Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities (review)

Janell Watson.Literature and material culture from Balzac to Proust: the collection and consumption of curiosities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 227 pp. ISBN: 0 521 49914 3.

Scholarship in the field of material culture has been growing in the past few years, particularly in history and the social sciences. With this study of nineteenth-century French literature, Janell Watson has transported this field of inquiry into the realm of the literary text. At times insightful and illuminating, her work also reflects the claustrophobia of the nineteenth-century interiors she so aptly evokes. Staking out her territory as the "interconnectedness of the material, the social, and the textual" (170), Watson examines literary texts from Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Gautier, Huysmans, the Goncourts, Jean Lorrain, Rachilde, and Proust (along with a few others in lesser detail). Her fil conducteur is the category of the bibelot, an object that is both prevalent and protean in nineteenth-century literature and culture.

The conspicuous role of bibelots in nineteenth-century literature is a function of their increased presence in nineteenth-century interiors. However, the bibelot as a category of objects maintains a fundamental ambiguity, as it can include rare curiosities, expensive objets d'art, and mass-produced kitsch. Likewise, the bibelot demonstrates an intrinsic mobility throughout the nineteenth century, as it moves among the social classes, finding a place in the aristocratic, the artistic, and the bourgeois interior, and as it is articulated in the household, the collection, the marketplace, and the museum. This ambiguity and mobility form the semantic field of Watson's inquiry, as she moves from the early nineteenth-century anthropomorphic interiors of Balzac, where objects in some manner reflect their owners' depths, to the superficial interiors of late century decadence, where the realms of the animate (owners) and inanimate (bibelots) are deliberately confused, and where there is only surface.

Watson employs Bourdieu's theory of "the logic of practice" in her study, beginning in the second chapter and at various points throughout her work, as a means of reconciling some of the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the term bibelot. Practical logic affords Watson the malleable tool she needs to discuss material culture, a category of daily life that resists formal, logical analysis. "The bibelot belongs to a world of material objects structured by the practical logic of daily life, which is to say 'just enough logic' to get by." (28) The bibelot brings into play a series of oppositions--useful/useless, valuable/worthless, artistic/kitsch, old/new, and pretty/beautiful--basic oppositions that form "practical taxonomies." These taxonomies support analytical classifications, and through them, the logic of practice actually permeates formal logic. While Watson admits that the bibelot "pushes practical logic to its limits" (29), it remains useful to her as she also draws on elements of aesthetics in her discussions of the bibelot, a field like that of daily life that also defies the rigor of formal logic.

The locus of the bibelot, and of the textual analyses in this work, is the interior, more specifically, what Watson calls the eclectic or artistic interior, a room that has incorporated collecting into its scheme. These rooms can exist in aristocratic homes as well as bourgeois apartments, but what remains salient is "the aesthetization of the interior" (67), an attempt to connect the objects in a room with the artistic production outside the home, by way of imitating the artists of a period. While imitations of artistic interiors by the bourgeoisie could often be vulgar and derivative, during the 1880s in particular, many manuals of interior decorating and style appeared to guide middle class tastes, and it is to Watson's credit that she draws on these contemporary sources in her evocation of the nineteenth-century interior, creating an historical context that adds texture to her study.

The heart of this work is the textual analysis, careful readings of passages and...