ABSTRACT
In her 1906 literary narrative Picturesque Brittany, the Englishwoman Nancy Bell gave voice to an established inclination among outsiders to the region to read desire and their own social and cultural preoccupations onto Breton regional costume. Making their way along the venerable course of the elite English and American cultural traveler from St Malo and the abbey at Mount Saint Michel to the fishing towns and beaches of the northern coast and then to the more traditionally Breton areas of the Finistère, she and her illustrator-husband turned inland at Roscoff and headed for the departmental capital of Quimper by way of Morlaix. Having encountered in the latter city only a rather indifferent celebration of the Fête of the Republic and no native costume whatsoever, the pair took a carriage southward to Plougastel, in hopes of seeing there the costumes said to be “the most remarkable in Brittany”. After nearly giving up the search to catch an earlier train to Quimper, they suddenly saw coming into view almost deus ex machina “an old country cart” crowded with peasants in full and glorious Breton costume. As they passed by other groups of similarly-attired peasants along the road to town, Bell recounted, the guidebooks seemed to have been proven right after all: “the men, women and children of Plougastel (did) still wear costumes such as were in vogue in the sixteenth century” (see figure 4.1). 1 Calvary and Costumes of Plougastel, taken from ‘Sites et Monuments de France: L'Amorique' (Touring Club de France, 1906), 75 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315579429/d235de56-d226-416f-8083-3e201acbf880/content/fig4_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
