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6. Between Good Intentions and Ulterior Motives: The Culture of Handbags
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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178 ch a p ter si x Between Good Intentions and Ulterior Motives The Culture of Handbags Why should I not wear a reticule like this, as it is now the fashion to do so? dora, qtd. in Sigmund Freud, An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria Jean-Luc Godard’s scathing indictment of acquisitive bourgeois culture and “serial consumption,” the 1967 film Le Week-end, channels Balzac through intertitles like “Scène de la vie parisienne” and through its commentary on the sham of bourgeois propriety, embodied in the self-centered couple Roland and Corinne. As they travel to the country one weekend to wrest an inheritance from Corinne’s parents, they are blithely oblivious to the many horrific scenes of human suffering they either pass or create along the way.1 Eventually, they themselves crash on the highway; and as husband and wife drag themselves from the wreckage, bloodied and distraught, the car in flames, Corinne, with a classic gesture of horror, screams in anguish for what is trapped inside. In one of her few expressions of affect in the film, Corinne doesn’t cry out what we might expect—“Roland!” or “My baby! My baby!”—but, rather, screams to lament an entirely different kind of loss: “Mon sac de chez Hermès!” (“My Hermès bag!”). Godard captures in this critique the essence of luxury consumption and its subsuming of other value systems.2 This scene, however, also illustrates a shift in defining the feminine that had been developing over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth: Godard’s Corinne demonstrates that woman’s societal function as wife and mother is now usurped by her new role as consumer of luxury fashion products.3 In this chapter, I focus on the sac à main (handbag) to demonstrate this shift. Nineteenth-century fashion journals do not describe or illustrate the sac and its variants with the same frequency as the other fashion accessories I consider in this study, but they do follow trends in Between Good Intentions and Ulterior Motives 179 bags—such as the leather shell bag of the 1820s, the châtelaine bags of the 1880s, and the reemergence of the reticule at the fin de siècle. The sac à main, however, has emerged as today’s iconic feminine fashion accessory, and it is indicative of consumption on two levels.4 Itself a luxury object and fashion accessory, thus signaling consumption in its very object status, it also signals consumption because it is shopping’s instrument, containing both the means for purchase (money and its forms) and many of the purchases themselves (the portable accessories of femininity).5 It is both a metaphor for consumption, the grand magasin in miniature, as we shall shortly see, and a prized object of desire —the metonymy of luxury fashion and emblem of female pleasure. The story of the sac à main incarnates the paradoxical doubleness of women’s role in consumption: like the ornamental idealized woman of the nineteenth century, the sac and its ancestors are decorative objects of desire. And yet, like the nouvelle femme of the fin de siècle, the sac à main becomes the vehicle and emblem of a new female autonomy that looks ahead to economic independence from patriarchal structures.6 The sac à main, a term that gained currency only in the early years of the twentieth century, serves as a pendant to the corbeille de mariage , the other container object in the female fashion repository, with which I began this book. Each object contains the props and seductive accoutrements of femininity, and the bourse de la mariée (bridal purse) as well as the aumônière (alms bag), both versions of sacs, were often included in the corbeille, as we shall see. Yet in spite of the close relationship, at once functional and symbolic, of these two objects, the sac represents a departure from the associations of the corbeille in radical ways. While the corbeille, containing the little luxuries of the married lady, was a static object destined for the domestic interior, like the wife who received it, the sac à main and its cousins were mobile and ventured out in public, like the new woman of the fin de siècle. Additionally , the corbeille contained wedding gifts offered by the groom and was inseparable from the institution of marriage; but the sac à main often contained items of women’s own selection and became emblematic of their new autonomy, mobility, and public presence...