Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction

Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction Literacy, Textiles, and Activism

Christine Bayles Kortsch

Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction

For Daniel

Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction Literacy, Textiles, and Activism

Christine Bayles Kortsch Eastern University, USA

© Christine Bayles Kortsch 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Christine Bayles Kortsch has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kortsch, Christine Bayles. Dress culture in late Victorian women’s fiction: literacy, textiles, and activism. 1. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. English fiction – Women authors – History and criticism. 3. Women – Education – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 4. Women – Books and reading – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 5. Literature and society – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 6. Clothing and dress in literature. 7. Sewing in literature. I. Title 823.8’09355-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kortsch, Christine Bayles. Dress culture in late Victorian women’s fiction: literacy, textiles, and activism / by Christine Bayles Kortsch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6510-6 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-7546-9458-8 (ebk) 1. English fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Clothing and dress in literature. 4. Sewing in literature. 5. Material culture in literature. 6. Material culture—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. PR116.K67 2009 823’.8093564—dc22 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6510-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-7546-9458-8 (ebk.V)

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments

vi ix

1 Writing in Fabric, Working in Print

1

2 The Needle Dipped in Blood

23

3 Fashioning Women: The Victorian Corset

55

4 Art’s Labor Lost: Haunting the Dress Shop

105

5 Beautiful Revolution: New Women Sew a New World

141

Afterword: Ode to a Dishrag

179

Bibliography Index

185 197

List of Figures 1.1

Elizabeth Laidman, sampler, England, 1760. Public domain. Released by owner Nick Michael into public domain in 2006. See Wikipedia at .

7

3.1 A lady, by Hills & Saunders, Oxford, c. 1877. Courtesy of Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, Dover Publications.

64

3.2 Mrs. Langtry, by Lafayette, London, c. 1888. Courtesy of Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, Dover Publications.

66

3.3

Mrs. Saxton Noble tricycling, c.1893. Courtesy of Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, Dover Publications.

67

3.4

The Princess of Wales, Princess Maud of Wales and her fiancé Prince Carl of Denmark. By W. & D. Downey, May 1896. Courtesy of Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, Dover Publications.

68

3.5

Miss Camille Clifford, the personification of the Gibson Girl, c. 1906. Courtesy of Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, Dover Publications.

70

3.6

Dr. Mary Walker, c. 1865. Courtesy of Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, Dover Publications.

78

3.7 Hygienic Excess,” cartoon, Punch 18 Oct. 1879. Public domain. For all Punch cartoons, see e-mail correspondence with Punch Library.

80

3.8 Jane Morris posed by D. G. Rossetti, July 1865. Courtesy of Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, Dover Publications.

82

3.9

85

Georges Du Maurier, “An impartial statement of the lady of fashion versus the aesthetic lady,” Punch 80 (1881).

List of Figures

vii

3.10

Illustration from William Henry Flower, Fashion in Deformity, as Illustrated in the Customs of Barbarous & Civilised Races (London: Macmillan, 1881). Public domain. Accessible on google books. See .

86

3.11

“The Venus de Milo; or, Girls of Two Different Periods,” cartoon, Punch (London) 1870. The caption reads, “‘Chorus: ‘Look at her big foot! Oh, what a waist!—and what a ridiculous little head!—and no chignon! She’s no lady! Oh, what a fright!’” Note the reference to Eliza Lynn Linton’s 1868 article, “The Girl of the Period” in which she chastises fashionable young women.

87

3.12

Bathing costume, Bier Family (author’s husband’s family), Muskoka, Ontario, Canada, c. 1908. Author’s personal collection.

102

3.13

Mona Handy Westinghouse (1900–1988; author’s great-great aunt), c.1920. Author’s personal collection.

103

4.1

John Tenniel, “The Haunted Lady or ‘The Ghost’ in the Looking-Glass,” Punch July 1863.

127

4.2

“The Modern Venus Attired by the Three Dis-Graces,” Punch 16 June 1888.

129

5.1 Embroidered Altar Frontal, executed by Miss May Morris, designed by Mr. Philip Webb. In Grace Christie, Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving (London: John Hogg, 1912). Public domain. Reproduced in Project Gutenberg. See .

156

5.2

158

Linley Sambourne, “Sweet Little Buttercup or Art-Embroidery,” Punch 14 June 1879.

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Acknowledgments This book has been a pleasure to write because of the support and enthusiasm of many people. Ann Ardis and Margaret Stetz guided the project from its inception; for their attentive reading, lively conversation, knowledge, and encouragement, I am deeply grateful. My mentors and colleagues at the University of Delaware and the University of Virginia provided a stimulating intellectual environment for the formative stages of this project. Particular thanks go to Karen Chase, Carl Dawson, Heidi Kaufman, Jennifer M. McBride, Deborah McDowell, Clyde Moneyhun, Tara Stern Moore, Therese Rizzo, Charles Robinson, Patricia Meyer Spacks, and Cheryl Wilson. For reading and commenting on various parts of this book, I extend special gratitude to Barbara Gates, Bernard Herman, Jean Pfaelzer, Talia Schaffer, and the anonymous reviewer. Thanks also to the astute and generous members of The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, The Northeast Modern Language Association, and the British Women Writers Association for their helpful comments on portions of this book. Thank you to my commissioning editor, Ann Donahue, for her skill and geniality. Caroline Cherry and Betsy Morgan started out as my mentors and over the years have become dear friends; special thanks to them and to all the students and colleagues at Eastern University who cheered me along the way. With gratitude I acknowledge the Northeast Modern Language Association, the Friends of Rockwood, and the University of Delaware, for the Summer Research Fellowship, Professional Development Grant, and University Graduate Fellowship, which allowed me to complete the archival research that was central to the beginning stages of this project. Particular thanks to the curators and staff of the Chertsey Museum, Runnymede; the Museum of Costume, Bath; The Quarry Bank Mill, Styal; the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Victoria and Albert Museum. My friends and family have sustained me with their affection and generosity. I am especially grateful to Erin Anderson, Deanna Downes, Jonalee Earles, Erin McQuade, Kara Belgiano Rhode, Erica Schair, and Kellie Wicklund. This book owes much to my grandmothers, Patricia Hall Talley and Elizabeth Hurd Bayles, to my great-great-aunt Mona Handy Westinghouse, to my great-aunt Rose Carolyn Hall Turner, and to my husband’s grandmother, Hanna Polarth Kortsch; they value(d) the life of the mind and of the hands. Thank you to Katie, David, Daniel, André, Candace, Vivian, Rachel, Skylar, Jon-Marc, and Anne for encouraging me and making me laugh. John and Karen Bayles have listened, read, edited, and celebrated; my thanks and love go always to them. Uli and Carol Kortsch read and commented on the manuscript, plying me with kaffee und kuchen or tea and shortbread when spirits were low. At every stage of the project, Karen Bayles and Carol Kortsch gave invaluable intellectual and practical support, talking me



Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction

through ideas and caring for my children while I worked those ideas into print. Jack and Owen Kortsch inspired me to work efficiently and fueled me with their energy and joy. Above all, I thank Daniel Kortsch, to whom I dedicate this manuscript. For his patient listening, incisive questions, and steady love, I owe a debt of gratitude too large for words.

Chapter 1

Writing in Fabric, Working in Print Tucked into a lonely corner of the Textile Room at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a sampler hangs. Quite a few samplers dot the walls, but this one is unique. It is made of plain white linen, worked in scarlet silk. No flowers, no alphabets, no Bible verses or birthdates mark this sampler. Instead, only words cross-stitched in block print without indentation, border, or any other decoration. The first line begins, “As I cannot write I put this down freely and simply as I might speak to a person to whose intimacy and tenderness I can fully intrust myself and who I know will bear with all weaknesses.” The creator, Elizabeth Parker of Ashburnham, Sussex, goes on to tell the story of her life. The daughter of a day laborer and a teacher, she entered domestic service at 13 years of age and was so mistreated by various employers that she tried to commit suicide. The sampler reads like a journal entry, a prayerful entreaty to God for mercy and sustenance. Eerily, the words break off in the middle of the canvas, in mid-sentence and without closing punctuation: “Oh, God, what will become of my soul.” Blank space follows this last line. The red thread with which Parker stitched her tragic story finds an echo in what we might consider an unlikely location. Olive Schreiner, the so-called first New Woman writer, began writing her first novel, From Man to Man, in 1873. (It was published posthumously in 1926.) In one scene in Schreiner’s novel, sewing serves as a metaphor for women’s inability to express themselves in the public world. Describing the tragedy of one of her heroines, Bertie, Schreiner’s narrator explains that while men have pens with which to express ideas and circulate knowledge, women must limp along with needles: “In that torn bit of brown leather brace worked through and through with yellow silk … lies all the passion of some woman’s soul finding voiceless expression. Has the pen or the pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human race as the needle?” The brutality of Schreiner’s image—of the needle stained with blood—suggests that sewing not only limits women, it destroys them. The needle may allow women to express their creativity and ambition, but it creates a type of writing the masculine world cannot decipher, and most often ignores. Yet contrary to what her needle image might imply, elsewhere in the novel and in her other works, Schreiner figures sewing as a creative, imaginative activity. Her protagonists Bertie and Rebekah use sewing for a variety of purposes, including reflection, creativity, effective  For photographs, see the Victoria and Albert’s webpage on the sampler at http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/textiles/stories/sampler/index.html.  Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, or, Perhaps Only (1926; London: Virago, 1982) 323.



Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction

communication, and financial freedom. For Schreiner’s reader, understanding the language of the needle—of sewing and dress—proves to be a pre-requisite for understanding the novel itself, including its radical call for women’s solidarity and intellectual freedom. Looking at these two cultural artifacts side by side—Elizabeth Parker’s uncanny sampler and the contradictory portrait of sewing in Schreiner’s novel From Man to Man—provokes important questions. What is the relationship between writing in cloth and writing in print? How did Victorian women understand and negotiate the relationship between stitching and writing, and how did they represent and utilize it? Parker’s sampler and Schreiner’s novel suggest that the best way to address this question is through the idea of dual literacy—a phenomenon which is rooted, I suggest, in the merged issues of women’s education, labor, artistry, and activism. Perhaps it is to be expected that a feminist such as Olive Schreiner would criticize sewing and dress as a symptom of female oppression. Yet what is surprising and equally important is the fact that Schreiner, along with contemporary women writers—New Woman, popular, and socialist writers alike—also validated women’s literacy in dress culture as a form of feminine knowledge, creativity, and power. Multiple Literacies, Dual Literacy Elizabeth Parker’s sampler haunts this project. The label text beside it informs the viewer that the sampler, dated sometime after 1830, has mystified and intrigued many people. Historian Maureen Daly Goggin has discovered that despite her painful adolescence, Parker became a teacher and lived in Ashburnham until her death in 1889 at the age of 76. Although the sampler certainly evokes sympathy and curiosity, it also highlights something that has become the focus of my project: Why is it that a woman stitching together letters, words, and sentences would begin her meditation with the apology, “As I cannot write”? Isn’t it perfectly obvious that she can write, since she writes those very words, albeit in thread and not ink? Surely one reason why Parker asserts her inability to write is humility. “As I cannot write” might mean, “Since I cannot write well or with grace and style.” Parker’s use of the word “writing” could imply polished exposition or literary style; as a working-class girl, she would have been hesitant to claim the skill of writing, a skill associated, in the early nineteenth century, with men and with the upper classes. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers made similar apologies for their fictional work, claiming that they had to write out of poverty or that writing never interfered with their domestic and familial duties. Writerly evasion and modesty allowed women writers to preserve their respectability while

 See Maureen Daly Goggin, “One English Woman’s Story in Silken Ink: Filling in the Missing Strands in Elizabeth Parker’s Circa 1830 Sampler,” Sampler & Antique Needlework Quarterly 8.4 (Dec. 2002): 8–49.

Writing in Fabric, Working in Print



yet pursuing their artistic and professional ambitions. Even today, some writers, particularly women or those of the working classes, stipple their work with these kinds of defensive maneuvers. There may be a more mundane reason for this phrase and the sampler it begins. Perhaps Parker did not have the materials necessary for writing—pen, paper, ink. In the 1830s, these items would have been expensive for a domestic servant. In working-class schools, such as the Apprentice House school for millworkers at the Quarry Bank Mill, established outside Manchester in 1784, slates or sand trays were often used for writing instruction. Paper, pens, and ink were reserved for the highest levels of male students. Even if Parker did have access to writing materials, in the 1830s, girls were rarely educated beyond basic writing. As we will see, many working-class girls received no formal education at all; those that did were taught, like girls of the middle and upper classes, what historian Lawrence Cremin calls “inert literacy,” the ability to read, memorize, or recite others’ ideas, but not to formulate their own. As linguistic anthropologists James Collins and Richard Blot explain, “Women might read, listen, be lectured to, but were not to participate in public in speech or in print.” Could it be that the writing to which Parker refers is a different kind of writing, one accomplished with a needle and not with a pen? Parker does in fact “participate in speech and print,” albeit it through a different kind of text and for a private purpose rather than a public one. Defying the nineteenth-century 

When they picked up a pen to write or tried to publish their work, Victorian women writers had to negotiate the cultural stereotypes that denied the possibility of women’s intelligent writing. Many scholars have explored this phenomenon. See Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1975); Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale, 1979); Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).  See Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) 275–7.  Apprentice House Tour, Quarry Bank Mill, Styal, Cheshire, U K. June 2005 .  See June Purvis, Hard Lessons: The Lives and Education of Working-Class Women in Nineteenth-Century England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 86–7.  Cremin contrasts “inert” literacy with “liberating” literacy; liberating literacy is similar to what Dewey termed “popular enlightenment”: it allows the subject to critique information and use it in decision-making. See Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience 1876–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988) and John Dewey, “American Education Past and Future,” The Later Works 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 6 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989).  James Collins and Richard Blot, Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 79.

Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction



prejudice against working-class women’s writing, she used the feminine art of needlework to communicate an active, not an inert, literacy. Parker’s disclaimer, “As I cannot write,” at once draws a distinction between and conflates the acts of stitching letters and writing them, the execution of expert embroidery and that of sophisticated writing. In educational theory and practice today, the term “dual literacy” is closely linked with bilingual instruction, or pedagogies that provide simultaneous training in two languages. A bilingual classroom, for example, might offer equal instruction time in both English and Spanish. In a similar way, Victorian girls learned to be dually literate in two languages—the language of cloth and the language of print. Yet in the context of this study, the meaning of dual literacy is quite different, for it calls into question the definition of a text. The comparison is more akin to the relationship between sign language and English. The idea is the same— synchronized instruction in two languages—but the languages rely on distinct means and methods of communication. James Collins and Richard Blot ask that we revise our understanding of the term “literacy.” Rather than relying on “presumed dichotomies such as literate versus illiterate, written versus spoken, educated versus uneducated, and modern versus traditional,” we need to recognize that “there is no single literacy, instead a multiplicity of practices and values that get the same label. Indeed, the label ‘literacy’ can be and is extended to areas that have no or little connection to text, or at least to processes of decoding entextualized information.”10 This study relies on the belief that, in the nineteenth century, sewing and interpreting textiles functioned as one of the “multiple literacies” Collins and Blot describe (4). But because Dress Culture focuses more narrowly on the relationship between women’s literacy in print and their literacy in textiles, throughout this study, I will use the term “dual literacy” rather than “multiple literacy.” Victorian women of all classes were expected to exercise literacy in what I call “dress culture”—that is, the interrelated skills of constructing and interpreting cloth and household textiles. By “dress culture” I mean any activity that includes not only the wearing, producing, purchasing, or embellishing of clothing and textiles, but also the regulating and interpreting of both women’s and men’s garments. In The Woman Reader, Kate Flint examines how women writers and readers utilized “alternative discursive systems,” as well as “traditionally masculine structures of knowledge.”11 When we consider that women of all classes were expected to be literate in the language of cloth, a material culture with its own history, values, and concerns, it becomes clear that women’s fluency in dress culture further complicates the dynamic Flint erects between mainstream and alternative discursive systems. I aim to illustrate that literacy in dress culture was specifically gendered as a type of feminine knowledge in Victorian social practice. This meant that it could be utilized as an alternative to mainstream, patriarchal 10

Collins and Blot 3. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 40.

11

Writing in Fabric, Working in Print



discourse. It could offer women a private language and culture, understood to be traditionally feminine. Yet at the same time, this knowledge was sanctioned, indeed mandated, by mainstream Victorian society. Mary Poovey has illustrated that proper womanhood was defined by patriarchal norms and expectations.12 Among other things, femininity required fluency in reading fabric. Thus literacy in dress culture could function simultaneously as an alternative discourse and a traditional one. The elasticity of this form of women’s knowledge enabled needleworkers and writers, such as Elizabeth Parker and Olive Schreiner, to turn it to a variety of ends. Refusing merely to recite others’ ideas, they wrote professionally, crafting their own autobiographies and fictions. Yet even as they did so, women writers— even at the fin de siècle—utilized two kinds of literacy, literacy in fabric (sewing and interpreting dress) and literacy in print (reading and writing). Reading, Writing, and Sewing In Charlotte Brontë’s influential novel, Jane Eyre (1847), Jane sets out to teach rural female schoolchildren the most rudimentary of skills: reading, writing, and sewing.13 Even into the latter decades of the Victorian period, women’s education— across class boundaries—stressed dual literacy. Victorian boys, depending on their class position and choice of trade or employment, could gain fluency in a variety of lexicons. By contrast, the educational experiences and professional opportunities of Victorian girls of all classes were more both more limited and more uniform. Girls of all classes were expected to know how to read and sew, and increasingly, how to write. These skills were considered the foundation of a girl’s education; if she learned nothing else, she would at least learn sewing and a little reading. As Eliza Farrar commented in 1837, in The Young Lady’s Friend, “A woman who does not know how to sew is as deficient in her education as a man who cannot write.”14 This is not to imply, of course, that all women were educated in the same way throughout the nineteenth century. Depending on time period and class position, women’s educational experiences varied widely. Over the course of the century, British parliamentary legislation extended the privilege of literacy to more and more of the populace. The 1870 Education Act famously laid the groundwork for a national system of education. By 1880, elementary education was compulsory for all children, male and female, ages five to ten years old, and novels such as Jane Eyre were being used in formal curricula in both Britain and its far-flung colonies to inculcate normative British values. As Gauri Viswanathan explores in Masks of Conquest, English literature was an integral part of the British schooling system in colonial India, the so-called Jewel in the Crown. With the Free Education 12 See Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 13 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847; New York: Norton, 2001) 303, 312. 14 E. W. R. Farrar, The Young Lady’s Friend (London: J. W. Parker, 1837).

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Act of 1891, education was finally offered free of charge, a detail of particular importance for working-class families. Regardless of these significant changes in education, throughout the century, British women of all classes were expected to know how to “work”—that is, to sew. Sewing took two general forms: plain sewing (also called plain work) and fancy sewing (also called fancy work). Plain work included constructing garments, mending, and darning, while fancy work referred to activities such as knitting, crochet, embroidery, and lace-making. Young girls like the ones Jane teaches in Jane Eyre learned reading, sewing, and basic writing simultaneously. Samplers allowed students to practice all three of these skills at the same time. Most schools, whether private, public, or charity, used samplers throughout the early Victorian period and into the 1880s. In the second half of the nineteenth century, children’s samplers waned, giving way to professional samplers worked by adult needlewomen and sold in fancy-work shops.15 Children’s samplers, such as Elizabeth Laidman’s, showcased a girl’s developing skills in reading, writing, counting, and embroidery (Figure 1.1). Usually worked in crossstitch with silk thread on a woollen canvas, Victorian children’s samplers generally contained the following elements: a quotation (most often a Bible verse or virtuous epigram) or dedication, the alphabet, the numbers one to ten, the name of the creator and the date completed, and repeating floral or geometric motifs.16 These were often worked in horizontal bands. Samplers could be rudimentary, or they might demonstrate a wide range of stitches and individualized design. 17 In their most basic form, however, samplers were used to teach young girls “spelling, counting, and marking” from the 1690s into the Victorian period.18 Marking meant “stitching the alphabet and numerals”; “marking” also meant labeling household linens with stitched initials, and “marking out” signified counting and laying out a design.19 Elizabeth Parker’s unusual sampler stands out for its divergence from this pattern, as well as for the fact that we know she completed it when she was older than at least thirteen years of age. A Victorian girl typically completed her first sampler at seven or eight years of age, and adolescent samplers usually demonstrated more complex skills.20 After mastering rudimentary stitches and working numbers, script, and decorative patterns, a girl might attempt more intricate family trees or eventually abandon print entirely in favor of elaborate pictorial embroidery. Barbara Morris, Victorian Embroidery (1962; New York: Dover, 2003) 164. Morris 164. 17 See Thomasina Beck, The Embroiderer’s Story: Needlework from the Renaissance to the Present Day (Devon: David & Charles, 1999) 110. See also Clare Browne and Jennifer Wearden, Samplers: From the Victoria and Albert Museum, (London: V&A Publications, 1999). For images of antique samplers, see Samplings: Antique Samplers and Silk Embroideries from M. Finkel & Daughter at . 18 Beck 109, 70; Morris 163–5. 19 Beck 70, 110; OED “Mark.” 20 Beck 46. 15 16

Writing in Fabric, Working in Print

Fig. 1.1



Elizabeth Laidman, sampler, England, 1760.

Just as children today trace letters in order to memorize their shape and significance, so Victorian girls used samplers to imitate and learn the letters of the alphabet. Yet unlike contemporary practice, the Victorian method of instructing girls in alphabetic literacy simultaneously taught another form of literacy— needlework. Like written or oral language, needlework consisted of a discrete lexicon, of a particular syntactical and semantic structuring of that lexicon—a grammar, if you will. Literacy in dress culture, like literacy in English, required the ability to do two things: to read and to write in the given language. Victorian girls learned to read fabric, to identify stitches—the alphabet of sewing—and the patterns into which those stitches could be arranged. This idea of reading fabric survives today. When I took my first knitting lesson, my teacher asked me to “read my yarn” to her. Like a young child learning simple sentences, such as “Tom sees cat,” I read out, “knit, purl, purl.” The phrases “reading yarn” and “reading stitches” remain current in oral tradition today; handworkers still use them to describe the ability to interpret accurately yarn or fabric. This is just one way in which the syntactical organization of language mimics that of handworking—or vice versa, since it is hard to say which comes first. And this is precisely the point. The distinctions between these types of reading are often

Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction



blurred, and the reasons for this include the simultaneity of their instruction and the complementarity of the ways they were valued in Victorian society. Learning to read fabric and design allowed girls to begin writing with that fabric, constructing their own textile objects. Girls learned to “unpick” garments— to take them apart seam by seam, stitch by stitch—and then re-use the material for new objects. They also studied how to read patterns, both printed ones and those of existing clothing. Until the dissemination of the first commercial paper patterns in the 1850s, both dressmakers and women sewing at home used old dresses as patterns, or simply designed their own.21 The ability to create or customize a pattern required practice and experience and was considered a fundamental skill. Stitching a sampler or sewing a shirt, women actively manipulated and altered the models they had studied in order to create new patterns, to “write” objects into existence. We must pause here to remember that textiles, along with other “movables” such as china, silver, and furniture, were traditionally part of a girl’s inheritance. They would “move” with her when she left her father’s household to join her husband’s. As historian Laurel Ulrich Thatcher points out, “In such a system, women themselves became ‘movables,’ changing their names and presumably their identities as they moved from one male-headed household to another.”22 Ulrich goes on to explore how women created a female lineage by marking objects with their names or initials: “Creating lineages, they asserted their ownership of things and sometimes of other people as well.”23 Readers may recall that in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Mrs. Tulliver takes enormous pride in her “laid-up treasures” of linens and silver.24 When the family falls into financial ruin, she must sell off these movables, her financial inheritance. Weeping over linens she had spun, bleached, and marked herself, Mrs. Tulliver suffers an excruciating material loss, but also a personal and spiritual one. The narrator mocks Mrs. Tulliver’s “household gods,” her treasures laid up not in heaven but on earth where moth and rust may not destroy but relatives and floods certainly do. But in the context of nineteenth-century property rituals, these movables are Mrs. Tulliver’s sole inheritance. They connect her to a precious reservoir of family security and identity, and their potential loss is every bit as significant as the loss of Dorlcote Mill. As Ulrich reminds us, “textiles, homemade or store-bought, were a form of wealth and the core of female inheritance.”25

21

For a discussion of the advent of paper patterns, see Joy Spanabel Emery, “Dreams on Paper: A Story of the Commercial Pattern Industry,” The Culture of Sewing, ed. Barbara Burman (New York: Berg, 1999) 235–54. 22 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Vintage, 2001) 130. 23 Ulrich 133. 24 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860; Toronto: Broadview, 2007) 230–31. 25 Ulrich 40.

Writing in Fabric, Working in Print



In the nineteenth century, girls of all classes were expected to know how to read fabric for the purpose of constructing or embellishing textile goods. They learned to read thread and material for meaning and purpose, mastering the characteristics of various stitches and seams and the properties of different kinds of fabric. They also learned how to “write” with fabric, how to design and execute their own compositions. Yet girls not only developed literacy in fabric for the purpose of understanding and creating material objects; they also learned to interpret the social significance of cloth and to claim it as their rightful inheritance. Imagining Community, Between Women As part of their socialization, Victorian girls learned to read textiles, both articles of clothing and household decoration, for their cultural meaning. Although one could argue that every individual in a given culture must interpret the social significance of clothing, women in the Victorian period were specifically charged with the task of regulating fashion and textiles. Magazines, novels, essays, sermons, and conduct books all assumed that dress culture fell under the category of “women’s work.” As The Ladies’ Hand-book of Plain Needlework (1843) opined, “To become an expert needlewoman should be an object of ambition to every British fair.”26 In 1859, the writer Harriet Martineau called needlework the “most valuable department of schoolwork” for girls.27 And as historians such as Christina Walkley and Janet Arnold point out, sewing was indeed the most consistently taught subject for young girls, and often a woman’s only marketable skill.28 Girls’ education emphasized the abilities to assemble and to decorate textile goods, and to understand and monitor the social implications of fashion. Like Roland Barthes in The Fashion System (1983), Alison Lurie argues in The Language of Clothes (1981) that clothing functions as a semiotic system.29 Lurie goes on to claim that different articles of clothing make up the vocabulary of dress, and that the combination of various “words” or pieces of clothing work together to communicate particular meaning about an individual. Although I agree with Lurie that what I call dress culture, which includes both the sewing and interpreting of cloth, functions as a particular type of communication, I am not interested in defining the rules and structure of that language. Rather than follow Lurie’s structuralist analysis, this study instead considers the language of cloth in relationship with the language of print. Because girls learned the two languages The Ladies’ Hand-book of Plain Needlework, 1843. Quoted in Christina Walkley, The Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress (London: Peter Owen, 1981) 2. 27 Hamilton 63. 28 See Walkley, The Ghost in the Looking Glass and Janet Arnold, “The Lady’s Economical Assistant of 1808,” in Burman 223–4. 29 See Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes (New York: Random House, 1981) and Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). 26

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concurrently, it is more fruitful to examine the conditions under which women learned and manipulated these analogous, although not neatly parallel, sets of skills. It is equally important to note that within the category of dress culture can be found a variety of particular styles, movements, and discords. Some women focused on plain sewing, while others affiliated themselves with art needlework or eighteenth-century revivalism. And, of course, in the late Victorian novels which I consider, certain types of handwork (such as Berlin wool-work) or fashion (such as Parisian couture) were rejected as bourgeois, passé, capitalistic, or unpatriotic. The same materials or articles of dress embodied different meanings for different audiences. Yet because of the nature of women’s education and the prevailing conventions of femininity, women did share a basic understanding of sewing and its uses. Victorian women’s dual literacy created modes of communication that linked them to other women in what Benedict Anderson, in the context of a discussion of nationalism, calls an “imagined community.”30 With the changes of industrialism in the early nineteenth century—the rise of periodical culture, the invention of paper patterns, the new connectedness of the nation through the steam engine and the penny post—women’s communities expanded into a national “feminine” identity.31 Print culture created the means whereby women living in diverse regions of Britain, with vastly dissimilar educations and experiences, could consider themselves nevertheless part of the same community of women. As Kate Flint argues, reading, particularly the reading of novels and magazines, allowed women to experience themselves in community with other women.32 Yet fiction, Anita Levy reminds us, was not considered literature until late in the century.33 Novels, often associated with women writers, provided women with models of how to be women, and as such, were alternately lauded as ameliorative and respectable, or denounced as pernicious, subversive, or just plain bad. Readers may recall George Eliot’s 1856 critique of “silly novels by lady novelists,” in 30

Anderson coined the term “imagined community” to explain the relationship between reading language and nationalism. He explores why individuals who share the same reading language, but have nothing else in common, will nonetheless view themselves as part of the same nation-state. As he argues in Chapter 3, print capitalism facilitated the construction of the nation as the “imagined community.” He identifies four key elements in the definition of nation: 1) it is imagined, 2) it is limited, 3) it is sovereign, and 4) it is a community (5–7). I use his term loosely here, to describe the relationship between gender and language, rather than between nation and language. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). 31 Valerie Steele discusses the rise of industrial capitalism and its impact on fashion, describing the changes of the early-nineteenth century as the “democratization of fashion.” See The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale, 2001) 35–6. 32 Flint, The Woman Reader. 33 See Levy’s Introduction, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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which she castigates dilettante writers who mar the reputation of women writers more generally. 34 We should note that Eliot penned this essay just before she began writing her own fiction. As Solveig Robinson points out, “the target of her attack is not merely the vain and untalented writers themselves, but the society that has presented them with no other viable—and more appropriate—outlets for their ambitions.”35 Later in the century, viewers snickered at Oscar Wilde’s hair-brained governess Miss Prism with her “three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality” in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).36 Here Wilde poked fun at the figure of the spinsterish woman writer, not to mention those ponderous and preachy triple-deckers which late-Victorians viewed as hopelessly passé. Along with novels, women’s magazines had a profound impact on the creation of imagined community. Particularly in the latter half of the century, the range of women’s magazines increased dramatically. From fashion magazines to feminist journals, periodicals served as a locus of debate and advice on everything from fashion to etiquette to education and women’s suffrage.37 Dress Culture extends the definition of reading to include the reading of material, of fabric. The dual literacy that late Victorian women shared with each other and with earlier women writers allowed them to communicate with women readers of print and of cloth in particularly fruitful ways, creating cross-currents that alternately enlivened and compromised the “imagined community” of which women were ostensibly a part. Psychoanalytic feminists such as Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan have explored communality in women’s relationships through their analyses of female subject formation. In The Reproduction of Mothering, first published in 1978, Chodorow argued that girls grow up engaged in the experience of “merging and separation” with the mother, as “part of the dyadic primary mother-relationship.”38 This primary attachment to the mother creates a pattern of female psychological development that, unlike the traditional Freudian model, allows a woman to experience herself as a subject through both identification and differentiation. Chodorow’s theory is useful in understanding the emphasis on community and attachment evident in the fictional representations of female-female relationships I See George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review 66 (Oct. 1856). In Solveig R. Robinson, ed., A Serious Occupation: Literary Criticism by Victorian Women Writers (Toronto: Broadview, 2003) 88–115. 35 Robinson 89. 36 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in The Portable Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Aldington and Stanley Weintraub (New York: Penguin, 1981) 502. 37 For an excellent introduction to Victorian women’s magazines, see Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman, eds., Victorian Women’s Magazines: An Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 38 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California, 1978) 166. Also see Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1982). 34

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will explore throughout this study. In the scope of my project, however, Chodorow’s perspective on women’s community needs qualifying. That Victorian women were expected to view themselves as part of a larger community—“Woman”—had a great deal to do with women’s authority and women’s reading, as well as with the class differences that challenged the very notion of community. We must ask ourselves, as well, did Victorian women really experience themselves as part of an increasingly national community, or did published cultural critics assign them this homogeneity in order to talk with greater ease about the social problems pertaining to women’s biology, legal rights, and social roles? The discursive emphasis on bonding and merging among women is, moreover, a predominantly middle-class phenomenon. The “we” of published, and therefore authorized, opinions on women’s issues most often excluded the working classes and the poor, who were viewed as objects of concern, needing instruction in both traditional sewing and appropriate dressing. In Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007), Sharon Marcus argues that we need a new language, a fresh set of critical ideas, for reading the variety of accepted relationships among Victorian women. Revising both Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s famous invocation of a “female world of love and ritual” (1975) and Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum” (1980), Marcus argues: Rather than valorize an invisibility or transgressiveness that all women’s relationships share, or define women’s relationships in terms of an intrinsic ambiguity that blurs the line between friendship and sexual partnership, we need distinctions that allow us to chart how different social bonds overlap without becoming identical.39

To this end, Marcus aims to provide “a history of sexuality and gender that does not focus on power differences or oppositions between polarized genders and antithetical sexualities.”40 Women’s relationships were complex and varied; some provided opportunities for “egalitarian affection,” while others displayed patterns of “aggression, hierarchy, objectification, and voyeurism.”41 In her exploration of female friendship, homosocial and homoerotic desire, and committed same-sex marriage, Marcus argues for the diversity and plasticity of women’s relationships. Pushing us beyond the complicit/subversive dichotomy, Marcus demonstrates that a variety of sexual, amatory, and erotic relationships between women were tolerated, indeed encouraged, by Victorian society. As she explains: Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) 30. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1.1 (1975): 1–29; and Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5.4 (1980): 631–60. 40 Marcus 21. 41 Marcus 21. 39

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Positing the existence of more than one kind of relationship between women leads us to recognize that many of those relationships worked in tandem with heterosexual exchange and patriarchal gender norms. … Between Women shows that even in the past, in a society that insisted strenuously on the differences between men and women, there existed institutions, customs, and relationships whose elasticity, mobility, and plasticity undid even the most cherished and foundational oppositions.42

Marcus’s work provides a useful way of thinking about the variety of women’s relationships I will explore in Dress Culture. Although I will not focus explicitly on women’s sexuality, I do emphasize the heterogeneity of women’s relationships. The word “community” implies solidarity, commonality, intimacy. Yet, as Dress Culture will explore, the imagined communities women formed through dual literacy also provided a forum in which to explore—or reproduce—the schisms and power inequities dividing women. As my readings of various late Victorian novels will demonstrate, the imagined female community of women, based at least in part on shared dual literacy in dress and print culture, provided women writers with a rich palette of possibilities. Yet these writers also identified and grappled with the differences among women that compromised community. Even as late Victorian women writers utilized their readers’ anticipated dual literacy, they nevertheless acknowledged—and often emphasized and bolstered—the profound differences separating women. In Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), for example, the upper-class character Alison Ives chides her friend Mary Erle for criticizing an East End girl that Alison has been trying to help. Alison exhorts Mary to swear “never, never to do anything to hurt another woman.”43 She goes on to lament, “If women only used their power in the right way! If we were only united we could lead the world. But we’re not.” Dress Culture focuses on the class differences with which late Victorian women writers wrestled, and on how those differences both destabilized and enriched the notion of women’s community. Women’s dual literacy in print and fabric not only facilitated a complex vision of female community, but it also equipped women with the language to govern and control that community. If, as French philosopher Michel Foucault has so famously argued, discourse is power, women’s sanctioned knowledge of all things pertaining to sewing and clothing gave them a certain kind of authority in a patriarchal society.44 Dual literacy provided women with a form of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital. Bourdieu defines cultural 42

Marcus 22, 23. Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894; Toronto: Broadview, 2004) 164. 44 Foucault emphasizes the relationship between power and discourse in most of his work. See Madness and Civilization (1965; New York: Vintage, 1988); Discipline and Punish (1977; New York: Vintage, 1995); The Order of Things (1971; New York: Vintage, 1994); and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972; New York: Pantheon, 1982). 43

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capital as the knowledge, skills, or expectations that parents instill in children, which allow those children to thrive in an educational setting and thereby gain access to particular class-based privileges. 45 Women’s dual literacy functioned as a form of cultural capital, legitimating their authority over an important aspect of women’s labor and education. Because literacy in dress culture could function simultaneously as an alternative discourse and a traditional one, it offered women writers a useful way to talk to and about women. Dress reform movements, for example, allowed women to express political agendas through their clothing. And the image of the overworked, underpaid seamstress galvanized Victorian society, prompting moral outrage, legislation, social investigations, and artistic renderings for decades. Women’s dominion over matters of sewing and dress allowed them to promote social causes in a sanctioned way. Even though doing so often resulted in a backlash of criticism, many women could write their own stories through the clothing they chose to wear or not to wear, through how, where, and under what conditions they chose to sew. Yet women’s authority was problematic for at least two reasons: it rested on particular class distinctions and hierarchies, and it simultaneously threatened and supported patriarchal society. For these reasons, how women dressed, and why and where they sewed, remained issues of heated debate for decades. Late Victorian Women Writers: New Women, Old Women, and Where We Go From Here Like their mid-Victorian predecessors, New Woman writers of the 1880s and 1890s took advantage of the flexibility and sophistication of women’s literacy in dress culture. The term “New Woman,” coined in a pair of 1894 articles between Ouida and Sarah Grand, meant, as Ann L. Ardis points out, “many things to many people.”46 For some, she was the ugly spinster type, one of George Gissing’s Odd Women who would never find a mate. For others, she was the “Wild Woman” who dressed like a man, smoked, drank, and slept around, all while waxing eloquent on the subject of women’s rights. For others, she offered a fresh vision of womanhood: she was beautiful, athletic, intelligent, liberated, and above all, modern. As New Woman scholarship has demonstrated, the New Woman was more 45

Bourdieu first used the term “cultural capital” in “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Power and Ideology in Education, eds. J. Karabel and A. H. Halsey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). His later work expands on the notion of capital, explaining other forms, such as economic, social, and symbolic. See Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia, 1993). 46 See Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” North American Review 158 (1894): 270–276; Ouida, “The New Woman,” North American Review 158 (1894): 610–619; and Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990) 10.

