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This gap between the language of the description and the object it purports to depict has elicited much commentary from critical readers of every stripe. For Georg Lukács, virtuosic descriptions, like that of Charles’ hat, are exemplary of the

enumerative style of the later realists (like Flaubert or Zola) in which the author privileges the proliferation of details over the depth of their signifying power (like Balzac and Tolstoy do). Lukács sees the piling up of “inessential details” as the symptom of the author’s inability to forge a sense of immediacy with natural

35 _{An attestation to this fact is La Casquette de Charles Bovary, a collection of illustrations in} which twenty-four different artists attempt to create an image of the infamous hat. See La Casquette de Charles Bovary by Michel Boujut.

objects—an immediacy that has been destroyed by the mass production of late capitalism (157). For Lukács, the convoluted description of Charles’ hat exemplifies the alienated relationships of a bourgeois world in which “details meticulously observed and depicted with consummate skill are substituted for the portrayal of essential features of social reality and the description of changes effected in the human personality by social influences” (143-4). In other words, in Flaubert’s aesthetic practice, an object like the hat has no symbolic significance in the text outside itself precisely because, as a mass-produced commodity, it is has no singular, significant meaning. The description of Charles’ hat is therefore both an allegory of the distance between subject and object in the industrialized era, and also a linguistic exercise unto itself as a demonstration of the Flaubert’s masterful command of the nineteenth-century sartorial lexicon.

If Lukács found cause to criticize the superfluity of description in Flaubert, Roland Barthes’ famous defense of the detail in “L’Effet de réel” posits that the “extraneous” details of Lukács’ characterization do indeed serve a purpose in realist texts: simply put, these details exist to signify “le réel.” In her reading of Barthes’ essay, Naomi Schor describes the shift from Lukács to Barthes as a move “from a

teleological to a tautological model of the detail” in which the real is denoted

through “a conspicuous consumption of language” (“Details and Decadence” 29). The abundance of details in Flaubert’s prose is portrayed by Barthes to be a kind of

linguistic luxury:

Ces notations [qu’aucune fonction…ne permet de justifier] sont scandaleuses (du point de vue de la structure), ou, ce qui est encore plus inquiétant, elles semblent accordées à une sorte de luxe de la

narration, prodigue au point de dispenser des details ‘inutiles’ et d’élever ainsi par endroits le coût de l’information narrative. (84) Though their presence may initially provoke anxiety in the reader, Barthes argues that the ultimate usefulness of these details lies in their luxurious abundance. It is in the very piling up of precisions that the text is able to signify the real.

For decades now, Lukács and Barthes’ respective writings on the role of the detail in realism have framed subsequent discussions of Charles Bovary’s hat. Despite Flaubert’s endless precisions, the hat, in all of its absurdity, has not been seen as a real object, but instead has always been interpreted as an allegory for something else. For Jonathan Culler, for example, the hat is a “parody of a symbolic object” and depicts not an actual hat, but represents rather an allegorical rendering of the schism between words and things (92). Lawrence Schehr sees in the

description of the hat the rejoining of romanticism (presence) and modernism (absence); the details constitute, but also irrevocably obliterate, the object, thus calling into question the “a priori adequation between language and things” (10). Elissa Marder’s psychoanalytic reading of “the most notable accessory in all of literary history” explores the symbolic combination of the tassel (male) and fur (female) in the hat as exemplary of Charles’ troubled sexuality (97). For Jean Ricardou, Flaubert’s piling up of details creates an “excroissance perpendiculaire” that stops the plot’s momentum to create a “temps mort” in the narrative. This dead space forces the reader to stop to contemplate the object, thereby generating a concordance between the literal and the referential dimensions—we the readers, like

Charles’ classmates, stop to stare at the new boy and his bewildering, ridiculous, overwrought hat (27-28).

While these readings are astute analyses of the symbolic and rhetorical role of Charles’ hat, there is one aspect of the passage that is consistently overlooked by contemporary readers, but that was nonetheless signaled by Flaubert’s critics in the nineteenth century—that is, the striking resemblance of Flaubert’s description to similar ones featured in nineteenth-century women’s fashion journals. Consider the similar tone and detail in the following passage from the January 4, 1824 issue of Le Journal des dames et des modes describing the remarkable headdress of Madame la duchesse de C[…]:

[P]our sa coiffure elle avoit quelque chose de si nouveau et de si distingué, que je n’eus pas grand mérite à en conserver l’idée; qu’on se figure une passé absolument ronde dont une moitié relevée grâce sur le front, étoit surmontée d’une immense plume blanche nouée; sur le sommet de la tête, plusieurs nœuds de velours également terminés par des ferrets d’acier étoient rassemblés avec art, et de manière à

retomber quelque peu sur l’arrière-passe du chapeau, dont l’étoffe

couleur de feu s’allioit on ne peut mieux au nom de chapeau Trocadéro qu’on lui a donné justement [sic]. (qtd. in Kleinert 6) The fact that critics like Cuvillier-Fleury immediately thought of a fashion magazine after reading the opening passages of Madame Bovary is unsurprising: the tone, focus, and scope of the description of Charles’ hat closely resembles those from contemporary fashion publications. The commercial motive behind the meticulous descriptions of clothing and accessories found in the presse féminine is clear: hats and clothing are described in such minute detail so that female readers, should they desire that their own milliners or seamstresses create for them something similarly sophisticated, could have the nouveauté reproduced for themselves. The text is

explicitly constructed so that the objects described can be produced materially, and then purchased by the reader. Flaubert’s motivation for imitating fashion journal discourse in Madame Bovary, however, is less clear: while female readers were able to translate fashion magazine descriptions into real objects, what kind of reality does Flaubert want his reader to derive from his own similarly detailed and materially oriented text?

My fundamental contention is that understanding the role of fashion and fashion journal discourse in Madame Bovary is essential to understanding the poetics of the novel. Underscoring the similarity between Flaubert’s prose and the text of nineteenth-century fashion magazines, I want to return to Barthes’ notion of the realist text as luxury made narrative and suggest that the consumption of

commodities is an essential driving force in Madame Bovary for both Emma and the reader. While romantic literature has long been acknowledged as the source material for Emma’s fantasies, I show how fashion journals, and nineteenth-century novels read as fashion journals, also contribute to Emma’s desire to escape her milieu. Furthermore, I use Ricardou’s argument about Charles’ hat—that the proliferation of details forces the reader to stop to look at the object—as a point of departure for my own analysis of how Emma looks at similarly detailed accessories and clothing in the novel. I argue this kind of looking—in other words, the search for meaning in the scrutiny of details—not only replicates a similar kind of looking that is solicited in nineteenth-century fashion journals, but also ironically reveals Emma’s profoundly myopic vision of her place in the world.

Using Jules de Gaultier’s 1921 characterization of le bovarysme as “un mode de vision” indicative of “le pouvoir départi à l’homme de se concevoir autre qu’il n’est” (55, 13), I show how Flaubert binds the discourses of the romantic novel and of the fashion journal together in Emma’s fantasy to show that they produce analogous and mutually reinforcing effects on her. More specifically, what pushes Emma to consume both romantic literature and fashion journals is rooted in the same

impulse—that is, the urge to escape the ennui of her provincial existence by deriving another reality from text. In turn, Emma’s consumption of these texts, both literary and periodical, has the same effect: in fueling her social and sartorial ambitions, they render her blind to the unbridgeable distance between her literary fantasy and her provincial reality. Her repeated—and, ultimately, frustrated—attempts to distinguish herself through dress is thus symptomatic of her bovarystic belief that she can

somehow transform her prosaic life into an elegant and singular existence. Flaubert reveals his protagonist’s endemic bovarysme through her profoundly ironic

relationship to fashion: the more that Emma seeks a sense of distinction through sartorial (and therefore social) superiority, the more that her clothing reveals her utter sameness or contiguity with the provincial milieu she so desperately tries to escape.

My argument is developed over four stages. First, using Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the “orders of simulacra” (imitation, production, and simulation) as a framework, I describe the seismic shift in the sartorial landscape of nineteenth- century France and how fashion journals, at once descriptive and prescriptive, shaped their female audience through the promotion of certain kinds of looking and

interpretive practices. Because their commercial viability depended on their readers’ willingness to buy their wares, these publications sold a “romance” of a different sort: that of the possibility of social ascension through elegant dressing. Second, I show how the question of distinction—between the obscene and the moral, between the disingenuous and the sincere, between reality and illusion—through visual

interpretation was of central importance both in Flaublert’s obscenity trial and in Gaultier’s definition of le bovarysme as psychological pathology. I discuss how these problems of distinction are intimately related to Emma’s own pursuit of distinction through fashion. Third, I explore how fashion and fashion journals—both as Emma consumes them and as Flaubert imitates them in the novel—reveal Emma’s

scotomatous vision of the world: Flaubert repeatedly shows that where Emma perceives difference (and where she seeks distinction), there is only sameness. I also argue that Emma’s consumption of fashion journals is one of many examples of dangerous reading in the novel in which the reader unsuccessfully tries to translate text to lived experience. Fourth, I discuss how the end of the novel, with Emma’s effacement and Homais’ exaltation, ultimately constitutes a critique of the disingenuous distinctions of the political culture of Second Empire France.