“The Joys of Motherhood are increased ten-fold when both
mother and babe enjoy perfect health.
Called upon to bear a double burden, the expectant mother must have
additional nourishment not supplied by ordinary foods.
Pabst Extract
The Best Tonic prepares the way for happy, healthy
motherhood. It is both a tonic (?) and a
food—highly concentrated and pleasant to the taste. Soothes the nerves, strengthens the lacrimal
glands, invigorates mind and body and insures quiet, peaceful sleep.
Order a dozen from your druggist—insist upon it being
‘Pabst’”
“The
Joys of Motherhood” is a late-Victorian Era advertisement by Pabst Brewing
Company (just “Pabst” at the time) for “The Best Tonic,” an alleged miracle
elixir that boasted the ability to ease the difficulties and pains of being a
new mother. The ad first ran in Vogue, an
American fashion magazine geared towards upper/upper-middle class women, in
1894 (“The Society Pages”). While the
advertisement itself does not constitute a major deviation from other ads of
the time, it does act as a significant example of a historical item whose information/content
are impacted by emerging media and information technologies. In it, we can see instances of remediation of
the self, the dichotomy between the public and private sphere, and the impact
of information dissemination controlled by capitalist interests.
The
Remediated [Romantic] Self
On a rhetorical level, the
advertisement draws heavily on the “good mother” ethos, depicting the woman
pictured as an ideal, caring, compassionate mother that all women should (implicitly)
aspire towards being. As Jay D. Bolter
and Richard Grusin discuss in their book Remediation:
Understanding New Media, “[W]e employ media as vehicles for defining both
personal and cultural identity. As these
media become simultaneously technical analogs and social expressions of our
identity, we become simultaneously both the subject and the object of
contemporary media” (Bolter & Grusin, 231).
Here, Bolter and Grusin highlight the ability that media vehicles like
advertisements, particularly those printed in popular nationally distributed
publications like Vogue, can have in impacting
individual identity formation, as well as social expression.
Although the authors denote “media”
in a general sense, perhaps one more advanced than the Best Tonic ad itself reflects,
they add that, “The desire to express one’s self through (artistic) media is a
hallmark of romanticism that long predates the development of digital media”
(234). Their reference to the romantic
era is particularly significant to the Best Tonic advertisement, as it was printed
during the Victorian era (directly following the Romanticism) and thus acts as
a remediation of aesthetic romanticism for the purpose of appealing to a
Victorian audience. This form of
remediation constitutes hypermediacy, as it acknowledges an aesthetic tradition
in which, “[The] viewer can pass through the window into the represented world”
(235). Once this passage occurs, the
viewer is able to envision herself as the doting, perfect mother depicted in
the ad. In this way, the viewer is able
to envision themselves as both the subject and object of the advertisement
itself, thus remediating their concept of their own identity and engaging that
category in a constant state of oscillation between themselves and the image in
the ad. Beyond the ideal mother image, there is also the implication of happiness,
and a more unified self—one that can balance motherhood, good health, and
seemingly utter tranquility. In these
ways, the advertisement appeals to a variety of viewers, and is thus
rhetorically effective.
The Emergence of a Capitalist
Information Society Within the Public Sphere
The
rhetoric used to convey the “information” that is purveyed in the Best Tonic ad
takes on new meaning when examined from
a later historical perspective than when it was originally printed. In his book Theories of the Information Society Frank Webster writes, “New
technologies are one of the most visible indicators of new times, and
accordingly are frequently taken to signal the coming of an information age”
(Webster, 9). While the Best Tonic
advertisement itself is not necessarily a new technology, the medium through
which is was reproduced, Vogue Magazine,
represents an emerging medium of commercially controlled information and
communication technology (i.e. a widely distributed publication that can itself
be seen as indicating a new information age).
Webster warns, however, that the reliability of information emerging
from these new technologies may be questionable, particularly when there are
capitalist gains at stake. He
writes, “[Mass media’s] key contribution as a reliable disseminator of
information about the public sphere is diminished. The media’s function changes as they
increasingly become arms of capitalist interest, shifting towards a role of
public opinion former and away from that of information provider” (166).
