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Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse
The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction
(eds.)
Reading Paul Valéry: Universe in Mind
Proust, the Body and Literary Form
Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion
Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony
A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume.
LITERATURE AND
MATERIAL CULTURE
FROM BALZAC TO PROUST
The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities
JA NEL L WA TS ON
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
http://www.cambridge.org
Acknowledgments x
Introduction
The bibelot
A nineteenth-century object
The logic(s) of material culture
Imitation, accumulation, and mobility
The fashionable artistic interior
Social (re)encoding in the domestic sphere
Flaubert’s ‘‘musées reçus’’
Bouvard and Pécuchet’s consumerist epistemology
Narrate, describe, or catalogue?
The novel and the inventory form in Balzac, the Goncourts,
and Huysmans
The parlour of critical theory
Reading dwelling space across disciplines
Rearranging the Oedipus
Fantastic and decadent floor-plans in Gautier, Maupassant,
Lorrain, and Rachilde
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ix
Acknowledgments
Three scholars with whom I have had the pleasure and privilege of
working personally have deeply influenced my thinking; these are
Naomi Schor (director of the dissertation version of this project), Fredric
Jameson, and Kenneth Surin. For first encouraging me to pursue the
topic of the bibelot I thank Alain Buisine. Others who have read part or
all of the manuscript in its various manifestations, offering valuable
comments, include David Bell, Jean-Jacques Thomas, Alice Kaplan,
William Reddy, Gérard Gengembre, Philippe Hamon, Julia Hell,
V.Y. Mudimbe, and James F. Hamilton. Articles derived from parts of
chapters two and three have been published in Mosaic and in French
Cultural Studies. Financial support at various stages was provided by the
Duke University Department of Romance Studies, the Ecole Normale
Supérieure Fontenay – Saint-Cloud, the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, and the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund.
x
Introduction
This book began as a study of the bibelot, the modern French term for
knick-knack or curiosity, but quickly grew to encompass the larger
questions of collecting, consuming, classifying, and describing. For the
sake of working within a coherent historical context, the primary locus
of the book remains nineteenth-century France, though analogous
cultural phenomena can be found throughout Europe, North America,
and many former European colonies. Because the topic does transcend
national borders, I do include several critical texts from outside France.
Bibelots – knick-knacks, curiosities, collectibles, antiques, objets d’art –
proliferate in French literary texts during the last decades of the nine-
teenth century. The bibelot makes its first major canonical appearance
in Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons (). Its golden age is marked by Huysmans’s
A rebours, Edmond de Goncourt’s La Maison d’un artiste, and Mallarmé’s
famous line ‘‘Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore’’ (, , and
respectively). By this point in literary prose, one more intellectual than
chronological, material objects have ceased to function as mere vehicles
of information about their user and the world of people, as authors
begin to provide more and more information about objects themselves,
and the world of objects to which these belong. Plot begins to deterio-
rate, overrun by description. Signifiers multiply then begin to float free.
By the end of the century, the presence of objects in texts no longer
needs to be justified by their connections either to people or to the
‘‘real.’’ The literary object becomes gratuitous, yet authors continue to
be drawn toward it. It multiplies and proliferates in the text, just as
objects without use-value – bibelots – multiply and proliferate in the
marketplace and in the nineteenth-century interior. We could call this
phenomenon the bibelot-effect, the sudden invasion of culture by gratu-
itousness, which amounts to a way of describing modernization and
decadence in terms of a literary history of material culture. The late
Introduction
nineteenth-century writer and critic Paul Bourget declares an under-
standing of the bibelot indispensable to the literary and cultural analysis
of his time. Several decades later, however, Proust celebrates the bi-
belot’s last moments of glory in A la recherche du temps perdu (–). Why
does the bibelot flourish in and then fade from French literature at this
particular time and place?
The literary history of the bibelot coincides with the history of
European material culture. As detailed in chapter one, by the s a
new category of objects has come into being, the category designated by
the word ‘‘bibelot,’’ whose meaning has evolved to encompass a dispa-
rate array of goods, ranging from mass-produced trinkets to priceless
collectors’ items. Examples include exquisite porcelain vases, finely
crafted snuff boxes, oriental figurines, master paintings, factory glass-
ware, and cheap souvenirs. Superfluousness, or the absence of use-
value, is the sole unifying criterion for the seemingly heterogenous list of
items belonging to this category. The confusing nature of the category
expresses the inadequacy of existing organizational frameworks for
dealing with the onslaught of material goods associated with industrial
production and mass consumption. The prominence of the term in
nineteenth-century French literature, in fiction as well as in criticism
and commentary, signals a massive semantic and spatial reorganization
of the world of goods.
Defined within the context of the consumer and industrial revo-
lutions, the bibelot can be seen as the quintessential object of modern
material culture. Its widespread presence signals that luxury goods have
become available, at least hypothetically, to the middle and even the
working classes. However, the emergence of this category of gratuitous
luxury goods cannot be explained solely by the economic history of
modern industrial production and mass consumption. The history of
older cultural practices such as collecting and interior decorating, as
well as non-monetary forms of exchange (barter, the gift, the recuper-
ation of debris, the archaeological dig), must also be taken into account.
Telling the story of the bibelot involves telling stories of collecting,
displaying, decorating, selling, shopping, classifying, and cataloguing.
That the bibelot becomes a literary object is a significant part of its
material history. Writing, in forms as diverse as novels, newspapers, and
interior decorating manuals, plays an integral part in the modernizing
reconfiguration of material culture which takes place throughout the
nineteenth century. Throughout this study, literary and para-literary
writing is juxtaposed against resolutely non-literary writing. Novels,
Introduction
short stories, and lines of poetry are considered alongside journalism,
diaries by literary figures, literary criticism, art criticism, museum cata-
logues, how-to manuals on collecting and interior decorating, industry
reports by arts administrators and decorative arts professionals, social
commentary, and sociology. The purpose of including commercial and
social scientific writing is to broaden the discursive field, thus allowing
for a better understanding of the world of goods, which far exceeds the
bounds of the literary realm. The relationship between the bibelot and
this writing is more than a question of rhetorical style. The bibelot calls
forth a concrete practice of objects, a logic of material things, an
aesthetics, an epistemology. To be a bibeloteur, a collector of bibelots, is to
contemplate, comprehend, and organize objects in certain ways,
whether these be the objects in a living room or the objects in a novel.
The presence of the bibelot transforms literature and living rooms alike.
The bibelot-filled novel is not a ‘‘representation’’ of the bibelot-filled
living room, nor is the literary bibelot some sort of self-reflexive signifier
cut off from its material referent by means of the transcendental powers
sometimes imputed to language. Rather, the heavily descriptive novel is
as much a product of nineteenth-century material culture as is the
bourgeois living room.
The onslaught of material goods associated with industrialization and
consumer society poses several sorts of problems. First and foremost,
there is the matter of organization, classification, and order. From the
perspective of the bibelot, an object born of domestic daily life, existing
notions of order tend to be overly formalistic, based as they are on
analyses of taxonomy, collecting, and the museum. I have therefore
found it necessary to rethink the logic(s) of classification in terms of the
logic of daily life. Second, there arise issues of evaluation, of determining
the relative worth of things in terms of money, aesthetics, scholarly
interest, and/or prestige. Third, accumulations of goods present prob-
lems of representation, whether one’s purpose is accounting, inventory-
ing, or describing. Fourth, and this stems directly from the third prob-
lem, there arise issues of balance between persons and things, and
between narration and description. Classic poetics presumes that per-
sons and events should be privileged over things and descriptions,
whereas many fin-de-siècle texts challenge this formulation. Finally,
there is the matter of interpretation, of finding meaning in superfluous
material things, of reading things for information about people, or for
historical or anthropological knowledge.
These concerns continuously surface and resurface throughout the
Introduction
chapters which follow, though each chapter brings one set of issues to
the forefront. Following the historical overview provided in the opening
chapter, chapter two makes use of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘‘practical
logic’’ to examine the less-than-coherent reasoning by which the objects
of material culture are classified, described, evaluated, and judged. In
chapter three, I move from organization to meaning, tracing a geneal-
ogy of the encoding of domestic furnishings with the vocabulary of art,
showing how distinctions of class and gender are mapped onto a
distinction between art and fashion. Chapter four shifts the focus from
meaning to knowledge, through a reading of the collecting episode in
Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet. Taking issue with previous criticism, I
argue that what seems to be an epistemology of the museum coincides
with and overlaps other epistemologies, those of domestic daily life, of
social class, and of consumption. Chapter five asks why modernist
literary critics have been harsh on inventory-like descriptions, while
poststructuralist and postmodern literary critics have embraced the
catalogue form. Chapter six examines descriptions of domestic interiors
by novelists, social commentators, and sociologists, all of whom use
similar strategies to elicit information from ordinary household objects,
in effect rendering the bibelot ‘‘readable.’’ Chapter seven charts a trend
that evolves in fantastic and decadent narrative: alterations in classic
plot structure correlate closely to alterations in traditional configur-
ations of household furnishings. Present in all chapters is the question of
order (and disorder), of the intertwined organizational logic(s) (and
illogic) of the material, the social, and the textual.
The bibelot
A nineteenth-century object
Why, at this particular time and place, nineteenth-century Paris, does it
become necessary to create a category of goods which unites valuable art
objects, industrial reproductions, and worthless junk, a group of disparate
items gathered together under the auspices of superfluousness, gratu-
itousness, heterogeneity, and accumulation? The industrial and con-
sumer revolutions provide the obvious context for this question. Rosalind
Williams describes the radical transformation of the world of goods, as
material things begin to multiply during the middle decades of the
century:
The quantity of goods available to most people had been drastically limited: a
few kitchen utensils . . . , several well-worn pieces of furniture . . . , bedding,
shoes or clogs, a shirt and trousers or a dress (and sometimes one outfit for
special occasions), some essential tools. That was all. . .
In the past century these ancient and universal patterns have been shattered
by the advent of mass consumption. . . The merchandise itself was by no means
available to all, but the vision of a seemingly unlimited profusion of commodities
is available, is, indeed, nearly unavoidable.
This multiplication of objects, their ‘‘seemingly unlimited profusion’’ at
once ‘‘real’’ and imagined, necessitates a radical reconfiguration of the
world of material things, a physical, economic, and cognitive reorganiz-
ation. However, the statement that ‘‘ancient and universal patterns’’ of
people’s relations to objects were ‘‘shattered’’ by this onslaught of goods
needs to be nuanced. It would be more accurate to say that these ancient
patterns, which are historical rather than universal, are not destroyed,
but rather modified, adapted, and supplemented in order to accommo-
The bibelot
date new types of goods, and their (at least hypothetical) availability to
new groups of people. The reconfiguration of ancient patterns for
dealing with goods is of primary concern here.
The historically determined patterns by which people confront goods
can be thought of in terms of the constantly evolving social structure of
the world of objects. The very concept of ‘‘material culture’’ carries with
it the assumption that, like language, the world of goods is fundamental-
ly social in nature. Like words, things are created and given meaning
collectively (Saussure’s dimension of langue), though used individually
(the dimension of parole). Furthermore, as Marx insists in his theory of
the commodity, relationships among things are inseparable from rela-
tionships among people, implying that the world of things is a social
world, with a social structure which includes not only class relations and
social positioning (the stuff of ‘‘distinction’’), but also gender relations,
written and unwritten rules of exchange, usages of objects in daily life,
and the significance accorded to objects, implicitly or explicitly, con-
sciously or unconsciously.
The world of objects is directly structured by institutions and spheres
of practice which are formalized to varying degrees; for nineteenth-
century Paris these include the marketplace, the household economy,
collecting, and the museum. The nineteenth century witnesses the
expansion and further specialization of these institutions, especially with
the creation of the magasin de nouveautés [novelty shop], the grand magasin
[department store], and many new public museums. In the sphere of the
household economy, it is worth noting that the term décoration intérieure
appears in print for the first time in France in . Also significant are
the many new publications destined for female homemakers.
Though the marketplace, the household, collecting, and the museum
seem to be quite separate, governed by very different concerns and
objectives, their mutual involvement in the world of goods makes for
some striking similarities among them. One activity critical to all four
domains is the creation and maintenance of spaces in which goods are
accumulated, displayed, classified, and valorized. Practices of display
and valuation depend on acts of classification. The category bibelot
represents such a classification, one which is frequently used in the
marketplace, in the household, and in private collecting, but which is
not altogether unrelated to the public museum. The creation of the
category bibelot signals the interconnectedness of these four domains,
since it belongs to all of them but is contained by none of them,
juxtaposing the museum-worthy heirloom against the mass-produced
trinket.
Literature and material culture
The heterogeneity and disparity in value of the objects designated by the
term bibelot can be traced to the evolution of its usage, as given in Ernest
Bosc’s Dictionnaire de l’art, de la curiosité et du bibelot:
. Ce terme, qui à son origine ne servait qu’à désigner des outils, des
ustensiles et des objets très divers et de peu de valeur, est aujourd’hui []
employé par les amateurs et les antiquaires pour désigner principalement des
objets d’art et de curiosité.
[ . – This term originally designated only tools, utensils and a wide
variety of objects of little value. Today +,, collectors and antiquarians use it
principally to designate objets d’art and curiosities.]
Bosc defines the category bibelot in terms of its changing relationship to
other categories of things: outils, ustensiles, objets très divers et de peu de valeur,
objets d’art, and objets de curiosité. He directly ties the contemporary usage
of the term to collecting by assigning it to the vocabulary of ‘‘les
amateurs et les antiquaires’’ [in this context, amateur, or enthusiast, is
synonymous with ‘‘collector,’’ with overtones of ‘‘connoisseur’’]. The
category bibelot thus shifts drastically in meaning between ‘‘son origine,’’
the Middle Ages, and Bosc’s ‘‘aujourd’hui,’’ the s, its designation
drifting from simple articles of daily domestic life to objets d’art and rare
collectors’ curiosities. The domains of collecting and of household goods
become even more entangled as more and more articles of daily life
become recognized as collectors’ objects, such as soup tureens of Sèvres
porcelain, shaving bowls of Rouen pottery, silver snuff boxes, or even
ornate antique bedwarmers, spittoons, and chamber pots.
While in Bosc assigns the term bibelot to the vocabulary of
antique collecting, by the century’s end the term is more commonly
assigned to the vocabulary of home furnishings, as is evident in a
treatise on interior decor co-authored by Edith Wharton:
It is perhaps not uninstructive to note that we have no English word to describe
the class of household ornaments which French speech has provided with at
least three designations, each indicating a delicate and almost imperceptible
gradation of quality. In place of bric-à-brac, bibelots, objets d’art, we have only
knick-knacks – defined by Stormonth as ‘‘articles of small value.’’
Like Bosc, Wharton too defines the bibelot in relation to other catego-
ries of things. Though French does have the advantage of numerous
terms, their meanings shift over the course of the nineteenth century,
making it difficult to discern the ‘‘delicate and almost imperceptible
The bibelot
gradation of quality’’ which they supposedly designate. Whereas for
Wharton in the term ‘‘bibelots’’ clearly belongs between ‘‘bric-à-
brac’’ and ‘‘objets d’art,’’ texts dating from the preceding century reveal
more ambiguity.
From roughly the s to , the ‘‘gradation in quality’’ represen-
ted by these terms was not only ‘‘almost imperceptible,’’ but also
ambiguous, particularly in the case of the central term, since a bibelot
was sometimes an objet d’art, sometimes merely bric-à-brac, while at
other times all three terms were used to describe the same object.
Furthermore, two key terms are missing from Wharton’s list: curiosité
and antiquité, which French shares with English. During the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, in France curiosité was the word commonly
used to designate collectors’ objects, while antiquité designated Greek
and Roman art and artifacts. Bric-à-brac refers to ‘‘objets très divers et de
peu de valeur’’ [‘‘a wide variety of objects of little value’’], to borrow
Bosc’s phrasing. A neighboring term, bimbelot, generally refers to toys,
but also to toiletry items and trinkets. When the word bibelot is revived
in the middle of the nineteenth century, it is used as a synonym of
curiosité, but still carries the connotation of its original meaning, ‘‘objets
très divers et de peu de valeur,’’ a pejorative overtone which the word
still carries. Antiquité came to include French and European collectibles
from the Gallic period, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, this entire lexical
chain is used more or less interchangeably to designate virtually the
same objects, though each term carries slightly different connotations.
These terms, as used during this period, can be arranged in a rough
order of least to most flattering: bric-à-brac, curiosité, antiquité, bibelot, objet
d’art. By this time the term bibelot refers strictly to decorative or
collectors’ objects, no longer designating any tool or utensil other than
antiques which no longer have use-value. There is always some degree
of irony involved in using terms with pejorative connotations, namely
bibelot and bric-à-brac, to designate valuable collectors’ objects, raising
questions about the collector’s attachment to what for many seem to be
useless trifles.
‘‘ ́’’
What Chevrie identifies as erudition could be compared to the spirit of
dilettantism which characterizes the century for Paul Bourget. This
characterization is brought to bear in the most substantial nineteenth-
century analysis of the bibelot I have found, Bourget’s newspaper
commentary, republished in his well-known collection, Essais de
psychologie contemporaine: Etudes littéraires. In it, Bourget draws an analogy
between the bibelot, the dilettante’s general intellectual attitude, and the
Goncourt brothers’ writing. In what appears to be a digression, this
piece of literary criticism presents a para-literary representation of late
nineteenth-century culture, from which can be deduced an intriguing
configuration of persons, things, literary production, and material
space. The intent here is not to read Bourget for an accurate portrayal of
some kind of world view, but rather to examine how frivolous material
goods fit into what he calls ‘‘psychologie contemporaine,’’ which he
understands as both individual and collective. The bibelot’s capacity to
carry such a heavy referential charge, as well as the nature of this
referential charge, reveals a great deal about the social significance
accorded material culture in the nineteenth century.
Literature and material culture
Writing in the medium of journalistic literary criticism targeted at the
more culturally sophisticated newspaper reader, but nonetheless obliged
to entertain, Bourget uses an almost obligatory tone of witty irony:
Les frères Goncourt ont été des hommes de musée, et en cela des modernes,
dans toute la force du mot, car cet esprit de dilettantisme et de critique s’est
développé chez nous à ce point qu’il a étendu le musée bien au delà des
collections publiques et privées, en l’introduisant dans le moindre détail de
l’ameublement et en créant le bibelot. Le bibelot, – ce miniscule fragment de
l’oeuvre d’art, qui met sur un angle d’une table de salon quelque chose de
l’extrême Orient et quelque chose de la Renaissance, un peu du moyen âge
français et un peu du e siècle!
[The Goncourt brothers were men of the museum and were therefore moderns
in the strongest sense of the word, for our spirit of dilettantism and of criticism
has developed to the point that it has extended the museum beyond public and
private collections by introducing it into the smallest detail of furnishing and
creating the bibelot. The bibelot – that minuscule fragment of the work of art
which brings to the corner of a table something of the Far East and something
of the Renaissance, a bit of the French Middle Ages and a bit of the eighteenth
century.]
In one sentence Bourget shifts his focus from the Goncourt brothers to
the bibelot, making the transition by evoking first the museum, then the
spirit of dilettantism and criticism with which he defines his age. To be
men of the museum is to embrace this spirit, therefore to be moderns.
This spirit of dilettantism and criticism is credited with the creation of
the bibelot. The meandering connections made in this sentence will
require some unraveling.
For Bourget, in this and other essays in the collection (especially the
article on Renan), dilettantism results from an ‘‘esprit d’analyse’’ which
considers in turn a multiplicity of often contradictory cultural forms (art
works, ideas, philosophies, religions, etc.) from various countries (pp.
–). It is the resulting incertitude in the face of diversity that defines
the dilettante. Unlike the situation of contemplating a single work of art
in its original spatial and cultural context, such as a Christian church or
Greek temple, the museum presents numerous art works which have
been detached, uprooted, and isolated from the context for which they
were designed, presenting the visitor with an overwhelming number of
contradictory influences. The museum, then, is not ‘‘le domaine du
génie et de la création, c’est celui du dilettantisme et de la critique’’ [‘‘the
domain of genius and creation, it is the domain of dilettantism and
criticism’’] (p. ). Dilettantism and criticism are opposed to genius and
The bibelot
creation. The opposition criticism/creation is used to describe the
Goncourts’ writing, which belongs to ‘‘le domaine de l’observation
pure,’’ thus requiring ‘‘des facultés de critique beaucoup plus que de
créateur’’ [‘‘the domain of pure observation’’ / ‘‘the capabilities of the
critic more than those of the creator’’] (p. ). In this spirit, the brothers
assemble and document facts to produce a ‘‘peinture’’ of the ‘‘moeurs de
notre âge,’’ reducing the novel, which should be ‘‘un art d’imagination,’’
to ‘‘une tentative de science exacte’’ (p. ). Such a project is well suited
to its time: ‘‘le roman de constatation, d’analyse minutieuse, de nomen-
clature et de petits faits, est aussi celui qui convient le mieux à notre âge
d’universel recensement’’ [‘‘the novel of observation, of minute analysis,
of nomenclature and of little facts, is also the novel which best suits our
era of universal census’’] (p. ). And yet, paradoxically, the Goncourts
are known for their self-described écriture artiste. This quasi-scientific
census or inventory (‘‘recensement’’) of minute facts is presented by
means of ‘‘une rhétorique de l’image’’ drawn from painting and sculp-
ture (pp. –). Their writing, then, partakes at once in erudite
documentation and the visual arts.
Summing up Bourget’s scattered remarks, what dilettantism, criti-
cism, the museum, and the Goncourts’ writing have in common is a
tendency to assemble and to analyze, juxtaposing things or ideas with-
out hierarchizing or concluding. In other words, philosophical eclecti-
cism meets decorative eclecticism, as the multiplication of objects con-
verges with the multiplication of knowledge. But what ultimately
underpin the creation of the bibelot as Bourget describes it – the
extension of the museum into the bourgeois salon – are the twin
nineteenth-century grand intellectual obsessions: the cult of Science and
the cult of Art. More than mere markers of distinction, material things
are at once a source of knowledge, hence their documentary value, and
a source of aesthetic pleasure. The museum as interior becomes a
private shrine of the cult of Art, rationalized by the doctrines of the cult
of Science.
These issues converge in the bibelot, which is created by the exten-
sion of the museum beyond the space of the collection into the space of
the living room (‘‘cet esprit de dilettantisme et de critique . . . a étendu le
musée bien au delà des collections publiques et privées, en l’introduisant
dans . . . l’ameublement et en créant le bibelot’’). The bibelot is born not
only of the displacement of art (from museum to living room), but also
by its fragmentation, as art is physically reformatted in miniature (‘‘min-
uscule fragment’’), suitable for display on a living room table. Moving
Literature and material culture
the artifact from the museum to the living room represents a secondary
displacement, since the artifacts of the museum collection have already
been displaced from cultures distant in time and/or space (the Orient,
the Renaissance, the French Middle Ages, the eighteenth century, etc.).
The growing body of criticism on collecting and the museum discusses
the phenomenon of displacement at length. Bourget describes the
movement of the bibelot through the material spaces of modernity, from
the museum to the bourgeois interior, then follows its passage through
the marketplace by noting its presence ‘‘aux devantures des grands
magasins de nouveautés’’ and ‘‘dans la boutique du papetier,’’ then
mentions the ‘‘magasin de bric-à-brac’’ (p. ). In the sentences that I
have cited, though, what is perhaps more significant than the displace-
ment of the objects themselves, from museum to living room via the
marketplace, is the displacement of agency from persons – in this case
the Goncourt brothers – to a prevailing cultural attitude, as embodied in
a cultural institution – the museum. To be ‘‘des hommes de musée’’ is to
be subjects constructed in and by a world of objects.
Bourget credits the bibelot with a transformation of the nineteenth-
century interior, and with the absence of a properly nineteenth-century
decorative style, echoing the remarks of Chevrie (cited above):
Le bibelot, – qui a transformé la décoration de tous les intérieurs et leur a donné
une physionomie d’archaı̈sme si continûment curieuse et si docilement soumise
que notre e siècle, à force de colliger et de vérifier tous les styles, aura oublié
de s’en fabriquer un! (p. )
[The bibelot, which transformed the decor of all interiors and gave them an
archaic physiognomy so utterly curious and so docilely submissive that, as a
result of collating and affirming all styles, our nineteenth century has forgotten
to make one for itself.]
In other words, the cultural phenomenon of the bibelot leads to a spirit
of passive submission (‘‘si docilement soumise’’) in the face of a disparate
array of past styles, a situation which in the end circumvents the creation
of a new nineteenth-century style.
Finally, in a sentence hidden in the middle of this tirade, it is revealed
that the bibelot corresponds to the period’s psychology:
Le bibelot, – manie raffinée d’une époque inquiète où les lassitudes de l’ennui et
les maladies de la sensibilité nerveuse ont conduit l’homme à s’inventer des
passions factices de collectionneur, tandis que sa complication interne le ren-
dait incapable de supporter la large et saine simplicité des choses autour de lui!
(p. )
The bibelot
[The bibelot, refined mania of an anxious era in which the weariness of ennui
and the illnesses of nervous sensitivity have led man to invent for himself the
artificial passions of the collector, while his internal complexity renders him
unable to tolerate the broad and healthy simplicity of the things around him.]
The connection between mental illness, artificiality, and psychological
complication corresponds to the familiar themes of decadence, which
Bourget theorizes in his famous essay on Baudelaire.
Bourget concludes his discussion of the bibelot by proclaiming its
fundamental importance to the comprehension of much of the literature
of his time:
Le bibelot . . . C’est une mode, et qui s’en ira comme une autre; mais l’analyste
de notre société contemporaine ne peut pas plus la négliger que l’historien du
grand siècle ne saurait laisser sous silence le paysage taillé du parc de Versailles.
La noble poésie de Racine est en rapport étroit avec l’horizon qui se voit de la
terrasse du vieux palais, et une grande portion de notre littérature actuelle
demeure inintelligible sans l’aspect de magasin de bric-à-brac habituel à nos
installations. (p. )
[The bibelot . . . It is a fashion which will disappear like any other, but the
analyst of our contemporary society can no more ignore it than the historian of
the great century can silently pass over the manicured landscape of the
Versailles gardens. The noble poetry of Racine is closely tied to the horizon
visible from the terrasse of the old palace, and a large part of our current
literature remains unintelligible without the presence of the curiosity shop so
common to our scenery.]
Had the ‘‘magasin de bric-à-brac’’ actually usurped the cultural place of
the Versailles gardens, Le Nôtre’s royal monument of landscape archi-
tecture? What are the implications of claiming such a substitution? The
Versailles park represents a grandiose rationalization of nature which
submits an entire horizon to seventeenth-century monarchial power.
In contrast, the magasins de bric-à-brac which populate the nineteenth-
century urban cityscape represent displays of cultural debris which
circulate in the marketplace, propelled by fashion (‘‘C’est une mode’’).
Under the Third Republic, fashion has replaced the monarch as arbiter
of style. Urban daily life has replaced court life as the locus of culture.
Le Nôtre’s rationalization of nature gives way to a pervasive commodifi-
cation of culture – at least as conceptualized in Bourget’s spatialization
of the literary imaginary.
The intimate relationship which ties material space, such as the
Versailles park and the antique/junk shop, to the literary works for
which they provide a visual field, would seem to suggest that material
Literature and material culture
culture provides the backdrop for the staging of literary production.
However, it is important to be wary of the shiftiness inherent in the
foreground/background distinction, especially in nineteenth-century
narrative forms, where the things in space traditionally relegated to the
background suddenly move to the foreground, first in the realist descrip-
tion, then even more dramatically in the heavily descriptive narratives
of naturalism and decadence. As material objects multiply during the
nineteenth century, material culture is accorded more and more space
in the literary text. Balzac establishes ample space for material culture in
the novel, but positions it in the background. In certain of their novels,
Flaubert, the Goncourts, and Huysmans move material culture into the
foreground. A sense of instability is created by the foregrounding of
elements ordinarily considered as background, such as bibelots, result-
ing in the sort of imbalance which characterizes what Naomi Schor has
called the ‘‘ornamental text.’’ The destabilizing effects of foregrounding
the background mirrors the cultural effects of the replacement of the
monarch by the amorphous forces of the market. The bibelot affords a
unique perspective on material culture precisely because it is a moving
vantage point, shifting from background to foreground, through the
spaces of art, commerce, and private life, through material space and
literary space. The bibelot creates and is created by this movement,
forms and is formed by the subjects which manipulate it, whether these
subjects be writers or their characters, explicitly fictive or purportedly
non-fiction.
