Pricking the male ego: Pins and needles in Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola

If the ubiquity of the solitary seamstress in nineteenth-century French painting appears ro reflect on women's lives in bourgeois and aristocratic milieux, the notion of feminine submissiveness to a domestic ideal that such art appears to represent is problematized in French literature of the same period. Analyzing literary allusion so various forms of needlework and their tools, this essay demonstrates how even such trivial objects as pins and needles can be fraught with dangerous potential in the male imaginary of the time. The principal texts examined are Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" (1857), Zola's "Nana" (1880) and Maupassant's "Les Epingles" (1888).