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social phenomenon than actual historical figure. The title of a collection of essays edited by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, The New Woman in Fiction and Fact (2000), highlights the difficulty of pinning down the New Woman. Both fictional and factual, applied to literary heroines and to real, historical women, the New Woman label found itself entangled in the social and political debates of late Victorian British society.47 In the 1880s and 1890s, the New Woman became a palimpsest for anxieties about women’s appropriate roles in society, whether professional, domestic, sexual, or artistic. Those writers who created versions of her in their fiction, the so-called New Woman writers, were usually middle-class. In their personal lives and in their fiction, some—but not all—of the New Woman writers espoused various forms of social activism. Many New Woman authors supported women’s suffrage, higher education, property rights, or access to previously unavailable professional opportunities. Others fought issues such as animal vivisection and contagious disease, debated the ethics of marriage, worried about labor and unionization, or ascribed to socialism and anarchism. Most questioned conventional norms of femininity, objecting to mainstream views of appropriate female sexuality, maternity, and domesticity. And from Schreiner to Dix, New Woman authors modified the form of the traditional three-volume novel in important ways. And yet, as Sally Mitchell argues, not all New Woman authors were politically active in women’s causes such as suffrage or marriage.48 As we know, some, such as Mary Ward, even opposed women’s suffrage. According to Mitchell, over half of the known New Woman novelists leave no record of political activism at all, less than half were single, and only one-sixth had some higher education.49 When we compare these numbers with the image of the New Woman as highly educated, pro–marriage reform, prosuffrage, and otherwise politically active, vexing contradictions arise. Mitchell’s findings urge us to pay close attention not only to tenuous interpretations of the New Woman in her own cultural context, but also in our own thinking as twentyfirst-century scholars. Not all New Woman authors supported radical causes or engaged in political activism; nevertheless, the association was widespread in late Victorian society and it reflects the cultural environment out of which the New Woman emerged.

Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, eds., The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin de Siècle Feminisms (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 48 See Sally Mitchell, “New Women’s Work: Personal, Political, Public,” NineteenthCentury Gender Studies 3.2 (Summer 2007), . This issue contains the keynote addresses of the Fifteenth Annual British Women Writers Conference; Ann Ardis, Sally Mitchell, and Teresa Mangum considered the topic “The New Woman’s Work: Past, Present, and Future.” 49 Mitchell asserts that after carefully researching the lives of 66 New Woman writers (almost all of whom appear in Ann Ardis’s groundbreaking New Women, New Novels (1990)), she was able to identify “thirty active feminists/suffragists among the sixty-six New Woman writers.” See Mitchell, “New Women’s Work.” 47

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The variety of opinion about the New Woman reflected important changes in British society. By the 1890s, single, middle-class women might be expected to find paid employment of some kind. Working-class women had, of course, always been required to work for pay, but the cult of domesticity had glorified and codified middle-class women’s position in the home. The Angel in the House, the idealized middle-class woman was expected to find fulfillment in her unpaid labor as wife and mother. By the 1890s, however, fewer women could marry and fulfill the Angel fantasy, for the 1891 census revealed that females outnumbered males by 900,000.50 More and more middle-class women either had to work outside the home or chose to do so. Traditional occupations, such as governess, teacher, or writer, continued to be available, but now a woman could also earn her living as a stenographer, journalist, social investigator, or secretary. New Woman writers brought increased visibility to women’s work in these new (and old) fields, and they also highlighted the value of the domestic and non-domestic work that women had always done, even during the high-Victorian years of ostensibly angelic housewifery. As New Woman scholarship has demonstrated, New Woman novelists such as Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, George Egerton, and Ella Hepworth Dixon struggled to redefine women’s work, pushing for broader visibility in the public sphere and modifying the domestic, realist novel. It might seem that dress culture bears little relation to such efforts. Yet, as we will see, exploring the connections between late Victorian women’s novels and textile literacy yields important questions. How might our understanding of late Victorian women writers change if we acknowledge their investment in dual literacy? How does dress culture bring together writers who seemingly share little in common? In what ways will our paradigm shift if we consider New Woman writers along with popular and socialist ones? What role does social class play in the portrayals of dress culture in late Victorian women’s fiction? In her introduction to Women’s Experience of Modernity (2002), Ann Ardis posed a question that should also be asked of Victorian studies: “If modernism was in fact one aspect—but only one aspect—of women’s modernity, then what other aesthetic modes and venues of literary and/or cultural production … did women explore and exploit?”51 More recently, Ardis has identified class as a major gap in New Woman scholarship. According to Ardis, we need to follow the example of Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, which Ardis describes as a “memoir/critique of working-class historiography,” and “foreground the tensions and ambiguities and disruptions of lives lived ‘on the borderlands’ in ‘the drama of class.’”[sic]52 Ann Heilmann believes that recent New Woman scholarship has Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1985) 293–4. 51 Women’s Experience of Modernity, eds. Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2002) 4. 52 Ann L. Ardis, “Landscape for a New Woman; or, Recovering Katharine St. John Conway, ‘Michael Field,’ and ‘the author of Borgia,’” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 3.2 (Summer 2007), . 50

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focused—rightly—on “the international, multi-ethnic and multi-racial dimensions of the New Woman” as well as “socially divisive and oppressive ideologies like eugenics, racial hygiene and imperialism” (35, 36). Teresa Mangum and Sally Ledger have suggested that instead of ignoring these offensive passages, we need to begin to grapple with them more intentionally.53 In a separate yet related discussion, Nicola Thompson has urged feminist literary critics to stop identifying Victorian novelists “according to our perception of their ideological position,” and instead respect “the complexity of the historically specific discourses and contexts in which the novels are embedded.”54 By reminding us of the complexities of ethnicity, class, and literary genre, these literary critics have asked us to modify our perception of the fin de siècle literary landscape. Along with Ardis, Heilmann, Ledger, Mangum, Mitchell, and Thompson, scholars such as Talia Schaffer have pressed for more textured analyses of late Victorian literary culture. In her study of female aestheticism, Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000), Schaffer encouraged us to redraw our literary map of the 1890s to include the numerous and influential female aesthetes of the 1890s. Her work illustrates that close attention to the crosscurrents and discords among fin-de-siècle women writers will deepen our understanding of the women who wrote and worked as New Woman writers, socialist writers, aesthetes, and popular writers. The categories that earlier New Woman criticism so helpfully created can be reframed productively so as to enlarge our view of the many eddies of conversation and debate that engaged writers and readers at the end of the nineteenth century. New Woman scholarship has often considered New Woman fiction’s relationship to other genres and time periods. In The “Improper” Feminine (1992), for example, Lyn Pykett demonstrated that New Woman novels found an important precedent in the sensation fiction of the 1860s.55 Pykett encouraged critics to recognize that New Woman fiction does not exist in a vacuum: instead, it developed out of earlier narrative forms. Margaret D. Stetz has illuminated the publishing culture of the 1890s, as well as the sometimes fraught relationships between male aesthetes and female writers.56 In her most recent essays, Talia Schaffer has urged us to consider

53 See Teresa Mangum, “New Strategies for New (Academic) Women,” NineteenthCentury Gender Studies 3.2 (Summer 2007), and Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 54 Nicola Diane Thompson, ed., Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 4. 55 See Lyn Pykett, The “Improper” Feminine: The Woman’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (New York: Routledge, 1992). 56 See Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990) and Margaret D. Stetz, “Debating Aestheticism from a Feminist Perspective,” Women and British Aestheticism, eds. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000).

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more closely what an investment in forms of material culture, such as the domestic handicraft movement, “allows [the novel] to do.”57 In this study, I ask that we follow the example of emerging scholarship and reframe the categories by which we understand late Victorian culture. To do this, we must consider the material culture of dress and sewing and analyze why and how late Victorian women writers—such as Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, and Gertrude Dix—employed dual literacy. Dress Culture will focus primarily on literary analysis, but it will employ material and cultural analysis as well. Along with close readings of novels, the book will explore the history of women’s education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion and alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism. I will offer readings of material objects from archives in the United States and England—samplers, corsets, dresses, paintings, and illustrations—in order to develop my argument. Dress culture engaged the imaginations of many late Victorian women writers. For this reason, Dress Culture does not focus exclusively on “New Woman” authors but instead traces the currents of conversation and debate that engaged writers who claimed a variety of perspectives. Although the New Woman will certainly play a prominent role, she shares the role of protagonist with other fictional types. In order to demonstrate how women writers’ employment of dual literacy complicates our current notion of literary alliances, I also consider the popular writer Margaret Oliphant and the socialist Gertrude Dix. Outline of Chapters In order to understand why New Woman writers assumed their female readers possessed dual literacy in cloth and in print, we must first recognize the conditions under which Victorian women learned to sew. We must also understand how class position impacted the education women received. Chapter 2 explores the historical context of Victorian women’s education and its emphasis on sewing, then turns to Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man for an analysis of how the so-called first New Woman author utilized the dual literacy that women’s education fostered.58 Even into the latter decades of the nineteenth century, whatever other skills it might offer, education for girls of all classes continued to emphasize reading and sewing. Bringing together Schreiner’s From Man to Man and Woman and Labour (1911) as well as articles by Eliza Lynn Linton and Harriet Martineau, this chapter explores the flexibility of dual literacy. It could be used to articulate and negotiate both the possibilities and restrictions of women’s dress culture. In From Man to Man, the See “Craft, Authorial Anxiety, and ‘The Cranford Papers,’” Victorian Periodicals Review 38.2 (2005): 222–39 and “Taming the Tropics: Charlotte Yonge Takes on Melanesia,” Victorian Studies 47.2 (2005): 204–14. 58 In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter argues, “Schreiner’s Lyndall is the first wholly serious feminist heroine in the English novel” (199). 57

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sisters Bertie and Rebekah manifest two very different aspects of late Victorian womanhood. For both heroines, however, varying degrees of dual literacy create opportunities for personal development and expression, and the means of social oppression. Chapter 3 traces the history of a highly contentious item of Victorian women’s underwear—the corset—in order to illustrate how New Woman writers employed their dual literacy in print and dress culture to negotiate the complicated relationship between women’s clothing, sexual morality, and social activism. The discussion of the corset galvanized Victorian society, merging with the ongoing debate over “The Woman Question” and leading to a fracas that dominated periodical literature for decades. Women’s rights activists and suffragists battled over the appropriateness of the corset; some, like Lydia Becker and Emmeline Pankhurst, defended the corset— and the respectable figure it created—as a tool for appealing to a conservative public. Others, such as Mrs. Harberton, founder of the Rational Dress Society, lampooned the corset, condemning it as a fetter not only for women’s bodies, but more dangerously, for their minds. And while Ella Hepworth Dixon commended her protagonist Mary Erle for her respectable (in order words, moderately laced) figure, Sarah Grand used her novels as a platform from which to preach the perils of tight-lacing. Chapter 3 examines the historical contexts of the debate over the corset and the female silhouettes it created in order to illustrate what social claims New Woman authors made by dressing their heroines as they did. Chapter 4 considers dressmaking in Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen (1890) in light of historical accounts of seamstresses and dress shops. Even as they represented dressmaking as a form of art, late Victorian woman writers such as Margaret Oliphant and Ella Hepworth Dixon struggled to reconcile the creative aspects of sewing with its association with oppressed, working-class seamstresses. In earlier iterations, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853), Thomas Hood’s famous poem “The Song of the Shirt,” and Punch’s antisweatshop cartoons, the seamstress had been figured as the exploited victim of the unregulated sewing trades. She symbolized the plight of the working poor. By contrast, in Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen (1890), dressmaking provides the eponymous heroine the means of financial independence and artistic fulfillment. In her romanticized portrait of dressmaking, Oliphant tried to disentangle women’s sewing from the layers of signification it had accumulated over decades of debate. By “unpicking” Oliphant’s depiction of the seamstress, we can begin to explore how her ostensibly “new” portrait of women’s sewing reworked previous and contemporary concerns. In Chapter 5, I consider a New Woman novel and a socialist one, Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and Gertrude Dix’s The Image-Breakers (1900). Both novels use dress culture to display their protagonists’ moral and social development and to consider the relationship between beauty and social justice. Beth Caldwell, the protagonist of The Beth Book, argues that male authors “entertain each other with intellectual ingenuities and Art and Style, while women are busy with the great problems of life, and are striving might and main to make it beautiful” (376).

20

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A writer and needleworker, Beth designs, works, and sells artistic embroideries. Grand’s description of her needlework associates her with the art needlework style, a movement entangled with William Morris’s revival of medieval and Renaissance embroidery, neo-Gothic ecclesiastical embroidery, aestheticism, and upper-class philanthropy. Beth’s journey from abused child to upper-class art embroiderer and well-dressed women’s rights activist reveals the class elitism that limited Grand’s community of women even as she proclaimed its expansiveness. In its representation of two socialist activists—one an upper-class woman, one lower middle-class—The Image-Breakers (1900) considers how class shapes women’s definitions of beauty as well as their ability to embrace socialism. Both novels present the creation of beauty and the quest for a more just society as inextricably linked, and they claim this twofold project as the particular work of women. Women’s Work In 1973, anthropologist Clifford Geertz proposed that the ethnographer must “interpret signs to gain their meaning within the culture itself”; he called this method “thick description,” a term he borrowed from British philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Geertz claimed that since “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”59 Geertz’s concept of thick description offers a useful mode of exploration for this project. I propose that we “thicken” our interpretation of late Victorian women’s novels by attending to the specific cultural and literary “webs of significance” to which they responded, those that inhered in the very language they used—that of dual literacy. For even at the end of the nineteenth century, the time period on which I focus, women continued to receive instruction in both writing and sewing. And like Elizabeth Parker in her mysterious sampler, late Victorian women novelists struggled to make sense of these interrelated forms of literacy. Along with Parker, late Victorian women writers dared to breach the divide between inert and active literacy. Dress culture, as we will see, provided late Victorian women writers with a richly textured language for addressing an imagined community of female readers. Anticipating, and indeed relying on, women’s dual literacy, these writers used that literacy to expose, complicate, and redefine women’s social roles and literary tradition. Although they sometimes criticized women’s textile culture as tedious drudgery or brainless frippery, late Victorian women writers also used dual literacy to valorize women’s dress culture as an artistic, authoritative, and community-building activity closely tied to the work of literary composition. Textile culture embodied the complexity of women’s multiple literacies. We must avoid the tendency to binarize women’s experiences, alternately criticizing 59 Chapter 1, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 5.

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women for their complicity in patriarchal Victorian culture or valorizing their subversion against it. We must also honor the differences and connections among women writers, whether New Woman, aesthetic, popular, or socialist. In this project, I aim to thicken our understanding of fin-de-siècle culture by exploring the variety of ways late Victorian women writers used textile culture to communicate with their readers. Using the language of cloth, late Victorian women writers plied dress culture to seemingly incongruous purposes. Many of them exposed the abuses of the textile industry, while yet asserting the superiority of their protagonists’ middle-class identities to those of the working-class subjects they describe. Others used traditionally upper-class types of needlework to symbolize lower middleclass women’s financial and artistic freedom. In so doing, they claimed dress culture as both evolutionary (indebted to “foremothers” such as Gaskell, Brontë, and Eliot) and revolutionary. For these late Victorian women writers, dual literary continued to provide a powerful means of communication. Whether new or old, modern or old-fashioned, radical or conservative, women writers claimed sewing and writing as women’s work.

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Chapter 2

The Needle Dipped in Blood To become an expert needlewoman should be an object of ambition to every British fair. In that torn bit of brown leather brace worked through and through with yellow silk … lies all the passion of some woman’s soul finding voiceless expression. Has the pen or the pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human race as the needle?

As any careful reader of Victorian novels will be quick to observe, nineteenthcentury heroines usually know how to sew. Sometimes skill with the needle defines a character. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, for example, adds to her family’s meager earnings by working as a dressmaker’s assistant. More often, sewing clicks along as a steady background activity to the more exciting happenings of the novel. The narrator may not belabor the point that Maggie Tulliver’s plain sewing is so “exquisite” as to rival fancy work, or that Lucy Snowe spends lonely evenings sewing by firelight, but very few Victorian novelists fail to provide their heroines with workbaskets and needles. Victorian women writers assumed that their female readers possessed a sophisticated knowledge of dress culture. They based this expectation on prevailing trends in formal and informal education: throughout the Victorian period, mothers and teachers continued to teach girls the age-old feminine art of needlework.  The national British system of education was born in the nineteenth century, but despite the changes that system initiated, girls of all classes were generally taught some type of needlework. This does not mean that all women enjoyed sewing, or that all women sewed well. The nineteenth-century reprise—that all women could sew—is contradicted by the many articles and manuals exhorting women to learn to sew better, or to sew in a different style. Many women received a meager education in only particular types of sewing, such as embroidery or mending. Some may never have learned to sew at all. Nevertheless Victorians stubbornly  The Ladies’ Hand-book of Plain Needlework, 1842. Quoted in Christina Walkley, The Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress (London: Peter Owen, 1981) 2.  Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, or, Perhaps Only (1926; London: Virago, 1982) 323. Further references to From Man to Man are given in the text.  See Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848; New York: Penguin, 1997); George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853; New York: Penguin, 2004).  See Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (New York: Norton, 1994).

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assumed that all women could and should sew. And even if they never picked up a needle, women learned to interpret the social codes inherent in various patterns and types of material. In the nineteenth century, women were expected to exercise dual literacy in the language of print and the language of cloth, and women novelists used that dual literacy for a variety of purposes. By the late Victorian period, New Woman writers strived to revise literary conventions as well as traditional notions of femininity. Women’s traditional “work”—sewing—created a predicament for these “modern” writers. Could sewing offer women opportunities for creativity and usefulness, or did it reflect outdated ideas about what it meant to be a woman? New Woman writers seemed unable to answer that question. Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, George Egerton, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix all employed dual literacy for seeming cross-purposes. These authors represented clothing and its creation as both expressive of the self and as negating the self. As we will see, that New Woman heroines were predominantly middle-class had a profound effect on their experiences of and opinions about sewing. Some heroines, such as Evadne Frayling of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), sew for pleasure, even for self-expression. Nevertheless, not all female protagonists use clothing to free themselves from constricting roles. Investing one’s energy into the making, wearing, and interpreting of clothing could also serve as a kind of self-erasure, as a symbol of women’s oppression, or merely as a way to keep oneself out of the poorhouse. In most cases the line between opposing viewpoints—dress culture as liberating, dress culture as stifling—is anything but distinct. In Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man, sewing serves a variety of functions, and these representations all work together to provide a bricolage of meaning. (Schreiner began writing the novel in 1873 but she never completed it; her husband published it in 1926, six years after her death.) In the excerpt above, the narrator laments that in needlework “lies all the passion of some woman’s soul finding voiceless expression” (323). Yet contrary to what this needle image might imply, elsewhere in the novel Schreiner figures sewing as a creative, imaginative activity. Why does Schreiner present such a contradictory view of women’s sewing? In order to answer this question, we need to understand the tradition of women’s education to which Schreiner’s novel responded, and consider how she used dual literacy to represent the myriad possibilities it offered individual women. Women may have been expected to demonstrate dual literacy in print and cloth, but, as my reading of From Man to Man will illustrate, how women writers negotiated the possibilities and the restrictions of these types of literacy was far from uniform. In order to appreciate the nubby texture of Schreiner’s depiction of sewing, and how her seemingly contradictory view of women’s sewing anticipates the concerns of the other late Victorian women authors I will discuss in this study, we must trace the history of that little slip of metal, the needle, throughout the Victorian period. By examining the conditions under which women learned to sew and the types of sewing they actually did, we can begin to follow the trail a needle leaves behind: the seam that joins seemingly disparate objects together and creates a single object out of distinct shapes.

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Learning to Sew and Sewing to Learn The word “needlework” gained currency in the English language as early as 1382, when it occurred in the book of Exodus in the Wycliffite Bible. The Oxford English Dictionary defines needlework, rather unsurprisingly, as “work done with a needle; spec. the art or practice of sewing or embroidery.” In English parlance, this broad definition is divided into two types of practice: plain and fancy work. The former is “work of a plain or simple kind, as distinguished from ornamental or ‘fancy’ work: spec. plain needlework or sewing, as distinct from fancy work or embroidery” (OED). Fancy work, by contrast, serves a decorative purpose; it is “ornamental, as opposed to plain, work, esp. in needlework, crochet, knitting, or the like” (OED). Traditionally, both types of work have been considered handwork: they are done by hand. For the Victorians, as for any needleworker today, plain sewing formed the foundation of all sewing. As the Living History project of Cornell University explains, “The main function of plain sewing is to assemble and protect a garment.” Victorian women used plain sewing to make, mend, and alter simple clothing and domestic items, such as baby clothes, shirts, nightclothes, caps, and household linens. Fancy work, which included skills such as embroidery, crochet, and knitting, was employed for home décor such as panels, upholstery, and fire-screens. It was also used to embellish clothing, handkerchiefs, and linens. Fancy work was one of the accomplishments of marriageable young ladies of the middle and upper classes. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, women’s colleges and art schools offered professional instruction in fancy work, particularly embroidery. Young girls learned plain and fancy sewing both at home and in school. Throughout the century, but particularly between 1800 and 1870, schooling for girls varied widely. William Forster’s Elementary Education Act of 1870 initiated a national system of education, making elementary education compulsory for all children aged five to twelve. Linda K. Hughes notes that the Act cannot be considered apart from the Second Reform Bill of 1867, which extended the vote to “male heads of households who paid rates (taxes) directly”; in so doing it “effectively doubled the number of voters in England.” Although it was not until decades later that the vision of the 1870 Education Act—basic education for all classes—became a general reality, the law did transform British education. Despite the differences in women’s education, one aspect of their schooling remained constant both before and after the 1870 Education Act: for girls of all classes, instruction in some type of needlework was standard. As The Ladies’ Hand-book “Needlework,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2003, Oxford English Dictionary, 15 July 2005 .  “A Flemish Smock, Plainest of the Plain: An Experiment in Plain Sewing,” Living History: Preserving the Past, 2006, Cornell University, 5 July 2005 .  Linda K. Hughes, “1870,” A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert Tucker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 35–50: 36. 

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of Plain Needlework declared, sewing “should form one of the most prominent branches of female education.” In the years between 1800 and the 1870 Education Act, middle- and upperclass girls were most often educated in what historian June Purvis calls “familial, domestic settings, such as home and/or a small private school managed by middleclass ‘ladies.’” Particularly in upper-class homes, governesses were provided for girls and tutors for boys; girls might also attend finishing schools.10 The subjects in which girls received instruction varied, but they were generally aimed at molding middle- and upper-class girls into attractive future wives. As Purvis outlines, these accomplishments included a smattering of “English, history, geography and Latin,” as well as the more ornamental “French conversation, fancy needlework, singing, piano playing and the use of the globes” (72). For wealthy girls, sewing skills could be applied to fancy work, or to sewing simple clothing for the less fortunate.11 In the latter half of the century, middle- and upper-class women began to attend colleges and universities in increasing numbers, and working-class women gained entry to mechanics’ institutes and colleges for working men.12 Art schools, such as the Royal School of Art Needlework (established in 1872), professionalized the traditional skill of embroidery and defined it as an art form.13 Yet even as they gained access to secondary and university educations, women of all classes contended with expectations of traditional feminine domesticity. The narrator of Ella Hepworth Dixon’s 1894 novel, The Story of a Modern Woman, describes the protagonist’s education as “more or less in the nature of an experiment.”14 She goes on to explain: Born too late for the simple days of the fifties, when all it behooved a young woman to do was to mind her account-book, read her Tennyson, show a proper enthusiasm for fancy work stitches, and finally, with many blushes, accept the hand of the first young man who desired to pay taxes and fulfil the duties of a loyal British subject …, Mary was yet too soon for the time when parents begin to take their responsibilities seriously, and when the girl is sometimes as carefully prepared, as thoroughly equipped, as her brother for the fight of life. (49–50)

The Ladies’ Hand-book of Plain Needlework, 1842. Quoted in Walkley 2. June Purvis, Hard Lessons: The Lives and Education of Working-Class Women in Nineteenth-Century England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 71. 10 Daniel Pool, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew (New York: Touchstone, 1993) 125. 11 Walkley 2. 12 See Purvis, Hard Lessons, Part III. 13 See Chapter 7, “Art Needlework,” in Barbara Morris, Victorian Embroidery (New York: Universe, 1962) 113–42. 14 Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894; Toronto: Broadview, 2004) 49.  

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Dixon’s novel explores upper middle-class education, but for working-class girls, schooling was something entirely different.15 Prior to the 1870 Education Act, poor children and the children of working-class parents received little or no formal schooling. Those working-class girls whose parents chose to send them to school received a smattering of education in a variety of schools. Most of these schools grew out of a middle-class, evangelical concern that poor children were growing up unable to read the Bible. In 1811, the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church was formed.16 There were also concerns that lack of basic education made the working classes susceptible to insurrection. As Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations (1776), “An instructed and intelligent people, besides, are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.”17 Yet many Victorians believed just the opposite. As Thomas William Heyck points out, “more conservative people felt that education of the working class would itself be politically dangerous and destructive of the deference properly demanded from working people.”18 Working-class schools included the following: “dame schools, Sunday schools, plait and lace schools, charity schools, factory schools, workhouse schools, ragged schools, schools of industry, Roman Catholic schools and the day schools of the National and British and Foreign societies.”19 The administrations, curricula, and physical structures of these schools sometimes had little in common, so different were the needs and resources of the students they served (or exploited, as we will see). In general, however, students were expected to learn by memorization and rote repetition with minimal direct instruction, teachers were inadequately prepared, conditions were often squalid, and corporeal punishment was ubiquitous and often brutal. Students studied subject matter “framed around their expected destinations in life and shaped by their economic circumstances”: for girls, needlework was standard.20 Because of the low value set on education for poor and working-class girls, if they received any education at all, it was likely in an unregulated school, such as a charity, factory, or dame school. Richard Altick paints a grim portrait of dame schools: “Situated in basements or lofts, they were overcrowded, ill ventilated, heated by a single stove, almost totally unequipped; and their educational value was further reduced by the mistress’ frequently leaving the

15

For more on middle- and upper-class girls’ education, see Chapter 6: “Reading at School” in Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 16 Pool 125. 17 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. 2 (1776; London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1910) 269. Quoted in Richard Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) 142. 18 Thomas William Heyck, “Educational,” A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert Tucker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 194–211: 205. 19 Purvis 72. 20 Purvis 94, 93.

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room to tend the shop she also kept or to quiet her babies, or by the master’s having to turn his wife’s mangle.”21 Only a small number of girls attended those working-class schools generally considered the best—the day schools of the National Society (Anglican) and the British and Foreign School Society (Nonconformist).22 According to Purvis, the day schools’ stronger reputation probably arose from the fact that most of the other working-class schools were not subject to any sort of inspection.23 In these schools, the monitorial system allowed one teacher to “instruct” several hundred children. Contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted the system’s similarity to a factory, calling it “this incomparable machine, this vast moral steam-engine.”24 Female students in these more highly regarded schools spent the majority of their day in “reading, religious instruction and sewing, with less frequent lessons in writing and arithmetic.”25 While boys learned writing and arithmetic, girls sewed. At Bampton National School, for example, only girls who behaved well would receive instruction in writing: “Needlework, Knitting &c. will form part of their constant employment for the purposes of training them up in habits of useful industry, and contributing to the support of the School.”26 As the final words of this statement reveal, girls’ labor was sometimes exploited. Their sewing “contribute[d] to the support of the schools.” The articles of clothing the girls made during their sewing lessons, including men’s and women’s shirts, night shirts, and pillow cases, were sold to supplement the school’s income.27 The 1870 Education Act established a national infrastructure for elementary education. We might be tempted to imagine that this legislation dramatically improved the quality and accessibility of working-class girls’ education; this, however, was not the case. As historians are quick to point out, it was not until Anthony John Mundella’s Education Act of 1880 that elementary education became compulsory for children of all classes, including both girls and boys, ages 5 to 10 years old.28 And it was not until the Free Education Act of 1891 that schooling was offered free of charge (for children ages 5 to 13). Even despite these improvements, many Victorians criticized the methods and curricula of working- and middle-class schools. As a school inspector in 1860, Matthew Arnold 21

Altick 147. Heyck 205. 23 Purvis 73. 24 Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual 444. Quoted in Altick 146. 25 Purvis 92. 26 Pamela Horn, Education in Rural England 1800–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978) 42–3. Quoted in Purvis 90. 27 Purvis 90–92. 28 This act also required parents to pay “school pence,” a sum many poor parents could not afford. As Bruce Rosen points out, it was “not until 1899 and the establishment of the National Board of Education that free public education was available to all children in England.” See Bruce Rosen, “State Involvement in Public Education before the 1870 Education Act,” The Victorian Web, 25 Feb. 2006 . 22

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focused his ire on school reading books: “Dry scientific disquisitions and literary compositions of an inferior order, are indeed the worst possible instruments for teaching children to read well.”29 A decade later, he seemed to have witnessed no change, for he commented dryly that the sole purpose of using literature in schools was to provide students “the power to read the newspapers.”30 Another state inspector observed that “at certain schools he could tell pretty accurately by the pupils’ faces how long they had been at school. The longer the period, the more stupid, vacant, and expressionless the face.”31 Quality of education aside, for working-class families on tight budgets, school was often a low priority. Like boys, girls often began to work outside the home at an early age; school was often deemed frivolous for girls, who were expected to manage a large share of the domestic duties in addition to whatever professional labor they might perform. As Richard Altick claims, “During the first half of the century most children from the working class left school after two or three years, and toward the end of the century the maximum period of attendance was only six or seven years.”32 Even after 1880, when elementary education became compulsory, poor children left school for full-time work “at the earliest possible moment.”33 The half-time system was just one way that factories circumvented the new education laws. Under the half-time system, children younger than thirteen could work half-days, then attend school the other half. Qualifying for half-time status was easy; students merely took an exam called the “Labour Exam,” a test that was, as Jill Liddington and Jill Norris point out, “notorious for never failing anyone.”34 Half-timers were particularly prevalent in the textile districts, and the system remained common until the end of the century. According to Liddington and Norris, “[E]ven in the early 1890s the half-time system was still the experience of half the child population over ten years old in Lancashire” (25). Because they were usually exhausted by the time they started their lessons, half-timers stood less of a chance of receiving a decent education than did children who studied for a full day. Despite the passing of several Factory Acts in the 1830s and 1840s, it was not until 1853 that workdays for women and children were reduced to ten hours; even then, employers continued to find ways around the law.35 And as I mentioned earlier, for working-class women and girls, a shortened professional workday did not lighten the heavy domestic load waiting at home. Arnold, Reports on Elementary Schools, 1852–1882 (1889) 87–9. Quoted in Altick 159. 30 Arnold 157. Quoted in Altick 160. 31 Joseph Payne, Lectures on the Science and Art of Education (Boston, 1883) 284. Quoted in Altick 165. 32 Altick 166. 33 Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London: Rivers Oram, 2000) 25. 34 Liddington and Norris 25. 35 Purvis 35. 29

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Hannah Mitchell, a working-class, socialist suffragette born in 1871, resented the fact that her mother deemed domestic duties, such as cleaning, sewing, and childcare, more important than school. In her autobiography, The Hard Way Up (1968), Mitchell remembered those early years: On winter evenings there was sewing by hand, making and mending shirts and underwear. At eight years old my weekly task was to darn all the stockings for the household, and I think my first reactions to feminism began at this time when I was forced to darn my brothers’ stockings while they read or played cards or dominoes. Sometimes the boys helped with rugmaking, or in cutting up wool or picking feathers for beds and pillows, but for them this was voluntary work; for the girls it was compulsory, and the fact that the boys could read if they wished filled my cup with bitterness to the brim.36

Hannah Mitchell’s experience was not unique. According to attendance records and personal remembrances, working-class families considered girls’ domestic and professional labor more important than their formal schooling.37 Truancy was common and, in the case of female students, overlooked. What education working-class girls did receive focused on domestic skills. Much to the dismay of educational reformers such as Lydia Becker, even as late as 1877, girls’ education still focused almost exclusively on domestic skills, including cookery and sewing.38 As Purvis concludes, “Learning various domestic skills, such as nursing children, household cleaning and sewing, was seen as a necessary and natural part of the socialization of a working-class girl.”39 Education altered dramatically over the nineteenth century, but one thing remained remarkably consistent: girls of all classes received instruction in some type of needlework, whether plain, fancy, or a combination of both. At mid-century, however, the textile market changed significantly. This had a profound effect on how and where women sewed. The Sewing Experience In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, most women—whether of the upper, middle, or working classes—would choose fabric and take it to a dressmaker to be cut and draped as they desired. Like tailoring, dressmaking was a skilled trade to which girls, such as the eponymous heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Ruth (1853), were often apprenticed. Dresses were made to measure, and the majority of women wore the same dresses, particularly Sunday best or evening 36 Hannah Mitchell, The Hard Way Up: The Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and Rebel, ed. G. Mitchell (London: Faber and Faber, 1968) 42–3. Quoted in Purvis 79. 37 See Liddington and Norris 26, 110. Also see Purvis 78–9. 38 Liddington and Norris 64. 39 Purvis 78.