Pure, easy, gracious, ornate, varied, prompt, blithe, devout, relief, perspective,
colouring and composition, design and foreshortening, imitator of Nature,
lover of the difficulties – Landino offers a basic conceptual equipment for
addressing Quattrocento pictorial quality. His terms have a structure: one is
opposed to, or is allied with, or is subsumed by, or overlaps another. It would
not be difficult to draw a diagram in which these relationships were registered,
but the diagram would imply a systematic rigidity which the terms in practice do not
and should not have.
Literature and material culture
Baxandall here suggests an opposition between systematic analysis and
practical analysis. Bourdieu makes the further point that the terms of art
criticism originate not in philosophy, but in commerce, in the commis-
sioning and trading of paintings. ‘‘Systematic rigidity’’ corresponds to
philosophical logic, whereas the looser logic of ‘‘practice’’ corresponds
to the domain of the art market. The same is true of bibelots. Like the
lexicon of terms which Baxandall provides in this citation, an extensive
vocabulary for evaluating and categorizing bibelots develops out of the
practices of collecting and trading bibelots in antique shops and at
auctions. Erudite works on collecting and the decorative arts published
in the nineteenth century develop this lexicon into a set of terms which
serves as the ‘‘conceptual equipment’’ for describing bibelots, terms like
those of the fifteenth-century critic cited here (which are not altogether
unlike those still used today). This vocabulary of bibelot-appreciation is
then vulgarized in decorating and collecting ‘‘how-to’’ manuals aimed
at the middle classes. Journalists, essayists, and novelists also borrow
from this lexicon. Like the terms cited by Baxandall, the terms used to
evaluate bibelots ‘‘have a structure’’ which, in practice, does not con-
form to systematic rigidity.
A ‘‘plurality of logics,’’ then, guides perceptions of material culture.
Different practical and formal logics organize different fields (champs) of
cultural production. The growing autonomy of cultural fields like art,
literature, science, private space, commerce, etc., is widely recognized
as a distinctive feature of modernity. However, many of the perceptual
categories of practical and formal logic cut across several of these fields,
the bibelot and related terms being among these.
The remainder of this chapter is organized around three terms which
are not immediately recognizable as applicable to domestic goods,
collectibles, or art objects, but which occur repeatedly in discussions of
the bibelot: imitation, accumulation, and mobility. These terms function in
conjunction with and in opposition to many others. Each opens up sets
of issues related to the topic at hand, the place of the bibelot in the
modernizing reconfiguration, reorganization, and reencoding of ma-
terial culture.
From one perspective, ‘‘imitation’’ presupposes the equally pervasive
antonym, ‘‘authentic.’’ From another perspective, ‘‘imitation’’ presup-
poses a different antonym, ‘‘original.’’ Both sets of antonyms are
The logic(s) of material culture
brought to the forefront during the industrial revolution, since the issue
of imitation is often linked to the copying or reproduction of older
stylistic forms. As a result, in this context the notion of imitation calls
forth further oppositions such as old/new and artistic/industrial. That
the theme of ‘‘imitation’’ is endemic to modern (and postmodern)
culture is amply demonstrated in Hillel Schwartz’s recent weighty book,
The Culture of the Copy.
The theme of imitation in modern culture is of course not limited to
industrial production, nor to the forms of ‘‘mechanical reproduction’’
discussed in Benjamin’s famous essay. Imitation, or ‘‘emulation,’’ to use
Veblen’s term, is also a key concept in discussions of social stratification.
Bourgeois culture is often seen as imitative of noble or artistic models,
which implicitly represent ‘‘authentic’’ culture. However, the binary
imitation/authenticity breaks down upon closer examination of the
chain of who serves as a model for whom. In the case of the nineteenth-
century bibelot-filled interior (what I will call ‘‘the artistic interior’’),
members of the cultural elite imitate collectors and artists; artists imitate
a romanticized image of themselves; the newly wealthy imitate the
cultural elite; the middle classes imitate representations of the decor of
their cultural superiors that they see in shop windows, in the newspaper,
in novels, and at the theater. In this sense, fashion itself is a form of
imitation.
The chain of social imitations commonly known as fashion motivated
a series of manufactured imitations: copies and reproductions of the
objects necessary to furnish fashionable fin-de-siècle interiors. It should
be noted that the techniques of mass production only gradually trans-
form the world of objects in nineteenth-century France, in contrast to
the rapid mechanization of industry in England and Germany. For
many years partial mechanization characterized French industry,
whose particular strength is luxury goods. Reproductions of antiques
produced by partially mechanized artisanal methods predominated
among the decorative goods on the collectors’ market, as well as in retail
stores. Historians now attribute the slowness of French industrialization
not to some sort of ‘‘backwardness,’’ but rather to consumer demand for
high-quality, aesthetically pleasing goods. The widespread taste for the
bibelot can be seen as part of this trend, since bibelots are produced by
the entire range of technological innovation, from hand-production to
partial mechanization to fully industrialized mass production.
Industrial improvements developed during the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury enabled the manufacture of the imitations of art objects and
Literature and material culture
luxury goods, thereby making luxury objects available and affordable
to hundreds of new consumers. These new technologies include ‘‘zinc
d’art,’’ ‘‘bronze d’art,’’ and ‘‘galvanoplastie,’’ as well as techniques
which speed the production and decoration of glass, crystal, porcelain,
and pottery. ‘‘Dans les diverses branches de l’art de la reproduction
tout a été transformé depuis un demi-siècle’’ [‘‘The various branches of
reproductive art have been completely transformed over the last half-
century’’], remarks the Revue des arts décoratifs in . Most of these
production methods remained partially artisanal, and should not be
conflated with the mass production of full industrialization. These
various production methods increased the output, availability, and
affordability of home furnishings, especially decorative items like bi-
belots.
This increased production of furnishings and decorative objects was
accompanied by an increased production of professional and special-
ized writing about them, the publication of which peaked in the s.
The topic of imitation arises frequently in these texts, which almost
without exception make liberal use of the term ‘‘bibelot’’ in referring to
decorative objects. Chief among these publications is the Revue des arts
décoratifs, which from its first appearance in combines the voices of
arts administrators, scholars deploying an erudite art-historical dis-
course, elite collectors, museum curators, art critics, and even some
producers from the luxury-arts industries. Several important interior
decorating manuals were published during this decade, some targeting
decorating professionals, others aimed at a middle-class public. This
body of writing is marked by inconsistencies, often within the same
article or book, resulting from conflicts among its several goals: the
elevation of the taste of the public, the preservation and historical study
of French decorative arts treasures from the past, the commercial
promotion of the French decorative arts industries, and the perpetu-
ation of aesthetic standards of elitist collectors. The two latter goals,
industry promotion and ‘‘high-brow’’ aesthetics, often simultaneously
embraced by the same writer, necessarily create an uneasy ambivalence
in regard to imitations and reproductions. Writers of the literary
sphere tend to express negative attitudes toward imitations and repro-
ductions, since for the most part they do not share the goal of promoting
the decorative arts industries. Even Edmond de Goncourt, himself
involved with many of the above-mentioned arts administrators, cura-
tors, art critics, and art collectors, shows little or no tolerance for
industrial imitation of any kind.
The logic(s) of material culture
Because the techniques of reproduction are many, encompassing the
full range from artisanal to mass production, it is necessary to think
about degrees of imitation in sorting out these published critiques of it.
This complicates and therefore destabilizes the anchoring pole of the
oppositions we set out to examine in this section, imitation/authentic
and imitation/model or original. The various types – or degrees – of
imitation can be divided into four groups: fakes, high-quality reproduc-
tions, simulated luxury materials, and the machine-made imitations of
industrial mass-production.
First, there are imitations best defined as fakes – modern copies which
are marketed as antiques by ‘‘fabricants de fausses antiquités’’ and
‘‘marchands de vieux-neuf.’’ It is here that the opposition old/new
comes into play. The market for fakes prospers from the s to the end
of the century, thanks to the popularity of the bibelot:
Malgré les commotions les plus violentes, le Bibelot règne toujours en souverain
maître. Il faut bien que le nombre des antiquités augmente en raison directe de
celui des amateurs; et c’est se bercer d’illusions que de vouloir empêcher les
naı̈fs d’acheter des vieilleries vendues par des truqueurs de profession.
[Despite the most violent commotion, the Bibelot still reigns as sovereign
master. The number of antiques must of course increase in direct proportion to
the number of collectors. We are deluding ourselves in wanting to prevent the
naive from buying the old-fashioned things sold by professional cheats.]
This citation is taken from Paul Eudel’s Le Truquage (), which
describes in detail the fabrication of different types of counterfeit an-
tiques. The ‘‘truqueurs de profession’’ take full advantage of the many
new collectors seduced by the charm of the bibelot.
In the context of the growing problem of fakes passed off for authentic
antiques, Bosc redefines the term ‘‘bric-à-brac’’ in :
-̀ - . – Dans son sens générique, ce terme sert à désigner toute sorte
d’objets vieux, tels que bahuts, armures, bronzes, tableaux, etc. Le goût
prononcé du public pour ces sortes d’objets a donné lieu à une industrie
nouvelle, la fabrication du vieux neuf, exécutée plus ou moins habilement. Il faut
souvent un oeil très exercé pour distinguer un vieil objet de curiosité authen-
tique d’avec un objet faux. En général, le mot bric-à-brac est employé comme
terme de mépris; on l’applique dans la langue usuelle à des objets de peu de
valeur.
[ - - . – In its generic sense, this term designates all sorts of old objects,
such as chests, armor, bronzes, paintings, etc. The public’s marked taste for these
sorts of objects has given rise to a new industry, the manufacture of the new
old-fashioned, more or less well-made. Distinguishing an authentic curiosity from a
Literature and material culture
false one often requires a very practiced eye. The word bric-à-brac is generally
used pejoratively. In common parlance it refers to objects of little value.]
Once associated with old objects, for Bosc the word ‘‘bric-à-brac’’ now
encompasses both new imitations of old valuables and old objects of no
value. In previous times ‘‘old’’ was a negative attribute; in the age of the
bibelot ‘‘old’’ is often synonymous with ‘‘authentic.’’ The opposition
‘‘vieux’’/‘‘neuf’’ folds into the opposition ‘‘authentique’’/‘‘faux,’’ now
that many old objects have acquired value as antiques. However, the
first opposition cannot be reduced to the second.
The second type of imitation comprises those which do not pretend to
be authentic; these are reproductions rather than fakes. In responding to
these products which made up an important part of the French deco-
rative arts industries in the latter part of the century, tastemaking writers
sympathetic to the concerns of trade found themselves torn between
aesthetics and commerce. Most of them discuss well-made reproduc-
tions sympathetically, though with many cautions. For example, in his
decorating manual Spire Blondel praises the mid-nineteenth-century
invention of a technique for making exact bronze reduced copies of
statues, writing that ‘‘aujourd’hui, il est peu d’intérieurs, mêmes mo-
destes, où l’on ne trouve quelques bonnes réductions de l’antique’’
[‘‘there are today few interiors, even modest ones, without some good
reproductions of antiques’’]. In a similar spirit, Eudel (cited above)
carefully distinguishes the reproduction, or avowed imitation, from the
fake, writing that ‘‘Du moment où vous ne donnez pas une copie
comme authentique, l’imitation est parfaitement légitime’’ [‘‘As long as
you do not proclaim a copy authentic, imitation is perfectly legit-
imate’’]. Honesty helps legitimate the reproduction of art works. Even
though Eudel himself numbers among collecting’s elite, he does accept
avowed reproductions. He even notes that such imitations can be
‘‘useful’’ for the arts, pointing out that the imitation ‘‘est souvent très
utile aux peintres et aux statuaires, dont elle vulgarise les oeuvres’’ [‘‘is
often very useful to painters and sculptors, whose works it popularizes’’]
(ibid.). In other words, reproductions publicize the work of artists,
making them known to a wide audience. The higher purpose of art thus
valorizes these miniaturized reproductions of statues, which might
otherwise be considered to be superfluous decorative objects.
‘‘Art’’ is often used to justify, legitimate, and sell the new decorative
products of nineteenth-century industry. Consider the following state-
ments by two decorative arts professionals:
The logic(s) of material culture
le plus admirable de tous les progrès, c’est la vulgarisation, par le bon marché,
des oeuvres de goût, de luxe et de fantaisie, et nous sommes heureux de
constater que l’immense majorité du public, à qui les arts d’imitation ont permis
une foule de jouissances dont elle fut si longtemps sevrée, partage entièrement
notre avis.
[popularizing tasteful, luxurious, fanciful works by making them affordable is
the most admirable of all advances. We are happy to report that our opin-
ion is shared by the vast majority of the public, for whom the imitative arts
have provided a host of great pleasures, from which they were so long cut
off.]
Le génie de la science moderne semble avoir eu pour objet de diminuer (en
attendant peut-être de la détruire un jour) le privilège exclusif de la richesse en
rendant accessibles à des fortunes modestes les produits les plus merveilleux de
l’industrie et de l’art. Ce qui est certain, c’est que les belles découvertes de la
science ont aujourd’hui pour résultat de distribuer à un très grand nombre les
jouissances de la vie, dont les plus nobles et les plus vives sont le sentiment et la
possession du beau.
[In making accessible the most marvelous products of industry and the arts, the
genius of modern science seems to have held as its goal the diminution (perhaps
awaiting its destruction some day) of the exclusive privilege of wealth. Certain-
ly, the great discoveries of science have today resulted in the distribution of life’s
pleasures to the many. Among these pleasures, the most noble and vivid are the
feeling for and the possession of the beautiful.]
The proliferation of the bibelot raises the problem of accumulation, as
signaled by the recurrence of certain expressions cited in this and the
previous chapter: encombrer, amasser, inonder, myriades, torrent, proportions
inouı̈es, flot montant, débordant, à la grosse, emplir, regorger, s’amonceler, profusion
[to encumber, to amass, to inundate, myriads, torrent, unheard-of
proportions, rising tide, overflowing, in bulk, to fill, to abound in, to pile
up, profusion]. These terms are rarely, if ever, meant to be flattering, for
accumulation poses practical problems on at least three levels: physical,
aesthetic, and moral. Physically, there is the problem of what to do with
Literature and material culture
material abundance, where to put it, how to arrange it, how to display it.
Aesthetically, accumulation produces the effect of disorder, confusion,
and incoherence. On the moral order accumulation is associated with
greed, decadence, licentiousness, gratuity, purposelessness, and vulgar
materialism. While aesthetes and other fashion-minded Parisians who
enthusiastically embraced the bibelot typically rejected or dismissed the
moral condemnation of accumulation, even they faced the physical and
aesthetic dilemmas associated with it.
Collecting and accumulation function as a dichotomous pair. When
an accumulation is reframed as a collection, each of the negative moral
attributes of accumulation listed above translates into its ‘‘positive’’
counterpart. For example, mere accumulation represents the hoarding
of a miscellaneous group of things gathered for no useful purpose other
than the satisfaction of lustful greed. In contrast, a collection represents
the systematic gathering of a selective group of things for higher purposes
such as science, aesthetics, or memory preservation. Collecting mobi-
lizes powerful legitimating discourses such as science, art, sentimentality,
and conservation to justify interest in material, earthly things. Accumu-
lation is irrational, sensuous, and libidinal. Collecting is orderly, intellec-
tual, and purposeful. The concept of the collection not only justifies and
legitimates the acquisition of otherwise superfluous material things, but
also provides them with meaning, value, and organizational principles.
From another perspective, collecting is not the opposite of accumula-
tion, but rather a form of it, and a historically specific one at that. The
pattern of accumulation specific to a particular time and place could be
called a ‘‘mode of accumulation,’’ and would correspond to Marx’s
‘‘mode of production.’’ Collecting bibelots symptomatizes the mode of
accumulation which characterizes nineteenth-century Europe and
North America, caught up in the grip of emerging mass consumption.
What I am calling ‘‘mode of accumulation’’ determines the fate of
surplus material goods circulating in the economy, the way they are
acquired and by whom, as well as how they are stored, displayed, and
disposed of. The bibelot is by definition associated with surplus, and is a
visible marker of a shift in the mode of accumulation which corresponds
to the rise of industrial capitalism, the mode of production of late
nineteenth-century France. I have chosen to speak of a ‘‘mode of
accumulation’’ rather than a ‘‘mode of consumption’’ because the
category ‘‘bibelot’’ includes so many objects which are not considered to
be consumer goods (defined as those recently manufactured objects
which pass through the marketplace by means of monetary exchange).
The logic(s) of material culture
More comprehensive than the notion of consumption is that of accumu-
lation, which comprises not only the purchase of consumer goods, but
also the acquisition of material artifacts through non-market mecha-
nisms like plunder, ‘‘primitive’’ exchange (such as that practiced by
ethnologists like Captain Cook), gift exchange, inheritance, second-
hand markets, auctions, and the ‘‘recycling’’ of debris. Furthermore,
bibelots are generally not ‘‘used up’’ or ‘‘consumed,’’ but rather are
stockpiled, which is more in keeping with the notion of accumulation
than with that of consumption. For these reasons, the nineteenth-
century bibelot is best thought of as a pre-consumer object. It is an object
poised on the brink of full-fledged mass consumption.
Collecting serves as a basic mechanism for the ‘‘mode of accumula-
tion’’ of emergent mass consumption. The logic and mechanisms of
collecting inform the entire nineteenth-century world of objects, provid-
ing models for displaying and classifying goods in such diverse spaces as
the living room, the department store, and the museum. Collecting, as
notion and practice, provides an already familiar model for addressing
the threefold problem of accumulation – physical problems of storage,
aesthetic problems of display, and moral problems of justifiable purpose.
Collecting must be understood as part of a broader process of assimila-
ting, managing, and promoting the material accumulation which results
from the multiplication of objects during the consumer revolution.
The accumulations of things typically associated with fin-de-siècle
bourgeois decor hardly correspond to twentieth-century notions of the
collection, which is seen as more selective and orderly than it was a
century ago. Because nineteenth-century collections were so eclectic,
the terms listed at the beginning of this section were often used to
criticize the period’s decor. These very terms in fact come to character-
ize the ‘‘mode of accumulation’’ of this era, a mode very different than
that which currently prevails in the United States and Europe. The
density of objects found in even the most elegant interiors of the s
and s would strike most people today as cluttered, chaotic, and
utterly unlivable. As Peter Thornton explains in discussing traits shared
by Victorian and fin-de-siècle Parisian interiors, those who lived in them
perceived them differently than we do:
‘‘Mobility,’’ as opposed to ‘‘immobility,’’ ‘‘fixity,’’ or ‘‘stability,’’ can be
understood physically, socially, and economically. Physically, bibelots
are not only inert, but are also generally immobile, lying around on
Literature and material culture
shelves gathering dust. However, the opposite is also true: again in
spatial terms, bibelots are mobile, as compared to architectural features
or even large pieces of furniture. It might be remembered that the
French word for building is immeuble, from the Latin immobilis (immo-
bile), while the word for furniture is meuble, or mobile. Socially, the
bibelot comes in all price ranges, and is thus found in the dwelling spaces
of persons spanning a wide range of classes, occupations, and lifestyles;
the bibelot is thus sociologically mobile as well. Economically, bibelots
circulate freely through the marketplace.
The spatial mobility of the bibelot corresponds to trends outlined in a
best-selling decorating manual of , pedantically subtitled ‘‘Gram-
maire de l’ameublement.’’ Henry Havard describes two main types of
interior decoration, ‘‘fixed’’ and ‘‘mobile.’’ Fixed decor relies on
‘‘l’architecture même de la pièce,’’ and thus consists of such elements as
wainscoting, wall covering, ornamental door frames, piers painted with
scenes, and the room’s general proportions. In contrast, mobile decor
relies primarily on ‘‘des meubles et des objets d’art,’’ including seating,
display cabinets, paintings, and mirrors, ‘‘disposés d’une façon plus ou
moins pittoresque.’’ The bibelot-filled interior is of course of the
second type, mobile, based as it is on the accumulation of certain types
of objects and furnishings.
The spatial mobility of the modern interior facilitates the bibelot’s
movements across social strata. With its sculpted moldings and painted
panels, the fixed decor described here by Havard is limited to the
wealthy. A simplified version of architecturally fixed decor does exist
among the rural popular classes, whose beds and storage units are often
built-in. These rustic homes, however, do not satisfy the taste for
luxury, a preference which is by no means restricted to the privileged. In
addition, the development of standardized apartment buildings de-
signed in response to urban population growth makes fixed decor even
more financially inaccessible even to many among the cultural elite.
Though a family of modest income living in Paris during the second half
of the nineteenth century cannot afford a custom-designed ‘‘fixed’’
interior decor, it can satisfy its desire for luxury by gradually accumulat-
ing the disparate elements necessary for a mobile decor, using antiques,
copies, or fakes. The density of objects in this type of interior tends to be
high not only because accumulation and profusion are valorized, but
also because period furnishings originally designed for large aristocratic
dwellings are routinely introduced into the middle classes’ smaller
modern Parisian homes and apartments. The bibelot is perfectly
The logic(s) of material culture
adapted to add a touch of aristocratic luxury to these scaled-down
spaces. As Havard observes, mobile decor is the more appropriate
design strategy not only for the middle-class family, but also for the
artist, since the ‘‘décoration fixe’’ tends to be ‘‘moins personnelle, moins
intime.’’ Of course, the flattering association with the artist makes the
eclectic interior even more appealing to fashion-conscious members of
the middle class.
Because the middle classes cannot always afford the ‘‘oeuvre d’art de
qualité supérieure’’ recommended by Havard, another decorating man-
ual explains how the housewife of modest means can create her own
eclectic interior:
Vous avez de vieux meubles, des imitations de l’ancien et des bagatelles
modernes, un portrait de Largillière et un paysage de Corot; ingéniez-vous par
le jeu des tapis et des tentures à tout harmoniser dans un cadre élégant. Vous
trouverez là l’occasion de donner une note personnelle et, à ce mélange
composite, un caractère particulier.
[You have old furnishings, imitations of antiques and modern trifles, a portrait
by Largillière and a landscape by Corot. Playfully arrange the carpets and wall
coverings so as to harmonize everything within an elegant frame. This will allow
you to add a personal note and particular character to this composite melange.]
On posa devant les brocanteurs un petit coffret avec des médaillons, des angles
et des fermoirs d’argent, le même qu’il avait vu au premier dîner dans la rue de
Choiseul [chez les Arnoux], qui ensuite avait été chez Rosanette, était revenu
The logic(s) of material culture
chez Mme Arnoux; souvent, pendant leurs conversations, ses yeux le rencon-
traient; il était lié à ses souvenirs les plus chers, et son âme se fondait
d’attendrissement, quand Mme Dambreuse dit tout à coup:
–Tiens! je vais l’acheter.
[Before the dealers was placed a small coffret with silver medallions, silver
corner pieces, and silver clasps, the same coffret he had seen at the first dinner
on Choiseul Street +at the Arnoux’s,, and that had afterward been at Ro-
sanette’s, then had come back to Madame Arnoux’s. Often, during their
conversations, his eyes encountered it. It was bound to his most dear memories,
and his soul melted with tenderness, when Mme Dambreuse suddenly said,
‘‘Well then, I’m going to buy it!’’]
For Frédéric the object has become a souvenir, a sentimental relic, but
of which woman, Madame Arnoux or Rosanette? The scandal of
adultery is displaced from human beings to inanimate objects, trans-
formed into objects of exchange. This antique from the Renaissance
was given as a gift, only to be taken back and given again to someone
else, then taken back once more in order to put it up for sale. The end
result is that the gift, an object sacralized by its symbolic function of
linking two persons, becomes a commodity, an object desacralized by
the alienating effects of money. The gift, subject by custom to a set of
implicit rules which preclude this kind of recycling, is degraded by its
metamorphosis into a monetary transaction. By its displacements from
dwelling to dwelling, then from domestic spaces (the women’s homes) to
a commercial space (the auction house), and also by its transplantation
from one exchange system (the gift) to another (the commodity), the
coffret escapes the ascendancy of the individual. It is therefore in vain
that Frédéric attempts to reattach his sentiments to this object which
refuses to remain in place, physically or economically.
As Diana Knight clearly demonstrates, in Flaubert’s fiction the fetish-
ization of material objects associated with a beloved person is intimately
connected to the commodification and industrialization of art and
sentiments. Yet if Frédéric’s reaction to the sale of the coffret is to be
understood in terms of a resistance to commodification, then his charac-
ter is cleaved by a contradiction, since he is one of the most ardent
consumers in French literature, buying new goods with every significant
turn of events, as noted above. His drive to renew his possessions
through purchase sets in motion a cycle which is halted by his momen-
tary attachments to Mme Arnoux’s belongings. I say that the cycle is
halted because the full cycle of renewal through consumption involves
not only the acquisition of objects, but also their disposal, the attribute of
Literature and material culture
objects which I associated with the late twentieth-century consumer
object. Frédéric resists the disposal of goods through resale: it should be
recalled that while he fails to save Madame Arnoux from dispossession,
he does manage to forestall the sale of Rosanette’s household effects.
Madame Arnoux likewise exhibits a sentimentality toward objects, in
committing to memory the contours of the bibelots in Frédéric’s apart-
ment during their last meeting in the penultimate chapter of the novel.
Her and Frédéric’s sentimental attachment to each other’s bibelots
seems to belong to an age which has already passed. Within the
emotional economy of L’Education sentimentale, because of its mobility, the
bibelot can no longer be expected to bear the weight of the tender
attachments projected onto similar objects by the Romantic heart of
yesteryear. Other characters in this novel exhibit no such sentimental
scruples. Arnoux, Rosanette, Mademoiselle Vatnaz, and Madame
Dambreuse readily traffic in bibelots; the latter’s willingness to purchase
the coffret of a rival testifies to a defiance of sentimental fetishization.
These characters are therefore much more evolved as consumers. The
cycle of acquisition and disposal to which I allude here is best expressed
in a sentence describing Rosanette:
Incapable de résister à une envie, elle s’engouait d’un bibelot qu’elle avait vu,
n’en dormait pas, courait l’acheter, le troquait contre un autre, et gâchait les
étoffes, perdait ses bijoux, gaspillait l’argent, aurait vendu sa chemise pour une
loge d’avant-scène.
[Incapable of resisting a desire, she became infatuated with a bibelot she had
seen, was kept awake by it, ran out to buy it, exchanged it for another, and
ruined fabrics, lost her jewelry, wasted money, would have sold her blouse for
box seats at the theater.]
Rosanette does not hesitate to resell what she buys. This is certainly
largely a function of her lower-class standing, intermittent poverty, and
above all her novelistic role as courtesan/prostitute: her commodified
sexuality is simply transferred to her sentimentality, by the sort of
structural analogy typical of classical narrative. Her cycle of buying-
selling-squandering-ruining-trading, however, is surely also indicative
of a more complete assimilation of the dynamics of consumption.
The most famous literary courtesan of the proto-consumer era, the
title character of Zola’s Nana, can be compared to Flaubert’s Rosa-
nette on several counts. Both inhabit bibelot-filled interiors which can
be described as ‘‘mobile’’ according to Havard’s schema (see above),
since their key feature is the eclectic combination of disparate elements
like animal skin rugs, European porcelain, and Oriental vases. More
The logic(s) of material culture
pertinently, Nana shares Rosanette’s willingness to break the senti-
mental bonds often associated with bibelots. Nana moves several times
during the novel according to the wealth of her latest lover, again like
Rosanette. At one point Nana sells her bibelots to live in poverty with
an actor. In another famous scene she takes great pleasure in smashing
precious bibelots given her for her birthday. The facility with which
she parts with her possessions certainly symbolizes the circulation of
men in her life, but also reveals a much wider transformation affecting
the relationship between individuals and their material goods for so-
ciety at large. As is the case with Flaubert’s post-sentimental con-
sumers (Rosanette, Arnoux, Mademoiselle Vatnaz, Madame Dam-
breuse), Nana is on the verge of discovering the most distinctive
elements of fully developed consumer society: the commutability of
values, alienability, and conspicuous waste. It is conspicuous waste
which evolves into ‘‘disposability’’ during the twentieth century. In
regard to the evolution of consumer culture, the difference between
the two novels is the absence in Nana of sentimental fetishists like
Frédéric and Madame Arnoux. This reflects a more complete assimi-
lation of consumption.
