Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

In this engaging book, Susan Hiner shows that, rather than being mere decorations, fashion accessories have signifying power in the social and gendered contexts of nineteenth-century France. Her prologue and introduction establish fashion's role in defining social class, facilitating social mobility, and, especially, distinguishing the proper woman from the questionable one. Drawing on theoretical perspectives, in particular Bourdieu's concept of distinction, her arguments are buttressed by readings of Balzac's La Femme comme il faut, Dumas's Filles, lorettes et courtisanes, and other texts, including physiologies, that present the strata of the demi-monde. Subsequent chapters take up the corbeille de mariage and four particularly meaning-laden accessories: the cashmere shawl, the parasol, the fan, and the purse.

The corbeille de mariage was a gift basket or box from a fiancé to his intended bride that contained many luxury accessories (jewels, lace, fans, and the like). A kind of exchange for the bride's dowry and presented when the contract was signed, it reveals the extent to which marriage was often a financial transaction. The corbeille signified a young woman's access to the world of luxurious consumption as well as her entry into adulthood, the married state, and bourgeois propriety. Hiner examines a wide variety of texts and several engravings that illustrate these functions, in particular Balzac's Le Contrat de mariage. In addition, she shows that the corbeille's exotic and lavish contents give it an erotic subtext, in tension with its other connotations.

One of the essential components of a corbeille was a cashmere shawl. Hiner emphasizes the orientalist and, perforce, eroticized aspects of these items, which were imported from the east, popular at the time of Algerian colonization, and soft and sensual in themselves. Furthermore, the quality of a shawl marked economic status, and the manner in which it was worn indicated both social class and feminine virtue. Hiner examines in detail two novels, Balzac's La Cousine Bette and Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, where cashmere shawls function as a structuring leitmotif and mark rivalries between women. In these and a number of other texts, she makes the case that "the cashmere shawl and its social history should be read as an allegory within the realm of fashion for the shifting social landscape of nineteenth-century Paris" (105).

Like the other accessories treated in this book, the ombrelle marked feminine respectability. But it had additional resonances. Associated with leisure activities, it signaled elite status. Echoing the form of a woman's skirts and existing in opposition to the masculine umbrella, it epitomized femininity. Serving to shield a woman's face and hands from the sun in order to preserve the whiteness of her skin, it also had racial overtones. A fair complexion was necessary to meet nineteenth-century standards of beauty. Hiner focuses on Balzac's Le Lys dans la vallée, in which Henriette de Mortsauf 's ombrelle protects both her beauty and her virtue, though it also evokes the sensuality of her white shoulders. Zola's Nana forms a contrast with Balzac's heroine. Her skin—or rather her flesh—is gleaming white, but in two important scenes Nana uses her ombrelle in ways that subvert domestic bourgeois respectability.

Like other accessories, the fan evokes the female body and connotes both modesty and seduction. Hiner examines the ball scene in Madame Bovary and then concentrates on Balzac's Le Cousin Pons, where a fan points up the opposition between the aesthetic object and the commodity, between nostalgia for the ancien régime and the development of a modern, commercial world. Brief examinations of fans in Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames and Proust's La Prisonnière follow. The first epitomizes the triumph of consumerism and women's growing importance as consumers; in the latter, the fan serves to return fashion to the realm of art.

In her chapter on the purse, the accessory...