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wear, for many years. Many women could not afford a dressmaker on a regular basis, and so they wore second-hand clothing (either purchased used or received as charity or hand-me-downs). At home, women would alter their own dresses to keep up with changing styles. Paper patterns were still a rarity, but as Janet Arnold points out, women found inspiration in old or borrowed garments, sometimes disassembling them to make patterns.40 Men depended on tailors for their suiting. Although dressmakers and tailors made more complicated articles of clothing, women and girls were responsible for sewing everything else at home. The type of plain sewing a woman did, and how often she engaged in it, depended on her financial status. Because middle- and working-class women could not afford to buy or make new clothing very often, mending and altering clothing—made from inexpensive and durable material such as wool and often hand-me-downs in the first place—was a crucial and unrelenting domestic task. As costume curator Grace Evans reminds us, almost no working-class clothing survives today for the simple reason that people wore and mended their clothing until it quite literally fell apart or was turned into rags.41 Wealthy women, by contrast, relied on seamstresses or domestic servants to do their plain sewing, putting their own fingers only to fancy work and relying on male bespoke tailors or court dressmakers for more elaborate clothing.42 As that arbiter of household management, Mrs. Isabella Beeton, optimistically intoned, “Plain work will probably be one of the lady’s-maid’s chief employments.” By keeping abreast of the latest fashions and by mending and altering her mistress’s clothing, the industrious lady’s maid might make herself “useful” and “invaluable.”43 By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, clothing production had become increasingly industrialized. The mass production and distribution of the sewing machine, a burgeoning ready-made industry, the invention of the commercial pattern, streamlined factory management, less expensive railway travel, and the establishment of department stores all profoundly changed the textile industry. The sewing machine, patented by the Americans Elias Howe (in 1846) and Isaac Singer (in 1851), improved dramatically during the 1850s, quickly entering mass production in the United States and abroad. The Singer company unveiled its first machine for family use in 1856, with improved models in 1859 and 1865. The 1865 model, called the New Family machine, was, according to economist Andrew Godley, so successful that “by 1867 Singer had become the leading producer

Janet Arnold, “The Lady’s Economical Assistant of 1808,” The Culture of Sewing, ed. Barbara Burman (New York: Berg, 1999) 225. 41 Grace Evans, personal interview, Chertsey Museum, Runnymede, UK 26 May 2005. 42 Beth Harris, ed. Introduction to Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) 5. 43 Isabella Beeton, “Domestic Servants,” Household Management, ed. Nicola Humble (1861; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 424. 40

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of sewing machines in the world.”44 The development of the sewing machine dramatically changed both personal and professional sewing. Women who could afford a sewing machine began making more and more of their dresses at home, in order to minimize household costs or to express personal creativity and taste. In 1886, the author of “How to Live on £100 a Year” cited home dressmaking as one of the best ways to save money. He quoted his frugal wife: “If I bought ready-made clothing, it would cost double …. The sewing-machine is a great help; I could not manage without it.”45 Yet, until the mid-1870s, in Britain (unlike the United States), professionals within the clothing sector were the primary purchasers of sewing machines.46 In Britain, it was not family machines, but those used in the factories and dress shops, as well as in the flats of outworkers (also called homeworkers or slop-workers), that led to Singer’s overwhelming success. Sewing machines were not the only invention to change women’s sewing. Paper patterns also had a profound effect on women’s dress culture. Prior to the 1840s, there were very few patterns in circulation. Women instead relied on old or new garments, which they merely copied or took apart and turned into patterns. In August 1850, however, the London monthly magazine the World of Fashion issued England’s first full-scale patterns.47 Paper patterns were originally directed to dressmakers, but as the market for home dressmaking grew, the average consumer gained increasing access to them. Women’s magazines, such as the World of Fashion, the Queen and the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, led the way, printing illustrations and sometimes patterns that women could copy and use. American companies, especially Butterick and Demorest, dominated pattern production and distribution, and patterns developed more quickly in the United States than in Britain. It was not long, however, before British women also had access to paper patterns. Butterick opened a store in London in 1874.48 By the 44 Andrew Godley, “Homeworking and the Sewing Machine in the British Clothing Industry, 1850–1905,” in Burman 257. As Godley points out, because Singer focused on foreign markets, particularly Britain’s thriving ready-made clothing industry, it quickly became the leader in non-US markets (257). By the 1870s and 1880s, decades that Godley identifies as offering “the world’s richest consumer market,” Singer dominated “at least three quarters of the British market” (258–9). 45 H., “How to Live on £100 a Year,” The Girl’s Own Paper 7 (9 Jan. 1886), reprinted in Selections from the Girl’s Own Paper, 1880–1907, ed. Terri Doughty (Toronto: Broadview, 2004) 228. 46 Godley 261. 47 Joy Spanabel Emery, “Dreams on Paper: A Story of the Commercial Pattern Industry,” in Burman 237. The London serial World of Fashion was published monthly from 1824 to 1891 under three different titles: World of Fashion and Continental Feuilletons, vol. 1–28 (1824–1851); Ladies’ Monthly Magazine, vol. 29–56 (1852–1879); and Le Monde Élégant or the World of Fashion, vol. 57–68 (1880–1891). Union List of Serials, ed. Edna Brown Titus, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1965). 48 Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2003) 12–13.

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1870s and 1880s, if a woman was a skilled seamstress and could afford to buy or borrow a magazine or a pattern, she could have access to the latest fashions. At the same time that women’s home sewing became more affordable and convenient, the ready-made clothing industry boomed. Britain’s ready-made industry, begun early in the nineteenth century and considered the world’s finest, grew increasingly sophisticated.49 Better sizing, a wider range of garments, a higher production rate due to sewing machines, and new forms of advertising all made ready-made clothing more popular than ever. By the end of the century, particularly in urban environments, clothing was more and more likely to be massproduced rather than custom-made. Less expensive railway transport bolstered the success of the ready-made clothing industry. Clothing could be freighted less expensively, and people could travel more easily to shop—which they did, in ever increasing numbers, particularly in the 1890s and early 1900s, when large department stores such as Whiteleys, Bainbridge, Barkers, Harrods, and Selfridges were established.50 As Patricia A. Cunningham notes, these department stores “cater[ed] especially to the needs of women, who had by this date become the major consumers for their families as well as the employees of those great emporiums.”51 Whether mending at home, embroidering an intricate sampler, sewing shirts for pay, designing dresses for customers, purchasing fabric for a dressmaker to make up, using that same fabric on a home sewing machine, or selecting a ready-made garment, Victorian women of all classes would have possessed a sophisticated knowledge of fabric, cut and style. Learning to sew and read textiles was a standard element of women’s formal and informal education, in all classes and throughout the nineteenth century, but how women experienced the activity of sewing could be as different as the women themselves. Women’s Work, Plain and Fancy We do not ask that the wheels of time should reverse themselves, or the stream of life flow backward. We do not ask that our ancient spinning-wheels be again resuscitated and placed in our hands …. This, we know, cannot be. The past material conditions of life have gone for ever; no will of man can recall them, but this is our command: We demand that, in that strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of

49

Godley 260. For discussions of Victorian shopping, see Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 51 Cunningham 13. 50

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Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction the labor of the Children of Woman. We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less. This is our “WOMAN’S RIGHT!52

In this passage, Olive Schreiner used the image of the broken spinning wheel to illustrate what she saw as the most urgent problem facing Europeans at the beginning of a new century—women’s labor. Middle- and upper-class women’s sewing and other traditional work had lost their social value. As she put it, “We do not ask that our ancient spinning-wheels be again resuscitated and placed in our hands. … The past material conditions of life have gone forever.” In ages past, according to Schreiner, women had found usefulness in domestic work, but by the end of the nineteenth century, men had taken over most of women’s traditional work. Mills and factories, overseen and often staffed by male employees, had claimed textile production as their “field of labor.” Not only were the “spinningwheels … all broken,” but male dressmakers had begun to “explode the ancient myth, that it is women’s exclusive sphere, and a part of her domestic toil, to cut and shape the garments she or her household wear” (46, 48). Bereft of meaningful work, women’s value rested on “sex functions alone”—in other words, their sexual partnership with men and their reproductive labor (77). Schreiner called this state of affairs “sex-parasitism” and dedicated the first half of Woman and Labor to the topic.53 Her rallying cry—that women must be provided useful labor apart from their sex functions in order to achieve equality in modern society—mobilized the suffrage movement. Hailed as “The Bible of the Woman’s Movement,” Schreiner’s 1911 treatise investigated the issues that had fueled the New Woman conversation. What was women’s appropriate work? If men, working-class employees, and machines had taken over middle-class women’s time-honored domestic work, and men resisted their entry into traditionally masculine fields of labor, what was women’s social function to be? How should middle- and upper-class women be educated in a social climate that now more openly demanded that they perform non-domestic (as well as domestic) labor, in addition to the biological work of reproduction? As we will see, the New Woman debate over women’s labor was not a new one, and neither was Schreiner’s focus on sewing as a central issue. Half a century earlier, the wellknown writers and social critics Eliza Lynn Linton and Harriet Martineau posed similar questions as Schreiner, although they arrived at very different answers. Both Linton and Martineau enjoyed long and productive writing careers, supporting themselves and their families by their pens. Writing over several decades, Linton and Martineau had ample opportunity to revise their thinking on various issues, and in many cases, did so. In general, however, both writers maintained a critical, conservative stance on women’s rights, and both writers 52 Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labor (New York: Stokes, 1911) 64–5. Further references to Woman and Labor are given in the text. 53 See Carolyn Burdett’s discussion of Woman and Labor in Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

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believed that the domestic sphere held untapped potential for producing broader social change. During her 54-year writing career, Eliza Lynn Linton (1822–1898) took a strong anti-feminist stance. An historical novelist, travel writer, and journalist, she built her reputation on her prolific essays. Writing mainly on women’s issues, she published numerous articles in journals such as the Fortnightly Review, the Saturday Review, the Nineteenth Century, and Macmillan’s Magazine. Famous for her antagonism to New Women, whom she labeled “wild women” in a series of articles, she coined the term the “shrieking sisterhood.”54 Despite what Susan Hamilton calls her “extravagantly vicious writing on women,” Linton nevertheless enjoyed the practical freedoms of feminism.55 When she was 23 years of age, the Morning Chronicle hired Linton on a salaried contract, making her the first English woman to become a salaried journalist. After requiring her fiancé to sign a contract guaranteeing her right to her own inheritance and future income, she separated from him after less than a decade. And although she quickly identified herself as a staunch conservative on women’s liberation, at the start of her career she maintained a more radical position: in 1854 she praised Mary Wollstonecraft’s treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.56 Susan Hamilton points out that although Linton opposed women’s political agitation for suffrage, “in her own life Linton supported equal but separate education for women, women’s property rights, and women’s rights to their children.”57 Despite the success of her own public writing career, Linton consistently asserted the belief that the domestic sphere, and middle-class women’s judicious influence over it, offered the best means of widespread social reform. In 1870, Linton published “The Modern Revolt” in Macmillan’s Magazine. In her essay, Linton argued that rather than try to find fulfillment in taking over “men’s work,” women should return to their traditional work: educating children, regulating dress, creating a safe and nurturing domestic space. It is important to note Linton’s projected audience: a middle- or upper-class reader. In her view, middle- and upper-class women had allowed servants to take over their most honorable duties, and not only were servants doing a bad job, but middle- and upper-class women were becoming bored and seeking inappropriate work outside the home. As she exhorted her readers,

54 See “The Wild Women: As Politicians,” Nineteenth Century (July 1891) and “The Wild Women: As Social Insurgents,” Nineteenth Century (Oct. 1891), both reprinted in Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Victorian Writing by Women on Women, ed. Susan Hamilton ( Toronto: Broadview, 1995) 188–97; 198–206. 55 Hamilton 208. 56 See Noreen Groover Lape’s introduction to Eliza Linton in Prose by Victorian Women: An Anthology, eds. Andrea Broomfield and Sally Mitchell (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996) 351–4. 57 Hamilton 208.

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Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction What, then, I contend for in this question of women’s work is, that in her own world, which is so beautiful, so useful, she has unexplored tracts and unfulfilled duties; and that is it a fatal mistake in her not to put her intellect and an extended education into social and domestic details; so that she may make her own work perfect—not by lowering herself to the condition of a servant, but by raising her duties above the level of the servant.58

For Linton, an important part of middle-class women’s work was the regulation of dress and fashion, a role that assumed women’s “literacy” in fabric. According to Linton, women should know not only how to sew, but how to dress themselves, their families, and their servants, so as to preserve distinct class and gender identities. (Servants would have been responsible for their own clothing; it would seem that Linton believed that employers should regulate what their servants wore, if not how they acquired it.) Linton used the distinctions between plain and fancy “work”—by which she meant needlework—as a metaphor for other types of work. By attending to their “plain” work (domestic duties arising from their “instinct”) rather than “fancy” work (exciting work outside the home), educated women would find fulfillment and usefulness. As she advised, “they might thus make a good living by useful work which they discard, while they prefer a wretched pittance by fancy work which no one wants, by miserable art which breaks the hearts of kindly ‘hangers,’ by attempts at teaching where they have everything to learn” (183). Linton’s reference to “fancy work which no one wants” had a more concrete basis, as well. By the 1870s, art needlework had begun to replace Berlin woolwork as the national craze. Berlin wool-work was a type of canvas work popular from the early nineteenth-century until the 1870s and 1880s, when it was eclipsed by art needlework. William Morris famously criticized Berlin wool-work, instead reviving medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century styles. In 1872, inspired by Morris and other artists, the Royal School of Art Needlework was founded as a charity run by upper-class women. At first associated with artists and the upper classes, art embroidery (which I will discuss at greater length in Chapter 5) was swiftly taken up by women of all classes and soon ousted Berlin wool-work to become the most popular type of embroidery. Historian Barbara Morris remarks dryly that “a great deal of the work classified under the term ‘art needlework’ hardly justified so exalted a description.”59 Many late Victorians agreed with her, including Linton. In her use of the plain/fancy dichotomy, Linton took a jab at the popularity of fancy work, even ostensibly among working-class women. In Linton’s view, working- and middle-class women had put the cart before the horse: they bragged of their slipshod embroidery but had no knowledge of the infinitely more practical, more useful, and more appropriate fundamentals of plain sewing.

58 Eliza Linton, “The Modern Revolt,” Macmillan’s Magazine (Dec. 1870), reprinted in Hamilton 177–87: 184. Further references to “The Modern Revolt” are given in the text. 59 Barbara Morris 122.

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As the 1870 date of Linton’s essay illustrates, her redefinition of women’s work signaled a profound anxiety about that very work—and about the new types of work increasingly available to middle-class women. Linton wrote at a moment when, according to Judith Lowder Newton, middle-class women were just beginning to find entrance into new fields of labor outside the home.60 Positions as clerical workers, accountants, stenographers, telegraph operators, copyeditors, nurses, social workers, and investigators became increasingly open to women. After the 1870 Education Act, teachers were in high demand, and by the 1880s, the invention of the typewriter had created the need for a new workforce. Women filled the majority of these emerging positions.61 At the same time, middle-class women worried that technological changes, as well as male laborers, were taking away their traditional work. In 1869, one writer proclaimed (in words that seem to foreshadow Schreiner’s) that “‘men have taken away from women the employments which formerly were appropriated to them,’ such as spinning, sewing, and domestic labor.”62 Much of this concern about male appropriation of women’s traditional work had to do with the changes in the textile and clothing industries around mid-century. Ironically, these concerns emerged just when male bespoke tailors also worried that “unskilled” female workers in the booming ready-made industry were stealing their “skilled” labor as unionized artisans. As Beth Harris points out, “The show-shops, and later in the century, the department stores, both with their aggressive advertising, competitive marketing, and cheap mass-produced goods … were often blamed for the downfall of the male artisan, the debased taste of the public, and for inciting the public to expect and demand cheap merchandise.”63 Both men and women worried that the readymade industry, as well as workers of the opposite gender, were stealing their traditional labor. As I mentioned earlier, Britain’s ready-made industries developed early in the century and grew out of the factory system that had begun to emerge in the late eighteenth century. Rather than depend on local weavers or small communities,

60 Judith Lowder Newton, “Power and the Ideology of ‘Woman’s Sphere’” (1981) in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997) 880–895: 889. 61 See Bruce Bliven, Jr., The Wonderful Writing Machine (New York: Random, 1954); Gregory Anderson, ed. The White-Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers Since 1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Samuel Cohn, The Process of Occupational Sex-Typing: The Feminization of Clerical Labor in Great Britain (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); and Angela V. John, ed., Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England, 1800–1918 (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1986). 62 John Boyd Kinnear, “The Social Position of Women in the Present Age,” Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture: A Series of Essays, ed. Josephine E. Butler (London: Macmillan, 1869) 332–6. Quoted in Newman 890. 63 Harris 5.

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entrepreneurs began to establish factories for streamlined labor.64 Textile mills capitalized on women’s traditional education in spinning and carding, but they changed the conditions of and compensation for that labor. The domestic space was no longer the scene of textile production, in which women and children did the spinning and carding while men did the weaving. With a factory system in place, not only fabric but soon clothing, as well, could be purchased outside the home. Inside the textile mills, however, gender roles remained relatively constant. Men did the more “skilled” and more highly paid work of weaving and machine maintenance while women and children did the carding, spinning, winding, and in some cases, the weaving of plain, cheap greycloth.65 With new technological developments, the textile industry became increasingly stratified and rigid in its organization. Despite the gross inequality between men and women’s pay, factories, particularly cotton factories, paid better than the sewing trades, which included dressmaking, millinery, laundry service, domestic service, and home working.66 The sewing trades employed mainly women and, despite varying conditions and levels of pay, depended on cheap female labor for their profits. At one end of the spectrum, women participated in the made-to-order system as dressmakers and milliners. At the other end of the spectrum, women performed sweated labor in unregulated shops or as home workers (also called outworkers or slop workers). Home workers were “overwhelmingly women who took bundles of unstitched garments from a clothing wholesaler or merchant and made them up at home. They received little pay and conditions were often harsh.”67 The distinction between “private” and “professional” labor, then, is anything but clear. These workers were the most exploited of all, since the laws that regulated workshops did not extend to them.68 In the last three decades of the century, much of the “unskilled” labor of the dress trades was performed by immigrant women. From about 1870 until the 1905 Alien Restriction Act, large numbers of immigrants—predominantly Eastern European Jews—arrived in England. Many settled in London’s East End, where they found employment in the dress trades, either as tailors and business owners, or as “unskilled” laborers performing slop-work.69 Many people expressed concerns about preserving English cultural identity in an increasingly multicultural society, 64 As early as 1810, the article “Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind” stated that “[t]he greater perfection and division of labor procures for us all the necessities and comforts of life almost ready made.” See “Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind,” Edinburgh Review 15 (Jan. 1810): 299–315. Quoted in Newton 890. 65 Textiles Gallery, Exhibition notes, Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, UK. May 2005. 66 Purvis 34. 67 Godley 255. 68 Purvis 33–4. 69 See Ian Whyte, “Migration and Settlement” in A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Chris Williams (Edinburgh: Blackwell, 2004) 273–86.

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as well as fears that the influx of cheap labor was driving down wages. Others, like Linton, yearned for the imagined stability of the earlier artisanal, guild system in which local tailors and dressmakers designed clothing for individual customers. Although changes in technology sometimes offered women more lucrative ways to use traditional skills, for the most part the “improvements” of technology merely introduced new sets of issues. When the American Isaac Singer patented his sewing machine in 1851, it was hailed as a saver of women’s back-breaking labor, both at home and in the factories. Fashion, however, responded to the opportunity by creating new and increasingly elaborate designs. As The Englishwomen’s Domestic Magazine complained in 1867, Great as is the saving of labour by the introduction of sewing machines, what lady can say that her sewing is less a tax upon her time and strength than it was before the sewing machine appeared? But this is not the machine’s fault; it is the fault of human nature. As soon as lovely woman discovers she can make ten stitches in the time that one used to require, a desire seizes her to put in ten times as many stitches in every garment as she formerly did.70

In a suave rhetorical move, the author of this article blamed “lovely woman”—in other words, female consumers—for the latest fashions. Yet magazines such as the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in which the article appeared printed the patterns and fashion plates that allowed new styles to circulate. No matter who was to blame for the vagaries of fashion, its production depended on the unregulated labor of working-class women and on the disposable time and income of middleand upper-class women. Linton was not the only cultural critic to use the categories of plain and fancy work to signify class differences. Harriet Martineau (1802–1876), known as a social reformer by her contemporaries yet a believer not so much in political agitation as in individual change, published essays on a variety of topics between 1822 and 1864. Throughout her 42-year career, Martineau maintained an interest in recording working- and lower middle-class culture. She described herself as a writer who “could popularise, while she could neither discover or invent.”71 Yet Martineau certainly underestimated her importance to Victorian society. As Herbert Northcote observes, “the study of that age would be incomplete without considering her, both as a writer and as a social reformer.”72 In 1859, Harriet Martineau published the article “Female Industry” in the Edinburgh Review. In her article she considered the education of workingclass girls. Although her article focused on working-class women, not middleclass women like Linton’s “The Modern Revolt,” Martineau also lamented the alleged absence of what she called “traditional” education. Martineau’s defense of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (Oct. 1867). Quoted in Walkley 6. Harriet Martineau, Obituary, The Daily News (June 29, 1876). 72 Herbert Northcote, introduction to Harriet Martineau, Broomfield and Mitchell 33–6: 35. 70 71

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traditional skills had a precedent in her personal life; early in her career, Martineau took in needlework to support herself, “doing needlework by day and writing by night.”73 One of Martineau’s primary concerns in the 1859 essay was that workingclass girls had lost the skills that would give them usefulness as well as personal pleasure. She asserted and lamented the ostensible fact that “a factory-girl cannot make her own clothes.”74 She worried that instead of mending the clothes they already had, “factory girls” wasted their limited resources buying new, fashionable, ready-made clothes (45, 58). Like Linton, Martineau feared that the “art of sewing seems well-nigh lost in England” (62). By “sewing,” she meant plain sewing, for she went on to agree with a report by a Mr. Norris, which ridiculed working-class girls’ schools for teaching fancy work such as “crochet and worsted work,” but not more useful plain work: “[T]hey have no religious instruction, no discipline, no industrial training; they are humored in every sort of conceit, are called ‘Miss Smith’ and ‘Miss Brown,’ and go into service at fourteen or fifteen, skilled in crochet and worsted work, but unable to darn a hole or cut out a frock, hating household work and longing to be milliners or ladies’ maids. While this is called education, no wonder that people cry out that education is ruining our servants, and doing more harm than good!” (69)

Implicit in both Martineau’s and Linton’s distinctions between plain and fancy work were several assumptions about class. These assumptions had a long history in British culture and did not originate with Linton and Martineau. Throughout the nineteenth century, cultural critics worried about the invisibility and the diminution of middle-class women’s work, at the same time that they criticized working-class women for not working hard enough, for wasting the resources available to them, or for laboring mutely under oppressive working conditions. In 1838, for example, The Workwoman’s Guide criticized working-class women for not making their clothing at home and instead relying (as all other women did) on dressmakers for the complicated work of dressmaking.75 Over 30 years later, Linton and Martineau launched a similar critique and hoped that working- and middle-class women would utilize the traditional skills of home sewing not only to manage household resources wisely, but also to find personal fulfillment. Yet as Janet Arnold queries in response to the 1838 Workwoman’s Guide comment, why is it that working-class women should be vilified for buying their clothing, when dressmaking was considered a skilled trade, one that required ample space to work, not to mention expensive tools such as shears and years of training?76 The defense of home sewing was even more problematic by the 73

Hamilton 71. Harriet Martineau, “Female Industry,” Edinburgh Review (Apr. 1859), reprinted in Hamilton 29–70: 56. Further references to “Female Industry” are given in the text. 75 Quoted in Arnold 224. 76 See Arnold. 74

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time Linton published “The Modern Revolt.” In 1870, the sewing machine was in wide use in the quickly developing ready-made clothing industry. Sizing had improved, a wider range of clothing had become available, and distribution was more widespread. This meant that people could now more easily and affordably purchase cheap ready-made clothing that actually fit. Why would anyone sew an entire garment by hand, if she had the option of purchasing one more inexpensively and without investing hours of labor? Although sewing machines were available for purchase, they were still considered a luxury, and very few women of the working classes would have had the disposable income necessary to purchase one, much less the physical space to store it. Furthermore, as I will discuss in the next chapter, in the 1870s, the fashionable silhouette was nearing its most elaborate and complicated incarnation. Elaborate bustles, numerous ruffles, tailored cuirass bodices, and a wealth of trimming and piping all required extensive skill, labor, and time. A dressmaker or ready-made factory worker—even one who catered to the tastes and budgets of working- or lower middle-class clients—would have been in a much better position to imitate these fashionable styles than a workingclass woman who probably had already worked a 12-hour day by the time she even thought about sewing. Indeed, she may have been the invisible woman who sewed the ready-made clothing in the first place. Underlying all of these critiques was an ongoing tendency to condemn working-class women for any desire to appear fashionable, as well as for failing to adhere to an idealized standard of neat and tidy domestic labor. Even as writers such as Martineau sincerely anguished over the abhorrent conditions under which working-class women labored in factories and squalid dressmaker’s shops, they also articulated a well-nigh unachievable ideal for working-class female labor. Content, efficient, and industrious, this female laborer materialized as Martineau’s “white-aproned tidy housewife, with her knitting in her hands, or a shirt for her husband on her lap,” as opposed to the “[s]lattern in her cheap, tawdry showfinery” (63). In their defense of “traditional” women’s labor and education, Eliza Lynn Linton and Harriet Martineau foreshadowed the concerns Olive Schreiner would raise in Woman and Labor. They also romanticized the past. Although Linton imagined that her advocacy for middle-class women’s traditional work offered a fresh response to a new problem, in reality the concern over women’s domestic labor had developed much earlier in the century. And while Martineau advocated better working conditions and educational opportunities for workingclass women, she nevertheless relied on middle- and upper-class perceptions of working-class labor. Uncritically using longstanding class stereotypes, Martineau and Linton recapitulated issues that had sparked heated debate throughout the century: middle- and upper-class women worried about their own usefulness and the oppression of needlewomen, while they were admonishing working-class women to be more industrious. The debate over women’s traditional sewing represented broader changes in women’s education and the labor for which that education prepared them.

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The Workbasket and the Writing Desk: Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926) In 1929, Virginia Woolf published what was to become a required text for late twentieth-century women’s studies courses, A Room of One’s Own. In her appraisal of female authors and female writing, Woolf claimed that every woman needs “money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). Surprisingly, Woolf’s famous “room of one’s own,” now so incessantly invoked as to seem pedestrian, bears an uncanny likeness to a fictional room invented by a late Victorian author Woolf considered a “rather distant and unfamiliar figure.”77 The author Woolf pitied as “one half of a great writer” was none other than Olive Schreiner, the South African “freethinker” whose 1883 bestseller, The Story of an African Farm, comforted many a Victorian torn between childhood faith and Darwinian atheism. In Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926), published two years before Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, Schreiner’s protagonist Rebekah cordons off a section of her children’s bedroom for writing. In that cramped yet private space, Rebekah locks away her books and manuscripts, her microscope and the evidence of her forays into amateur science. It certainly seems odd that Woolf would deny any debt to “distant and unfamiliar” Schreiner and her “room of one’s own” when her modernist contemporary D. H. Lawrence had his heroine Ursula Brangwen read Woman and Labor to inspire nascent independence.78 Olive Schreiner’s corpus includes allegorical stories, collected under the titles Dreams (1890), Dream Life and Real Life (1893), and So Then There are Dreams (1901); a novella about racist South African politics, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897); the extended essay I discussed earlier, Woman and Labor (1911); and three novels, The Story of an African Farm (1883), From Man to Man, or, Perhaps Only (published posthumously in 1926), and Undine (published posthumously in 1929). In the 1880s, the heady agnosticism of Schreiner’s first novel, The Story of an African Farm, ricocheted through British society. The frisson it sparked landed Schreiner a place among late Victorian freethinkers from all schools: socialists, aesthetes, suffragists, and agnostics alike slaked their thirst with Schreiner’s bibulous philosophizing. The pre-Freudian sexologist Havelock Ellis adored Schreiner, becoming her lover (supposedly they never consummated their relationship even though they did examine Ellis’s sperm under a microscope) and personal pharmacist (Schreiner complained of a variety of physical and mental maladies, and Ellis prescribed the medications she took throughout her 77 In her review of Cronwright’s The Letters of Olive Schreiner (1924), Woolf also acknowledged that Schreiner was “the equal of our greatest novelists” and “too uncompromising a figure to be disposed of.” New Republic (March 18, 1925). Quoted in Claudia Roth Pierpont, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (New York: Vintage, 2000) 26. 78 Ursula Brangwen was the protagonist of Lawrence’s The Rainbow, published in 1915 and blacklisted for obscenity.

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life—potassium bromide and quinine among others).79 Through her membership in the Fellowship of the New Life, one of the most prominent socialist groups in London, she met and became friends with many socialists, including Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter. Sally Ledger notes the emotional intensity and desire of a “love letter” from Marx to Schreiner, in a time period in which “same-sex love between women had not yet been coded as ‘lesbian.’”80 Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw penned rave reviews for Dreams, Edward Carpenter invited her to stay at his commune in Derbyshire (the one that inspired E.M. Forster’s Maurice), and when Woman and Labor was published in 1911 it was lauded by suffragists and socialists alike. Schreiner’s From Man to Man occupied her throughout her literary career. One day in 1873, 18-year-old Schreiner finished reading The Descent of Man. That same day, she put pen to paper and began to write a female version of natural selection, what would become From Man to Man, or, Perhaps Only.81 Schreiner worked on it for 47 years, but she never finished it, and although it was her first novel, it was not published until 1926, six years after her death. Schreiner’s husband, Samuel Cronwright, published it, and in his introduction to the 1926 edition, he explained the origin of the title: “This title is taken from a sentence of John (later Lord) Morley’s, which runs as follows, except that I have forgotten the adjective: ‘From man to man nothing matters but … charity.’ The missing word connotes ‘boundless,’ ‘all-embracing,’ or some such large and generous attitude of mind.”82 On one of the manuscripts, Schreiner had written the subtitle “Perhaps Only,” taken from a line in the novel that reads, “Perhaps only God knew what the light and shadows were.”83 Perhaps only God, if there was one for agnostic Schreiner, knew the ending of the novel, for she never completed it. (In his 1926 edition, Cronwright added several possible endings of his own, which later editions have since removed.) In 1888, Schreiner wrote to her beloved Ellis, “Rebekah is me; I don’t know which is which anymore. But Bertie is me, and Drummond is me, and all is me, only not Veronica and Mrs. Drummond (except a little!). Sometimes I really don’t know whether I am I or one of the others.”84 Despite—or perhaps because of—Schreiner’s enmeshment with her characters, she never wrestled the novel into a satisfactory shape. A crazy quilt of a novel, From Man to Man’s ragged edges betray the episodic nature of its composition. Its abrupt ending leaves readers with unsettling questions. Pierpont 16. See also Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (London: Virago, 1989). 80 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) 122–5. 81 Pierpont 27. 82 See Samuel Cronwright, ed., From Man to Man (1926; London: Virago, 1982) 495. 83 Line taken from “The Prelude: The Child’s Day,” From Man to Man 67. 84 Olive Schreiner, “To Havelock Ellis,” 24 Jan. 1888, The Letters of Olive Schreiner, 1876–1920, ed. Samuel Cronwright (London: Unwin, 1924) 129. 79

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Why couldn’t Schreiner complete this, her most beloved novel? Why did she continue to write and rewrite, to join in new colors but never finish the project? From Man to Man plays with threads that run through her oeuvre: women’s labor, sexuality, and intellectual freedom. If From Man to Man held all the materials for knitting together a textured narrative about the themes that occupied her throughout her life, why couldn’t Schreiner finish the novel? And if, as she laments in Woman and Labor, women’s spinning wheels have all been broken, why does From Man to Man highlight the practical, creative potential that sewing continues to provide individual women? Approaching this baggy novel from a perhaps unlikely perspective, dual literacy, will help us begin to answer these questions. Set on a farm in colonial South Africa, From Man to Man traces the development of two sisters, Rebekah and Bertie. Rebekah, deeply intellectual and trapped in the confines of colonial and patriarchal society, marries unhappily but finds freedom and solace in her children and her writing. Bertie follows the path of the fallen woman. Tragically misunderstood, she eventually disappears into the sordid underworld of London. Although men play pivotal roles in the novel, the primary actors are all women. For all the female characters, sewing forms an integral part of the rhythm and ritual of domestic duties. Work-baskets or bags in hand, the women sew or knit together. While they sew, the women talk. On the farm, conversations among Rebekah, Bertie, and their “little mother” almost always unfold over sewing. Just as the “tick, tick” of the women’s stitching adds a background rhythm to their humming voices, so too does that stitching propel the plot (128). In these exchanges of information, the plot moves forward. Talk weaves the characters together in increasingly complex ways, and the fabric of social exchange becomes more and more finely and intricately embroidered. What is most compelling in these scenes of social exchange is how speech mirrors the activity of sewing. Sewing involves taking separate pieces of cloth and stitching them together. A row of stitches becomes a seam, and each new seam draws together the pieces of material. Two-dimensional shapes with no apparent relationship become, through the trained vision of the needleworker, a threedimensional whole. With each new seam in place, each new connection made, the jumble of random shapes transforms into something recognizable, something familiar: a bodice, a shirt, a pillowcase. What is strange, unrelated, and useless becomes identifiable and real. The elision of speech and sewing is most evident in Bertie’s storyline. In Schreiner’s rendition of a figure Victorians would have swiftly recognized as that of the fallen woman, she relied on her reader’s understanding of that most mundane aspect of women’s work, sewing. The series of exchanges between women that seals Bertie’s fate begins in Cape Town, where Bertie has fled to live with her older sister Rebekah. Bertie abandoned the farm that was her home because she had fallen in love with Rebekah’s brother-in-law, John-Ferdinand, who had come to visit. John-Ferdinand rapturously worships Bertie as a living incarnation of womanly purity, until Bertie reveals her secret—that in her

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girlhood she “gave herself” to a male tutor. The reality is that Bertie was most likely seduced and possibly raped. The reader really does not know exactly what happened, because the rupture in Bertie’s relationship with her tutor is represented only through silence—Bertie’s silence, ennui, and mental anguish, and the tutor’s hasty disappearance from the farm. Regardless, upon hearing Bertie’s tortured confession, John-Ferdinand stonily rejects her and her shameful “sin.” Cape Town offers Bertie an escape from the unbearable. Safely away from John-Ferdinand and the farm yet deeply depressed, Bertie grows languid. Those things that occupied her time—needlework, pretty clothes—fall neglected to the workbasket (149). What lifts her from this malaise is a neighbor, Mrs. Drummond. Mrs. Drummond is garrulous, fashionable, and gently derided by the men of the neighborhood for her perpetually absent husband. She is also an expert needleworker, and when she comes to sit with Bertie on the verandah, she brings her fancy work: “Almost every afternoon she tripped over with the little silk bag over her arm; the bag varied to match each costume, and in it she carried the fancy work she was always doing for church bazaars” (152).85 All afternoon long, she rattles on about dresses, shops, and a bit of gossip about “why some lady was never called on, or how a certain young girl was getting herself talked about” (152). As the two women’s friendship deepens, news arrives that John-Ferdinand has married Veronica Grey, a conniving woman and compulsive knitter, who had come to live on the farm before Bertie left. Bertie retreats to her bedroom for a few days, but Mrs. Drummond draws her back onto the porch—and beyond. Under Mrs. Drummond’s tutelage, Bertie turns into a social butterfly. Dances, dinners, croquet parties—the two women spend as much time making the dresses for their whirl of social events as they do attending them. Bertie receives three proposals of marriage, all of which she refuses. Afternoons chatting over the workbasket lead to elaborate social conquests, and Mrs. Drummond is the thread drawing the two together. Yet this is only the first seam in the story of Bertie’s fall. A few months later, John-Ferdinand and his new wife Veronica Grey arrive for a visit. Rebekah and Bertie conveniently take themselves away to Rebekah’s small farm while the newlyweds stay at their Cape Town home. Now the partners have changed. Instead of Mrs. Drummond and Bertie sewing and talking together on the porch, Mrs. Drummond and Veronica Grey assume their places in the exchange. Veronica knits and Mrs. Drummond works on an altar cloth, and the women gossip of many things, including, of course, their absent hosts, Rebekah and Bertie. After rifling through Rebekah’s and Bertie’s private possessions, Veronica finds herself 85

Mrs. Drummond spends the majority of her time doing church embroidery. Between 1850 and 1900, ecclesiastical embroidery became an increasingly popular pastime for middle- and upper-class women and was held up to very high standards. See my discussion of church embroidery in Chapter 5. Also see Chapter 5, “Church Embroidery,” in Barbara Morris, Victorian Embroidery.

