Vanity

I'm working on my final paper for my English/American Studies class. I've chosen a topic on how vanity transformed America in the Gilded Age era. Does that sound exciting or what?

Well...just to give you a little more exciting insight into the subject I thought readers would be ecstatic to learn that...
-department stores came out during this time. What would we ever do without a department store telling us what exactly we need to fill our homes with and to dress and adorn our bodies with?
-skyscrapers started to appear in the late 19th century. Bye-bye pretty stone buildings (it's all a pretty facade now) but hello strength and height.

But my favorite insight into this subject of vanity comes from a passage in Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie. The following passage tells me that first, vanity has been around for a while and second, that women have always been drawn to the beautiful-especially in regards to fashion.

"Your bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked maiden, over whom a poet might well rave for the flowerlike expression of her countenance and the lissome and dainty grace of her body, may reasonably be dead to every evidence of the artistic and poetic in the unrelated evidences of life, and yet not lack in material appreciation. Never, it might be said, does she fail in this. With her the bloom of a rose may pass unappreciated, but the bloom of a fold of silk, never. If nothing in the heavens, or the earth, or the waters, could elicit her fancy or delight her from its spiritual or artistic side, think not that the material would be lost. The glint of a buckle, the hue of a precious stone, the faintest tints of the watered silk, these she would devine and qualify as readily as your poet if not more so. The creak, the rustle, the glow-the least and best of the graven or spun-, these she would perceive and appreciate-if not because of some fashionable or hearsay quality, then on account of their true beauty, their innate fitness in any order of harmony, their place in the magical order and sequence of dress."
(Dreiser, Theodore. "Sister Carrie." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. NY:W.W.Norton and Company, Inc., 2007. 950.)