Abstract
This excellent book complements, but elaborates in much greater detail, Miranda Gill’s thinking in the chapter on the femme à la mode in her recent study of Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris (see JES 40(2) (2010) 186−8). For Susan Hiner demonstrates that, over and beyond the decorative we might take for granted, objects such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans and handbags function as markers with far-reaching implications. She starts with contemporary attempts to define the femme comme il faut, articulated in Balzac’s 1840 essay with that very title, as well as within his own Ferragus and alongside Dumas’s Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843) and the plethora of physiologies which also reveal a prevailing anxiety generated by social mobility and the consequent blurring of categories. The discourse of fashion journals has an unsurprising prominence in this analysis. Between respectability and its antitheses, the female body idealized or accessible, bourgeois virtue and promiscuity, it is not only in the tensions but also in the confusion that the ‘modern’ is once again located. Where this book goes much further than others in its focus on indeterminacy and the compensatory urgency of distinction (in every sense of the term), however, is its grounding in research devoted to specific instruments of that dynamic, literally and metaphorically initiated in ‘Unpacking the corbeille de mariage’. The contents of the latter are contractual at a number of levels, from jewels to symbolic guarantees of fidelity; its power lies in domesticating exotic goods and appropriating them for the ‘social theater of Paris’ (p. 72); oriental eroticism is offered under the necessary cover of fabrics and mouldings which do not preclude sensual pleasure. Their very provenance is inflected with myth and ideology. So too the ombrelle and the fan are disposed in a performance bereft of utilitarian purpose, even if masked by the visible occlusion of the sun and the overt protection of the purest white skin from the contaminations of heat and dust. And long before handbags acquired the prominence of today, the elegance of bourses, aumonières and sac à ouvrages speak of the ‘closed world of female production’ (p. 195), on the one hand retailing the moral value of embroidery and, on the other, in gesturing back to the dowry, enclosing the intimacies available only through marriage. But the disorders of Pandora obstruct such simplification. Hiner is acutely aware of the complexities and ambivalences inseparable from all these ‘accessories’. The ubiquitous sac à main, serving as a ‘foil to the corbeille de mariage’ (p. 209), inverts this ‘containing and hierarchizing object’ by ‘displaying publicly what once had been guarded under the skirts of women’ (p. 210) and, what is more, accompanies them far from home and into the city streets, emblematic of dangerous licence and potential licentiousness. The erotic is nowhere more troubling than in what Hiner calls the ‘Fan Fetish’ (pp. 145−77). And all these signs of identity and status lose their distinctiveness as the imperatives of fashion are incorporated in the ‘armature of feminine seduction’ (p. 1) displayed, at both ends of the social spectrum, by la Présidente of Balzac’s Cousin Pons or Proust’s Odette de Crécy. Most of Hiner’s wonderful examples are indeed drawn from the novels of the period, with La Comédie humaine, Madame Bovary and Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames having a privileged place in the range of texts explored here. Even those very familiar with them will return to highlighted passages with renewed attention. In respect of fans, Hiner is partly indebted to Marni Kessler’s Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris (see JES 38(1) (2008), 81−3). It is perhaps a shame that the discussion is not extended to painting more generally, and that a rich bibliography includes neither Marie Simon’s Mode et peinture (Paris: Hazan, 1995) nor, more precisely angled within her own critical perspective, Ruth Iskin’s Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (see JES 38(3) (2008), 324−6). What remains clear, underlined in citing other such works of scholarship, is that the habitual connotations of ‘accessories’ are wildly misleading and that this latest contribution to the field of ‘fashion and the feminine’ is an important one.