Because she so disliked bombast, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson never trumpeted her own achievements. A private, even shy woman, she would have had a hard time accepting our characterization of her influence on the field of nineteenth-century French studies. But we like to think that she would have been gratified to know that the editors of this special issue feel as if we have been in continual dialogue with her as we have worked together to bring it to life. We are fortunate to have this opportunity to mark the breadth of her impact on scholars like ourselves, whom she trained and mentored, as well as on many others whose research she made possible, and continues to make possible, through her own.
From the idea of the bourgeois, to the French literary field, to the meanings of Paris in the nineteenth century, the sociology of French cuisine, and finally to the cultural history of roses—Priscilla’s reach was vast. The diversity of projects she oversaw and the fact that she met each of us on our own terms testify to her intellectual versatility and commitment to helping younger scholars articulate their own scholarly visions. Always enthusiastically receptive to new ideas and genuinely happy for any of us who managed to find fulfillment in the life of the mind, Priscilla modeled an uncommon and uncompromising style of intellectual engagement.
Although each of Priscilla Ferguson’s three major academic monographs grapples with a different subject matter—from literary institutions to nineteenth-century urban culture to French cuisine—the subtitle of Literary France aptly captures the essence of her entire scholarly oeuvre: “the making of a culture.” In thinking through what constitutes culture, Ferguson drew on methodologies of literary studies, sociology, and history—par for the course in nineteenth-century French studies today, but pioneering when she embarked on each of her projects. Her work was interdisciplinary long before interdisciplinarity became a widespread approach in academic scholarship.
Ferguson’s ambitious Literary France: The Making of a Culture (1987, repr. 1991) explores the unique and complex role the institution of literature has played in the creation of a specifically French cultural identity since the seventeenth century. Reading French cultural history through the social construction of its literary institutions, broadly conceived, she shows how central literature and its practitioners have been to underwriting and shaping the state and its subjects.
In Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (1994), Ferguson engages with key terms that define our understanding of nineteenth-century French culture—Paris, revolution, modernity. Published over twenty-five years ago, this book remains a crucial reference for anyone writing about nineteenth-century Paris and modernity. Her exploration of the connection between the Revolution as a historical event and revolution as literary practice, her reading of texts about Paris and her reading of Paris as text changed the way we think about this period and its culture. Her chapter on the flâneur, which traces the genealogy of this quintessential figure of Parisian modernity, remains the most authoritative piece of writing on the subject. Ferguson brings together and places on equal footing the grand narratives of the French canon—those of Hugo, Zola, Flaubert—and distinctly noncanonical texts—city guidebooks and street signs, maps and various “minor” works that she rescues from scholarly oblivion.
In Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (2004) Ferguson turns her attention to another pathway toward the “making of a culture”: here she argues that French cuisine was a central building block in the construction of a French national identity. Drawing a distinction between “food”—the material substance, and “cuisine”—a cultural and social construct, Ferguson takes her readers on a culinary adventure through a range of texts (gastronomic treatises, cookbooks, novels both famous and forgotten, chefs’ memoirs, etc.) and other artifacts (films, menus) that she convenes across genres and time periods. By positioning “cuisine as a privileged agent for the elaboration of collective identity” (3), Ferguson helped establish food studies as a serious field of inquiry and forged important connections across time, disciplines, and canonical boundaries: Ratatouille the Disney rat is treated alongside Brillat-Savarin to help define the elusive object of taste.
Ferguson’s last published book, Word of Mouth: What We Talk about When We Talk about Food (2014), explores the cultural meaning of conversations about culinary practices in the United States and France. As in her previous books, here Ferguson draws on a broad array of cultural documents, from novels by Proust and art films to cookbooks and New Yorker cartoons. While Word of Mouth draws on Ferguson’s expertise in food studies, this was a new kind book for her—one that addresses the general public rather than academic audiences.
Each of these books generated new fields of study, paving the way for other scholars to pursue fresh paths they might not otherwise have taken. Her work authorized us to move beyond the confines of traditional literary analysis to explore what had long been on the margins of what was considered culture—from obscure texts and material objects to works of popular culture. She taught us that there are many ways to think through cultural experiences of the past. The essays that follow demonstrate Ferguson’s impact on scholars, each of whom originates, like Ferguson herself, in the field of French and Francophone studies, and, in Ferguson’s mold, reaches beyond their fields to incorporate new perspectives and unanticipated cultural synergies.
This special issue of Romanic Review attests to Priscilla’s range as a scholar and a mentor. Contributors include former students as well as scholars and colleagues who came into her widening intellectual orbit along the way—at conferences, colloquia, and symposia. The issue is organized according to the key themes that marked the trajectory of her thinking, from her early work in intellectual history and institutions to her more recent scholarship on how food shapes cultural and personal identities.
