L’Esprit du chiffon: Le Vêtement dans le roman français du XIXe siècle (review)

Marzel’s book is an ambitious and detailed survey of the significance of clothing in nineteenth-century French fiction, with particularly thorough reference to examples of fashion in La Comédie humaine, Madame Bovary, Nana, La Curée and Au Bonheur des Dames. Marzel’s aim, through her exhaustive close readings of literary descriptions of clothing, is to ascertain what these descriptions reveal about both nineteenth-century society and the literature in which they are found. Marzel’s study does indeed make some valuable, although not always new, points about the role that clothing plays in nineteenth-century France. Her observations, for instance, about the implications of the difference between male and female dress, the relationship between fashion and social class, the impact the rise of the department store had on the lives of women, the differences between fashion in Paris and in the provinces and the reasons behind the vicissitudes of fashion offer a useful summary of the ways in which something as apparently banal as clothing in fact reveals much about the tensions and preoccupations of an increasingly consumer-oriented and appearance-driven society. As a history of the socio-cultural importance of clothing in the nineteenth century, this study works well. Where it is less successful, however, is in its discussion of the specificities of the literary text. Marzel’s extensive list of all the outfits of the protagonists she is discussing appears at times to privilege the heroines’ tastes in clothes over their authors’ motivations and she thus occasionally fails to discuss or even acknowledge the fictional specificity of the likes of Emma Bovary and Renée Saccard. There is some excellent analysis of the significance of specific costumes—such as the dress Emma wears when she visits her baby’s wet-nurse, or the clothes worn by the shop girls in Au Bonheur des Dames—but the study would have benefited from a more selective approach that resisted the temptation to offer a plausible interpretation of every outfit. The author’s laudable attention to detail unfortunately means that even the most obvious points—such as the funereal connotations of black and the virginal connotations of white—are discussed in some depth. Marzel’s all too brief discussion of Balzac’s journalistic articles on sartorial elegance is much more useful as it introduces scholars to a set of little known documents, offers some insightful comparisons with Balzac’s fiction and opens up new lines of enquiry. The work on the whole is very well organized and carefully written, although there is a certain amount of repetition, perhaps occasioned by the over-reliance on sub-headings. Marzel’s discussion would also have benefited from wider consultation of secondary sources—only the most well-known French sources are used and there is very little reference to the numerous Anglo-American works on the subject.