Fashioned Texts and Painted Books: Nineteenth-Century French Fan Poetry

PREFACE

WHY FANS?

The relationship between literature and material culture has lately attracted the attention of literary scholars, and the subject has proven to be a fruitful area of inquiry within the context of nineteenth-century French studies in particular as monographs have appeared on subjects ranging from the décor of the artist’s studio to the intricacies of bourgeois fancy dress with many others in between.¹ Although over the last decades this growing field has produced several surveyistic accounts of the century’s imposing materiality, a number of more specialized treatments of the role of dress in nineteenth-century French literature have also appeared more recently.²

As accounts of material culture in literary texts, and even accounts dealing specifically with clothing, have proliferated, they have also tended to analyze references to material culture in isolation. This kind of analysis is not without benefits; it can be very useful, for instance, in deciphering social information. However, in this model material culture is often treated as a sort of corollary element of the text in question. While it is certainly possible to attribute undo significance to material culture,³ even in cases where a focused analysis of it is called for by the text, what is lacking in accounts that simply aggregate large samples of references to material culture (relying on frequency to indicate significance) is precisely an examination of its literary function. In short, in these accounts content is frequently considered without regard to form. It is my intention here to offer an analysis of a fashion accessory that considers not only its social dimensions, but also its aesthetic contributions.

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

This study is divided into three parts. Because an understanding of the multiple cultural implications of the fan in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries including its place in fashion, its association with the feminine and with sexuality, and the influence of japonisme on its popularity as an art object, is essential to this project, part one includes three chapters dedicated to exploring the place of the fan in society in greater detail. Chapter one focuses on Uzanne’s L’Éventail (1882). Billed as a literary history of the fan, L’Éventail celebrates the eponymous object as an instrument of gallantry and romance linked with verse. Indeed, although it is a prose text, a great deal of space in L’Éventail is devoted to the discussion and citation of poems written on the subject of fans and, significantly, inscribed on literal fans. The chapter incorporates a comparative survey that samples other contemporary fan histories.

Chapter two addresses the fan’s significance in the works of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists and elaborates on the ambiguous legacy of painted fan leaves. Although works by a number of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists figure into my analysis, I focus particularly on works by Degas, Manet, Morisot, and Gauguin. Chapter three moves on to consider the fan as a commemorative object by emphasizing its identity as a communicative one. Offering further essential information related to the history of fans, and specifically to the development of various fan languages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it further contextualizes the tradition of giving (inscribed) fans as gifts and concludes with a close reading of Proust’s prose poem L’Éventail, a text that effects the transition from the largely contextual part one to the more properly analytical parts two and three, which focus on the fan poetry of Mallarmé and Claudel, respectively.

In the 1880s and early 1890s, Mallarmé composed and inscribed on fans a series of occasional poems that have come to be known collectively as the éventails. The majority of these short texts appear in Vers de circonstance, but three more substantial texts, Autre éventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé, Éventail de Méry Laurent, and Éventail de Madame Mallarmé, are included in the Poésies. In his éventails, Mallarmé emphasizes the symbolic and plastic characteristics of the fan, highlighting the folding fan in particular as an ideal book form. In part two, chapter four examines the links between Mallarmé’s fashion writing in the short-lived journal La Dernière Mode and his subsequent éventails; in this chapter I also have occasion to treat some of the little-studied shorter éventails. Chapter five offers close readings of the three longest éventails that give much-needed attention to the original fans upon which they were inscribed as well as exploring the difficulties associated with this kind of integrative analysis given the paucity of attention devoted to these rare paratexts over the years. Chapter six explores the influence of the éventails on two of Mallarmé’s most famous (and famously difficult), texts, the sonnet en –yx and Un Coup de Dés. The textual abstraction of these mature works marks the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and from Mallarmé to Claudel.

Claudel, who held various diplomatic appointments in Asia in the early twentieth century (which is to say in the years following the European vogue for fans), composed and published, in three distinct editions, a collection of poems entitled Cent Phrases pour éventails during his tenure in Japan between 1921 and 1927. Several of the definitive third edition’s 172 poems were originally calligraphed on fan leaves and this edition was first published in facsimile in a folding format. Part three begins with chapter seven, which introduces Claudel’s fan poetry by exploring its connections with Mallarmé’s earlier texts. In chapter eight, close readings of selected phrases are paired with analyses of the corresponding visual paratexts. Finally, chapter nine makes the case for the inclusion of Claudel’s Cent Phrases pour éventails within the tradition of the artist’s book and examines its relationship to concrete poetry.

