Home and Its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France.

Edited by Suzanne Nash (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993. ix plus 345pp.).

These fifteen short essays depict perceptions of home and homelessness. The topic is especially germane for the nineteenth century because of the magnitude of the rural exodus and the advent of industrial and cultural modernity. Many of the essays suggest that nostalgia for one's roots related to the crisis of national identity. Although this book is predominantly one of literary analysis, the texts form part of the historical record and contribute to an understanding of culture and mentalites.

The first essay, Michael S. Roth's "Resuming to Nostalgia," raises one of the book's themes by showing how sensitive individuals, not only young men but female domestic servants who had left their kin in the countryside, longed for homes left behind. William Paulson's chapter explaining Gustave Flaubert's use of the hearth as symbolic of homes of the past also incorporates the idea of young men's nostalgia. Based on the novels of Flaubert, Honore de Balzac, and on Emile Durkheim's Suicide, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson's essay singles out the emotions of the flaneur and introduces the concept of Paris as the gendered female city that seduces him, yet remains beyond his reach.

Several contributions to this volume have particular appeal to the social historian. Philip Nord's excellent chapter, "Republican Politics and the Bourgeois Interior" is the historical cornerstone. Nord questions what private life and the home meant to bourgeois men and women from the 1850s through the 1880s. In so doing he demonstrates that the ideal structure of the home's interior, the foyer, was neither clear nor uniformly agreed upon. Based upon Republican ideologies, and with keen attention to gender roles and spaces within the home, Nord shows that the Republicans attempted a "reconstruction of the foyer" (p. 199) to provide an ideal environment for modeling a moral, fit, family and citizenry. Rather than treating homelessness (mental and intellectual) Nord establishes the terms of the debate for the ideal home (emotional and physical).

Locating his essay within the context of nineteenth-century French history, Robert Morrissey emphasizes the relationship between home and homeland. Based on Eugene Sue's little known Les Mysteres du peuple, and employing analytical categories of both Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, Morrissey shows how Sue used the home to portray the conceptual space "wherein traditions are preserved combining national and 'racial' consciousness" (p. 130). National identity begins at home. Richard Terdiman's contribution places Baudelaire's "Le Cygne" within the context of the destruction of the old Paris and the construction of the new. He puts Haussmannization in a cultural perspective showing the avant-garde's attitudes toward the remaking of the city. Patrizia Lombardo's essay also discusses Baudelaire's opposition to Haussmannization. Several of these essays suggest that homelessness indicates discomfort in the modern city.

Women's relationship to the home and to homelessness occupies the last third of this book; the essays demonstrate what this meant to Flora Tristan, the Saint-Simoniennes, domestic servants and governesses in literature. Deborah Nord's well-crafted essay, "The Female Pariah: Flora Tristan and the Paradox of Homelessness," reveals how Tristan created her identity from experiences of dislocation, and introduces the relationship of the working-class woman to the home. The idealized Republican home appeared as part of Tristan's psyche. Kari Weil's chapter raises the question of where the shifting public and private spheres left Saint-Simonienne women. Both public authorities and their patriarchal leader, Prosper Enfantine, scrutinized the women's homes. Martine Gantrel confines her article to Alphonse de Lamartine's and Edmond and Jules Goncourt's depiction of servants, not as part of the bourgeois household, but rather as homeless women after hours. She shows that Emile Zola modified this view, portraying the bourgeoisie negatively interacting with their servants. Historical contextualization would reveal that the frequent job changes and the instability inherent in domestic service rendered servants actually and metaphorically homeless. Maria DiBattista's essay on Charlotte Bronte's savoir-faire brings to the forefront a woman's predicament of being part of a home, yet detached from it in the role of the governess. Janet Beizer's curious article on "Emma's Daughter . . . and Mothersickness" plays on the words mal de mere\mer in examining hysteria in Madame Bovary. According to Beizer, Emma Bovary's malady is her "wandering womb," or motion/mother sickness as she attempts to find happiness away from her own home. These essays all indicate that women had a problematic relationship to their home, and each chapter adds another piece to the puzzle in which we try to construct a picture of woman's place in the city--ideologically, literally, and metaphorically.

Despite the strength of many of the contributions, this book has some problems. Several essays lack a historical context; they are textual analyses of "crisscrossing discourses" based on sometimes obscure literary works; readers need to know the literature well. Mary J. Harper uses the imagery of Ballanche, Custine and Nerval to show homelessness and dislocation as a theme of early nineteenth-century writing, but we need to be already acquainted with these writers' works. Likewise, David Bromwich's piece, "The French Revolution and Tintern Abbey," requires familiarity with Wordsworth's poem. Julia Ballerini's article about Maxime DuCamp's photographs of Egypt forms part of the section on the "Aesthetic Representation of Homelessness" but needs a stronger connection to the major arguments of this volume.

The book begs a lengthier or more conceptual introduction or general conclusion in which Nash extracts and connects the thematic threads. It would be useful if she discussed the recurring motifs of nostalgia, or of the upper-middle-class man searching to find a place in a city amidst new industrial developments, yet yearning for a former place. Both are common currents of many essays, not sufficiently highlighted in the introduction. The volume would be further strengthened if the introduction discussed Habermas's theories of the public and private spheres; several contributions indicate the blurring boundaries of the public and private in the home and in sentiments about the home. The essays on women could be thematically linked, addressing the challenge that women had in creating a home in a male-constructed world--a world that even the men had problems building and accepting. The Afterward, by Antoine Compagnon, using "Proust's Homecoming" to embody the search for "a home, or rather a metaphor for a home" (p. 332), while intriguing, helps little to unify the volume. Nevertheless, there is much of value to the social historian in this book.