Cleanliness and Class in the Countess de Ségur's Novels

Abstract

Cleanliness and Class in the Countess de Ségur's Novels Marie-France Doray (bio) Translated by Margaret R. Higonnet (bio) There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. —Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger In the mid-nineteenth century, even before Louis Pasteur's discoveries rationalized the struggle against dirt, dirtiness became a major preoccupation of the French bourgeoisie, who wove new links among filth, stench, poverty, and vice.1 Uncleanliness became emblematic of immorality in a perceptual code of value that run-of-the-mill children's literature helped transmit. From its first years, the principal children's weekly, La Semaine des enfants (The Children's Week),2 published numerous stories whose leitmotif was "poor but clean." In these stories the concern for cleanliness both masked and expressed the bourgeoisie's apprehensions about the "dangerous" working classes. Only one of the authors who wrote that year for the Semaine des enfants is still known and read by French youth: the Countess de Ségur. Her nineteen novels, written between 1858 and 1869, shed special light on a critical moment in the formation of class relations and social values. This exceptional author rejected the new descriptive code, according to which cleanliness plays an essential moral role. Her sense of propriety in effect harks back to aristocratic definitions of manners that predated nineteenth-century bourgeois efforts to neutralize corporal excretions and exhalations; inner virtues take precedence over outer traits. For her, filth could be an undesirable result of physical circumstances or (on rare occasions) could even serve as a catalyst of hearty humor. As a realist, she charted the newly reinforced distaste of the bourgeoisie for the dirt of the lower classes. But she condemned the simplistic equation [End Page 64] of dirt with vice; as a profoundly religious woman, she believed this moral arithmetic threatened the peaceable coexistence of rich and poor and undermined charity.3 As nineteenth-century adults struggled to repress the evidence of our natural drives, a split appears to have developed between parents and their children. The children, who only gradually internalized adult repugnance for dirt, natural functions, and odors, seem to have remained closer to the manners of an old Russian aristocrat than to the newer bourgeois mores.4 What was true then is probably still true today. Ségur's treatment of these themes helps explain her persistent success among children.5 At the same time, her explicit discussion of taboo material, especially bodily excretions (and corporal punishment), brought her condemnation by adults, including even Freud.6 "Poor but Clean" There is no French proverb equivalent to the English Protestant "cleanliness is next to godliness," and yet by the mid-nineteenth century, this message was conveyed by many stories in the Semaine des enfants. The originality of the Countess de Ségur clearly emerges, if one considers the fiction in this weekly. A study of the narratives published in 1859 (a year when one of her novels also appeared there) indicates that, as a broadly accepted social norm permitting us to judge chance acquaintances, cleanliness displaced vulgar language and manners. Subtly, this new index of value led readers to reconcile the socially useful principle that "poverty is not a vice" with its subliminal opposite, a general suspicion of the poor or the nearly destitute. In later years, the encoding of dirt as vice in this journal became even more pronounced. Even more than an author addressing adults, a children's writer must be careful to indicate whether new characters introduced into a narrative are good or evil. Concise moral adjectives may furnish this information ("the honest," "the sly") or physiognomic descriptions ("open-faced," "shifty"). Or a simple physical description may do: "A little boy of nine or ten years, modestly but cleanly dressed" (Plemeur 212), where "modest" is a measure of wealth, not character. To describe a character as "cleanly" dressed is to signal a "nice" person (and "nice" in English carries just this ambiguity), but the clue is valid only if the individual is poorly dressed—or even [End Page 65] covered with rags. For the well-dressed person, cleanliness is a matter of course...