Browsing by Subject "objectification"

This thesis discusses the links between consumer capitalism and the body in literature. The primary material for this thesis is Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, which details the daily life of its main character and narrator Patrick Bateman, which mostly consists of him sitting in his office, going to restaurants and clubs, shopping, and getting various beauty treatments. What break the monotonous routine of Patrick’s daily life are at first the very detailed sex scenes between him and various women, including sex workers, and later in the novel, the equally detailed gruesome murders committed by Patrick. Set in the 1980s, the novel criticizes the consumerist lifestyle of yuppies (“young upwardly mobile professionals”) and the intense need to conform that causes it. The theoretical background of this thesis consists of a brief cultural-historical background of the setting of the novel, an introduction into the field of body studies, and how bodies are viewed within consumer culture. Additionally, I also discuss objectification. Through the close reading of American Psycho and with the help of the theoretical background and other secondary material, this thesis argues that Ellis is criticizing the objectification of people prevalent in our consumer culture by creating a satirized character who takes this objectification to the extremes as he murders women and creates objects out of his victims in an attempt to find satisfaction. It is the combination of the unsatisfactory nature of consumer capitalism, as well as the misrepresentation of women in the media that Patrick consumes, which lead him to torture and murder women.