1 Becoming a Parisienne
In his essay La Parisienne, published in 1893, the French journalist Arsène Houssaye claims that a trade minister once said: “If the Parisienne did not already exist, she would have to be invented” (1893, 9).1 This curious statement implies, most notably, two things: Firstly, that there seems to be a link between the French economy and Parisian women. And secondly, that being a Parisienne signifies something else or rather something more than just being a woman who lives in Paris.
And indeed, a close look at the French media of Houssaye’s time reveals that he has a point. Advice literature of that time explains to women how to behave
In the aforementioned essay, Houssaye elaborates on the topic of becoming a Parisienne by stating: “It’s the first time a little girl wears a dress that you can say: ‘There’s a Parisienne.’ One can also be born a Parisienne at one’s first passion and on one’s first trip to Paris, because it is the country of metamorphoses and transfigurations” (1893, 5).4 It is somewhat telling that Houssaye designates Paris a country rather than a city. He intends to elevate Paris and to create the notion of a place that is vast, multifarious, and, above all, self-sufficient. The author thereby emphasizes centralistic discourses that have differentiated Paris from the rest of France for more than 100 years.5 This opposition is consistent with that of centre and periphery as it is analysed within imagological studies in different spatiotemporal contexts. “The relationship between centre and periphery,” as Joep Leerssen stresses, “is not a spatial one, but one of power and prestige” (2007, 279). These narratives accordingly subsume the whole of France, apart from its capital, under the derogatory term province. Different regions, cities, towns, and villages thus become one homogeneous and retrogressive space whereas Paris emerges as a modern and “dynamic centre” (Leerssen 2007, 280). The life- and, more importantly, identity-changing trip to Paris Houssaye mentions is a popular topos that aligns well with these discourses. Paris is thereby unified as well and becomes a place with a specific kind of agency—a space that changes the people in it. Consequently, change of place is equated with personal change.
There were fair Parisiennes in fresh and elegant toilettes all about him; Mme. de Bargeton’s costume, tolerably ambitious though it was, looked dowdy by comparison; the material, like the fashion and the color, was out of date. That way of arranging her hair, so bewitching in Angouleme, looked frightfully ugly here among the daintily devised coiffures which he saw in every direction.
Balzac 2016, n.p.6
Balzac 2016, n.p.7
In the provinces comparison and choice are out of the question; when a face has grown familiar it comes to possess a certain beauty that is taken for granted. But transport the pretty woman of the provinces to Paris, and no one takes the slightest notice of her; her prettiness is of the comparative degree illustrated by the saying that among the blind the one-eyed are kings.
By having the confirmation of Lucien’s assessment expressed by a heterodiegetic narrator, who is positioned outside of the action and thus appears to be neutral in his judgement, the statement acquires an epistemic content that transcends the story.
In direct comparison with the fashionable Parisiennes, Mme. de Bargeton cannot (yet) compete—and compete she must because the novel constantly sets its characters, and especially the female figures and their appearances, up against each other. In Mme. de Bargeton’s eyes, Lucien disqualifies himself as well when she compares him to the elegant Baron du Châtelet and the narrator remarks how the “disenchantment” (ibid.)8 of the two is sparked by Paris. Paris, it seems, lends people a clear perspective and sense of judgement.
On the way to the opera the next day, the comparison is resumed. Lucien encounters yet again a number of Parisiennes of whom the text offers no description apart from them being referred to as “divinely dressed and divinely fair” (Balzac 2016, n.p.).9 Mme. de Bargeton, Lucien concludes, “compared with these queens, […] looked like an old woman” (ibid.).10 At the opera, Lucien compares Mme. de Bargeton to her cousin, again a real (and aristocratic) Parisienne: “[…] the brilliancy of the Parisienne brought out all the defects in her country cousin so clearly by contrast […]” (ibid.).11 Finally, the novel states that now at last Lucien is able to see the true Mme. de Bargeton (“as she really was,” ibid.), the way she is seen by all the other people in Paris: “[…] a tall, lean, withered woman, with a pimpled face and faded complexion; angular, stiff, affected in her manner; pompous and provincial in her speech; and, above all
All the colors of her toilette had been carefully subordinated to her complexion; her dress was delicious, her hair gracefully and becomingly arranged, her hat, in exquisite taste, was remarkable even beside Mme. d’Espard, that leader of fashion. […] She had adopted her cousin’s gestures and tricks of manner […]. She had modeled herself on Mme. d’Espard without mimicking her; the Marquise had found a cousin worthy of her […].