Yet in another sense Nana is a less evolved consumer than those of
Flaubert. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that she is uneven-
ly evolved, for despite her very modern affective relation to objects,
she is not yet a true consumer, since unlike Flaubert’s Frédéric and the
(female) clientele in Zola’s Au bonheur des dames (), she makes no
purchases, but rather receives gifts. Nana is thus caught up in a hybrid
economy which combines the features of a gift economy with that of
an emerging consumer economy. To sell or destroy a gift is to render
it ‘‘alienable,’’ which according to the well-established anthropological
tradition characterizes the commodity form endemic to consumer so-
ciety. It should be noted that the bibelot, whether given or pur-
chased, cannot be considered a consumer object as long as it functions
as a relic, or emits a Benjaminian ‘‘aura.’’ Nana’s originality, as com-
pared to Frédéric, is to have given up the symbolic status (in the strong
sense of the sacred) of the bibelot as relic or gift, in order to benefit
from a convertibility of values (monetary or sentimental) by sale, or by
destruction in an act which draws from both the sacrificial nature of
potlach (Bataille) and conspicuous waste (Veblen). Nana’s attitude and
actions in relation to her possessions reveal that, although she is not
yet a consumer in the current sense of the term, she has already begun
to assimilate certain behaviors necessary to the full development of
Literature and material culture
consumption as it is known today in Europe, North America, and the
wealthier countries of the Far East.
Such is not the case with Frédéric Moreau, who feels lost in the face of
the displacement of the decorative objects which he associates with
Madame Arnoux. His uneasiness is no doubt as sociological as it is
sentimental. Brian Rigby describes a paradox fundamental to the ma-
terial culture of the nineteenth-century novel: a complex aesthetic and
moral resistance to material objects accompanies elaborate descriptions
of great quantities of them. A similar ambivalence is apparent in
Frédéric: in spite of his own frequent spending sprees, he shows resis-
tance to structures of consumption that the more evolved consumers
listed above have already interiorized. Frédéric has not yet begun to
assimilate the principles of the modernizing mobility of objects – their
convertibility, circulation, and waste – whereas Nana especially seems
exhilarated by the new capacity of objects to circulate freely or to be
disposed of at will.
The myth of the artist and the cult of art so permeate nineteenth-
century French literature and criticism that Claude Duchet suggests
revising the familiar schema for periodizing French studies by century:
he places the ‘‘paradigme de ‘l’artiste’’’ between ‘‘l’ère des ‘philosophes’
et l’avènement de ‘l’intellectuel’.’’ The private dwelling becomes an
important site on which the nineteenth-century ‘‘paradigme de ‘l’art-
iste’’’ is played out, for during this period, artistic sensibility is
commonly manifested by an appreciation of the ‘‘minor’’ arts of interior
furnishing and decor, fueling the popularity of collecting and the bi-
belot. To launch an inquiry into the relationship of the philosophe or the
intellectual to interior decor would be ludicrous; however, many of the
writers of the era of the artist take decor very seriously and write about it
at length, often dramatizing the sociology of aesthetic judgment in
fiction and non-fiction. Issues of class and gender complicate matters:
the image of the artist appeals to social groups from whom a mostly male
cultural elite strives to distance itself, the bourgeoisie and women. The
home interior thus becomes a field of struggle for claims to artistic taste.
At the heart of this struggle one finds the bibelot in its various guises –
objet d’art, objet de luxe, objet de mode, objet superflu, objet de consommation, objet de
désir.
The lengthy descriptions of interior decor characteristic of nine-
teenth-century novels are best understood within the context of both the
sociology and the aesthetics of the decorative arts. For this reason, in
what follows I consider literary texts alongside commercial writing on
interior decor, such as how-to manuals, trade journals, and newspaper
articles. The story of the interior which emerges from these two bodies
of writing goes something like this: the collection used as decor (in other
words, the cultural phenomenon of the bibelot) purportedly originates
among the aristocratic and artistic elite (including collectors, painters,
and writers), then is popularized and vulgarized by the middle classes,
Literature and material culture
and by women. A common strategy for gendering decor emerges:
feminine bibelots are relegated to the sphere of fashion, while masculine
bibelots are elevated to the sphere of art.
The dominant decorative styles of the eras of the philosophe, the artist,
and the intellectual are, respectively, rococo, eclecticism, and modernist
functionalism. By ‘‘eclecticism’’ I refer to the incorporation of collecting
into the home interior. This generally European trend, reflected for
example in the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton, is especially
important in France, recognized as a leader in the production of high-
quality luxury goods. Literary and commercial writers alike frequently
deploy the words art and artistique to emphasize the aesthetic value of the
furnishings and collectibles of the eclectic interior. I use the phrase
‘‘artistic interior’’ to designate this particular conceptualization of eclec-
tic decor.
Describing an interior as artistic (or in many cases, as less than artistic)
is complicated by changes in the usage of the word art in the wake of
what Pierre Bourdieu describes as the autonomization of the field(s) of
cultural production. I speak specifically of France and French, though
the situation is similar throughout Europe. By the end of the eighteenth
century, the field of art has divided into two domains, on the one hand
the beaux arts, and on the other hand l’art mécanique, also known as l’art
décoratif or l’art industriel. Semantically, artiste comes to be understood as a
derivative of beaux arts, while artisan is understood to derive from l’art
mécanique. Art becomes opposed to industrie, which eventually refers to
factory rather than artisanal production. As a result, the presence of the
word art in the compound terms art décoratif and art industriel becomes
problematic. However, the prestige-value of the term art prompts
industrialists to retain claims on it, by redefining the decorative arts in
terms of the beaux arts. Meanwhile, the decorative arts become caught up
in the trend of collecting household luxury objects produced during the
pre-industrial age. Collectors too seek to retain the kinship between the
higher-status beaux arts and their decorative/industrial/mechanical
counterparts.
As early as the s the vocabulary of art begins to appear in literary
depictions of eclectic home interiors. Many writers presume a straight-
forward homology between aesthetic status and social status. The rela-
tionship between antique furnishings, the myth of the artist, and social
The fashionable artistic interior
hierarchies is made clear in many texts by Balzac, such as La Muse du
département, Le Cousin Pons, and La Cousine Bette. However, I will begin
with a more unusual source, George Sand’s Le Compagnon du Tour de
France (), a socially conscious novel of trade unions. The love
between the highly idealized hero and heroine, an artistically gifted
carpenter and an aristocratic heiress, is bound up in the beautifully
archaic decor of the latter’s family château, which the former is renova-
ting. In reference to this setting, the narrator remarks that at the time
when the novel is set, around , ‘‘le goût des curiosités n’était pas
encore descendu dans la vie vulgaire’’ [‘‘the taste for curiosities had not
yet trickled down into the common way of life’’]. As compared to the
time of the novel’s writing, ‘‘La boutique de bric-à-brac n’était pas aussi
essentielle dans chaque rue de Paris . . . que la boutique du boulanger’’
[‘‘The curiosity shop was not yet as essential to every Paris street . . . as
the bakery’’]. In , ‘‘S’entourer de ces objets hétérogènes et vivre
dans la poussière du passé était déjà une mode, mais une mode exquise
et répandue seulement dans les hautes classes ou chez les artistes en
vogue’’ [‘‘To surround oneself with these heterogenous objects and to
live in the dust of the past was already the fashion, but it was an
exquisite fashion which had spread only among the upper classes or
among artists in vogue’’] (p. ). Sand thus identifies the eclectic in-
terior with aristocrats and artists, disdaining the spread of this taste
outside of these two ‘‘classes.’’ The apparent contradiction between
Sand’s artistic elitism and her socialist politics is resolved by her identifi-
cation of the ideal working-class artisan as an artist; her elitism is
directed against the middle classes.
Writing nearly twenty years later, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
echo Sand’s elitist attitude toward collecting (if not her socialist politics).
In their journal they observe that ‘‘La collection est entrée complète-
ment dans les habitudes et dans les distractions du peuple français’’
[‘‘Collecting has been completely integrated into the habits and pas-
times of the French people’’]. They too deem that this represents ‘‘une
vulgarisation de la propriété de l’oeuvre d’art ou d’industrie, réservée
dans les siècles précédents aux musées, aux grands seigneurs, aux
artistes’’ [‘‘a popularization of the proprietorship of the work of art or of
industry, which in previous centuries was restricted to museums, great
lords and artists’’]. For the Goncourts it is museums as well as artists
and aristocrats who, as collectors, are being imitated by ordinary French
people. The phrasing of the second sentence presents vulgarization as a
post-revolutionary violation of feudal property rights. Sand and the
Literature and material culture
Goncourts socially encode the interior filled with collectibles as elite by
assigning it aristocratic and artistic origins, identifying collecting as a
Restoration () or ancien régime (‘‘siècles précédents’’) tradition. The
notion of vulgarization sets up the artist and the aristocrat as models
which other classes merely imitate.
The Goncourts soon extend their proprietary attitude toward art to
high society (whose members are not limited to what remains of the
ancien régime aristocracy), whom they accuse of collecting art objects for
illegitimate motivations, with an inadequate capacity for artistic ap-
preciation. Edmond de Goncourt is perhaps the most vocal defender of
the true collector (apparently epitomized by himself ) against those who
are just posing – not only members of the middle classes, but also ‘‘les
hommes et les femmes du monde qui ont la prétention d’être des natures
artistiques’’ [‘‘those men and women of high society who claim to be
artistic by nature’’]. The rights to the terms artiste and artistique are in
dispute throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century because they
are so often appropriated undeservingly in the eyes of those who claim
membership among the cultural elite.
The brothers seem to enjoy comparing their taste to that of persons
among the highest social ranks. In two very different entries they
evaluate the ‘‘artistic interior’’ of the Second Empire’s princess
Mathilde. They begin by mocking her amateur painting activities, and
at this point clearly number her among ‘‘les hommes et les femmes du
monde qui ont la prétention d’être des natures artistiques.’’ They then
belittle the decor of this same studio, which they find to be ‘‘encombré
de ces choses qui ne sont des objets d’art que pour les femmes, un faux
pastel de Boucher, de faux pastels de Chardin’’ [‘‘cluttered with those
things which only women consider to be objets d’art, a fake Boucher
pastel, fake Chardin pastels’’]. This sentence introduces a gender
distinction, in the insinuation that men would not consider fake pastels
to be art works, whereas women do; mistaking non-art for art becomes a
feminine trait. The gendering of art appreciation becomes common-
place, a point to which I will return below.
It is with a quite different attitude that, twelve years later, after having
developed a friendship with the princess, Edmond writes a favorable
description of her studio. The Princess had invited him to lunch to show
him her ‘‘bibelots,’’ he explains. ‘‘Me voilà dans son atelier de Paris, au
milieu de cet amas de choses, de ce monde d’objets très rares, très
précieux, très chers, dans lesquels jurent et détonnent des singularités
hétéroclites’’ [‘‘Here I am in her Paris studio, in the midst of this mass of
The fashionable artistic interior
things, in this world of very rare, very precious, very dear objects, where
heterogenous singularities collide and clash’’]. There is no indication
here that the term ‘‘atelier’’ is used in an ironic way. On the contrary,
the terms ‘‘rares,’’ ‘‘précieux,’’ ‘‘chers,’’ and ‘‘singularités’’ indicate a
respectful recognition of the value of these tastefully chosen things. The
rivalry of taste present in the earlier passage gives way to an alliance of
taste. In both cases, taste functions as a mediator in the relationship
between the Goncourts and the princess.
In contrast, Edmond shows great disdain for the display of collectibles
in the famous Rothschild château at Ferrières in referring to its ‘‘bi-
beloterie écrasante’’ [‘‘crushing knick-knack-ware’’]. This dwelling
‘‘n’est pas un château meublé, c’est un magasin de curiosités’’ [‘‘is not a
furnished château, but a curiosity shop’’]. Unlike the princess’s bi-
belots, the Rothschild collection does not produce artistic effects, but
rather recalls the curiosity shop, an inappropriate model for the display
of a collection, as compared to the favored model of the atelier. It is not
simply the authenticity of the objects themselves that is questioned, but
rather the authenticity of the collector’s practice. As one journalist puts
it in an article, ‘‘pour un sensitif’’ the most expensive luxury is
intolerable unless tempered by ‘‘les délicatesses et les discrétions’’ of
taste, which is innate, and cannot be improvised. The vulgar bourgeois
buys luxury, while the ‘‘sensitif’’ (a code word for ‘‘aesthete’’?) filters
vulgar luxury through his delicate and discreet taste. Thus though the
bourgeois and the ‘‘sensitif’’ own the same objects, they are signs of
vulgarity in the home of the former, as opposed to signs of artistic taste
in the home of the latter.
By the s the terms art, artiste, and artistique are commonly found in
commercial descriptions of eclectic home interiors. For example, an
article in the professional journal Revue des arts décoratifs makes
reference to the growing passion ‘‘du mobilier de luxe et du mobilier
d’art, jointe à un goût d’archéologie qui a passé des amateurs au public’’
[‘‘for luxury and artistic furnishings, along with a taste for archaeology
which has been passed on from collectors to the public’’]. The phrase
‘‘mobilier d’art,’’ along with its variants ‘‘ameublements d’art’’ and
‘‘meubles d’art,’’ refers to furnishings chosen for their historicism or
exoticism, whether the pieces be actual antiques, modern copies, or
original modern designs inspired by historic or exotic models. Like-
wise, decorators’ catalogues and how-to manuals from the s bear
names such as Ameublements artistiques, L’Art au foyer domestique, L’Art dans la
maison, and L’Art intime.
Literature and material culture
An article by Victor Champier ties the public interest in the
decorative arts to larger factors such as economic growth, social ambi-
tion, and democratization. The ‘‘amour du luxe’’ has never before been
so widespread, Champier argues. Equality among the classes is manifes-
ted by the similarity of their clothing and furnishings, yet there also
prevails a desire to be noticed and to dazzle. These factors create the
conditions which favor this ‘‘penchant universel’’ for all that is flashy,
and which promotes comfort and well-being. The following sentence
describes what I am calling the ‘‘artistic interior’’:
La mode elle-même s’en est mêlée, et la passion de notre temps pour
l’archéologie mobiliaire, pour les antiquailles et les bibelots, a répandu jusque
dans les classes bourgeoises le goût de belles choses, a éveillé des curiosités
artistiques, a développé des désirs nouveaux pour le superflu élégant et aimable
qui est le signe d’un certain raffinement intellectuel.
[Fashion itself has intervened, and our era’s passion for the archeology of
furnishings, for antiquities and for bibelots, has spread the taste for beautiful
things to the bourgeois classes, has awakened artistic curiosities, has developed
new desires for elegant and lovely superfluities, which is the sign of a certain
intellectual refinement.]
The taste for that which is encoded as artistic has in turn become
encoded, since it is the ‘‘passion’’ for antiques, and not the objects
themselves, which functions as the ‘‘signe’’ of a refined intellect. Fur-
thermore, such taste, and, I would add, the awareness of the sign-
function of such taste, has trickled down into the bourgeoisie. I cite this
passage not simply in support of the now all too familiar notion of
‘‘distinction,’’ but rather to demonstrate a longstanding awareness of
what could be called a sociology of furnishings.
Echoing Champier almost a century later, Pierre Bourdieu describes
choices in home furnishings (especially antique collectibles) in a number
of the case studies which illustrate Distinction. In analyzing these
examples, Bourdieu ‘‘reads’’ codes which are already in place, exposing
an established encoding of objects by a class-inflected though ostensibly
neutral discourse of art and personal preference. I would add that these
codes are often gender-inflected as well. Furthermore, these codes are
already present in the nineteenth-century literary, para-literary, and
commercial discourse which not only reports, represents, and prescribes
such interiors, but also aids in their dissemination, which is in turn
reported, represented, and prescribed in print. As a part of the process,
these bodies of writing simultaneously develop, implement, and trans-
The fashionable artistic interior
form a lexicon of class- and gender-inflected code words for inscribing
home furnishings and domestic objects with both personalized and
shared meanings, the interpretation or ‘‘reading’’ of which is also class-
and gender-inflected. From this perspective, ‘‘bibelot’’ is both a code
word in itself, as well as a category of things being described by other
code words.
Like the home of the collector, the artist’s studio, or rather an idealized
image of it, undergoes the transformation from antiquarianism to aes-
theticism. The aestheticized collection based on the myth of the artist
becomes the style of decor associated with the fin-de-siècle art studio. As
a recent architectural critic puts it, the ‘‘ ‘style artiste’’’ becomes ‘‘de
rigueur’’ in fin-de-siècle artists’ studios, suggesting that artists too are
compelled to adopt the style of the artist, as if merely producing art
works is no longer enough to qualify a person as a true artist, as if being
an artist means living the lifestyle of the artist.
This transformation of the artist’s studio is explained in an article on
the studios of the Romantic generation. The studio of the Romantic
painter Decamps is calls a ‘‘boutique de bric-à-brac.’’ This pile of odds
and ends is contrasted against the ‘‘élégants boudoirs ou des nefs
gothiques où nos peintres à la mode symbolisent et esthétisent, y ac-
cumulant toujours des bibelots, mais avec un choix délicat et une
coquetterie’’ [‘‘elegant boudoirs or gothic naves where our fashionable
painters symbolize and aesthetize, always accumulating delicately and
coquettishly chosen bibelots’’]. It is noteworthy that the term ‘‘bi-
belot,’’ preferred by aesthetes, appears only in the context of fin-de-
siècle decor, whereas the term ‘‘bric-à-brac,’’ associated with antiquar-
ianism, is used in the earlier context. The two terms are in turn assigned
to different types of spaces: the ‘‘boutique de bric-à-brac’’ characterizes
the earlier studio, while the later studios are compared to the boudoir and
Literature and material culture
the Gothic cathedral. In these feminine (boudoir) and spiritual (Gothic)
interiors, artfully chosen bibelots demonstrate their owner’s tempera-
ment through his artful arrangement of them.
Literary incarnations of the chic atelier filled with bibelots include the
studio of Coriolis in the Goncourts’ Manette Salomon, the studio of
Pellerin in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, the atelier Raoule decorates
for her artist lover in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, and the home of the
high-society painter Fagerolles in Zola’s L’Oeuvre. Of course, not all
artists’ studios are decorated in this way, as the article cited here points
out. In fiction, the heroic artist Bongrand of L’Oeuvre disdains the studio
decorated with ‘‘cette magnificence de tentures et de bibelots dont
commençaient à s’entourer les jeunes peintres’’ (: ).
An how-to manual by a decorator-upholsterer implicitly pres-
ents the artist’s studio as a model for his (would-be) clients, noting that
studios are decorated like salons, with ‘‘toutes sortes de meubles, de
sièges, de bibelots, d’étoffes, de tentures’’ [‘‘all sorts of furniture, chairs,
bibelots, cloth, and wall hangings’’]. He goes on to explain that ‘‘la
profusion et la diversité des objets’’ is justified here because the artist can
use these things in his paintings. Qualities such as profusion and
diversity could be seen as negative if encoded as signs of sloppy deco-
rative arrangement, or worse, as signs of bourgeois materialism, or as
signs of a penchant for ostentation. Instead, the author of the manual
legitimates the proliferation of superfluous things by pointing out their
contribution to artistic creativity.
- -
Literary authors also establish the home of the writer as an authentic
version of the artistic interior. ‘‘Quand se rendra-t-on compte que les
ameublements artistiques ne peuvent être intéressants que chez les
artistes . . . ?’’ [‘‘When will we realize that artistic furnishings can only be
interesting in the homes of artists . . . ?], asks the narrator of Proust’s
early novel, Jean Santeuil (–). The artists named in the passage
thus introduced are all writers: Edmond de Goncourt, Anatole France,
and Robert de Montesquiou. Like the atelier of the painter or sculptor,
the home of the writer is represented here as an ‘‘authentic’’ artistic
interior. A subordinate clause which opens a long Proustian sentence
describes a decorative minimalism which one might expect to find in the
home of the artist-writer. In the sentence’s main clause, the narrator
notes that the houses of collectors such as Edmond de Goncourt,
The fashionable artistic interior
Anatole France, or Robert de Montesquiou ‘‘intéressent le romancier et
redeviennent pour lui matière à description’’ [‘‘capture the interest of
the writer and provide descriptive material’’]. The next sentence posits a
spiritual, even mystical relationship between writers and their collec-
tions:
Après de longs pèlerinages incertains vers un dessin de Watteau, une statuette
de Clodion, une estampe d’Houkasaı̈, ils ont enfin trouvé la vraie pierre de
l’autel du dieu et l’ont intronisée à la place qui semblait l’attendre entre d’autres
idoles qu’une même ferveur, plutôt qu’une seule enceinte, y a réunies. (p. )
[After long, uncertain pilgrimages to a drawing by Watteau, a statuette by
Clodion, or a print by Houkasaı̈, they finally found the authentic altar stone of
the god and enthroned it in the place which seemed to await it, amidst other
idols united more by the same fervor than by the same enclosure.]
Montesquiou’s interior was discussed above. Anatole France’s passion
for collecting shows itself in his high-society novel Le Lys rouge (). It
should be recalled here that Edmond de Goncourt published a two-
volume annotated inventory of his and his late brother’s collections,
inscribing the myth of the artist in the title: La Maison d’un artiste ().
The fictitious and the biographical overlap here, because it is largely
through written discourse that the writer’s artistic interior is invented as
a concept, whether or not this writing makes reference to an actually
existing space.
For the writers that Proust mentions, a poeticization of the dwelling
accompanies the aestheticization of the collector’s interior. The connec-
tion between the interior and artistic production among post-Romantic
writers has been summed up by Guy Sagnès, who suggests that for many
fin-de-siècle writers, ‘‘athées de la nature, dévots de meubles et de
bibelots,’’ their room provides the poetic inspiration that the Romantic
generation found outdoors. A number of post-Romantic poets regu-
larly evoke interiors which are conceivably their own; these include
Baudelaire (‘‘La chambre double,’’ ‘‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais
mille ans,’’ ‘‘Dans les fauteuils fanés des courtisanes vieilles,’’ etc.),
Mallarmé (‘‘Sonnet en -yx,’’ etc.), Cros (Le Coffret de santal), and Ro-
denbach (‘‘La Vie des chambres’’).
To cite another example of a writer-collector, the link between Victor
Hugo’s collecting activities, his decor, and his writing is less direct. A
collector and bricoleur (handyman, do-it-yourselfer), he often built fur-
nishings by reassembling disparate pieces of antiques. In an book
dedicated to the house in Guernsey where Hugo lived in exile during the
Literature and material culture
Second Empire, Gustave Larroumet observes that the eclectic decor of
the home resembles the work he wrote there, La Légende des siècles. Decor
and book alike bring together the Old and New Testaments, the Gothic,
the sixteenth century, and all succeeding centuries up to the Revolution.
Larroumet goes on to state that ‘‘Voir Hauteville-House, c’est mieux
comprendre non seulement Victor Hugo, mais le romantisme’’ [‘‘To see
Hauteville House is to better understand not only Victor Hugo, but also
Romanticism’’]. The author of an newspaper article on the same
subject claims that the great romantic writer was not only ‘‘le rénovateur
de la poésie française,’’ but also ‘‘un précurseur en décoration et en
ameublement,’’ since already in , Hauteville House was decorated
with ‘‘ce beau désordre apparent’’ so fashionable in . Hugo’s
collection thus not only embodies the remains of the Romanticism which
he outlived, but also reflects his modernism, in that he is a precursor of
fin-de-siècle taste. That Hugo’s decor is considered worth writing about
is testimony to the period’s fascination with the decorative arts.
Balzac’s use of his interior in his writing is much more prosaic than
that described by Sagnès and Proust in regard to his successors. He
sometimes used his own interiors directly in his writing, reproducing
one of his early apartments in the description of Paquita’s boudoir in La
fille aux yeux d’or, and including many items from the inventory of his own
collection in compiling the inventory reproduced in Le cousin Pons. For
Balzac the objects of decor are related to sociology (conspicuous con-
sumption, ‘‘distinction’’), to scenes of seduction (Paquita), or to the
collector’s passion (Pons) rather than to the splenetic disposition of the
aesthete.
Alain Buisine sees a very different rapport between Pierre Loti’s
writing and his collecting, seeing Loti’s oeuvre as ‘‘le prolongement,
l’amplification littérale et littéraire’’ of the little museum of souvenirs
that the writer assembled as a child, as described in Le Roman d’un enfant
(). In the previous chapter I discussed the theme of collecting in
his largely autobiographical Madame Chrysanthème (). As manifested
in these and other texts, Loti’s relationship to his collection is more
libidinal than that of Balzac, though it is not always melancholic in the
sense of Baudelairian spleen.
The Goncourts articulate the subjective experience of the artistically
encoded interior in creating a fictitious melancholic writer, the epony-
mous hero of Charles Demailly (), an early incarnation of the acutely
impressionable neurotic aesthete common in decadent literature. Not
only is the fictitious writer Demailly overly sensitive to people as well as
The fashionable artistic interior
to things, his sense of aesthetics is attributed to his nervous nature. It is
suggested that his writing talent – ‘‘Ce talent nerveux, rare et exquis
dans l’observation, toujours artistique, mais inégal’’ [‘‘This high-strung
talent, rare and exquisite in observation, always artistic, but uneven’’] –
is a product of his temperament and poor health (p. ). This sensitivity
is evidenced by Demailly’s refined taste in domestic objects, as ex-
plained by the narrator in a well-known passage inspired by Théophile
Gautier:
Un mobilier lui était ami ou ennemi. Un vilain verre le dégoûtait d’un bon vin.
Une nuance, une forme, la couleur d’un papier, l’étoffe d’un meuble le
touchaient agréablement ou désagréablement, et faisaient passer les disposi-
tions de son humeur par les mille modulations de ses impressions.
[An item of furnishing was either his friend or his enemy. A hideous glass for
him spoiled the taste of a good wine. A nuance, a shape, the color of the
wallpaper, the fabric of a piece of furniture, struck him as pleasant or unpleas-
ant, and altered the dispositions of his humor according to the thousand
modulations of his impressions.]
:
Bibelots are neither masculine nor feminine, though they are often
encoded as one or the other. On the one hand, by its association with
the domestic, the pretty, the detail, and the ornamental, the bibelot can
easily be considered feminine. On the other hand, the bibelot becomes
Literature and material culture
masculinized by its association with the erudite collector and the schol-
arly tradition of the curiosity cabinet. It becomes stereotypical for men
to create an artistically inspiring atmosphere in their cabinet de travail,
while women create a sanctuary for romantic dreams of seduction in
their boudoir and dressing room. The bibelot as an element of fashion
tends to be relegated to feminized spaces, whereas men are more likely
to be portrayed as possessors and displayers of artistic bibelots.
Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau (L’Education sentimentale), like Proust’s Swann
(A la recherche), manifests a nostalgia for an erudite aesthetics in filling his
apartment with bibelots, whereas Zola’s Nana (Nana), like Proust’s
Odette (Swann’s mistress then wife), masters the domain of fashion in
acquiring an eclectically decorated hôtel. Because gender is conferred
upon the bibelot by the context which is created for it, masculinized or
feminized bibelots can be used to reinforce and/or destabilize conven-
tional gender identities. This has important implications for the narra-
tive depiction of domestic economies and of the sexual relations which
take place therein.
:
Because the bibelot is so closely associated with feminine and bourgeois
spaces such as the courtesan’s boudoir and the family foyer, nine-
teenth-century male collectors must enlist several strategies for mascu-
linizing their domesticized collections. Encoding them as ‘‘artistic’’ is
the primary strategy used. The most clearly masculinized of these
collections are those found in the homes of ‘‘real’’ and fictitious bach-
elors, including Balzac and his character Pons; the Goncourts;
Maupassant and the narrator of his short story Qui sait?; Huysmans and
des Esseintes of A rebours, along with Durtal of the Catholic novels;
Gardilanne and Dalègre of Champfleury’s Le Violon de faı̈ence; Anatole
France and Dechartre of his novel Le Lys rouge; Jean Lorrain along with
Fréneuse and Ethal of his Monsieur de Phocas; and Frédéric Moreau of
L’Education sentimentale, as well the eponymous heroes of Bouvard et
Pécuchet.
