Disembodiment as a Masquerade: Fashion Journalists and Other "Realist" Observers in Directory Paris

Disembodiment as a Masquerade: Fashion Journalists and Other "Realist" Observers in Directory Paris1 Margaret Waller BY ALL ACCOUNTS the first decades after the French Revolution marked a sea change in the class and gender politics of personal appearance in France. Whereas prior to the Revolution fashion had been primarily a prerogative of class and/or wealth, as a result of the Jacobin hostility toward aristocratic display, fashion was increasingly seen as frivolous—a fitting preoccupation for women but a feminizing one for men. In those postrevolutionary years, a trend that had begun in the Old Regime accelerated: men of the upper classes, following bourgeois men's lead, abandoned ornate finery, bright colors, and other forms of sartorial exhibitionism in what has been called the Great Masculine Renunciation. According to the notion of masculinity that resulted, in matters of personal appearance man was by rights the subject of the gaze rather than its object and enjoyed therefore a kind of privileged invisibility.2 One mid-nineteenth-century figure in particular seems to embody this notion of man as unobserved observer. Portrayed as a disinterested spectator who strolled along urban streets unobserved, the flâneur was free to look but remained unmoved, untouched. As feminist critics have long noted, a woman who strolled alone in the city, by contrast, was far from impervious to her surroundings because she risked being taken for a streetwalker—or judged as if she were a fashion plate. The comments made by the few women such as George Sand, Rosa Bonheur, and others who wore men's clothes in public seem to provide further evidence that "men" (even if they were only women disguised as men) enjoyed a liberating , mobile invisibility. "Je courais par tous les temps, je revenais à toutes les heures, j'allais au parterre de tous les théâtres. [. . .] Personne ne faisait attention à moi et ne se doutait de mon déguisement," wrote Sand in her autobiography.3 Critics have traditionally taken the idea of the invulnerable flâneur and Sand's exuberant evocation of passing as a man as if they were accurate descriptions of what it may have been like to be a man (any man?) in Paris in the nineteenth century. More recently, however, the 44 Spring 1997 Waller invisible, invulnerable "man" has come under renewed scrutiny. As a representation and performance of gender, it produced the very effects and perceptions that seemed to corroborate its "essential" truth yet was far from either truly universal or universally true.4 D. A. Miller, for example, contrasts the notion of the "impenetrable" male spectator with a gay man's awareness of his body as a possible object of other men's gaze and desire, thus showing disembodiment as a sign of male heterosexual privilege that is also its own kind of constraint.5 What I propose here is to examine in detail an early and defining moment in the association of bourgeois, presumably heterosexual, masculinity with disembodiment in the fashion and society press of the Directory. Like the later flâneur, the authors of these texts could be said to have roamed the streets as invisible observers. They did not do so in supposedly idle disinterestedness, however, for they were in fact paid to report on the latest in appearances. In what follows I will give a brief overview of the role of gender in the late eighteenth-century press, then turn to specific instances of the representation of femininity as embodiment and/or the performance of masculinity as disembodiment. Part Two analyzes one "objective" and one prurient report on fashion and shows how each sets up the viewer/writer as disembodied, invulnerable, and male. Part Three will take a remarkable counterexample from the same year, 1797, which suggests, I will argue, what fashion and society journalists both highlighted and hid when they chose disembodiment as their authorizing fiction. Part One: "Objective," disembodied observation was hardly an invention of the postrevolutionary era. Nor was it new in the construction of elite forms of masculinity, since it had long been a mainstay during the Old Regime in scientific and scholarly writing, for example— areas that were dominated by men. Journalism, by contrast, as a relatively...