Poetry as Accessory

Abstract

With industrialisation, literature in the 19th century, especially aestheticism and decadence, shows itself influenced by commodity and consumer culture. In Mallarmé’s case, this connection is already biographically obvious: through his editorship of the fashion magazine La Dernière Mode in 1874. That his connection to fashion was not a biographical intermezzo but rather formative for the poetry has already been noted in research. In contrast to a research tradition that understands Mallarmé’s poetry as absolute, self-referential poetry with metaphysical and ontological implications, research in recent decades has emphasised its embeddedness in everyday culture. This essay aims to examine Mallarmé’s affinity with commodity and consumer culture with regard to a fashion object that was of particular importance to him: the fan, which was not only the subject but also the material carrier of numerous poems, each addressed to a lady and written on her fan. By using objects of daily use as writing carriers, the fan poems reflect the materiality of literature. The primacy of reading is thus replaced by other modes of use.