These bachelors use their aestheticized collections to create a kind of
domesticity from which women are excluded, except as temporary
Literature and material culture
visitors, though even then the presence of woman threatens the order of
this bachelor universe. As Vilcot observes in regard to Huysmans’s
novels, the typical Huysmansian hero is in search of a protected interior
space which is not modeled on the domestic interior comfort associated
with the bourgeois or the woman, beings with which he tends to be
fundamentally incompatible. Hence this solitary hero seeks refuge in an
interior based on other models, such as the hermitage, the museum, the
monastery, or the cloister. This observation applies to the interiors of
the above-listed bachelor-collectors as well. In these masculine sanctua-
ries, bibelots – including paintings, drawings, engravings, and fetishized
book collections – transform the otherwise dreary apartment of the
bachelor into ‘‘un temple de l’Art,’’ where the occupant lives ‘‘en
compagnie de ses objets, exclusivement’’ sheltered from the ‘‘fal-
lacieuses sollicitations du commerce.’’ In this way, aided by the appeal
to art, the bachelor not only encodes the bibelot as masculine, but also
extracts it from the bourgeois order of the marketplace. Because this
idealized interior is both elitist and sexist, I call this way of life ‘‘macho
domesticity.’’
Writing plays an important role in the process of masculinizing the
bibelot through aestheticization. By intellectualizing the interior
through publications aimed at fellow connoisseurs, writers like the
Goncourt brothers and Montesquiou promote an aesthetics based on a
high level of erudition, creating an elite culture of collecting which is
inaccessible to many women and members of the middle classes, who
usually lack the necessary classical education. At the same time, these
publications define and provide models for an interior masculinized
through an erudite aesthetics, thus culturally legitimized for a mostly
male artistic elite. The interior of des Esseintes in Huysmans’s A rebours is
the classic example of such a refined and inaccessible aesthetics.
Another strategy commonly used to reinforce the masculinity of the
bachelor-collector is, paradoxically, to identify the bibelot as feminine.
For example, Edmond de Goncourt characterizes the bibelot as a
replacement for woman in the opening remarks of La Maison d’un artiste.
The machismo of the male collector is bolstered by his possession of the
feminized bibelot – and, conversely, of the bibelotized woman, about
which more in a moment. Defining collecting in terms of womanizing
thus serves the purpose of masculinizing the bibelot-filled interior. One
of Goncourt’s more sexist statements links collecting to writing: ‘‘La
littérature, c’est ma sainte maîtresse, les bibelots, c’est ma putain: pour
entretenir cette dernière, jamais la sainte maı̂tresse n’en souffrira’’
The fashionable artistic interior
[‘‘Literature is my saintly mistress, bibelots are my whore: the former
will never suffer in order to keep the latter’’].
,
The opposition art/fashion is often mapped onto gender distinctions,
art being identified as a masculine realm, fashion being relegated to the
feminine. However, though art and fashion tend to form an oppositional
pair, it is crucial to recognize to what degree art and fashion become
intertwined even as attempts are made to separate them into auton-
omous spheres. The decadent dandy makes fashion into an art, while
high society makes art into fashion. For example, the term ‘‘artiste’’ is
associated with fashionable decor, as when in a newspaper article
tastemaker Mme de Girardin recommends ‘‘l’air artiste’’ for the tasteful
conversation salon. A curious cultural configuration sustains the art/
fashion conundrum: the nineteenth-century aesthetes’ legitimating code
of Art and high society’s legitimating code of Fashion are both founded
on the myth of the artist. These matters frequently manifest themselves
in the literature of the period, often inscribing interpersonal conflicts
into what seems to be mere decor.
Maupassant’s Notre coeur () tells the story of Michèle de Burne, a
cold-hearted high-society widow, and her frustrated lover André
Mariolle, a wealthy dilettante and collector. They meet in Michèle’s
‘‘salon . . . très artiste’’ (p. ), in which she has gathered an impressive
collection of art objects as well as a group of loyal male admirers, many
of whom are artists. The novel’s descriptions of Michèle’s collection of
valuable art objects become imbricated into the description of her habit
of breaking the hearts of artistically gifted intellectual men. In a series of
encounters between Michèle and her admirers staged in the salon of the
former, the machismo of artistic erudition is played against the feminin-
ity of the merely decorative.
Charles Castella insists on the dimension of class in explaining the
social use of the myth of the artist in the high-society circles which serve
as the novel’s setting: ‘‘Henceforth this elite . . . seeks the supreme
ennoblement in art. After aping each other, now the aristocracy and the
bourgeoisie, together and in unison, ape a common master model: the
artist.’’ I would like to extend Castella’s remarks on social stratification
to encompass the dimension of gender.
Maupassant describes Michèle as a typical ‘‘modern’’ woman, which
is to say one who self-consciously constructs herself as a decorative
Literature and material culture
object. This point is presented as part of Mariolle’s musings, which are
made into generalizations through the use of indirect discourse, dou-
bling his mental voice with that of the narrator. The Mariolle/narrator
voice says that the modern woman’s body is now but ‘‘un objet à orner,’’
and no longer ‘‘un objet à aimer’’ (p. ). Maupassant thus creates a
‘‘type,’’ the ornamental but unloving modern woman, then inserts his
heroine into it. The ‘‘artifice’’ (ibid.) of Michèle’s beauty is shown to
exert an irresistible appeal on male high-society aesthetes like Mariolle,
the ‘‘l’artiste infécond’’ (p. ) whose talent is wasted on the activities of
the idle rich, including the accumulation of a ‘‘jolie collection de
tableaux modernes et de bibelots anciens’’ (p. ). In the eyes of this
collector, Michèle is comparable to a rare bibelot. She is ‘‘une créature
factice,’’ ‘‘un objet de luxe rare, attrayant, exquis et délicat.’’ She whets
the appetite of those who gaze upon her, as if she were one of those
gourmet dishes in a glass display case, ‘‘préparées et montrées pour
exciter la faim’’ (p. ). Even after becoming his lover, in spite of their
physical relationship Michèle remains as inaccessible to Mariolle as if
she were a precious artifact on display in a museum, an object which the
collector longs to take home, but cannot (p. ). Artificial in appear-
ance, she loves artificially as well, with an ‘‘ardeur factice’’ (p. ).
Michèle’s physical beauty is framed not only by artful clothing, but
also by the exquisite bibelots displayed in a salon ‘‘dont elle était presque
aussi fière que d’elle-même.’’ She owes the high quality of her decor to
the expert guidance of her male artist friends, on whose taste she relies in
choosing exceptional art objects (p. ). Each of these artists in turn
becomes ‘‘un bibelot rare’’ (p. ) on display in this salon which he
helped decorate. Mariolle too becomes trapped in her exhibit: wary
from the beginning of becoming merely one of ‘‘sa collection de favoris
plus ou moins illustres’’ (p. ), he becomes precisely that, objectified
into a belonging comparable to the ‘‘petits bibelots qui traînaient sur sa
table’’ (p. ). Thus, women and men are in turn reduced to decorative
art objects to be admired or collected.
What separates the men from the women in this novel is artistic taste.
The male characters know how to appreciate art through a sophisti-
cated aesthetics, while for the women art is simply an element of
fashionable decor, an accessory. In one of the key scenes in the novel,
during a dinner at the heroine’s home the sculptor Prédolé admires and
comments on her rare bibelots. The reader is told that the men
‘‘l’écoutaient avec un intérêt extrême, tandis que les deux femmes . . .
paraissaient s’ennuyer un peu . . . , déconcertées de ce qu’on pût prendre
The fashionable artistic interior
tant de goût à de simples contours d’objets’’ [‘‘listened to him with
extreme interest, while the two women . . . seemed a bit bored . . .
disconcerted that anyone could so admire the simple contours of ob-
jects’’] (p. ). Not surprised that Michèle finds the sculptor dull, one of
the secondary characters, the writer Lamarthe, reflects to himself,
‘‘‘Parbleu, il n’a pas admiré votre toilette; et vous êtes le seul de vos
bibelots qu’il ait à peine regardé’ ’’ [‘‘‘Of course, he didn’t admire your
clothing; you are the only one of your bibelots that he hardly looked
at’’’] (p. ). Michèle’s display of decorative art objects is thus portrayed
as an act of narcissism. Through slippages and displacements from her
bibelot-like person to the bibelots in her living room, she offers the
objects in her collection to her admirers to be fetishized as part-object
extensions of herself. Unlike the other men, who succumb to this
strategy of seduction, Prédolé refuses this fetishism. Lamarthe explains,
Pour elle, un buste de Houdon, des statuettes de Tanagra ou un encrier de
Benvenuto ne sont que les petites parures nécessaires à l’encadrement naturel
et riche d’un chef-d’oeuvre qui est Elle: Elle et sa robe, car sa robe fait partie
d’Elle; c’est la note nouvelle qu’elle donne chaque jour à sa beauté. Comme
c’est futile et personnel, une femme!
[For our hostess, a Houdon bust, Tanagra statuettes, or a Benvenuto inkwell
are nothing more than little adornments, necessaries to the natural and rich
frame of the true masterpiece: Herself. Herself and her dress, which is part of
Herself . . . Women! how futile and self-centered they are.]
Lamarthe sums up the significance of Prédolé, the idealized artist who
idolizes genuine art, refusing to fetishize artificial women. A great artist
who lives only for art, he seems unconcerned with feminine artifice, with
‘‘nos femmes à colifichets, à dentelles et à déguisements,’’ as Lamarthe
observes. Rather, Prédolé demands ‘‘de la pure plastique, à lui, et non
de l’artificiel.’’
Lamarthe’s erudite familiarity with decorative artists forms part of
the gentleman’s education and serves as a sign of cultural mastery. He
understands that Prédolé recuperates Michèle’s decorative objects by
his admiration of them as examples of pure plastic beauty, detaching
them from their (feminine) function as seductive ornamentation in order
to elevate them into a (masculine) realm of high Art. The implication is
that even the most well-bred modern women apprehend art objects
according to a code of fashion, whereas their male counterparts appre-
hend the same objects through a code of aesthetics. Maupassant master-
fully draws on the myth of the artist (incarnated by Prédolé) in conjunc-
tion with the vogue of antique decorative arts (embodied, collected, and
Literature and material culture
admired by Michèle and Mariolle), in order to overdetermine the
structure of the central plot element, the love relationship between the
hero and heroine. A cold but visually and intellectually stimulating
ornamental object (Michèle) ‘‘collects’’ a sensitive but unproductive
artist and connoisseur (Mariolle), who fails to live up to the standard of
the ideal artist (Prédolé).
In Proust’s Un amour de Swann the tension between aesthetics and
fashion is mapped onto class and gender distinctions following the
patterns already established in the Goncourts’ Charles Demailly and in
Maupassant’s Notre coeur: all three involve a couple consisting of a man
with refined artistic taste and a woman incapable of appreciating this
taste because she confuses art with fashion. Proust’s Swann is bourgeois
but also well educated, and welcome in the highest social circles.
Furthermore, throughout A la recherche Swann is consistently shown to
have superior taste to aristocrats in matters of art. In contrast, his
mistress Odette de Crécy, a demi-mondaine and former prostitute, makes
judgments of taste based on her naive notion of ‘‘chic.’’ Swann, on the
other hand, not only studies and collects art, but also understands what
is truly ‘‘chic’’ through his access to high-society circles. This difference
in competency level in both aesthetics and fashion plays itself out in the
furnishings of the couple’s respective apartments during their period of
courtship. Swann’s rooms are furnished with authentic antiques whose
value escapes Odette, who describes them as ‘‘meubles cassés’’ and
‘‘tapis usés’’ [‘‘broken-down chairs’’/‘‘threadbare carpets’’]. In con-
trast, she lives in a heavily draped harem-like apartment obviously
designed for scenes of seduction, filled with exotic Oriental bibelots and
large plants. Odette’s apartment thus serves as a fitting backdrop for her
early encounters with Swann. Both interiors are of course stereotypi-
cally nineteenth-century, faithfully corresponding to the social standing
and gender of each character.
Though she does not realize that Swann’s decor falls into the same
category, Odette correctly recognizes the term bibelot as ‘‘chic,’’ as
expressed through a litany of fin-de-siècle clichés. Because it captures so
well the socio-historical significance of the bibelot during the nineteenth
century, I quote the passage at length:
De ceux qui aimaient à bibeloter, qui aimaient les vers, méprisaient les bas
calculs, rêvaient d’honneur et d’amour, elle faisait une élite supérieure au reste
de l’humanité. Il n’y avait pas besoin qu’on eût réellement ces goûts pourvu
qu’on les proclamât; d’un homme qui lui avait avoué à dîner qu’il aimait à
flâner, à se salir les doigts dans les vieilles boutiques, qu’il ne serait jamais
The fashionable artistic interior
apprécié par ce siècle commercial, car il ne se souciait pas de ses intérêts et qu’il
était pour cela d’un autres temps, elle revenait en disant: ‘‘Mais c’est une âme
adorable, un sensible, je ne m’en êtais jamais doutée!’’ et elle se sentait pour lui
une immense et soudaine amitié. Mais, en revanche ceux, qui comme Swann,
avaient ces goûts, mais n’en parlaient pas, la laissaient froide. Sans doute elle
êtait obligée d’avouer que Swann ne tenait pas à l’argent, mais elle ajoutait d’un
air boudeur: ‘‘Mais lui, ça n’est pas la même chose’’; et en effet, ce qui parlait à
son imagination, ce n’était pas la pratique du désintéressement, c’en était le
vocabulaire.
[People who enjoyed picking up antiques, who liked poetry, despised sordid
calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she
placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity. There was no
need actually to have those tastes, as long as one proclaimed them; when a man
had told her at dinner that he loved to wander about and get his hands covered
with dust in old furniture shops, that he would never be really appreciated in
this commercial age since he was not interested in its concerns, and that he
belonged to another generation altogether, she would come home saying:
‘‘Why, he’s an adorable creature, so sensitive, I had no idea,’’ and she would
conceive for him an immediate bond of friendship. But on the other hand, men
who, like Swann, had these tastes but did not speak them, left her cold. She was
obliged, of course, to admit that Swann was not interested in money, but she
would add sulkily: ‘‘It’s not the same thing, you see, with him,’’ and, as a matter
of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterested-
ness, but its vocabulary.]
The sensitive soul of Odette’s superior elite manifests itself through an
odd list of preferences: bibelots, poetry, anti-commercialism, love, and
honor. The only readily discernible connection between these tastes and
the bibelot would seem to be the nostalgic disdain for ‘‘ce siècle com-
mercial,’’ commerce being associated with interest, as opposed to disin-
terestedness. What is most significant about this passage, though, is the
opposition drawn between really having these tastes and merely claim-
ing to have them, between the practice of disinterestedness and the
vocabulary of disinterestedness. Underpinning these remarks, then, is
an eloquent commentary on the sign-function of taste, on the difference
between having a certain taste, and deploying this taste socially. In a
sphere ruled by fashion, as high society proves increasingly to be as A la
recherche progresses, the exercise of good taste is less important than the
vocabulary of good taste.
I will take as emblematic of a certain critical moment the well-known
essay by Eugenio Donato, ‘‘The Museum’s Furnace: Notes Toward a
Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet’’ (), whose assumptions
about the nature of the museum are widely shared. Stated briefly, the
large body of Bouvard and Pécuchet criticism produced during the late
s and early s almost invariably associates the museum with a
pre-modern, naive faith in order, totality, and transparent meaning;
these studies then demonstrate that for Flaubert such naive faith has
become impossible, leading him to write a novel which is radically
modern in its production of incoherence, fragmentation, and a post-
Saussurean linguistic uncertainty. I do not dispute the validity of this
conclusion, but rather this characterization of the museum. Recent
scholarship in the growing interdisciplinary field of museum studies
necessitates a reformulation of the notion of the museum, predicated on
a shift in emphasis from the epistemological to the cultural.
Donato, in one of the best-theorized formulations of the poststruc-
turalist, ahistorical strain of Flaubert criticism, compares the museum to
the encyclopedia, understanding it as a totalizing system of knowledge
based on the classical episteme of taxonomia, or Order, as defined by
Flaubert’s ‘‘musées reçus’’
Foucault in The Order of Things. To characterize the museum in this way
is, perhaps paradoxically, to de-historicize it, in two senses. First, the
museum is not an abstract universal concept like taxonomia, but rather
an evolving institution imbued with local and historical particularity.
The earliest public museums in France were not founded until the s.
Second, if we lend credence to Foucault’s epistemes, I would argue that
the nineteenth-century museum belongs to the modern episteme of
History rather than to the classical episteme of Order. To properly
grasp the episteme of the museum it is necessary to distinguish between
order and Order: the order of the nineteenth-century museum differs
from the Order of Linné and Buffon, as well as from the order of its
twentieth-century counterparts.
Donato erroneously oversimplifies the museum and Foucault in re-
ducing both to expressions of taxonomic Order. Claiming that Foucault
himself is ‘‘rooted in the episteme of the Enlightenment he describes so
well,’’ Donato understands the epistemic shift from Order to History
(which roughly corresponds to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
respectively) as ‘‘simply the displacement onto human history of what
was until then considered ‘natural history.’’’ In other words, Donato
restates the shift from Order to History as a simple disciplinary shift from
natural history to human history. Donato in this way retains the En-
lightenment notion of taxonomic Order for the nineteenth-century
episteme of History. By redefining the nineteenth-century epistemic shift
this way, Donato demonstrates his profound misapprehension of
Foucault. Donato writes, ‘‘The eighteenth century generated its botan-
ical nomenclatures by a procedure based upon the same epistemology
that would later on be applied to archeological artifacts.’’ Donato makes
his error in assuming that Foucault is referring to an archaeology based
on taxonomy in The Archaeology of Knowledge, disregarding epistemic shifts
within archaeology, treating this disciplinary field as an ahistorical
abstract concept, just as he does the museum. In fact, Foucault specifi-
cally defines the type of archaeology described by Donato as the tradi-
tional type which modern archaeology has surpassed. It seems clear to
me that the museum belongs to modern archaeology, which corresponds
to what The Order of Things defines as the modern episteme of History.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault describes this disciplinary
transformation of archaeology in terms of history, and vice versa:
To be brief, then, let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to
‘‘memorize’’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend
Literature and material culture
speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say
in silence something other than what they actually say; in our time, history is
that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past,
history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that
have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form
totalities. There was a time when archaeology . . . attained meaning only
through the restitution of a historical discourse; it might be said, to play on
words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to
the intrinsic description of the monument. (p. )
The novel’s chapter opens with a declaration that the two former
copy clerks have become archaeologists and that their country house
now resembles a museum (p. ). However, the museum contains not
only their archaeological finds, but also geological specimens and mem-
entos brought from their Parisian apartments, for which Pécuchet had
already set aside a room (‘‘pour ses collections,’’ p. ) upon moving into
Flaubert’s ‘‘musées reçus’’
the new home two chapters earlier. During the museum episode they
will also add their phallus collection made up of anything vaguely
oblong, ‘‘des palonniers de voiture, des jambes de fauteuil, des verrous
de cave, des pilons de pharmacien’’ [‘‘carriage bars, chair legs, cellar
bolts, pharmacy pestles’’] (p. ).
In chapter (three chapters later), after they have moved on to other
projects upon becoming disenchanted with the museum, the word
‘‘bibelot’’ appears in a sentence which expresses despair in the face of
the failure: ‘‘Bouvard voulut dresser le catalogue du muséum, et déclara
ces bibelots stupides’’ [‘‘Bouvard wanted to compile a museum catalogue,
then declared these bibelots stupid’’] (p. ; my emphasis). The terms
‘‘bibelot’’ and ‘‘muséum’’ appear in contradicting clauses. The Latinate
version of the French ‘‘musée’’ underlines the irony behind the juxtapo-
sition of the two terms. By using the word ‘‘bibelot’’ in reference to the
objects that make up the ‘‘muséum’’ of the two ‘‘archéologues,’’
Flaubert creates a deliberate ambiguity as to their status, confusing the
vocabulary of a fashionable Parisian pastime and style of interior decor
(‘‘bibelot’’) with the terminology of serious historical and scientific
scholarship (‘‘muséum’’).
The juxtaposition of ‘‘bibelot’’ against ‘‘muséum’’ is prefigured in the
earlier versions of the manuscript, in which Bouvard and Pécuchet’s
collection is first referred to as a ‘‘parloir gothique,’’ becoming ‘‘parloir
gothique – musée,’’ and finally ‘‘musée.’’ It is thus not by accident that
a piece of furniture inspires their interest in collecting, as fore-
shadowed in chapter , in the offhand remark that the two friends would
often admire ‘‘un vieux meuble’’ and wish they had lived during the
period of its use, even if they knew nothing of the period (p. ). The
topic of antique furniture is evoked again in chapter to explain the
genesis of the museum:
Pour avoir des morceaux dans le genre du meuble [the dilapidated antique
chest which is missing a panel] Bouvard et Pécuchet s’étaient mis en campagne.
Ce qu’ils rapportaient ne convenait pas. Mais ils avaient rencontré une foule de
choses curieuses. Le goût des bibelots leur était venu, puis l’amour du moyen
âge. (p. ; my emphasis)
[Bouvard and Pécuchet set off to find pieces to match the old chest. What they
brought back was unsuitable, but they had encountered a host of curious
things. They had acquired a taste for bibelots, then a love for the Middle Ages.]
Once again, the vocabulary choice ‘‘bibelots’’ seems odd in relation to
‘‘l’amour du moyen âge.’’ The interests which make up the curious
Literature and material culture
progression ‘‘meuble – bibelots – moyen âge’’ recall Bourget’s image of
the museum spilling into the salon to create the bibelot (see my chapter
), only in reverse order. In this case, it is a piece of furniture that inspires
the taste for bibelots, which only then (‘‘puis’’) leads to a love of the
Middle Ages, which in turn will inspire the transformation of Bouvard
and Pécuchet’s salon into a museum. It is the progression of interests that
seems odd: looking for pieces to repair an antique chest sets off an
interest in the past, rather than the other way around. This passage
demonstrates that the order of Flaubert’s museum is subject at once to
domestic order, and to the scientific order of the museum.
Examining the collection’s spatial arrangement in Bouvard and
Pécuchet’s house, as can best be determined by its various presentations
in the text, there emerges a logical system of classification in terms of
potential value. The inventory of the collection amounts to the naming,
usually with a few qualifiers, of nearly fifty items. These easily divide into
two groups, based on the spatial presentation. The first group is com-
posed of the items in the entry and first room, all of which closely
resemble objects found in museums or historical sites visited by
Flaubert; while these items are not necessarily museum-worthy, they are
certainly museum-like. In contrast, the second group of objects, located
in the second room or library, contains only objects which are best
described as petty-bourgeois: the mementos the clerks brought with
them from Paris, a few masterpieces of kitsch acquired later (a shell-
work cabinet with plush trimmings, a petrified cat), and the ridiculous
collection of ‘‘phalluses’’ (mentioned above) in its ‘‘compartiment
nouveau’’ (p. ). The items in the second room are neither museum-
worthy nor even museum-like. The one notable exception to this ar-
rangement is the statue of Saint Peter, which is placed in the second
room with the petty-bourgeois kitsch, but in the window, a place of
honor.
The grouping of objects into two distinct spaces provides order for
them. This order can be discerned only by rereading the novel’s descrip-
tions of the collection with the attention to detail particular to the
museum catalogue. The post-structuralist critics who have devoted
articles to Flaubert’s museum (Donato, Schuerewegen, Lalonde) all
privilege generalized concepts, glossing over the almost overwhelming
quantity of accurate, carefully accumulated details present in Flaubert’s
Flaubert’s ‘‘musées reçus’’
writing. For example, Donato could not have seen the classificatory
spatial arrangement separating the museum-like artifacts from the petty-
bourgeois bibelots, since in his study he uses a short enumeration of the
collection found in an earlier draft, rather than the much more elaborate
descriptions in the last version of the text. Lalonde likewise fails to notice
these organizing principles in providing examples of accumulated ob-
jects with ‘‘no connection between them.’’ He is less than accurate in
stating that the coconuts are next to the antique medallions and the
sombrero next to a funeral urn, since the collectors have in fact placed
these objects in two separate rooms, the coconuts and sombrero being
found in the library while the antique medallions and funeral urn are
displayed in the first room with the other items presumed to be of
historical value. There is a coherence underlying the apparent ‘‘funda-
mental incoherence characteristic of this collection.’’
Flaubert’s mockery is aimed less at an abstract concept of the museum
than at the actual museums of his time. The above-cited criticism seems
to assume that Flaubert chose the objects of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s
museum at random. On the contrary, it is much more likely that
Flaubert culled Bouvard and Pécuchet’s museum from the collections of
what might be called Flaubert’s musées reçus (to play on the title of
Flaubert’s own Dictionnaire des idées reçues), museums which Flaubert
almost certainly visited. Several such musées reçus are named in the
novel’s account of the couple’s Parisian activities in chapter , but as is
often the case with books cited in the novel, Flaubert does not list all of
his sources. The Parisian public collection that is the obvious model for
the fictitious private museum is one not mentioned by Flaubert, the
‘‘Musée des Thermes et de l’Hôtel de Cluny.’’ A second model, also
unmentioned, is located in Flaubert’s home town, Rouen’s ‘‘Musée
d’Antiquités et le Musée Céramique.’’ A third musée reçu, Caen’s ‘‘Musée
de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie,’’ is mentioned in Flaubert’s
notes and scenarios but not in the novel. For the purposes of this section,
the petty-bourgeois bibelots in the second room will be considered
separately from the carefully chosen items which Flaubert has con-
sciously grouped together in the entry and first room.
I have read the nineteenth-century catalogues of each of these three
museums, and have also read Flaubert’s travel notes from French
historical sites. In them I have found items which correspond almost
Literature and material culture
exactly to virtually every artifact Flaubert locates in the entry and first
room of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s house, as well as the statue of Saint
Peter in the bow-window of the second room. Having made this careful
comparison, I am convinced that Flaubert visited and recalled all three
museums in his novel: any author who would read , books and
make two visits to an out of town museum (Caen) would not neglect
similar museums in cities where he resided (Rouen and Paris). The
author draws on his memory (or on lost or unedited notes) to reproduce
the objects he saw there. Furthermore, the founding of museums is a
topic of current interest at the time of the writing of the novel: all three
model museums were founded during Flaubert’s lifetime. Likewise,
many of the artifacts described in the catalogues of these actual mu-
seums were discovered in France during the mid-nineteenth century.
The correspondence between actual museum objects and those dis-
played in the entry and first room of the fictitious museum challenges
Schuerewegen’s reading of the juxtaposition ‘‘locks, bolts, screws’’ as a
sign of fundamental incoherence (p. ), since the museum at Caen
contains similar items. The reader might also be tempted to interpret
the fragments of ‘‘tuiles rouges’’ [‘‘red tiles’’] in the same way, whereas
the same item is found in all three model museums. When carefully
compared to actual museum catalogues, Bouvard and Pécuchet’s collec-
tion is not simply an ‘‘anti-museum,’’ as the other articles imply, but
rather a surprisingly accurate mimicry of Flaubert’s ‘‘musées reçus.’’ A
mimetic order guides the choice of these objects.
It could be argued that in spite of their resemblance to actual museum
objects, the items of the fictitious museum are obviously inauthentic. But
to adopt this conclusion would be to fall into the trap set by the text’s
repetition of idées reçues [truisms, clichés]. The problem of counterfeit
antiques had in fact become a commonplace of collecting, thus finding
its way into Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues – twice:
Sont toujours de fabrication moderne.
Sont toujours de fabrication moderne.
[ Always of modern manufacture.
Always of modern manufacture.]
Authenticity poses a problem not only for the private collector, but also
for the public museum, including such prestigious institutions as
Cluny. During the mid-nineteenth century museums varying greatly
in quality begin to appear all over the provinces. ‘‘How many galleries
and museums would survive a serious and rigorous examination of their
Flaubert’s ‘‘musées reçus’’
attributions?,’’ asks an critique of a provincial museum. Thus by
constantly placing in doubt the authenticity of the museum-like artifacts
in the entry and first room of the museum, Flaubert is invoking an idée
reçue. Bouvard and Pécuchet’s fictitious doubts regarding the authentic-
ity of their artifacts are thus mimetic of the concerns of actual museum
directors.
