Abstract
Balzac's Le Cousin Pons (1847) provides the primary vehicle for an analysis at once literary and literal — that is, offering consideration of the fan, an object that wields cultural power both within and beyond the pages of Balzac's final novel. An object both collectable and consumable, the fan is hard to place within the dichotomy of art and fashion and it thus presents a challenge to the nineteenth-century gendered hierarchy. Polyvalent, the fan gradually assumed a commercial role, for its erotic symbolism was deeply bound up in the relationship between women and fashion in nineteenth-century France. Its coupling of virtuosity and virtue enacted the paradoxical status of nineteenth-century femininity. This constantly resurfacing object, in the hands of the bourgeois subject, came to mediate the developing tensions of modernity itself as both fans and women emerged as commodified objects of circulation.
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