The works I consider, and especially those of Mallarmé and Claudel, form a corpus that reveals the fan to be both an art object and a textual object, one that functions as a site for the inscription of texts and whose unique physical properties motivate poetic texts replete with specific kinds of imagery and themes. As a result, this study insists upon the formal connections between the fan and texts dedicated to it rather than simply analyzing accumulated references to the object out of context. It equally links this category of Mallarmé’s occasional verse more closely with his larger body of work as well as suggesting new connections between his fan poetry and that of Claudel. Finally, and importantly, it seeks to rehabilitate the forgotten fan in both its literary and, although to a lesser extent, its plastic iterations.

Regrettably, despite its enormous popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond, neither plastic nor literary works in the fan format have ever acquired much prestige. As the painted fan leaves of the last decades of the nineteenth century and those of the first decades of the twentieth century exist at the boundary of fine and applied art, art and fashion, and taste and consumerism, so, too, do literary works on the subject of and in the form of the fan challenge accepted notions of genre and register. Each of these works straddles the boundary between literature and the visual arts and, taken together, they reveal how the fan, in a different way than other similar objects, could be made to function as a literary objet d’art.

Indeed, objet d’art is the ideal descriptor for such delicate keep-sakes as the fans I consider in this study. The term is equally significant inasmuch as it hints at the surprising inaccessibility of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fans today. The one constant during the time I was writing this book detailing the plastic appeal of these occasional texts was limited access to the primary objects. Without question, the fan poems composed by Mallarmé and Claudel and the many fans painted by the celebrated visual artists who were their contemporaries have been undervalued in literary and art historical discourse, but this circumstance is hardly surprising given that the institutions that possess the surviving original artifacts have only rarely exhibited them.

To be sure, interested readers will enjoy some success in conducting Internet searches for Mallarméan and Claudelian fans and Impressionist and Post-Impressionist fan leaves, and select reproductions are equally available to those willing to seek out the exhibition catalogues listed in the bibliography. The reader who wishes to consult these texts and images primarily in their original versions, however, will have to go to very great lengths to do so. It is worth mentioning that the most widely reproduced among them is the 1927 edition of Cent phrases pour éventails, numbering only 200 copies. As the field of nineteenth-century French studies continues to engage with the period’s rich material culture, though, I am hopeful that access to these exquisite objects will increase accordingly.

Notes

1  Janell Watson’s Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust is a seminal example.

2  For instance Susan Hiner’s Accessories to Modernity.

3  Culler offers a number of examples of this kind of analysis in The Uses of Uncertainty. A particularly amusing example is Charles Bovary’s hat (Culler 76-79). Barthes’ notion of the effet de réel, to which I will have occasion to return, is significant here as well.

PART ONE

THE FAN IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE FRANCE

CHAPTER 1

FAN HISTORY: OCTAVE UZANNE AND OTHER HISTORIANS OF UBIQUITY AND (F)UTILITY

1.1. WEST MEETS EAST: A VERY BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE FAN

THE fan is an object with a centuries-long history that I have occasion to explore only briefly here. It has played many different roles and served a multitude of functions over the years and, unlike many fashion accessories, its usage has been widespread. It has adorned the bodies of the most important political figures of the world’s greatest empires and it has cooled their lowliest workers in the fields; it was the trendiest of fashion accessories carried by Europe’s upper crust only a century ago, but now it is sold in the West mainly as an inexpensive and kitschy souvenir. Although these remarks suggest the general pervasiveness of the fan in human society, it bears mentioning at the outset that to study the fan as a surface for writing or image making (or in any of its other capacities) is at the most fundamental level to study the interaction of East and West.

