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Article Excerpt
Almost from the moment of Fortune's inception as a literary and cultural trope, clothing emerged unchallenged as the goddess's material good par excellence, central as it was to the core symbolism of losing (or being stripped of) one's goods and status. Lucian imagined Fortune as the costume designer and supplier for the "pageant" of life; Boethius depicted his own physical despoilment as the point of departure for philosophical truth; and myriad later writers explored the idea of mortal man at various stages of prosperity clinging to Fortune's wheel in various stages of dress and undress. (1)
As the Middle Ages progressed, however, this sartorial symbol of worldly transience inevitably took on additional forms and meanings. Boethius's conception of Fortune as the controller of worldly prosperity provided writers throughout medieval Europe with a highly effective theoretical structure through which to explore the pleasures and dangers of materialism. As I discuss in this article, Fortune's figure became through the high and late Middle Ages a focal point for specific historicized notions of material change. Representations of Fortune not only chart the trajectory of medieval ideas about clothing and its vacillations, but also illustrate the cultural integration of more subtle Boethian views about the important and multifaceted role objects and ornamentation play in subjectivity and self-conception, and determinism and free will. What began as a symbol of the lack of control mortals have over their own material circumstances, I argue, also becomes by the end of the medieval period a symbol for the power wielded by the self-fashioning subject. Later medieval representations of Fortune's materiality and materialism fetishize the dividing line between external and internal motivators for personal transformation. Fortune no longer merely strips and re-clothes her hapless victims at whim, but takes on these material transformations herself, either through a process of repeatedly stripping and clothing her own body or through wearing garments that themselves perform aesthetic change. Stylistic change stands in for change in circumstance, and in the process the developing concept of fashion's never-ending fluctuations gets mapped more consciously onto the larger Boethian cycle of having and losing. Fortune's material lessons still include clothing's revelatory potential, but they add to this clothing's cultural role as appropriator and mediator of various gendered, classed, and raced historicities. Ultimately, I argue, medieval authors' sartorial manipulation of both Fortune and those over whom she exerts control creates in the goddess a figure for the emerging conspicuous consumer--one who embraces, rather than fears, material changeability, and as such is decidedly in charge of his or her own material destiny.
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One of the few critical attempts to historicize medieval Fortune's changing iconography underscores the importance of the twelfth-century's commercial and economic changes to her development. Alexander Murray posits that the emergence of the wheel in twelfth-century visual representations of the goddess may reflect the explosive new money-based economy of this period as well as the social instability that came with it: "the growing prevalence and vigour, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, of up-and-down social movement." (2) Equally--and in many respects, more profoundly--influenced by that period's increased focus on money, commerce, and social mobility, however, is Fortune's sartorial representation. While the majority of recent costume scholarship locates the birth of Western "fashion" in the revolution of dress and tailoring that began in the mid-fourteenth century, Sarah-Grace Heller's recent study locates a clear "fashion system" in the commercial developments of twelfth- and thirteenth-century France, where desire for novelty, discourses of spending and shopping, unique sewing and styles, and fashion vocabulary abounded. (3) Fortune's literary iconography in this period seems to reflect these cultural changes in a specific way, which is to present Fortune as enacting upon her own body the type of spectacular sartorial oscillation that she so famously unleashes on her victims.
Alain de Lille and Jean de Meun offer influential early examples of this reconceptualization. In his Anticlaudianus, Alain imagines Fortune as a Boethian figure in a Roman toga, lamenting her change of circumstances: "Nunc meliore toga splendet, nunc paupere cultu plebescens Fortunajacet, nunc orphana veste prostat et antiquos lugere videtur honores" [now she shines forth in finer toga, now slumming, she wallows in the clothes of the poor; now left without a dress to her name, she offers herself to the public and is seen bemoaning her honors of old.] When she arrives at court to give her gifts to the New Man (the final contribution after the virtues and seven liberal arts), she is again described in terms of her "change of dress" (habitus mutatio) and "declasse look" (vultus degener). (4) Reason's protracted description of Fortune in Jean de Meun's section of the Roman de la Rose elaborates further on Fortune's sartorial bipolarity:
Et quant el veut estre honoree, Si se trait en la part doree De sa maison, et la sejorne; Lors pare son corps et atorne, Et se vest cum une roine De grant robe qui li traine, De toutes diverses olors, De moult desguisees colors, Qui sunt es soies ou es laines, Selonc les herbes et les graines, Et selonc autres choses maintes Dont les draperies sunt taintes, Dont toutes riches gens se vestent Qui por honor avoir s'aprestent. Ainsinc Fortune se desguise; Mes bien te di qu'ele ne prise Tretous ceus du monde ung festu, Quant voit son cors ainsinc vestu; Ains est rant orguilleuse et fiere, Qu'il n'est orguex qui s'i afiere. Puis va "rant roant par la sale, Qu'elle entre en la partie sale, Foible, decrevee et crolant, O route sa roe volant. Lors va soupant et jus se boute, Ausinc cum s'el ne veist goute; Et quant illec se voit cheue, Sa chiere et son habit remue, Et si se desnue et desrobe, Qu'ele est orfenine de robe, Et semble qu'el n'ait riens vaillant, Tant li sunt tuit bien defaillant. Et quant el voit la mescheance, Si quiert honteuse chevissance, Et s'en vait au bordiau cropir Plaine de duel et de sopir. La plore a lermes espandues Les granz honors qu'ele a perdues, Et les delis ou ele estoit Quant des granz robes se vestoit.
[When she wants to be honored, she betakes herself to the golden part of her house and remains there, adorning and beautifying her body, dressing herself like a queen, in a long robe that trails behind her and is variously scented and brightly colored, as silks and woolens can be, depending on the plants and seeds and many other things used to dye the clothes worn by all rich people who are preparing to receive honors. So Fortune disguises herself, but I tell you truly when she sees her person attired in this way, she gives not a straw for anyone in the world but is so proud and haughty that there is no pride to be compared with hers.... Then, with her wheel all flying, she goes turning through the house until she comes to the part that is dirty and ramshackle, cracked and tottering. Then she stumbles and falls to the ground as if completely blind, and, seeing herself fallen there, she changes her appearance and her dress, denuding and stripping herself to such an extent that she is bereft of clothes, so lacking in goods that she seems to have nothing of worth. When she sees this misfortune, she looks for a shameful way out, and betakes herself to a brothel, where she lies, sighing and lamenting. There she sheds floods of tears over the great honors that she has lost and the delights she enjoyed when she used to wear fine clothes.] (5)
In the poet's detailing of Fortune's luxurious attire we are not only made to see the actions of the goddess--the requisite changing of high to low--but also to glimpse a more private medieval experience regarding Fortune's goods. For example, both the wealthy, scented, adorned Fortune and the stripped, prostituted, abject Fortune in this passage rely on the feminine power of self-gaze--what Michael Camille calls the courtly woman's process of "self-spectacularization" (6)--to calculate her sartorially-appropriate status: when she sees the riches that adorn her ("quant el voit ses grans richesses" [6405]), she is haughty and prideful; similarly, when she sees her fallen and misfortunate states ("quant illec se voit cheue" [6417]; "quant el voit la mescheance" [6423]), she embraces the attire and status of the forsaken.
By describing Fortune in the familiar terms of feminine self-fashioning and self-gaze, not to mention the preponderant human vice of pride, Jean de Meun thus humanizes the goddess. As E. Jane Burns puts it, "it is an elaborately dressed lady named Fortune" that we are made to see here. (7) Moreover, if we...
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