IBID.15
This becoming a Parisienne is told as a narrative of progress in Balzac’s novel. It has become evident that living in Paris is not the same as being a Parisienne. Being a Parisienne rather is something that can (and should) be learned. The story stereotypes the Parisienne as a figure that revolves around appearance, fashion, taste, and a certain habitus. All of them are connotated very positively and set apart from a negative counterimage: the so-called Provinciale, who has none of these things, is thus inferior in every way, and consequently runs the risk of being expelled from Parisian high society. But how is it possible that it takes Mme. de Bargeton only two days to achieve a transformation that is made to look all-encompassing when beforehand she was declared not only to be lacking in manners, speech, and taste but also shamed because of her body and age? This question requires a closer look at the novel and points to the intersectional nature of stereotypes.
2 Intersectionality as a Perspective within Imagological Studies
Consider an analogy for traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happened in an intersection, it can be caused by cars travelling from any number of
CRENSHAW 1989, 149directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.
As is the case with all visualizations, this is necessarily a simplification of the matter for the sake of providing orientation and, thus, facilitating discourse. After all, in order to intersect at a specific moment, categories like gender or race, of course, must have been separate before that moment. Other approaches that have further explored the concept of intersectionality emphasize the instability of gender, race, class, and similar dimensions of power. Researchers like Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2002), Leslie McCall (2005), Gabriele Dietze, or Lann Hornscheidt (cf. Dietze et al. 2012) reject the idea of stable categories, defining them instead as context-specific and internally structured by one another.
This idea provides a new perspective on Balzac’s character Mme. de Bargeton and her sudden transformation. In the novel, France is divided into Paris and Not-Paris, the so-called province—the latter being the negative counterimage that constructs Paris as the superior norm. Both of these images are personified and clearly gendered, which is a common strategy that has been described by scholars engaging in gender studies for a long time in different contexts.17 Once in Paris, both Lucien and Mme. de Bargeton need to adapt to the norm. Since the novel presents a hegemonic hetero-cis male perspective, Mme. de Bargeton is, for the most part, scrutinized for her appearance and behaviour and judged rather harshly. However, in the end, she is the one whose change is realized quicker and more efficiently than that of her male counterpart. This has nothing to do with a questioning of gender roles. It has to do with the way class is narrated in the novel. Gender, race, class, sexuality, and age are entangled narratively through the story. It is only because Lucien and Mme. de Bargeton are cisgendered, white, aristocratic, heterosexual, and relatively young that they gain access to that image of elegant and superior Paris, to Parisian high society, in the first place. Mme. de Bargeton is “already” thirty-six years old when they arrive and is looked down upon because of it (“old woman,” “withered,” “faded”). But Lucien has a disadvantage of his own that clearly outweighs Mme. de Bargeton’s age: he is only partly aristocratic. What is more, it is his mother who was noble, not his father. When Mme. de Bargeton’s
By their very nature, stereotypes are intersectional dynamics. They are a means of constructing social groups and producing knowledge about them. In most cases, practices of stereotyping attempt this via normalization and naturalization. They create identity and belonging but also, inevitably, exclusion and discrimination. A concept of intersectionality can be very useful in understanding and deconstructing these processes.20 It has been rightfully pointed out by the editors of this volume (cf. Edtstadler, Folie, and Zocco 2022, from 31) and by other scholars in the field like Joep Leerssen (2016) that intersectionality can provide a valuable perspective for imagological research. Ethnotypes or national stereotypes, as Leerssen stresses, “always work in conjunction with other frames, especially gender, age and class” (ibid., 26).21 My own research employs a concept of intersectionality that builds on two approaches: (1) the general instability of categories, and (2) the interdependency of these categories. When applied to imagology’s central concept, nationality, this means assuming an idea of nationality that is necessarily open, unstable, and always
