Femmes et luxe, perspectives littéraires ed. by Soundouss El Kettani and Isabelle Tremblay (review)

Reviewed by: Femmes et luxe, perspectives littéraires ed. by Soundouss El Kettani and Isabelle Tremblay Jennifer Carr El Kettani, Soundouss and Isabelle Tremblay, eds. Femmes et luxe, perspectives littéraires. PU de Rennes, 2022. Pp. 218. ISBN 978-2-7535-8584-3. 22€ (paper). In their introduction, the editors cite a relative lack of literary scholarship on luxury and gender, suggesting that understanding the former as a "topos littéraire [End Page 168] genré" (205) might offer privileged insight into the feminist implications of material culture. This intuition informs Femmes et luxe's twelve chapters (all written in French), which, though they largely remain tethered to metropolitan France, nonetheless open transhistorical and transcultural lines of inquiry into luxury as a social logic that, from the Ancien Régime to the present, has defined—and often circumscribed—women's agency. The volume's wide-ranging priorities foreground luxury's semantic flexibility, uniting phenomena as disparate as jewelry and oral contraceptives, freedom of movement and literature itself. Though this variability risks dulling luxury's critical usefulness, it also reveals the term's capaciousness as shorthand for a rarefied sphere whose limits often map onto class and gender. Ultimately, the volume's eclectic scope offers less a systematic overview of luxury, literature, and gender than an invitation to future work on their conjuncture (what, for instance, might literary representations of luxury tell us about non-normative gender identities?). Still, individual chapters will appeal to scholars of French and Francophone North African literature whose work intersects with gender and cultural studies, particularly those interested in literary representations of material culture. Femmes et luxe is organized into three parts. Part I, "Les discours dominants sur le luxe," revisits accepted discourses on luxury. In "De la notion de luxe à celle de luxure : une perspective féministe," Frédérique Chevillot offers a feminist reading of recent (male-authored) theorizations of luxury that, by foregrounding the shared etymology of luxe and luxure, replicate misogynist discourses. In "Le luxe des dessous. Une transgression du discours social par le discours littéraire de Zola," Corina Sandu follows the trope "dessous douteux" across Zola's corpus, where unwashed women's undergarments connote a "luxe sale" (48) associated with bourgeois moral corruption. In "La déconstruction des 'belles images' comme impératif social et comme divertissement pascalien," Sophie Bastien analyzes the polysemic title of Simone de Beauvoir's Les belles images (1966), whose proliferating referents (from advertisements to bourgeois gender norms) obscure social ills. In "La situation des femmes de lettres dans la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade," Tetzner Leny Bien Aimé approaches literature as a luxury object, examining the gendered gatekeeping that conditioned Beauvoir's 2018 entry into the Pléiade. Part II, "Les impératifs sociaux du luxe," examines the mechanisms by which luxury circumscribes the feminine. In "Du désir de plaire aux impératifs du luxe sous la plume de Mme Benoist," Isabelle Tremblay shows how Benoist's eighteenth-century epistolary novels stage gendered power imbalances configured by emergent forms of luxury, and advocate for women's solidarity as a corrective to libertine venality. In "Le bijou : traditions, distinctions, transgressions fin-de-siècle," Sophie Pelletier demonstrates how jewels concretize gender relations in fin-de-siècle literature by Maupassant, Zola, and others, who reify female characters as luxury objects while nonetheless allowing space for transgressive appropriations of bodily adornment. Soundouss El Kettani's "Le luxe, une spécialité féminine de la littérature maghrébine francophone ?" considers North African literature's vexed relationship with [End Page 169] luxury—a legacy of colonialism's deprivations—through two Moroccan writers, Fatima Mernissi and Yasmine Chami. For the former, luxury is synonymous with women's restricted mobility; for the latter, it becomes a signifier of creative possibility. Eylem Aksoy Alp traces a similar progression in "L'évolution du luxe au féminin chez Annie Ernaux," mapping Ernaux's evolving conception of luxury, which culminates in the emancipatory project of literary creation. Part III, "Le luxe et la quête de l'être," centers luxury's role in identity construction. In "Balzac et les théories du luxe et de l'élégance à l'épreuve de l...