22 pages • 44 minutes read
At the Galleria Shopping Mall
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Symbols & Motifs
Labels
The labels of the purses in the Galleria symbolize the profound emptiness of American consumer culture. The poet observes that, “Today is the day [Lucinda] stops looking at faces / and starts assessing the labels of the purses” (Lines 13-14). In the end, it is not the purses that Lucinda notices, it is their labels.
Purses are by definition practical things, simple things. They are accommodating satchels able to carry stuff from one place to another. Lucinda, however, all of nine years old, begins to assess not the purses—she is too young really to require a purse for pragmatic reasons—but she is at that age already enamored by the labels. She is drawn not by the quality or by the practicality of the purse but rather by its label. In this, the poet/speaker acknowledges his young niece has already bought into the consumer culture that mistakes value for cost and that judges the value of a thing by the label that it bears.
In this, the labels symbolize everything that is problematic about America’s consumer culture, the lure of expensive labels that do not reflect that actually quality of the product. The infatuation with labels and the willingness to evaluate purchases based on the label indicates a culture too satisfied with the most superficial criteria for evaluating the value of a product. And Lucinda is only nine—she has already yielded to the consumer culture that says the label is more important than the product itself, that somehow a Jimmy Choo purse or a Valentino purse is better because of the attention it draws. In this, Hoagland exposes the core of American capitalism, how labels become more significant, more telling, and somehow more valuable than the thing itself. That a nine-year-old already buys into this curious (and demonstrably materialistic) logic is both telling and disturbing.
Daphne and Coronis
The Greek myths that the poet/speaker invokes show how easy is it for a person like his niece, sweet and innocent and naïve, to become a thing. References to Greek mythology seem radically out of place within the superstructure of an American mall, with its clearance bins, its cheap appliances, and its displays of gaudy purses. In introducing the character of both the nymph Daphne and Princess Coronis, however, the poet/speaker achieves two things. First, the references isolate the poet/speaker. After all, he is surely the only person wandering the “dazzling bounty” (Line 15) of the stores and thinking ruefully of characters from ancient myths. It is a way of displacing the speaker, isolating the speaker. References to pop culture, television, or film, or even perhaps pop music would be far more in line with the suggested shallowness of an American consumer culture. In this, Hoagland juxtaposes the world of pop culture, the world of the mall, with the grand tradition of high culture and exposes in turn the degradation of contemporary society. How many of the earnest and committed competitive shoppers would even recognize the names Daphne and Coronis.
“And let us watch / As the gods in older stories / turned mortals into laurel tree and crows” (Lines 17-19). In addition to symbolizing the intellectual and spiritual isolation of the poet/speaker, the myth references underscore what the poet/speaker sees as the high stakes in watching his young niece flounce off, lost to the gravitational pull of the mall: Invoking the characters from Greek myth, the poet/speaker reveals how disturbing the niece’s surrender to materialism is, how she has forfeited what was hers: her humanity, her innocence, her identity. Much like the characters from Greek mythology, Lucinda, to preserve the integrity of herself, destroys that self—a kind of suicide in self-defense. In succumbing to the glitz of American acquisition mentality, Lucinda falls from grace as her name, which echoes Lucifer, suggests.
War
The poem is in a curious way a pro-war poem. Not in the sense that Hoagland promotes war (he is far too much of a latter-day hippie for that) but rather in the sense that Hoagland fears the real-time world of war somehow disappears into irrelevance in a post-postmodern consumer America where Americans are far more concerned with buying labeled purses and cheap televisions than with any disturbing implications of that world.
The poem is set in the first decade of the new century. The first thing the poet/speaker notices in the mall is a cheap foreign-made television covering American military presence in some distant unnamed war. It is a jarring juxtaposition: the frivolity and superficiality of the consumer-world of the mall and the real-time operations of the American warn machine somewhere in some “far-off war” (Line 3). Tony Hoagland, born in the 1950s and intoxicated by the logic of life on the road and perpetually fascinated by the counterculture of the 1960s, was simply born too late to be a hippie. The footage of the American military operations, most likely the occupation of Iraq or perhaps Afghanistan, is all but lost in the white noise of the mall. Indeed, the poet/speaker happens to notice the soundless footage on a television marked for quick sale next to another television marked for quick sale that shows a lively and animated discussion over the breast sizes of actresses.
Unlike the generation of poets immediately before Hoagland, a generation committed to urging peace against the flagrant aggression of the American war machine, “At the Galleria” is not so much an anti-war poem as it is a hey-look-there-is a-war-going-on poem. War here is used not to condemn America’s aggressive hawkish military but to juxtapose the real-world with real-world issues and real-world complications against the frivolous and superficial world of the mall with its “dazzling bounty” (Line 15) of, well, stuff. The mall becomes a hermetically sealed, dangerously claustrophobic, self-contained, and self-sustained pretend-world where the urgent realities the larger world—America versus Iraq, for instance—become no more alarming than, say, a soft news fun piece on the competitive comparison of the breast sizes of American versus Indian actresses.
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