The Parisienne has become a national stereotype in the course of the nineteenth century, repeatedly constructing the French capital as a synecdoche for France as a whole. Like Balzac’s Mme. de Bargeton, those female characters are always cisgendered, heterosexual, white, able-bodied, and young, or middle-aged. Since the Parisienne represents a nationalized norm, her class changes in the course of the nineteenth century from nobility to bourgeoisie, along with political power shifts in the country. Another literary text that engages in these practices of stereotyping is Henry James’s The American (1877).23
The American is primarily set in Paris, which is thus (re)produced as a nucleus of European cultural history.24 In James’s novel, Europe becomes a homogeneous, self-reliant entity with a privileged history and culture—being a white, heteronormative, binary, abled culture that knows no more than two classes: nobility and bourgeoisie. The story’s first chapter takes place at the Louvre: a topical place linked to cultural knowledge, art, and distinction. More precisely, the story’s starting point is the Salon Carré, where the Salon exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts had been taking place since the beginning of the eighteenth century—virtually the heart of the Louvre at the time the novel is set.
An observer with anything of an eye for national types would have had no difficulty in determining the local origin of this undeveloped connoisseur, and indeed such an observer might have felt a certain humorous relish of the almost ideal completeness with which he filled out the national mould. The gentleman […] was a powerful specimen of an American.
JAMES [1877] 1978, 17
What is noticeable about this description is not only the humorous but also biologistic tone of the passage, which allows for an implicit comparison with descriptions and classifications of animal species (“a powerful specimen”). At the same time, a kind of connoisseurship is created that reinforces the association with nature observation: the trained spectator will easily be able to assign Newman to a particular nation or “local origin” (ibid.). One might ask oneself at this point whether the humorous tone in which Newman is described and classified by the text ironizes national stereotyping. A close reading makes it clear, however, that the novel merely produces an aesthetic (and hierarchical) distance between the readers and the protagonist, which is supposed to make him the object of ridicule. By essentializing the character’s origin and subjecting his perception of the world to national barriers, the stereotypes reproduced by the text are much rather reinforced.
The cultivation of the fine arts appeared to necessitate, to her mind, a great deal of byplay, a great standing off with folded arms and head drooping from side to side, stroking of a dimpled chin with a dimpled hand, sighing and frowning and patting of the foot, fumbling in disordered tresses for wandering hair-pins. These performances were accompanied by a restless glance, which lingered longer than elsewhere upon the gentleman we have described.
IBID.
Her performance ultimately is successful. Newman approaches the woman (“At last he rose abruptly […]” (ibid.)) and addresses her with a sudden and contextless “Combien?” (ibid.).25 This first verbal communication between the story’s characters not only reveals Newman’s lack of French language skills and manners. Since his “Combien?” directly follows the woman’s bodily display, it refers not only to her painting but also, on another level, to herself. The artist, having consciously hinted at it, recognizes the double meaning of Newman’s statement but decides to bypass it.26 Still, Newman’s behaviour in the Salon Carré (and subsequently in the further course of the novel) reveals
After the bumpy start, a communication unfolds between Newman and the copyist, in the course of which the protagonist buys her painting (which is repeatedly marked by the narrator as inferior in quality). Furthermore, he will order eight more of her paintings in the course of the story. The dialogue between Newman and the Parisian woman, who is called Noémie Nioche, is as clumsy as its beginning, though. Both of them only partially master the language of the other and yet Noémie Nioche retains control from the onset. Once again, the readers know more than the main character; they know that the copyist continues to cleverly play her role, while Newman remains unsuspecting. At one point, the narrator remarks on her behaviour: “The young lady’s aptitude for playing a part at short notice was remarkable” (James [1877] 1978, 20), while Newman reflects only a few moments later: “[…] it gratified him to think that she was so honest. Beauty, talent, virtue; she combined everything!” (ibid.)
