From pudeur to plaisir: Grandville’s Flowers in the Kingdom of Fashion

Abstract

This article argues that J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs animées, long dismissed as an homage to the delicate beauty of nineteenth-century femininity, should be read instead as a satire of that very ideal. Through a subtle dialogue between two popular ‘feminized’ genres — the flower book and the fashion plate — Grandville’s illustrations of flower-ladies portray the natural world as a socialized and commodified space and disrupt the prevailing ideology of feminine pudeur that those visual genres worked to construct and maintain. Grandville’s animated flowers offer a social commentary through a persistent juxtaposition of these two benign genres and produce a comically disturbing effect that questions the roles that bourgeois culture had prescribed as natural for women. Through his exaggerated commingling of natural and cultural visual rhetorics, Grandville proposes a decoupling of the natural and the cultural, thus initiating an ideological critique of the most potent discourses around the feminine in nineteenth-century France.