DOCSLIB.ORG

Prostitution, Regulation and the Poetics of Realism in Balzac and Sand

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Prostitution, Regulation and the Poetics of Realism in Balzac and Sand ‘Réprimer le désordre’: Prostitution, Regulation and the Poetics of Realism in Balzac and Sand Steven Wilson The figure of the unregulated prostitute — the fille insoumise who escaped the rigours of the police des mœurs — was typically identified with disorder, insubordination and the spread of venereal disease in nineteenth-century France. As Alain Corbin suggests, the sense of menace embodied in the unlawful prostitute stems from her unhindered circulation in different social spheres: ‘Si la clandestine inspire une telle terreur aux spécialistes, c’est bien parce qu’en apparence c’est une femme […] qui côtoie tous les milieux et présente, de ce fait, un risque accru de contagion morale et sanitaire.’1 As a member of the unruly classes dangereuses, the prostitute therefore became a figurehead for attempts to manage myriad forms of ‘excess’ in the ever expanding city of Paris.2 From his background as a member of the Conseil général de salubrité from 1825–36, the public hygienist Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet turned his attention to the scourge of prostitution and quickly became the city’s chief authority on the subject. His two-volume study, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, argued that the threat posed to the efficient workings of the body (and society more widely) required effective policing in the form of a regulated brothel solution. For Jann Matlock, Parent-Duchâtelet’s desire to control urban prostitution is symptomatic of a more widespread (and patriarchal bourgeois) obsession with the imposition of order over sexually ‘deviant’, troublesome figures in 1. Alain Corbin, Filles de noce: Misère sexuelle et prostitution au XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), p. 193. 2. Prostitution was defined as ‘[une de] ces formes extrêmes de la pathologie urbaine’ by Louis Chevalier in Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1958), p. 331. IJFrS 11 (2011) 2 WILSON nineteenth-century culture.3 Charles Bernheimer has further argued that the fantasmatic dimension to prostitution — or, ‘all the vague fears, tensions, anxieties, and misogyny of the nineteenth century’ that get tangled up in it, as Jill Harsin puts it4 — led to a proliferation of plots of control and containment in the male-dominated literature and art of the time.5 Notwithstanding the validity of these analyses, particularly the insistence on a rich lexical field of prostitutional metaphors emanating from Parent-Duchâtelet’s writings, this article suggests that representations of prostitution in Balzac and Sand’s writings should not be seen merely as strategies designed by individual writers to police the prostitute’s narrative destiny, for this limits the scope of enquiry and, crucially, neglects the literary significance of the prostitute figure who is freed from the strictures of plots of containment, often in women’s writing.6 Instead, this study aims to reveal a more fundamentally textual — rather than fantasmatic — self-consciousness that pervades the narrative structures of the nineteenth-century ‘roman de la prostitution’. In this respect, my approach is to situate texts in dialogue with each 3. See Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), especially pp. 29–33. 4. Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. xx. 5. Bernheimer argues that ‘the strategies he [Parent-Duchâtelet] recommended to control this potential contamination from below by germs of disease and desire are analogous to the strategies of plot and style devised by 19th-century novelists to control their fantasies of women’s threatening sexuality’. Charles Bernheimer, ‘Prostitution in the Novel’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. by Denis Hollier (London & Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 780– 85 (p. 781). Also see Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997) for a sustained examination of the generative impulses behind artistic strategies that policed and regulated the sexualized female. 6. Bernheimer states that the scarcity of prostitutes in women’s writing is due to the fact that they are ‘anomalous creatures’ who typically ‘play primarily symbolic roles as sexually liberated women in a repressive social order’. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, p. 6. My reading of prostitution in Sand’s writings will suggest that such an interpretation underestimates the literary significance of the textually liberated prostitute, freed from strictly controlled narrative structures. REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 3 other, so that the circulation of the prostitutional motif is appreciated as a textual, rather than simply a sexual, phenomenon. In particular, I propose that the essential tenets of prostitution in the work of Balzac reflect the tone, character and content of Parent-Duchâtelet’s representations, and should be read as an essential feature of a poetics of realism that, according to Naomi Schor, could ‘neither accommodate the Otherness of Woman nor exist without it’.7 Then, building upon Richard Terdiman’s theory that dominant nineteenth-century discourses encounter a series of alternative counter-discourses in an era defined by social rebellion and political subversion,8 I will suggest that George Sand’s writings on prostitution, which are entwined with a number of challenges to the principal modes of representing women in the realist tradition, provide a particularly pertinent model by which to chart resistance to the dominance of realism. Thus, prostitution, which lends itself to an articulation of myriad metaphorical concerns, may also be read as a motif around which debates on literary representation coalesce. Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet regarded his seminal 1836 study of prostitution as a natural progression from his previous research into the conditions required for the efficient functioning of the Parisian sewage networks. Following this apparent logic, he considered prostitution in terms of a network that required strict surveillance and control so that the biological cycle did not become contaminated through the spread of syphilis, or the social sphere blemished by moral contagion: Une des lois constantes de la nature, c’est que les êtres vivants ressemblent à ceux qui les reproduisent, et que les générations se transmettent les vices aussi bien que les bonnes qualités du corps et de l’esprit; de là, le précepte donné aux chefs des États par les 7. Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. xi. 8. Terdiman defines counter-discourses as ‘a variety of strains of opposition to the modes of perception and assertions which writers and artists in the nineteenth century experienced as the dominant discourse’. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/ Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 13. 4 WILSON législatures de tous les temps, de surveiller les générations futures, d’éloigner d’elles les maladies et les infirmités, en fortifiant leur constitution, et de faire concourir au perfectionnement moral et physique des populations tous les moyens capables de conduire à ce but.9 Parent-Duchâtelet identified the prostitute in particular with instinctual and biological transgression; hence the need to control and regulate her mobility, as this was felt to be the driving force behind the spread of venereal disease and evolutionary decline. This is why prostitution became inextricably linked to a range of concerns — including crime, madness and hysteria — that were themselves the target of various mechanisms of power, control and containment in the nineteenth century. This connection between prostitution and the imposition of authority infuses much of Parent-Duchâtelet’s writing. With the assertion that ‘les bonnes mœurs de toute une population’ were his overriding concern (DP I 19), a desire to control prostitution for social and moral, as well as biological, reasons, pervades his work. As such, his observations on how to contain prostitution through a regime of tolérance in strictly controlled brothels — the so-called ‘maisons closes’ — highlight a perceived necessity for public displays of vice to comply with the strictures of administrative procedures and sanitary controls, and therefore to become less obvious, and potentially less corrosive, to society at large. He argued that channelling desire into well-regulated brothels, where it would be subject to ‘une surveillance exacte’, itself designed to ‘réprimer le désordre’, was preferable to the destruction that unchecked passions could cause in society (DP I 315); therefore he regarded his recommendations in terms of a broader social ideal characterized by ‘le bon ordre public’ (DP I 353) and ‘[le] pouvoir de l’autorité’ (DP II 513). In other words, the imposition of authority over the prostitute — via the mechanism of inscription into police 9. Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, considérée sous le rapport de l’hygiène publique, de la morale et de l’administration, 2 vols (Paris: Baillière, 1837), I, 8, hereafter DP in the text. REALISM IN BALZAC AND SAND 5 files and medical reports — become the guiding principle defining his writings, and an analysis of the discourse
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Selected Primary Bibliography (In Chronological Order of Publication)
    selected primary bibliography (in chronological order of publication) major works The Voyage Out. London: Duckworth, 1915; New York: Doran, 1920. Night and Day. London: Duckworth, 1919; New York: Doran, 1920. Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth, 1922; New York: Harcourt, 1923. Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth, 1925; New York: Harcourt, 1925. To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth, 1927; New York: Harcourt, 1927. Orlando: A Biography. London: Hogarth, 1928; New York: Harcourt, 1928. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth, 1929; New York: Harcourt, 1929. The Waves. London: Hogarth, 1931; New York: Harcourt, 1931. Flush: A Biography. London: Hogarth, 1933; New York: Harcourt, 1933. The Years. London: Hogarth, 1937; New York: Harcourt, 1937. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth, 1938; New York: Harcourt, 1938. Roger Fry: A Biography. London: Hogarth, 1940; New York: Harcourt, 1941. Between the Acts. London: Hogarth, 1941; New York: Harcourt, 1941. essays and shorter fiction The Mark on the Wall. London: Hogarth, 1917. Kew Gardens. London: Hogarth, 1919. Monday or Tuesday. London: Hogarth, 1921; New York: Harcourt, 1921. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. London: Hogarth, 1924. The Common Reader. London: Hogarth, 1925; New York; Harcourt, 1925. The Common Reader, Second Series. London: Hogarth, 1932; The Second Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, 1932. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth, 1942; New York: Harcourt, 1942. A Haunted House and other Short Stories. London: Hogarth, 1944; New York: Harcourt, 1944. The Moment and Other Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth, 1947; New York, Harcourt, 1948. 253 254 palgrave advances in virginia woolf studies The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays.
