Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris by Heidi Brevik-Zender (review)

Reviews 237 trivial since the English are also Catholic. In her defiance of the authority of her father, and of the authority of the church, to which she later submits, she becomes a great threat to the existing social, political, and religious order. Divine right does not yet exist; however, Jeanne’s background as a commoner is in direct conflict with the hierarchy of nobility and the clergy. The legal maneuvering by the judges is not in her favor, and she is aware of their bad intentions. Allies of the English, the church hierarchy includes the pope and notably the theologians from the University of Paris who serve as judges. Therefore, her execution must proceed quickly, and Cauchon, who would risk his life in not condemning her, must find her guilty. It is not until the death of Bedford, who paid her ransom that the Duc de Bourgogne allies with Charles VII, despite his having killed the Duc’s father. Bouzy makes a case against previous works that place too much emphasis on the rise of nationalism as opposed to the familial relationships and political alliances of the French and English feudal nobility. As a consequence of the war, will Jeanne d’Arc replace the king as the new symbol of France? Bouzy allows the discovery of fresh insights with an impartial view that will appeal to those interested in an authentic scholarly approach to her life as opposed to authors treating her as a religious or political icon. This book will interest readers with basic knowledge of the Hundred Years War and the political role of Jeanne d’Arc. Northwest High School, Omaha (NE) Denise Arnold Brevik-Zender, Heidi. Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late-NineteenthCentury Paris. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2015. ISBN 978-14426-4803-6. Pp. 376. $75 Can. Pinpointing intersections between space and fashion in late-nineteenth-century French literature, Brevik-Zender traces through the lens of various twentieth-century critical discourses how these intersections yielded destabilizing moments that responded to the Second Empire’s legacy of social and political homogenies (Haussmannization, bourgeois norms,colonization,etc.).Fashioning Spaces eloquently addresses a rich trove of prose, theater, art works, newspaper reports, and illustrations related to cultural crises that surged out of the rise of the modern metropolis. Reading otherwise overlooked or “dislocated” spaces such as staircases, antechambers, and fashion ateliers as synecdoches for a new Paris struggling to negotiate the effects of urban planning, the Franco-Prussian war, and even France’s expansionist agenda, the author’s wellresearched tome adroitly addresses all of the ambivalences of the modern city whose glitz and glamour cloak its unsettling undercurrents. Disassociating fashion from its traditional connotations of surface and ephemerality, Brevik-Zender convincingly demonstrates in her readings of Zola, Rachilde, Maupassant, Daudet, and Feydeau how developments in women’s dress were rooted in profound cultural anxieties surrounding the issues of gender and class. The opening chapter alone, whose blueprint determines the five that follow, starts with Charles Garnier’s plans for Paris’s new opera house and its grandiose staircase (1875), moves to a discussion of an advertisement for a new garment fabric called “Le Nouvel-Opéra” in Le Monde Illustré (1875), next addresses Félicien Rops’s watercolor L’attrapade (1877), then traces the emergence of the new fashion trend of the bustle before finally reading Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) as the “conjunction” of all of these “highly charged occurrences of fashion” (43) that seem to anticipate the ruins left in the wake of the Commune. Remaining in command of her material at every turn, Brevik-Zender effectively contributes a new line of inquiry to well-explored terrain by reading late-nineteenth-century French authors through critical constructs formulated by Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Habermas, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Michel de Certeau instead of from the familiar vantage points of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, or Walter Benjamin (although, in her introduction, she belabors the issue of originality by insisting almost anxiously on her approach’s“innovation”). Though she sometimes makes awkward stretches to reinforce the general framework of her analysis of cultural subversions as a textual réseau of fashion moments in fiction— a more skeptical reader...