Mystique (pronounced mi-steek)
(1) A framework of doctrines, ideas, beliefs, or the like,
constructed around a person or object, endowing the person or object with
enhanced value or profound meaning:
(2) The aura of mystery (real, imagined or confected) or
mystical power surrounding a particular occupation or pursuit:
1891: A borrowing by English in the sense of “atmosphere
of mystery and veneration”, from the French noun & adjective mystique (a mystic; the act of a mystic;
the mystical), from the Latin mysticus,
from the Ancient Greek μυστικός (mustikós)
(secret, mystic), from μύστης (mústēs)
(one who has been initiated). Mystique
is a noun; the noun plural is plural mystiques.
When Le Deuxième
Sexe (The Second Sex (1949)) was published by French feminist and social
theorist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), it was recognized almost at once as a
landmark in feminist thought but it was in the twenty-first century re-evaluated
when gender came to be re-defined as a spectrum rather than a binary. Of particular interest was de Beauvoir’s
mapping of existentialist thought on to the matter, asserting that being a
woman was a construct, something obviously dependent on being born female but
the product of processes integral to a society in which women had been defined
as inferior to men, a tradition she traces back centuries. The
Second Sex and Germaine Greer’s (b 1939) The Female Eunuch (1970) remain the two most important texts of late
twentieth century feminism. De Beauvoir is one of those writers who led a life which many choose to entangle with what she wrote but The Second Sex is best read by allowing the words to prevail.
However, the complexity of The Second Sex, infused as it was with strands of French structuralism,
meant that it lacked accessibility unless a reader had some background in
certain philosophical traditions and it was American feminist Betty Friedan’s
(1921–2006) The Feminine Mystique
(1963) which, by sheer weight of numbers, proved the greater influence
politically, many claiming still it was the work responsible for the emergence
of second wave feminism. The Feminine Mystique is by comparison a
slight work and although not of excessive length, is thematically repetitious
and can be deconstructed as a long social media post about one woman’s
discontent with her life, something to which she (not without justification)
links the structure of the patriarchal society in which she exists. That made it a compelling polemic for the
receptive millions of women who read it as their own biographies and ensured
its success but it also lent second-wave feminism (which greatly the book at
least influenced) a distinctly white, Western, middle-class flavor which asked
many of the right questions but ignored (rather than deliberately excluded)
most of what lay beyond that fashionable but narrow cultural vista.
Jane Birkin and the mystique of the Birkin Bag
One well-known example of manufactured mystique is that attached to the Birkin Bag manufactured by the French fashion house Hermès, the origin of which was a chance meeting in 1984 on Paris-London shuttle flight between the English actress Jane Birkin (1946-2023) and Jean-Louis Dumas (1938-2010), then executive chairman Hermès. Ms Birkin was placing her usual straw bag in the overhead locker when “everything fell out” her belongings scattering over her and Monsieur Dumas. The inevitable conversation ensued and the pair thrown together by circumstances spent the brief flight designing Ms Birkin’s ideal leather bag for weekend travel, the airline’s sick bags improbably used for the first sketches. Within months, the Birkin was a Hermès part-number.
Although in her later years Ms Birkin ceased to carry one (it became “just too heavy"), over the last four decades, the Birkin has become a coveted item, much sought by those attracted by its association with pop-culture celebrities and the price-tag which begins somewhere over US$10,000 and can, for a custom unit, extend into six figures. Although the Birkin range is advertized both in the glossy catalogues and on-line, it’s not a “display item” carried on the shelves of the bricks & mortar stores and it’s long been part of the product’s image that as well as being PoA (price on application), they’re not “for everyone”, Hermès selling them only to someone “suitable”; it’s all part of the mystique. There has long been speculation about how “real” this mystique may be, the suspicion being that if anyone offers cold hard cash (or its modern equivalent), a store manager would think of their end-of-year bonus and make the sale. However, in March 2024, two disgruntled (rejected) Birkin customers filed suit in Federal court in California, alleging Hermès was in violation of US antitrust legislation by allowing only those with a “sufficient purchase history” with the company to bag a Birkin. Essentially, the case hinges on the lure of the right to buy a Birkin being used as an inducement to spend money on shoes, jewellery, scarves and such, the carrot of the bag dangled while the stick is used to force folk to create a “purchase history”. The suit also noted the company’s sales associates are driving the scheme, thereby gaining benefits for both themselves and Hermès, an important technical point in US antitrust law.
