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

L'Esprit du chiffon provides a detailed tour of the century's most celebrated novelists through the eyes of a tailor. While we might think we know the characters in Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola inside out, Shoshana-Rose Marzel invites us to focus precisely on the important boundary which separates "inside" and "out" – their clothes. After the collapse of the ancien régime, French clothing began to show signs of an important and unprecedented evolution, as the fall of feudalism and strict sartorial laws gradually gave way to a theoretical democratization of control over outward appearances. French literature became fascinated as never before with the exploration and figuration of these appearances, and what they could (or could not) tell us about the person behind the clothes. Whereas the perennial preoccupation with the distinction between être and paraître dates back many centuries, the phenomenon of fashion and its endless mutations tied this problem as never before to the temporal dimension – as soon one could signify as being "in," anyone else could be "out." As artificial and arbitrary a process as launching and debunking fashion trends may seem, it nevertheless became an essential component to the decoding and navigation of the constantly-shifting semiotic environment – one which is still with us today.

By pairing close textual analysis in novels by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola with accounts from twentieth-century histories of fashion, Marzel verifies or denies the strict historicity of a large number of references to clothing in these fictional works, in order to expose the variety and historical evolution of the uses of fashion by these authors. She urges us to see the intricate weave that bound together text and textiles in the period beginning with the July Monarchy and continuing through to the rise of prêt-à-porter and the revolution of the department store. Though most of us remember such iconic scenes as Rastignac's famous failures and successes getting dressed in Le Père Goriot, Emma Bovary's constant experimentation and dangerous flirtation with Parisian fashions, or the rise and fall of Nana as seen (quite literally) through her clothing, L'Esprit du chiffon explores a wide variety of easily overlooked examples in these and other texts, providing overwhelming evidence of how obsessively important were certain cuts or fabrics or ways of wearing clothes to the conception of each author's referential æsthetic.

While grounded more in the indexing of detail than taking flight in the kind of abstract analysis that typically – perhaps necessarily – characterizes traditional literary criticism, there is a sense in which Marzel's vision of the novel may actually recover a lost historical mode of reading. Though all but the most learned scholars of nineteenth-century fashion are incapable of appreciating the nuances of meaning contained within the many descriptions of clothing in the nineteenth-century French novel, contemporary audiences most certainly gleaned an enormous – and often underappreciated – amount of knowledge about characters, situations, literary devices, and even the real world of fashion from these descriptions, much of which Marzel faithfully and laboriously recovers. In Madame Bovary, for example, Marzel adds a further level of nuance in our appreciation of the relationship between Paris and the Provinces carefully elaborated throughout the novel via a proficient exposure of Flaubert's sustained attention to sartorial details the uninitiated modern reader could overlook in the richness of his prose. While others have tended to concentrate on Emma, or perhaps Charles Bovary's famous hat, Marzel completes the picture through a systematic examination of even the most minor characters in the novel, highlighting the specific historical, and thus implicitly thematic, significance of clothing worn by Justin or Rodolphe or Charles at different moments of the story. She further underlines Flaubert's portrayal of the body as existing in a more or less tightly woven relationship to clothes, and how...