Conventional wisdom holds that the fan originated in the Far East, and logic suggests a warmer climate than any to be found in the Northern hemisphere as its source given the fan’s most basic utilitarian function of circulating cooling air. Because of this function, the fan has been linked throughout its long history with flight and with the wing. Several Asian languages provide support for the analogy. For example, according to Nancy Armstrong, "the Hindi generic term for a fan is pankha, from pankh meaning feather or bird’s wing. In China the archaic symbol for a fan looks like, and means, ‘a bird’s wing’, and the newer word shan means ‘feathers under a roof’" (19). The fan as a literary device, too, is inextricably linked with notions of flight and air, and so, in addition to the multiple social meanings the object would take on in nineteenth-century France, it will be useful to bear this association in mind.

Indeed, it is equally applicable to all three major groups of fans: the fixed-screen fan, the brisé fan, and the folding fan. Of these, the fixed-screen fan was probably the first to emerge as it is the simplest form and the one closest to nature’s other original model, the leaf; brisé and folding fans, which are both more complicated from a technological standpoint, are more easily traceable to China and Japan (Armstrong 21, 25), the cultures that remain the most closely associated with the fan in the Western cultural imagination. Another detail of the fan’s early history pertinent to this study is the idea that the brisé fan likely developed by analogy with the writing tablets of court officials. Comprised of thin slips of wood or ivory that were suited to the top to bottom writing order of both languages, a cord strung through a small hole in each strip may have been an early method for keeping them organized (Armstrong 21). The notion of the fan as an ideal surface for inscription introduced here is one to which I return throughout my analyses. The folding fan, on which the majority of my attention falls, while it represents a later stage in fan technology, is by no means a recent invention even if our cultural memory of it in the West spans only a few centuries (Armstrong 26). Having evoked both the fan’s association with the wing and with inscription, the majority of the object’s prehistory, which is in any event largely speculative, may be left to one side in favor of a brief rehearsal of some key points concerning the fan’s emergence in Europe in order to understand how it came to be such a fixture there.

No exact date can be given for the folding fan’s introduction into Europe, and there is some disagreement among scholars of the fan on this point.¹ By the sixteenth century, however, the accessory was solidly entrenched in European fashion as its frequent and varied representation in visual art confirms.² One hypothesis that has gained some acceptance is that fans came to the French court in 1549 with Catherine de Médicis and then, under the influence of the court, the fashion ultimately spread to all levels of society (Bennett and Berson 6). Catherine’s original fans, though, would not have been of the folding variety; initially, they were likelier to have been fixed feather fans, although it would not be long before the folding fan would make inroads into the Valois court and the broader European market. Indeed, Catherine’s son, Henri III, was among the first proponents of the folding fan because its ability to open and close quickly apparently lent to it an element of surprise allowing it to fully impress itself on its viewer (Bennett 12).

In the wake of continued imperialist efforts in the Far East by the major European powers, by the late Renaissance the Orientalist vogue was already nascent. To give an indication of how integrated West and East had already become at the turn of the seventeenth century, it is interesting to note that the English and Dutch East India Companies were established in 1600 and 1602, respectively (Bennett 13). However, France’s engagement with the Far East and its fans (and other cultural artifacts) differed slightly from that of its Western counterparts because France was (at that time) relatively unsuccessful in such colonial ventures (Bennett and Berson 8). A fanciful, hyperbolic vision of the particular riches of the East had been present in the European consciousness since its earliest exploration in the Middle Ages; over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this myth was further exaggerated in France resulting in the enormous class of objects we now term chinoiseries (Bennett and Berson 8). Jacques Dufwa offers additional information related to the Westernized character of the products the East India companies were responsible for importing to Europe; he writes, "[e]ven before Le Havre became the home port of the newly started French East India Company, chinoiseries had been produced, freely copied from Chinese patterns (33). Copying authentic Chinese designs, however, was very quickly replaced by careful manipulation of them with an eye to the preferences of Western consumers. Indeed, this process likely began still earlier as one source notes that [n]early all the Chinese and Japanese objects exported to Europe after the fifteenth century were so carefully designed to satisfy the western collector’s conception of oriental art that they reflected the European vision of Cathay" (cited in Dufwa 34, my emphasis) rather than Eastern aesthetics.

