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107 ch a p ter fou r Mademoiselle Ombrelle Shielding the Fair Sex Dans cette œuvre d’art qui s’appelle la toilette d’une femme, l’ombrelle joue le rôle du clair-obscur. octave uzanne As Emma Rouault enters the foreground in the opening sequences of Madame Bovary and makes her play for the country doctor, she is enveloped in the soft glow, the special effect, of an “ombrelle, de soie gorge-de-pigeon, que traversait le soleil, [et qui] éclairait de reflets mobiles la peau blanche de sa figure” (parasol, made of marbled silk, [which] as the sun came shining through it, spread shifting colors over the whiteness of her face).1 The spell of illusion is cast in the clair-obscur of the ombrelle’s visual trick: Charles is smitten by Emma’s picture of idealized femininity, with its promise of submission, fidelity, and untarnished beauty. Her whiteness, emblematic of her desirability and beauty within nineteenth-century aesthetic standards, is both guaranteed and enhanced by this requisite outdoor fashion accessory. Several chapters and a wedding later, however, Emma’s ombrelle is closed, and as she wanders through the countryside for only the reader to see, her ombrelle comes to figure the very crystallization of her discontent: “ses idées peu à peu se fixaient et, assise sur le gazon, qu’elle fouillait à petit coups avec le bout de son ombrelle, Emma se répétait:—Pourquoi, mon Dieu, me suis-je mariée?” (73) (Then her ideas gradually came together, and sitting on the grass, poking at it with the point of her sunshade, Emma kept saying to herself:—Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him? [34]). Her own illusions of romance, in which the feminine ideal stars in the leading role, are laid bare in the harsh light of banal lived experience , untempered by special effects; and the ombrelle, stripped here of its fashion-use value, signals instead Emma’s slippage from the norma- Mademoiselle Ombrelle 108 tive role prescribed to women in nineteenth-century France as it punctuates her plaintive lament on marriage. This chapter focuses on the role of the ombrelle in the production and perturbation of idealized bourgeois femininity. In particular, here I wish to develop an analysis of the ombrelle as a highly gendered guarantor of respectability, indicating, above all, leisure and its presuppositions . In the fashion plates of the nineteenth century from the First Empire to the fin de siècle, the most visible and ubiquitous accessory for outdoor activities associated with leisure was the ombrelle. Because this accessory was ostensibly used to protect tender female skin against sun, not rain, the cultural imperatives of leisure and domesticity defining bourgeois femininity were implicit in the object’s function to ensure and valorize whiteness. The ombrelle, a “dôme portatif de taffetas” (portable taffeta dome), married domesticity and leisure by reproducing on a small, symbolic scale the private, domestic interior of its carrier in the public great outdoors (Figure 11).2 The development of leisure as a concept and the expansion of a leisure class have been well documented by contemporary historians such as Bonnie Smith in her influential study of nineteenth-century bourgeois women in northern France, Ladies of the Leisure Class, and by early economists such as Thorstein Veblen, whose 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class offers still-pertinent observations on the relationship of women to luxury. With the rise of capitalism and the shift from their role as laborers to curators of domesticity, Smith argues, bourgeois women’s responsibility as the signposts of family status and propriety became increasingly heavy.3 As Veblen convincingly argues, status was predicated on wealth and leisure, but it was also linked to the domestic space, morally idealized and removed as it was from the brutal world of masculine industry, which, of course, subsidized domesticity’s idealization (Smith).4 Both leisure and domesticity privileged whiteness as a key sign of participation in their linked value systems, which were constructed simultaneously on a marked separation from work—both manual, organizing women by class and race, and industrial-financial, organizing them by gender. The ombrelle, by its shape and construction, as we shall see in the analyses I set forth below, incarnated the feminine itself. Like the fashion doll and later the fashion mannequin, the ombrelle figured woman in an inanimate fashion accessory, performing the double act of dehumanizing and fetishizing her, just as it represented and sought to maintain iconic femininity, predicated on a...

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