Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris (review)

If the term 'eccentricity' originates in the language of astronomy and geometry, its associations become more complex from the eighteenth century onwards, especially once it migrates across the Channel. By the end of the nineteenth century, Miranda Gill argues, eccentricity – earlier identified with a relatively light-hearted view of Englishness – has become truly French. Yet in the course of the century its shifts and transformations are so numerous and so deceptive that it might seem rash to try to pin down this protean theme in any scholarly study. After all, eccentricity can cover anything from harmless quirkiness to disturbing abnormality or downright insanity, and as Gill herself points out, the link between eccentricity and madness proves particularly and enduringly difficult to define. Furthermore, as yesterday's eccentricity becomes today's norm, eccentricity also routinely becomes invisible before it reinvents itself (in his account of Nerval's madness, Gautier asserts that it was some time before any of their circle even realised that this was something more than the cultivated difference that everyone had come to expect of everyone). But, as Gill cheerfully argues, it is precisely because notions about eccentricity shift continuously in the course of the century that the concept merits our attention, and it is its very elasticity that provides the key. Since eccentricity is a context-dependent term, Gill argues, there can of course be no grand narrative of its development. Nonetheless, discourses about eccentricity, predominantly a product of the urban middle classes, are themselves an excellent marker of change, always symptomatic of the bourgeoisie's ambivalence. That ambivalence is shown, on the one hand, by the normative discourses of order and conformism, and on the other hand, by an increasing fascination with eccentricity, for in a city where everyone watches everyone, eccentricity is also linked to genius, originality, creativity and individualism. It is, then, the very flexibility of the theme that this wide-ranging and engaging study investigates. Eccentricity duly crops up in vastly different areas of cultural life – in literature and the arts, of course, but also in fashion, the science of monstrosity, psychology and alienation, bohemianism, sexual mores and the demi-monde, and (fascinatingly) the fairground. This excellent book touches, it seems, on almost every aspect of nineteenth-century life, and shows with great clarity and flair how eccentricity, for all its instability, weaves its way in and through the century's discourses and debates. Particularly readable is the chapter on dandies, femmes à la mode and lionnes, as are those on monsters, madness and medicine. While some areas of this inexhaustible subject may not get the limelight that they could so easily take, the book is a fund of information and insights, and it offers a subtle, sympathetic and illuminating new reading of the nineteenth century.