Anna Bennett and Ruth Berson echo these remarks in their introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition Fans in Fashion where they write that [t]he balance of fact and fancy in chinoiserie art shifted from faithful imitation in the early years to free-wheeling invention in the mid-eighteenth century (8). Fans were no exception to this rule. Indeed, many of the processes of traditional Chinese and Japanese fan making were either unknown to Europeans or impossible for them to replicate leading to fans produced in Europe that were at best pastiches (and more often parodies) of the originals (Bennett and Berson 8-9). Due to the enormous and continued interest in imports from the East (notably porcelain), fans, although less valuable than many other art objects making their way back to Europe over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, kept arriving, and, because of their relative inexpensiveness, in vast quantities (Bennett 13). These authentic Eastern exports were quickly absorbed into the Western market, where they were joined by both products of Eastern manufacture designed specifically for the Western market and European-made fans that simulated Eastern styles and motifs (Bennett 13).

So prevalent was this Orientalist vogue that [b]y 1750 the Oriental motif dominated the decorative arts in Europe, but this did not mean that it was equally common in all areas of society, at least not at first (Bennett 13). In Louis XIV’s court, such motifs were very slow to catch on primarily because of the rigidity with which that court’s dress code was designed and upheld. The influence of the East could be seen, though, in the context of masquerade, a prevalent form of leisure in the Sun King’s heyday; in this context, however, Western mythological motifs were much more common in the early decades of the reign given the parallels drawn at that time between Louis and Apollo (Bennett 14). Following Louis XIV’s long reign, though, the carefully elaborated system of mores that had developed quickly decayed. The rigidity of the court at Versailles was replaced by the sweeping voluptuousness of the Paris court where the rococo reigned supreme (Bennett 14). Indeed, because the godlike royal persona of Louis XIV found only a pale imitation of itself in Louis XV, the mythological motifs that had predominated in the previous century were soon forgotten; in their place appeared a variety of motifs inspired by nature, and the engaging figures of the chinoiserie repertory [. . .] seemed at home among the rocks and shells of the full-blown rococo (Bennett 14). In addition to Orientalist motifs, one genre that attained great popularity during the eighteenth century was the pastoral, which, in addition to its prominence as a decorative theme, enjoyed considerable success in high art where it was primarily known as the fête galante (Bennett 15). The quotidian, too, emerged as an inspirational domain; fans in particular were adorned with the words and music of popular songs, significant events such as battles, royal births and weddings, and even technological novelties like the hotair balloon, which unsurprisingly enjoyed some popularity as a fan motif (Bennett 15).

The particularities of eighteenth-century French costume also had an impact on fan design. Specifically, the imposing silhouette achieved by the addition of paniers necessitated a larger fan for visual balance, and the larger size of the fan provided some of the impetus for expanding an already impressive repertoire of decorative motifs over the course of the eighteenth century (Bennett 15). However, in the second half of the century as the Revolution drew near, the popularity of the rococo style declined as simpler designs that reflected the intellectual and stylistic trends imported into France, notably from England, around the same time were increasingly favored (Bennett 16). Expectedly, it is with the Revolution that the history of the fan in nineteenth-century really France begins. Speaking purely in terms of production, the decline in fans produced by skilled craftsmen, coupled with an increase in mass-produced fans, may be linked with the service and deaths of many skilled workers over the course of revolutionary struggle (Alexander 47). Apart from a straightforward decline in numbers, though, fine craftsmanship like that displayed by the luxurious trappings of the aristocracy became suspect in the wake of the Revolution (Bennett 16). As industry standards of production fell, the size of fans decreased proportionately until, by the turn of the nineteenth century, women were carrying tiny fans that merited the name imperceptibles (Bennett 16). Until the folding fan again became popular in the 1820s and 1830s, the paradigmatic fan featuring a painted leaf was virtually absent (Bennett 16).

Importantly, shifting methods of production coincided with the changing market; in the absence of the aristocratic patron, fans had to be cheap enough and plentiful enough to accommodate the bourgeoisie (Alexander 47). Because the growing middle class had become the principal market for fans, a more typically industrial model superseded the former production schedule in which fan makers worked only seasonally (Alexander 49).³ In the Napoleonic era, brisé fans were popular and the best-quality examples were carved in Dieppe, a port city with constant access to English-imported horn (Alexander 49). However, folding fans were also fashionable in the early-nineteenth century, particularly those with fabric leaves, which of course required dedicated methods of production different from those used in the pleating and mounting of paper leaves (Alexander 50). In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, fans