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insatiably curious about the reason for John-Ferdinand’s break with Bertie. She wheedles the story out of her husband, and before leaving for the Eastern Province, writes one letter—to Mrs. Drummond. The second seam is complete. Upon her return, Bertie is surprised to find Mrs. Drummond’s visits less frequent than before. When Mrs. Drummond does bring over the work bag one afternoon, it is with a purpose. Punctuated by questions about tatting patterns and featherstitching, the conversation moves toward sensitive ground. Mrs. Drummond asks whether Bertie ever went to school, slowly reinforcing the final stitch in Bertie’s humiliation. The truth of the matter—or rather Veronica’s and Mrs. Drummond’s version of the truth about Bertie’s sexual history—is of course revealed in a public setting. At a dance, Bertie finds herself shunned. Whispers swirl around her, eyes steadily avoid her gaze. Shamed and reviled, Bertie hurries home and leaves a few days later for an aunt’s. Like stitches and seams, words and sentences knit together events, ideas, and people. A few words on a porch, about girls who get themselves talked about, or whether or not Bertie had a tutor—these words can, through the vision of Mrs. Drummond and Veronica Grey, become a convincing story. In the eyes of the community, it is even more than a story—it is a truth. The story is the completed garment, the three-dimensional object, stitched, reinforced and coherent, seemingly irrefutable. Indeed it is irrefutable. Everyone recognizes the story, for everyone has seen or heard stories like it before, of girls who got themselves talked about or had scandalous relations with male tutors. Yet underneath and between the seams and the stitches, there is the negative space of the unknown and the unknowable. Gossip is like a garment: made up of things said and not said, seen and unseen, yet when organized into a cohesive whole, somehow undeniable. In this sequence of scenes it becomes clear that sewing fills more than merely the functional and metaphorical purpose of creating an opportunity for conversation among the female characters; it also provides a basis of knowledge by which women read each other. The most striking example of feminine reading occurs in London, where Bertie has ended up after a rift with her beloved aunt. Aunt MaryAnna grew uncomfortable with the gossip surrounding Bertie and shipped her off for home on the earliest postcart, with a man named simply “the Jew” to watch over her. “The Jew”—he is given no other name—is “a money lender and diamond spectator” (329). Rather than go home, Bertie instead allowed the Jew to take her all the way to England, to his home in Bloomsbury. There Bertie spends her days, trapped inside her keeper’s house with nothing to do but admire the pretty clothes he brings her. Here Schreiner utilized the anti-Semitic stereotype of the rapacious Jew who seduces unwitting young women, a characterization that appeared in many Victorian novels. While “the Jew” in Schreiner’s narrative does rescue Bertie from colonial insularity, it is only to lead her into another kind of danger. One day, Bertie wanders through the streets wearing a disheveled outfit—a fur coat thrown over a pink dressing gown, with her petticoat showing (374). In this attire, she happens upon a woman and her daughter, described as “two ladies” (374).

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The women stand outside a shopfront admiring a collection of new hats and dresses for autumn. Bertie studies the pair, reading their hair and attire according to a familiar standard, that of her sister Rebekah. The older woman does her hair differently from Rebekah and is older, but she wears a brown outfit “just as Rebekah might have dressed” (375). When Bertie reaches out to touch the woman’s sleeve, she finds her own clothing read, albeit with a different reaction: For an instant she looked at Bertie and took it all in—the beautiful round white face with its fringed eyes, the little fifteen-guinea French bonnet tied a little askew on the natural curls, the ninety-guinea sealskin coat with the edge of pink silk showing below it, and the points of white petticoat with priceless lace that had tipped here and there in the mud; she looked at the little house-shoe with the paste buckle and the ungloved hand with the rings. All her face hardened. If she had asked her why she had touched her, Bertie would have spoken; but she turned and said to her daughter, “Dear, we must go now.” (375)

The woman at the shop window protects her daughter from Bertie’s disgrace, just as Aunt Mary-Anna had told Bertie that she had to send her away in order to protect her own daughters’ reputations. In this scene, Schreiner clearly critiques women’s censoring and exiling of each other, a topic she explores in much of her writing, particularly in the short stories, “The Woman’s Rose” and “I Thought I Stood.”86 But Schreiner laments more than the fact that women fail to support each other. In this scene, she considers how women educate their daughters to read and monitor each other: through their clothing. Bertie’s natural beauty, combined with muddied expensive clothing more appropriate for evening or house wear than a stroll through the shopping district, signals her “fallen” status to the prim middle-class woman in her “sealskin jacket with a little brown bonnet and skirt” (375). That the woman dresses like Rebekah further cements her respectability, for, despite her choice not to wear corsets and her recycling of the same dress year after year, Rebekah is always simply and tastefully dressed. In twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist theory and criticism, much has been said about the ways women use knowledge to police and control one another in order to ensure particular types of behavior.87 But what few critics have examined is how consistently women’s literacy in dress culture gets called upon as the means of knowing, of reading, other women. Schreiner does not need explicitly to outline why the woman at the shop window rejects Bertie or why Bertie falls into a deep and irretrievable depression after this encounter, nor does she need to spell 86 Olive Schreiner, “I Thought I Stood,” Dreams (1898; Boston: Little, 1910); “The Woman’s Rose, Dream Life and Real Life (London: T. F. Unwin, 1893). 87 Many feminists draw on the work of Michel Foucault, in particular his “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish, in which he argues that in an authoritarian structure, subjects become “docile bodies,” self-regulating and self-censoring. See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1977).

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out why Bertie’s clothing changes over the course of the novel—from innocent white muslin dresses with blue sashes to the jumbled, garish ensembles of a kept woman. For here Schreiner relies on her imagined reader’s dual literacy. Not only the characters, but the audience, as well, are expected to have a sophisticated knowledge of dress culture and its significance. For Schreiner’s late Victorian readers, too much attention to dress provided an obvious clue to a woman’s tendency toward social conniving, sexual immorality, or, at the very least, mental vacuity. From Lydia Bennett of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) to Blanche Ingram of Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) to Rosamund Vincy of Middlemarch (1871–1872), the girl who spends her time cooing over lavish fabrics and pretty ball gowns always means trouble. The reflective protagonist with her vibrant inner life, by contrast, reaps unconventional rewards— intellectual and artistic fulfillment, or, if nothing else, the comfort of knowing herself to be self-sufficient. Schreiner’s fallen woman, Bertie, would have been easily recognizable to her intended audience. In the eighteenth century, William Hogarth’s famous series of six engravings, “A Harlot’s Progress” (1732) displayed the familiar storyline of the innocent country girl who comes to the big city to work as a seamstress or servant, only to find herself seduced by fine clothes into a life of prostitution and crime. When Moll arrives in the city, a workbag with thread and scissors dangles demurely on her wrist, but in the subsequent engravings we track her journey from gaudily dressed mistress to common prostitute to criminal and syphilitic pauper and finally to a grisly death.88 In the Victorian period, characters such as Ruth Hilton of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth and Marian Erle of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh provided examples of the fallen woman type. As Deborah Anna Logan explains: Both characters are exploited while young, ignorant, and vulnerable; both are working class yet drawn with an ‘inherent’ moral purity not acquired through birth or marriage; both bear illegitimate children in whom they delight and through whom their social ‘sin’ finds redemption; both are apprenticed seamtsresses and thus vulnerable to exploitation on several levels; both refuse marital legitimation; and finally, neither achieves social integration.89

Logan argues that while these two characters embody the quintessential fallen woman archetype, most fallen women characters are in fact middle- or upperclass.90 Marian Valverde has explored the close link between a “love of finery” and fallenness in the Victorian imagination.91 Bertie’s love of fine clothing, her William Hogarth, “A Harlot’s Progress,” Engravings by Hogarth, ed. Sean Shesgreen (New York: Dover, 1973). 89 Deborah Anna Logan, Fallenness in Victorian Women’s Writing: Marry, Stitch, Die, or Do Worse (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998) 47. 90 Logan 27–8. 91 See Mariana Valverde, “The Love of Finery: Fashion and the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse.” Victorian Studies 32.2 (Winter 1989): 169–89. 88

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skill with a needle, and her hyperbolic innocence would have immediately cued Schreiner’s readers for her inevitable fall. Yet Schreiner’s palpable sympathy for her fallen woman character—not to mention her blistering criticism of the sexual double standard that created and condemned women like Bertie and the fact that Rebekah searches frantically for her lost sister—would have surprised them. Or at least Schreiner, like Gaskell and Barrett Browning before her, probably hoped that it might. The differences between fallen Bertie and intellectual Rebekah become clear early in the novel. On two different occasions, Bertie imagines that because of her love for fine clothing and needlework, her sister Rebekah finds her trivial and stupid (154). Bertie admires Rebekah for her ability to “read and think,” for being so “clever,” acknowledging that she herself “can understand about work [needlework] and such things” but lamenting that she “can’t talk about books and all the clever things other people talk of” (154, 118–19). Indeed, when Rebekah warns John-Ferdinand not to break her sister’s heart, she informs him that Bertie has led an isolated life. She tells him, “Bertie does not know even the world of books” (120).92 Bertie’s primary form of self-expression is through fabric. To show her affection for her Aunt Mary-Anna, Bertie revamps her aunt’s entire wardrobe and even reupholsters all her furniture (318). When the girls in Aunt Mary-Anna’s community initially snub her for her stunning beauty, Bertie gets them to like her by helping them design and make new dresses (319–20). After learning that JohnFerdinand and Veronica have had a child, Bertie spends countless hours working on a delicate baby’s gown, which she embroiders exquisitely and painstakingly. It is as she works on this garment that the narrator remarks on the indecipherability and the impotence of sewing as a form of expression. As the narrator grieves, “In that torn bit of brown leather brace worked through and through with yellow silk … lies all the passion of some woman’s soul finding voiceless expression. Has the pen or the pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human race as the needle?” (323). Bertie uses her sewing to show affection and to communicate pain, to purchase other people’s admiration and to try to stitch their goodwill toward her into permanence. Yet Bertie’s attempts to express herself, or to engage meaningfully with other people, ultimately fail. The tragedy of her story is that the traditional elements of Victorian womanly education—good looks, proper manners, docility, expert needleworking—neither protect nor advance her interests. In the end, she is shunned by society, for having too much of what that society says that it desires in womanhood. No wonder then that Bertie is described again and again as larger than the average woman, as “queenly” and “magnificent,” but with a small head and with feet so small she almost totters on them (132, 228, 231, 317). Rebekah, on the other hand, focuses most of her energy on reading, writing, and thinking. She is intensely intellectual, and entire passages of the book are made up of her essayistic reflections on women’s development and on the 92 It is interesting to note who taught Bertie how to read and how to sew. Rebekah taught her to read, and her “little mother,” consistently represented as frivolous and unsubstantial, taught her to sew (167).

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evolution of humanity. Her attention to dress is minimal but sometimes radical. Mrs. Drummond scorns her for wearing the same brown dress year after year, and coloured servant girls ridicule her for not wearing a corset (140). Yet even though Rebekah wastes little time fussing over her clothing, she does spend a great deal of time sewing. Although her primary medium for selfexpression comes in the form of writing, it is Rebekah’s sewing that fuels this intellectual pursuit. As she sews for her children, she thinks and plans, often moving from the workbasket directly to the writing desk. At the center of From Man to Man is Rebekah’s 50-page essay, which is included as part of the novel. In preparation for composing that essay, Rebekah sews: After a time she drew the basket nearer her and began to work. For nearly an hour she sewed on buttons and darned little worn places in little garments, till there was nothing left in the basket but a few pairs of socks and stockings; she took one up and began to darn it, but soon put it with the mended things in the basket with the unmended at the top, and then leaned back again on her chair, resting. … After a time she drew her chair closer to the desk, and from one of the top drawers took a book. It was an exercise book in a black cover. She laid it open on the desk. (175)

The book that she opens is one of several writing books she has kept since she was a child. Reading over her old writing inspires new thoughts, and the “long discussion with herself” begins (177). Sewing not only provides a quiet space for philosophical reflection and mental wrestling, but it brings Rebekah happiness: “She was happy … when she sat at work at the children’s clothes” (240). Sewing fosters active inactivity, a time when a busy mother can think her own thoughts, even while caring for the material needs of her family. Sewing also reveals secrets—the most wretched secret of all being her husband’s chronic infidelity (257, 264). It is Rebekah’s ability to read and interpret dress that finally exposes the terrible truth. One day Rebekah discovers an overcoat that looks like her husband’s lying in a bedroom next to Mrs. Drummond’s cloak. Upon closer inspection, she sees in the pocket a blue muffler embroidered with initials she herself had marked (266). Thinking back on her husband’s relationship with Mrs. Drummond, she remembers how much he had always admired her dress (256). Then, after she suspects Frank has moved on to a “coarse and unpleasant girl” with “very short dresses” for her 15 years, she invites the girl to her house on the pretense of buying crocheted lace from her (273–4, 279). One day in the street, a woman runs up to Frank; Rebekah notices her “red dress and a black bonnet with red roses in it” and surmises the truth about their relationship (283). And finally, one night Rebekah follows her husband to their servant girl’s room, only to discover the girl alone, wearing “a red striped flannel petticoat and a pair of crimson satin corsets, embroidered with white flowers; above the corsets, from a mass of frilled white lace, showed her puny black arms and bare shoulders; on the bed beside her lay a white nightdress heavy with bows” (301). The girl is about to put on her plain serge dress, and now Rebekah knows why the girl has smirked at

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her for weeks. With little or no narrative explanation, the reader is expected to read these tiny details and, along with Rebekah, to grasp their significance. Rebekah never discovers Frank in the act of infidelity, but the clothing and attitudes of his mistresses tell her everything she needs to know. Literacy in dress culture provides Rebekah with valuable information and opportunities: accurately reading other women’s dress helps Rebekah to recognize her husband’s affairs, and sewing gives her a quiet, restful place to know her own thoughts. Even so, we might imagine that her writing, more than her sewing, provides an efficacious means of expressing creative intent and desire. Yet more often than not, Rebekah’s writing proves futile: her husband Frank repeatedly refuses to read the long letters she writes him about her desire to make their marriage more satisfactory for them both (252). By refusing to read her words, he invalidates their existence. His unwillingness to receive her communication renders it impotent, and Rebekah ultimately accepts this rejection, destroying the unread letters and instead issuing telegram-like ultimata (which he also ignores). In trying to know her husband’s desires and to articulate her own, Rebekah discovers that her literacy in dress culture, rather than her writing, better conveys the truth. Because Rebekah is fully fluent in both dress and print cultures, she survives, whereas her sister Bertie does not. Even though Rebekah suffers intensely and nearly commits suicide over her husband’s deception and her feelings of isolation, Rebekah is a stronger, more resilient character. Although the novel breaks off without an ending, Rebekah does meet a man, Drummond (Mrs. Drummond’s husband), who promises to be her intellectual and emotional equal. Drummond undertakes a search for the missing Bertie, and Rebekah allows him to examine her fossil collection in the sacred sanctum of her study. Toward the end of the novel, Rebekah dons a gorgeous black dress with a silver star pattern, one she had copied years before from one of Mrs. Drummond’s gowns. Strands of silver adorn her hair and her waist. Her children admire her appearance, exclaiming “Oh, how beautiful! How beautiful!” (415). The beauty of Rebekah’s dress, with its deep color and celestial pattern, reflects the beauty of her mind. There seems to be more hope for Rebekah than for her sister Bertie because she demonstrates multiple literacies; she has the ability to communicate in more than one language, in more than one art form. In New Woman Fiction, Ann Heilmann discusses the depiction of the woman artist figure in late Victorian fiction. She argues, In the New Woman novel the external conflict between artist and society is displaced into the psyche of the heroine. Torn between her creative urges and social expectations, the heroine is painfully aware that, whatever course of action she decides to take will disqualify her either as a woman or as an artist.93

One of the ways this self-division gets expressed in fiction is through “doubling.” Heilmann argues that doubling is a consistent characteristic of New Woman 93 Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 163.

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novels, in which “the futility of the protagonist’s struggle is reflected in the fates of other female characters” (164). If, in the figure of Bertie, late Victorian readers encountered Schreiner’s reworking of the tragic fallen woman type, her older sister Rebekah offered another vision of late Victorian womanhood. Like Lyndall of African Farm, erudite Rebekah grapples with women’s need for useful labor, sexual equality, and political representation. It is perhaps more flattering to the feminist reader (both Victorian and twenty-first-century) to identify with Rebekah and to see Bertie’s misfortune as an example of what Rebekah escapes. Yet, if we follow the novel’s portrayal of dual literacy, it becomes evident that Schreiner uses conventional character types even as she rewrites them. Both Bertie and Rebekah demonstrate dual literacy in dress and print culture throughout the novel, and each figure leans more towards one particular type of language. Bertie stitches her emotions into fabric, but she is subject to misinterpretation. Rebekah fights to express herself through intellectual pursuits, and sewing creates opportunities to think and write. Ultimately, however, both sisters are frustrated by a society that will not hear or acknowledge their literacy in either meaning system. I certainly see doubling at play in From Man to Man. When, however, we expand our view of the artist to embrace Schreiner’s—to accept the artist as both writer and needleworker—even more profound complexities arise.94 In Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism, Carolyn Burdett argues that over the course of her career, Schreiner’s 94 Schreiner’s work demonstrates doubling not only horizontally (between sisters— Rebekah and Bertie in From Man to Man and Lyndall and Em in African Farm), but also vertically (between mothers and daughters). It is curious that Schreiner used her mother’s name for both of her feminist protagonists—Rebekah of From Man to Man and Lyndall of The Story of an African Farm. In 1837 Rebekah Lyndall followed her evangelical missionary husband to Africa at the age of nineteen and encountered there the hardships of a harsh climate, few friends, “gross sensual heathen” (her words), and a feckless husband who dragged the family from one lonely outpost to another. In her depiction of the fictional Rebekah, Schreiner recalls another Rebekah, the educated and decorous English mother who rarely found time for her beloved books, much less “her French and Italian, her flower painting and music,” after a long day of grinding toil (quoted in Pierpont 11). Schreiner’s tragic female figure, yearning for intellectual freedom outside the bounds of conventional British femininity, appears in another form in African Farm in the character of Lyndall. These two feminist protagonists may owe their names to Schreiner’s mother, but they clearly function autobiographically as well: like her restless heroines, Schreiner chafed against the strictures of colonial British society. Schreiner’s real mother did not inspire feminist or freethinking accolades. She hovers in the background of From Man to Man, in the “little mother,” a feeble-minded invalid who fails to provide adequate education for Bertie and Rebekah. (Schreiner’s own mother shipped her sons off to boarding school but spent barely a penny on her daughters’ education.) In The Story of an African Farm, Schreiner invoked an even darker side of her mother: the brutal whipping that Waldo receives in the fuel house bears an alarming likeness to two beatings that Schreiner’s mother ruthlessly administered to her young daughter. See Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (London: Virago, 1989).

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liberal insistence that ‘lower’ races must be nurtured and ‘raised’ is radicalized by, on the one hand, a growing emphasis on the importance of difference (of peoples, cultures, and ways of doing things). On the other hand, she is bitter about claims of ‘progress’ which fail to understand or recognize common humanity— the sameness which exists in relation to difference—and thus achieves advance for some at the cost of others’ suffering and exploitation.95

Although I have not focused on Schreiner’s racial politics, Burdett’s point about Schreiner’s investment in both difference and sameness casts light on the relationship between Bertie and Rebekah. The two sisters’ narratives reflect the larger problems of women’s labor, education, and sexuality that haunt all of Schreiner’s writing. Their inability to express themselves effectively, either in print or in fabric, mirrors Schreiner’s contradictory working of dual literacy in the novel and her inability—or unwillingness—to formulate a clear response to the questions she raised again and again throughout her writing. As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, Schreiner claimed that she was Rebekah, and Bertie, and Drummond all at once. Schreiner herself embodied multiplicity: as New Woman and socialist, ecstatic acolyte and strident atheist, racist colonist and outspoken pacifist, dependent lover and outspoken suffragist, clingy invalid and intrepid freethinker, she refused to be pigeonholed into existing categories. Like many New Woman authors, she posed important and difficult questions and she reworked the novel form to better allow for those questions, but the answers to her queries ultimately eluded her. It seems that neither the novel form, nor late Victorian society, could contain the New Woman. As she wrote in Woman and Labor, “I am only comforted by the thought that perhaps all sincere and earnest search after truth, even where it fails to reach it, yet often comes so near to it that other minds more happily situated may be led, by pointing out its very limitations, to obtain a larger view” (13). As Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man illustrates so vividly, Victorian women writers’ dual literacy in print and dress culture afforded them a flexibility of vision. Bringing to the activity of writing a shared history of educational and linguistic experiences, women writers could rely on a projected female readership to interpret accurately the details of dress and sewing as well as of literary culture. Yet From Man to Man demonstrates that dual literacy did not provide homogeneous experiences for women writers or readers. Rather, like any language system, dual literacy could be understood and utilized in a variety of ways, many of them deeply conflicting. A needle dipped in blood, or the impetus for intellectual musing? Olive Schreiner refused to give a firm answer, leaving that question for the New Women who would follow in her footsteps.

95 Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 89. Emphasis in original.

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Chapter 3

Fashioning Women: The Victorian Corset The first purpose of Clothes … was not warmth or decency, but ornament. … Warmth he [the primitive human being] found in the toils of the chase; or amid dried leaves, in his hollow tree, in his bark shed, or natural grotto: but for Decoration he must have Clothes. Deformity has through long custom become to us beauty. Off with the corset!.. No, don’t give them to Biddy. Never fasten about another woman, in the sacred name of charity, the chains from which you have yourself escaped. … So burn up the corsets! … your “emancipation” … has from this moment begun!

In the final years of the nineteenth century, New Woman novelists continued to utilize women’s dual literacy in print and in cloth. Like earlier writers such as Olive Schreiner, New Woman writers of the 1890s assumed that their female readers understood a great deal about dress culture. This ideal reader certainly knew the basics of plain sewing: she could mend and darn, construct a simple garment, sew on buttons, and make a straight hem. More likely, however, her expertise exceeded these basic skills. If funds were limited, she might know how to take apart a gown and use it for a pattern, or how to alter an old dress to fit changing styles. When dressing her family, this ideal reader could deftly choose the appropriate fabric for a given season or occasion. If from a middle- or upper-class background, she also boasted the genteel hobby of fancy work. She could embroider just about anything—cushions, panels, clothing, or linens—and probably knew how to crochet or knit, as well. In her work bag, the ideal woman reader carried not only shears and a needle, but something more invisible, less tangible—a sophisticated knowledge of the social significance of clothing and of the etiquette surrounding even the simplest of garments. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Boston: James Monroe, 1840) 37, 28. Ada S. Ballin, The Science of Dress in Theory and Practice (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1885) 151. Quoted in Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) 53. Ballin was a British philologist who lectured, among other things, on matters of health and dress.  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, What to Wear? (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873) 78–9. In this book, Phelps, an American author and reformer, offered a step-by-step plan on how to rid oneself of the corset. She queries resistant readers, “Are women born in whalebone jackets?” (80).  

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The corset was one of those garments, but the interpretive challenge it posed was far from simple. This lowly piece of underwear ignited a furor of debate that burned steadily throughout the nineteenth century, reaching its zenith in the 1880s and 1890s. For New Woman novelists entering the fray, the corset could signify just about anything, making the reactions it provoked particularly resonant—and volatile. Since the early Victorian period, dress reformers and doctors had blamed tight-lacing—lacing a corset to extremely small dimensions—for a variety of female maladies, including neurasthenia and consumption. Corsetry was also vilified for its mental and moral risks: The Mother’s Book (1838) connected tightlacing with “habits that shun the light,” and in 1846, American phrenologist Orson S. Fowler argued that tight-lacing had “been shown to produce partial insanity, and also to excite impure desires.”  More commonly, people worried that lacing too tightly made women vain and trivial. It turned them into slaves to fashion, willing to deform their bodies into a silhouette characterized as unnatural, unhealthy, or, even worse, uncivilized. Despite these concerns, the corset remained an expected article of dress for all free-born British women throughout the Victorian and into the Edwardian periods. Contrary to Thorstein Veblen’s famous 1899 claim that only upper-class women wore corsets, allegedly as a sign of their “conspicuous consumption,” twenty-first-century historians agree that throughout the Victorian period the vast majority of women of all classes wore corsets. Choosing not to wear a corset, depending on the decade and one’s class and social circle, identified a woman as a prostitute, dress reformer, aesthete, or feminist. Yet despite the presence of alternative dress options, most Victorian women participated in the corset industry. Some championed the corset, whether as beauty and fashion experts writing in its defense, enterprising seamstresses creating new designs, or mothers fitting their daughters. Surprisingly, not even the suffrage movement consistently espoused dress reform. Corsetry, moreover, led to a number of contradictory cultural judgments. Although tight-lacers were accused of using the corset to arouse impure desires, not wearing a corset could nevertheless lead to charges of sexual promiscuity or moral laxity. In fact, the negative connotation of the word “loose” has its origins in prostitutes’ custom of not wearing corsets out of doors to attract customers. When laced to an “appropriate” size, the corset epitomized gentility; yet its purpose was to shape and display the feminine form to the greatest advantage. Perhaps even more complex was the shifting definition of the term “Nature.” For many, Greek ideals of beauty, as exemplified by the Venus de Milo and as Mrs. L. H. Sigourney, “Tight Dressing—Corsets,” The Mother’s Book (Aug. 1838) 170; and Orson S. Fowler, Intemperance and Tight-Lacing; Founded on the Laws of Life, as Developed by Phrenology and Physiology (New York, 1847; London, 1849) 33, 36–9.  Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; New York: Modern Library, 1934).  Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2003) 23. 

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advocated through Oxford classicism, were supposed to guide the Victorian woman’s fashion choices, for Venus represented a woman’s “natural” figure. As we will see, the association of Venus with a woman’s “natural” figure was widely used, by historians, artists, scientists, novelists, and even Mr. Punch. For others, however, classical ideals bore little connection to contemporary English experience, taste, or climate. This conflation of the terms “classical” and “natural” recapitulated the concerns of a larger, ongoing discussion about women’s “Nature” and therefore, their role in society. Defining women’s nature, normal figure, and appropriate dress served to authorize myriad visions of what women’s ideal role in society should be. For New Woman writers of the 1880s and 1890s, the corset—and the silhouettes it created—continued to fuel controversy. Many New Woman writers eschewed tight-lacing, if not the corset itself, as a symbol of women’s societal restrictions. For some, the novel served as a pulpit from which to preach the evils of tight-lacing: Sarah Grand, for example, gave her heroines ample time to ridicule corsetry as a “deformity” and as a metaphor for small-mindedness. Frances Willard’s snooty remark that “Niggardly waists and niggardly brains go together” seems to have been Grand’s motto. In From Man to Man (1926), the more subtle Olive Schreiner underscored her heroine Rebekah’s independence by having her refuse to wear a corset. New Woman writers’ relative openness about the corset squared with their sometimes bellicose disregard for social niceties—or for literary traditions about what was or was not appropriate content for a novel. Even at the end of the century, talking about women’s undergarments could come across as practically immoral to the conservative reader, merely gauche to the forward-thinking. In either case, the corset endured as an explosive symbol, and for this reason, even New Woman writers sometimes alluded to its effects (a narrow waist, an ample bosom) obliquely. For a reader to pick up the cues provided by a character’s dress choices, he or she had to possess literacy of at least two kinds—literacy in dress culture and literacy in the print culture surrounding women’s dress. When reading about women’s corsets and the silhouettes those corsets created, readers of New Woman fiction had to navigate a minefield of opinion. Along with their New Woman contemporaries, Grand and Schreiner created protagonists who rejected the corset and its hold over women’s bodies and minds. Their sometimes searing criticism of extreme corsetry reflected the success and the spirit of the dress reform movement and so-called “artistic” styles. At the same time, their reticence to completely abandon mainstream fashion reflected issues of aesthetics and class. Could a New Woman wear the latest fashions, which, as we will see, required particular types of corsetry? If a woman admired mainstream fashion as beautiful, did that mean she was a slave to fashion, a hobbling nitwit duped by an oppressive society? Most New Woman writers were middle-class, and the  Frances Willard (1839–1898) was an American temperance leader. Quoted in Helen Gilbert Ecob, The Well-Dressed Woman: A Study of the Practical Application to Dress of the Laws of Health, Art, and Morals (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1893) 28–9.

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clothing in which they dress their female characters reveals a great deal about the writers’ own assumptions about class differences: in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), for example, women who ape the latest fashions (including tightlacing) are always working- or lower middle-class, characterized as the victims of mass consumerism, women without taste, education, or intelligence. In Gertrude Dix’s The Image-Breakers (1900), by contrast, artistic fashion is what the upperclass character Rosalind Dangerfield must abandon in order to become part of a socialist community. If a female character rejected mainstream fashion and opted for alternative dress, with what other agendas did she have to align herself? What if the alternatives seemed almost as bad as mainstream fashion and she, like many New Woman writers, considered rational dress too unflattering or inflammatory and artistic dress too antiquated or bohemian? These questions illustrate the fact that for New Woman writers and their readers, the stereotypical feminine quandary—what shall I wear?—offered a unique opportunity to consider the interrelated issues of women’s rights, aesthetics, and class. In order to understand why New Woman writers dressed their protagonists as they did, and in order to recognize what was at stake in that dressing, we need to trace the history of the controversial garment that created the fashionable silhouettes—the corset. The Shifting Silhouette Corsets as the Victorians knew them—form-fitting and form-altering garments— had been worn more or less consistently in English society since the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages, both men and women wore fitted jackets called “corsets,” but it was not until the early sixteenth century that corsets as we conceptualize them today came into being. Probably originating in Spain or Italy, the corset quickly migrated to France and England, where it was accepted as a standard item of fashionable dress. Constructed of whalebone, these early corsets were called corps à la baleine or simply “bodies.” By the eighteenth century, bodies had become “stays,” and their shape and construction had changed to facilitate new clothing styles. Although they were worn sometimes as underwear, sometimes as outerwear, stays remained fashionable until the end of the eighteenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century, travelers to England, such as Peter Kalm in 1745, noted that whether in the city or the country, “All go laced.” After a hiatus from the late eighteenth century until about 1825, the small waist regained its desirability. The corset, the Victorian version of bodies or stays, became a necessary undergarment for achieving the tiny waist so popular throughout the entire Victorian period and into the Edwardian. Although male dandies or men desiring a slimmer physique wore corsets in the early nineteenth century, by 1850 it was extremely rare for







Valerie Steele, The Corset 7. Peter Kalm, quoted in Steele 26. Kalm was a Swedish botanist.

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a man to wear a corset unless he had a medical or military reason to do so.10 Children wore corsets, ostensibly to help them “grow up with straight body and limbs,” but also to begin shaping small waists from an early age. 11 From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, infants and toddlers wore miniature versions of adult corsets, but by the nineteenth century, children’s corsets were looser and supposedly healthier.12 In the nineteenth century, wearing a form-shaping corset marked a girl’s initiation into young womanhood. In Louisa May Alcott’s Rose in Bloom (1876), for example, Rose’s aunts delight in fitting their adolescent niece in her first corset, much to the disgust of her Uncle Mac, a doctor who advocates “rational” dress.13 The hourglass corset evolved around 1830 and remained the dominant corset style until 1900, when the “straight-back” or “S-curve” corset replaced it. The hourglass corset nipped in a woman’s waist, pushing the extra flesh and internal organs either up toward the bosom or down toward the hips. Using whalebone or metal boning, this corset style molded the naturally oval shape of the female abdomen into a small, smooth circle. Hourglass corsets usually hooked up the front and laced up the back for adjustments. Available in various sizes, they could be laced tightly or loosely depending on the wearer’s desire. The front of the corset typically contained a busk, a thin, rigid panel that slipped behind the front opening and created a smooth, hard line down the front of the body. In the Renaissance, busks were quite elaborate; often made of wood, they were painted or covered with intricately embroidered stomachers. 14 At that time the stomacher would be visible through a deep V cut out of the front of the bodice. By the Victorian period, however, busks were usually sewn into the corset itself and hidden under the bodice. Corsets fashioned a figure that embodied social etiquette and class status. More than any other garment, the corset guaranteed a woman’s respectability, and it became a mandatory article of dress for women of all classes. Despite its invisibility, the corset created the contained and “feminine” silhouette so necessary to a neat and tidy appearance. Not wearing a corset stimulated at the very least tremendous social scrutiny; more likely, a woman would be ridiculed and ostracized for flouting the demands of seemliness. Trussed in this way, a woman’s corseted body indicated 10

Steele 39. The custom of fitting children in corsets dates from as early as the sixteenth century. In 1536, Eucharius Roeslin wrote, “A young tree, if it is kept straight and bent, keeps the same shape as it grows. The same happens with children who, if they are well and properly bound in their little bonds and swaddling clothes, will grow up with straight body and limbs. On the other hand, if they are bound sideways and crookedly, they will remain the same way as they grow.” See Eucharius Roeslin, Des divers travaux et enfantements des femmes (Paris, 1536), quoted in Steele 12. 12 Steele 49. 13 Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom 1876 (New York: Puffin, 1995). 14 Steele 10–11. 11

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her class status: she did not have to do manual labor. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, even working-class women wore corsets. Although the fitted bodice, small waist, and rounded hips created by the hourglass corset could inhibit a woman’s physical movement, working-class women nevertheless wore their own versions of the fashionable style as a means of communicating their respectability and sometimes their middle-class aspirations. As Leigh Summers points out, “In an era when moral behavior was determined as much by dress as by actions, and when one’s own reputation and that of one’s family could be made or ruined by appearances, it was of tremendous importance to working- and middle-class women to be appropriately attired.”15 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, jumps, a looser version of the corset that laced up the front for easier access, allowed women greater freedom of movement while still affording them the decorum associated with the corset.16 Because corset-making was a sophisticated skill, corsets were expensive until the end of the century, when changes in technology allowed for streamlined production. Working-class and even poor women, however, did not have to do without the mandatory undergarment. They could make their own corsets, buy them secondhand, or wear the cast-offs of middle- and upper-class employers or benefactors. And by the 1880s and 1890s, inexpensive, mass-produced corsets such as Symington’s Pretty Housemaid corset, “the strongest and cheapest corset ever made,” were marketed specifically to women in domestic service.17 The hourglass figure provided visual verification of a woman’s gentility and respectability. Yet, as theorists writing both before and after Freud have argued, this articulated figure also emphasized the eroticism and the sexual potential of the female form. As the late Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis alleged, the goal of the corset was to “furnish woman with a method of heightening at once her two chief secondary sexual characteristics, the bosom above and the hips and buttocks below.”18 In the early twentieth century, James Laver, Assistant Keeper of the Print Room at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1922 to 1959, first proposed the notion of the “shifting erogenous zone,” an idea that has shaped fashion theory ever since. In Taste and Fashion (1937), Laver borrowed extensively from the work of psychoanalytic clothing theorist J. C. Flügel to assert that “the sexuality of the female body is more diffused than that of the male, and as it is habitually covered up the exposure of any part of it focuses the erotic attention, conscious

15 Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford: Berg, 2001) 21. 16 Steele 27. 17 Cording, sturdy fabric, and a busk protector all strengthened this corset. See the “Pretty Housemaid” corset, 1890, Symington Collection of Corsetry, Foundation, and Swimwear. . For further discussion of the “Pretty Housemaid” corset, see also Steele 48. 18 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Selection in Man (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis and Co., 1918) 172.

