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... la feuille de figuier de notre mere Eve etait une robe de cachemire.
Theorie de la demarche
In the first "Convolute" of The Arcades Project, taking for subject "Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautes, and Sales Clerks," Walter Benjamin identifies the cashmere shawl as the essential hot commodity of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Quoting an 1854 volume entitled Paris chez soi, Benjamin offers the following synopsis of the lifespan of the shawl:
... In 1798 and 1799, the Egyptian campaign lent frightful importance to the fashion for shawls. Some generals in the expeditionary army, taking advantage of the proximity of India, sent home shawls ... of cashmere to their wives and lady friends ... From then on, the disease that might be called cashmere fever took on significant proportions. It began to spread during the Consulate, grew greater under the Empire, became gigantic during the Restoration, reached colossal size under the July Monarchy, and has finally assumed Sphinx-like dimensions since the February Revolution of 1848. (55)
Benjamin's source conflates two favorite nineteenth-century discourses in his brief chronology--that of malady (disease, spread) and that of orientalism (Sphinx-like)--linking the two through the concept of size (gigantic, colossal, etc.). According to Benjamin's bemused speaker, who historicizes the contagion of cashmere, the cashmere shawl, unlike most other shorter-lived fashion trends, possesses an ever-expanding appeal that seems, curiously, to be directly linked to the shifting political regimes of nineteenth-century France.
What might this "feverish" acquisition of cashmere shawls indicate about French society and its consumption habits in the nineteenth century and, no less significant, what does it suggest about the cultural impact of the object itself? Further, what political subtext might be lurking beneath the surface of the story of cashmere in nineteenth-century France? This article investigates the trajectory of cashmere shawls in Balzac's La Cousine Bette and Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale and proposes that the rise and fall of the cashmere shawl as fashion trend expresses significant social and political concerns--namely the inter-related anxieties over authenticity and social mobility--that preoccupied the nineteenth-century imagination. Before exploring the novels, first I will outline the historical context of the cashmere shawl in nineteenth-century France and then consider two key early texts by Balzac that define its cultural context.
1. CASHMERE IN CONTEXT
An expensive, hand-woven textile brought to France from the East through Napoleon's campaigns, the cashmere shawl was to become a cultural fetish evoking sensual fantasies of the Orient before falling out of fashion in the latter half of the century. Frank Ames, in his history of the Kashmir shawl, describes the first point of contact between fashion and empire: "When Napoleon returned from Egypt, the generals and officers who had served under him brought back mementoes of the Orient. Among these were Kashmir shawls which they wore wrapped around their waists as belts, and which had been plundered from the Mamelukes, the soldiers of the Egyptian army" (135). From its origin as a war souvenir, back in Paris the shawl was quickly transformed into fashion's dernier cri, in part for its beauty but also for its functionality in the new, simpler fashions of the first Empire, which necessitated warm coverings for exposed decolletages and gauzily-clad limbs (Ames 135). An erotic vestimentary sign because of its warmth and delicacy, the cashmere shawl permitted fashionable ladies to dress scantily in public and still remain decorously covered. The garment that was once associated with the masculine, public domain of the military, its appropriation indicating conquest and power, shifted as it moved into the feminized, private, and domestic sphere of fashion, but lost none of its power. Its rise to the status symbol par excellence of the mid-nineteenth century was precipitated largely by the trend setting and exhorbitant spending of the Empress Josephine, who reputedly never asked the price of a shawl (Ames 135). (2) Following Josephine, every fashionable lady required a shawl to complete her wardrobe and signal her standing among the social elite of early nineteenth-century Paris.
