SOURCE: Orr, Mary. “The Cloaks of Power: Custom and Costume in Flaubert's Salammbô.” Nottingham French Studies 36, no. 2 (autumn 1997): 24-33.

In the following essay, Orr focuses on costume in Salammbô to emphasize Salammbô's feminine challenge to the power of male authority.

Flaubert's eponymous heroine has attracted some excellent feminist criticism largely focusing on how she is chained and sacrificed to a patriarchal power system.¹ Exchanges of power are represented by the goddess Tanit's veil, the famous and problematic ‘zaïmph’, which the Barbarian Mâtho tears from the inner sanctuary of Tanit's temple and which Salammbô as priestess of Tanit retrieves, at the cost of her inner veil. I shall be reopening the question of what ‘taking the veil’ signifies in this paper.² A preponderance of cloaks, mantles, veils, in this text, wrapped up with costume and custom, are so prominent that I shall read it primarily as...