    [Show full text]
  • Men, Masculinity and the Female Rebel in French Women's Fiction
    MEN, MASCULINITY AND THE FEMALE REBEL IN FRENCH WOMEN’S FICTION, 1900-1913 A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2011 LUCY C. STONE SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES, LINGUISTICS AND CULTURES 2 Contents Abbreviations 3 Abstract 4 Declaration and Copyright Statement 5 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 Chapter 1 Cries for Help: Men in Trouble in Colette Yver’s Les Cervelines (1903) and Daniel Lesueur’s Nietzschéenne (1908) 53 Les Cervelines: Dreaming of a Doctor for a Wife 55 Nietzschéenne: Propping up the Boss 77 Chapter 2 Anxious Seducers: Jeanne Marni’s Pierre Tisserand (1907) and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus’s Douce moitié (1913) 97 Pierre Tisserand: Misandry and Masculine Anxiety 99 Douce moitié: A Beleaguered Man 123 Chapter 3 Triangular Shackles: Masculinity, Male Homosociality and the Female Rebel in Marcelle Tinayre’s La Maison du péché (1902) and Colette’s L’Entrave (1913) 145 La Maison du péché: Objects of Faith 148 L’Entrave: Double Binds 165 Chapter 4 Giving and Taking Away: Rachilde’s La Jongleuse (1900) and Gabrielle Réval’s Le Ruban de Vénus (1906) 191 La Jongleuse: A ‘tour de passe-passe élégant’ 194 Le Ruban de Vénus: Loving Men, Laughing at Men 218 Conclusion 246 Bibliography 256 WORD COUNT 80,453 3 Abbreviations DM = Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Douce moitié (Paris: Fasquelle, 1913) E = Colette, L’Entrave, in Œuvres, ed. by Claude Pichois, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1984- 2001), II, 325-474 LC = Colette Yver, Les Cervelines (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1928 [1903]) LJ = Rachilde, La Jongleuse (Paris: Des femmes, 1982 [1900]) MP = Marcelle Tinayre, La Maison du péché (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1902) N = Daniel Lesueur, Nietzschéenne (Paris: Plon, 1908) PT = J.