The cachemire was a marker of economic status, and one's correct use of it a marker of class. As an illustration of the cash value of a cashmere shawl, an 1806 inventory of the Empress Josephine's possessions "evaluated her 45 shawls at 36,000 francs, a Rubens at 1,500 and a Leonardo Virgin and Child at 1,000" (Werther 88). Of course, there were gradations of value even among the French imitations, which were perfected over the course of the century, but the genuine Kashmiri shawl was always the most highly valued, followed by the "Parisian" shawl, and finally the "provincial" shawl. (3) Fashion correspondent Alida de Savignac reveals at once the great fashion for and the hierarchy among shawls in an article on the "Exposition des Produits de l'Industrie de 1839" written for the Journal des demoiselles:
Malgre la mode des mantelets, les fabriques de chales n'ont point suspendu leurs efforts pour egaler les chales de cachemire; on peut meme dire que l'un de nos fabricans a surpasse tout ce que l'Inde et la Perse peuvent offrir de plus merveilleux. Figurez-vous un chale d'une grandeur extraordinaire, et sur ce chale sont representes des jardins, des pagodes, des processions de personnages divers. Ge sont des pretres, des musiciens, des soldats, des caravanes, tout cela se detachant assez nettement, et aussi facile a distinguer que s'il s'agissait d'une gravure. Il est impossible de pousser plus loin l'audace de la composition, l'eclat et l'harmonie des couleurs, que ne l'a fait M. Gaussen dans l'execution de ce chale prodigieux. A cote de ces merveilles, auxquelles les tetes couronnees peuvent seules mettre un prix, les fabricans de Paris ont expose de fort beaux chales tapis, dont la chaine et la trame sont en pure laine cachemire. La fabrique de Lyon offre aux fortunes mediocres des chales indous, dont la chaine est en bourre de soie. Enfin, Nimes est parvenu a tisser des cachemires tres jolis et d'un prix si modere, que cela semble un reve. (Savignac 188-89)
Mme de Savignac's description of the prodigious Gaussen shawl contains an excess of oriental referents, belying its inauthenticity, its "trying too hard," but her narrative nonetheless attests to the great power of the cashmere shawl to inflame the desires of a wide range of shoppers.
Most potent in terms of what we might designate its "moral" signifying value, the prized cachemire was linked not only to social and economic status, but also to feminine virtue, the corollary to masculine honor. Traditionally a trousseau item, a cachemire was often handed down from mother to daughter or purchased at great expense before her wedding. "Comme le precise la presse feminine, le chale est le surtout de demi-saison que, seules, les femmes mariees ont le droit de porter" (Levi-Strauss 100). In short, as fashion journals imply and as novels make explicit, the cachemire was an accessory reserved for married or marriageable women. "Inappropriate" women's appropriation of it signals at once their desire to be respectable and the sartorial imposture of the lower class into the upper class. (4)
For its social, economic, and moral signifying power, then, the cashmere shawl emerged as an important marker of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "distinction," that quality of uniqueness that the dominant social group cultivates in order to maintain its place in the hierarchy. (5) The authentic cashmere shawl was coveted by all, but difficult to obtain, thus ensuring and augmenting its cultural value. Distinction gave way to imitation, however, as fashion typically, and paradoxically, illustrates. (6)
In his historical study of the shawl, John Irwin recounts the rise of the European shawl industry, the eventual success of which would depend on mass production, which, paradoxically, caused the ultimate decline in the value of the cashmere shawl as a luxury item reserved for the elite. Irwin tells us that in 1801 "M. Guillaume Louis Ternaux, a well-known shawl manufacturer, obtained the semi-official support of the French Government to sponsor a trip to Tibet to acquire a flock of goats ... By the time he reached France most of the goats had died; the rest suffered severely from a scab disease.... Initial results ... were disappointing" (27). Eventually though the shawl was successfully imitated, and Ternaux's name became synonymous with the most common imitation shawl on the market. As the century progressed, the cashmere shawl began to circulate, focusing the desires of the dying aristocracy, the rising bourgeoisie, and the Parisian demi-monde alike.
2. LA FEMME COMME IL (EN) FAUT
Balzac's notion of distinction, which in many ways anticipates Bourdieu's, provides the necessary framework for the analyses of the novels that follow and will help piece together the links between the fashion trend and the broader social commentary that the shawl's story illustrates in the texts examined here. Famous for his proto-Darwinian classification of social species, Balzac, in one of his short stories about Parisian life, lays out a crucial distinction between two types of Parisiennes that wittily turns on the absence or presence of a pronoun. Lafemme comme il faut, (7) the proper lady, the kind you marry, according to the Parisian...
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