Material Figures: Political Economy, Commercial Culture, and the Aesthetic Sensibility of Charles Baudelaire by Marguerite S. Murphy (review)

This book takes as its starting point a mise en question of the idea that artistic and literary autonomy is fundamental to modernism. Focusing on the prose, poetry, and critical writings of Charles Baudelaire, and drawing in particular on the theories of Jacques Rancière and Pierre Bourdieu, Marguerite Murphy aims to examine the neglected relationship between political economy and aesthetics in nineteenth-century France. Baudelaire's writings are central to an understanding of this relationship since he emerges as 'a spectator desirous of both art and goods whose sensibilities cast light not only on his own poetic texts, but also on transformations in the tenor of everyday life and habits of perception' (p. 12). Murphy's discussion begins with an exploration of contemporary nineteenth-century French discourse on economics, with particular attention to Jules Dupuit's writings on utility, in which he defines utility as drawing on desire as well as need and which she sees as similar to the modern subjectivity of Théophile Gautier and Baudelaire. The second chapter offers a fascinating account of the press coverage of the annual art salons and the periodic industrial exhibitions from the July Monarchy, revealing the emergence of an aesthetic of the commodity. Citing Gautier's description of manufactured vases, Murphy relates how the critic 'implies that the object asks to be read into the viewer's own fantasies of the primitive and the exotic, in the guise of history' (p. 87). The remaining four chapters, focused on Baudelaire, chart more familiar critical territory, rereading the poet's critical essays on art and poems from Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris from the perspective of an aesthetic of the economic. Of these, Murphy's chapter on Le Salon de 1846 provides the most interesting insights, in particular into Baudelaire's complex relationship with his bourgeois public; she reads the essay via Bourdieu 'as a document whose aims include the positioning of the artist and writer within the larger spectrum of social meaning and discourse and as a map of that attempt' (p. 95). The final two chapters discuss poems including 'À une passante', 'La Chevelure', Les Foules', and 'Une chambre double', and the author again raises very valid points on the intricate relationship between commodities, display, and desire in Baudelaire's aesthetics, although here the wealth of material and critical perspectives sometimes detracts from the argument's cohesion. Murphy's thesis that 'economic statements [are] as potent as literary ones in shaping sensibilities' (p. 231) is a convincing one, and her well-researched and highly engaging book will be valuable not only to all Baudelaire scholars, but to all those interested in the history of modernism.