    [Show full text]
  • (2018) Page 1 H-France Review Vol. 18 (June 2018), No. 133 Manon
    H-France Review Volume 18 (2018) Page 1 H-France Review Vol. 18 (June 2018), No. 133 Manon Mathias, Vision in the Novels of George Sand. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 192 pp. $110.00 U.S. (hb). ISBN 978-0-19-873539-7. Review by Pratima Prasad, University of Massachusetts, Boston. For some time now, scholars have been questioning the received idea that George Sand was an idealist writer whose novelistic art stood in opposition to the realism of her (male) contemporaries. Manon Mathias’s exploration of vision in Sand’s novels brings a refreshing and unique perspective to this conversation. The book’s central claim is that Sand’s œuvre was aimed at “bridging the gap between physical sight and abstract vision” (p. 3). As such, Mathias throws into sharp relief the ways in which Sand’s novels disrupt the divide between realism and idealism and blur the boundaries between the two canonized modes of novelistic production in nineteenth-century France: Romanticism (which we tend to associate with introspection and abstract vision) and Realism (which emphasized physical observation and mimetic representation). Vision in the Novels of George Sand is conceptually profound in its articulation of vision and the visual; at the same time, it is lucidly written and accessible. The book also casts a wide net, relating the concept of vision to literary esthetics, social utopianism, painting, and scientific investigation. Mathias’s study moves chronologically through Sand’s corpus. Chapter one reads Sand’s early novels, such as Indiana, Valentine, and Lélia, as they engage with what may be termed as visual realism, or the practice of reproducing social reality.
    [Show full text]
  • Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
    brown university spring 2010 Pembroke Center for teaching and research on women 2010-2011 Pembroke Dedication of the Feminist Seminar: The Power and Mystery of Theory Papers Expertise Formally dedicated on February 5, 2010, for the preservation of – and scholarly the Feminist Theory Papers project has access to – the papers. Each set of docu- collected—and will continue to collect— ments is unique, representing that David Kennedy, Professor of Law at Har- materials of scholars who, in the last scholar’s contributions to feminist the- vard Law School and Faculty Director of several decades, have changed the intel- ory as well as to her discipline and, in the Institute for Global Law and Policy will lectual landscape of universities in the some cases, to political work and institu- lead the 2010-2011 Pembroke Seminar. United States and The seminar will explore the question of internationally. expertise. The significance of expertise for Although distin- rulership today is easy to see – in the ver- guished collections nacular of national politics, the manage- of women’s scholar- The Feminist Theory Papers ment of international economic life, the ship exist elsewhere, arrangement of family and gender rela- such as in the tions, and more. But what is “expertise”? Schlesinger History What part knowledge, what part common- of Women in Amer- sense – what portion analytics, argument, ica Collection at Har- lifestyle, character? Expertise is often asso- vard, Brown’s Femi- ciated with professional or disciplinary for- nist Theory Papers is mations; how important are these institu- the only collection tional forms to the practice and that offers a rare reproduction of expert rulership? How perspective on the does expertise write itself into power? rigorous interdisci- plinary work that brought feminism to tion building.
    [Show full text]
  • 2004 Catalog
    Mission Statement i Mission Statement When Grinnell College framed its charter in the Iowa Territory of the Untied States in 1846, it set forth a mission to educate its students “for the different professions and for the honorable discharge of the duties of life.” The College pursues that mission by educating young men and women in the liberal arts through free inquiry and the open exchange of ideas. As a teaching and learning community, the College holds that knowledge is a good to be pursued both for its own sake and for the intellectual, moral, and physical well-being of individuals and of society at large. The College exists to provide a lively academic community of students and teachers of high schol- arly qualifications from diverse social and cultural circumstances. The College aims to graduate women and men who can think clearly, who