The comic presentation of objects might also be taken as confirma-
tion that these objects are inauthentic. However, comic presentation
does not necessarily imply inauthenticity. For example, the two collec-
tors discover a ‘‘bahut Renaissance’’ [‘‘Renaissance chest’’] which
Gorgu was using to store oats. This comic situation is actually copied
from real life: Flaubert’s friend Laporte had reportedly seen and ac-
quired bahuts which had served to store oats. Similarly, the ‘‘vieille
poutre de bois’’ [‘‘old wooden beam’’] (p. ) in the entryway, which is
reportedly ‘‘l’ancien gibet de Falaise d’après le menuisier qui l’avait
vendue – lequel tenait ce renseignement de son grand-père’’ [‘‘the old
gibbet from Falaise, according to the carpenter who sold it to them, and
who had gotten this information from his grandfather’’] (p. ), corre-
sponds to an item in the museum at Caen described in Flaubert’s notes:
‘‘carcan de la haute justice d’Annebaut qui est une poutre’’ [‘‘pillory of
Annebaut’s death sentence decrees, which is a beam’’]; the beam which
is a pillory in the ‘‘real’’ museum becomes a gibbet or gallows in the
fictional one. As for finding museum-worthy objects in odd places such
as barns and lumberyards, such anecdotes are common among collec-
tors. The Renaissance chest and the gibbet cannot be immediately
dismissed as pitiful imitations. Of course, it is entirely possible that
Flaubert doubts the authenticity of the actual models for the fictitious
objects, or that the textual copies are intended as purely visual imita-
tions. Such ambiguity produces a constant shifting of the target of the
irony in the text. But even assuming the similarity is intended as purely
visual, the question posed by the resemblance of Flaubert’s museum to
its models remains puzzling: why does the author go to such lengths to
reconstitute the museums of his time, when he could have haphazardly
listed a miscellaneous pile of junk, as other critics have assumed he did?
This meticulous imitation, like Flaubert’s ambition to write a novel
consisting entirely of idées récues, is integral to the radical irony of this text
whose author/narrator hides behind a faithful copy of the bêtise [stupid-
ity] around him, taking great pains to add no omnipotent judgments of
his own. Yet the writer is never absent from the text; there is no such
thing as pure copy. Flaubert invents by imagining two copy clerks whose
Literature and material culture
collection includes copies of the contents of prestigious museums. The
mimesis of well-known museums turns ironic in the attribution of a
museum-worthy collection to a pair of seemingly incompetent collec-
tors, and by its juxtaposition against the petty-bourgeois kitsch displayed
in the library, which is no doubt also based on specific objects familiar to
the author. Whereas I am convinced that the kitsch objects in the
library are copied and not imagined, the idea of presenting them as
museum objects included in the guided visit is pure invention. Which
raises a difficult question posed by Flaubert’s deadpan irony: why are
both groups of objects presented as equally worthy of display?
Does this equalizing juxtaposition debase the potentially museum-
worthy objects, or elevate the artifacts of kitsch? Both responses are
equally true, based on Flaubert’s self-contradicting fascination with
both the banal and the sublime, with the ‘‘clinquant’’ as well as for the
‘‘or.’’ Intrigued by the banal object according to an often-cited letter to
Louise Colet (‘‘Il y a dans chaque objet banal de merveilleuses his-
toires’’), Flaubert is also an ‘‘archéologue et antiquaire,’’ equally
captivated by barbarian treasures ‘‘énumérées avec la minutie et
l’exactitude d’un inventaire’’ as if by ‘‘un commissaire-priseur qui
s’amuse,’’ in the words of Sainte-Beuve in his critique of Salammbô, the
tale of exotic splendor and barbaric atrocity set in ancient Carthage [‘‘In
every banal object there are marvelous stories’’ / ‘‘archaeologist and
antiquarian’’ / ‘‘an auctioneer having fun’’]. Emma Bovary’s bour-
geois luxury appears all the more ridiculous when contrasted against the
sublime decor of the young priestess Salammbô’s bedroom, ‘‘avec toutes
ses raretés et ses bibelots carthaginois; c’est d’une chinoiserie exquise’’
[‘‘with its rarities and knick-knacks from Carthage; it’s exquisitely
Oriental’’]. But isn’t the sublimity of the ridiculous one of the funda-
mental tenets of the realist enterprise? Don’t the endless descriptions of
interiors in the realist novel function as a sort of museum of lower-class
objects? Given the author’s double predilection for both archaeologi-
cal and banal objects, the inclusion of both classes of objects in the
museum begins to seem logical, in an ironically Flaubertian way.
[He was lost in Celticism . . . He even asked them to gather for him a few of
those flint axe-heads, then called celtae, which the Druids used in their ‘‘criminal
holocausts.’’
Through Gorgu they acquired a dozen and sent him the smallest, while the
others enriched the museum.]
The very act of collecting is thus physically set in motion by these two
savants, the professor and the lawyer/archaeologist, in their requests that
the two hobbyists procure for them certain curiosities. Again, the
vocabulary choice is not accidental: the word ‘‘muséum’’ in its Latinate
form underlines the historical nature of these artifacts.
In contrast, Marescot is described in a rough draft as ‘‘leur rival
comme collectionneur de bibelots’’ [‘‘their rival in collecting bibelots’’],
a vocabulary choice which in this context suggests a bourgeois mode of
collecting which serves as a mark of social distinction. It is the soup bowl
belonging to the abbot and admired by Marescot which inspires Bouvard
and Pécuchet’s interest in ceramics. More importantly for my present
purposes, the text attaches the fashionable cachet artiste to this type of
collecting: Marescot, who owned several pieces of old Rouen stoneware,
‘‘tirait de là comme une réputation d’artiste’’ [‘‘which gave him a sort of
artistic reputation’’] (p. ). Similarly, Bouvard and Pécuchet’s collec-
tion is meant to give its owners a ‘‘réputation d’artiste’’: when receiving
visitors to the museum, Pécuchet wears his ‘‘bonnet de zouave qu’il avait
autrefois à Paris, l’estimant plus en rapport avec le milieu artistique’’
[‘‘the Zouave’s cap that he had before in Paris, considering it to be more
suitable for the artistic setting’’] (p. ). Flaubert’s earlier outlines
describe the museum episode as the ‘‘phase artistique’’ during which the
former copy clerks ‘‘prennent le genre artiste,’’ once again mixing the two
modes of collecting, this time with a clearly ironic tone. Throughout
these passages the term artiste is used ironically, its meaning having been
emptied for Flaubert with the inclusion of the famous articles ‘‘Art’’ and
‘‘Artistes’’ in the Dictionnaire des idées reçues.
Neglecting the dual nature of collecting which gives rise to a spirit of
eclecticism, Bouvard and Pécuchet criticism tends to examine the museum
exclusively in terms of encyclopedic erudition, completely bypassing
aesthetic concerns present in the text as well as in the period’s concep-
tion of the collection. This aesthetic or artistic aspect of the collection
manifests itself not only in the choice of objects collected, but also in
Literature and material culture
displays based on an impressionistic eclecticism, as opposed to a more
methodical arrangement. Clément de Ris contrasts the two organizing
principles in describing the rearrangement of a mid-nineteenth-century
private collection often visited by other collectors:
Au fouillis plein d’imprévu . . . avait succédé un classement méthodique que regrettaient
un peu les véritables amateurs, ceux qui recherchaient avant tout le caractère.
La collection ainsi rangée était plus instructive, on y embrassait plus facilement
chacune des séries qui la composent; mais elle était moins amusante . . .
[A jumble full of the unexpected . . . was succeeded by a methodical classification, which
was considered rather unfortunate by the true collectors, those who sought
character above all. Arranged in this way, the collection was more educational,
for it was easier to grasp each of the series which it included, but it was less
entertaining . . . ]
Following the lead of private collectors, the nineteenth-century museum
inherits both modes of display, not only ‘‘methodical classification’’ but
also the more entertaining ‘‘fouillis plein d’imprévu’’ so alien to our late
twentieth-century museum aesthetic.
Donato’s reduction of the museum to encyclopedic taxonomia is
completely ahistorical. He supports his version of ‘‘the ideology that
governs the Museum in the nineteenth century’’ by citing American and
British museum directors writing between and , that is to say
thirty to fifty years after Flaubert’s death, concluding that the dominant
feature of the museum is the erasure of heterogeneity. If we compare
these twentieth-century citations to the discourse of French museum
directors in Flaubert’s time, the ‘‘ideology’’ we find is quite different.
From the time of the opening of the Louvre in , the two aspects of
the collection – erudite and artistic – formed the basis of a polemic as to
the aim of the public museum. Should a museum be ‘‘un livre
d’histoire’’ or ‘‘un beau livre d’images’’ [‘‘a history book’’ or ‘‘a beautiful
picture book’’]? This debate concerns not only the purpose of the
museum, but also its physical arrangement. In his preface to the
catalogue, Rouen’s museum director declares: ‘‘un Musée méthodique
pour le savant, passe encore, mais pour le public un Musée artistiquement
installé d’abord’’ [‘‘a methodical museum is fine for the scholar, but for
the public an artistically arranged museum is preferable’’]. He ex-
plains his preference for a picturesque artistic arrangement over a cold,
dry, pedantic chronology:
En , la manie du classement à outrance n’était pas encore de mode. Aussi
a-t-on installé d’une manière très pittoresque le Musée d’Antiquités de Rouen.
On a fait de même d’ailleurs au Musée de Cluny, qui date à peu près du même
Flaubert’s ‘‘musées reçus’’
temps, et il est certainement de nos jours des esprits chagrins qui ne peuvent se
consoler de voir un luxueux fanal de galère vénitienne du e siècle dominer
des pierres tombales du Moyen âge, tandis que des meubles Renaissance
supportent des ivoires byzantins ou des miniatures du siècle dernier. Les
classements méthodiques ont certes du bon, il serait puéril de le méconnaı̂tre; mais
la sécheresse d’une exhibition rigoureusement chronologique et le classement
par ordre nous paraı̂tront difficilement préférables à un agencement artistique qui
séduit et attire, même les natures les plus vulgaires. Une installation pittoresque
parle bien plus à l’esprit qu’un étalage sec et froid, inspiré d’un étroit pédantisme, et c’est
par le premier système, plutôt que par le second, qu’on obtient une réelle
vulgarisation.
[In , the mania for extravagant classification was not yet fashionable. Rouen’s
Museum of Antiquities was thus arranged in a very picturesque manner. The
same was done at the Cluny museum, which dates from roughly the same
period. Certainly today there are sad souls who cannot get over seeing a
luxurious sixteenth-century Venetian galley lantern overlooking Medieval
tombstones, while Renaissance furniture bears Byzantine ivory figurines and
eighteenth-century miniatures. It would be puerile to deny the merits of
methodical classification; however, I for one find it hard to prefer the aridity of an
exhibit based on rigorous chronology and orderly classification, over an artistic
arrangement which seduces and attracts even the most common mind. A pictur-
esque installation speaks more to the soul than does a dry and cold display inspired by
narrow pedantry. It is by means of the first system rather than by the second that
true popularization is achieved.]
This passage makes clear that ‘‘le classement par ordre’’ is by no means
the dominant mode of organizing museums during Flaubert’s lifetime,
since ‘‘la manie du classement à outrance’’ only becomes popular (‘‘de
mode’’) during the second half of the century. This is why the juxtaposi-
tion enumerated here – ‘‘fanal de galère – pierres tombales – meubles
Renaissance – ivoires byzantins – miniatures’’ – seems no more hetero-
genous or disordered than the objects assembled in the first room of
Bouvard and Pécuchet’s museum.
In addition to the frequency of the ‘‘installation pittoresque,’’ the
museums of Flaubert’s time were in general less specialized than those of
today. For example, whereas at present Cluny displays exclusively
medieval artifacts, its catalogue includes not only ‘‘Objets prov-
enant de fouilles et remontant aux époques celtique, gauloise, gallo-
romaine et aux premiers temps du moyen âge’’ [‘‘objects from digs
dating back to the Celtic, Gallic, and Gallo-Roman periods, as well as
the early Middle Ages’’], but also a collection of ceramics which extends
through the eighteenth century. In addition, it seems that the quantity
of artifacts on display was as important as their quality, reflecting the
Literature and material culture
prevailing taste for dense accumulations. Cluny’s disparate collection
was streamlined after World War II to accommodate the more rigorous
museum standards of the twentieth-century public, ‘‘for whom it is no
longer possible to display the most remarkable pieces lost amidst those
which are secondary, not to mention suspect.’’ Flaubert mimics the
nineteenth-century museum’s tolerance for secondary works with
Bouvard and Pécuchet’s statue of Saint Peter. Flaubert had seen such a
statue on two visits to the museum at Caen, and describes it in detail in
his travel notes. More surprisingly, the Caen museum’s ‘‘real’’ cata-
logue implies that the statue is not a masterpiece, by describing it as the
‘‘travail grossier d’un statuaire inhabile’’ [‘‘the crude work of an un-
skilled sculptor’’].
Critics of Bouvard and Pécuchet have misinterpreted the spirit of eclecti-
cism which is so much a part of the tradition of collecting in Europe,
reading the museum of Bouvard and Pécuchet anachronistically, based
on a twentieth-century perspective. While it is of course true that
assembling a museum implies an attempt at organizing fragments into a
representative and coherent whole, this aspect has been overem-
phasized in Bouvard and Pécuchet criticism. As a result, the preference of
many nineteenth-century collectors and curators for the happy hetero-
geneity of eclecticism has been overlooked.
The museum episode mimics not only the physical order of the nine-
teenth-century museum, but also the social order of the nineteenth-
century culture which embraces the museum. Pierre Bourdieu and
Alain Darbel instigated a sociology of the twentieth-century museum.
Flaubert’s novel can be read in terms of a sociology of the museum in his
time.
Sociological hybridization characterizes both the novel’s collection
and its collectors. By their attributed social origins alone Bouvard and
Pécuchet are already comical, since as ‘‘autodidactic cleaks,’’ they begin
from a ‘‘position doomed to ridicule.’’ The two copy clerks who
through an inheritance become country gentlemen then savants, eventu-
ally becoming archaeologists and collectors, have arranged their socio-
logically hybrid collection accordingly. The items collected as savants
greet the visitor in the entry and first room, while the second room or
library contains objects of petty-bourgeois decor, including the items
brought by the couple from the apartments they occupied as clerks in
Flaubert’s ‘‘musées reçus’’
Paris, such as Pécuchet’s coconuts and the portrait of Bouvard’s uncle.
The presence of the ‘‘arbre généalogique de la famille Croixmare’’
[‘‘family tree of the Croixmare family’’] underlines the significance of
social origins.
The same is true of the secondary characters, whose savant and artistic
interests in collecting are contrasted against their strictly bourgeois
professions: Larsonneur is a lawyer and archaeologist; Marescot is a
notary and ‘‘ami de beaux-arts,’’ even an ‘‘artiste’’ (pp. , ). As is
the case for the objects of the collection, there are also ‘‘real’’ models for
these collectors: two socially hybrid amateurs, the engraver/archaeol-
ogist E.H. Langlois and the clergyman/archaeologist l’abbé Cochet,
were associated with the museum at Rouen. Other models for these
bourgeois collectors were abundant in Flaubert’s hometown, where the
collector is a ‘‘character type well represented among the Rouen bour-
geoisie of Flaubert’s time . . . Among these collectors, one finds the
upper and petty bourgeoisie, and all of the professions.’’
The definition ‘‘antiquaire’’ of the Dictionnaire de la conversation et
de la lecture criticizes the casual collector:
tels sont ces individus qui, sans avoir fait les études préparatoires nécessaires
pour se livrer à une recherche hérisée de difficultés, prennent pour l’amour de
l’antique la triste manie de recueillir sans ordre et sans choix une foule de
débris, souvent apocryphes, dont ils forment à grands frais de prétendues
collections . . .
[Without having done the preparatory studies necessary for undertaking re-
search fraught with difficulties, such individuals mistake the love of antiques for
that sad mania which consists in the disordered and indiscriminate gathering
together of masses of often apocryphal debris, out of which, at great expense,
they form so-called collections . . .]
I include this citation to demonstrate that the incompetent casual
collector has become a social type, and that the critique of such hobby-
ists has become an idée reçue. By its comical presentation of the collection,
the text suggests that Flaubert’s collectors have simply assembled a
disordered and indiscriminate mass of debris. Or is the text simply
copying another idée récue? What if two semi-imbeciles do succeed in
creating a museum that rivals famous private collections and public
museums of its time? What better way to mock elitist collectors who are
already mocking the mock collector, than to attribute an impressive
array of authentic antique artifacts to two ‘‘autodidactic clerks’’? The
discourse of authenticity becomes inseparable from the discourse of
social status.
Literature and material culture
The comments of secondary characters as they visit the museum are
directly linked to their social positions. The noble comte de Faverges
appreciates the collectors’ interest in the Middle Ages, ‘‘époque de foi
religieuse et de dévouements chevaleresques’’ [‘‘an era of religious faith
and chivalrous devotion’’] (p. ), which he sees as favorable to his
moral and political leanings. The unsophisticated provincial bourgeois
widow Mme Bordin admires the petty-bourgeois objects (especially the
shell-work cabinet and petrified cat from Saint Allyre) while Marescot
the notary/collector dismisses them, more interested in the ceramics, a
collectors’ item fashionable enough to be included in the Dictionnaire des
idées reçues (‘‘ Plus chic que la porcelaine’’). Gender is at play
here as well: Mme Bordin’s role as an ignorant admirer of a collection is
very similar to that of Balzac’s Mme Camusot in Le Cousin Pons. Though
both belong to the same social class as other male characters who
appreciate collectors’ objects (Marescot and M. Camusot), as women
they lack the education essential to the serious collector. Finally, the
lowest class of ‘‘bibelots,’’ the religious objects exchanged for museum
objects in chapter , are admired by a member of the lowest social class,
the servant Marcel, who ‘‘nettoyait ces splendeurs, n’imaginant au
paradis rien de plus beau’’ [‘‘cleaned these splendid things, imagining
nothing as beautiful even in paradise’’] (p. ). The museum episode
traces a descent down the social ladder of collecting.
Class also determines the degree of ambiguity in the text’s treatment
of the question of museum-worthiness and value. Whereas the text
remains stubbornly ambiguous in giving contradictory clues as to the
authenticity of the first group of objects, the petty-bourgeois objects in
the second room are described in enough detail that we can be sure they
had no collector’s value at the time. Likewise, the phalluses, the collec-
tion-within-the-collection added later, are clearly a grotesque imitation
based on a purely visual similarity, like the ornamental garden of
chapter and the pathetic do-it-yourself gymnasium equipment of
chapter . The case of the religious bibelots displayed by the colpor-
teur, as well as those seen during the two clerks’ pilgrimage to la
Délivrande (a site comparable to Lourdes; chapter ), is particularly
instructive here in terms of ambiguity and clues which indicate a
possible authenticity. The museum items which the former collectors
exchange with the colporteur are all located in the first room of the
museum and correspond to actual museum objects. While this mer-
chant’s interest in the exchange may or may not mean that these objects
are authentic antiques, it would seem to indicate that they are clever
Flaubert’s ‘‘musées reçus’’
enough facsimiles – and popular enough items – to be sold to other
less-than-expert collectors. In contrast, unlike these potentially valuable
objects, the religious objects are disparaged by the narrator, the
Flaubertian narrator whose voice is rarely so clear. The description of
the religious objects in the boutiques at la Délivrande ends, ‘‘ – et le
soleil, frappant les verres des cadres, éblouissait les yeux, faisait ressortir
la brutalité des peintures, la hideur des dessins’’ [‘‘ – and, striking the
framed glass, the sun dazzled the eye, bringing out the crudeness of the
paintings and the hideousness of the drawings’’] (p. ). The various
series of objects – the potentially museum-worthy objects, the petty-
bourgeois objects of the library, the phallus collection, the religious
bibelots – are presented in the novel in the order of descending value.
The lower the class of bibelot the more clearly its worthlessness is
inscribed in Flaubert’s text.
It is noteworthy that the books purchased here belong not to the domain
of the dusty library, but to the domain of nouveautés, or new consumer
goods: this bookseller gets them the latest books, those which are well
known at the time. Knowledge has become a lack to be filled through
consumption (‘‘la physiologie’’ . . . ‘‘leur manquait’’). Just as desire is by
its very nature destined to remain unfulfilled, so the consumer must
constantly experience the deceptions of incomplete satisfaction. The
desire for satisfaction leads to new purchases, which provide only partial
satisfaction, which leads to another series of purchases, ad infinitum. At
the same time, the repetition of this sequence provides a steady source of
pleasure. This is the same pattern by which Bouvard and Pécuchet
consume science, hoping for full satisfaction from each new project,
experiencing disappointment when satisfaction proves to be partial,
Flaubert’s ‘‘musées reçus’’
then repeating the cycle again with high hopes for their newest epis-
temological enterprise. As we have learned from Lacan, the aim of this
endlessly repeating cycle is not satisfaction, but rather the prolongation
of desire.
After their disappointment with the results of their venture into
aboriculture, undertaken ‘‘comme spéculation!’’ (p. ), they realize that
science is costing them too much money and effort. ‘‘Ensuite, ils
s’accusèrent d’avoir été trop ambitieux – et ils résolurent de ménager
désormais leur peine et leur argent’’ [‘‘Afterwards, they reproached
each other for having been too ambitious, and they resolved to better
manage their efforts and their money, from then on’’] (p. ). How-
ever, they are immediately lured into the next project, a decorative
garden inspired by a book they already own, The Architect of the Garden.
Luckily they find an inexpensive means of realizing the project, which
implicitly justifies new expenditures:
et dans un enthousiasme progressif, après beaucoup de tâtonnements, avec
l’aide d’un seul valet, et pour un somme minime, ils se fabriquèrent une résidence
qui n’avait pas d’analogue dans tout le département. (p. ; my emphasis)
[and with growing enthusiasm, after much feeling their way around, with the
aid of a single servant, and with minimal expense, they built themselves a residence
unmatched by any in the region.]
In reality the objects – whether these are the objects of the image or the real
objects of a room, or of a street – are linked only by a single form of connection,
which is parataxis, i.e., the pure and simple juxtaposition of elements. This kind
of parataxis of objects is extremely frequent in life: it is the system to which are
subject, for example, all the pieces of furniture in a room. The furnishing of a
room achieves a final meaning (a ‘‘style’’) solely by the juxtaposition of el-
ements.
[Thus the Goncourts take refuge in the knick-knack. They choose as the their
supreme value the pretty, that beauty without depth, or worse yet prettiness, which
is to say the most superficial and least significant in the pretty. No danger here,
no temptation to flee: the object can be held in the palm of the hand; it can be
handled and felt, its most profound truth limited to the pleasure derived from its
handling. In short, the knick-knack seduces by its charming smile, but it is a
dead smile, one deprived of duration and echo.]
: ,
In the passage cited above, Dangelzer contrasts the excesses of the
Goncourts’ description of Coriolis’s art studio with the descriptions of
Balzac, claiming that even though the latter ‘‘pourtant meuble ses
intérieurs à souhait’’ [‘‘does indeed amply furnish his interiors’’], he
never produces the sense of suffocation and fear of being crushed by
falling objects that one encounters in Coriolis’s studio. This compari-
son is curious, since Balzac in fact includes an even longer collection
inventory in one of his early novels, La Peau de chagrin. However,
Balzac’s inventory of the antique shop in which Raphaël purchases the
magic skin is much more suited to the modernist aesthetic, whereas
something like an aesthetics of excess is needed to appreciate the
Goncourts’ presentation of the claustrophobia-inducing collection of
an artist’s bibelots. Again, for the modernists it comes down to a
question of balance and proportion, of establishing the proper equilib-
rium between description and narration, between the visual and the
semantic, between chaos and order, and, above all, between persons
and things. The Goncourts tip the balance so prized by modernism,
even though, for example, their description of Coriolis’s art studio is on
many counts very similar to Balzac’s description of the antique shop. In
the end Balzac’s inventory leaves the reader with an impression of
order, whereas many find the Goncourts’ enumerative descriptions
disorderly.
Literature and material culture
While enumeratio in the novel is criticized in terms of excess and
disorder, paradoxically, one of the main functions of actual inventories
and catalogues is to provide a rational framework for organizing ma-
terial goods. Interestingly enough, the most striking similarity between
the novelistic inventories in La Peau de chagrin and Manette Salomon is that
both Balzac and the Goncourts actually thematize disorderly juxtaposi-
tion. The narrators of both novels convey to the reader that the objects
in question form a chaotic jumble, in the framing sentences which
introduce their enumerative descriptions. I cite first Balzac, then the
Goncourts, italicizing the rhetoric of uncontrolled pell-mell:
Au premier coup d’oeil, les magasins lui offrirent un tableau confus, dans lequel
toute les oeuvres humaines et divines se heurtaient . . . Le commencement du
monde et les événements d’hier se mariaient avec une grotesque bonhomie . . . C’était
une espèce de fumier philosophique auquel rien ne manquait, ni le calumet du
sauvage, ni la pantoufle vert et or du sérail, ni le yatagan du Maure, ni l’idole
des Tartares. (Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, pp. –; my emphasis)
[At first glance, the storerooms presented him with a confused picture, in which
all works human and divine collided . . . The beginning of the world and recent
events joined hands with grotesque camaraderie . . . It was a sort of philosophical dung
heap, lacking nothing, neither the savage’s peace pipe nor the harem’s silver and
gold slipper, neither the Moor’s yataghan nor the Tartars’ idol.]
By letting us know up front that the collection has been catalogued, and
that it contains nearly , items, Balzac is able to sketch out a rapid
impression of its importance and extent simply by noting the kinds of
items it includes. Unlike the contents of the antique shop in La Peau de
chagrin, Pons’s collection is highly specialized, consisting in paintings,
miniatures, porcelain, and snuff boxes. Though the collection as a whole
is often referred to throughout the novel, this is the most extensive
enumeration of it until much later.
The next description of the collection occurs during a scene which is
placed nearly halfway through the novel. In between, there develops an
intrigue of money-grubbing greed, whereby Pons’s valuable collection
of ‘‘biblots’’ [sic] (pp. , , ; author’s italics) is disputed by two
rival groups of avaricious characters, one headed by a distant bourgeois
cousin, Madame Camusot, and the other headed by the petty-bourgeois
concierge, Madame Cibot. After an illness exacerbated by the cold-
heartedness of his ‘‘cousins,’’ Pons dies, leaving his valuable collection to
his closest friend, a naive musician, but the plotting women wrest it from
him in the end, aided by a group of shady art dealers and legal advisors,
some of whom work for both sides. The ending is tragic, not only
because the hero dies a miserable death, but perhaps more significantly
because the bourgeoisie (represented by Mesdames Camusot and Cibot)
triumphs over the artists (Pons and Schmucke).
Pons’s failure to extract his collection from this network of petty-
bourgeois and bourgeois socio-economic relations hinges on the way
Balzac positions him within a family structure. Pons is a homely bach-
elor who shares his apartment with another homely bachelor, the naive
musician to whom he tries to leave the collection. However, Pons,
though a musician and art aficionado, is not content to live for art alone,
as is his idealist roommate Schmucke, for in addition to being materi-
alist through his passion for collecting, Pons is also a connoisseur of
gourmet food. To satisfy his gourmet appetite, he relies on dinner
invitations from various bourgeois cousins (hence the title of the novel),
many of whom are only distant cousins by marriage. Pons’s position
within traditional kinship structures is thus a very marginal one, first in
Narrate, describe, or catalogue?
his sharing domestic intimacy with another man, Schmucke, and sec-
ond in his stretching family ties to include distant cousins, including
Madame Camusot.
In an attempt to consolidate his place on the most important standing
dinner invitation list, that of his ‘‘cousins’’ the Camusot, Pons brings
Madame Camusot a gift, a rare collector’s item, a fan painted by
Watteau for Madame de Pompadour. When this gift fails to elicit the
reciprocal gift of the continued standing dinner invitation, Pons brings a
prospective groom for the Camusot’s daughter, whom the couple is
having trouble marrying appropriately for want of a better dowry. The
bourgeois hostess and her daughter are invited to visit Pons’s collection
as a pretext for meeting the prospective groom. This is how Madame
Camusot learns the monetary value of her ‘‘cousin’’ Pons’s collection.
By bringing his bourgeois cousin a precious bibelot (the fan) then by
inviting her into his otherwise closed sanctuary of art (to meet the suitor),
Pons sets in motion his own demise.
This visit furnishes the occasion for the second and lengthiest de-
scription, allowing Balzac to incorporate a four-page enumeration into
the plot. Upon seeing the collection, the prospective bridegroom im-
mediately recognizes its artistic and monetary value, which he patient-
ly explains to the Camusot’s daughter, who dutifully listens. As the
suitor leaves the apartment building, the owner of the second-hand
shop downstairs overhears the evaluation, which he reports to the
concierge, Madame Cibot. A third enumerative description of the
collection appears in the novel when the contriving concierge intro-
duces art dealers and legal advisors into the dying Pons’s apartment, so
that they may evaluate it for the purposes of negotiating the antici-
pated inheritance. Although this description does include much infor-
mation on art and artists, it does not seem gratuitous, because it is
offered through the eyes of one of the art dealer characters in the act
of evaluating the collection for the purposes of the main plot, the
disputed inheritance.
