Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France . By S usan H iner . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. x + 282 pp., ill. Hb $47.50; £31.00.

Abstract

Susan Hiner's excellent rereading of a corpus of classic nineteenth-century texts (Zola, Balzac, Flaubert) opens up the realist novel to gender studies while at the same time moving beyond the traditional focus on the rise of the bourgeoisie to suggest a more systemic erosion of class boundaries. The literary texts are approached via the intermediality of the fashion industry. Indeed, the study is valuable in that it looks beyond the canonical texts to include extraliterary contexts such as fashion journals, physiologies, and manuals of comportment. The approach adopted initially fragments the female body, each chapter being organized around a specific accessory, in order to reconstruct the bigger picture behind the fashion industry and the representation of the feminine. Hiner argues that the seemingly trivial has been dismissed and needs to be taken seriously. She thus proposes a recuperation of the marginal within the dominant discourses of modernity, which she defines as imperialism, social mobility, authenticity, and commodification. As she argues for the centrality of the accessorial, Hiner's accessory takes on the force of the Derridean supplement: ‘because of its trivialized status, the feminine fashion accessory could accomplish ideological work imperceptibly’ (p. 1). My only reservation in this sense is that the concept of modernity is sometimes marginalized or taken as widely understood, as, for example, in this concluding remark: ‘this metonymic slippage [of the sac à main, which represents the foyer] emblematizes modernity’ (p. 207). An initial chapter on the difference between ‘la femme comme il faut’ (the proper lady) and ‘la femme comme il en faut’ (‘necessary’ women, or prostitutes) sets up the theme of social mobility that underpins the argument. As such, the study focuses on the slippage of the markers of female respectability. The chapter on the cashmere shawl illustrates this idea particularly well, as the once highly-prized item, indicative of the respectable married woman, becomes readily available via an industry of imitation. Hiner draws on Bourdieu and the idea that distinction is a socially constructed tool of power to put forward her own argument that in times of social instability the pursuit of distinction through the accessory takes on the greater urgency. The following chapter argues that the corbeille de marriage, offered to the bride by the groom, ‘embodied the rite of passage into female adulthood’ (p. 50). In subsequent chapters, as she traces the origins and significance of the accessories contained within the corbeille, Hiner exposes many ironies: the cashmere shawl, for example, the ultimate in female respectability, is also a symbol of the male colonial conquest, stolen from the harem. The chapter on the ombrelle explores the promotion of fair skin and the supposed correlation with moral purity, and that on the fan examines how the object was used to convey secret messages. There is a chapter on how the handbag turned the hidden pockets of previous generations inside out, ‘displaying publicly what once had been carefully guarded under the skirts of women’ (p. 210). With well-researched contextualization of close readings, Hiner's book is highly successful in unmasking the ‘performance of respectable femininity’ (p. 71), and makes an important contribution to nineteenth-century studies.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.