can speak and write persuasively and even eloquently, who can evaluate critically both their own and others’ ideas, who can acquire new knowledge, and who are prepared in life and work to use their knowledge and their abilities to serve the common good. ii Core Values Core Values of Grinnell College Excellence in Education for Students in the Liberal Arts ■ varied forms of learning, in and out of the classroom and beyond college ■ creative and critical thinking stimulated by the free, open exchange of ideas ■ education that reflects on its own process ■ excellent teaching as the highest priority of the faculty ■ active scholarship in traditional and interdisciplinary fields ■ need-blind admission
    [Show full text]
  • Curriculum Vitae Peggy Kamuf
    Kamuf Vita, 1 CURRICULUM VITAE PEGGY KAMUF Department of French and Italian University of Southern California University Park Los Angeles, CA 90089-0359 Tel.: 213-740-0101 Fax : 213-740-8058 email: [email protected] • EDUCATION B.A., French and English, Bucknell University, 1969 Ph.D., Romance Studies, Cornell University, 1975 • UNIVERSITY APPOINTMENTS 1975-80: Assistant Professor of French, Miami University. 1980-88: Associate Professor of French, Miami University. 1987-88: Visiting Associate Professor of Literature, University of California, San Diego 1988- : Professor of French, University of Southern California 1989-95: Directeur de Programme Correspondant, Collège International de Philosophie (concurrent appointment) 1991- : Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Southern California (joint appointment) 1998: Visiting Professor, Centre d’Etudes Féminines, Université de Paris 8, Vincennes- St. Denis 2001-2003: Guest Professor, Department of French, University of Nottingham, England 2001- Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French, University of Southern California (named professorship) 2006: Visiting Professor, Centre d’Etudes Féminines, Université de Paris 8, Vincennes- St. Denis 2010- Distinguished International Fellow, London Graduate School, London, England 2015- Distinguished Visting Professor, Kingston University, London, England • GRANTS AND HONORS 1976: Sigma Chi Foundation Grant, Miami University 1978: American Council of Learned Societies, Research Fellowship 1980: Miami University Summer Research Grant 1983: Miami University Summer Research Grant 1991: Ida Beam Visiting Professorship, University of Iowa Kamuf Vita, 2 1995: Raubenheimer Distinguished Faculty Award, USC 1996-97: Mellon Dissertation Seminar in Literature and History (with Professor Marshall Cohen, Philosophy) 2002: Invited Senior Fellow, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University 2005: Colloquium grant, Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation 2006: René C.
    [Show full text]
  • Literary Theory and Critical Thought, Lectures MT17 on The
    Literary Theory and Critical Thought, Lectures MT17 On the following pages you find a presentation of the lecture-series on ‘Literary Theory and Critical Thought’. You also find a number of bibliographical references. Please note that these references are not the prescribed readings for ‘Paper 12: Literary Theory’ or for the graduate module ‘Key Questions in Critical Thought’. These two courses each have their own bibliographies. What is listed below is material we will be engaging with in the lectures. Texts (Weeks 1 and 2, Ian Maclachlan) The idea that in studying literature we’re involved with texts may seem like just about the most unilluminating ‘no-brainer’ imaginable. But in the latter part of the 20th century the resonances of a lexicon of textuality, writing and difference were bound up with a radical reconception of the literary work, its meaning, and its cultural role and value. This reconception may be summarised in terms of the movement from structuralism to post-structuralism and beyond, and these two lectures will offer an account of those intellectual developments, focusing on such figures as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Rancière, and discussing notions of semiology, intertextuality, deconstruction, and différance. They will also explore the idea that Derrida’s famous proclamation ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte [There is no outside-text]’ in no way implies a schism between text and world, but rather heralds their ceaseless interweaving and, therefore, an essentially political dimension of the literary text, as we see, for example, in the later work of Barthes and in Rancière’s thinking of the politics of literature.