By the end of their first meeting, Noémie Nioche has not only persuaded the protagonist to purchase her (rather bad and also unfinished) painting. She has also arranged for Newman to take French lessons with her father, despite him not being a teacher and not being confident about the idea at all. For both, she relentlessly negotiates exorbitant prices. When she has successfully managed everything, Noémie Nioche takes her belongings and leaves Christopher Newman behind in the Salon Carré. The chapter ends with the following sentence: “The young lady gathered her shawl about her like a perfect Parisienne, and it was with the smile of a Parisienne that she took leave of her patron” (James [1877] 1978, 25). The effect of this statement is that of a conclusion or even a kind of punch line. Noémie Nioche has been successful in her act and she has simultaneously assigned the roles in this chamber play: Parisienne and wealthy, naive, and uncultivated American.
In this first chapter of the novel, the two characters are diametrically constructed: New World versus Old World; naive, good-natured, financially independent, and uncultivated versus clever, manipulative, financially dependent, and cultivated; cis male versus cis female. Both characters constitute each other and, following the dominant Western concept of gender, remain
Noticeably, the novel retains the French term Parisienne rather than translate it. Thereby, it explicitly calls up the stereotype—a stereotype that is known to the novel’s implicit reader as a specific representation of bourgeois, white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgendered femininity that is clearly linked to a particular concept of Paris. Interestingly, the naming of the Parisienne coincides with the first time that fashion and performing in/with fashion are mentioned in the text. But the point here is not to understand what it means exactly to put on a shawl “like a perfect Parisienne” (ibid.) or what smiling like one looks like—that remains for the readers to be imagined. The chapter is about setting up two intersectional stereotypes against one another. Furthermore, it is about the narrative production and essentialization of the nation as an active agent that generates clearly identifiable people. In The American, topoi, clichés, and stereotypes are exaggerated in a way that makes the novel seem like a parody of those constructs. At the same time, though, the story does not provide its characters with a way out of these fixed structures. The protagonist and the majority of the other characters are doomed to fail because of them. It is only Noémie Nioche, the representation of a manipulative, artificial Paris, who succeeds in the end.
4 Conclusion
In James’s novel, the Parisienne represents and produces France as a nation. Moreover, the stereotype acts as a representation of Europe as a whole, a counterimage to that of America. This idea of nationality or national identity, though, is not a stable one. It only ever appears to be because national stereotypes provide linear narratives, which seek to achieve coherence, chronology, and causality. Imagology, as Joep Leerssen has put it, is about “deconstructing the discourse of national and ethnic essentialism” (2016, 13). An intersectional perspective can be helpful in achieving just that: it focuses our attention on the
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My translation. Original quote: “Un ministre de commerce a dit ce beau mot: ‘Si la Parisienne n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.’”
See for example Jules Chéret’s posters for the ready-made clothing store “À la Parisienne” or the “How to” guides on behaving like a Parisienne in the lifestyle magazine Femina.
I elaborate more on the themes and approaches of this essay in my doctoral thesis: “Voilà une Parisienne! Stereotypisierungen als verflochtene Erzählungen” (En: “Voilà une Parisienne! Stereotypings as Entangled Narratives”; not yet published).
My translation. Original quote: “C’est à sa première robe qu’on peut dire d’une petite fille: ‘Voilà une Parisienne.’ On peut encore naître Parisienne à sa première passion et à son premier voyage à Paris, car là est le pays des métamorphoses et des transfigurations.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, writes about fashion and the Parisienne as early as 1761: “Fashion dominates provincial women but the Parisienne dominates fashion […]” ([1761] 1967, 190). My translation. Original quote: “La mode domine les provinciales ; mais les Parisiennes dominent la mode […].”
Original quote: “Le voisinage de plusieurs jolies Parisiennes, si élégamment, si fraîchement mises, lui fit remarquer la vieillerie de la toilette de madame de Bargeton, quoiqu’elle fût passablement ambitieuse: ni les étoffes, ni les façons, ni les couleurs n’étaient de mode. La coiffure qui le séduisait tant à Angoulême lui parut d’un goût affreux, comparée aux délicates inventions par lesquelles se recommandait chaque femme” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 140).