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or unconscious, and makes for seductiveness.”19 In her landmark scholarship on fashion and art, Seeing Through Clothes (1978), Anne Hollander explored further the idea of shifting erogenous zones first theorized by Flügel and Laver. She claimed that in Western art, the female torso is the visual focal point for this shifting eroticism: The placement, size, and shape of the breasts, the set of the neck and shoulders, the relative girth and length of the rib cage, the depth and width of the pelvis and the exact disposition of its fleshy upholstery, front and back—all these, along with styles of posture both seated and upright, are continuously shifting visually, according to the way clothes have been variously designed in history to help the female body look beautiful (and natural) on their terms [those of the given culture].20

In the Victorian and early Edwardian periods, the primary erogenous zone of the female torso was the waist. In the era directly preceding the Victorian, neoclassical style (including Directoire, Empire, and Regency fashions) called for a long, tubular silhouette. Originating in France where it was modeled by Empress Josephine Bonaparte, this classical style was in vogue from the end of the eighteenth century until about 1825, and has been popularized for the modern British and American viewer in the spate of films based on Jane Austen novels. A high Empire waist line and perilously low décolletage accentuated the bust, and corsets were usually worn only by women who could not bear to do without them. Filmy muslin clung Greek-like to the body, and gowns often boasted meticulous whitework—intricate hand-embroidery worked with white thread on white fabric. Pastel shades may have been appropriate by day, but by night, no color would do but white. As Pauline Weston Thomas explains, “Regular wearing of white gowns was a sign of social status as white soiled so easily.”21 Ballrooms trembled with thinly-clad, bare-bosomed beauties, all wearing the virginal color white yet, in the opinions of the Victorians who looked back on them, all scandalously underdressed. By 1825, the small waist triumphed again. The Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815) firmly behind them, British women resisted all things French in pursuit of a quintessentially “English” look. Fanned by the fashionable writings of Sir Walter James Laver, Taste and Fashion: From the French Revolution to the Present Day (London: Harrap, 1937) 200. Laver’s theory of the “shifting erogenous zone” bears a heavy debt to the work of J. C. Flügel, particularly to his theory of the relationship between modesty and exhibitionism. Flügel was a well-known clothing theorist heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, Herbert Spencer, and early anthropology, and he is most famous for his Psychology of Clothes (1930). Both Flügel and Laver have received credit for the idea. For more on both theorists, see Michael Carter’s chapters on Flügel and Laver in Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes (Oxford: Berg, 2003). 20 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Viking Press, 1978) 91. 21 “Regency,” Fashion-Era, 2001–2006, ed. Pauline Weston Thomas and Guy Thomas, 26 Feb. 2006 . 19

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Scott and of the naughty Lord Byron, the neo-Gothic Romantic style raced across the Continent. Corsets—a longer version of eighteenth-century stays—once again became mandatory underwear. Small-waisted, with a bell-shaped skirt, sloping shoulder line, and gigot (or “leg-of-mutton”) sleeves, the dresses of the 1830s were colorful and brightly patterned. Around the time of Victoria’s ascension to the throne in 1837, a new mood in dress swept over the nation. Sleeves narrowed, colors and patterns softened, and poke bonnets and shawls enveloped the woman of the 1840s in modesty and demureness.22 The small waist remained a crucial element of the look that Alison Lurie has called that of the “drooping adolescent.”23 The ideal figure was tiny, girlish, and frail, and sloping shoulders would draw admiration and envy in any ballroom. Branwell Brontë’s famous portrait of his literary sister Emily shows her to be remarkably in vogue, never mind her wild Yorkshire upbringing. In the early 1850s, several inventions and developments radically altered clothing production and fashion design. These changes affected the fashionable silhouette of subsequent decades and how it was produced. In Chapter 2, I discussed the impact of the sewing machine, paper patterns, the ready-made industry, railway travel, and department stores. Another important change was heralded in 1856 when an 18-year-old chemistry student by the name of William Perkin accidentally produced the first aniline dye. Synthetic, or aniline, dyes became the rage, forever changing textile production. It just so happened that Perkin created the color mauve; the pinkish-purple hue became an instant success, and after Queen Victoria wore a mauve dress to her daughter’s wedding in 1858, the color enjoyed a resplendent although brief popularity.24 Perhaps the brightness of the synthetic dye dazzled a public more accustomed to a subtle, vegetable-dye palette. More likely, mauve was simply left by the wayside as newer and ever more brilliant colors—electric blue, hot pink, near-neon green—competed with each other in the colorful years of the late 1950s. Not only outerwear boasted a Technicolor palette: a glimpse of a scarlet petticoat was sure to titillate the observant passerby.25 In Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War romance, Gone with the Wind, even Mammy, Scarlett O’Hara’s black slave, wears a fashionable scarlet petticoat, a gift from the dashing Rhett Butler.26 Mid-century changes in clothing and textile production allowed for faster dissemination of the latest fashions. Victorians once again looked to Paris for inspiration, particularly with the rise of haute couture fashion in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1858, the Parisian designer Charles Worth (an Englishman), Oliver Garnett and Penelope Byrde, The Museum of Costume & Assembly Rooms, Bath: The Authorised Guide (Bath: Heritage Services, n.d.) 34. 23 Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes (New York: Random House, 1981) 62–5. 24 For a fascinating look at Perkin’s revolutionary invention, see Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World (London: Norton, 2000). 25 Joan Nunn, Fashion in Costume, 1200–2000 (Chicago: New Amsterdam Books, 2000). 26 Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York: Scribner, 1936). 22

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now considered the founder of couture, began not only to label his clothing with his own name, but also to display finished pieces on models. Worth’s approach forever changed high fashion. Prior to Worth, most dressmakers responded to the individual tastes and desires of the client, rather than showcasing examples of their own artistic inspiration for inspection and possible purchase. Haute couture garments, by contrast, are made to measure, hand designed, and hand sewn, with astonishing attention to detail and artistry. As costume historian Elizabeth Wilson explains, “[T]he exclusive dress had to be definitely distinguished from the vulgar copy; the dress designer had to become an Artist.”27 The wealthy could afford to travel to Paris each season to consult with couture designers, but middle-class Victorians also had access to the latest styles through women’s fashion magazines. And as the ready-made garment industry became more and more sophisticated in the latter half the century, some working-class women, as well, could afford inexpensive knock-offs of the latest styles. The small waist popular in the early Victorian period became even more de rigueur at mid-century. In the 1850s, with industry and trade booming due to political reforms, a lowered infant mortality rate, and a higher birth rate, the middle classes grew not only large in number, but prosperous. Victorians firmly set the “hungry ’40s” behind them, and fashion reflected the new affluence of the nation. The ideal woman was Coventry Patmore’s “Angel in the House”: industrious, practical, and morally pure, she managed her household with confidence and grace. Rich colors, a dizzying variety of fabrics, and ever-widening skirts offered tangible opportunities to display wealth and success. Fitted bodices, tiny waists, and voluminous, bell-shaped skirts marked the 1850s and 1860s. To achieve the small waist and fashionably wide skirt, women wore short, lightly boned hourglass corsets and up to fourteen pounds of petticoats stiffened with horsehair—that is, until W. S. Thompson took out a patent on his cage crinoline in 1856. The cage crinoline, or hoop skirt, was so popular that in 1859 even the American activist Amelia Bloomer gave up her infamous bloomers for it. According to Bloomer, technology had solved the problem of unhygienic, cumbersome petticoats.28 By 1870, the rage for the crinoline had petered out, and the fullness of the skirt now narrowed and moved to the back of the dress. From 1870 to 1876, the first incarnation of the bustle, often called the “Dress Improver,” dominated mainstream fashion. The Dress Improver was constructed of petticoats reinforced with horsehair or small wire frames. Visual emphasis remained on the small waist, but with slimmer skirts hugging women’s hips and buttocks, the derrière commanded greater attention, as well. In order to achieve a small waist in proportion to the now narrowed hemlines of the 1870s, women had to lace ever more tightly. New corset designs, and tighter lacing, allowed them to do just that. Long cuirass bodices, like that worn by a lady in the c. 1877 photograph, extended from the shoulders down over the hips (Figure 3.1). The style required cuirass corsets to smooth the lower 27 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 32. 28 Bloomer cited other reasons for abandoning trousers, as well. See Cunningham 44.

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Fig. 3.1

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A lady, by Hills & Saunders, Oxford, c. 1877.

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abdominal bulge often created by shorter versions of the hourglass corset. By the late 1870s, the bustle was replaced by a slim, narrow silhouette. The bustle, however, refused to be banished and reappeared in the early 1880s as a crinolette. Like the crinoline of the late 1950s, the crinolette was constructed of metal and allowed for even more dramatic plumage at the back of the skirt. The ideal woman of the 1880s stood tall and majestic, a John Singer Sargent goddess of large, voluptuous proportions. Trilby, the eponymous heroine of George Du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Bertie of Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926), and Rhoda Nunn of George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) are just a few examples of this statuesque beauty.29 Opulent fabrics and rich, jewel-toned colors emphasized the queenliness of this stately figure. Breathtakingly tight bodices spilled down into heavily draped and embellished skirts, and evening wear glittered with intricate beaded embroidery on a backdrop of rich satins, velvets, brocades, and silks. The Jersey Lily, actress Lillie Langtry, drew attention as much for her gorgeous figure as for her acting (Figure 3.2). Ella Hepworth Dixon, author of The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), included in her autobiography, As I Knew Them (1930), a photograph of herself in which she embodied this ideal figure.30 No longer drooping and demure, the fashionable beauty of the 1880s was larger-thanlife, but her waist was tinier than ever. Beneath her sumptuous dress, the popular spoon-shaped busk literally “spooned” out over the lower abdomen, containing the extra flesh and organs pushed downward by the cinched waist. At the end of the 1880s, the woman’s suit or “tailor-made” became popular. Modeled after women’s riding habits, tailor-mades provided a practical daytime uniform for the thousands of women now entering newly emerging or once male-dominated occupations such as stenography, social work, accounting, and journalism. By the 1890s, the tailor-made was standard fare (Figure 3.3). The bustle disappeared and the suit—consisting of a jacket and skirt, usually in a woolen material, over a starched shirtwaist—crowded London streets by day. If not choosing a woolen tailor-made, women wore fitted, frilled bodices and Aline skirts, made of stiff silk for day wear, satin or brocade for evening wear.31 Imperious leg-of-mutton sleeves, popular in the early 1830s, made a comeback. Renowned for her style and her miniature waist, Princess Maud shows herself to be impeccably in vogue with her breastplate of a bodice and colossal sleeves (Figure 3.4). Readers may recall that in L. M. Montgomery’s popular children’s book, Anne of Green Gables (1908), orphaned Anne pines for the “puffed” sleeves so popular in the 1890s.32 See George Du Maurier, Trilby (1894; Toronto: Broadview, 2003); George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893; Toronto: Broadview, 1998); and Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, or, Perhaps Only (1926; London: Virago, 1982). 30 Ella Hepworth Dixon, As I Knew Them: Sketches of People I Have Met on the Way (London: Hutchinson, 1930). 31 Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion (New York: Dover, 1981) 79. 32 L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908; New York: Bantam, 1987). 29

Fig. 3.2

Mrs. Langtry, by Lafayette, London, c. 1888.

Fig. 3.3

Mrs. Saxton Noble tricycling, c.1893.

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Fig. 3.4

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The Princess of Wales, Princess Maud of Wales and her fiancé Prince Carl of Denmark. By W. & D. Downey, May 1896.

At the turn of the century, a new mood swept over the nation. Queen Victoria died in 1901, and her son Edward’s reign (1901–1910), known as the belle époque or “long sunlit afternoon,” lives on mythically as a time of leisure, wealth, and contentment before the outbreak of World War I in 1914. In reality, of course,

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the era was much more complicated.33 But the fashionable clothing of the early Edwardian years certainly reflected the mood of the times. Frothy skirts and the audible rustle of “frou-frou” petticoats, pompadour hair styles of alarming proportions, a wealth of ribbons, lace, and pintucks, the dominance of the color white: these fashion trends expressed a highly ornamental femininity. American artist Edward Dana Gibson created the “Gibson girl” look in 1901; above all, the style required a seductive, S-curve silhouette. Gibson’s version of the New Woman was, according to Pauline Weston Thomas and Guy Thomas, “competitive, sporty and emancipated as well as beautiful.”34 No one embodied this look more perfectly than the actress Miss Camille Clifford in her London performance in The Belle of Mayfair (Figure 3.5). Her ideal figure curved with almost serpentine sinuousness. As costume historian Alison Gernsheim observes, “The whole figure was a system of curves.”35 The S-bend or S-curve figure was created by a bust thrown forward, a stomach cinched in and pulled back, and a prominent derrière. A woman’s body very rarely follows this line of its own accord, so the secret behind the new silhouette was, not surprisingly, a new corset design. In 1900, Madame Inez Gâches-Sarraute, a corsetière who also had a degree in medicine, invented the “straight-front” or “hygienic” corset. The narrow hemlines of the 1880s and 1890s had required women to lace ever more severely in order to achieve a proportionally tiny waist. In reaction, dress reform organizations, such as the Rational Dress Society, founded in 1881, and a host of doctors and medical experts all advocated the creation of a healthier corset. Although lightly boned or merely corded “hygienic” (or “rational”) corsets were available in the 1880s and 1890s, relatively few women wore them. One of many similar designs, Gâches-Sarraute’s “hygienic” corset was said to eliminate the harmful pressure the hourglass corset exerted on the waist and lower abdomen, while still shaping the desired small waist. In 1901, the Lady’s Magazine recommended the new corset, praising it as “more hygienic and healthy” and perfect for achieving “that curved look so essential to a good figure.”36 At the Museum of Costume at Bath, one will find an exquisitely embroidered straight-front corset (c. 1902) in the permanent exhibition on corsets. The label text beside it informs the viewer that despite the brouhaha over women’s corsets in the 1890s, corsetry was actually more extreme in the Edwardian period than ever before. Ostensibly a healthier version of the earlier hourglass, the straightfront corset actually produced more ill effects and allowed women to lace to even smaller waist sizes. Why? Unlike that of the hourglass corset, the busk (or central front panel) of the straight-front corset did not curve inward, then out again over

33 For more on the Edwardian period, see Roy Hattersley, The Edwardians (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004). 34 “Regency,” Fashion-Era. 35 Gernsheim 83. 36 The Lady’s Magazine (Feb. 1901) 217 and (Mar. 1901) 304.

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Fig. 3.5

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Miss Camille Clifford, the personification of the Gibson Girl, c. 1906.

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the lower abdomen. Instead, the straight, stiff busk flattened and pushed back the stomach and abdomen. As fashion historian Valerie Steele explains, The modern woman was no longer supposed to have a stomach. Indeed, another name for the straight-front corset was the sans ventre corset. Being cut lower on top, the new corset no longer functioned as well to support the breasts, and some women began to wear bust-bodices along with their corsets—a trend which eventually lead to the development of the modern brassiere.37

Amy Crowder, a modern corsetière, points out that it was not merely the rigid boning of the corset that gave it its shape, but “the shape and cut of the fabric pieces in conjunction with the stiffness and placement of the boning.” Crowder calls the straight-front or S-curve corset “the height of complicated corset design.”38 The straight-front corset allowed its wearer to achieve not health, but an even smaller waist size. Surprisingly, in the early Edwardian period, after years of dress reform, suffrage agitation, and advocacy for women’s rights, women engaged in the most extreme corsetry of the Victorian period. What allowed this contradiction to thrive in the Edwardian era? How did the corset controversies of earlier decades set the stage for this supreme irony? Corset Controversies Examining the corset controversies of the 1860s to 1890s demonstrates that above all, the problem was a discursive one. Any discussion of discourse must necessarily rely on the work of many influential theorists, including Michel Foucault. Foucault’s work has made it commonplace to view discourse as a set of statements governed by specific rules and conventions. Thus, it is possible to delineate different types of discourse within the same language, for example, medical discourse, or legal discourse. Even more important, however, Foucault and others such as Mikhail Bakhtin explore the relationship between discourse and ideology. Foucault suggests that authoritative discourse, made possible by the exertion or threat of power, imposes certain ways of speaking and viewing the world that eliminate other possibilities. Similarly, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that words or ways of using words depend upon authority. Thus he speaks of various types of discourse, including “double-voiced discourse,” which emerges from dialogic communication.39

37

Steele 84. “Corset Silhouette,” Wasp Creations, 1998–2006, ed. Amy Crowder, 9 Sept. 2005, 39 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 185. 38

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Victorian debates over the corset represent more than mere discursive contest; they demonstrate attempts to create what Foucault calls “docile bodies.” In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault marks the change from traditional to modern society by the dissemination of power. Rather than through a monarch who authorized a certain set of social mores, in modern society, power “circulate[s] through progressively finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures and all their daily actions.”40 The docile bodies created by such diffuse power have so interiorized the “master discourse” that they need no policing; instead, they learn to police themselves. In 1988 Sandra Bartky used Foucault’s work to argue that modern women have internalized the master discourse, becoming their own police. She writes, “There are significant gender differences in gesture, posture, movement, and general bodily comportment: women are far more restricted than men in their manner of movement and in their spatiality.”41 Seeing a corollary between women’s restraint and containment on a physical level and their restraint and containment in the social arena, Bartky nevertheless recognizes that the relationship is not always so straightforward. If, as feminist Judith Butler argued in Gender Trouble (1990), gender is a function of culture, not simply of biology, then we can better understand why adhering to the norms of femininity—wearing a corset—became the focus of such volatile and protracted debate in Victorian periodicals and literature.42 The connection between language and power that Foucault and Bakhtin discuss provides a helpful perspective on the corset controversies of the 1860s to 1890s. These controversies raged in letters, magazines, journals, and newspapers; poets, novelists, and artists represented them in differing ways in their art. They relied on a whole host of discourses—medical, classicist, scientific, aesthetic. The cacophony of voices that clamored to be heard on this particular “Question” (“Questions” being so very popular in the Victorian press) relied on distinct, yet overlapping discursive formulations. Thus the meanings of key words such as “Nature,” “Art,” “beauty,” “Woman,” “English,” “savage” and “civilized” never remained stable. They shifted and clashed, not only within the 30-year period I will explore, but even within one cultural moment. Why did the corset become such a source of controversy and debate in the Victorian period? And why does that debate continue to rage amongst twentyfirst-century historians, some of whom, like Leigh Summers, view the corset as part of misogynistic efforts to control female sexuality? Valerie Steele offers a 40 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 151. 41 Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, ed. Rose Weitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). First printed in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Northeastern University Press, 1988. 42 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

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convincing answer. She credits the Industrial Revolution and “the democratization of fashion” with women’s greater access to corsets; as she explains, “Beauty was now supposed to be every woman’s ‘duty’ (or her ‘right’), by means of artifice if not naturally.”43 With revolutionary changes in production and advertising came a staggering variety of corsets from which to choose, at prices most women could afford. If she were working-class, a woman might choose a Pretty Housemaid corset, advertised as “the strongest and cheapest corset ever made.” Middle-class and concerned about health? A “Good Sense” corset would do nicely.44 And if a woman were upper class, she could choose from a variety of haute couture designs and fabrics. Indeed, new designs appeared as fast as corsetières could create them. Whether a woman was pregnant, “thin-busted,” corpulent, old, or young, there was a corset for every body type and every pocketbook. Not only could a Victorian consumer choose from a variety of designs at a variety of prices, she could read about new corsets in newspapers and magazines. Advertising accompanied industrial changes, creating a new environment with print representations of a whole host of competing corsets. As Thomas Richards argues, “The icons of Victorian commodity culture all originated in middle-class periodicals. Until the very end of the nineteenth century advertising consisted almost entirely of the bourgeoisie talking to itself.”45 The question of whether or not to lace, then, was made possible by the development of mass consumerism in Victorian society. Like the various other Questions debated in English periodicals, such as The Woman Question or The Marriage Question, The Corset Question, even if never posed quite so suggestively, drew a wide range of opinion. Moderate stances on corsets did not make for fast-selling journalism. Thus one of the best-known and most referenced discussions on the topic was a series of letters published in Samuel Beeton’s the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. From 1867 to 1874, over 150 letters appeared in the correspondence section. The letters were so popular that in 1868 they were published as a collection under the title The Corset and the Crinoline; a later edition, The Freaks of Fashion, appeared in 1871. (Notice the title’s shift in tone.) The correspondents boasted extremely small waist sizes, often as small as 16 inches, the dimension regarded both as the tiniest waist possible and as dressmakers’ ideal. Many of the letter-writers claimed to have experienced tightlacing as part of a regime of discipline, to which they were subjected by mothers or boarding schools. These first-hand accounts of juvenile, often punitive, corsetry titillated and scandalized the reading public. The letters achieved mythic status, and the so-called “votaries of tight-lacing” continued to inspire incredulity, criticism, and imitation into the 1890s. Many twentieth-century historians assumed that the

43

Steele 35–6. Steele 48. 45 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) 7. 44

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letters represented the average Victorian woman’s experience, an assumption that has come under recent attack. In 1977, Hélène Roberts famously argued that tight-lacing symbolized women’s social restriction: “the clothing of the Victorian woman clearly perfected the message of a willingness to conform to the submissive masochistic pattern, but dress also helped mould female behavior to the role of the ‘exquisite slave.’”46 Art historian David Kunzle rejects this notion. He views tight-lacing as a fetishistic practice that symbolized rebellion and sexual freedom, not passivity.47 Valerie Steele believes that the letters represent the experience, real or fabricated, of a tiny minority of society and, as such, should be read as “sexual fantasies.”48 Costume historian Leigh Summers argues that tight-lacing was more widespread and more acceptable than Kunzle or Steele acknowledges: “An examination of mid- and late nineteenth century medical texts, advice texts, feminist and dress reform texts, or even a swift perusal of fashion plates that embellished nineteenth-century women’s magazines, reveals that tight-lacing was a practice undertaken by women across the social classes for reasons unrelated to sexual ‘perversion.’”49 So just how tightly did Victorian women lace? Without a clear picture of how representative the letters actually are, we are bound to misinterpret Victorian corsetry. Summers’ comment that a glance at fashion plates will clear up the matter demonstrates just how murky the issue actually is. Looking is a matter of perspective. To a twenty-first-century Western eye accustomed to a slimmer, more athletic look, most Victorian waists appear impossibly tiny. Perhaps even more important, the perceived smallness or largeness of a waist is proportional to the size of the hips and bust. Fashion has always been good at playing tricks on our eyes. Looking at a fashion plate (which is of course, a fantasy in and of itself) does not provide an accurate understanding of how tightly average Victorian women laced. Anne Hollander notes that in Western art, nude figures maintain the shape created by their clothing even when that clothing has been discarded: “even in their artless, unselfconscious privacy they assume the fashionable posture …—a posture that had clearly come to seem ‘natural.’”50 If, as Steele and others claim, the EDM letters and other depictions of tight-lacing characterize the experience of only a minority of women, our conception of the average Victorian woman’s corsetry changes dramatically. This would mean that most women laced down only a few inches from their natural waist size, instead of the 10- to 12-inch difference suggested by the EDM letters. Given that twentieth- and twenty-first 46

Hélène Roberts, “The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman,” Signs 2.3 (Spring) 557. 47 David Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of the Corset, Tight-Lacing and Other Forms of Body-Sculpture in the West (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982). 48 Steele 90. 49 Summers 103. 50 Hollander 134.

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century reconstructions of Victorian culture have often assumed that women did lace dramatically, as the letter-writers in the EDM claim, it is important to clarify, as much as possible, the actual number of inches the average Victorian woman would have laced down, given the requirements of the fashionable silhouette of a particular decade. The Museum of Costume at Bath and the Chertsey Costume Museum in Runnymede provide some answers to this conundrum. In a recent survey of one thousand Victorian dresses, the Museum of Costume at Bath found the smallest waist size to be 21 ½ inches.51 Twenty-one-and-one-half inch waists are certainly a big jump from the famed 16- or 18-inch waists of the EDM letters or of Scarlett O’Hara, the product of Margaret Mitchell’s 1930s literary nostalgia. Yet Grace Evans, curator of the Chertsey Museum, notes that, in general, the thousands of Victorian dresses she has examined have all been quite small by modern standards. Finding the equivalent of a modern British size 12 (which has a waist measurement of 27–8 inches, equal to that of an American dress size eight or ten, depending on the clothing manufacturer) is an extremely rare experience.52 In order to help modern readers visualize these numbers, let me mention that in 2004, the national survey SizeUK revealed the average British woman’s dress size to be a 16, and the average waist measurement 34 inches.53 The typically small waist sizes of extant Victorian dresses do not, however, mean that all women laced severely. Historians agree that due to differences in nutrition and environment, people in the Victorian period were smaller than we are today. We must also recognize that many Victorians either gave away old clothing for charity or re-sale, used it as fabric, or altered and mended it until it fell apart.54 Most of the clothing that has survived was owned by the wealthy and fashionable, or was saved after being worn for a special occasion such as a wedding or other major event.55 And as Evans points out, some extant clothing was stored away because of its abnormally tiny proportions. Thus the clothing available for study today does not necessarily represent the average, everyday dress of middle-class Victorian women, much less working-class women. We must also keep in mind that a woman could boast a 20-inch waist because she wore a 20-inch corset. In reality, however, her waist measurement might actually be several inches larger than that number, since corsets could be adjusted by lacing them either more tightly or more loosely. The fabric did not even 51

Corset Gallery, Exhibition notes, Museum of Costume, Bath, UK, May 2005. Grace Evans, personal interview, Chertsey Museum, Runnymede, UK, 26 May 2005. 53 See Ros Taylor, “XL: the shape of things to come,” Society Guardian, 1 Sept. 2004, 9 Sept. 2005 ; and “SizeUK announce results from UK National Sizing Survey,” London College of Fashion website, 2005, 9 Sept. 2005 . 54 Evans. 55 Evans. 52

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have to join at the back, for laces could open it up to greater dimensions. Alison Gernsheim cites The Dress Reform Problem (1886) as proof of the discrepancy between corset and waist measurements: “Young girls, especially, derive intense satisfaction from proclaiming the diminutive size of their corset. Many purchase 18 and 19 inch stays, who must leave them open 2, 3, and 4 inches.”56 Unlike that of the EDM letters, less sensational testimony corroborates the Museum of Costume at Bath’s and the Chertsey Musuem’s findings: Victorian women were generally smaller than British women today, but very few of them actually laced down to waist sizes smaller than 21 ½ inches. In 1866, the English beauty writer Arnold Cooley claimed that the majority of women did not allow their waists to exceed 24 inches.57 If we believe Cooley’s claim that in 1866 the average woman’s “natural” waist size was somewhere around 28–9 inches, we can venture to say that most women would have had to lace in at least 4 to 5 inches to achieve that 24-inch waist. When trying to compare the sizes of extant material objects with historical commentary, it is crucial that we remember the limitations of the objects to which we have access. They are not always representative of the “average” woman’s experience, whoever that “average” woman may be. Nor do the physical dimensions of the objects—or the women who wore them—match the ideal figure that only a few women could have attained in any given time period. Particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the fashionable silhouette changing year by year, and with more and more alternative dress styles emerging, only a minority of women could attain or chose to attain the ideal figure deemed beautiful at any given time and from any given perspective. Perhaps even more important, however, the current scholarly debate over how tightly women actually laced reiterates the same conflicts argued by the Victorians in their own long-winded quarrel. Whether or not the majority of women laced drastically or moderately, the tight-lacing phenomenon touched a sensitive chord in mid to late Victorian society. Certainly the letters created a frisson of sexual tension and titillation, but even more, they triggered concerns about women’s nature and role in society. As fashion historian David Kunzle points out, the EDM ran letters and articles supporting “female emancipation” concurrent with the letters on tight-lacing.58 Kunzle uses this fact to assert that Beeton saw tightlacing as feminist. I find his conclusion tenuous; more interesting is merely the juxtaposition itself. That tight-lacing and women’s rights could share space in the same magazine points to the range of consumer tastes and interests, and to the complexity of the society that valued both issues.

The Dress Reform Problem (Bradford, 1886). Quoted in Gernsheim 70. Arnold Cooley, The Toilet and Cosmetics in Ancient and Modern Times, with a Review of the Different Theories of Beauty (1866; New York: Burt Franklin: 1970) 352. 58 Kunzle 217. 56

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Alternative Dress Although many commentators criticized the corseted figure, few acceptable alternatives existed for women. Those who chose not to wear a corset were typically associated with one of two movements, Rational (or Hygienic or Reform) Dress or Aesthetic (or Artistic) Dress. With roots in the 1850s, the peak of industrialism and gaudiness in dress, the two movements aimed to reform women’s dress to reflect philosophical, artistic, and medical agendas. Although they wanted to modify women’s dress for differing reasons, the two styles had a profound influence on each other, coalescing and merging around common concerns. Rational (also called hygienic or reform) dress reacted against the alleged impracticality and restrictiveness of women’s fashions. In the early 1850s, American feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer deplored the cumbersome, muck-collecting petticoats necessary to achieve the broad hemline of the time. Instead, they donned a shortened skirt over wide-legged trousers, dubbed “bloomers.” The photograph of Dr. Mary Walker provides an example of early rational dress (Figure 3.6). Amelia Bloomer was not the first woman to wear the Turkish-style trousers that bear her name. Most historians give credit for the style to Elizabeth Smith Miller, a feminist who introduced them to her friends Bloomer and Cady Stanton. (Bloomer popularized bloomers in Lily, a journal of which she was editor, and on her lecture circuit.59) Bloomer and Cady Stanton sported the controversial trousers until the public’s vitriolic reaction began to compromise their work as women’s-rights activists—and, as I mentioned earlier, until the cage crinoline appeared in 1851. In England, some women adopted the Bloomer costume, particularly for use in women’s athletics, which became more and more popular toward the end of the century. Major strides toward dress reform, however, did not begin in England until the 1880s. In the 1880s, the three major English organizations that worked to reform women’s dress for reasons of physical and intellectual health were founded: the Rational Dress Society, the Rational Dress Association, and the Healthy and Artistic Dress union. These groups advocated loosened or modified corsets (or, in more radical circles, no corset at all) and divided or bifurcated skirts, often ones that did not touch the ground.60 By the 1890s, divided or bifurcated skirts became popular with women who enjoyed cycling, calisthenics, gymnastics, or other forms of physical activity. At various exhibitions and shows, these societies modeled “rational” clothing and even sold it on-site. The reform-minded organizations disseminated their ideas and latest designs through local and national clubs and through periodicals and books. The Rational Dress Society, founded in 1881 by Lady F. W. Harberton and Mrs. E. M. King, gave as its objective “to promote the adoption, according to individual taste and convenience, of a style of dress based upon considerations of health, comfort, and beauty, and to deprecate constant 59

See Cunningham 38–48. Cunningham 68.

60

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Fig. 3.6

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Dr. Mary Walker, c. 1865.

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changes of fashion that cannot be recommended on any of these grounds.”61 The Rational Dress Association, a more radical offshoot of the Rational Dress Society, offered more specific criteria under its “Requirements of a Perfect Dress”: 1. Freedom of movement. 2. Absence of any pressure over any part of the body. 3. Not more weight than is necessary for warmth, and both weight and warmth evenly distributed. 4. Grace and beauty combined with comfort and convenience. 5. Not departing too conspicuously from the ordinary dress of the time.62 The dress-reform societies emphasized comfort, health, rationality, and beauty in dress. In England, they were heavily influenced by the aesthetic movement. Their particular strength was reform underwear. As Patricia Cunningham points out, “Underwear reform had a broader base of activists and greater acceptance in part because it was more subtly subversive; the changes could not be seen.”63 Getting women to jettison their corsets was, however, no easy task. Most reformers advocated “hygienic” or “reform-style” corsets: boneless or simply less stiff, these softer corsets nevertheless fit tightly. By the mid-1880s, many Victorians seemed to accept elements of rational dress, perhaps because the style had become associated with increasingly popular women’s athletics. Some mainstream Victorians found alternative dress styles refreshingly modern. But many others still found them offensive, unattractive, and dangerous. The 1879 Punch cartoon “Hygienic Excess” speaks to this contest of opinion (Figure 3.7). The cartoon pictures four young (and very Grecian-looking) girls gathered around a tennis net. Their muscular arms and uncorseted waists inspire Mr. Punch’s tongue-in-cheek lament: they have distorted their Figures into the likeness of so many Greek Statues, and have no more waist to speak of than that quite too horrid Venus at the Louvre; indeed they have given up stays altogether as a bad job. As they are all engaged to marry Dukes, Mr. Punch fears they will set the fashion; and as he holds that a long and wasp-like Waist is as essential to a Lady as a—well, as a Hump between the Shoulder, a prominent Nose and Chin, and a protuberant Abdomen are to a Gentleman, he hopes that the above Caricature may serve as an Example and a Warning.64

If nothing else, rational dress offered a refreshing alternative to Mrs. Grundy stuffiness. A few years later, in 1884, Punch ridiculed that tyrant of bourgeois manners, Mrs. Grundy, and her disciples for grumbling at “a natural waist, or Rational Dress Society’s Gazette 1 (Apr. 1888): 1. Exhibition Catalog, Prince’s Hall, Picadilly, The Rational Dress Association, May 1883. Quoted in Cunningham 69. 63 Cunningham 205. 64 “Hygienic Excess,” Punch 18 Oct. 1879: 174. 61 62

Fig. 3.7

Hygienic Excess,” cartoon, Punch 18 Oct. 1879.

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absence of corsets,… [or] tailor-made attire or accepted bathing-costume.”65 Yet, even into the 1890s, extreme rational dress still raised eyebrows. Like rational or hygienic dress, aesthetic or artistic dress evolved slowly over time, resulting in many permutations and hybridizations. These terms became almost synonymous in the 1880s and 1890s. Artistic dress originated from the work of two important social philosophers, John Ruskin and William Morris. In 1848, inspired by Ruskin’s Modern Painters, which advocated the study of art and nature as a spiritual pursuit, three young artists at the Academy of Art in London formed what they dubbed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Brotherhood founders included William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais, but other artists such as Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones came to be associated with them, as well. Aiming to reform contemporary art, the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood rejected the academic prejudice toward classical poses and mannerism, particularly the influence of Raphael and Michelangelo. Instead, they admired early Renaissance painters such as Botticelli and Donatello. The medieval period offered particular inspiration, for in the view of the Brotherhood, medieval art glimmered with spiritual depth and insight. Eschewing mechanistic reproductions of classical scenes, the Brotherhood strove for spiritual intensity and adherence to nature. Clothing for their models had to be made, and again, medieval and early Renaissance dress offered the artists what they were looking for. The Brotherhood’s primary models, Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti’s wife, and Jane Morris, William Morris’s wife, epitomized Pre-Raphaelite notions of beauty (Figure 3.8). The ideal Pre-Raphaelite beauty had pale skin, green eyes, and red hair. Victorians generally considered red hair unsightly, but Pre-Raphaelites adored the fiery shade. If not blessed by nature with red hair, an artistic type could dye her hair with henna. Artistic costume, such as that worn by Jane Morris in Figure 3.8, consisted of loose, dropped waists seemingly absent of corsetry, fabric with an easy drape, puffed sleeves, and unconventional colors (often of vegetable dyes even after the rage for synthetics). As Pauline Weston Thomas explains, “Natural softer vegetable dyes produced half tints of indigo, salmon, sage-green, terracotta, amber gold. Most of all Aesthetics liked the colours to look old and faded, strange, antique or even vaguely exotic as peacock blue might be.”66 By the 1870s, dresses were often exquisitely embroidered in the Art Needlework style, characterized by delicate patterns derived from nature and worked in vegetable-dyed silks. Artistic clothing reflected medieval-inspired details such as smocking at the waist, neck, or wrists. These details reflected the philosophical origins of artistic dress: both the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement valued the handmade over the machine-made, the one-of-a-kind object over the mass-produced one. In 1873, writing in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Walter Pater famously asserted the view that art had only an aesthetic value, that it “comes to 65 Punch 13 Oct. 1884: 178. Quoted in Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990) 179. 66 “The Aesthetic Movement,” Fashion-Era.

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Fig. 3.8

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Jane Morris posed by D. G. Rossetti, July 1865.