The fictitious collection’s fictitious catalogue mentioned near the
beginning of the novel reappears near the end, after Pons’s death. We
are told that the catalogue is entirely handwritten, in two copies, in
Pons’s hand. This time it is cited by one of the characters, the lawyer
Frasier, who is shown reading it, comparing it to the paintings on
display in Pons’s apartment. The document of antiquarianism and art
history drawn up by Pons is thus reappropriated by Frasier and trans-
formed into a legal document. During this scene, the conniving lawyer
Literature and material culture
Frasier reads the following catalogue entry aloud to Madame Cibot, the
concierge; his own comments follow:
‘‘No. . Magnifique portrait peint sur marbre, par Sébastien del Piombo, en , vendu par
une famille qui l’a fait enlever de la cathédrale de Terni. Ce portrait, qui avait pour pendant un
évêque, acheté par un Anglais, représente un chevalier de Malte en prières, et se trouvait
au-dessus du tombeau de la famille Rossi. Sans la date, on pourrait attribuer cette oeuvre à
Raphaël. Ce morceau me semble supérieur au portrait de Baccio Bandinelli, du Musée, qui est
un peu sec, tandis que ce chevalier de Malte est d’un fraı̂cheur due à la conservation de la
peinture sur la (ardoise).’’
– En regardant, reprit Frasier, à la place No. , j’ai trouvé un portrait de
dame signé Chardin, sans No. !... [ . . .] j’ai vérifié les tableaux, et il y a huit
substitutions de toiles ordinaires et sans numéros, à des oeuvres indiquées
comme capitales par feu monsieur Pons et qui ne se trouvent plus... Et enfin, il
manque un petit tableau sur bois, de Metzu, désigné comme un chef-
d’oeuvre...
[‘‘No. , Magnificent portrait painted on marble by Sebastian del Piombo in , sold by a
family who had it taken from the cathedral at Terni. Paired with a bishop’s portrait bought by
an Englishman, this portrait depicts a Maltese knight praying, and was found hanging above
the Rossi family tomb. Without the date, this work could be attributed to Raphael. This piece
seems to me to be superior to the portrait of Baccio Bandinelli in the Museum, which is a bit
dry, while this Maltese knight retains a freshness preserved by its being painted on
(slate).’’
‘‘Looking at place ,’’ Frasier continued, ‘‘I found a woman’s portrait signed
Chardin, with no number ! ... +. . ., I checked the paintings, and there are eight
substitutions of ordinary canvases without numbers for works which the late
Monsieur Pons has identified as major, and which are no longer here... And
finally, also missing, there is a small painting on wood by Metzu, designated as a
masterpiece...]
This is the only catalogue entry actually cited. It is presented as if it were
from a ‘‘real’’ collection catalogue, numbers and all. Pons’s detailed
comments on the painting and its attribution show the catalogue to be a
labor of love by a true connoisseur of art. The tone is very similar to that
Edmond de Goncourt will use in the catalogue-style entries of La Maison
d’un artiste. However, Frasier reads the catalogue not as an art lover, but
as a lawyer, treating it like an inventory of Pons’s estate, like a legal
document. The lawyer uses the art collection catalogue only to verify the
identity and presence of objects which interest him only for their
potential monetary value. The catalogue reveals to him not information
about art, but clues about a theft.
Pons’s catalogue, like his collection, partakes of (at least) three very
different socio-cultural domains: art collecting, the marketplace, and the
law. Though these domains are not coextensive, they are at the same
Narrate, describe, or catalogue?
time inseparable. In the modern (Euro-American) world, no object
attains value in one sphere without also attaining value in the two
others, and therefore no object enters one without entering the others.
This is, in a sense, the ‘‘moral’’ of Le Cousin Pons: it is futile to try to keep a
collection gathered from the marketplace from falling back into the
marketplace. The law proves to be complicit with the market. The art
collection is a socially symbolic system. Hiding it, even if it is never
found, does not make it less social.
As for the relationship between persons and things in Le Cousin Pons,
though the collection is featured prominently, the strong plot structure
keeps it well subordinated to the actions of the characters. Pons’s
personal relationship to his collection, though, differs significantly from
that between protagonist and the collection in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin
and the Goncourts’ Manette Salomon. The lengthy catalogue-like descrip-
tions of the collections in the latter two novels are used, at least in part,
to ‘‘map out’’ the complex subjectivities of the poet/philosopher
Raphaël and the artist Coriolis. Pons, in contrast, exhibits the very
simplified subjectivity of the monomaniacal man ruled by passion, in
this case a double passion, collecting and gastronomy. Motivated by
simple passions, Pons functions as a rational economic agent, negotiat-
ing in order to acquire that which he desires most, exchanging minimal
amounts of money for undervalued collectibles, exchanging a valuable
collectible for dinner invitations. The catalogue of bibelots in Le Cousin
Pons serves as an accounting of value, of artistic value for Pons, and of
monetary value for Frasier and the other bourgeois characters.
, :
In French literary history, two books mark a high point in the evolution
of catalogue-like literary description. In (well after brother Jules’s
death) Edmond de Goncourt published La Maison d’un artiste, a two-
volume inventory of and commentary on the collections gathered in his
home. Three years later his friend Joris-Karl Huysmans published A
rebours, the founding novel of decadence, whose main plot consists in the
choosing, arrangement, and rearrangement of the decor and collectibles
in the hero’s secluded house. Many critics have commented on the
catalogue-like nature of this novel, as well as on the similarities between
it and Goncourt’s catalogue. Both Huysmans and Goncourt use the
term ‘‘bibelot’’ to collectively designate the contents of the homes they
Literature and material culture
inventory in elaborating a refined aesthetics of daily life. These books
break with literary tradition, marking a moment of rupture in the very
possibilities for describing interior decor in literature: material objects
have begun to rival human characters in importance.
What made Huysmans’s strange novel A rebours possible, and why has
postmodern literary criticism taken such a keen interest in it? Given the
exigencies of plot and character development generic to the novel form,
the very existence of a novel like A rebours must be regarded as puzzling.
The premiss of the novel can hardly be called a plot: the wealthy duc des
Esseintes retires from society and moves to a house which he decorates
only with the most exquisite bibelots, with books made bibelot-like by
the care with which they are expensively bound, with paintings, engrav-
ings, and other well-chosen furnishings. Few other persons are men-
tioned; of these, none qualify as secondary characters. The bulk of the
novel consists in des Esseintes’s choosing, arranging, rearranging, and
musing on these objects. To write such a novel is to write as a bibeloteur,
savoring the contours of every item, pausing to let each object inspire
study, ideas, and fantasies. Because objects are so central to this novel, it
seems only logical that its author turns to the catalogue form, to
inventory art works, artifacts, books, furnishings, domestic goods,
plants, food substances, diseases, and drugs.
The writing of A rebours was made possible by the textual space which
earlier novelists had carved out for material culture, for descriptions of
the man-made material environment. It has been suggested that the
‘‘novelization’’ of A rebours renders it obviously superior to Goncourt’s
inventory. I would argue instead that by choosing to write a catalogue
instead of a novel, Goncourt makes a significant move, a move which
enables the conceptualization of A rebours. By devoting his energies
entirely to the sphere of things, Edmond opens the way for a novel like A
rebours, where interactions with material culture take the place of inter-
actions among human characters.
The organization of A rebours follows the model of La Maison d’un
artiste, in which Goncourt enumerates the contents of his house room by
room. Just as the space of La Maison d’un artiste is the space of Edmond’s
house, the house of des Esseintes is almost the only setting of A rebours.
What renders A rebours especially catalogue-like is that many if not most
of its chapters revolve around the collections gathered in the various
rooms of the house. A rebours is organized not by plot, not by the
interactions of human characters, but by material things in physical
space, in the space of a house, a private dwelling which is also a
Narrate, describe, or catalogue?
museum, a library, a decorator’s showroom, and a sanatorium. As one
postmodernist critic puts it,‘‘the reader is invited to move from chapter
to chapter just as a visitor moves from room to room in a well-organized
museum.’’ First Huysmans shows us des Esseintes’s bedroom, study,
and dining room, as the decorative choices in each are explained in
accord with an elaborate aesthetics. There are chapters almost entirely
devoted to paintings and engravings, while another chapter is devoted
to the famous jewel-encrusted turtle, and still others to exotic hothouse
flowers, liqueurs, and perfumes. Three different chapters scattered
throughout the novel are consecrated to the library.
Many postmodernist critics speak of the catalogue-like qualities of A
rebours, one calling the novel ‘‘a catalogue of rarities,’’ another ‘‘a story
that never ceases to march in place and which lives only by recourse to
the catalogue.’’ A third critic refers to ‘‘the long catalogue of invento-
ries of A rebours,’’ suggesting that the novel is a catalogue of inventories,
‘‘an overabundance of catalogues and lists, a litany of erudite nota-
tions.’’ In complete contrast to the above-cited modernist critics of the
Goncourts’ writing, none of these critics finds the inventory-like aspect
of A rebours problematic, a reaction which signals a drastic shift in critical
tastes. The studies of Huysmans to which I refer were all published since
the mid-s, when A rebours was ‘‘canonized’’ by its inclusion on
France’s national teaching exams, the and the Agrégation, in itself
strong evidence that what I have been calling the ‘‘postmodernist
aesthetic’’ dominates French studies today.
Why have the catalogue, and with it the museum, the collection, and
the bibelot, suddenly become privileged objects of critical enquiry?
Poststructuralist and postmodernist critics have recuperated these ob-
jects, the products of the modern material culture of consumer and
industrial capitalism, by abstracting them into figures of the free play of
language. This act of critical abstraction relies on the killing off of the
concrete referent in favor of pure textuality. Patrick Wald Lasowski
provides a particularly lucid articulation of this move to separate lan-
guage from materiality. He begins by banishing the referent:
But from La Maison d’un artiste by Goncourt (whose ‘‘setting of delicious inti-
macy’’ was appreciated by Huysmans) to A Rebours, the referent – the group of
objects which Goncourt inventories – is effaced. The text is affirmed.
As material things acquire more and more prominence in the novel,
they simultaneously become more and more autonomous from the
exigencies of narrative plot and character development. This growing
autonomy of the material object results from the incorporation into the
novel of the logic of modern material culture, especially consumer
culture. This logic is a ‘‘practical logic’’ of excess, of overproduction
and overaccumulation, as well as of circulation, exchangeability, repro-
duceability, seriality, fungibility, and interchangeability. Mainstream
literary criticism has resisted the logic of material culture until quite
recently. The catalogue itself is a vehicle of this logic of material
culture, for the inventory and the catalogue are the written forms of
Literature and material culture
cumulative stockpiling, in commerce, in collecting, and in the legal
profession (estate inventories, etc.). From this perspective, what in the
end distinguishes the modernist from the postmodernist critics is that
the latter have assimilated the logic(s) of consumer culture. Post-
modernism is after all the cultural logic of consumer capitalism, to play
on Fredric Jameson’s famous formulation. The mid-s turn to
Benjamin and the Frankfurt school serves as testimony to an interest in
and incorporation of the logics of consumer culture on the part of
postmodernist literary critics, even and perhaps especially those who
gloss over Benjamin’s Marxism.
:
To restate matters a bit differently, novelists, social commentators, and
sociologists who take an interest in material culture face the narrative
task of connecting two objects of analysis: persons and material things.
The primary figures for making connections are analogy, homology,
and reciprocal influence. This is how Balzac establishes a relationship
between dweller and dwelling in the well-known (and critically well-
worn) description of Madame Vauquer’s boarding house in Le Père
Goriot. Balzac is of course celebrated for the unity of his compositions,
which masterfully blend lengthy descriptions with narrative action,
colorful but realistic characters, and complex but orderly plots. His
descriptive portraits of important characters combine details of physiog-
nomy, clothing, and housing. Homology is a mechanism which Balzac
routinely uses to organize and unify his lengthy descriptions. The
portrait of Madame Vauquer is exemplary for the way it explicitly
situates her in a mutually determining relationship to her environment,
including her interior decor.
The opening sentence of Le Père Goriot simultaneously introduces
Madame Vauquer and her bourgeois boarding house: ‘‘Madame
Vauquer, née de Conflans, est une vieille femme qui, depuis quarante
ans, tient à Paris une pension bourgeoise établie rue Neuve-Sainte-Gen-
viève, entre le quartier latin et le faubourg Saint-Marceau’’ [‘‘Madame
Vauquer, née de Conflans, is an old woman who for forty years has kept a
bourgeois boarding house on Neuve-Sainte-Genviève street in Paris, be-
tween the Latin quarter and the Saint-Marceau area’’]. The sentence
grammatically locates the mistress in the subject position, with the
Literature and material culture
house as the direct object. Through this positioning, the story of a
person is accorded prominence over the description of setting, though
the house is given an equal amount of attention in the sentence, based
on the number of words devoted to it. This sentence, with Madame
Vauquer as subject and her house as predicate, prefigures the organiz-
ation of the heavily descriptive pages which follow. However, the
positions of Madame Vauquer and her boarding house are momentar-
ily reversed, since the house is depicted in detail before the owner
makes her second appearance. After briefly evoking the downward
mobility of the bourgeois boarders (including old Goriot), and the
house’s dubious neighborhood (already mentioned in the first sentence),
the narrator begins his description of the rundown house from the street
(named in the first sentence), first providing the exterior view. He then
moves inside to the shabby interior of ‘‘la maison Vauquer.’’ The text
gives several samplings of the interior’s tasteless decor, detailing the
chairs, wallpaper, greasy tablecloth, and cheap bibelots. Even new,
these objects would have reflected the worst of bourgeois and even
petty-bourgeois taste. To underline their present state of decline, the
narrator provides a list of adjectives which summarize the general
condition of the pension’s furnishings: ‘‘vieux, crevassé, pourri, trem-
blant, rongé, manchot, borgne, invalide, expirant’’ [‘‘old, cracked, rot-
ten, trembling, eaten away, one-armed, one-eyed, invalid, expiring’’]
(p. ). These adjectives could also be applied to most of the pensioners,
especially the aging Madame Vauquer and old Goriot, whose sad
situations have already been mentioned in the text. The message is
becoming clear: the pensioners and their pension have both deterio-
rated into a similar state of ruin, the condition of the one mirroring that
of the other. By the time the equally dilapidated Madame Vauquer is
shown entering this decrepit space, the stage has been set. Her face,
nose, hands, and torso are said to be ‘‘en harmonie avec’’ the room,
‘‘dont madame Vauquer respire l’air chaudement fétide sans en être
écoeurée’’ [‘‘in harmony with’’ / ‘‘whose hotly fetid air Madame
Vauquer breathed without feeling nauseous’’]. Only a creature of this
noxious milieu is able to breathe here. The relationship between dwel-
ler and dwelling is reciprocal: ‘‘toute sa personne explique la pension,
comme la pension implique sa personne’’ [‘‘her entire person explained
the boarding house, just as the boarding house implied her person’’]
(ibid., my emphasis). To understand the one is to explain, even project,
the other. Furthermore, the old woman’s pale, plump body ‘‘est le
produit de cette vie, comme le typhus est la conséquence des exhala-
The parlour of critical theory
isons d’un hôpital’’ [‘‘is the product of this life, like typhus is the
consequence of a hospital’s exhalations’’].
The innovation introduced by this kind of description is that the
similarities drawn between Madame Vauquer and the pension are not
mere analogies. What is being presented here is not simply a person
amidst a group of things, but also and more importantly a theory about
the relationship between them. The dwelling is more than a metaphori-
cal or allegorical reflection of its owner, for if the room is ‘‘en harmonie
avec’’ the physical traits of Madame Vauquer, if her tattered skirt
‘‘résume’’ the public rooms and garden, ‘‘annonce’’ the kitchen and
‘‘fait pressentir’’ the other inhabitants, this is because Madame Vauquer
‘‘est le produit de’’ her life in the pension, just as disease ‘‘est la
conséquence’’ of the bad air in hospitals. This is not so much a poetics as
a social theory, or, one could perhaps say, a social poetics: people are
products of their milieu, such that descriptors for the one entity apply to
the other. To describe a room in this way is not to reproduce ‘‘the real,’’
but rather to advance a hypothesis about the mutual construction of
persons and their built environment.
The claim that the description of the Vauquer pension is founded on
a social theory rather than simply on a poetics is hardly a revelation,
given that Balzac considers his novels to be works of social science, and
describes himself as docteur ès sciences sociales. It is well known that Balzac
models his novelistic portrayals of society on the natural sciences,
especially zoology, as he so famously explains in his preface to La Comédie
humaine, the vast cycle of novels which (among other things) is meant to
be a zoology of French society. It follows from Balzac’s reasoning based
on zoological theories that Madame Vauquer is a human type deter-
mined by her environment, just as any animal species is determined by
its habitat.
The scientifically minded individual of the nineteenth century is a
keen observer. It is thus fitting that the description of the maison
Vauquer is presented by a third-party narrator-observer who appears to
be conducting a visual examination of the house as he records its
physical characteristics for the reader who cannot see it. At the same
time, he interjects interpretations and background information, elabor-
ating and synthesizing as he notes visual data. To borrow a notion from
semiotics and visual culture studies, the narrator is ‘‘reading’’ the house.
The analogy of reading implies that the house is composed of signs.
Physical characteristics become ‘‘signifiers’’ of something else (the aging
process, a bourgeoisie in decline, social marginalization, etc.). The
Literature and material culture
narrator’s clever ‘‘reading’’ of this interior is made easy, since the
connections he appears to be finding between dweller and dwelling are
in fact created by the text itself. The reading narrator, the object read
(the house), and the interpretation are all fabricated together, based on
the interpretive schema of homology, by which dwellers and dwelling
space coexist in a mutually influential interrelationship. Material details
are made to form a coherent system which not only mirrors the coherent
system of characters, but also mirrors and reinforces the coherence of
the entire novel.
Balzac’s interiors firmly establish a place in the novel for ordinary
domestic objects. His successors will make use of what soon becomes a
narrative convention, filling their own novels with the details of house-
hold decor. Writers like the Goncourts and Huysmans will allow ma-
terial culture to virtually take over the novel, at the expense of character
development and plot.
[The furnishings assembled around each family seemed to surround them with
the instruments of their pleasures, the images of their tastes, and the symbols of
Literature and material culture
their times. The house was but another suit of clothing, less tight but more
lasting, and which in a way molded to itself the individual’s soul with the vaster
souls with which it interacted.]
: -
There are interesting parallels between the analysis of domestic furnish-
ings in Balzac’s and Proust’s novels, and that found in Max Nordau’s
famous work of social commentary, Degeneration, first published in ,
the same decade as Jean Santeuil. Like Proust, Nordau detects a change in
the relationship between dwellers and their dwellings.
Nordau was both a literary and social critic, as well as a trained
physician. He left Hungary for Germany, then settled in Paris where he
lived for most of his life. I cite his widely read and translated Degeneration
() because in it he makes use of the dweller/dwelling homology to
tie the bibelot-filled interior not only to literary and artistic movements,
but also to social and psychological transformations. Nordau ‘‘reads’’
the bourgeois interior as symptomatic of the individuals and the society
of his time. The notion of symptom is taken literally here, since Nordau
is using medical discourse to diagnose ‘‘degeneration,’’ a mental and
moral disease. Degeneration is written from the point of view of a liberal
who believes in science, progress, and (middle-class) morality. Though
politically liberal, Nordau’s aesthetics are quite conservative. His posi-
tivist Darwinian notion of progress grounded in science pitted him
against those who proclaimed that art should be free from utilitarian
and moralistic concerns.
Though Nordau seeks and finds symptoms of ‘‘degeneration’’
throughout Europe, he claims that it is especially prevalent in France.
The French words ‘‘decadence’’ and ‘‘fin-de-siècle’’ are for him practi-
cally synonyms of ‘‘degeneration.’’ He writes: ‘‘Fin-de-siècle is French, for
it was in France that the mental state so entitled was first consciously
Literature and material culture
realized.’’ The term ‘‘mental state’’ already implies the search for a
pathology. The common feature of the various manifestations of this
mentality is ‘‘a contempt for traditional views of custom and morality’’
(p. ). Nordau senses ‘‘the end of an established order,’’ the immanent
decline of the current epoch of history, which is signaled by the attacks
on order and rational logic waged in the arts by symbolists and aes-
thetes. ‘‘All certainty is destroyed’’; ‘‘forms lose their outlines’’; ‘‘moral
sea-sickness’’ spreads. Though ‘‘the great majority of the middle and
lower classes is naturally not fin-de-siècle,’’ the fin-de-siècle minority of
‘‘rich educated people or fanatics’’ exerts a disproportionate amount of
influence, and thus presents a real danger, warns Nordau.
Such views allow for no sympathy toward the bibelot, whose preva-
lence throughout Europe is indicative of mental and moral degener-
ation. Of the ‘‘furniture and bric-à-brac’’ of the ‘‘fin-de-siècle’’ dwell-
ing, here is a sample of what Nordau has to say:
Here are at once stage properties and lumber-rooms, rag-shops and museums
. . . On all the tables and in all the cabinets is a display of antiquities or articles of
vertù, big or small, and for the most part warranted not genuine; a plate beside
a long-necked Persian waterpot of brass, a bonbonnière between a breviary bound
in carved ivory, and snuffers of chiselled copper. (p. )
Nordau describes the same bibelot-filled interiors as the other authors
cited throughout this book. However, whereas the Goncourts, Huys-
mans, and company aestheticize the always passionate, sometimes per-
verse and neurotic, relationship between the collector and his surround-
ings, Nordau denounces it as confusion:
Everything in these houses aims at exciting the nerves and dazzling the senses.
The disconnected and antithetical effects in all arrangements, the constant
contradiction between form and purpose, the outlandishness of most objects, is
intended to be bewildering. There must be no sentiment of repose, such as is
felt at any composition, the plan of which is easily taken in, nor of the comfort
attending a prompt comprehension of all the details of one’s environment. He
who enters here must not doze, but be thrilled . . . All is discrepant, indiscrimi-
nate jumble. The unity of abiding by one definite historic style counts as
old-fashioned, provincial, Philistine, and the time has not yet produced a style
of its own. (p. )
The qualities presented by the bibelot-filled interior defy classical no-
tions of rational order: ‘‘disconnected,’’ ‘‘antithetical,’’ ‘‘outlandish-
ness,’’ ‘‘bewildering,’’ ‘‘discrepant,’’ ‘‘indiscriminate jumble.’’ ‘‘Unity’’
is perceptively recognized as an outmoded value. Again, the implication
The parlour of critical theory
is that persons and their environment are not only mutually reflective,
but also mutually constitutive: the confusion of styles not only mirrors
mental confusion, but also amplifies this confusion by ‘‘exciting the
nerves and dazzling the senses.’’ A tale of transformation can be detec-
ted by ‘‘reading between the lines’’ of this description: if the ‘‘indiscrimi-
nate jumble’’ of fin-de-siècle decor creates a sentiment of bewilderment,
then it follows that traditional (early nineteenth-century) decor creates a
‘‘sentiment of repose’’ through its easily comprehended ‘‘composition.’’
The homology between persons and things is so strongly established
that social and psychological changes produce decorative changes, and,
though perhaps to a more limited degree, vice versa, decorative changes
produce social and psychological changes.
Nordau draws on medical discourse to diagnose the collecting of
bibelots as symptomatic of a mental disorder:
The present rage for collecting, the piling up, in dwellings, of aimless bric-à-
brac, which does not becomes any more useful or beautiful by being fondly
called bibelots, appear to us in a completely new light when we know that
Magnan has established the existence of an irresistible desire among the
degenerate to accumulate useless trifles. (p. )
It is not the diagnosis that interests me, but rather the gesture of reading
degeneration into the subversion of the rational order associated with
traditional home decor. Nordau makes the assumption that the orderly
or disorderly arrangement of furnishings reflects and even contributes to
mental and moral order or disorder, respectively.
: - - ̀
I now turn to a fin-de-siècle sociologist’s discussion of bibelot-filled
interiors, Georg Simmel’s lengthy commentary on domestic goods in
The Philosophy of Money, published in , roughly contemporaneous
with the above-cited texts of Proust and Nordau. Like Proust and
Nordau, Simmel too tells a tale of historical transformation, in analyzing
the changing relationship between people and their household things.
Though there are certainly important differences between French and
German patterns of domestic consumption, as cultural historians like
Whitney Walton amply demonstrate, the taste for eclectic, cluttered
interiors is common throughout Europe during the s. That the
relevance of Simmel’s cultural analysis exceeds the national boundaries
of Germany is evidenced by the many translations of this book. His
Literature and material culture
commentary on interior decor is relevant to this chapter because it is
sociological in perspective, and much more lucidly articulated than, for
example, Walter Benjamin’s impressionistic reflections on the Louis-
Philippe interior, which might have been a more obvious choice. Above
all, Simmel’s commentary posits structural homologies between dwel-
lers and dwellings in theoretically sophisticated ways.
In the final chapter of The Philosophy of Money, Simmel uses the
Hegelian subject/object dialectic to analyze profound cultural changes
which take place over a one hundred-year period, from the end of the
eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. This chapter, called
‘‘The Style of Life,’’ includes a discussion of ordinary household furnish-
ings and other products of material culture. Furnishings and consumer
goods are used to illustrate the process that Simmel calls the ‘‘objectifi-
cation of culture,’’ which occurs as money comes to dominate social
relations. The result is a ‘‘growing estrangement’’ between (human)
subjects and (material) objects.
‘‘The divergence of subjective and objective culture’’ occurs on many
levels, and can be seen for example in the results of the division of labor
which comes about with industrialization. As material things are pro-
duced and consumed in ever greater quantity, producing and consum-
ing subjects alike become distanced from them, rendering relationships
between persons and things increasingly impersonal. At first, ‘‘Custom
work, which predominated among medieval craftsman and which
rapidly declined only during the last century, gave the consumer a
personal relationship with the commodity.’’ Later, when consumers no
longer buy goods directly from craftsmen, the personal relationship
between persons and goods deteriorates, as ‘‘exchange relations become
increasingly complicated and mediated.’’ Finally, factory production
separates the worker from the end product through specialization.
(Human) subjects become separated from (material) objects, though
paradoxically while confronting them in abundance.
The relationship between people and their home furnishings also
grows more distant during this time: ‘‘During the first decades of the
nineteenth century, furniture and the objects that surrounded us for use
and pleasure were of relative simplicity and durability and were in
accord with the needs of the lower as well as of the upper strata’’ (p. ).
The phrase ‘‘in accord with’’ echoes Proust’s characterization of the
Balzacian interior. Simmel next points out a generational difference in
the relationship between persons and their furnishings: ‘‘This resulted in
people’s attachment as they grew up to the objects of their surroundings,
The parlour of critical theory
an attachment that already appears to the younger generation today as
an eccentricity on the part of their grandparents’’ (pp. –). Detach-
ment is associated with the ‘‘younger generation’’ of the s, while
attachment is associated with their early nineteenth-century grand-
parents. This growing detachment (alienation, in the language of Marx
and Lukács) is the tale of historical transformation that Simmel tells
through his ‘‘readings’’ of domestic interiors.
The comfortable attachment of subjects to objects still prevalent in
the early nineteenth century erodes as a result of several factors, notably
abundance, specialization, differentiation, and commodification. By the
s, the ‘‘sheer quantity’’ of specialized objects ‘‘makes a close and, as
it were, personal relationship to each of them more difficult.’’ People
were closer to objects in earlier times, because ‘‘a few and simple utensils
are more easily assimilated by the individual.’’ Later, ‘‘an abundance of
different kinds almost form an antagonistic object to the individual self’’
(p. ). Now there are too many different kinds of things to cope with.
Further contributing to the sense of detachment are the alienating
effects of the money economy. ‘‘What is distressing is that we are
basically indifferent to those numerous objects that swarm around us,
and this is for reasons specific to a money economy: their impersonal
origin and easy replaceability’’ (ibid.). I understand ‘‘impersonal origin’’
to mean that objects are produced by persons unknown to the consum-
ing subject. Their ‘‘easy replaceability’’ would seem to refer to their
being made equivalent through the abstract medium of money.
Simmel next describes the modern configuration of the world of
objects as ‘‘an interconnected enclosed world that has increasingly fewer
points at which the subjective soul can interpose its will and feelings’’
(ibid.). In other words, the subject/object relationship begins to give way
to object/object relationships which seem to exclude the subject. The
subject confronts a world of material objects which he/she experiences
as separated from the self.
Finally, objects become separated from people by their mobility.
