Personal Financial Identities in Psychology and Popular Literature

Abstract

Despite the growing economic power associated with consumerism, the newspapers continued to cleave to financial moralities developed in the nineteenth century: prudent investment in private property and education assumed as good; unsecured consumer debt, non-utilitarian consumption, and superfluous lifestyles, deviant. Journalists worried that young people and women’s attitudes and behaviours towards consumption and financial management diverged from notions of prudence. In this chapter, I explore how the construction of the debt-ridden shopaholic who emerged in the press accounts, also circulated in post-1980s psychological literature and a series of highly popular novels by Sophie Kinsella. This figure crystallizes many of the most deeply held cultural anxieties that surround late modern consumer culture and personal finance.