The interface between fashion and literature in Balzac’s novel le Colonel Chabert

Abstract

The legacy left by great literature authors finds dialog with writers who regard fashion nowadays as a complex and wide universe, leaving behind the idea of fashion as a simple elite’s frivolous expression, and considering it a powerful instrument of sociological analysis. Honoré de Balzac, in the 19th century, had already noticed the profound connection between fashion and literature. Thereafter, in the first decades of the 20th century, the Bakhtin Circle would provide significant contributions to the understanding of both domains as cultural products, thus, necessarily marked by ideology. Also, the publications of the French philosopher and scholar of hypermodernity, Gilles Lipovetsky, help to investigate several fashion references in the 1844 version of Le Colonel Chabert. This paper attempts to show how fashion constitutes a relevant element to build the diegesis, the characters’ perception about themselves and about others, and, in an intra- and extratextual movement, the view of the post-Revolution French society. Finally, this paper seeks to combine domains not very often linked and to present the opportunity of an enlargement of perspectives on the literary text and its social environment.