Coiffures: Hair in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture by Carol Rifelj (review)

Opening her first chapter with an analysis of Marcel Mauss’s 1935 “Les techniques du corps,” Noland signals that her focus on a body that both informs and is informed by cultural practices has a rich tradition, one that, furthermore, places bodily performatives, as opposed to discursive ones, “at the center of cultural theories of subjectivation and resistance” (21). As such, she underscores the importance of phenomenological knowledges in the development of habitus, leading her to see in the work of Mauss and his successor Merleau-Ponty a way to understand gesture as never separated from cultural meaning but capable of being subversively un- and re-learned. A second chapter pursues her explorations of Merleau-Ponty, examining in particular his work on habitual gestures in conjunction with a close analysis of the series The Passions by New Media artist Bill Viola. Reading cultural and kinetic possibilities in the gaps between and among consciously learned gestures, Noland points to the rich potentials inhabiting multilayered gestural vocabularies informed by the body’s experiences of its own affects. Noland’s third chapter restores the work of paleoethnographer André LeroiGourhan to a genealogy of gestural agency and knowledge. Seeing in particular rich rhetorical rewards in his affirmation that humans contribute to the cultural habitus “par tâtonnements” (102), Noland combines a reading of Leroi-Gourhan with contemporary digital writing to warn that societal developments that may inhibit experimental groping and gesturing may also inhibit expressions of our very humanity. Noland turns to the work of Henri Michaux in a fourth chapter, exploring his graphic productions as not only intriguing experiments in the making of signs; Michaux also offers “valuable insights into the performative nature of signing” (133), recalling, restaging, and reconditioning the gestures inherent to the making of marks, to the marking of signs, and to writing itself. As he renders writing explicitly kinetic, he points to the possibility that movement marks resistance to and reconfiguration of inscribed cultural conditioning. Noland engages with the writings of Judith Butler in a fifth chapter, spending considerable time laying out Butler’s notions of the performative before offering a supple analysis of their strengths and shortcomings. Calling for us to recognize that the use of performative gestures “generates an experience of the body as it moves” (195), and not only as it might see its mirrored reflection or be called into words, this chapter becomes a necessary complement to any serious reading of Butler’s claims of the performative’s powers and potentials. As she closes this chapter with a brief but strong exploration of Fanon, Noland forcefully places the sensations, resonances, and cries of the moving body as central to questions of experiential agency. This is an important and exciting book. Drawing on work from multiple fields and sources, Noland not only reminds us of the potency of gestures: she cogently and powerfully asks us to attend to the strengths of the agency, the agencies, marked by, in, and through our living bodies. Union College (NY) Charles Batson RIFELJ, CAROL. Coiffures: Hair in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture. Newark: UP of Delaware, 2010. ISBN 978-0-87413-099-7. Pp. 297. $62.50. If ever there was a successful amalgamation of literature and culture, it is this Reviews 363 book. Thoroughly researched, meticulously documented, and beautifully illustrated, Coiffures is replete with fascinating information about all things hair-related in nineteenth -century France. Each of the five chapters opens with a general discussion of a given topic (the language of hairstyles, sex/sexual identity, color, toilettes, cuts and locks), with supporting material from texts both non-literary (advice manuals, the fashion press, etc.) and literary (primarily novels), and closes with a detailed analysis of an individual work (La curée, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Béatrix, Ferragus, and Indiana). Rifelj begins by examining hairstyles such as the Titus, a short cut popular early in the century but rarely featured in Romantic works, which tend to idealize feminine beauty and to take place in remote times and places. She describes various curl configurations, including the “sausage” (tire-bouchons or anglaises), in vogue during the July Monarchy, and the Marcel wave, made possible later by innovations to the curling...