    [Show full text]
  • Feminist Art and the Essentialism Controversy*
    The CENTENNIAL !!@VIEW THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW VOL. XXXIX, NO. 3, FALL 1995 Vol. XXXIX N o. 3 Fall1995 AESTHETICS AND IDEOLOGY Editor Assistant Editor Edited by Judith Stoddart R. K. Meiners RichardT. Peterson CONTENTS Managing Editor Editorial Assistant Cheryllee Finney WendyFalb Acknowledgments Editorial Board 385 Linda Beard, African & Afro-American Literature Frieda S. Brown, Romance & Classical Languages After Ideology? Stephen L. Esquith, Philosophy . Judith Stoddart A. C. Goodson, English & Comparattve Ltterature 387 James Hill, English Karen Klomparens, Botany & Plant Pathology Richard Phillips, Mathematics I. RECITING BAKHTIN Linda Stanford, Art Mark Sullivan, Music Bakhtin at 100: Art, Ethics, and the Architectonic Self Scott Whiteford, Latin American Studies Caryl Emerson 397 Editorial Advisory Board Jean Elshtain, Vanderbilt University A Response to Caryl Emerson: Marvin Fisher, Arizona State University Bakhtin's Aesthetics: From Architectonics Carolyn Forche, George Mason University and Axiology to Sociology and Ideology Gerald Graff, University of Chicago Don H. Bialostosky Alison M. Jaggar, University of Colorado-Boulder 419 Douglas Kellner, University ofTexas-Austin Donald Kuspit, SUNY-Stony Brook Bakhtin and Social Change; Or, Why No John Vandermeer, University of Michigan One's Bakhtln Is Politically Correct Evan Watkins, University of Washington Michael Bemard-Donals Cornel West, Harvard University 429 Sheldon Wolin, Princeton University, Emeritus Bakhtln and Language Theory: Beyond a Unified Field Theory Barry Alford 445 FEMINIST ART AND THE ESSENTIALISM CONTROVERSY* By Mary D. Garrard THE YEAR 1994 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the beginning of the modern feminist movement-a time for celebration and reflection. It has not been a simple uphill journey, in fact the road has been quite rocky at times, and many feminists have been discouraged to see more backlash than progress.
    [Show full text]
  • French Fall 2016
    yale department of french fall 2016 GREETINGS qualities that have distinguished him as the truly incomparable candidate in his FROM THE field, and as a leading intellectual across the humanities in general. CHAIR A second hire at the junior level was also cause for rejoicing. JILL JARVIS (below with Pierre Saint-Amand), our new assistant professor in North African literature, works on Maghrebi literature written in French and Arabic. Her hire brings to a conclusion our determined search for a vibrant scholar who works in both linguistic and cultural traditions. Jarvis’s dissertation, “Absent Witness: The Politics of Fiction in the Postcolony, Algeria 1962-2001,” engages attended his lecture, given in French—a sign with Algerian literary history as a site for the among many that francophone culture on critique of state violence. She is interested our campus is alive and well. Daoud, author in the transformative powers of literature, of the international bestseller, Meursault, beyond what area studies or development contre-enquête, spent his last morning on discourse might accomplish. Her article campus working with the original manuscript “Remnants of Muslims: Reading Agamben’s of Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe, one of the Silence” won the 2014 Ralph Cohen prize treasures of the Beinecke. He later wrote from the journal New Literary History, about the experience in Le Point. Daoud’s awarded to the best essay by an untenured Yale lecture is available with English subtitles scholar. Jill lived in France as a child, but her on YouTube. Support from the Whitney first formal study of the language was via Humanities Center, the Poynter Fellowship, I’M DELIGHTED TO BEGIN THIS our own “French in Action.” Stay tuned for and the Macmillan Center allowed us to newsletter with word of two faculty hires, sightings of Robert and Mireille in Algiers… provide this resource to students reading each of which was long in the planning.
    [Show full text]
  • Fashion, Fiction, and Femininity in Second Empire France
    University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2013 Designing Women: Fashion, Fiction, and Femininity in Second Empire France Sara Frances Phenix University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Phenix, Sara Frances, "Designing Women: Fashion, Fiction, and Femininity in Second Empire France" (2013). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 911. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/911 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/911 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Designing Women: Fashion, Fiction, and Femininity in Second Empire France Abstract This dissertation explores the role of fashion and fashion journal discourse in some of the most widely read French novels of the nineteenth century: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), Ã?mile Zola's La Curée (1871), and Edmond de Goncourt's Chérie (1884). As access to popular styles and fashion magazines became increasingly democratized over the course of the nineteenth century, Second Empire Paris, with its new public parks, cafés, and amusements, became the locus of an unprecedentedly visual culture. Though fashion has often been considered a feminine frivolity in scholarly circles, I argue for its importance in the Second Empire as economic engine, powerful political tool, and visual signifier of social status. The rising significance of fashion in nineteenth-century French cultural life is paralleled by an increased interest in la mode in male-authored realist and naturalist texts. In the decline and dissolution of their respective heroines, I explore how Flaubert, Zola, and Goncourt thematize and problematize the kind of gaze that fashion elicits.