Looking at the Best Tonic ad from
our current historical perspective, we can easily see the presence of
unreliable information in an advertisement that emphatically suggests that
nursing mothers use this miracle elixir (i.e. alcohol) to ease their pains and
troubles, as well as those of their newborns.
Admittedly, it could be argued that FDA regulations were essentially
non-existent at this time and that consumers were unaware that they were
purchasing what was essentially hard liquor from what would become one of the
preeminent brewing companies in the United States. Still, the unreliability of the information
that the ad communicates, as well as the capitalist stake in the believability
of that information, remains the same. While
drinking Pabst’s Best Tonic may in fact “Soothe ones nerves and insure quiet,
peaceful sleep,” it also carries serious, though unstated, health risks along
with it.
With relation to the public’s access
to and interaction with information at large, Webster uses Jurgen Habermas’s
theory of the public sphere to emphasize the widespread effects of a capitalist
information monopoly on various sectors of society. He summarizes Habermas’s concept of the
public sphere as, “[A]n arena, independent of government (even if in receipt of
state funds) and also enjoying autonomy from partisan economic forces, which is
dedicated to the rational debate (i.e. to debate and discussion which are not
‘interested’, ‘disguised’ or ‘manipulated’) and which is both accessible to
entry and open inspection of the citizenry” (163). This form of rational discourse in
undermined, however, by the emergence of mass media like Vogue and other capitalistically motivated publications that
resemble it. Habermas predicts this
challenge to the public sphere when he states, “In the realm of the mass media,
of course, publicity has changed its meaning.
Originally a function of public opinion, it has become an attribute of whatever
attracts public opinion: public relations and efforts recently baptized
“publicity work” are aimed at producing such publicity” (Habermas, 2).
Given the period during which
Pabst’s Best Tonic advertisement was published, before women had the right to
vote in the U.S., we can see the inklings of a political agenda being
promulgated via within the advertisement.
Rather than motivating women to enter the public sphere and engage with
and shape the rational discourse that is its cornerstone, the ad instead
encourages them to remain complacent consumers, tucked away in their homes
performing their private domestic duties, never developing a personal stake in
the very discourse that decides the actions of their own lives. To this end, Webster’s concerns about
capitalist mediated information are realized as, “[C]apitalism is victorious,
the autonomy of individuals is radically reduced, the capacity for critical
thought is minimal, there is no real space for a public sphere in an era of
transnational media conglomerates and a pervasive culture of advertising” (Webster,
167). While the Pabst Best Tonic ad is
geared primarily towards women, Webster and Habermas illustrate the very real
concerns that capitalist mediated “information” poses for all members of
society.
Conclusion
Pabst’s
Best Tonic ad contains a number of rhetorical and political devices that are
cleverly employed to make the advertisement effective. On an aesthetic level, the advertisement
remediates the Romantic era gaze by positioning the consumer to view themselves
as both the subject and object of the ad itself, deeply appealing to their
personal sense of identity in order to promote the product. The text in the ad betrays a slanted
capitalist interest in the “information” posed about the product itself. While Webster emphasizes that information,
particularly that which is controlled by capitalist shareholders, is never
neutral, Habermas illustrates the significant political implications that can
occur when members of society resign themselves to private, complacent
consumerism. The fact that the “Joys of
Motherhood” advertisement was published before the turn of the twentieth
century, at a time when information and technology were considered to be far
less ubiquitous and crucial than they are today, we are left to wonder to what
extent we as individuals, as consumers, and as members of society, are being
similarly manipulated without even knowing it.
Works Cited
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 1999. Print.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press. 1991. Print.
Sharp, Gwen. "Sociological Images." Vintage Ads for Cocaine and Opium Products ».
N.p., 22 Feb. 2010. Web. 29 Sept. 2012.
<http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/02/22/vintage-ads-for-cocaine-and-opium-as-medicines/>.
Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society. New York: Routledge. 2002. Print.
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