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you” giving pleasure only. “Art for art’s sake” became the motto of the Aesthetic Movement of the 1880s and 1890s, with Oscar Wilde the most flamboyant exemplar of the movement. Others included William Morris, May Morris (his daughter), Mary Eliza Haweis, G. F. Watts, Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), Constance Wilde (Oscar Wilde’s wife), Lord Leighton, Walter Crane, Ellen Terry, and J. M. Whistler. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, “aesthetes” looked to earlier eras and to nonWestern cultures for inspiration. Inspired by classical and Japanese influences, aesthetic clothing emphasized simplicity, classical proportion, and rationality.67 Aesthetes could be identified by sunflowers and peacock feathers, and, in their view, the Venus de Milo or the Venus de Medici modeled the most perfect female figure. At first associated specifically with the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetes, socalled “artistic” clothing evolved into a bohemian counter-fashion. Many creative people (or those hoping to appear so) found the artistic style graceful and elegant, praising its classical simplicity and proportion. In the late 1870s and 1880s, avantgarde women abandoned the fashionable bustle with its long, tightly corseted waist and heavy petticoats. Instead, they chose aesthetic or artistic dress, a style that by contrast looked limp and flowing, with a (seemingly) uncorseted waist that fell at its natural placement or in the Empire style. The style’s long, flowing lines became a fashion in their own right; by the 1880s and 1890s tea gowns or art gowns were an elegant option for fashionable women. Tea gowns were similar to house gowns, also called morning gowns or wrappers. Generally made of soft, flowing material, tea gowns were intended for entertaining at home; only the most brazen of artistic types would wear one out of doors. Looser in fit than day or evening wear, tea gowns were designed to be worn with a relaxed corset (or in a bolder move, with no corset at all). By the 1890s, tea gowns were a modish garment for any woman, especially those with artistic pretensions. One did not necessarily have to subscribe to all the views of the aesthetic movement in order to keep up with the latest style. Fabric had to be made for artistic garments, and by the 1880s, women looked to Morris and Co. for inspiration. Founded by William Morris in 1875, the company designed and produced their textiles using handloom jacquard weaving, handblocked prints, and vegetable dyes.68 But the process was expensive, and only the wealthy could afford Morris’s celebrated designs. As a result, Morris’s goal of merging socialist labor with traditional handwork went largely unrealized. In 1876, before his adoption of militant socialism, he complained, “I spend my life

67

For images of aesthetic dress from the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, see “Aesthetic Dress” at . 68 The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Textile Collection: British Textiles from 1850 to 1900, ed. Linda Parry (London: V & A Publications, 1999) 14.

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in ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.”69 Arthur Lasenby Liberty agreed with Morris that textile production needed reform, but he set out “to prove that industry, mechanized industry, could produce tasteful and artistic goods.”70 His company, Liberty and Co., was established in 1875 and quickly became famous as the chic locale to purchase artistic fabric and clothing. Liberty was a member of The Healthy and Artistic Dress Union (founded in 1890), an organization that tried to avoid what they saw as antiquated Pre-Raphaelite style and aesthetic sloppiness in favor of beautiful, historic, individualized garments that allowed for freedom of movement. Liberty and Co.’s exquisite, drapable fabrics, described as “art fabrics from the Orient,” garnered much praise.71 The Liberty style became famous in Europe and in the United States: it “became the ‘mode’ for special occasions among artistic people and their imitators; it was recognizable at a glance.”72 Miss Louise Barry, on Regent Street, was also well-known for her artistic dresses. Women who wore artistic dress were often associated—positively or negatively, depending on the viewer—with artists, socialists, or aesthetes. (By the 1890s, the styles had overlapped so much that many people had trouble distinguishing between them.) George Du Maurier’s 1881 Punch cartoon, “An Impartial Statement in Black and White,” satirizes the warring opinions on aesthetic dress. He contrasts an “aesthetic lady” with a “woman of fashion” (Figure 3.9). In the first panel, the aesthetic lady is stooped and ugly, while the woman of fashion looks polished and elegant; in the second, the woman of fashion looks swollen and uncomfortable, with her too-tight stays and chinless face, while the aesthetic lady stands tall and serenely symmetrical. The cartoon reflects the conflict of opinion as to which style—fashionable or aesthetic—was more attractive. For most opinionated orators on the subject of corsets, Mother Nature served as an authority. Critics of the corset often pitted Fashion and Nature against each other, clearly with the goal of proving Fashion harmful, ugly and unnatural. The “natural figure” was consistently a classical one, that of Venus. By the early 1870s, the comparison between a corseted woman and the Venus de Milo (or de Medici) had become a familiar trope for critics of the corset. In 1874, the illustrator and publisher John Leighton (Luke Limner, no relation to Lord Leighton) published Madre Natura Versus the Moloch of Fashion, in which he compared the skeletal structure of a corseted woman with that of the Venus de Medici. He went on to cite a variety of doctors and philosophers, compiling a frightening list of corset-induced ailments.73 The English zoologist Dr. William Flower also contrasted the figure of a clothed, corseted woman with that of the Venus de Milo in his Darwinian critique of fashion, Fashion in Deformity (1881) (Figure 3.10). 69 Quoted in Marilyn Oliver Hapgood, Wallpaper and the Artist (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992) 54. 70 Cunningham 127. 71 Quoted in Cunningham 126. 72 BETA [author], “Costume Department,” Liberty Lamp 7 (Oct. 1931) 97–8: 97. 73 Cunningham 122.

Fig. 3.9

Georges Du Maurier, “An impartial statement of the lady of fashion versus the aesthetic lady,” Punch 80 (1881).

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Fig. 3.10

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Illustration from William Henry Flower, Fashion in Deformity, as Illustrated in the Customs of Barbarous & Civilised Races (London: Macmillan, 1881).

The consistent comparison of a corseted figure with a so-called natural one— always classical—quite expectedly became fodder for satirists like Mr. Punch. In 1870, Punch printed a cartoon in which a group of corseted women gather around the Venus de Milo. Titled “The Venus de Milo; or, Girls of Two Different Periods,” the cartoon has a caption which reads, “Chorus: ‘Look at her big foot! Oh, what a waist!—and what a ridiculous little head!—and no chignon! She’s no lady! Oh, what a fright!’” (Figure 3.11). The comparison between Venus and a corseted Victorian woman continued to circulate throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Calling on a classical standard became even more popular in the next two decades: in the 1880s, Greek ruins were excavated for the first time, and the female classicist Jane Harrison bewitched audiences on her popular lecture circuit. Until the turn against

Fig. 3.11

“The Venus de Milo; or, Girls of Two Different Periods,” cartoon, Punch (London) 1870. The caption reads, “‘Chorus: ‘Look at her big foot! Oh, what a waist!—and what a ridiculous little head!—and no chignon! She’s no lady! Oh, what a fright!’” Note the reference to Eliza Lynn Linton’s 1868 article, “The Girl of the Period” in which she chastises fashionable young women.

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Hellenism, heralded by Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial and imprisonment for “gross indecency with another male,” Victorians were fascinated with ancient Greece.74 In her 1880 article “The Aesthetics of Dress,” the well-known artist and art writer Mary Eliza Haweis listed seven rules of dress. Rule number one was to “retain the human form under all circumstances.”75 Haweis was not the only one to propose that classical ideas of beauty and proportion be applied to dress. In 1883, in an article published in the Nineteenth Century, G. F. Watts argued that bulges resulting from unnatural constraints were both unsightly and immodest, and that they violated the laws of Greek proportion.76 Oscar Wilde advocated the revival of the Directoire style, for “at least it has the merit of indicating the proper position of the waist.”77 The preference for a classical, “natural,” female figure appeared in fiction as early as 1860. One of the protagonists of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Walter Hartright, admires Marian Halcombe’s figure, if not her face. He extols “her waist, perfection in the eyes of man, for it occupied its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays.”78 Hartright describes her figure in classical terms, praising her “set of shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model,” “symmetrical limbs,” and “perfectly shaped figure.”79 Despite many people’s admiration for classical and Pre-Raphaelite simplicity and proportion, they (unlike the daring Oscar Wilde) nevertheless argued that Greek-style dress, like the Directoire style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, should remain in the attic. Rather, elements of classical style should be incorporated. As the beauty writer Mrs. Fanny Douglas expounded in 1894, The opponents of the corset and the waist are a little too fond of pointing to the Venus de Milo as proof of how beautiful a waistless woman can be. They forget or ignore the fact that the Venus de Milo is a charming nudity, and that it is the custom in most countries to cover oneself with clothes. Had Venus been compelled by a cold climate to drape herself, we have little doubt she would have worn stays to give her clothes the shape they lacked.80

Although she condemned tight corsetry, Lady Harberton, co-founder of the Rational Dress Society, agreed with Mrs. Douglas on this point, finding Greek74 See Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1994). 75 Mary Haweis, “The Aesthetics of Dress,” Art Journal 42 [London] (Apr. 1880). Quoted in Cunningham 117. 76 G. F. Watts, “On Taste in Dress,” Nineteenth Century 13 (1883): 47. 77 “Slaves of Fashion,” Art and Decoration (London: Methuen, 1920). 78 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860; New York: Penguin, 1974) 58. 79 Collins 59. Her figure is all the more elegant and beautiful when contrasted with her surprisingly ugly, masculine face. As Hartright laments, “Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted.” 80 Mrs. Fanny Douglas, The Gentlewoman’s Book of Dress (London: Henry & Co., [c. 1894]): 123–4. Quoted in Steele 53.

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style dress “unsuitable to English climate and English ways.”81 And although she supported aesthetic dress, Mary Haweis nevertheless argued that “The Greek dress is wholly unsuited for our climate, habits, tastes, and complicated trade interests …. And it is inconsistent with stays, which have become a necessity to a race naturally small-waisted.”82 Haweis’s premise, that English women were “naturally small-waisted,” demonstrates that the conflation of natural and classical had a great deal to do with the larger question of English nationalism and women’s “nature.” In the nineteenth century it was widely held that small waists, like little hands, were hereditary or “natural” in upper-class white women. This cultural assumption, however, served as nationalistic projection, rather than as fact. Given the extensive evidence of a thriving corset industry that used a variety of strategies to appeal to consumers, the assertion falls flat. Although relatively few women would have qualified as tightlacers, most women did wear corsets. Thus the declaration that English women were “naturally” small-waisted presents a problem. A particularly fascinating trade card from the 1890s illustrates my point. The card, for Thomson’s GloveFitting Corset, depicts a female artist dressed in a waistless art gown.83 She is just finishing a sculpted bust of a classical female figure—classical, that is, except for the corset the figure is wearing. What does this trade card indicate about its anticipated audience? It demonstrates what many saw as perfectly appropriate: a case of Art assisting Nature. Yet if art had to be called in to assist what was supposed to be natural, it becomes evident that claims such as Haweis’s had more to do with projections of English identity than with actual body proportions. The belief that upper-class European women naturally had small waists (and that small waists were desirable) relied on an important underlying assumption— that the upper classes of European society were more highly evolved than lower classes and “uncivilized” nations. As Gillian Beer points out in Open Fields, midcentury Victorians saw “the white, middle-class, European male as the crowned personage towards whom the past of the world [had] been striving.”84 English women, since women were generally viewed as the complements of men of the same class and ethnicity, would then occupy a position above women of other races. In colonial settings, wearing a corset functioned as a way of resisting local indigenous culture and modeling a supposedly superior moral code. As Leigh Summers argues, “Corsetry may have helped [colonial] women preserve their sense of culture and their sense of identity as ‘civilized’ modern women

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Cunningham 123. Haweis, “Aesthetics of Dress,” 99. 83 Reprinted in Steele 54. 84 Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 77. Quoted in Barbara Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): 17. 82

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while they remained in seemingly ‘uncivilized’ parts of the world.”85 At home in England, critics of the corset manipulated these cultural assumptions in a very different way. In 1882, one of the founders of the Rational Dress Society, Mrs. E. M. King, compared Victorian women’s dress to that of “savages.” King believed that “‘civilized man’ wore decent, comfortable clothing.”86 Although King used the civilized/uncivilized binary differently from colonial women, underpinning her argument was the assumption that despite their “uncivilized” clothing, the British were still the “civilized” race. Using other cultures’ “uncivilized” practices to criticize her own culture allowed King to heap double shame on the heads of the “civilized” English. One of the favorite uses of the rhetoric of “savage” versus “civilized” involved Chinese foot binding. As one writer expressed it, We laugh at the folly of the Chinese belles, who compress their feet until they are no longer fit for walking….and yet our own females are equally ridiculous, and even more criminal, when they imagine that they improve the beauty of their chests and waists by distorting them from that form which nature wisely imparted to them.87

Olive Schreiner used the imagery of Chinese foot-binding to critique women’s cramped social possibilities: in The Story of an African Farm (1883), Lyndall complains that British women have been trained to “fit our sphere as a Chinese woman’s foot fits her shoe, exactly, as though God had made both.”88 In Fashion in Deformity (1881), medical doctor Sir William Flower took a similar perspective. He argued that it “was reserved for mediæval civilised Europe to have invented the system of squeezing together, rendering immobile, and actually deforming, the most important part of the human frame.”89 Dr. Flower went on to argue that by adopting elements of European fashion such as tight shoes and corsets, “we are simply putting ourselves on a level in point of taste with those Australians, Botocudos, and Negroes.”90 These critiques depended on the ideology of racial hierarchy that underpinned much of Victorian thought. They rely on the premise that since English people were naturally more advanced than other peoples, it was doubly appalling that the English should engage in “uncivilized” practices. Even the French were criticized, for importing extreme fashions; in 1874, the Boston educator and dress reformer Abba Gould Woolson tried to distance Englishspeakers from French influences, claiming that Protestant Christians should 85

Summers 19. Mrs. E. M. King, Rational Dress, or, the Dress of Women and Savages (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882) 6. 87 “Tight Dressing—Corsets,” The Mother’s Book (Aug. 1838): 170. Quoted in Steele 53. 88 Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883; New York: Penguin, 1971) 189. 89 William Flower, Fashion in Deformity as Illustrated in the Customs of Barbarous and Civilised Races (London: Macmillan & Co., 1881) 79–80. 90 Flower 85. 86

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reject “demi-monde fashion mongers of Paris.”91 If we reflect back to the reality that most women’s waists, upper class or otherwise, were not as small as they were “naturally” supposed to be, it becomes apparent that the terms “nature” and “natural” had a great deal to do with the creation of an idealized image of British society. It would seem that Foucault’s claim that discourse is power holds true in this case. The “natural” never existed a priori; rather, competing discourses all aimed to create that category through the act of defining it. Attempts to characterize “woman’s nature” ran parallel to emerging ideas about evolution, heredity, and eugenics. As Barbara Gates’s Kindred Nature (1998) makes evident, the debate was a complicated one that spanned the nineteenth century. According to many social Darwinists, nature should determine proper social roles; if it was woman’s “nature” to produce offspring, then educating women for other roles clearly made little sense. By the 1860s, educated women such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Lydia Becker countered the rhetorical use of “nature,” arguing that most people had their categories reversed. Rather than using biology, or nature, to determine social roles, critics of women’s equality actually used existing social mores to authorize the “natural.” As Lydia Becker put it in 1868, “the attribute of sex does not extend to mind.”92 A prominent advocate of women’s rights, including their enfranchisement, Becker nevertheless took a conservative stance on dress. In 1888, the Rational Dress Society’s Gazette reported that Lydia Becker publicly advised women to “stick to your stays ladies, and triumph over the other sex.”93 Unlike Lady F. W. Harberton and Mrs. E. M. King, founders of the Rational Dress Society, Becker seemed to have believed that radical dress choices hurt rather than helped the women’s cause. She was not alone in this opinion. Although they differed from their forerunner Lydia Becker on the priorities of the women’s movement, Emmeline Pankhurst and the militant suffragists of the Women’s Political and Social Union (founded in 1903) dressed in the height of Edwardian fashion: the more radical their message, the more feminine their clothing. This theatricality in the suffragists’ dress served to popularize their pageants and marches, drawing the public’s attention to the suffragists’ beauty and respectability, and perhaps assuaging public censure.94 As Alison Lurie explains, “To wear such [fashionable] Abba Gould Woolson, Dress Reform: A Series of Lectures Delivered in Boston, On Dress as It Affects the Health of Women (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874) 1. Woolson, a member of the New England’s Women’s Club, led a Boston committee on dress reform and edited this collection of lectures on the subject. 92 Lydia Becker, “Is There Any Specific Distinction Between Male and Female Intellect?” Englishwoman’s Review 8 (1868): 483–91: 484. 93 Becker, quoted in Rational Dress Society’s Gazette (Oct. 1888): 1. 94 For more on the suffragists’ performance of femininity, see Barbara Green’s chapter “Advertising Feminism” in Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905–1938 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997) and Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 91

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clothes, however, did not necessarily mean acceptance of the status quo. Some feminists wore them deliberately in order to confuse or disarm their opponents: indeed, several of the leaders of the Emancipation Movement were famous for their stylishness.”95 Simultaneously challenging mainstream fashion and political conservatism could be dangerous. The memory of the early American suffragists and their notorious bloomers was enough to sober any late Victorian activist. For middle-class women’s-rights activists like Becker and Pankhurst, dress could be used as a subtle tool, as a way to render intellectual or political radicalism more palatable. That Lydia Becker took such a conservative stance on corsets not only reflects the public’s sometimes mocking, sometimes mordant, attitude toward dress reform; it also indicates both her priorities and the nature of the corset industry in the 1880s. Whereas the Rational Dress Society’s stated mission was to reform women’s dress in order to make it hygienic and practical, Becker’s goal was the enfranchisement of women. This is not to say that Harberton and King did not support women’s rights, or that Becker disregarded the corset issue. They merely had different priorities. Becker’s stance on stays must be viewed from a consumer’s perspective. By mid-century a variety of elastic, boneless, or other “health” corsets had become available. The Rational Dress Society and the Rational Dress Association both sold boneless corsets. It is likely that Becker recommended these types of corsets. Many moderate participants in the women’s rights movement did not support the idea of scrapping the corset; rather, they advised choosing what they viewed as sensible, healthful designs. Activists and reformers were not the only ones to mock the corseted figure but not abandon it entirely. Art critic Mary Eliza Haweis called the corset as a “machine” that results in a “grotesque outline of the body,” yet she nevertheless claimed that “people who refuse to wear any corset at all look very slovenly.”96 We must keep in mind that Victorian corsets did more than shape and smooth the waist; they also served as a brassiere that lifted and supported the breasts. For many women, not wearing a corset was a sign of sexual promiscuity or at the very least, immodesty. Although working-class and poor women did wear corsets, not wearing one was still associated with the moral looseness attributed to the lower classes, in particular with prostitutes. This is hardly the image that activists wanted to convey to an already hostile audience. If, as Patricia Cunningham asserts, the corset controversy reached its peak in the 1880s, it probably had a great deal to do with the work of women’s rights activists such as Lydia Becker. Decisions like Becker’s, to sideline the dress issue, may have reflected fear of demanding too much change too fast, for other major changes occurred in the early 1880s. In 1879 and 1882, the Married Women’s Property Acts gave women increasing control over their own inheritances and property, assets which previously had passed into husbands’ control upon marriage. 95 Lurie 223. Lurie goes on to note that second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem also used this strategy. 96 Mary Eliza Haweis, The Art of Beauty (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878) 48.

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The Contagious Disease Acts (which legalized the forcible examination and possible incarceration of any woman suspected of having a venereal disease) were finally repealed in 1883 and 1886, due largely to the struggle of Josephine Butler. As I discussed in detail in Chapter 2, in 1880, Mundella’s Education Act made elementary-school attendance compulsory for all children ages five to ten years of age, bringing the vision of the 1870 Education Act closer to reality. Also in the 1870s and 1880s, several women’s colleges were established, including Newnham at Cambridge (1871) and Westfield in London (1882). In 1881, Mrs. King and Lady Harberton founded the Rational Dress Society. These momentous changes in English society reflected years of agitation and struggle, and their installation was not without dissension and debate. New corset designs and more sophisticated advertising also appeared in the 1880s. As Leigh Summers points out, “By the 1880s few publications were without corset advertisements of some kind, and by the 1890s corset advertising saturated public reading space.”97 Corsets—in astonishing variety—were more obvious to the reading public. Furthermore, advertising in the late 1870s and early 1880s became increasingly adroit, targeting diverse audiences in clever ways. Suffrage journals, for example, often printed corset ads picturing intellectual women in eyeglasses. These ads appealed to consumers on the grounds of health, rather than of beauty or fashion. Furthermore, until the late 1870s, corset advertisements pictured corsets suspended in mid-air, filled with flowers or surrounded by cupids and butterflies. Not until the 1880s did advertisements begin to picture drawings and photographs of actual female bodies in those corsets.98 And perhaps most important, the fashionable silhouette of the 1870s and 1880s demanded a tinier waist. Thus corsetry was more dramatic than it had been in earlier decades. When the crinoline was in vogue, almost any woman could appear to have a small waist. With such voluminous, bell-shaped skirts, the waist looked proportionally tiny. When that style dominated, dress reformers such as Amelia Bloomer and the predecessors of the Rational Dress Society focused their attention on the crinoline and the absurd weight of petticoats and other underwear. But from the 1870s to the 1890s, skirts grew more and more narrow, bodices longer and tighter. With these changes, it was much trickier to fake a small waist, and longer, more extreme corsetry became necessary. Given these developments in women’s rights and fashion, it makes sense that the corset controversy should have reached a fever pitch in the 1880s. Inasmuch as the Victorian corset controversies represented questions of women’s nature and role in society, they also reflected attempts to define English class and national identity. In the Victorian period, a wider variety of opinion than ever before became available for public consumption, and new discourses entered the fray, relying on similar terms but providing subtly different definitions. 97

Summers 174. Steele 44; Summers 178. See Summers’s discussion of corset advertising in Chapter 7, “Corsetry, Advertising, and Multiple Readings of the Nineteenth-Century Female Body,” Bound to Please. 98

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These discussions were made possible by the development of the press and a voracious consumer society, as well as by changes in education. But the greater the variety of opinion, the stronger the need to authorize one point of view. The corset question galvanized Victorian society, triggering and manipulating anxieties about gender, class, and national identity. These anxieties prompted a variety of questions. What is women’s nature? What should women’s role in society be? In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), she writes that “clothes wear us and not we them … they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues.”99 Almost fifty years earlier, Olive Schreiner makes a similar point in The Story of an African Farm (1883). The character Lyndall says that everyone is born a “little plastic being.” Women grow accustomed to restraint: “We fit our sphere as a Chinese woman’s foot fits her shoe, exactly, as though God had made both.”100 The point is clear: clothing not only expresses identity, it creates it. The New Woman and Radical Dress The debate over the corset may have peaked in the 1880s, but the raging storm of opinion was far from quelled afterwards. When the New Woman captured the nation’s imagination, she was instantly linked with radical dress movements. Many New Woman novelists did dress their heroines in forms of alternative dress, but their costume choices reflected a need to mold existing options to fit new possibilities. Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth Clarke McFall) (1854–1943), one of the bestknown and most prolific of the New Woman writers, attacked the corset in both her fiction and non-fiction. In all her novels, Grand used the tight-lacing issue as a way to speak about women’s containment and restriction, not only physically but metaphorically, in a society that limited their rights and possibilities. As Ann Heilmann puts it, “Sarah Grand was at the forefront of writers who exposed the corset as a straitjacket of the mind.”101 In her bestselling three-decker novel, The Heavenly Twins (1893), Grand condemned the society that persuaded women to deform their bodies and minds to fit a supposedly feminine ideal. All three of the female protagonists, Angelica, Evadne, and Edith, use dress as a way to express their reactions to the ideological structure of late Victorian society. Twice in the narrative, a silent, tight-laced woman acts as a sort of emblem for these more progressive characters to observe and criticize. Against these tableaux vivants depicted as vain, trivial, and “low-class,” Angelica, Edith, and Evadne embody aristocratic sprezzatura or stylish radicalism. The first example occurs early in the narrative, and the young, precocious Angelica Hamilton-Wells is quick to respond. A visitor arrives at the house, whom Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; New York: Harcourt, 1956). Olive Schreiner, African Farm 189. 101 Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 122. 99

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the narrator caustically describes as “one of those heroic women who have the constancy to squeeze their figures in beyond the V shape, which is the commonest deformity, to that of the hourglass which bulges out more above and below the line of compression.”102 Without giving the woman a chance to explain why she has chosen to lace “so tight in the middle,” Angelica announces that she admires the Venus de Medici, whose “good figure” she plans to have when she grows up (132). Here Grand utilizes the anticipated comparison between Venus and a corseted woman, showing what type of woman Angelica will grow up to be by the figure she prefers. In her portrait of Angelica, Grand seems to allude to the famous female classicist, Jane Harrison, whom I mentioned previously. In the early 1880s, when Grand was writing The Heavenly Twins, Harrison was working at the British Museum, giving lectures there and eventually touring around Britain. Harrison, who had worn aesthetic dress since her days as a student at Newnham College, became extremely popular for her lectures and her scholarship. 103 In 1882, she published her first book, Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature, to much acclaim. Grand’s message is clear: women who are properly educated will grow up to have good, sensible, rational taste. In this scene and others, “proper” education means a classical, upper-class, masculine one. Angelica and her twin Diavolo challenge gender roles from precocious infancy, insisting that Angelica is the smarter one and that she should receive the same education as her brother. Presaging the experience of Woolf’s genderbending Orlando (of the novel Orlando, 1928), Angelica explains that it is as if their minds had switched places: “I am Diavolo and he is me” (124). In their symbiotic relationship, the twins demonstrate the ambiguous and even arbitrary nature of culturally ascribed gender roles, criticizing the society that educates men and women differently. Angelica may boast the rare gift of an upper-class, masculine, classical education, but she also demonstrates literacy in a more traditional feminine language, that of dress. As an adolescent, Angelica discovers the power of clothing to shape social identity. Wearing a long dinner gown for the first time (274), Angelica learns, according to Ann Heilmann, that “gender codes impose a feminine masquerade which, by accentuating sexual difference, disrupts the psychic unity with her brother.”104 Afterward Angelica assures Diavolo that if she ever wears long dresses again, “it shall only be a disguise” (275). Angelica continues to use dress as a masquerade, cross-dressing in order to visit “inappropriate” venues, such as a menagerie. Her cross-dressing demonstrates the fluidity of gender roles, showing gender-specific clothes, and gender itself, to be mere “disguise.” Ultimately, Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (1893; MI: Univ. of Michigan, 1992) 132. Further references to The Heavenly Twins are given in the text. 103 See Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 104 Heilmann 130–31. 102

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however, Angelica abandons her cross-dressing romps, choosing the outward appearance of femininity, if not the social and intellectual limitations it imposes. Later in Grand’s novel, another corseted woman strolls onto the stage. A different female protagonist, Edith Mentieth, is resting at the seaside with her husband Sir Mosley Mentieth. (We later discover that ailing Edith is dying of syphilis, contracted from her husband and his sexual exploits on the cheekily named H.M.S. Abomination.) Sitting comfortably in a “low easy-chair,” Edith watches people on the beach as if she were the spectator of a vaudeville act. The first act, a group of rowdy, shrieking “grown up people canter past upon donkeys” (278). On these, Edith pronounces the verdict, “Horrid, common people! … How dreadful it would be to have to know them!” The next performance is presented by a girl riding awkwardly on a hired horse. She wears an ill-fitting “rusty black skirt” and rides clumsily. In response, Edith visualizes the completely opposite picture she herself would present in the same position, but she graciously concedes that the girl must be having a good time. Finally, a tight-laced girl enters the stage. The narrator describes her as “one of those good-looking girls of the middle class … young women with senses rampant, and minds undisciplined, impelled by natural instinct to find a mate, and practicing every little art of dress and manner which they imagine will help them to that end by making them attractive” (279). Giving a comical performance of pausing, looking confused, searching for something in her pocket, and gazing dreamily about (all for the benefit of Edith’s husband, Mentieth), the girl is ridiculously dressed. She “had made herself up by tight-lacing into a notable specimen of the peg-top figure, bulgy at the bust and shoulders, and tapering off at the waist” (279). Too-tight shoes and gigantically fluffy hair complete the absurd look “known to her set as ‘stylish’” (279). Edith feels sorry for the girl but also infuriated by her husband’s shameless “ogling the girl on the beach” (281). Edith’s critiques of others’ dress demonstrate the class biases that undergird the narrator’s assessment of tight-lacing. Upper-class in every sense (described as delicate and fragile, fitting “hereditary” upper-class characteristics perfectly), Edith critiques the corseted girl for dress choices the narrator characterizes as “middle-class.” The attributes the narrator condemns— attention to appearance and the performance of coquetry—are embodied by a girl described as vulgar and bourgeois, a victim of passing fads and mass consumerism. By characterizing her “set” along with her, the narrator makes it clear that the girl could be any middleclass girl; she has no identity, no voice, of her own. Yet the association between dress and class goes even deeper. The scene is framed in such a way that Edith takes a superior position to those she observes. Contrasted against the raucous, unsightly people she criticizes, Edith’s upper-class tastes and judgments take on a more burnished gleam. A woman of leisure, taste, and refinement, Edith may be criticized for her complicity in an oppressive patriarchal system, but not for her artistic, upper-class sensibilities. Along with Angelica and Edith, the third protagonist, Evadne Frayling, displays artistic taste and intellectual freedom in her clothing choices. Evadne, a

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well-read and thoughtful woman who ends up trapped in a marriage to a man she cannot respect, goes so far as to design and make her own clothing. Upper-class Evadne could certainly afford to purchase Parisian couture or the latest Liberty styles, but she chooses instead to create her own clothing in order to express an exclusive, individualized, avant-garde style. For the most part, Evadne’s dress designs do not provoke strong reactions; they do not identify her with either dress reform or aesthetic dress, but with a vaguely artistic, intelligently stylish, and most definitely upper-class sensibility. Her first ensemble, for a ball in Malta, elicits the admiration of her husband and his friends, but her husband soon discovers that his unconventional wife “doesn’t care a hang whether she’s admired or not— rather objects, if anything, perhaps” (582). And in a later scene, Evadne responds to Mr. Hamilton-Wells’s assumption that she has adopted aesthetic dress. In the scene, Evadne wears a lovely “art gown” which Dr. Galbraith describes as “very becoming to her” (611). Mr. Hamilton-Wells also notices her appearance: “‘I suppose you are a strong supporter of the aesthetic dress movement,’ he said, doubtless alluding to the graceful freedom of her delicate primrose draperies.” She responds, “Not at all,” and the subject is dropped (611). As the narrator explains, she started “a distinctive style of dress, always a dangerous experiment, but in her case, fortunately, so admirably successful, that it was never remarked upon as strange by people of taste; only as appropriate” (328). Here Grand fictionalizes the same issue Becker faced when she admonished women to “stick to [their] stays.” Knowing that alternative dress choices often jeopardized women’s intellectual and political agendas, many real New Women, such as Sarah Grand, advocated sensible but not radical dress. As Grand makes clear through the narrator of The Heavenly Twins, Evadne’s clothing choices are regarded as “appropriate” by “people of taste”—in other words, by progressive, intelligent, upper-class people. Through her narrator and her characters, Grand expressed disdain for tightlacing, a practice she associated with “low” classes and with mass consumerism. Her preference for the handmade and the unique links Grand with the harbingers of modernism—the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Aesthetic Movement. Yet Grand’s personal stance on alternative dress remains unclear. A committed suffragist, she belonged to the Rational Dress Society, but in an 1896 interview published in the Humanitarian, she expressed a desire for more attractive reform dress.105 She found rational dress “exceedingly ugly” and “unsightly” and claimed that radical dress styles, even mere sloppiness, hurt the women’s movement: Want of taste in dress on the part of many women, who advocate what are called advanced views, has thrown back the woman’s cause fifty years. Everyone who takes part in the movement ought to be particularly careful in dress and manners; and I am sorry to say that the manners of some are simply disgraceful. (165) 105

“The Woman’s Question. An Interview with Madame Sarah Grand,” by Sarah A. Tooley, Humanitarian 8.3 (Mar. 1896): 161–9. In A New Woman Reader, ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson (Toronto: Broadview: 2001) 160–67: 164. Further references to “The Woman’s Question” are given in the text.

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Grand nevertheless claimed that rational dress “takes ten years off your age,” probably because of its less restrictive cut. And as part of the Rational Dress Society, she met leaders of the women’s movement who became important allies. Sarah Grand’s stance in The Heavenly Twins, together with her personal comments, implicitly suggest that class distinctions dictate dress choices just as they determine how radical one can afford to be. By contrast, Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926). I discussed the novel in detail in Chapter 2, but there is more to say about it here. In the novel (set, like most of Schreiner’s work, in her native South Africa), the female protagonist Rebekah finds herself the target of derision for refusing to wear a corset.106 Rebekah describes, when I go down the Government Avenue, and the coloured girls sitting there laugh because they see I don’t wear stays as other women do, it’s as if a knife ran into me under my ribs. I know I’m right; that in years to come people will wonder women could be so mad and foolish to deform themselves. And yet, when these women laugh at me, I am so full of pain I can hardly walk down to the station; and when I come home I feel I want to creep on to the bed and cry. I’ve tried to like coloured women and do all I can to help them, and then they jeer at me! I don’t want for days to go out again.107

It is important to note that the ridicule comes from “coloured girls,” women below Rebekah on the social scale by virtue of their class and ethnicity. In colonial South Africa, the word “coloured” was a complex and contested term, generally used to describe “a person of mixed white and African (black) or Malay (East Indian) descent.” 108 Carolyn Burdett provides fuller insight into the cultural context of the term: What was, by around the middle of the nineteenth century, already being called the Cape’s coloured population, is a complex grouping of the Cape’s indigenous peoples, the Khoi and the San (with some mixture of European or Xhosa ancestry), and the descendants of slaves and ex-slaves, many of whom were born of sexual relations between white slave-owners and slave women, and then, even more commonly, between white men and Dutch-speaking Cape-born women of mixed parentage.109 Schreiner’s better-known heroine, Lyndall, of The Story of an African Farm (1883), made fun of women with “souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble,” but did not make an overt connection between tight-lacing and mental constriction (185). Perhaps Schreiner’s tacit admiration for a petite figure (she could not seem to stop herself from obsessively noting Lyndall’s tiny hands, feet, and waist) limited her interest in condemning the corset as a means of producing that thimble-sized soul. 107 Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man or, Perhaps Only (1926; London: Virago,  1982) 140. 108 “Coloured,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2006, Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 Feb. 2006 . 109 Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 100. For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see Burdett, notes 42–4 in Chapter 3, “Capturing the Ideal.” 106

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Before the establishment of Apartheid in 1948, intermarriage between so-called coloureds and whites was fairly common, and by adopting “white” manners, dress, and speech, many coloured people became integrated into white communities. Rebekah’s choice not to wear a corset contrasts sharply with her own coloured servant’s decision to wear a lacy, scarlet one—for sleeping with Rebekah’s husband. In another scene, Rebekah follows her husband to the young servant girl’s room, only to find the girl alone, but dressed in a garish red corset (301). Suddenly, Rebekah understands why the young maid has taken to snickering at her and challenging her authority. Schreiner’s isolated references to corsets in these two scenes demonstrate that for those in a position of subjugation, defying social norms can be dangerous, while conforming to them reaps precious rewards. In New Woman Fiction (2000), Ann Heilmann argues, “That the women who deride Rebekah are black servants, and thus triply exploited in terms of race, class, and sex, illustrates the ideological function of dress codes.”110 Heilmann’s point about the importance of dress codes is well taken, but she overlooks a crucial detail: the women who mock Rebekah are not black, they are coloured, and in colonial South Africa, the distinction is critical. The women’s “triple exploitation” is actually much more complicated than Heilmann acknowledges. As coloured women, they are both victims of and agents within an oppressive colonial system. The women who deride Rebekah do so out of subjugation to and investment in a particular class structure. Not only would the coloured female servants on Government Avenue face stiffer punishments if they were to transgress dress codes, but following those dress codes also offers them a way to advance in colonial society. As coloured women they had the opportunity to climb the social ladder, if only by a few rungs, and respectable clothing would have helped them to do so. Rebekah is a woman of a higher class by virtue of her skin color, her education, and her financial situation. Although she suffers for her choice to abandon the corset, she does so from a position of relative power and stability. Her class status is already secure: the decision to transgress social dress codes cannot change the color of her skin, the way she speaks, or her financial status, even if it can change the way others perceive her. For the coloured servants, however, choosing to wear a corset identifies them as proper and respectable, or even as attractive and admired. Wearing a simple, moderately-laced corset allows the women on Government Avenue to avoid being characterized as prostitutes, an association European colonists would find easy to make by virtue of their intermediate skin color and the value of the clothes they could afford, and a stereotype reinforced in Schreiner’s depiction of the housemaid seduced by the master. Yet even as she used that stereotype, Schreiner aimed to rewrite it: Rebekah will eventually adopt the housemaid’s illegitimate child Sartje and try to teach her sons to treat her as an equal. She tells her children a very long allegory of the hostile history between the

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Heilmann 122.

