Rachel Mesch (RS) Reviews Jim Johnson’s (HI) New Monograph
When Professor Jim Johnson began his ambitious project analyzing the history of the mask in Paris from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, he could not have foreseen how important this object would become to twenty-first century American culture. “We know what it is to wear a mask,” Johnson writes in the afterward to Paris Concealed: Masks in the City of Light, published this past Spring by the University of Chicago Press, as he acknowledges how his book’s central topic has made its way unexpectedly to a central role in our lives. After all, every one of his readers will have worn a mask at some point in the past five years, and we have seen how masks can become charged with political meaning. To understand the polarizing force of the face mask in twenty-first-century America, future historians will need to become deeply familiar with our very specific cultural context: our politics, our debates around public health and personal freedom, our responses to student protests, and the subtle workings of social media. The vast interdisciplinary reach of Johnson’s book becomes that much more appreciable when one recognizes the vast semiotic resonances of this simple object. The way a culture masks, it turns out, offers us a window into the way that it understands the very notion of selfhood, not to mention the very notion of truth.
Proceeding chronologically, Johnson’s book offers a “history of identity in terms of how people have concealed it” in order to “understand the range of possible selves, and the limits of imaginable selves” (ix) that have emerged over the course of French history. This sweeping history, set in Paris beginning in the seventeenth century, covers both the shifting forms and uses of the face mask and its related hermeneutics: what it has meant to mask, both literally and figuratively, over nearly three centuries. Wearing his erudition lightly, Johnson guides us through an accessible macro history that attends alternately to cultural history and material culture, literary history, history of ideas, history of emotions and of the self. The book ends on the cusp of the twentieth century, when the now familiar conviction “that authentic selfhood entails unmasking one’s truest nature” emerged as a core principle. But it was not always thus. Tracing the impact of shifting political regimes, beginning with the reign of Louis XIV, Johnson demonstrates how notions of selfhood, independence, and identity were deeply tied to power and class structures on the one hand, and popular culture, on the other.
The book contains too vast an array of examples, anecdotes, and analyses to fairly do it justice in this short space, so I offer only a taste of a period that bears some unexpected resemblances to our own. The seventeenth century, writes Johnson, marked “a historic turning point as the contest between nobles and royals began to shift decisively in favor of the king.” Louis XIV was particularly talented in manipulating his court to bend to his will in exchange for royal favor. To do so required his courtiers to present the king with the version of themselves that might please him. The duc de la Rochefoucauld was particularly troubled by these dynamics. In his Reflections, or Sentences and Moral Maxims, a collection filled with pithy aphorisms that reveal complex truths, he lays bare the hypocrisy at the heart of the court, in which sincerity was simply a ruse to secure reward. With his writing, La Rochefoucauld aimed to see behind the mask, exposing the “gulf between seeming and being” (8).
Fascinatingly, this figurative interpersonal masking mirrored the physical objects that were in vogue at the time. Masks, Johnson details, were more popular in seventeenth-century France than at any other period. He recounts how, in the masquerades of Versailles, attendees would wear a wax version of their own face as a mask, underneath a carnival mask. “The surprise came later in the evening,” writes Johnson, “when you unmasked yourself to reveal the second, lifelike mask” (10). This double masking echoed the themes of deceit that troubled writers and philosophers who sought to understand the mechanisms of status that governed the court. In the ancien régime, authenticity was irrelevant. To succeed, you had to calculate who you wanted to be and perform it for those in power.
Physical masks were not limited to masquerade. They could be found in parks and on the streets, their meaning dependent on context, gender, class and a variety of other details that Johnson explores with expertise, alongside a dazzling array of illustrations (the book contains dozens of images along with four color plates). “The seventeenth-century’s proliferation of masks,” writes Johnson, “was a product of its hierarchy” (37). Masks gave citizens an element of control over social structures that left them with little of it. Their use of the physical object, and their meditations on themes of truth and sincerity, can only be understood through a nuanced understanding of the social contexts in which they were deployed.
Johnson’s compelling cultural, social, and material history explores examples drawn from the course of the next two centuries that demonstrate the shifting uses of the mask. His case histories range from jaw dropping crimes of identity-theft to a nuanced account of the famously gender-crossing Abbé de Choisy. Though masks today are associated with concealing identities, Johnson sees masking in the seventeenth century as a way to protect individuals, while still calling attention to their individuality. It was not really possible to redefine one’s identity during this time, argues Johnson. One’s best hope of realizing a unique sense of self was behind a mask, while carefully keeping up appearances.
The rest of the book leads us through the eighteenth century–as hierarchies began to falter– to the era immediately following the French Revolution and the new freedoms that it ushered in. By the end of the nineteenth century, the use of the physical mask receded, perhaps in correlation to the new interest in the psyche. The metaphorical masks constructed through nineteenth-century poetry and philosophy are likely more familiar to us: poet Charles Baudelaire’s masks are the ones that we use to “veil our suffering and remorse from the eyes of the world” (281). In the era directly preceding Sigmund Freud, writers and artists meditated on the drives and instincts that fueled what would later be called our subconscious. Unmasking the psyche would become not just the cornerstone of psychoanalysis, but a kind of universal project of the individual, “the culmination of a long history toward greater autonomy in forming one’s own identity” (330). Paris Concealed ends with the shared project that so many of us are actively engaged in these days: that of knowing the self and working to reveal it to the world, unmasked.
Johnson’s analysis of the physical and figurative masks throughout modern history offers the possibility of contemplating aspects of our current culture that are at once contested and rarely considered together. Like pre-revolutionary France, our contemporary American culture is replete with masks, in ways that are hard to understand in the aggregate. On the one hand, social media and our general zeitgeist valorize personal truth and self-discovery more than ever. We feed on the unmasking of others that takes place in minute by minute updates on our newsfeeds. On the other hand, the current regime is made up nearly entirely of those who have visibly constructed themselves – often with the help of a particular television empire–in order to play a public role, in ways that often appear demonstrably insincere. The current president’s national reputation was forged through a reality TV program, and he is known to favor those who speak about him fawningly, preferably in front of a large audience. The women who play public roles in his administration share a certain look that relies on plastic surgery and other means of physically altering their bodies– a sort of permanent masking, if you will. As I write this, masked men grab immigrants off the street and during their court appearances; a terrorist donned a life-like mask and fake police uniform to murder Democratic politicians in Minnesota. Still others are criticized for continuing to wear masks to protect themselves from Covid-19 and its aftermath.
Johnson’s book might provide a lens for understanding the through line of these widely varied masks – both physical and figurative. The multiplicity of disparate forms of masks and masking seems, in light of this reading, one of the many signs that we are living through a moment in which truth is not stable, but once again up for grabs. This shift seems at least in part to be a kind of backlash against the consensus around “greater autonomy in determining our personal truths.” When it comes to trans rights, for example, personal truths are now directly threatened by state power.
A gifted storyteller and an incisive critic, Johnson thus offers us here more than just a sweeping history of this particular object and its significations. Rather, his book is an invitation to understand our present cultural moment more deeply. Johnson’s sustained study of masks teaches that the proliferation of masks in today’s world is no coincidence. If history is any guide, it may in fact be a warning.
by Rachel Mesch, Professor of French