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Abstract
Fashion is both an integral component to the flâneur’s representation of self and symbolic of the modernity that the stroller observes and chronicles in depictions of the city. This essay examines the ways in which Guy de Maupassant, in his 1885 novel Bel-Ami, uses fashion to divide the figure of the flâneur across lines of gender into three of the text’s principal characters: Georges Duroy, Clotilde de Marelle, and Madeleine Forestier. This approach reveals that Maupassant understands both fashion and flânerie as multisensorial practices that engage the city through the senses of smell, touch, and hearing. Paradoxically, rather than contributing solely to the notion of a fractured, fragmented urban subject, Maupassant’s separation of the flâneur can also be read to suggest the opposite: the possibility of shared subjectivity in Third Republic modernity.
The author would like to thank the members of her Winter 2011 graduate seminar, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ for their lively discussions of Bel-Ami during the early drafting of this article.
Notes
1 A case for the nineteenth-century flâneuse has been most recently made in Le Flâneur et les Flâneuses by Catherine Nesci.
2 The title of the short-lived 1848 newspaper Le Flâneur bears further witness to mid-nineteenth-century associations between flânerie and journalism (Benjamin, 2006: 448). For more on ties between the journalist and the flâneur, see Gluck (2005: 67, 78).
3 For the notion of women shopping in department stores as female flânerie, see Ferguson’s study of Zola’s Au bonheur des dames in ‘The Flâneur On and Off the Streets of Paris’. See Iskin’s ‘The Flâneuse in French Fin-de-siècle Posters’ for an examination of popular poster art depicting women browsing, looking, and strolling the city streets. In ‘Women in Public’, Thomas studies Impressionist paintings of women riding carriages in public parks that problematize the intersection of gender and flânerie.
4 See, for example, ‘Boule de Suif’ and ‘Mademoiselle Fifi’ in which it is not ‘respectable’ people but rather prostitutes who display courage, generosity, or heroism.
5 Two of the best studies on the intersection of modernity and fashion are Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams and Ulrich Lehmann’s Tigersprung.
6 Théophile Gautier, one of the first writers to interrogate modernity by way of women’s fashion, used the term throughout his writing to describe the sound of skirts. In his 1832 short tale ‘Onuphrius’, for example, the eponymous protagonist describes the noise at a fashionable soirée as ‘le froufrou des robes’ (OC, 1: 61), and in Avatar (1856) Gautier depicts the arrival of the comtesse Prascovie Labinska as ‘un froufrou de taffetas’ (OC, 2: 378). Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, the joint librettists for Offenbach’s wildly popular operetta La vie parisienne (1866), included the term several times in their libretto: ‘Sa robe fait frou, frou, frou, frou, Ses petits pieds font toc, toc, toc’ (OC: 73); ‘Frou frou de la soie, le long des couloirs’ (OC: 109). In his 1870 sonnet ‘Ma Bohème’, Arthur Rimbaud invokes the synesthetic experience of ‘hearing’ the stars as the sound of skirts: ‘Mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou’ (OC: 35).
7 The rue Montchanin is today renamed in honour of the World War II Resistance hero Jacques Bingen.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Heidi Brevik-Zender
Heidi Brevik-Zender is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. Her current book project examines fashion and modernity in the literature of nineteenth-century France. She has published on representations of fashion at the Belle Époque racetrack, the relationships among garments, furniture, and interior design in the fin-de-siècle texts of the decadent novelist Rachilde, and fashion in Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette.
Correspondence to: Heidi Brevik-Zender, Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages, HMNSS 2407, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA. Email: [email protected]