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whites and the blacks in South Africa, ending with an admonition: “even if people aren’t like us at all, deep down there is something that joins us together” (438). The young servant girl gains power over her mistress by wearing the red corset as a symbol of seduction—a seduction based, by the way, on Western ideals of beauty. Of course, the young girl loses infinitely more than she gains: because she is a pawn in the hands of a white master, her sexuality is not her own. As Burdett convincingly argues, Rebekah is devastated by what Frank’s adultery symbolizes, its entanglement in an old, brutal system of exploitation and oppression: “in making the object of Frank’s sexual appetite a so-called coloured woman, Schreiner is quite deliberately embedding the novel’s gender politics in their South African context…. Frank’s sexual liaison in the backyard thus evokes a past in which sexual, racial and class exploitation are bound together in the horror of slavery.”111 Laughing at her shamed mistress may afford the young servant girl the only possible way to assert her own identity and power in a situation in which she is actually a victim. In these two scenes, the coloured servants who ridicule Rebekah have an investment in reinforcing certain definitions of femininity, even if those definitions are part of a colonial system that creates the means of their own oppression. In light of Rebekah’s experiences in From Man to Man and that of the protagonists of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, the fragility of an imaginary community of women becomes painfully clear. Through the experiences of her character Rebekah, Schreiner considered the risks a middle-class white woman must take in trying to help another woman, whether a fallen sister or the child of a husband’s illicit union with a woman of a different race. While Grand’s narrative emphasized the need for solidarity among women, it did so at the expense of working- and middle-class women, women who seemed to fall outside the bounds of sisterhood. In both novels, the differences among women compromise community, making it impossible to talk about gender without taking into account the power inequalities inherent in Victorian formulations of race and class. For New Woman writers, dressing their heroines in artistic or rational dress offered a way to display their resistance to the pressures of normative middle-class culture. Characters such as Angelica, Evadne, and Rebekah abandon corsets not only for the sake of comfort, but in order to accentuate their chosen identities—as artists, intellectuals, and activists. Yet for both Grand and Schreiner, too much radicalism in dress might compromise readers’ acceptance of or admiration for their heroines. Both authors avoid labeling their characters as dress reformers or aesthetes, and they also emphasize the traditional femininity of their protagonists: Rebekah, for example, is a devoted mother who sews for her children, and Evadne longs for heterosexual love with her husband. Grand and Schreiner relied on the fact that by the turn of the century, the distinctions between the philosophies behind the various dress movements had become blurred. Now a character who wore an

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art gown or rejected a corset could be charmingly artistic, or an intellectual, or just radical enough to prompt admiration but not derision. After 1910, the corset’s popularity receded. During World War I, women needed shorter hemlines—or even trousers—in order to work safely in factories. Material and notions were rationed and clothing became much more functional. But the corset had begun to release its hold even before this point. Decades of agitation by dress reformers, doctors, and suffragists seemed to have finally turned the tide of opinion. Women’s athletics—especially tennis, gymnastics, cycling, and swimming—had become increasingly popular, and to participate in these activities women wanted looser, more comfortable clothing (Figure 3.12). The modern dance movement began in the early twentieth century. Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham rejected the rigid, airborne, “unnatural” poses of classical ballet in order to explore movement which used undulation, floor work, pelvic contractions, and spare lines—all of which shocked or thrilled their contemporaries. Women’s athletics and modern dance reflected the aesthetics of modernism, with its emphasis on structural simplicity, geometrical shapes, and spare, clean lines. French designer Paul Poiret explored the modernist aesthetic in his designs; some of his more famous contributions to fashion include his oriental designs, Art Deco gowns, and the invention of the modern brassiere. It is curious that while Poiret claimed to liberate women from their corsets, some of his designs stipulated even more elaborate corsetry. In order to pull off his kimono-inspired “hobble skirt,” women had to wear knee-length corsets. By the 1920s, a long, tubular silhouette had become fashionable. While this look required a trim physique—or undergarments that helped to create one—waistcinching corsets were suddenly passé. Corsets were still worn, but they now looked nothing like their Victorian parents; their goal was to smooth and flatten from bust to knees, not to attenuate the waist. The photograph of Mona Handy Westinghouse illustrates this style (Figure 3.13). The ideal female figure stood tall, angular, and slim, draped in simple rectangles of fabric rather than coiled into elaborate suiting. Lines rather than curves dominated early-twentieth-century fashion. Although corsets have lived on in later incarnations—girdles and merrywidows, the bra still worn today, modern lingerie, bondage wear, and most recently, in haute couture—never again did they hold such power over Western society. During most of the twentieth century, tiny waists were no longer a primary fashion goal. As Alison Gernsheim reminds us, “the straight vertical line remains the basic principal of modern dress.”112 In the late 1940s and 1950s, Christian Dior’s New Look did of course showcase the small waist and full bust. Reveling in swaths of fabric finally available after decades of war rations, the New Look celebrated the articulated hourglass shape that had fallen out of fashion in the 1910s. In the second half of the century the hourglass figure, often considered womanly and romantic, never disappeared entirely, but after 1960, the ideal figure was long and lean. In the 1970s strenuous exercise in the form of aerobics and 112

Gernsheim 94.

Fig. 3.12

Bathing costume, Bier Family (author’s husband’s family), Muskoka, Ontario, Canada, c. 1908.

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Fig. 3.13

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Mona Handy Westinghouse (1900–1988; author’s great-great aunt), c. 1920.

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jogging ushered in the aesthetic of muscular curviness or ultra-thin androgyny; these silhouettes have remained popular into the early twenty-first century. Today exercise, diet, and cosmetic surgery, not to mention descendents of corsets such as girdles, control-top pantyhose, push-up bras, and other “foundation” garments, are used to squeeze wayward bodies into ideal shapes. Once the primary sign of a woman’s class status, respectability, and adherence to fashion or anti-fashion, the Victorian corset lost its power to contain so much significance. Like the New Woman and her clamorous bid for social change, the corset came to represent defunct questions and moot points. Folded neatly into a dusty attic trunk, the hourglass corset ceased to operate as a mainstay of women’s dress—not so much because of its violence or extremism, but because of its inability to shape and display the “modern” female silhouette. It came to signify excess, not decorum; captivity, not beauty; romance, not reality. After the controversy and conflict reached their peak in the 1880s and 1890s, the corset—and the resistance and radicalism it inspired—fell out of fashion. Once a mandatory garment for all British women, by World War I the corset as the Victorians knew it had become old-fashioned. At the dawn of a new century, the corset failed to contain modernity, exhaling a sigh of relief as it released its hold.

Chapter 4

Art’s Labor Lost: Haunting the Dress Shop “A woman,” wrote Margaret Oliphant in 1858, “who cannot be a governess or a novel-writer must fall back on that poor little needle, the primitive and original handicraft of femininity. If she cannot do that, or even, doing it, if stifled among a crowd of others like herself, who have no other gift, she must starve by inches, and die over the shirt she makes. We are all perfectly acquainted with this picture.” Forty-two years later, Oliphant published one of her final novels, Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago (1890). Set in the 1810s and 1820s, the novel tells the story of a Scottish noblewoman who runs away from an arranged marriage to become a dressmaker in London. Dramatically different from the starving seamstress Oliphant described in her 1858 article, “The Condition of Women,” the eponymous heroine of Kirsteen not only supports herself and her family by dressmaking, but in the process she becomes an artist. The narrator describes Kirsteen’s designs as “compositions,” the work of a “genius.” Yet in order to claim dressmaking as art, Oliphant had to bury decades of contentious public debate over the abuses of the sewing trades, abuses she herself critiqued in her 1858 article and that were still a major concern in the 1880s when she was writing Kirsteen. Oliphant also chose to utilize the vocabularies of both aestheticism and New Woman novels, movements with which she seemingly had little else in common. Does Oliphant’s romanticized portrayal of the classed world of the dress shop reveal an unwillingness to engage with her contemporaries’ concern over the plight of women workers in the unregulated sewing trades, or does it offer a masked intervention in that debate? Why does Oliphant obsessively assert Kirsteen’s aristocratic blood, acknowledging the disgracefulness of her heroine’s “trade” as a dressmaker, while simultaneously declaring it a form of art? In her contradictory and problematic portrait of the dress shop, Oliphant unsteadily negotiated the merged issues of women’s artistry, labor, and class status—issues that also perplexed other Victorian women writers, including New Woman contemporaries such as Ella Hepworth Dixon and George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), as well as the mid-Victorian writer Oliphant considered “second-rate,” Elizabeth Gaskell. In her bestselling Kirsteen, Oliphant presented a fantasy of modern sewing in a fabricated past: no longer traditional, no longer

 Margaret Oliphant, “The Condition of Women,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Feb. 1858), in Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Victorian Writing by Women on Women, ed. Susan Hamilton (Toronto: Broadview, 1995) 209–30: 212.

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associated with fallen women and crushing exploitation, sewing had become modern, a means to both financial independence and artistic expression. In New Woman scholarship, Oliphant has most often been considered for her antagonism to New Woman writers, particularly on the issue of women’s sexuality. Oliphant critics, such as Valerie Sanders, D. J. Trela, and Ann Heilmann, have endeavored to understand more fully Oliphant’s political position on women’s rights. Was she a feminist, an anti-feminist? Generally conservative in her political views, we do know that Oliphant favored independent, strong-minded heroines, even if she disdained sensation novels and New Woman novels, novels which, in her view, broached “noxious topics” such as the “sensuous raptures … of physical sensation.” In considering Margaret Oliphant’s novel Kirsteen, I would like to set aside the issue of whether or not Oliphant was a feminist. Instead, I propose that we “thicken” our reading of Oliphant’s career by examining the material culture in which it was entangled—that of women’s dress culture—and how that entanglement connected it to the concerns of New Woman contemporaries such as Ella Hepworth Dixon and George Egerton. For even though Oliphant cut out and assembled a new design, she did so using old material, material she shared with unlikely partners—aesthetes, New Women, and social reform novels. How does the material culture of women’s dress weave together Victorian women writers and their readers, and how does Oliphant’s Kirsteen exemplify the ways dual literacy could be used both to illuminate and obfuscate those connections? “More Than a Machine” Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), prolific novelist and social critic, enjoyed a 48-year career as a fiction-writer and journalist, most notably for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Oliphant was born outside Edinburgh and grew up in northern England. As an adolescent tending her sickly mother, Oliphant began to write because she did not care for the more typical female pastime, sewing. 

Heilmann argues that although Oliphant most certainly did denounce some of the subject matter of New Woman writers and “came down on the side of establishment morality,” “in her articles she articulated feminist thoughts, and in her novels created selfassertive women characters with a vision of determination and professional success.” See Ann Heilmann, “Mrs. Grundy’s Rebellion: Margaret Oliphant between Orthodoxy and the New Woman,” Women’s Writing 6:2 (1999) 215–37: 1, 19. See also Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive, ed. D. J. Trela (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1995) and Valerie Sanders, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).  Oliphant, “Novels,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 102 (Sept. 1867), in A Serious Occupation: Literary Criticism by Victorian Women Writers, ed. Solveig C. Robinson (Toronto: Broadview, 2003) 144–74: 147, 149.  Margaret Oliphant, Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. Oliphant, ed. Mrs. Harry Coghill (New York: Dodd, 1899) 16, 23–4.

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Nevertheless, throughout her career, Oliphant wrote in the maelstrom of domestic activity, a ritual that led her to boast in 1885: “I don’t think I have ever had two hours undisturbed [for writing].” Modest about her success in her Autobiography (published posthumously in 1899), Oliphant actually enjoyed a lucrative writing career. She wrote an astonishing number of novels—about one hundred—as well as essays on a variety of topics, most for Blackwood’s, with which she published for forty-four years. Forced to support her children and her relatives’ children as well, Oliphant made her living by her pen, and she took great pride in both her domesticity and in her ability to provide for her family. “A house without needles how can that be?” asks one of the female characters in Kirsteen. And indeed, with the predominantly female group of characters constantly knitting, sewing, purchasing material for their projects, or talking about fashion, patterns, and techniques, it is hard to see how a house could actually survive without the obligatory needle. During the first part of the novel, Kirsteen lives a dull and secluded life in rural Scotland, trapped in a domestic cage by her controlling father. In the “bare little house of Drumcarro,” the women of the household perform the family’s plain sewing. Kirsteen, her sisters Mary and Jeannie, their chronically ill mother Mrs. Douglas, and the working-class housekeeper and true matriarch of the group, Marg’ret [sic], mend clothing, darn stockings, and knit (32). In Chapter 1, I discussed how the female characters in Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man form communities—some supportive, some destructive—around the activity of sewing. Oliphant also portrays sewing as a communal activity, one performed with other women at home. As we will see, later in the novel she transfers this portrait of private, communal sewing to the workplace, with controversial consequences. In From Man to Man, men play minor roles. Likewise, in Oliphant’s novel Kirsteen’s father plays a small but crucial role as a domineering Scottish laird. The family patriarch prefers to be called by the name of his estate, Drumcarro, rather than by his surname, Douglas. This elision between name and land establishes Drumcarro as a member of an economic system—part feudal, part detritus of the failing late-nineteenth-century British empire—that, as the novel demonstrates, is beginning to crumble. Nevertheless, the entire Douglas family takes enormous pride in its lineage. It does not deign to associate with those perceived to be

Oliphant, Autobiography 24. For other perspectives on Oliphant’s relationship to art and New Woman fiction, see Kabi Hartman, “‘An Artist in her Way’: Representations of the Woman Artist in Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen,” Schuylkill 2.2 (Summer/Fall 1999), 10 Nov. 2006. ; and Linda Peterson, “The Female Bildungsroman: Tradition and Revision in Oliphant’s Fiction,” Margaret Oliphant: Gentle Subversive, ed. D. J. Trela (London: Associated University Presses, 1995).  Margaret Oliphant, Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago (1888; London: Everyman, 1984) 24. Further references to Kirsteen are given in the text.  

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“beneath” it and stubbornly clings to the value of a name, even when financial resources become increasingly limited. Despite his class status, Drumcarro fails to treat his daughters as wealthy landowners generally would—as valuable commodities on the marriage market. This unwillingness to manage his daughters according to tradition underscores Drumcarro’s miserly, brutish nature. The villain of the narrative, Drumcarro bullies the women, alternately cowing them to his will or unwittingly fanning their small rebellions. He believes his daughters are useless to him, a mere drain on his already depleted resources. In Drumcarro’s view, girls “were unlucky accidents, tares among the wheat, handmaids who might be useful about the house, but who had no future, no capabilities of advancing the family, creatures altogether of no account” (33). But Drumcarro’s refusal to seek profitable marriages for his daughters also signals his ambivalence about the types of labor appropriate for women of his daughters’ class. Rather than use carefully arranged marriages as a way of “strengthening [his] house by alliances,” Drumcarro instead treats his daughters as “almost servants” (33, 36). The sons, though spoiled and overindulged, get shipped off to the colonies as soon as they are of age; Kirsteen’s mother plays the part of the proverbial doormat; and as it turns out, Kirsteen’s older sister was banished for marrying a doctor whom the narrator wryly describes as a person “without pedigree or pretensions like their [the family’s] own” (35). In her portrayal of this unstable household, the narrator lays the blame on the patriarch. She describes Drumcarro with an almost sadistic glee: he is cold, stoic, tightfisted, and above all, ridiculously proud. In this characterization, Oliphant seems to offer a caricature of Scottishness; that she will go on to poke fun at Kirsteen, for her overarching family pride, corroborates this view. But Oliphant critiques something else here, as well. Patriarchy itself is a decomposing morass of outdated social relations and unenlightened customs. It depends on a vision of British empire that, like the family unit, displays deep and irreparable dysfunction. Drumcarro made his fortune as a slaveowner in Jamaica —or rather tried to, since by the time Oliphant begins her story, the family’s finances are in shambles. The neighbors call him the “auld slave-driver” and gossip about his exploits in the Caribbean. Like Jane Austen in Mansfield Park (1814), Oliphant offers a critique of the ostensibly benevolent, wise, just patriarch. Oliphant’s inept bully cannot govern the women of his own household, much less the natives at the farther reaches of empire. His control is an illusion, a sham. For Drumcarro, sewing serves as the women’s only measurable contribution to the family’s economic stability: “[W]hat do they want that they haven’t got— plenty of good meat, and a good roof over their heads, and nothing to do for’t but sew their seams and knit their stockings and keep a pleasant tongue in their heads” (43). Sewing, according to Drumcarro, is more than a frivolous pastime to keep unoccupied hands and heads busy: it is how the women earn their keep. Unlike typical women of their class, the Drumcarro women do not spend their time at elaborate fancy work. Instead, they do all the family’s plain sewing—mending, darning, knitting, and making new garments.

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In its emphasis on plain sewing rather than on other accomplishments, the Douglas girls’ education bears closer resemblance to early-nineteenth-century, working-class, female education than to that of the nobility. In Chapter 2, I discussed Victorian women’s education, and how, especially between 1800 and 1870, working-class girls generally received formal instruction in little more than sewing and reading. In fact, working-class girls’ sewing crossed the boundary between education and labor: the items they made during their hours of instruction were often sold for the benefit of the schools. And certainly, at home, workingand middle-class girls performed the crucial, yet unpaid and unregulated, work of sewing and mending the family’s clothing and linen. In Kirsteen, a novel set quite self-consciously in Scotland in the 1810s and 1820s, the heroine and her sisters receive the equivalent of a working- or lower-middle-class woman’s education and perform the domestic duties associated with that education, even though they are landed gentry. Rather than learn French, music, or fancy work, as would more appropriately match their class status, the girls spend the majority of their time plain sewing with their mother and working-class housekeeper, Marg’ret. Like women with limited means, the women do not sew primarily for themselves, but for the men of the household. The narrator tells us that the Douglas daughters grew up “without even the meager education then considered necessary for women” and that their father treated them “almost as servants” (33, 34, 36). The girls “acquired somehow the arts of reading and writing, and many housewifely accomplishments, but without books, without society, without any break in the monotony of life or prospect in their future” (34). In her description of “the meager education then considered necessary for women,” Oliphant launches her post–Mundella Act reader into a gloomy past, one in which women were not educated properly. She also portrays rural Scottish education as less developed and regulated than urban English education, for even the lower middle-class seamstresses Kirsteen will meet in London display the trappings of a good education. She certainly undercuts the family’s pretensions; the fact that servants are not available to help with the work of plain sewing signals a contradiction in the family’s class status. Drumcarro demands that his wife and daughters display fluency in dress culture. All of the women are excellent seamstresses, and all of them demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the social significance of clothing. Kirsteen’s sister Mary is the best mender, and Mrs. Douglas works on little but knitting (97). Kirsteen, however, possesses talents the others do not. The most proficient seamstress of them all, she tackles the most difficult fine work—her father’s linen, about which he “was very particular” (48). As the narrator observes, “Kirsteen’s hemming was almost invisible, so small were the stitches and the thread so delicate. She was accomplished with her needle according to the formula of that day” (48). In this description, Oliphant subtly reminds the reader that before the mid-century invention of the sewing machine, women’s hand-sewing was held up to higher 



See Chapter 2, “The Needle Dipped in Blood.”

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standards. Not only does Kirsteen display the most advanced needleworking skills, she alone demands that her labor be recognized and valued. Moments after one of the Douglas sons has left for an uncertain future in India, the women of the household settle back to work, but Kirsteen protests, “I cannot settle to work … and I will not. I’m not just a machine for darning stockings. I wish I was Robbie going out into the world” (24). Kirsteen asserts that she is more than a machine, that she ought to choose the circumstances under which she will work. It is Kirsteen’s ability to work with the needle—and her demand for just compensation for that labor—that will allow her not only to go out into the world, but to thrive in it. Kirsteen and her sisters find clever ways to use their dual literacy to their own advantage. The girls receive an invitation to a local ball, and in order to attend, each girl must have the white muslin gown that was fashionable, indeed required, in the early nineteenth century. (As I described in the previous chapter, variations on the tubular neoclassical style were in vogue from the end of the eighteenth century until about 1825. White muslin was the most popular color and fabric for women’s gowns, particularly for fancy balls.) As was the custom in the early-nineteenth century, a dressmaker will need to make the gowns. But Drumcarro stubbornly resists, calling the dresses and the ball a waste of time and money. The women of the small community band together, using their knowledge of dress to convince their father that a triumphant coming-out might actually produce enough economic gain to offset the cost of the dresses. They might snare wealthy husbands, thereby adding to the family resources much more profitably than by sitting at home sewing. That Drumcarro needs a tutorial in aristocratic social alliances underscores his dim-wittedness. He retorts that the women merely pretend to sew while in fact they plot secretly against him. The reader knows that his suspicions are well-founded, for the women do use sewing as a facade for clandestine conversations about how to skirt Drumcarro’s control. Ultimately, however, Drumcarro’s family pride and insatiable greed lead him to conclude that perhaps the women can make more money by wearing fine dresses than sewing his shirts (48). Kirsteen also applies her dual literacy to a private purpose. She uses her literacy in fabric to communicate personal desire. In the opening scene of the novel, Kirsteen marks a handkerchief for the man she loves. Ronald Drummond, along with Kirsteen’s brother, is about to set off for India in the Company’s service. “R. D.” are the initials Kirsteen embroiders, and because they are the same as her brother’s, she is able to give her brother’s handkerchief to her lover without the notice of anyone else in the family. With the exchange and a whispered promise to wait, the two enter into an unspoken, secret, and yet binding engagement. This exchange bears further consideration for two reasons. First, Kirsteen embroiders the letters “R. D.” not with silk or cotton, but with a strand of her own distinctive, red-gold hair. The narrator hurries to assure her reader that such a practice was normal “in those days” (5). The narrator makes much of Kirsteen’s red hair, perhaps to highlight her Scottishness, yet in the 1810s, English people certainly would not have admired the color. Kirsteen’s anachronistic red hair, however, would have been attractive for some late Victorian readers. Due to the Pre-Raphaelite obsession with red hair, it had become fashionable in artistic

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circles. Second, Kirsteen is no blushing maiden caught unawares by male desire. She planned for Ronald to see the handkerchief and read its meaning: “But Kirsteen when she marked her brother’s handkerchiefs with her hair had fully intended that Ronald should see it, and be struck with the similarity of their initials and ask for or take one of them at least. Her heart beat high when this happened according to her prevision” (17). In a muted but undeniably erotic gesture, Kirsteen stitches a piece of her own body into cloth. The strand of hair, threaded and knotted into letters, communicates her desire, as well as a bid for permanence. Jewelry and fancy work created with human hair were popular at various times throughout the nineteenth century: readers may recall the ubiquitous lockets containing a strand of a beloved’s hair. Human hair was also used in hair bracelets d’amitié, portrait miniatures, and various types of fancy work, including collage.10 For the Victorians, as for many cultures, human hair was associated with personal identity, sensuality, or sexual fetish. To give it to another was an act of intimacy.11 In this scene, Kirsteen marks more than a piece of cloth. She marks Ronald as her own. Rather than wait demurely for Ronald’s advances, Kirsteen initiates the exchange, and her pursuit proves successful: with the exchange of the handkerchief, the lovers make a secret pact to wait for each other, despite the anticipated separation of several years. In this scene, the narrator praises Kirsteen’s independent spirit, yet she hurries to assure the reader that Kirsteen’s actions fall within the bounds of modesty and propriety (5). As I discussed in Chapter 2, Bertie of Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926) tries to express herself through her sewing, but she finds few acceptable outlets for that creativity. Bertie’s tragedy is that other people conflate her sexual history and her beautiful sewing, assuming that she must be a fallen woman because she loves fine clothes, and that she must love fine clothes because she is a fallen woman. As Lynn M. Alexander and Mariana Valverde describe, in the nineteenth century, dressmakers, seamstresses, or women who merely loved clothes were particularly susceptible to the charge of fallenness—both sexual and class.12 Art reflected the common belief that seamstresses were particularly prone 



The “C” in “C. D.” refers to the French spelling of Kirsteen, Christine. Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion (New York: Dover, 1981) 29; and Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 176. 11 For a discussion of the significance of human hair in Victorian jewelry and handcrafts, see Cynthia Amnéus, “The Art of Ornamental Hairwork,” in Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum, eds. Julie Aronson and Marjorie E. Wieseman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); and Pamela A. Miller, “Hair Jewelry as Fetish,” in Objects of Special Devotion: Fetishes and Fetishism in Popular Culture, ed. Ray Broadus Browne (Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1982). 12 See Lynn M. Alexander, Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003) and Mariana Valverde, “The Love of Finery: Fashion and the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse,” Victorian Studies 32.2 (Winter 1989): 169–89. 10

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to temptation. William Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress (1734) depicts a young woman with a sewing bag in hand, who comes to the city to work an honest living yet is swiftly seduced by the love of finery into prostitution. Over a century later, John Everett Millais’s Virtue and Vice (1853) shows a virtuous dressmaker being lured into prostitution by a fallen woman. Dressmakers and seamstresses occupied an ambiguous class position. Sometimes they were figured as respectable middle-class women forced to work a “trade” out of financial necessity, other times as working-class women climbing their way up the social ladder, for dressmaking was considered more genteel and respectable than working in a textile factory or mill. Quite often, dressmakers and seamstresses were pitted against one another: dressmakers were portrayed as malicious tyrants who overworked the fragile, corruptible young seamstresses in their employ. Whether falling or rising, dressmakers and seamstresses faced constant exposure to rich and sensuous fabrics; this environment ostensibly led to a love of “finery” and from there it was only a few steps out the door and onto the street. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), for example, the eponymous heroine, a seamstress, finds herself seduced by an upper-class man. Apprenticed to a negligent dressmaker, orphaned Ruth has no one to chaperone her properly, and it is not long before Bellingham leads her astray. Ruth’s artistic nature, together with her trade as a seamstress, makes her particularly susceptible to seduction. Yet as Rosemarie Bodenheimer points out, Gaskell elicits sympathy for the fallen woman Ruth by stressing her lack of a protective mother figure. According to Bodenheimer, “The question of sexuality is overridden by Ruth’s need for a loving parent; innocence or guilt is subsumed in an argument about psychological need.”13 In her sympathetic portrait of the seduced and abandoned seamstress, Gaskell, like Schreiner, aimed to expose the sexual double standard that punished women, but not men, for sexual transgressions. When the publication of Ruth provoked a scandal, Gaskell responded, “It has made them talk and think a little on a subject which is so painful it requires all one’s bravery not to hide one’s head like an ostrich.”14 In Oliphant’s novel, by contrast, Kirsteen’s sewing affords her an effective yet discreet way to communicate her private feelings to her lover. The narrator hurries to point out that Kirsteen’s actions would have been considered appropriate “in those days.” Unlike Bertie or Ruth, Kirsteen “correctly” deploys her literacy in fabric as a token of her affection, rather than as a sign of compromised virtue. Despite Kirsteen’s demure and effective gift, her romance plot unravels almost as soon as she stitches it. Kirsteen does not learn of Ronald’s death until the end of the novel, but after the first few pages, he vanishes from the narrative. Kirsteen’s expression of her sexual desire, so poignant, direct, and effective in the early 13 Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) 157. 14 The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966) 227.

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scenes of the novel, turns to stony silence. Only one other person ever learns of her pact with Roland. Although she mourns her lost lover, her grief is brief, decisive, and final. With the romantic male lead swept off to India and a quiet death, Oliphant’s heroine is forced—or free—to make her own way in the world. As we will see, Oliphant limits Kirsteen’s opportunities to use dual literacy to express private desires; instead, she turns Kirsteen’s skill with a needle to professional dressmaking. Kirsteen, the narrator informs us, is “one of those who make a story for themselves” (36). By emphasizing both Kirsteen’s autonomy and her propriety, Oliphant simultaneously aligned herself with and distanced herself from her New Woman contemporaries. As Ann L. Ardis and Valerie Sanders have pointed out, Oliphant roundly criticized Grant Allen and Thomas Hardy for their frank, and in her view, perverse depictions of women’s sexuality. In the 1896 essay, “The AntiMarriage League,” she disapproved of the themes chosen by these authors and their openness in exploring female sexual desire.15 Yet even if many New Woman writers chose to address openly the issue of women’s sexuality, not all of them allowed their heroines to express that sexuality. Sexual purity advocates such as Sarah Grand, for example, focused on women’s political, economic, and professional enfranchisement rather than on their sexual freedom. And as Mary Poovey argued in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), Victorian woman writers had to negotiate the negative stereotypes associated with women’s writing. Neither addicted to fashion nor “mannish” in appearance, frivolous and trivial nor tiresomely intellectual, the figure Mary Poovey terms the “proper lady” had to navigate a minefield of extremes.16 In Kirsteen’s election of a professional life rather than a romantic one, Oliphant affirms the possibility of intellectual and financial freedom even as she limits her heroine’s free expression of sexuality. Kirsteen begins to make “a story for herself” by fleeing Scotland. To avoid an arranged marriage with Glendochart, a lord more than twice her age, Kirsteen escapes to an uncertain future in London. She confides in one other person, her surrogate mother Marg’ret. Marg’ret directs her to her sister, Miss Jean, who owns a dress shop in Mayfair. Upon her arrival in London, Kirsteen shocks Miss Jean by asking to work in her shop. Blushing deeply with “the colour of pride,” Kirsteen informs Miss Jean that she has come to learn her “trade,” to “work for [her] living—and make [her] fortune” (161, 157). Miss Jean cannot seem to believe that a lady of Kirsteen’s upper-class background would sully her good name with the grime of the shop, but Kirsteen eventually convinces her that she has severed family ties, even though she continues to respect their value. Although she lives with Miss Jean, Kirsteen holds herself apart from the other girls, refusing to fraternize with English women below her class or to use her surname in the 15 See Margaret Oliphant, “The Anti-Marriage League,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 159 (Jan. 1896): 135–49. 16 See Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

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business, out of fear that doing so would contaminate the family’s reputation. Very quickly the heroine also begins to discover the artistry of dressmaking, spending time matching fabrics and draping cloth this way and that. The other seamstresses do not have her vision, or more practically, her freedom to insult customers, play with designs, or boss Miss Jean. Kirsteen’s higher class status affords her the time, freedom, and confidence to develop her artistic sensibilities and to make her fortune at the same time. Kirsteen supports herself by sewing—but not by the unpaid, unimaginative sewing her father demanded. Kirsteen’s initial dependence on Miss Jean’s generosity seems strange, given the novel’s preoccupation with class distinctions. It would appear that class differences are less important between Scottish women, or that the sentimental bond with Marg’ret has been transferred to Miss Jean, or that the age difference between the two women allows for a different kind of relationship. Soon, however, the power between the two women is returned to its more conventional configuration: within months, Kirsteen enacts her unofficial coup of Miss Jean’s dress shop. Innate businesswoman and consummate artist, she finds that it is actually her pride, not her skill, that grants her the first taste of power. Having heard what they perceive to be Kirsteen’s wildly romantic story—that she ran away from home to avoid marrying Glendochart—some members of the Scottish gentry, staying in London for the season, swoop down upon the shop. The aptly named Lady Chatty and her mother try to wheedle the story out of the offended Kirsteen, only to find themselves stonily rebuffed. Not only does Kirsteen withstand the onslaught of questions, she, on behalf of Miss Jean, informs the women that the shop will not make up their dresses. The more she resists, the more their desire intensifies. Ultimately Miss Jean steps in, Kirsteen acquiesces, and although the ladies get their gowns, the dress shop comes out the beneficiary. Kirsteen’s pride bodes well for business, and soon other wealthy aristocrats find their way to the shop. Miss Jean astutely recognizes her protégée’s potential and decides to lay aside her crown and her anxieties about insulting potential clients. She admits, “Miss Kirsteen is just the prop of this house …. Not a thing can be done without her advice” (211). From Miss Jean’s perspective, Kirsteen’s key to success is not only her noble blood, which gives her dignity and spirit, but more practically, that “she makes all the fine ladies stand about” (211). Not to be mollified, Kirsteen eventually decrees that no “commoners” or “nobodies” will be allowed to frequent the shop. Her definition of “commoner” extends beyond lack of money, to the lack of something more intangible—nobility. When Miss Jean wonders why Kirsteen wants to begin “insulting all the poor bodies that are not good enough to please ye,” Kirsteen quickly clarifies her definition of poverty: ‘Not the poor bodies,’ said Kirsteen, ‘but the folk with money and nothing else, that come in as if they were doing us a favour—women that Marg’ret [Miss Jean’s sister, the housekeeper who raised Kirsteen] would not have in her kitchen; and they will come in here and give their orders as if it was a favour to you and me! I would like to learn them a lesson: that though we’re mantua-makers, it’s not for the likes of them—a person with no name to speak of—and giving her orders to one of the Douglasses! We will learn them better before we are done. (214)

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Notwithstanding her lofty ideals, Kirsteen makes her decision to screen customers in response to a prosaic stimulus: her sister Mary’s snobbish demand for a new dress. Mary Glendochart neé Douglas, has, with great celerity and cunning, married herself to Kirsteen’s jilted older lover, Lord Glendochart. Flouncing into the now famous dress shop, Mary expects deferential treatment from her sister, whom she views as a poor, jejune runaway. Kirsteen’s refusal to serve Mary—and her subsequent choice to reject all “commoners” and “half and half gentry”— represents Kirsteen’s prideful response to her sister’s attempt to humiliate her. Kirsteen’s new mandate to reject all “commoners” also reveals disquieting concerns about what constitutes gentility. Miss Jean agrees to her young business partner’s plan, but she notes privately that although neither Mrs. Mary nor Miss Kirsteen could qualify as “half and half gentry,” yet “there was much in the other [the “well-born Highland girl,” Kirsteen] that resembled the ‘half and half gentry’ of whom the experienced mantua-maker had seen many specimens” (214). This marks one of several points where the narrator lightly mocks Kirsteen’s pretensions, even as she rewards the heroine for her pride. In this scene, Oliphant seems to critique the restructuring of British society through the rise of capitalism. Kirsteen eschews the nouveaux riches, valuing an older system. Yet, as we have seen in the narrator’s description of the Drumcarro estate, that economic and social system no longer works, at least not in Scotland. In what will become a refrain, the narrator’s eagerness to cast Kirsteen as a noblewoman, an artist, and an independent woman clashes with her subtle critiques of Kirsteen’s Scottish provinciality and her unwarranted hauteur. The narrator may take jabs at Kirsteen’s pride, but that very pride allows her to build a successful small business. Using every resource available to her (noble background, aristocratic connections, creativity, technical skills, managerial capacity), Kirsteen becomes a businesswoman. In Famine and Fashion (2005), Judith DeGroat, Susan Lewis, Nicola Pullin, and Pamela Nickless demonstrate that in France, the United States, and England, many women enjoyed relative success and stability as small business owners in the higher end of the needle trades (such as dressmaking and millinery). In London, according to Nicola Pullin, “a London trade directory for 1845 reveals that all but 6% of the 1040 businesses listed were run by women.”17 She goes on to reveal that “millinery and dressmaking businesses remained one of the most highly profitable trades for female entrepreneurs.”18 Yet, despite their success, those West End businesses that catered to the aristocracy— such as Kirsteen’s fictional one—were, according to Pullin, either vilified or made invisible by the press. The sometimes deplorable conditions of the employees of these establishments became fodder for public outrage, touchstones for the class conflicts that raged throughout the century. Yet the employers “were 17 Nicola Pullin, “‘A Heavy Bill to Settle with Humanity’: The Representation and Invisibility of London’s Principal Milliners and Dressmakers,” Famine and Fashion 215–28: 215. 18 Pullin 215.