Simmel observes that new types of transportation make the commodity
more mobile than ever, moving it without its being accompanied by its
merchant. ‘‘By their independent, impersonal mobility, objects com-
plete the final stage of their separation from people,’’ he concludes
(ibid.). Mobility is what in the end lies behind the eclecticism of fin-de-
siècle home furnishings. Also attributed to mobility is the prevailing
taste for decorative historicism: ‘‘The historicizing preference of our
century . . . is only the internal aspect of the general development of its
Literature and material culture
adaptability and its wide-ranging mobility. This is the root of the bewil-
dering plurality of styles that are absorbed, presented and appreciated by
our culture’’ (p. ; my emphasis). The juxtaposition of historic and
exotic furnishings in home decor is but one aspect of ‘‘the bewildering
plurality of styles’’ which proliferate in many sectors of culture at this
time, ‘‘from the construction of buildings to the format of books, from
sculptures to gardens and furniture with their juxtaposition of Renais-
sance and Japanese styles, Baroque and empire, the style of the Pre-
Raphaelites and realistic functionalism’’ (p. ). This ‘‘multitude of
styles’’ results from ‘‘the enlargement of our historical knowledge, which
in turn is associated with modern man’s penchant for change mentioned
earlier’’ (ibid.).
Simmel then ties the plurality of styles to the process of detachment,
which he ascribes to the objectification of culture. The very possibilities
of choice presented by this barrage of styles leads to the further degrada-
tion of the subject/object bond. I have highlighted the terms which refer
to the ever widening subject/object separation:
Only where a variety of given styles exists will one detach itself from its content so
that its independence and specific significance gives us the freedom to choose
between the one or the other. Through the differentiation of styles each individual
style, and thus style in general, becomes something objective whose validity is
independent of human subjects and their interests, activities, approval or disap-
proval. The fact that the entire visible environment of our cultural life has
disintegrated into a plurality of styles dissolves that original relationship to style where
subject and object are not yet separated. (p. ; my emphasis)
:
What has been the fate of the nineteenth-century interior during the
present century? In order to analyze the mid-twentieth-century house-
hold interior, Jean Baudrillard found it necessary to define its prede-
cessor. In The System of Objects, he sketches out a prototype ‘‘traditional
interior’’ easily recognizable to readers of nineteenth-century novels as
the typically realist dwelling. For this reason, Baudrillard’s remarks are
pertinent to the topic of the literary interior in general, and the bibelot in
particular. Like Proust, Nordau, and Simmel, Baudrillard also tells a
‘‘then’’/‘‘now’’ story involving the household interior, which is shown to
Literature and material culture
be homologous with the mental, familial, and social structures of its
inhabitants, such that changes in any one of these structures are mir-
rored by similar changes in the other structures. Baudrillard’s periods,
though, are located further down the time line, ‘‘then’’ being the
nineteenth century, ‘‘now’’ being the mid-twentieth.
‘‘Everything began with objects,’’ declares Jean Baudrillard in a
retrospective reflection on his own work. The objects with which
‘‘everything began’’ are located in the nineteenth-century interior: the
first chapter of his first book, The System of Objects (Le Système des objets,
), begins with a lengthy description of ‘‘The Traditional Environ-
ment.’’ What Baudrillard describes under this rubric is the stereotyped
image of the ideal bourgeois family dwelling, the conditions of possibil-
ity for which come into being with the economic growth, technological
improvements, and ideological constructs coterminous with the indus-
trial and consumer revolutions. For Baudrillard this type of interior, his
‘‘then,’’ no longer exists in its original form in his ‘‘now,’’ the s.
Because all of his subsequent theories of consumer society, free-floating
signifiers, simulacra, and seduction originate in this first book, which
begins with the bourgeois dwelling, it could be said that the nineteenth-
century interior is the parlour of Baudrillard’s critical theory.
The ‘‘traditional environment’’ described in The System of Objects
strangely resembles Balzac’s maison Vauquer, and Proust’s Balzacian
interior. The affinities between Baudrillard’s theories and literature are
perhaps explained by his intellectual debt to Roland Barthes. Here are
some of the key sentences which introduce Baudrillard’s bourgeois
family house. I have italicized the rhetorical indicators of homology:
The arrangement of furniture offers a faithful image of the familial and social
structures of a period. The typical bourgeois interior is patriarchal . . . The
emphasis is on unifunctionality, immovability, imposing presence and hier-
archical labelling. Each room has a strictly defined role corresponding to one or
another of the various functions of the family unit, and each ultimately refers to a
view which conceives of the individual as a balanced assemblage of distinct
faculties. The pieces of furniture confront one another, jostle one another, and
implicate one another in a unity that is not so much spatial as moral in character.
They are ranged about an axis which ensures a regular chronology of actions;
thanks to this permanent symbolization, the family is always present to itself.
For Baudrillard, what characterizes the traditional household is that the
structure of its furnishings and the layout of its rooms reflect and
reinforce the structures of the patriarchal family, as well as the social
structures of bourgeois society, also patriarchal of course. The dweller/
The parlour of critical theory
dwelling homologies so starkly presented here are certainly symp-
tomatic of the prevailing winds of structuralism in s France, but the
similarity to Balzac is certainly not to be overlooked. The dwelling
structure described here corresponds to a nineteenth-century concept of
the family house, since before this time, what he calls the ‘‘typical
bourgeois interior’’ did not have separate rooms with strictly defined
uses; indeed, such arrangements were not common in aristocratic dwell-
ings until the eighteenth century. The language that Baudrillard
chooses for characterizing this environment projects what is now com-
monly recognized as the totalizing, hierarchizing, essentializing theo-
retical constructs which will be deconstructed by so-called postmodern-
ist criticism: ‘‘unifunctionality,’’ ‘‘immovability,’’ ‘‘hierarchical labell-
ing,’’ ‘‘strictly defined role,’’ ‘‘unit,’’ ‘‘balanced assemblage,’’ ‘‘unity,’’
‘‘permanent symbolization.’’ By insisting on this group of adjectives, he
sets up the reversal that he will identify later in the chapter.
As if the point that the ‘‘traditional’’ family space faithfully mimes
‘‘traditional’’ family structures may not be clear, Baudrillard drives
home the point in a second paragraph. He chooses the most system-
atic, unified, totalizing image available to him, the biological organism.
The traditional environment ‘‘constitutes an organism whose structure
is the patriarchal relationship founded on tradition and authority.’’
The ‘‘heart’’ of this organicized household ‘‘is the complex affective
relationship that binds all the family members together.’’ The family
home actually functions like an organism: ‘‘the primary function of
furniture and objects here is to personify human relationships . . . and to
be inhabited by a soul.’’ The model of organic unity is the very model
which Balzac and Zola use for their novelistic portrayals of society, in
comparing humans to animals, insisting that humans and animals are
organized in the same way, both individually and socially. Baudrillard
reinforces the notion of the personification of inanimate things by
evoking anthropomorphism of the ‘‘primitive’’ sort, writing that ‘‘In
their anthropomorphism the objects that furnish [the traditional in-
terior] become household gods, spatial incarnations of the emotional
bonds and the permanence of the family group’’ (p. ). The spatial
incarnates the emotional. Household objects turn into deities. The
family thus inscribes itself into the things around it. It is because
furnishings function anthropomorphically that they can be endowed
with meaning. They function as symbols because they embody the
family. The referent of these symbols is ultimately the dweller and his
social relations.
Literature and material culture
Baudrillard describes, analyzes, and interprets this ‘‘traditional’’ re-
gime of meaningful domestic goods only in order to declare that it no
longer exists. This is a typically Baudrillardian move: twenty years later
he declares that the ‘‘system of objects’’ no longer exists. The identifi-
cation of rupture is, after all, the basis of theories of modernity and
postmodernity, since to be ‘‘modern’’ something has to be different than
it was before. To evoke the notion of the modern is to tell a ‘‘then’’/
‘‘now’’ story.
Localizing a modernizing rupture in the transmutations of the bour-
geois interior, Baudrillard posits that by the mid-twentieth century,
furnishings are no longer anthropomorphic, nor are they sacred. How-
ever, traditional furniture itself does not disappear, but returns in a
desacralized form, that of nostalgia. A ‘‘modern generation’’ casts aside
the ‘‘household gods’’ of its grandparents. However, ‘‘on occasion,’’ the
castoffs are ‘‘reinstated . . . in an up-to-date nostalgia for whatever is
old.’’ This furniture then ‘‘passes from a naı̈ve utility into a cultural
baroque.’’ Such traditional furniture is popular ‘‘because it embodies
the official certainties of the group and enjoys the sanction of the
bourgeoisie,’’ and, furthermore, echoes ‘‘the persistence of traditional
family structures across broad social strata of modern society’’ (p. ).
The important aspects of the transformation here described are sys-
temic, conceptual, and semiotic. It is not simply the emergence of new
designs or new decorating schema that changes the interior, but rather
the way the mid-twentieth-century inhabitants interact with their in-
teriors. Furthermore, even in the late s, traditional furnishings are
still manufactured, are still purchased, and are often still arranged in
traditional ways. However, these furnishings are no longer sacralized
incarnations of family and social structures. Instead, they take on the
function of symbolizing the persistence of traditional structures. Domestic
objects are no longer gods, but quaint revivals. They no longer repro-
duce family structure, but merely mark loss.
What is eradicated with furniture’s passing from a (nineteenth-cen-
tury) ‘‘naı̈ve utility’’ to a (twentieth-century) ‘‘cultural baroque’’ is the
principle of organic unity. With the traditional interior arrangement,
the ‘‘then’’ of the then/now rupture, the house was the double of the
body, ‘‘the symbolic equivalent of the human body.’’ The body’s ‘‘po-
tent organic schema is later generalized into an ideal design for the
integration of social structures’’ (p. ). House, body, and society are
structured homologously. ‘‘Then,’’ the organizational structure of the
home interior was based on the organic principles by which the human
The parlour of critical theory
body generated or engendered the house as body, as well as the social as
body.
‘‘Now,’’ after the rupture, organic structure is being replaced by the
functionality of technocratic, communicational, systemic principles.
The ‘‘basic ordering principle’’ of the nineteenth-century system of
objects was ‘‘Nature.’’ Conversely, ‘‘what we glimpse today in modern
times is the coming end of this order of Nature; what is appearing on
the horizon . . . is a qualitatively new kind of relationship, a new kind of
objective responsibility’’ (p. ). ‘‘Our old pieces of furniture remained
concrete symbols’’ of ‘‘the very idea of genesis.’’ Today’s world is not
reproduced organically, but ‘‘constructed’’ (ibid.). The new world op-
erates not according to organic principles, but rather according to
‘‘practical computation and conceptualization on the basis of total
abstraction’’ (ibid.). In these sentences, the ‘‘then’’ and the ‘‘now’’ are
organized into a series of opposed images and metaphors. ‘‘Then,’’ the
‘‘order of nature’’ predominated, providing organizational, conceptual,
and even experiential schemas based on the organic notions of ‘‘gen-
esis,’’ ‘‘origins,’’ and ‘‘essences,’’ of a world perceived as ‘‘given.’’ In
contrast, ‘‘now,’’ ‘‘in modern times,’’ the order of technology domi-
nates, replacing the old nature-based schemas with inorganic schemas.
The world is not ‘‘given,’’ but made. It is no longer engendered, but
constructed. As nature gives way to technology, genesis gives way to
production.
For Baudrillard, it is the whole structure of meaning production that
is put in jeopardy at this moment of rupture, in the passing from nature
to technology, from a regime of anthropomorphic interior decor to a
regime of functional interior decor. The house and its furnishings can
no longer function as an organic entity because the very regime of
meaning which it is meant to symbolize – ‘‘origins, received meanings
and ‘essences’’’ – has collapsed. Because the house is no longer
grounded in the body, there is no longer a basis for the personification,
anthropomorphism, and sacralization of furnishings. The nineteenth-
century structure of meaning, affect, and identity formation has been
replaced by a twentieth-century system of functionality, organization,
and technical control. The dweller is no longer a creator of relics and
idols, of graven images. Rather, in the modern, functional home he is a
technocrat, ‘‘an active engineer of atmosphere’’ (p. ).
The structure of meaning has been eradicated, not the traditional
home furnishings themselves, insists Baudrillard again in the central
part of The System of Objects, in two sections entitled ‘‘Marginal Objects:
Literature and material culture
Antiques’’ and ‘‘A Marginal System: Collecting.’’ Antiques and collec-
tibles incorporate the modern ‘‘system of objects’’ as markers of origins,
as reminiscences of the earlier, organic regime of meaning. ‘‘Unique,
baroque, folkloric, exotic and antique objects’’ do not ‘‘fall outside’’ the
mid-twentieth-century interior decorative principle of ‘‘functional cal-
culation’’ (p. ). These are not to be understood as ‘‘survivals from the
traditional, symbolic order,’’ but rather as signifiers of ‘‘historicalness,’’
or ‘‘marginality,’’ or ‘‘exoticism,’’ or ‘‘naturalness’’ (p. ). In the twenti-
eth-century interior, ‘‘the antique object presents itself as a myth of
origins’’ (p. ).
For Baudrillard, the twentieth-century interior does in a sense remain
‘‘readable,’’ despite the (hypothesized) collapse of the ‘‘traditional’’
organic structure of meaning. It is not symbolism, however, that one
‘‘reads’’ in the new interiors, but rather the communicational strategies
of technological society, along with the new mental structures of the
technological dweller. This new bourgeois dweller is at once engineer
and modern consumer, for modern advertising targets the new strategic
approach to interior design (p. ). One must ‘‘read’’ functionality,
system, and code in the modern interior, not symbols whose referential-
ity was established based on a relationship of organic analogy to the
body of the individual dweller. Anthropomorphism is eradicated by the
abstraction of system.
The readings of household interiors presented thus far collectively
express an intimate relationship between persons and things as a char-
acteristic of the nineteenth-century interior. Those writing in the last
decade of the nineteenth century, Proust, Nordau, and Simmel, along
with Baudrillard writing seventy years later, convey a sense of loss in
recounting stories of rupture with this time when dwellers experienced
an intimate, affective relationship to their furnishings. Given the prevail-
ing stereotype of the perverse overattachment of late nineteenth-century
dwellers to their bibelot-filled interiors, the sentiment of loss detectable
in these tales of transformation is perhaps surprising. This is the paradox
of modern material culture: too much distance between persons and
things results in alienation, whereas too much closeness results in
fetishism. To clarify at the risk of oversimplification, the collector acts
out of passion and is fetishistically overattached, whereas the consumer
acts out of compulsion and remains unnaturally detached. However,
collectors survive to this day, while consumers already existed during
the nineteenth century.
The parlour of critical theory
The wife’s task is to create an agreeable interior. There her personality can
express itself in all of the details that make up the home. Her tastes and her
character will be so clearly reflected there, that without even knowing her, a
visitor with some skills at observation could represent to himself the mistress of
the house as she really is, ‘‘careful and flirtatious, attentive and artistic,’’ all of
these qualities will emerge in the furniture and the things . . . Of course, all the
faults of laziness, of lack of taste, of inattention will also leave their mark.
Auslander and other cultural historians have noted that the task of
organizing and properly encoding the interior tends to fall to the wife
and mother. The self-image of the entire family depends on the taste
and choices of the mother. The home is the site of self-expression, to the
extent that the personality is reflected there. Any fault in furnishings
risks being ‘‘read’’ unfavorably by observant visitors.
Baudrillard’s strategy of reading dwelling space in terms of homolo-
gies between decorative arrangements and social structures follows
reading practices well established in literature, social commentary,
turn-of-the-century sociology, journalism, treatises on taste, and adver-
tising aimed at consumers. Such is the strange genealogy of the theories
of a leading, albeit often contested, voice in cultural criticism. This is not
to entirely dismiss the theory, but rather to point out postmodernism’s
roots in bourgeois daily life. If postmodernism is the ‘‘cultural logic of
late capitalism,’’ then it is also the cultural logic of consumption. It is
only fitting, then, that Baudrillard, whose name has become virtually
synonymous with postmodernist theory, especially for its critics, should
ground his thinking in the bourgeois household, the space where the
durable goods of early mass consumption gather to create a private
dream world, a haven for the industrial capitalist, who seeks escape in a
domesticized aesthetic sphere.
What remains somewhat troubling is that the starting point of Baud-
rillard’s ‘‘critique’’ of consumer culture so completely incorporates the
discourse of consumer culture. This is not to say that there is any
‘‘outside’’ point from which to critique consumer culture, certainly not
now. Rather, in order to move forward in the critique of consumer
The parlour of critical theory
culture, the very hypothesis of the readability of furnishings and other
belongings urgently needs questioning. While it seems undeniable that
possessions do function as symbols of the self, and that they always have,
this symbolic function has been ingrained in and exploited by the
machinery of consumer capitalism. Any ‘‘theory’’ of the deep meaning
of material things must therefore be greeted with caution. The belief in
the readability of man-made things is fundamentally constitutive of the
consuming subject. It is time to quit ‘‘reading’’ for a moment, in order to
ask what such readings of possessions ultimately do, whose purposes
they ultimately serve.
[And the plaster head hanging on the wall watched the cadaver, while the
decapitated body quivered prolongedly in the shadowy frame of the accursed
door; and on the dark carpet, the two feet writhed, convulsed in excrutiating
anguish; at this moment, the head cast its other-worldly gaze upon me, and,
wrecked, I fell to the carpet.]
The head remains attached to the wall, looking across the room at the
body framed by the door, while the feet writhe against the background
of the carpet, set off from the rest of the sentence by semi-colons.
Though Oedipal order is respected to the extent that a male collector
develops a cathexis around a feminized part-object, the part–whole split
is left unrestored in the end of this tale, precluding narrative closure, as
well as any possibility of so-called normal sexual union. The narrator
does not take the reanimated woman to bed, as did the protagonist of
Maupassant’s La Chevelure, nor does he court her, pursuing marriage as
did the protagonist of Gautier’s Le Pied de momie. Lorrain’s revivified
woman is left in pieces, as are the Oedipal plots of sexual union and the
pursuit of a young beautiful bride.
In terms of the logic of material culture, a significant difference
between Lorrain’s tale and those of Maupassant and Gautier lies in the
issue of authenticity, of the model versus the copy: the fantastic object in
Le Pied de momie is an authentic mummy’s foot, and in Maupassant’s La
Chevelure, an authentic lock of hair. In contrast, in Lorrain’s tale, the
fantastic object is a plaster cast of a head, hardly a classic fetish object, as
are feet and hair. Furthermore, the woman’s foot which does appear in
Lorrain’s tale is not generated from an actual woman’s preserved body
part, but rather from a statue, and not from the ‘‘authentic’’ original,
but rather from a copy of a statue, a simulacrum of a simulacrum, to
borrow Baudrillard’s well-worn phrase. Lorrain’s plaster cast is not of
the whole statue, but rather of a part, a part whose severance from the
whole is emphasized in the story. By building an illusion based on a
copy, and one that is not whole at that, narrative order is in the end
subverted. Authenticity is replaced by appearance. Antiquarianism
gives way to aestheticized illusion. Romanticism’s idealized muse
(Gautier) gives way to a particularly monstrous decadent femme fatale
(Lorrain). All of this is caught up in the issues of imitation and reproduc-
tion which so haunt industrial culture. It could be said that in the
Rearranging the Oedipus
fantastic, the discourse of authenticity produced out of the material
culture of antique furnishings grounds ‘‘the real’’ on which the fantastic
relies for its hesitation between the natural and the supernatural. Lor-
rain’s Réclamation posthume distances itself from this practice of grounding
the real in domesticized antiques by taking us into the logics of the copy,
the series, and the simulacrum, whereby the antiquarian’s concern with
authenticity gives way to emphasis on appearance.
.
With its recurring themes of masks, casts, and copies, Lorrain’s fantastic
and decadent fiction repeatedly raises the question of the simulacrum,
an issue crucial to the material culture of European industrialization. In
Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard schematizes the ‘‘successive phases
of the image’’:
it [the image] is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
As I said at the beginning of this chapter in regard to another of
Baudrillard’s formulations, whether or not this schema is found to have
relevance to sociology or history, it does work very well for thinking
about the use of material objects in nineteenth-century French litera-
ture. In this context, the ‘‘reality’’ in question here would be that
conceptual construct which underpins positivism, nineteenth-century
science, and the realist novel, all of which make up the reality grounded
in the bourgeois values embodied in Balzac’s bourgeois living rooms.
Objects in Balzac either reflect a profound reality, or mask and denature
a profound reality; in both cases, the profound reality ‘‘exists’’ without
question. Objects in Flaubert question the very existence of this
profound reality, at times masking and denaturing it, at times masking
its absence. Within the classic fantastic of Gautier and Maupassant, the
supernatural is but another face of profound reality, a reality more
profound than the natural.
Lorrain’s simulacra, such as the plaster cast of the Donatello statue,
mask ‘‘the absence of a profound reality,’’ the fourth of the ‘‘successive
phases of the image.’’ The era of simulation is fostered in by the
industrial era of serial production, just as the cult of authentic antique
bibelots is in many ways a nostalgic reaction to industrialization. While
Literature and material culture
Jean Lorrain evokes the cult of the bibelot throughout his fantastic and
decadent fiction, his work also manifests an assimilation of the copy, of
the series, of the simulacrum, through his frequent evocations of repro-
ductions of art works, by means like photography (Ophélius) and plaster
casts (Réclamation posthume). His obsession with masks and portraits con-
tributes to the frequent confusion of persons and things. Anthropomor-
phism in his work at times leads to an almost complete erasure of the
boundaries between humans and their material artifacts.
The absence of the ‘‘real’’ in the work of Lorrain is perhaps most
evident on the psychological plane. Even in their fantastic tales, writers
like Gautier and Maupassant use the anthropomorphism of domestic
objects to reinforce the illusion of psychological realism, by reinforcing
the mental structures attributed to their characters through the dou-
bling of these structures in the structure of a personified material
culture. In contrast, rather than personifying objects, Lorrain objectifies
people, insisting on their visual, surface qualities, on the mask-like
nature of their personas. Consequently, a logic of objects governs the
logic of human relations. Collecting, the bibelot, and the museum take
on new dimensions in Lorrain.
Serialized sexuality
In his most important novel, Monsieur de Phocas, Lorrain serializes sex-
uality while exalting serialized art, a serialization accomplished by the
logics of collecting and of copying. The word bibelot appears frequently
throughout this decadent work, eliciting fixations on interior decor, on
the antique market, and on the culture of the museum. The hero, the
duc de Fréneuse, alias Phocas, is to a large extent modeled on Huys-
mans’s reclusive des Esseintes of A rebours. Fréneuse too is a collector, of
gemstones, antique jewelry, precious carpets, rare weapons, and strong
poisons, most of which he has gathered on yearly trips to ‘‘l’Orient’’ (p.
).
The logic of collecting guides Fréneuse’s pursuit of his main obses-
sion, eyes the color of emeralds and of the sea. The eyes are perhaps the
least gendered part of the body, as compared, for example, to the hair
and feet which were the fetish-objects in Maupassant’s La Chevelure and
Gautier’s Le Pied de momie. At the same time, eyes are also easily
assimilated into the Baudelairean/Huysmansian aesthetics of mineral-
ity and artificiality. Fréneuse finds these emerald, sea-green eyes not
only in people, male and female, but also in the statues and paintings of
Rearranging the Oedipus
major museums. Captivated by the statue of the Greek ephebe Antinoüs
in the Louvre, whose eyes he would like to replace with emeralds, he is
equally struck by the eyes of Salomé and other exotic female beauties in
the paintings on view in the museum of Gustave Moreau. He finds the
same eyes in female acrobats and in male sailors.
Collecting provides a logic for groupings based on physical similari-
ties. The logic of seriality which animates the activities of the collector
also animates this search for eyes of a similar type. Seriality is established
through a visual resemblance which allows the collecting subject to pass
from males to females, from humans to their portraits, from the animate
to the inanimate. In this way, seriality serves the purpose of dissimula-
ting homosexual desire, since desire can begin with a legitimate Oedipal
object (for a man, a woman) then, through the logic of seriality, move on
to an illegitimate object (an inanimate object like a statue; or for a man,
another man). The logic of seriality is thus put to the service of the logic
of inversion.
The novel’s characters are also created out of the logic of seriality, of
resemblance, of artistic reproductions, of the simulacrum. Fréneuse
encounters others who share his obsession with eyes, first Claudius
Ethal, an older man and mentor figure who later introduces him to a
second, younger man, the disturbingly handsome Thomas Welcôme.
Fréneuse identifies strongly with Welcôme, then learns that he has
probably killed another older man, Burdhes. Near the end of the novel,
young Fréneuse copies the alleged crime of young Welcôme, by mur-
dering his own older mentor, Ethal.
Throughout the recounting of these serialized liaisons, obsessions,
and murders, a number of collectors’ objects are displayed and ex-
changed. Ethal, an artist, ceremoniously shows Fréneuse several collec-
tions, of masks, of wax statues, and of painted portraits, some of which
he gathered from the international antique collectors’ market, others
made by himself or by artist friends. While traveling, Ethal sends other
collectors’ objects to Fréneuse, as gifts. In Holland he purchases ‘‘le plus
merveilleux bibelot,’’ ‘‘une pièce de musée,’’ a sixteenth-century wax
sculpture of an Infanta, which he then shows to Fréneuse on his return,
all with great fanfare. These displays and exchanges depend on a
circulation and replaceability of objects which defy the Oedipal order of
bourgeois sexuality, for the showing and exchanging takes place be-
tween men, recalling then violating the rules of gift exchange governing
courtship and marriage negotiations, for such frequent expensive per-
sonal gifts are customarily reserved for fiancés and family members.
Literature and material culture
Furthermore, these objects all function as effigies, joined to the various
characters of the novel by associative chains based on resemblance and
portraiture. Ethal compares his own likeness to that of a dwarf in a
painting in a museum, which he urges Fréneuse to go and see. One of
the engravings which Ethal sends as a gift includes a figure which
resembles Fréneuse. Wax figures are preferable to portraits because
their resemblance is superior. Claudius’s collection of wax ‘‘portraits,’’
of young adolescent boys and famous aristocratic women, is called ‘‘un
boudoir de mortes’’ [‘‘a boudoir of female cadavers’’] (p. ). The
cadaver-like quality of art is thus underlined, and reinforced by Ethal’s
attraction to sick and dying models, in accordance with the fin-de-siècle
fashion of pale, wraith-like, drugged, or diseased women, such as those
painted by the pre-Raphaelites.
From London, Ethal sends Fréneuse the most obviously symbolic of
all of the bibelots mentioned in the novel, a black onyx statue of the
Middle Eastern goddess Astarté. This statue was found in the temple
Burdhes, allegedly murdered by Welcôme, had erected for a cult he
imported from the Far East. The black onyx Astarté witnessed the
murder of Burdhes, who was found dead in the temple. In the ensuing
estate sale Ethal bought the statuette, admiring its slender androgynous
body and emerald eyes, with a tiny skull in the place of its genitals. By
sending Fréneuse the green-eyed statue which witnessed the death of
Burdhes, amidst ‘‘des décors de crime’’ (p. ), Ethal prefigures the
scene of his own murder, setting up the decor for a second murder
scene. However, present as a witness to Ethal’s murder is not the
statuette of the ‘‘déesse androgyne’’ (p. ), but rather the wax bust of a
dying young Italian street urchin, sculpted by Ethal himself. A male
statue-witness is thus substituted for a female one. On the night of his
murder, as Ethal strokes the head of the male adolescent’s bust, Fré-
neuse notices his emerald ring (green of course, the eye color which
obsesses him), which he knows contains a strong poison which kills
instantly. The younger man breaks open the hollow stone of the ring on
Ethal’s teeth, killing him. The replacement of the androgynous female
effigy (the onyx Astarté present at Burdhes’s murder) by the adolescent
male effigy (the wax bust of the dying street urchin present at Ethal’s
murder) repeats the logic of seriality. Such substitutions of effigies for
people, of male effigies for female ones, mask the replacement of one
gender for another in relations of sexual desire.
