, and existing in opposition to old-fashioned religious and social values such as self-restraint and self-denial, hard work and delayed gratification, repression and guilt, this new culture emphasized luxury and indulgence. At its heart was the quest for wealth, security, comfort, and pleasure. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new culture emerged in the United States. Literary scholars have long interpreted “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as a fable of populism, but it is more than that: It is a celebration of consumer culture as the the very meaning of America, this bright and shining land where men and women are happy to deceive themselves into believing a fairy tale, which, as the Wizard of Oz himself admitted, every sensible person ought to know is untrue.
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