Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France

by Cheryl Krueger

Despite long-standing assertions that languages, including French and English, cannot sufficiently communicate the experience of smell, much of France’s nineteenth-century literature has gained praise for its memorable evocation of odours. As French perfume was industrialized, democratized, cosmeticized, and feminized in the nineteenth century, stories of fragrant scent trails aligned perfume with toxic behaviour and viewed a woman’s scent as something alluring, but also something to be controlled. Drawing on a wealth of resources, Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France explores how fiction and related writing on olfaction meet, permeate, and illuminate one another. The book examines medical tracts, letters, manuscripts, posters, print advertisements, magazine articles, perfume manuals, etiquette books, interviews, and encounters with fragrant materials themselves. Cheryl Krueger explores how the olfactory language of a novel or poem conveys the distinctiveness of a text, its unique relationship to language, its style, and its ways of engaging the its signature scent. Shedding light on the French perfume culture that we know today, Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France follows the scent trails that ultimately challenge us to read perfume and literature in new ways.

382 pages, Paperback

Published July 17, 2023

Reviews

[Cana McGhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

explores the ways that literature deployed scented language, and the ways that perfumers used literary language to market and craft their perfumes. the organization felt a little frenetic to me, in that i'm not totally sure about the decisions behind chapter order (not exactly thematic, not exactly chronological). but there are so many interesting images and literary examples Krueger introduces that it almost doesn't matter. really interesting conversation she's having about the connections between marketing, literature, gender, madness, sensory sciences, and modernism!

[Wisconsin Alumni]

Cheryl Krueger ’82, MA’84, PhD’92
Author

From the author:
Despite long-standing assertions that languages, including French and English, cannot sufficiently communicate the experience of smell, much of France's nineteenth-century literature has gained praise for its memorable evocation of odors. As French perfume was industrialized, democratized, cosmeticized, and feminized in the nineteenth century, stories of fragrant scent trails aligned perfume with toxic behavior and viewed a woman's scent as something alluring, but also something to be controlled. Drawing on a wealth of resources, Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France explores how fiction and related writing on olfaction meet, permeate, and illuminate one another. The book examines medical tracts, letters, manuscripts, posters, print advertisements, magazine articles, perfume manuals, etiquette books, interviews, and encounters with fragrant materials themselves. Cheryl Krueger explores how the olfactory language of a novel or poem conveys the distinctiveness of a text, its unique relationship to language, its style, and its ways of engaging the reader: its signature scent. Shedding light on the French perfume culture that we know today, Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France follows the scent trails that ultimately challenge us to read perfume and literature in new ways.