Interestingly, it was further alleged the floor staff don’t
earn commissions on Birkin bag sales and are instructed to use the handbags only
as a device “…to coerce consumers to
purchase ancillary products” while only “…those consumers who are deemed worthy of purchasing a Birkin handbag
will be shown a Birkin handbag” in a private viewing room.” Any civilian (ie a non-celebrity or not someone
identified as rich) walking into the store and asking to see a Birkin is told
they’re “out of stock”. The lawsuit requested class-action status for
thousands of US consumers who bought Hermès goods or were asked to buy them as
a prerequisite for buying a Birkin and sought unspecified monetary damages and
a court order banning Hermès’s allegedly anti-competitive practices.
Restrictions on a right to purchase are not unusual. Ferrari have specified that some of their low-volume
models are available only to previous customers and that has sometimes demanded
the prior purchase of more than one of the Italian machines. Whether apocryphal or not, the story is that
on more than one occasion, upon being informed of the clause, the buyer would at
random pick a Ferrari from the showroom stock and buy it, just to qualify. Somewhat down the food chain, in 1974 when quietly
Holden in Australia introduced their L34 option (a homologation package to
ensure certain parts could be used in racing) for the Torana SL/R 5000,
although the thing could be registered for road use, it was specified it could
be bought only by holders of a certain level of competition licence issued by
CAMS (Confederation of Australian Motor Sport).
That policy was a pre-emptive strike to ensure there would be no
repetition of the moral panic stirred up two years earlier by the tabloid press
which claimed the three local manufacturers were selling “160 mph (257 km/h) supercars” to the public, summoning the fear of
the usual suspects (males aged 17-25) unleashing these lethal weapons on public
roads. As was often the case in moral
panics, the tabloids were being economical with the truth but their campaign
spooked the politicians and the manufacturers, the new generation of
high-performance machinery swiftly cancelled.
Ironically, when tested, it transpired the L34 package was about
durability rather than power or speed and was actually a little slower than a
standard SL/R 5000 but the exotic terms & conditions (T&Cs) certainly gained
it some mystique.
The Mean Girls (2004) crew on DeviantArt by SBBeauregarde in cosplay mode: Marvel Comics' Mystique.
The Mystique de la Merde
The word mystique even has a place in what must be one of
the darker corners of literary theory.
The term Mystique de la Merde dates from September 1956 when an article
by Robert Elliot Fitch (1902-1986) was published in the New Republic. Fitch was a Congregationalist minister who
graduated successively from Yale (1923), the Union Theological Seminary (1926)
and Columbia (1929), later becoming a professor of Christian ethics and dean of
Berkeley's Pacific School of Religion but he was interested also in literary
theory, often as a device by which he could explore the decline in Western
society associated with God’s withdrawal from the place. Fitch’s Mystique de la Merde wasn’t literally
“the mystique of shit” but a description of what he detected in literature (and
therefore life in general) as “a
preoccupation with the seamier, muddier, bloodier aspects of life, as well as,
excessively, with sex and money.” Befitting
the decline of civilization, Mystique de la Merde was a deliberately more
vulgar version of Nostalgie de la boue
(nostalgia for mud), a phrase coined in 1855 by French dramatist Émile Augier (1820–1889) meaning “an attraction for low-life
culture, experience, and degradation (in individuals, institutions & culture).”
In his New Republic piece, Fitch started as he intended
to continue: "…perhaps we should
take note of a brand of piety which may best be characterized as the mystique
de la merde. This might be rendered in English as the deification of dirt, or
the apotheosis of ordure, or just plain mud mysticism. At any rate it provides a label for a sectarian cult which appears to have
attracted some of the best talent in contemporary literature." He nominated Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) as
a founding father of the cult (he must have been tempted to call him the “high
priest”) in whose writing he identified a surfeit of “…fertility, money, blood and iron." One sex was stirred into that mix (as
Hemmingway did), one has, as Fitch noted: all “…the basic ingredients of ultimate reality" as seen by the
merde mystics.
Writing in the milieu of the beat generation writers, Fitch observed that in handling what clearly was a literary phenomenon, the critic was at some disadvantage because while writers could function on the “four letter [word] level”, “…the critic must stick to three-syllable words.” He concluded, presumably not without regret, that: “When we have become honest, we discover that the reigning God is only a devil in disguise" and the real reason for this is that God “…has made us unhappy.” He cites Mrs Evans in Eugene O'Neill’s (1888–1953) soliloquy heavy Strange Interlude (1928) who affirms that the only good thing is being happy: “I used to be a great one for worrying about what's God and what's devil, but I got richly over it… being punished for no sin but loving much.” One suspects Fitch might have written a critique of the early twenty-first century with some relish.
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