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

Prologue

1 Prologue In nineteenth-century France, modernity often operated precisely through what was most easily dismissed—the seemingly negligible fashion accessories of women. A cashmere shawl might obliquely refer to imperial conquest in Algeria but openly indicate married status in Parisian society. A silk parasol could whisper racial and cultural supremacy but loudly proclaim the delicacy of the fair sex. A painted fan might conceal aesthetic and social inauthenticity but also reveal the uncontested power of social status buttressed by wealth. Because of its trivialized status, the feminine fashion accessory could accomplish ideological work imperceptibly, both avowing and disavowing its connection to some of the most complex processes of modernity. The hidden stories of fashion accessories come to light in the chapters that follow through an unearthing of their provenance, their histories, and their roles in both literary and extraliterary contexts.1 Fashion accessories have been taken for granted, accepted as an inconsequential part of the décor of realist novels. Because they are taken to signify little beyond the discreet literary construction of reality, objects such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags have received little serious attention. Literary scholars have relegated the fashion accessory to the realm of the ornamental, the decorative, the feminine. Yet these accessories are far from secondary. They are the unmistakable armature of feminine seduction; more important still, as essential instruments in the production and presentation of respectability and virtue, they are crucial components of the bourgeois idealization of womanhood, which depended on women’s objectifica- Prologue 2 tion—her becoming an aestheticized accessory in the social theater of male success and status.2 The accessory exemplifies one of the overarching paradoxes of the ideology of the feminine in nineteenth-century culture: the proper lady was required to carry on her person the social and moral hierarchies of a society in the process of reinvention while, at the same time, satisfying the imperatives of erotic seduction. As that je ne sais quoi, the subtle detail that pulls an outfit together and makes it all work in the fashion economy, the feminine accessory turns out to be a polyvalent cultural marker. The shawl, the parasol, the fan, and the handbag put on display in the pages of novels a wealth of social and historical meanings. By uncovering these links, Accessories to Modernity reveals the power of the seemingly frivolous fashion detail both to shape and reflect modern French culture. Modernity in France refers to a confluence of phenomena occurring roughly from the period of the social and political upheavals unleashed by the Revolution of 1789 to the end of the Second Empire in 1870; it is marked in part by conflicts between and collusion among rapid social mobility and notions of legitimacy, colonialism and domestic retrenchment , and mass culture and elite aesthetics.3 This book analyzes the complex ways in which women’s fashion accessories became primary sites for the ideological work of modernity: the interplay of imperialist expansion and domestic rituals, the quest for authenticity in the face of increasing social mobility, gendering practices and their interrelation with social hierarchies, and the rise of commodity culture and woman ’s paradoxical, and fragile, status as both agent and object within it. The objects I analyze here “accessorize” these ideological impulses, naturalizing , domesticating, but sometimes also contesting them. These peripheral instruments of power moved into the indeterminate space created by postrevolutionary confusion when dress itself was an increasingly unreliable indicator of social position. Indeed, the accessory became improbably central to the project of social mobility. While the term accessory may connote “marginal” or “peripheral,” the fashion accessory is in fact laden with meanings pertinent to the cultural thinking of the time. I argue that by taking the novelistic items of women’s fashion accessories literally and considering them in extraliterary contexts such as fashion journals, press illustrations, and sociohistorical documents (for example, court transcripts, physiologies, and manuals of savoir-vivre), we can discover the many cultural valences these objects possessed and cast fresh eyes onto some of the most wide- Prologue 3 ly read novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust. For these objects contain histories not explicitly narrated in the plots of these novels, histories that may appear peripheral to the stories that contain them but that are fundamental to the larger cultural work in which these novels participate. Yet accessory also bears another meaning often expressed in a legal context: the culpable...