The daily mirror: Production, play and art in nineteenth -century Paris.

An overlooked vehicle of modernity in the culture of nineteenth-century Paris, the mirror created situations of dramatic ambiguity for the city's inhabitants as they played, shopped, read and looked at themselves and others. In its transformation from a luxury to a quotidian object, a process that occurred largely in the second half of the nineteenth century, the looking glass was a crucial component of optical toys that reproduced images of the real. Parisians took pleasure in producing personal spectacles and optical deception with images of their own bodies. More importantly, however, mirrors acted as consciences, exacerbating a split in the modern subject that is best represented by the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, whose descriptions of the dialectical experience of modernity resonate with the representation of mirrors in his work. The mirror's power to monitor individual words and deeds increased as Second Empire transformations of Paris led to the construction of large public spaces such as the department store. In these commercial spaces, as Emile Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873), Nana (1880) and Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) demonstrate, the power of the looking glass expands to act on the crowd---on shoppers who were predominantly female---fueling their consumer desire while duping them into feeling liberated by their increased visibility and buying power. The mirror's capacity to create images and to reduce three-dimensional bodied depth to two-dimensional glass surfaces also made it an emblem of the decadent movement's cult of the artificial. In Huysmans' A Rebours (1883) and Rachilde's Monsieur Venus (1884) and L'Araignee de cristal (1892), the mirror's power to liberate the artistic subject from the constraints of tradition in writing and in defining gender is as strong as the destructive fear this visible symbol of the human conscience evoked in the collective psyche of nineteenth-century Paris. As an artifact of the prehistory of our current hyper-visual Western culture, the mirror promoted an ambiguity in nineteenth-century Parisian spaces of play, commerce, art and literature that thrives in television, cinema and cyberspace at the fin de millennium.Ph.D.Language, Literature and LinguisticsRomance literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132597/2/9977182.pd