Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture: Famous Women in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

Celebrity status couples recognition of individual achievement, the preeminent cultural ideal of Western societies since the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, with the power of the media to disseminate visibility and publicity. This article demonstrates the relevance of celebrity culture well before film and the electronic media by historicizing and gendering it. The nineteenth-century French press offered its bourgeois readers a lively celebrity culture, notably featuring famous women more than men. The historicized and gendered concept of celebrity provides an important tool of cultural analysis since societies inevitably project upon celebrities—and expect them to perform—reigning myths about self-fulfillment and personal uniqueness. In the case of nineteenth-century France, there was a telling evolution in the representation of women celebrities from femmes fatales to proper women whose achievements outside the home were accepted as legitimate.