The first section, entitled “Histories of Reading,” offers two new interpretations of canonical French literary works that interrogate, through the prism of Ferguson’s Literary France, how “literary culture” is constructed. Alexandra K. Wettlaufer’s “Signifying Difference: Reading Balzac and Sand/Writing Balzac and Sand” analyzes two of Balzac’s works, Béatrix and Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, in relation to Sand’s novels Horace and Jacques. Wettlaufer identifies key points of connection and indeed communication between these two authors, so often understood in French literary history as opposites. Her piece suggests that, through “double reading,” not only can we reimagine institutionalized literary canons to perceive unlikely communions, but we must also deconstruct the notion of “literary culture” to do so productively. Likewise, Geoffrey Turnovsky’s contribution, “Reading Exercises: French Literature in the Classroom,” examines the construction and power of literary institutions with a study of Régis Sauder’s 2011 documentary, Nous, princesses de Clèves, a film that follows a group of high school students in Marseille as they read Lafayette’s novel, encounter other monolithic symbols of French high culture, and prepare for the Baccalauréat. Through his socio-historical approach, Turnovsky’s piece resonates with Ferguson’s own treatments of the popular to reveal the cultural work underpinning cultural artifacts.
The second section, entitled “Cities and Dwellers,” shifts gears to take Ferguson’s Paris as Revolution as its guiding thread. Here, two distinct approaches to writing the nineteenth-century urban environment and experience are showcased in pieces that ask us to reimagine the city. Cheryl Morgan’s article, “Voices Carry: Jeanne Marni’s Urban Comic,” takes readers into the vibrant cityscape of the female urban journalist and satirist Marni (Jeanne Marnière), as she makes her way into the decidedly masculine geographical space of the flâneur and equally gendered disciplinary spaces of comedy and journalism. Building on Ferguson’s exploration of the social meanings and constructions of Parisian mythologies, Morgan examines Marni’s Belle Époque urban comic dialogues, entitled Fiacres, and illustrates the power of the female voice to shape the cultural moment. If Morgan’s piece revels in the comic, Catherine Nesci’s article, “‘The City of Combat’: Reading Jules Vallès’s Tableau de Paris with Priscilla Ferguson’s Paris as Revolution,” shifts affective registers to examine Vallès’s confrontation of the politics of melancholy and nostalgia in his fiction and journalism. Through a careful application of Ferguson’s use of the palimpsest metaphor, Nesci pays homage even as she extends Ferguson’s palimpsestic gesture in her own reading of these texts.
The third section, “Food Cultures,” takes up the important intellectual turn in Ferguson’s food studies. Janet Beizer’s essay, “The House of Harlequins: Les Mystères de Paris and Eugène Sue,” takes us into the strange “gastrotopia” of lower-class eating practices in nineteenth-century Paris. Focusing on the polyvalent figure of the “harlequin,” both an alimentary term for “leftovers” and a ubiquitous urban personage, Beizer reads Sue’s novel through Ferguson’s deconstruction of binaries—gendered, cultural, classed. Cary Hollinshead-Strick also approaches the question of the culinary through a literary lens, but with a special focus on the press. In her piece, “Text Puréed or in Patches: Alimentary Metaphors for Press Practices,” Hollinshead-Strick builds on Ferguson’s Accounting for Taste to consider the intersection of literature and the press through the way food and meals, as cultural products, became symbolic capital. She thus demonstrates how alimentary metaphors were used to express new ways of putting together a newspaper.
The fourth and last section of this issue, “Identity and Memory,” elaborates on Ferguson’s work on food studies, from her earliest essays in the 1970s to Accounting for Taste and her later Word of Mouth. Priya Wadhera’s article, “Food Fears: From Proust to Perec, Madeleine to Anti-madeleine,” studies several of Georges Perec’s works, including La Vie mode d’emploi (1978), through questions of trauma and memory as filtered through the sensuous experience of food and the meanings of its absence. Wadhera’s piece reminds readers that for Ferguson, scholarly meditations were never far removed from lived experience. John Westbrook’s “Learning to Eat French” describes the promotion and maintenance of a “national culinary identity,” to use Ferguson’s own terminology. Westbook shows how education reforms of the late nineteenth century amplified nationalism as it deployed culinary texts in primary schools to consolidate identity and create a common patrimony.
Finally, the issue concludes with excerpts from an unpublished conference talk by the late Priscilla Ferguson herself. In the last decade of her life, she had begun to cultivate intellectually a long-held fascination with roses, and was applying with her usual rigor a mix of authorial meticulousness, sociological research methods, and deep understanding of French cultural fields to this new object of analysis. “Roses and Everyday Beauty in France” gives us one last glimpse into the extraordinary range and intellectual dimension of Priscilla Ferguson—scholar, teacher, cook, gardener, mentor, and dear friend.
Several times a year since the three coeditors of this special issue of Romanic Review left Columbia University, the four of us would meet in New York over lunch or dinner, usually at a restaurant where the chef knew Priscilla by name for her work on cuisine. These reunions gave us the chance to stay connected with her over many years, continuing after her retirement. Even as her health declined, she retained her curiosity about our research projects and continued to advise us on them.
In addition to so much else, Priscilla gave us the gift of working together on this editorial project. She enriched our scholarship by showing us how a scholarly community can work—a community of mutual mentors, not one-uppers; a community driven by generosity and compassion, rather than arrogance and ambition; and, of course, the pleasure of each other’s company over food, wine, and conversation.
We miss Priscilla terribly. And we are grateful for this opportunity to trumpet, at last, those extraordinary achievements and the influence that she would never have trumpeted on her own behalf.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Susan Hiner’s research assistant, Suchen Zhu (Vassar College, class of 2022) for his valuable assistance in compiling this bibliography.