    [Show full text]
  • Nancy-Bauer-Simone-De-Beauvoir-Philosophy-And-Feminism-2001.Pdf
    SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, PHILOSOPHY, & FEMINISM GENDER AND CULTURE CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN & NANCY K. MILLER, EDITORS GENDER AND CULTURE A series of Columbia University Press Edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller IN DORA’S CASE: FREUD, HYSTERIA, FEMINISM Edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane BREAKING THE CHAIN: WOMEN, THEORY, AND FRENCH REALIST FICTION Naomi Schor BETWEEN MEN: ENGLISH LITERATURE AND MALE HOMOSOCIAL DESIRE Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ROMANTIC IMPRISONMENT: WOMEN AND OTHER GLORIFIED OUTCASTS Nina Auerbach THE POETICS OF GENDER Edited by Nancy K. Miller READING WOMAN: ESSAYS IN FEMINIST CRITICISM Mary Jacobus HONEY-MAD WOMEN: EMANCIPATORY STRATEGIES IN WOMEN’S WRITING Patricia Yaeger SUBJECT TO CHANGE: READING FEMINIST WRITING Nancy K. Miller THINKING THROUGH THE BODY Jane Gallop GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY Joan Wallach Scott THE DIALOGIC AND DIFFERENCE: “AN/OTHER WOMAN” IN VIRGINIA WOOLF AND CHRISTA WOLF Anne Herrmann PLOTTING WOMEN: GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN MEXICO Jean Franco INSPIRITING INFLUENCES: TRADITION, REVISION, AND AFRO-AMERICAN WOMEN’S NOVELS Michael Awkward HAMLET’S MOTHER AND OTHER WOMEN Carolyn G. Heilbrun RAPE AND REPRESENTATION Edited by Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver SHIFTING SCENES: INTERVIEWS ON WOMEN, WRITING, AND POLITICS IN POST-68 FRANCE Edited by Alice A. Jardine and Anne M. Menke TENDER GEOGRAPHIES: WOMEN AND THE ORIGINS OF THE NOVEL IN FRANCE Joan DeJean MODERN FEMINISMS: POLITICAL, LITERARY, CULTURAL Maggie Humm UNBECOMING WOMEN: BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE NOVEL OF DEVELOPMENT Susan Fraiman THE APPARITIONAL LESBIAN: FEMALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND MODERN CULTURE Terry Castle GEORGE SAND AND IDEALISM Naomi Schor BECOMING A HEROINE: READING ABOUT WOMEN IN NOVELS Rachel M.
    [Show full text]
  • Comparative Sapphism
    SHARON MARCUS CHAPTER TEN Comparative Sapphism It is a truth universally acknowledged by readers of nineteenth-century literature possessing an interest in sapphism: they ordered this matter bet- ter in France. Odd women, romantic female friends, passionately devoted sisters and cousins may shadow British narratives of courtship and mar- riage; otherworldly female creatures drawn to women may occasionally creep into its supernatural fiction. In almost every case, however, those British texts refuse to define any relationship between women as explicitly sexual. For representations of women whose desire for women is unmistak- ably sexual—and it is that desire I am calling lesbian, and those representa- tions I am calling sapphic—one must cross the literary channel from En- gland to France. Comparative studies of British and French literature have paid little attention to sapphism even though critics have long defined the differ- ence between the two national literatures as sexual, particularly with re- spect to the novel. For most comparatists the sexual difference between nineteenth-century British and French literature is exclusively heterosex- ual: against the staid British novel of courtship throbs the French novel of adultery. But the lack of any British counterpart to the sapphism that thrived in France shows that the difference between the two literatures is also homosexual. With respect to heterosexuality, nineteenth-century French and British novels offer a contrast between two kinds of presence; with respect to sapphism, the contrast is between presence and absence. It would thus seem that the critic who compares nineteenth-century French and British sapphism is in the paradoxical position of comparing some- thing to nothing.
    [Show full text]