Assimilating mobility: Material culture in the novel during the age of proto-consumption

French Cultural Studies

Volumn 9, Issue 26, 1998, Pages 131-146

  Watson, Janell ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0001986752     PISSN: 09571558     EISSN: 17402352     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/095715589800902601     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 2-3, 9
2. e siècle: Le Livre des passages (Paris: Cerf, 1989)
3. Société de consommation (Paris: Denoël, 1970), 114. The notion of 'consumer culture' used throughout this article draws heavily on Baudrillard, though I have benefited greatly from the recent flux of research on consumption, much of it authored by British social scientists
4. 'Edmond et Jules de Goncourt' (1885), in Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Études littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 318-9; my emphasis
5. Édouard Pommier, introduction to Jean-Baptiste-Pierre LeBrun, Réflexions sur le Muséum national (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1992). Work on the history of the museum in France intensified around the bicentennial of the Louvre in 1992-93. In French see the studies of Dominique Poulot, Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, and Krzysztof Pomian, and in English, that of Daniel Sherman
6. For an overview and bibliography see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995)
7. See also the special issue of the Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 'Littérature et musées', 95.1 (January-February 1995)
8. 'Edmond et Jules de Goncourt', op. cit., 318
9. The public museum in France dates from the 1790s. The department store dates from the 1860s; see Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981)
10. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1982, 1988), 13-4
11. Cited by Henri de Noussane, Le Goût dans l'ameublement (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1896), 151
12. L'Art dans la maison: Grammaire de l'ameublement (Paris: Rouveyre & G. Blond, 1884), 219; my emphasis
13. For an 1887 description of Sarah Bernhardt's interior, see Jean Lorrain, cited in Philippe Jullian, Jean Lorrain ou le satiricon 1900 (Fayard, 1974), 125-6
14. On the many dwellings of Madame de Pompadour see Nancy Mitford, Madame de Pompadour (New York: Harper & Row, 1954, 1968)
15. Jean Cuisenier, L'Art populaire en France: Rayonnement, modèles et sources (Fribourg, Office du Livre, 1975), 33-5
16. Monique Éleb-Vidal and Anne Debarre-Blanchard, Architectures de la vie privée: Maisons et mentalités, XVIIe-XIXe siècles (Bruxelles: Archives d'architecture moderne, 1989), 75
17. Éleb-Vidal et Debarre-Blanchard, Vie privée, op. cit., 265
18. Architecture intérieure et décoration en France des origines à 1875 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1988), 349
19. Havard, L'Art dans la maison, op. cit., 219
20. L'Éducation sentimentale, ed. Édouard Maynial (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1964), 47, 109
21. See Alison Fairlie, 'Aspects de l'histoire de l'art dans L'Éducation sentimentale', Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 'Flaubert', 81.4-5 (July-October 1981)
22. as well as her 'Pellerin et le thème de l'art dans 〈L'Éducation sentimentale〉', Europe, 'Colloque Flaubert', xlvii (485-7) (September-November 1969), reprinted in Imagination and Language: Collected Essays on Constant, Baudelaire, Nerval and Flaubert, ed. Malcolm Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
23. See also William Paulson, 'Industrial art', in 'Sentimental Education': The Complexity of Disenchantment (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992)
24. Maurice Andrieu, 'Les Maisons', Europe, lxvii (485-7) (September-November 1969), 75
25. 'Dans ce roman où tous les personnages se connaissent et se fréquentent, le fonds «collectif» de l'Art industriel permet d'alimenter un véritable réseau d'échanges' (Isabelle Daunais, Flaubert et la scénographie romanesque [Paris: Nizet, 1993], 163)
26. Expression borrowed from Igor Kopytoff, 'The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process', in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
27. L'Éducation sentimentale, op. cit., 414
28. See Sterling Haig, 'Madame Arnoux's Coffret: a monumental case', Romanic Review, lxxv (4) (November 1984), 469-82
29. On the distinction between the gift and the commodity in anthropology see C.A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (London: Academic Press, 1982)
30. Object choices: taste and fetishism in Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale', in French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century: A Material World: Essays in Honour of D. G. Charlton, ed. Brian Rigby (London: Macmillan, 1993)
31. L'Éducation sentimentale, op. cit., 144
32. For a detailed analysis of a similar cycle of objects see Marie-Christine Bellosta, Le Capharnaüm célinien ou la place des objets dans 'Mort à crédit', Archives des Lettres Modernes, no. clxiv (2) (Paris: Minard, 1976)
33. Consumption also plays a vital role in La Curée, as well as in Nana; I have chosen Nana because it involves many more bibelots. On consumption in La Curée see my 'The gendered political economy of Zola's La Curée', Nineteenth-Century French Studies, xxv (1-2) (Fall-Winter 1996-97)
34. See Jean Borie, 'Maisons', in Zola et les mythes ou de la nausée au salut (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 139 and 143-4
35. For a recent discussion and bibliography see Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991)
36. In his interesting but sexist and élitist book on what he calls the 'bibelotization' of art, Rémy de Saisselin posits woman as a mediating figure between the art museum and the department store. Along with the bourgeois man (especially American millionaires), she is held responsible for the degradation of the status of the art object, or bibelotization (The Bourgeois and the Bibelot [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984])
37. On the semiotics of the museum see Mieke Bal, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (London: Routledge, 1996). The classic works on space are of course those of Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre
38. 'La Mode ou la féerie du code', in L'Échange symbolique et la mort, NRF (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 134
39. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, reprint Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 145-51
40. Baudrillard, 'La Mode', op. cit., 135