Erin E. Edgington - Fashioned texts and painted books: nineteenth-century French fan poetry

The relationship between literature and material culture has lately attracted the attention of literary scholars, and the subject has proven to be a fruitful area of inquiry within the context of nineteenth-century French studies in particular as monographs have appeared on subjects ranging from the dcor of the artists studio to the intricacies of bourgeois fancy dress with many others in between.

As accounts of material culture in literary texts, and even accounts dealing specifically with clothing, have proliferated, they have also tended to analyze references to material culture in isolation. This kind of analysis is not without benefits; it can be very useful, for instance, in deciphering social information. However, in this model material culture is often treated as a sort of corollary element of the text in question. While it is certainly possible to attribute undo significance to material culture, even in cases where a focused analysis of it is called for by the text, what is lacking in accounts that simply aggregate large samples of references to material culture (relying on frequency to indicate significance) is precisely an examination of its literary function. In short, in these accounts content is frequently considered without regard to form. It is my intention here to offer an analysis of a fashion accessory that considers not only its social dimensions, but also its aesthetic contributions.

My choice of the fan from among the numerous accessories worn by well-dressed nineteenth-century women is motivated by its unique relationship with the literary and, moreover, with the poetic. By the turn of the twentieth century, the fan had assumed the secondary identity (overlapping with its primary fashionable one) of a poetic object. In what follows, I explore the expression of this identity in works by Stphane Mallarm, Paul Claudel, Octave Uzanne, Marcel Proust, and Guy de Maupassant. Of these authors, Mallarms and Claudels works receive the most thorough treatment while the other authors works, and especially Uzannes, contribute instead to my overarching arguments about the significance of the fan in late-nineteenth-century France. Complementing my literary analyses of these works, and my account of the fans textual identity more generally, are art historical analyses of the unique visual paratexts associated with them intended to better situate fan poetry within the fans broader social context including, most notably, its omnipresence in the visual art of the period.