From Grisette to Midinette

Abstract

This chapter examines the early nineteenth-century grisette as a literary type, and traces her reappearance on the cultural scene as a figure of nostalgia at the turn of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the century, the grisette of the 1830s and 1840s still regularly appeared throughout French popular culture as a sign of heightened romantic longing for a lost Paris, a France of small-scale industry, sentiment, and elegance. She was frequently conflated with contemporary garment workers, tethering living belle époque workingwomen to a figure of literary wistfulness. Parisian garment workers were repeatedly cast in the mold of a pleasing throwback, a woman at once thoroughly embedded in the modern Parisian landscape and yet, also, out of time, carrying within her the essence and soul of a lost or endangered France. The most popular grisette at the turn of the century was Musset’s Mimi Pinson, who was featured in songs, poems, postcards, ballet, vaudeville shows, short stories, novels, and films. This chapter also develops a physiognomy of the grisette’s belle époque descendant, the midinette, a modernized version of the type, and inheritor of both the grisette’s cultural significance and her limitations. From strike reportage to pulp novels to monuments, the Parisian garment worker found eroticized and socially useful shades of herself promoted around her city and nation in these years, shades which more often than not moved backward in time to the grisette of the 1830s and 1840s.