The plot of double murder is inscribed in the novel’s ‘‘floor-plan,’’ in
the spatial dimension of its settings. As compared to the solitary lifestyle
Rearranging the Oedipus
of Huysmans’s des Esseintes living in his suburban retreat, Fréneuse
leads a sordid social life, which alters the floor-plan of Monsieur de Phocas,
in comparison to A rebours. Huysmans’s des Esseintes spends almost the
entire narrative time of the novel confined to his own collection-filled
house, while Lorrain’s Fréneuse spends most of the time of the narrative
outside of the confines of his Parisian family mansion. Whereas very few
scenes are set in the space of the protagonist’s home, several important
scenes are set in his friend Claudius Ethal’s Parisian art studio, whose
decor, based on the aesthetic of fin-de-siècle collecting, is transformed
like a theater set for each different scene. Fréneuse does visit his own
long-deserted childhood home during the novel, a country estate in
Normandy, drawn by the memory of a long-dead farmhand’s beautiful
eyes. Other scenes are set at vaudeville-type theaters, and in cheap hotels
frequented by the lowest-class prostitutes. Fréneuse the wealthy collector
roams these spaces as if no home can contain his murderous desires and
obscure vices, so many figures devised to mask the unspeakable (and
unspoken) homosexual attractions which drive him from his home.
Fréneuse, then, is a wandering collector, a thematic which amounts to
a rewriting of the customarily fixed floor-plan of the bibelot-filled
interior. In this novel, the logics of circulation and exchange become
more important than the logics of display and decor. With Lorrain, the
bibelot achieves its ultimate degree of mobility. In fin-de-siècle narra-
tive, the seriality of the collection lends itself to the seriality of love objects.
Given this floor-plan, it is significant that Monsieur de Phocas begins and
ends with the theme of travel, the long trip that the protagonist under-
takes after the murder of Ethal, a voyage announced in the opening
chapter then again at the end. Like Welcôme, suspected of Burdhes’s
murder, Fréneuse too will set off for a long voyage to the Far East. ‘‘Les
voyages, c’est l’exil volontaire,’’ remarks Ethal. In Monsieur de Phocas, the
aesthetics of collecting leads not to the construction of a sanctuary, but
rather to the exiled state of the traveling dealer in clandestine artifacts,
the lifestyle of the adventurous pillaging antiquarians and archaeologists
of high colonialism. One is also reminded of the seafaring figure of
collector Pierre Loti, an admirer of exotic women and of young male
sailors. The traveling collector makes the world his floor-plan.
Williams, Dream Worlds, pp. –.
Chandra Mukerji contests this periodization, pushing the dawn of con-
sumption back to the early modern period. See her From Graven Images,
chapter .
Pearce, On Collecting, pp. –; Barthes, ‘‘Semantics of the Object.’’
Gere, Nineteenth-Century Interiors, p. .
Bosc, Dictionnaire, p. .
Octave Uzanne parodies this trend in a short story, ‘‘Le Crachoir’’ [‘‘The
Spittoon’’], in Le Bric-à-brac de l’amour ().
Wharton and Codman, The Decoration of Houses, p. .
‘‘La bimbeloterie, ainsi nommée du vieux mot bimbelot, jouet d’enfant,
dérivé lui-même de l’italien bimbolo, poupée, comprend non-seulement les
divers jouets destinés à l’amusement des enfants, mais encore les masques,
certains objets d’étagère, et des articles pour les confiseurs, les coiffeurs, les
couturières et les modistes’’ (Burée, Les Eventails. La Bimbeloterie, p. ).
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Histoire de la société française pendant le
Directoire, p. .
Clément de Ris, La Curiosité, p. ; author’s emphasis.
Bonnaffé, Causeries sur l’art et la curiosité, p. .
Goncourt, La Maison d’un artiste, : ; author’s emphasis.
Clément de Ris, La Curiosité, . On the parallels between Pons and the
other collectors of his time, see Lorant, Les ‘‘Parents pauvres’’, esp. : –,
and his introduction and notes to the Pléiade edition of Le Cousin Pons.
Bonnaffé, Causeries, p. .
Notes to pages –
Vachon, La Belle maison, pp. –.
On the department store, see Miller, The Bon Marché; Bowlby, Just Looking;
Williams, Dream Worlds; and Schor, ‘‘Before the Castle,’’ in Bad Objects. On
other retail forms, see Nord, Paris Shopkeepers; and Jones, ‘‘Women Buying
and Selling in Ancien Régime Paris,’’ in De Grazia, ed., The Sex of Things.
Magraw, ‘‘Producing, Retailing, Consuming: France –,’’ in Rigby,
ed., French Literature, Thought and Culture, p. .
Bourget, ‘‘Edmond de Jules de Goncourt,’’ in Essais, p. .
‘‘[I]ls offrent une réponse anticipée à tous [les] désirs [d’un peuple],’’ ibid.
Clément de Ris, La Curiosité, p. .
Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, p. .
Goncourt, Journal, June , : .
Bonnaffé, Causeries, p. ; my emphasis. In France, the public auctions are
state regulated. These regulations changed just after the revolution. The
auctions were moved to the hôtel Drouot in , where they are still held
today (ibid.).
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Renée Mauperin, p. ; authors’ emphasis.
Clément de Ris, Curiosité, p. ; author’s emphasis.
Ibid., pp. , ; Goncourt, Maison, : , , ; Journal, : , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , and : , ,
, , , , , , , .
Montesquiou, Les pas effacés, : .
Zola, L’Oeuvre, in Les Rougon-Macquart, : , , , , .
Benjamin, ‘‘Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian,’’ p. . On Romanti-
cism and collecting, see Wainwright, The Romantic Interior; and Pearce, On
Collecting, pp. –, , and –.
Zola, L’Oeuvre, : ; my emphasis. On Romanticism in L’Oeuvre, see
Zamparelli, ‘‘Zola and the Quest for the Absolute in Art’’; and Brady,
‘L’Oeuvre’ d’Emile Zola, pp. –.
Edmond de Goncourt comments on Zola’s ‘‘épatant faux mobilier
moyenâgeux, Renaissance,’’ underlining the same paradox: ‘‘Le lit de
l’auteur de l’Assomoir serait défendu par une grille en fer forgé’’ (Journal,
January , : ). See also Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature, pp.
–.
Rey, ‘‘Le nom d’artiste,’’ p. .
Balzac, La Muse du département, : ; my emphasis.
Gautier, ‘‘Préface’’ [] to Mademoiselle de Maupin, p. .
Barbey d’Aurevilly, Du dandysme, p. .
Nochlin, Realism, p. .
‘‘Brummell passait pour avoir une des plus nombreuses collections de
tabatières qu’il y eût en Angleterre’’ (Barbey d’Aurevilly, Du dandysme, p. ).
McGuinness, ‘‘Mallarmé’s Ptyx and the Symbolist ‘Bric-à-Brac’’’; Hel-
geson, ‘‘Presque Rien: Mallarmé’s Objects.’’
Chevrie, Pourquoi n’avons-nous pas de style moderne, p. .
Bourget, ‘‘Edmond de Jules de Goncourt,’’ in Essais, p. .
Notes to pages –
Simmel makes a similar connection in his Philosophy of Money (), pp.
–.
See Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin de Siècle France.
See Mukerji, ‘‘Territorial Gardens.’’
On the relationship between monarchial power and style, see part of
Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France.
( )
Bourdieu, In Other Words, pp. , , –; The Rules of Art, pp. –; Outline
of a Theory of Practice, pp. –; and The Logic of Practice, pp. –.
Bourdieu, In Other Words, pp. , .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. ; my emphasis. See also Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu, p. .
Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty.
Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. .
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in
the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p.
, cited in Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, pp. –.
Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. .
Zukin, ‘‘Mimesis in the Origins of Bourgeois Culture.’’
On fashion as imitation, see Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, pp. –; and
Simmel, ‘‘Fashion,’’ in On Individuality and Social Forms.
See for example Walton, France at the Crystal Palace; and Nord, ‘‘Republican
Politics and the Bourgeois Interior.’’
Servant, Les Bronzes d’art (); Bouilhet, ‘‘La Galvanoplastie’’ (–);
Noguès, ‘‘Les cristaux’’ (n.d.); Vidal, ‘‘La décoration céramique par impres-
sion,’’ (–). On bronze statues, see Walton, France at the Crystal Palace, pp.
–; and Wosk, ‘‘The Anxiety of Imitation: Electrometallurgy and the
Imitative Arts,’’ in Breaking the Frame, pp. –.
[No author], ‘‘Une Histoire de la reproduction artistique’’ (–).
Walton, France at the Crystal Palace, pp. – and –.
Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, pp. –; Nord, ‘‘Republican
Politics and the Bourgeois Interior,’’ pp. –.
G., ‘‘La Guerre à la contrefaçon’’ (–), .
Eudel, Le Truquage: Les contrefaçons dévoilées (), : –.
Bosc, Dictionnaire, p. ; author’s emphasis.
Blondel, L’Art intime et le goût en France (), p. . See also Cardon, L’Art au
foyer domestique (), p. (cited below); Servant, ‘‘Les Bronzes d’art,’’ p. ;
and Blanc, Grammaire des arts décoratifs (), pp. –.
Eudel, Le Truquage, : –; my emphasis.
De Noirmont, ‘‘Imitations artistiques en cuir bouilli,’’ in ‘‘Revue de
l’Exposition de ’’ (–).
Blanc, Grammaire des arts décoratifs, pp. –.
Nord, ‘‘Republican Politics and the Bourgeois Interior,’’ p. .
Notes to pages –
Baudrillart, Histoire du luxe privé et public (), cited by Eleb-Vidal and
Debarre-Blanchard, Architectures de la vie privée, pp. –.
Cardon, L’Art au foyer domestique, p. . See also Blanc, Grammaire des arts
décoratifs, pp. –.
On kitsch, see Moles, Le Kitsch, Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, and
Sternberg, Les chefs-d’oeuvre du kitsch.
De Noussane, Le Goût dans l’ammeublement, p. ; my emphasis.
Huysmans, ‘‘Le Musée des arts décoratifs,’’ p. .
Ibid., p. .
Chevrie, Pourquoi n’avons-nous pas de style moderne, p. . On the relationship
between the detail and mechanical reproduction, see Schor, Reading in
Detail, pp. –.
On the moral critique of luxury, see for example Campbell, The Romantic
Ethic, pp. – and –; Eleb-Vidal and Debarre-Blanchard, Architectures de
la vie privée, pp. –; and Williams, Dream Worlds, pp. and –.
Nicholas Thomas makes a similar point in a different context in his
‘‘Licensed Curiosity: Cook’s Pacific Voyages,’’ in Elsner and Cardinal, eds.,
The Cultures of Collecting.
My use of this term is unrelated to the concept of ‘‘Regime of accumula-
tion,’’ as explained in Boyer, The Regulation School, pp. xii–xiii and –.
Historical accounts of forms of accumulation which predate modern col-
lecting can be found in Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, pp. –; Alsop,
The Rare Art Traditions, pp. –; and Pearce, On Collecting, pp. –.
Thornton, Authentic Decor, p. .
Ibid., p. .
Blondel, L’Art intime, p. .
See for example Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons and Maupassant’s ‘‘La Chevelure.’’
Jameson, ‘‘Flaubert’s Libidinal Historicism,’’ p. .
Havard, L’Art dans la maison (), p. .
Cuisenier, L’Art populaire, pp. –.
Eleb-Vidal and Debarre-Blanchard, Vie privée, p. .
Ibid., p. .
Havard, L’Art dans la maison, p. .
Noussanne, Goût dans l’ameublement, p. .
Watson, ‘‘Assimilating Mobility.’’
Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, p. . On art and the artist, see Fairlie,
‘‘Aspects de l’histoire de l’art dans ‘l’Education sentimentale’’’ and ‘‘Pel-
lerin et le thème de l’art dans ‘l’Education sentimentale’.’’
Andrieu, ‘‘Les Maisons,’’ p. .
D’Avenel, Le Mécanisme de la vie moderne, : . The chapter entitled ‘‘La
Maison parisienne’’ appeared in La Revue des deux mondes in .
Ibid., pp. –.
Daunais, Flaubert et la scénographie romanesque.
Expression borrowed from Igor Kopytoff, ‘‘The Cultural Biography of
Things: Commoditization as Process,’’ in Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of
Notes to pages –
Things.
Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, p. . See Haig, ‘‘Madame Arnoux’s
Coffret.’’
On the gift/commodity distinction, see Gregory, Gifts and Commodities.
Knight, ‘‘Object Choices: Taste and Fetishism in Flaubert’s L’Éducation
sentimentale,’’ in Rigby, ed., French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth
Century.
For a psychological reading of this scene, see Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, p.
.
See for example Thomas, Entangled Objects.
Rigby, ‘‘Things, Distinction and Decay in Nineteenth-Century French
Literature,’’ in Rigby, ed., French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth
Century.
Duchet, ‘‘L’artiste en question,’’ p. . Romantisme devoted three issues to the
question of the artist: . (st quarter, ); . (st quarter, ); .
(st quarter, ).
Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot.
Walton, France at the Crystal Palace, p. .
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, pp. , , –, –.
Rey, ‘‘Le nom d’artiste,’’ p. .
Leduc-Adine, ‘‘Les arts et l’industrie au e siècle,’’ p. ; Woodmansee,
The Author, Art and the Market, p. .
On Sand’s idealization of the worker, see Schor, George Sand and Idealism.
Goncourts, Journal, ( December ), : .
Ibid. ( March ), : ; author’s emphasis.
Ibid. ( December ), : .
Ibid. ( December ), : .
Ibid. ( September ), : .
Uzanne, ‘‘Note sur le goût intime,’’ p. .
De Noirmont, ‘‘Ameublements d’art,’’ pp. –.
De Noirmont, ‘‘Ameublements d’art’’; ‘‘Meubles d’art,’’ advertisement.
Guinard, Cardon, Havard, Blondel respectively.
Champier, ‘‘A propos de l’enquête sur les industries d’art,’’ p. ; my
emphasis.
Uzanne, ‘‘Note sur le goût intime,’’ p. .
Montesqiou, Les Pas effacés, : , .
Fourdinois, ‘‘De l’état actuel de l’industrie du mobilier,’’ pp. –.
Montesqiou, Les Pas effacés, p. ; author’s italics.
Feray, Architecture intérieure et décoration, p. ; see also Praz, Histoire de la
décoration d’intérieur, p. .
Nogressau, ‘‘Intérieurs d’ateliers,’’ p. .
Lenoir, Traité théorique et pratique du tapissier, p. .
Notes to pages –
Proust, Jean Santeuil, p. .
Sagnès, L’Ennui dans la littérature française, p. .
Larroumet, La maison de Victor Hugo, pp. , .
Houssaye, ‘‘De Marine-Terrace à Hauteville-House,’’ p. .
See Dangelzer, La Description du milieu, p. , and Lorant’s notes and
introduction to the Pléiade edition of Le Cousin Pons.
Buisine, ‘‘Le culte des reliques,’’ in Tombeau de Loti, p. .
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Charles Demailly, p. ; see also Silverman,
Art Nouveau, pp. –.
Cited by Danger, Sensations et objets, p. ; my emphasis. The Goncourt
brothers comment, ‘‘Flaubert n’a aucun sentiment artistique. Il n’a jamais
acheté un objet d’art de vingt-cinq sous. Il n’a pas chez lui une statuette, un
tableau, un bibelot quelconque. Il parle pourtant d’art avec fureur; mais ce
n’est que parce que, littérairement, l’art est une note distinguée, bon genre,
qui couronne un homme qui a un style artiste, et puis c’est anti-bourgeois’’
(Journal, December , : –).
Lalonde, ‘‘La Collection curieuse de Bouvard et Pécuchet,’’ pp. –.
Lorrain, ‘‘Ophélius,’’ in Contes d’un buveur d’éther, p. . On Lorrain’s decor,
see Jullian, Jean Lorrain ou le satiricon , pp. , –, , –, –,
–, as well as d’Anthonay, Jean Lorrain: Barbare et esthète, pp. –.
Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, p. .
On bourgeois imitation during the eighteenth century, see Scott, ‘‘Counter-
feit Culture on the Right Bank,’’ in The Rococo Interior, pp. –.
Cardon, L’Art au foyer domestique, p. .
d’Hervilly, Le Bibelot. Prior to Pons, the fictitious collector is generally
portrayed as a maniacal fool blinded by his passion (Lorant, Parents pauvres,
: –).
Bauquenne, ‘‘Ménages parisiens,’’ p. .
Le Monde Illustré ( January ): ; Ohnet, ‘‘La Comtesse de Sarah,’’
L’Illustration ( November ): .
Apter, ‘‘Splitting Hairs: Female Fetishism and Postpartum Sentimentality
in Maupassant’s Fiction,’’ in Feminizing the Fetish.
See for example Walton, ‘‘Constructing the Bourgeoisie Through Con-
sumption,’’ in France at the Crystal Palace, pp. –; Nord, ‘‘Republican
Politics and the Bourgeois Interior’’; and Auslander, ‘‘The Bourgeois Stylis-
tic Régime,’’ in Taste and Power, pp. –.
Blanche de Géry, ‘‘L’Ameublement moderne,’’ series of articles in La Mode
de Paris. On bibelots suitable to the man of the house, see September and
November , pp. and . On the woman’s dressing room, see
August , p. .
Journal ( December ), : .
Dumas fils, La Dame aux camélias, pp. –.
Havard notes that ‘‘les dames du meilleur monde’’ attend the auctions of
actresses and visit ‘‘leurs hôtels somptueux’’ (L’Art dans la maison, p. ).
Mornand, ‘‘L’hôtel de Mademoiselle Rachel,’’ p. ; author’s emphasis.
Notes to pages –
Zola, Nana, : ; my emphasis.
On Maupassant’s strange ‘‘mobilier de putain,’’ see Goncourt, Journal (
December ), : ; Nadine Satiat, Introduction to Notre coeur, ;
Dominique Frémy, Brigitte Monglond, and Bernard Benech, introductory
material to Maupassant’s Contes et nouvelles, : –.
Vilcot, Huysmans et l’intimité protégée, pp. –.
Borie, Huysmans: Le Diable, le célibataire et Dieu, p. . Eve Sedgwick has
suggested that the literary character of the bachelor is sometimes – but
certainly not always – homosexual (Epistemology of the Closet, pp. –).
Goncourt, Journal ( February ), : . Sexist genderings of collecting
and the bibelot persist. Werner Muensterberger repeatedly compares col-
lecting to Don Juanism in his Collecting: An Unruly Passion, while Rémy G.
Saisselin combines sexism with elitism in his The Bourgeois and the Bibelot. On
Baudrillard’s sexist theory of collecting, see Schor, ‘‘Cartes postales,’’ –.
‘‘Chroniques,’’ La Presse, January and May , cited in Champier,
‘‘Les artistes de l’industrie,’’ p. .
Castella, Structures romanesques et vision sociale, p. .
Maupassant, Notre coeur, p. . On Prédolé, see Vial, Guy de Maupassant et
l’art du roman, pp. – and .
Proust, A la recherche, : ; Remembrance of Things Past, : –.
Balzac, Le Père Goriot, p. ; my emphasis.
Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, p. .
‘‘L’animal est un principe qui prend sa forme extérieure . . . dans les milieux
où il est appelé à se développer. [. . .] La Société ne fait-elle pas de l’homme,
suivant les milieux où son action se déploie, autant d’hommes différents
qu’il y a de variétés en zoologie?’’ (Balzac, preface to La Comédie humaine).
Jameson, ‘‘The Realist Floor-Plan,’’ p. .
On the signification of various Balzacian interiors, see Frölich, ‘‘La descrip-
tion du boudoir de Mme du Tillet’’; and Guichardet, ‘‘‘Espaces intérieurs’
et décors,’’ in Balzac ‘archéologue’ de Paris, pp. –.
Proust, Jean Santeuil, p. .
Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. .
Proust, A la recherche, : –; Remembrance, : .
Bourdieu, Distinction, pp. , –. See also pp. , , , and Outline of a
Theory of Practice, pp. –.
George L. Mosse, introduction to Nordau, Degeneration, pp. xiii–xxxvi.
On these notions in particular and on the Philosophy of Money in general, see
Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, pp. –, and Poggi, Money and
the Modern Mind.
Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, p. .
Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p. .
For Adorno, the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior is the parlour of
Kierkegaard’s critical theory: ‘‘It is the bourgeois intérieur of the nineteenth
century, before which all talk of subject, object, indifferentiation, and
situation pales to an abstract metaphor . . . Just as in the metaphorical
intérieur the intentions of Kierkegaard’s philosophy intertwine, so the intérieur
is also the real space that sets free the categories of the philosophy’’ (Adorno,
Kierkegaard, p. ).
Baudrillard, The System of Objects, p. . The English translation of the
italicized rhetoric of homology is accurate.
Bourdieu describes his earliest reading of the Kabyle house as ‘‘perhaps the
last work I wrote as a blissful structuralist’’ (The Logic of Practice, p. ).
d’Avenel, Le Mécanisme de la vie moderne, : –.
Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p. .
See especially Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society.
Mme Hennequin, L’Art et le goût au foyer (Paris: Armand Colin, ), p. ,
cited and translated by Leora Auslander, ‘‘The Gendering of Consump-
tion,’’ in de Grazia and Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things. See also Auslander,
Taste and Power; Nord, ‘‘Republican Politics and the Bourgeois Interior in
Notes to pages –
Mid-Nineteenth-Century France’’; and Walton, France at the Crystal Palace.
Viollet-le-Duc, Habitations modernes, p. .
Auslander, ‘‘Gendering,’’ p. ; Auslander’s translation.
Pietz, ‘‘Fetishism and Materialism,’’ in Apter and Pietz, eds. Fetishism as
Cultural Discourse, pp. –.
An example of this kind of thinking about object investment can be found in
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.
Todorov, The Fantastic, pp. –.
Baudrillard, The System of Objects, p. ; see chapter above.
On the first-person narrator, see Todorov, The Fantastic, pp. –.
Ibid., p.
Harter, Bodies in Pieces, p. .
Vacher-Gravelli, ‘‘Quand l’objet ancien devient fantastique’’; Ponnau, ‘‘La
Perte du sens et le blanc du texte: L’envers du décor’’; Chambers, ‘‘Gautier
et le complexe de Pygmalion,’’ p. ; Castex, Le Conte fantastique en France,
pp. –; Bancquart, Maupassant: Conteur fantastique, pp. –, –, –;
Schapira, ‘‘Le Thème du mort-vivant’’; Harter, Bodies in Pieces, pp. –. On
fictitious haunted houses of the same period, see Vidler, ‘‘Houses,’’ in The
Architectural Uncanny.
Pomian, ‘‘The Collection: Between the Visible and the Invisible,’’ in
Collectors and Curiosities.
Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. –.
La Chevelure is one of the examples that Todorov uses to illustrate his
observation that the fantastic often involves taking a rhetorical figure lit-
erally (The Fantastic, p. ).
Chambers explains that the reconstitution of the fragmented character –
both subject (male narrator) and object (female lover) – is a precondition for
the proper functioning of what he calls Gautier’s Pygmalion complex
(‘‘Gautier et le complexe de Pygmalion’’). See also Shapira, ‘‘Le thème du
mort-vivant dans l’oeuvre en prose,’’ pp. –; and Steinmetz, ‘‘Ombelles
sur tombeaux: Gautier, poète frénétique?,’’ p. .
For recent anthropological studies of gift exchange, see Strathern, The
Gender of the Gift, and Thomas, Entangled Objects.
Unlike Gautier, Lorrain leaves his Pygmalion complex unresolved, to
borrow the phrasing of Chambers (‘‘Gautier et le complexe de Pygmalion’’).
From ‘‘The Precession of Simulacra,’’ in Simulacra and Simulation, p. . This
schema bears a striking resemblance to the stages which Nietzsche outlines
in explaining ‘‘How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth,’’ in Twilight of
the Gods.
Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, pp. –.
See my discussion of mobility in chapter .
Dauphiné, introduction to Rachilde, La Jongleuse.
Notes to pages –
Rae-Beth Gordon diagnoses Eliante as a hysteric by her refusal of a male
partner, as well as by her attraction to textiles and ornamental objects
(Ornament, Fantasy and Desire, pp. –).
Peter Brooks has collected and exposed many such plots in his Body Works,
which he has lavishly illustrated with paintings of nude women, in a sense
repeating the plot structure he analyzes.
On the relation between family structure and sexuality in Rachilde, see
Hawthorne, ‘‘The Social Construction of Sexuality,’’ p. .
On Rachilde and motherhood, see Lukacher, ‘‘‘Mademoiselle Baudelaire’:
Rachilde and the Sexual Difference.’’
Baudrillard, The System of Objects; Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly
Passion; Apter, ‘‘Cabinet Secrets,’’ in Feminizing the Fetish.
‘‘Les romans de Rachilde dénoncent le leurre de la représentation, du réel
et de la vérité . . . En ce jeu de miroirs, l’origine se perd, et l’identité; la
ressemblance se fond en semblance, la marque sexuelle se perd sur les
corps’’ (Besnard-Coursodon, ‘‘Monsieur Vénus, Madame Adonis,’’ p. ).
See especially part , ‘‘Making,’’ in Scarry, The Body in Pain. On the place of
the body in architecture, especially its displacement from modern designs,
see Vidler, ‘‘Bodies,’’ in The Architectural Uncanny.
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Index
Index
Darbel, Alain, household goods: designations for, –; as
D’Avenel, Georges, –, collectors’ objects, , –,
De Girardin, Madame, how-to manuals, , ,
De Noussane, Henri, Hugo, Victor, –
Decadence, , , , , , –, – Huysmans, J.-K., , , ,, , ; A
decorative arts, , , , , – rebours, , , , , , , , ,
Deleuze, Gilles, , ; Le musée de l’art décoratif,’’
description, –, , –, – –
Donato, Eugenio, –, –, ,
Du Sommerard, , imitation, –
Duchet, Claude, industrial art,
Dumas fils, Alexandre, interior decor: first appearance of term, ; in
decadent literature, –; in fantastic
eclecticism, , , – literature, –; gendering and
encyclopedia, order of the, , –, – sexualization of, –; social theories of,
enumeratio, , , , –
epistemology, –, , –,– irony, –
erudition, , –
Eudel, Paul, , James, Henry,
Jameson, Fredric, –,
fantastic literature, –,
fashion, , , , – Kant, Immanuel, , ,
fetishism, , , –, , , Knight, Diana,
Flaubert, Gustave, , ,; Bouvard et knowledge, –, ,
Pécuchet, , , , –; Dictionnaire des
idées reçues, –, ; l’Education Lacan, Jacques,
sentimentale, , , –, , , , ; Lalonde, Normand, –
Madame Bovary, , , , –; Landino, Cristoforo,
Salammbô, , , , –; La Tentation Larroumet, Gustave,
de Saint-Antoine, ; Trois contes, –, , Lasowski, Patrick Wald, –
Lévi-Strauss, Claude,
Foucault, Michel, –, literary criticism, , – –,
France, Anatole, –, living room, , –, ,
Freud, Sigmund, logic of practice, see Practical logic
Loomis, Jeffrey,
Gautier, Théophile, , , , , , , Lorrain, Jean, –, ; Monsieur de Phocas, ,
, – , –, ; Ophélius, ; Réclamation
gender, , , –, – posthume, , –,
gift exchange, – Loti, Pierre, –,
Gombrich, Ernst, Lukács, Georg, –, , , , ,
Goncourt brothers, –, , , –, , ,
, , –, ; Charles Demailly, –; magasin de bric-à-brac, –, –, ,
Germinie Lacerteux, –; Histoire de la société Mallarmé, Stéphane, , ,
française pendant le Directoire, ; Madame market, see Collector’s market
Gervaisais, ; Manette Salomon, , –, Marx, Karl, , , ,
–; Renée Mauperin, , material culture, concept of,
Goncourt, Edmond de, , , –; La Maison Maupassant, , , , –; La Chevelure,
d’un artiste, , –, – –, , ; Notre coeur, –, ;
Gordon, Rae-Beth, – Qui sait?, , –; Une aventure parisienne,
Havard, Henri, , Maze-Sencieer, Alphonse,
Hennequin, Madame, mobility, –, –
heterogeneity, , –, , , , – Moles, Abraham,
history, –, – Montesquiou, Robert de, , , , –,
homology, –, – Mouchard, Claude,
Index
Museum: in Flaubert, –; aesthetics of, Rothschild château,
–; and the creation of bibelot, –,
organization of, – Sagnès, Guy, ,
Sainte-Beuve, ,
naturalism, , , Sand, George, –
Neefs, Jacques, Saussure, Ferdinand de, ,
Nerval, Gérard de, Sauvageot, Charles, , –,
Nochlin, Linda, Scarry, Elaine,
Nord, Philip, – Schor, Naomi, , –
Nordau, Max, –, Schuerewegen, Franc, ,
Schwartz, Hillel,
objet d’art, meaning and use of, –, Simmel, Georg, ,
order, –, –, –, –, –, superfluousness, , –, ,
– symbolist poetry,