Original quote: “Transportée à Paris, une femme qui passe pour jolie en province, n’obtient pas la moindre attention, car elle n’est belle que par l’application du proverbe: Dans le royaume des aveugles, les borgnes sont rois” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 140).
Original quote: “désenchantement” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 140).
Original quote: “divinement mises et divinement belles” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 145).
Original quote: “comparée à ces souveraines, se dessina comme une vieille femme” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 145).
Original quote: “[…] la brillante Parisienne faisait si bien ressortir les imperfections de la femme de province […]” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 147).
Original quote: “[…] une femme grande, sèche, couperosée, fanée, plus que rousse, anguleuse, guindée, précieuse, prétentieuse, provinciale dans son parler, mal arrangée surtout!” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 147).
Original quote: “honteux d’avoir aimé cet os de seiche” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 147).
See Balzac [1843] 1983, 160. While Balzac’s novel describes Mme. de Bargeton’s evolution as a “métamorphose,” the English translation by Ellen Marriage, which I am referring to, uses different wording.
Original quote: “[…] les couleurs de sa toilette étaient choisies de manière à faire valoir son teint; sa robe était délicieuse; ses cheveux arrangés gracieusement lui seyaient bien, et son chapeau d’un goût exquis était remarquable à côté de celui de madame d’Espard, qui commandait à la mode. […] Elle avait pris les gestes et les façons de sa cousine […] Enfin elle s’était faite semblable à madame d’Espard sans la singer ; elle était la digne cousine de la marquise […]” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 159).
For a concise overview of intersectional theory, see Hill Collins and Bilge (2016); Walgenbach (2012).
See for example Silke Wenk’s works on allegories of different nations that present a form of immobilized femininity which, in turn, represents a secure nation (cf. Wenk 1996, 2000).
Original quote: “Cette mise de boutiquier endimanché prouve que ce garçon n’est ni riche ni gentilhomme ; sa figure est belle, mais il me paraît fort sot, il ne sait ni se tenir ni parler ; enfin il n’est pas élevé” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 157).
Original quote: “Si madame de Bargeton manquait d’usage, elle avait la hauteur native d’une femme noble et ce je ne sais quoi que l’on peut nommer la race” (Balzac [1843] 1983, 148).
This fact is underlined by the multifarious contributions of this section (cf. the articles by Martina Thiele (chap. 13), Karin Andersson (chap. 15), and Ivana Drmić (chap. 16)).
On the methodology of a gender-based imagology see for example Bock (2013).
Here, imagology can profit from critical whiteness studies which do not analyse whiteness as an actual skin colour but rather as a racialized normative construction (see e.g. Hill 1997). This perspective can be helpful in deconstructing practices of stereotyping that render whiteness invisible, thus reproducing it as the norm that does not have to be marked.
In my analyses I avoid the concepts of hetero- and auto-images. Even though it would be possible to describe Balzac’s Parisienne as an auto-image while describing the Parisienne in James’s novel as a hetero-image, I think this categorization would create the notion of two stable diametrical figures and thus inherently limit the possibilities for my analysis. My aim is rather to compare and contrast practices of stereotyping in different media, which shifts the analytical focus to the (literary) strategies and ways of narrating a stereotype. Additionally, it leaves room to account for ambivalences, changes, and variations within different stereotypings. I agree with Joep Leerssen who states: “What is an auto-image and what a hetero-image is not the stable polarity that it was once thought to be” (2016, 21).
The Europe of Henry James’s novels is a limited, topical Europe: the novels are set, above all, in Western Europe and there, almost exclusively, in Great Britain, France, and Italy.
Meaning “How much?” in English.
“The artist stared a moment, gave a little pout, shrugged her shoulders […]” (James [1877] 1978, 19).
For an analysis of this consumer logic displayed by Newman, see Kovács (2006, 62–67).
The nobility of Mme. de Bargeton is, of course, always already interwoven with her gender, sexuality, race, ability, etc.