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never as visible in contemporary debates as were their oppressed operatives.”19 In Kirsteen, as I will explore more carefully later, Oliphant offers a vision of female leadership that is at once benevolent and unregulated. In her defense of female entrepreneurship, Oliphant seems to anticipate a reaction like that of Eliza Lynn Linton, who, in 1891, one year after the publication of Kirsteen, attacked those she labeled “Wild Women” for violating traditional class structures. In an article published in the Nineteenth Century, belligerently titled “The Wild Women: As Social Insurgents,” Linton blamed those she called the “wild women” for inspiring a “social phenomenon of the voluntary descent of the higher to the lower forms of ways and works.”20 Linton claimed that dressmaking, once suspect for its association with working-class “trades,” was just one of the fields being embraced by middle-class women: Women who, a few years ago, would not have shaken hands with a dressmaker, still less have sat down to table with her, now open shops and set up in business on their own account—not because they are poor…but because they are restless, dissatisfied, insurgent, and like nothing so much as to shock established prejudices and make the folk stare.21

In this passage, Linton complained that middle-class women were violating traditional, class-based distinctions between types of work. Middle-class women had begun to turn private sewing into public employment, and New Women were the ones to blame. Linton would probably not have considered Oliphant a “wild woman,” but Kirsteen’s choice of employment certainly would have disgusted her. In order to assuage censure like Linton’s, Oliphant’s narrator emphasizes the artistic potential of Kirsteen’s work. Kirsteen’s skill goes beyond technical excellence, and it provides more than financial freedom. In the course of the novel, she becomes an artist. By placing a woman of noble blood in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “bleared, smeared” world of trade, Oliphant elevates that “trade” to a higher level—that of art. “An Artist in Her Way” Kirsteen’s first exposure to the idea of dressmaking as artistry appears before she leaves Scotland, in the humble figure of Miss Macnab, the local dressmaker who makes the girls’ ball gowns. Her mouth full of pins, Miss Macnab nevertheless manages to instruct Kirsteen in the fine art of dressmaking. For dressmaking is an art, the narrator tells us, and the dressmaker an artist. Notwithstanding the allegedly unattractive styles of 1814, the narrator avers, “the mind of the artist is 19

Pullin 225. Eliza Linton, “The Wild Women: As Social Insurgents,” Nineteenth Century (Oct. 1891), in Hamilton 198–207: 201. 21 Linton, “The Wild Women: As Social Insurgents” 201. 20

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always the same whatever his materials may be” (165, 53). Miss Macnab was “an artist in her way,” practicing a “sculptor’s art” and a “devotion to her art” (54). But Kirsteen fails to see Miss Macnab as an artist. She laughs at the dressmaker’s “high yet mild pretensions” and the minute and tedious adjustments to which she subjects the sisters. Impatient and bored, Kirsteen ridicules the time and effort Miss Macnab expends on plain and simple muslin: “It’s not as if it were silk or velvet,” she complains (54). In response, the dressmaker offers Kirsteen her first lesson in dressmaking and in art, just as the narrator teaches the late Victorian reader a few things about neoclassical fashion. Forethought, the dressmaker intones, is the most important lesson to be learned. This “mild philosopher” instructs her young observer: Take a’ the trouble ye can at the beginning, and the end will come right of itsel’. A careless start means a double vexation in the finish. And that ye’ll find to apply … to life itsel’ as well as to the dressmaking, which is just like a’ the airts I ever heard tell of, a kind of epitome of life. (55)

Miss Macnab goes on to inform Kirsteen that muslin is one of the most difficult fabrics with which to work. In this exchange, Oliphant facilitates a conversation between the late Victorian woman reader and the Regency one. To the late Victorian reader, muslin was no longer the prized fabric it had been in the early years of the nineteenth century. Muslin, along with other cotton fabrics, had come to be viewed as cheap and boring, the Regency styles for which it had been used scandalously flimsy. How could a now homely fabric such as muslin require more technique than the sumptuous silks and velvets that were so popular in the 1880s and 1890s? How could a respectable woman go without petticoats, much less a corset? Oliphant anticipates her reader’s distaste for Regency fashion, remarking, “I do not myself think that dress was pretty in those days—but every fashion is beautiful to its time” (164–5). At the same time, we must also keep in mind that, as I discussed in the previous chapter, Regency fashion was enjoying a revival among late Victorian aesthetes. Oliphant seems to predict the fact that for some readers, elements of Regency style had become attractive. But she is also careful to anticipate the more common opinion, that Regency style—and late Victorian aesthetic dress—was ugly and antiquated. When we consider this passage along with Kirsteen’s anachronistic red hair, it would seem that Oliphant at once celebrates and derides aestheticism. Miss Macnab may offer Kirsteen her first taste of dressmaking as art, but she merely points the way. After Kirsteen’s success in London, she returns to Drumcarro and sees the dressmaker, now referred to as “the humble artist,” “the country artist” (305). Once again, the women gather together for the private home dressmaking ritual. Miss Macnab works as painstakingly as ever, yet now Kirsteen observes her from a new position. This time she scoffs inwardly at the older dressmaker, not for her “pretension” but for her ineptitude: “Kirsteen looked on with something of the suppressed amusement with which a great scholar contemplates the village pedagogue who taught him his first Latin, or an artist the house-painter who first

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showed him the uses of the brush” (282). In London, Kirsteen has become a fine artist. Dressmaking, according to the narrator, requires first the ability to read and follow existing patterns, and then, the genius to see beyond and through them to new possibilities. Kirsteen does more than demonstrate literacy in the language of dress: she invents new language. Kirsteen not only designs beautiful gowns for her clients, but she also sets the London fashions. When one of her most important clients, Lady Chatty, wears “an effect” that Kirsteen invented, troops of ladies descend upon the shop demanding the same look (222). The narrator spends several pages musing on Kirsteen’s art, and on the appropriateness of this work for a literary heroine: It may not be thought a very high quality in a heroine, but Kirsteen soon developed a true genius for her craft. … She was not, perhaps, very intellectual, but she was independent and original, little trained in other people’s ideas and full of fancies of her own, which, to my thinking, is the most delightful of characteristics. … Mrs Lucy Dodd [of a Charles Reade novel] only, I think, made and invented mantles; but Kirsteen tried her active young powers upon everything, being impatient of sameness and monotony, and bent upon securing a difference, an individual touch in every different variety of costume. She was delighted with the beautiful materials, which were thrown about in the work-room, the ordinary mantua-maker having little feeling for them except in a view of their cost at so much a yard. But Kirsteen, quite unused to beautiful manufactured things, admired them all, and found a pleasure in heaping together and contrasting with each other the soft silken stuffs… . … I do not myself think that dress was pretty in those days—but every fashion is beautiful to its time. … However that may be—and I do not suppose that Kirsteen was before her time, or more enlightened than the rest of the world—it is certain that she applied herself to the invention of pretty confections and modifications of the fashions with much of the genuine enjoyment which attends an artist in all crafts, and liked to handle and drape the pretty materials and to adapt them to this and that pretty wearer, as a painter likes to arrange and study the more subtle harmonies of light and shade. (164–5)

In this scene, Oliphant anticipates and challenges her reader’s expectations of both heroines and novels. She notes the precedent for a dressmaking heroine: Charles Reade’s Lucy Dodd “made and invented mantles.” How curious that Oliphant does not mention the far more obvious Victorian precedents—Elizabeth Gaskell’s acclaimed Mary Barton (1848) and scandalous Ruth (1853). Unlike Gaskell, Oliphant creates a heroine who successfully uses her sewing skills to support herself, and eventually even her family. In her fantasy of professionalized, artistic labor, Oliphant, as I mentioned earlier, diverts her reader’s attention from the common conflation of sexual promiscuity and dressmaking that Gaskell manipulated so notoriously, particularly in Ruth. Without mentioning Gaskell or her infamous seamstresses, Oliphant claims that Kirsteen’s dressmaking surpasses that of previous heroines. Kirsteen, she explains, was “bent upon securing a difference, an individual touch” in her compositions. Here Oliphant seems to respond to several cultural movements which I discussed at greater length in the previous chapter: the rise of couture fashion with the House of Worth, the Arts

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and Crafts Movement, and aestheticism, all of which emphasized the value of the unique and handmade object over the mass-produced and machine-made one. Kirsteen may be an artist, but the work to which she applies her art is a trade, a fact that creates conflict for both Kirsteen and her narrator. Even though she asserts that Kirsteen is a “genius,” as much as any presumably masculine sculptor or painter, the narrator assumes that her reader will not find dressmaking “a very high quality in a heroine.” Regardless, the novel rewards Kirsteen for her independent profession: at the end of the novel, the unmarried Kirsteen purchases land that used to be part of Drumcarro, accepting, even reveling in, her role as the “stand-by” of the family. In the final paragraphs of the novel, however, the narrator informs us that Kirsteen eventually left the dress shop to enjoy the active and fulfilling life of a wealthy socialite in Edinburgh. Once reviled for “mantuamaking and [her] trading that’s a disgrace to [her] family,” Kirsteen now boasts a reputation as “the best dressed woman in Edinburgh” and “the friend of the poor and struggling everywhere ” (342). No one remembers her former profession, merely her high family connections. As the narrator explains in the last lines of the novel, “[M]ost people had entirely forgotten that in past times, not to disgrace her family, her name had appeared on a neat plate in conjunction with the name of Miss Jean Brown, Court Dressmaker and Mantua-Maker, as MISS KIRSTEEN [sic]” (343). At the end of the novel, Kirsteen’s “disgraceful” dressmaking conveniently disappears from everyone’s memory. Oddly, at the beginning of the novel, the narrator claims that only upper-class women can be dressmakers: Miss Macnab informs the Drumcarro girls that only “well born” women such as herself can be true dressmakers. When Marg’ret remarks that her sister, who will turn out to be Miss Jean, is a successful dressmaker in London, Miss Macnab waits for her to leave the room, then informs Kirsteen and Mary that “it wants good blood in your veins and a leddy’s breeding before you’ll ever make a gown that will set off a leddy” (56). Her assertion that dressmaking is an art, one exclusively available to “leddies,” foreshadows Kirsteen’s future experience as a dressmaker, but it also reveals the novel’s unstable representation of sewing. Is dressmaking really an art, one to be practiced by upper-class women, or is it mere labor, the shameful drudgery of working-class seamstresses? Can a woman be an artist and a professional laborer at the same time? In these scenes, dressmaking seems to function as a metaphor for a particular kind of writing. Like Kirsteen, Oliphant supported herself and her family by writing—not with a needle, but with a pen. Her inability to decide whether or not dressmaking can truly be called art has a great deal to do with her own ambiguous social and literary position as a woman author categorized as a maker of “bestsellers.” The narrator comments on the artistry of dressmaking, the forethought, technique, and imagination it demands. But then she seems to doubt her right to make such a claim and apologizes for Kirsteen: “She was not, perhaps, very intellectual, but she was independent and original, little trained in other people’s ideas and full of fancies of her own, which, to my thinking, is the most delightful of characteristics.” With her admission that Kirsteen is not “intellectual,” the narrator seems to allude to High Art novels or New Woman novels such as Olive

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Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), types of fiction Oliphant herself never wrote. In her Autobiography, Oliphant noted that she wrote her many novels at a furious pace, and that the income she earned enabled her to provide for her family. Yet in this passage, Oliphant presents the possibility that even though it may not be very intellectual, and even though it can be classed as a “trade,” dressmaking, like the writing of popular fiction, can still demonstrate a kind of artistry. By focusing on Kirsteen’s dressmaking as a profession, the narrator turns the reader’s attention away from the longstanding association of dressmaking with prostitution. She offers a vision of professional labor—whether dressmaking or the writing of popular fiction—freed of its association with sexual promiscuity or class fallenness. Oliphant was not the only late Victorian writer to present a problematic picture of women’s sewing. In her unstable vision of sewing as both art and trade, Oliphant shares much with the New Woman writers whom she criticized for their frank portrayal of feminine sexuality. Yet is Oliphant’s Kirsteen really all that different from New Woman heroines? As we have seen, sexual propriety often determined a woman’s class standing. Given the fears of sexual promiscuity associated with the sewing trades and with single working women, New Woman writers such as Ella Hepworth Dixon did sometimes choose to mute their heroines’ sexuality in order to authorize their professionalism, their artistry, or their class standing. Machines and Hobbies: The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) Ella Hepworth Dixon (1857–1932) published only one novel, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894).22 The novel’s protagonist, Mary Erle, is the daughter of an upper middle-class professor. Mary has no mother, and the novel opens with her father’s unexpected death, an event that leaves Mary alone in the world to make her own way writing three-penny-a-line novels and doing hack journalism. Mary must depend on an education that emphasized the ornamental accomplishments of fancy work and painting, one that prepared her for a suitable marriage. Yet unlike most young women of her class, Mary was also trained to work as an amanuensis for her scholarly father. She was acting as such when her father so inconveniently died, rendering her unusual education useless. As she struggles to make her way in the world, living amongst “starved-looking pillows” and barely less starved herself, Mary somehow always manages to look perfectly tidy, neat, and above all, respectable.23 A reincarnated Jane Eyre, dressed always in classic shades of black and grey, Mary, like Kirsteen of Oliphant’s novel, For biographies of Ella Hepworth Dixon, see Valerie Fehlbaum, Ella Hepworth Dixon: The Story of a Modern Woman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) and Margaret D. Stetz, “Ella Hepworth Dixon,” Late Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists, Second Series, Dictionary of Literary Biography 197 (1999): 99–109. 23 Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894; Toronto: Broadview, 2004) 96. Further references to The Story of a Modern Woman are given in the text. 22

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stands out from other women. The narrator describes Mary as “a little princess” amidst a throng of vulgar women of lower classes (85). Mary’s “neat hair and her well made black dress” contrast sharply against the appearance and manners of the women she meets, including the lower-middle-class female students at the art school she attends, “daughters of retail shopkeepers dressed in gowns of orange or green serge, cut rather low about the throat,” and nouveau riche Violet Higgins, whose “under-bred face” and “over-trimmed clothes” belie her family’s wealth (85, 140). Although Mary must support herself financially—first out of necessity, then because she refuses to be Vincent Hemming’s mistress—Mary’s clothing marks her as a member of a higher class than that of the people who surround her. Like the beauty of Lyndall, the heroine of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Dorothea Brooke, of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), Mary’s grace and gentility shine out best against simple, respectable garments. Neither “over-trimmed” like that of Violet Higgins, nor “fashionable” like that of her wealthy friend Alison Ives, Mary’s clothing matches her class status. As we will see, and as Margaret D. Stetz points out, Mary’s critiques of the dress and manners of working- and lower middle-class women demonstrate her class elitism—and that of her narrator.24 In the end, this elitism compromises the pact Mary makes with Alison “never, never [to] do anything to hurt another woman” (164). In her struggle to forge an identity as a writer and artist, and above all, to survive on her own, Mary continually gathers material from those she observes around her. Strolling around London, she scrutinizes others’ appearances, turning the material of their clothing into material for her fiction. Several times, for instance, she watches a girl in the park (who, by the way, turns out to be integral to the plot). Mary observes the girl’s clothing and posture and then paints meaning into each detail: “She sat on the green bench now. Her hair was untidy. In her hat was a dirty pink bow. Her dark stuff gown was frayed at the edge. The woman in her was dead; she was past the stage of caring about her appearance” (116). Like the scene of feminine reading in From Man to Man that I discussed in Chapter 2, here, too, women read each other’s clothing. In Schreiner’s novel, her protagonist Bertie is the fallen woman, and a genteel mother reads her disgrace in the muddy, disheveled, overly fine clothing she wears. In Dixon’s novel, the genteel heroine reads the sexual history told in a woman’s clothing. The woman’s frayed gown and dirty bow reveal to Mary the truth of the woman’s descent. Like Schreiner, Dixon will go on to provide a new way of reading the fallen woman: Mary, along with Alison, will eventually align herself with this fallen woman, condemning the upper-class man who seduced and abandoned her. Like other New Woman writers, Dixon relies on the precedent set by Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth: she tries to incite sympathy for a fallen woman and condemnation for the man who ruins her.

24 Margaret D. Stetz, “Ella Hepworth Dixon,” Late Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists, Second Series, Dictionary of Literary Biography 197 (1999): 107.

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This tendency to observe working-class women for writing material and guilt about doing so also appears in the fiction of George Egerton. The short story “Wedlock,” from her 1894 collection Discords, explores the discomfort of an unnamed writer-figure who watches her alcoholic landlady and uses the details of the working-class woman’s appearance as writing material. The landlady is the second wife of the owner of the house, a woman grieving her husband’s refusal to let her daughter live with them. Watching her landlady, the protagonist notes her “clean pink cotton gown,” a pitiful attempt at respectability when other scenes describe her “dusty and lime-marked” gown, ripped bodice and crooked bonnet.25 Like Mary Erle, for whom “[t]he strain of writing was intense; there were whole mornings which she spent staring at a sheet of white paper on her desk” (132), this woman writer also “is writing for money, writing because she must, because it is the tool given to her wherewith to carve her way” (118). What she uses to craft that fiction are the details of others’ clothing, those materials that both shroud and expose others’ interiority. For this middle-class woman writer, her creative rendering of the material of working-class women’s lives turns into the money on which she survives: “The other woman observes her closely as she does most things—as material. It is not that her sympathies are less keen since she took to writing, but that the habit of analysis is always uppermost” (120). Yet as the disclaimer “it is not that her sympathies are any less keen” reveals and as Margaret D. Stetz has pointed out, using others as material provokes a vague sense of discomfiture and guilt.26 Like Egerton’s woman writer figure, Mary reads history and pathos into the appearance and actions of silent working-class figures. On the day of her father’s funeral, Mary sits with a seamstress who has come to alter a black dress for her. Mary watches the woman who is working “with the regularity of a machine,” noting her “drab-[complexion],” “fat hand,” and “ill-cut nails” (48–9). Likening the woman to “some patient domestic animal” and a “clock,” Mary sees the sewing, working-class woman as an archetype of oppressed Woman. The women exchange no words, but as they silently sew together, Mary considers the woman before her: she was curiously reminded of many she had seen: ladies, mothers of large families, who sat and sewed with just such an expression of unquestioning resignation. The clicking sound of the needle, the swish of the drawn-out thread, the heavy breathing of the workwoman, all added to the impression. Yes, they too were content to exist subserviently, depending always on someone else, using the old feminine stratagems, the well-worn feminine subterfuges, to gain their end. The woman who sews is eternally the same. (49) George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne], “Wedlock,” Discords (1894; Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2003) 120, 115. Further references to “Wedlock” are given in the text. 26 See Margaret D. Stetz, “Life’s ‘Half-Profits’: Writers and Their Readers in Fiction of the 1890s,” Nineteenth Century Lives, ed. Laurence S. Lockridge (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1989). 25

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With this thought, Mary tosses her work to the side “with an impatient gesture,” suddenly flooded with pity for the woman and possible shame over what she now calls “her foolish strips of flounces.” It is important to note that Mary chooses to sew with the seamstress for a limited period of time, because “it sometimes soothed [her] to stitch” (48). She can enjoy the steady, quiet ritual because she has the freedom to leave it behind when she tires of it. The silent tableau of the seamstress at work fuels her imagination, becoming material for her own reflections, to be cut and draped as she finds memorable. Thus one individual sewing woman can become for Mary a symbol of the general oppression of women of all classes, her silent figure material to be worked and embellished in fiction. Through Mary’s upper middle-class gaze, the seamstress’s work appears demeaning, primitive, rote. There is no creativity in this seamstress’s work. She does it for pay, because she must. The seamstress is not given a voice, merely heavy, laboring breath. Mary and her narrator associate the laboring seamstress with “mothers of large families,” as if to signal the monstrosity of women who bear many children. Biological reproduction itself becomes a mechanistic, animalistic process; in the novel’s anti-naturalist vision, the female fertility that is often figured positively—the creation of life—functions quite differently. Reproduction and sewing are associated with working-class women’s mindless drudgery, the demands of the body overruling those of the mind. In this scene, a relatively privileged woman uses the figure of the seamstress for her own ends. The seamstress becomes a symbol not so much of her own working-class oppression, but of the oppression of ladies, upper-class women who use “feminine stratagems” and “subterfuges” to navigate patriarchal society. Yet Mary’s point—that dress culture demeans women—is compromised by her view of her friend Alison. Mary and the narrator describe Alison, a true “modern girl,” in flattering terms. Dressed always in the height of fashion, with breezy hats and smart suits, Alison inspires Mary’s admiration, not her censure. That Alison is an independent woman of the upper classes may shed a good deal of light on this distinction. It would seem that Emma Woodhouse’s observation, “a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable,” still holds sway almost a century later.27 Alison has her dresses made for her, by an expert dressmaker or bespoke tailor. She has no need of economical home dressmaking and is too modern to sit at home huddled over her fancy work. Together with her philanthropic work, and the public transportation she uses in reaching it, Alison’s attention to clothing serves as a sign of her modernity. Yet Alison’s noble enterprises ultimately fail, undermining the seriousness of her dilettante philanthropy. Ella Hepworth Dixon depicts the act of sewing as either drudgery or hobby; the difference lies in the class position of the woman who does the sewing. Dixon’s working-class seamstress sews like a machine, without thoughtfulness, creativity, or even more importantly, choice. Mary and her narrator conflate the labor of reproduction and the labor of sewing, criticizing and pitying the seamstress for her Jane Austen, Emma (1815; New York: Norton, 2000) 56.

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alleged inability to choose the location, conditions, or duration of her work. Mary, by contrast, does not sew because she has to, but because it helps her to relax. In these depictions, the act of sewing remains the same, but how it is experienced depends on the class position and education of the subject doing the sewing. As I mentioned earlier, because of Oliphant’s criticism of the sexual explicitness of New Woman novels, she and her New Woman contemporaries have often been cast as antagonists. Yet, as we have seen, Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman and Oliphant’s Kirsteen shared an ambivalence about women’s sewing and the extent to which it could function as art or labor. These novels have in common profound contradictions about how women’s class allegiances shaped and limited whatever commonalities gender might afford. Both heroines choose professional artistry over sexual expression, albeit for different reasons. Mary Erle chooses not to become Vincent Hemming’s mistress out of respect for his wife, while Kirsteen’s romance plot never has a chance to unfold. Both Dixon and Oliphant use the figure of the seamstress or dressmaker to address the complicated issues of women’s class, sexuality, and professionalism. In order to understand more fully their manipulation of these issues, we need to explore the historical significance of the figure of the sewing woman. “The Little Community” or a Sweatshop? In the mid-1890s, by the time both Kirsteen and The Story of a Modern Woman were published, Victorians were quite familiar with the ravages of the sewing trades. Long hours, poor work-room ventilation and lighting, illness, verbal insults, and sexual harassment: these were just a few of the abuses to which seamstresses were subject. As scholars from a variety of disciplines have illustrated, the preoccupation with seamstresses spanned the Victorian period.28 The seamstress—overworked, underpaid, and ostensibly subject to the temptations of prostitution and seduction—was a character that prompted debate and reform. Whether considering the seamstress as a recipient of philanthropy, a subject for investigation, or a citizen needing legal protection, Victorians thought and talked a great deal about this figure. In literary and periodical culture, the seamstress was considered respectable, if vulnerable to working-class criminality and vice (particularly prostitution). As Beth Harris remarks, “the seamstress often had middle- or upper-class origins that See Lynn M. Alexander, Women, Work, and Representation; Christina Walkley, The Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress (London: Peter Owen, 1981); Beth Harris, Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005); Deborah Denenholz Morse, “Stitching Repentance, Sewing Rebellion: Seamstresses and Fallen Women in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction,” Keeping the Victorian House, ed. Vanessa Dickerson (New York: Garland, 1995); and Deborah Anna Logan, Fallenness in Victorian Women’s Writing: Marry, Stitch, Die, or Do Worse (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998). 28

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made her seem more refined, vulnerable, genteel, and therefore more feminine and sympathetic than her working-class counterparts.”29 Harris goes on to argue that “sewing had connotations of delicacy, precision, and grace” and that its close association with idealized femininity made the figure of the oppressed seamstress particularly distressing for Victorians.30 Patricia Zakreski agrees that the “refined” and “refining” work of sewing emphasized a woman’s femininity, and “almost everyone was united in pity for these ‘white slaves of England.’”31 As the ravages of industrialism achieved notoriety, many philanthropic societies for the protection of poor needlewomen sprouted up all over Britain. In 1843, the Association (or Society) for the Aid and Benefit of Dressmakers and Milliners was founded to try to ameliorate the working conditions of needlewomen. Reasonable hours, proper work-room ventilation, and medical assistance ranked as some of their primary goals.32 In 1847, The Distressed Needlewomen’s Society followed suit, also working to better the conditions of needlewomen. Local organizations advocated for needlewomen in various cities. In Glasgow, the Glasgow Milliners and Dressmakers’ Association was established in 1861. In Manchester in the 1870s, the famous suffragist Lydia Becker worked on behalf of needlewomen with the Female Provident Association.33 By the 1880s, not only philanthropists but also social investigators and socialists concerned themselves with needlewomen’s working conditions. Beatrice Potter Webb famously investigated East End sweat shops and recorded her findings in both the Nineteenth Century (1888) and in her autobiography My Apprenticeship (1926).34 After investigating East End shops, W. J. Walker and Frances Peak founded a shirt-making and tailoring cooperative. Based on this experience, in 1889 Walker addressed Parliament’s Select Committee on the Sweating System. Like Beatrice Potter Webb and her husband Sidney Webb, Walker advised banning home-work and forming unions. In 1890, The Select Committee on the Sweating System also advocated, if not unions, then “co-operative societies.”35 Historian Sheila Blackburn has pointed out that despite widespread concern over the unregulated labor of homeworkers, it was not until 1909 with the Trade Boards Act that the government legally controlled seamstresses’ pay. For Blackburn, the 29

Harris 5. Harris 6. 31 Patricia Zakreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006) 26. 32 Walkley 92–3. 33 See Walkley, Chapter 6, “The Tendency of the Age,” for more on efforts to improve needlewomen’s lives. 34 See Beatrice Potter [Webb], “Pages from a Workgirl’s Diary,” Nineteenth Century (Oct. 1888) and Beatrice [Potter] Webb, My Apprenticeship (1926; London: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 35 Statement to the Select Committee on the Sweating System, 1889. Quoted in Walkley 106. 30

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Act marked a “fundamental break in laissez-faire attitudes toward state intervention in the legal control of low pay.” Its impetus? The Anti-Sweating Exhibition of 1906.36 Held in the West End, the Anti-Sweating Exhibition staged live enactments of working conditions in sweated industries, especially the needle trades. As Blackburn describes, “Sweated seamstresses and similarly degraded workers were now no longer represented, as in popular poems, paintings, and plays of the past as uncomplaining and inert victims, they were participants in a dynamic, living spectacle.”37 This event, and the agitation and investigation it prompted, revealed the prevalence of sweating not only among homeworkers but also in workshops and factories, as well as the need for government control of low pay.38 In the Victorian period, the figure of the overworked seamstress appeared often as a subject in fiction and art. The poem that inspired countless allusions was Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt.” Published in the Christmas issue of Punch in 1843, the poem was based on an account of a widow who, unable to make ends meet by her sewing, sold some of her master’s possessions and was charged with theft. The first stanza characterizes the poem: WITH fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread— Stitch! stitch! stitch! In poverty, hunger, and dirt, And still with a voice of dolorous pitch She sang the “Song of the Shirt.”39

The seamstress’s plaintive song etched itself into public memory. Referenced in periodicals and fiction for decades and familiar even today, Hood’s poem symbolized the oppression not only of women in the sewing trades, but of the poor more generally. As Lynn M. Alexander points out, by the 1840s, the seamstress had become a “working-class paradigm: her condition had become a representation of the condition of all workers.”40 Twenty years later, in 1863, Punch published a cartoon titled “The Haunted Lady or ‘The Ghost’ in the Looking-Glass” (Figure 4.1). Part of Punch’s Anti-Sweatshop Campaign, the cartoon pictures a fashionable lady in evening dress, inspecting her appearance in a mirror. Her dressmaker stands behind her. Yet in the mirror toward which the lady turns the viewer sees reflected neither the lovely ball gown nor the 36 Sheila Blackburn, “‘To Be Poor and To Be Honest … Is the Hardest Struggle of All’: Sweated Needlewomen and Campaigns for Protective Legislation, 1840–1914,” Harris 243–57: 244. 37 Blackburn 249. 38 Blackburn 254. 39 Thomas Hood, “The Song of the Shirt,” Punch 16 Dec. 1843. 40 Alexander 57.

Fig. 4.1

John Tenniel, “The Haunted Lady or ‘The Ghost’ in the Looking-Glass,” Punch July 1863.

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admiring dressmaker: instead, we see the corpse of a seamstress, her mouth lolling open and her arms collapsed at her sides. That the dressmaker is French, “Madame la Modiste,” reflects Victorians’ common association of the French with both high fashion and social irresponsibility. It also points to the real dress shop behind the cartoon, one owned by a “Madame Elise” (who might or might not have been French). Punch published the cartoon in response to the widely publicized death of Mary Anne Walkley, a seamstress working at Madame Elise, Regent Street. On 17 June, 1863, The Times published an anonymous letter from “A Tired Dressmaker,” claiming to be one of Walkley’s coworkers, who had discovered her “dead in her bed.”41 The letter spurred a fracas of frenzied debate, a well-publicized inquest, and greater public awareness of the dismal working conditions and unregulated hours which were determined to be a cause of Walkley’s death. In August of the same year, The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine claimed the unforgettable nature of Mary Anne Walkley’s tragic demise: “The story of Mary Anne Walkley has been too widely told, too closely argued, too thoroughly exhausted, for [the public] ever to forget it, or the lesson it conveys.”42 Despite this prognostication, the sensation surrounding Walkley’s death did not actually produce many tangible changes for other women in her position. Although the Factory Acts of 1847 and 1850 limited workday hours, they did little to regulate the hours and working conditions of most seamstresses, for most seamstresses worked in private houses, and private houses did not have to open their doors to inspectors.43 It was not until the end of the century that most clothing came to be made in factories, rather than dress shops or in homes, and not until 1890, as I stated earlier, that the Select Committee on the Sweating System recommended “co-operative societies” as the only way to curb the excesses of the sewing trades. Minimum wage was not established until 1909 with the Trade Boards Act. Yet although Walkley’s story produced little practical change for other dressmakers, it did, like Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt,” become part of shared cultural memory, reappearing in various forms in later years. In 1888, the year Oliphant wrote Kirsteen and the 25-year anniversary of Walkley’s death, Punch published a cartoon titled “The Modern Venus Attired by the Three Dis-Graces” (Figure 4.2).44 Like “The ‘Ghost’ in the Looking-Glass,” the cartoon pictures a woman being fitted in a new dress. But, now instead of a formal ball gown, the woman wears a fashionable suit with a narrow skirt, fitted bodice, and tailored jacket, and her stance resembles that of the famous Venus de Milo. She looks over her shoulder toward the mirror behind her, which reflects a hazy silhouette of her head and torso. Huddled around the woman are three seamstresses in various poses of measuring and stitching. Unlike the large, “A Tired Dressmaker,” Letter, Times 17 June 1863. T. Hood, “Living—and Dying by the Needle,” Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine Aug. 1863. 43 Walkley 73. 44 Merryn Williams, introduction, Kirsteen vi. 41 42

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“The Modern Venus Attired by the Three Dis-Graces,” Punch 16 June 1888.

queenly figure of the “Modern Venus,” the “Dis-graces” have haggard, roughly sketched faces and slight, narrow figures. On the floor in the foreground lie an iron and a tablet that reads “Tailor Made Patterns.” Characteristically, Punch parodies the latest fashions: here, it is the rage for the “tailor-mades” that prompts its jabs, as well as the reality that traditionally, only male tailors made “tailored” suiting. As I discussed in the previous chapter, during the late 1880s and into the 1890s, the tailored suit became increasingly popular. Inspired by women’s riding habits, which had required the training of male tailors to achieve the meticulous

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fitting necessary, the suit demanded more precise measuring and cutting than dressmaking, and it required dressmakers to borrow more and more from tailoring techniques. Titling the seamstresses “the Dis-Graces” is more than a clever pun on classical mythology and current fashions; rather, it demonstrates the negative attitudes toward seamstresses and needleworkers. Although the seamstress inspired sympathy and calls for social reform, she was also viewed as particularly susceptible to the dangers of seduction, prostitution, and crime. Without family to supervise her activities and watched over by dressmakers who only cared about production, the seamstress could fall easily into the “dis-grace” of being not only ungracefully dressed, but cast out of grace by a society that did not tolerate sexual “impurity” in a woman. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Oliphant was hardly oblivious to the social problems facing women, particularly needlewomen. In her 1858 article, “The Condition of Women,” she defended women’s capabilities in a society that treated them as second-class citizens. In considering the fact that half of the female English population had to support itself, she turned to the example of the seamstress: There are consequently crowds of half-starved needlewomen, thousands of poor governesses, and a great many more feminine writers of novels than are supposed to be good for the health of the public; and so the tale is full. A woman who cannot be a governess or a novel-writer must fall back on that poor little needle, the primitive and original handicraft of femininity. If she cannot do that, or even, doing it, if stifled among a crowd of others like herself, who have no other gift, she must starve by inches, and die over the shirt she makes. We are all perfectly acquainted with this picture.45

Oliphant’s phrasing—“half-starved needlewomen,” “die over the shirt she makes”—reveals her debt to popular culture’s representations of the seamstress, particularly Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt.” Yet by the time she wrote Kirsteen, in 1888, Oliphant not only made her seamstress Kirsteen upper-class and perfectly able to earn a living by her needle, but she also ignored the abuses of the sewing trades in order to create a peaceful, female-led dress shop. Despite her 1858 claim that “we are all perfectly acquainted with this picture,” in Kirsteen, Oliphant proceeded to create a dress shop that defied readers’ historical knowledge. Oliphant’s figuring of the dress shop is problematic for several reasons. Not only does she express ambivalence about the class position, leadership style, and responsibilities of the group’s leader, Kirsteen, but she also paints a romanticized yet highly charged portrait of an early nineteenth-century dress shop. While she claims the historical accuracy of her representations of Miss Jean’s dress shop, we will see that her

45 Margaret Oliphant, “The Condition of Women,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Feb. 1858), in Hamilton 209–30: 212.

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shop is actually cobbled together from several different types of shops and from a variety of perspectives on the labor of the seamstresses who staffed them. Oliphant’s dress shop, run by women, patronized by women, staffed by women, offers a vision of idealized female community. Indeed, the narrator refers to the group as “the little community” (223). In the narrator’s first description of the workroom, she demarcates the boundary between outside and inside, public and private, the street and the shop. Outside Miss Jean’s shop lies fashionable Mayfair. Fashionable or not, from Kirsteen’s perspective, the narrow streets are not only “tedious, insignificant, and unlovely,” but clogged with “foggy smoky air,” and the “blank line of houses” conveys a sense of the “petty and dingy and small” (160, 159). Inside, however, the work-room exudes a safe, quiet, and even cheery ambiance. Described as a “long room built out at the back of the house,” the workroom is well ventilated with “many windows” (159). In Miss Jean’s parlour, “the chief literature” to be found is the Ladies’ Museum, which the narrator identifies as “a magazine of the time in many volumes, and containing beautiful prints of the fashions” (161). Oliphant’s description of the workroom is brief, yet she makes certain to include an important detail: there are many windows. In the 1880s, arguments over working conditions often included complaints over the poor ventilation and lighting in dress shops. Given the cost of window glass in the 1810s, it is unlikely that a dress shop like Miss Jean’s fictional one would have had many windows. Oliphant was not unaware of the window-tax that made windows so very expensive in the early nineteenth century; she credits the lack of windows at Drumcarro to the tax (8). That Miss Jean’s shop is light and airy reflects the shop’s status as a first-rate house as well as its financial success. But like Kirsteen’s red hair, these anachronistic windows also address late Victorian concerns and tastes. In 1849–1850, the famous investigator of the London poor, Henry Mayhew, classified dress shops into four categories. A court dressmaker catered to the nobility and strove to mitigate any sense of buying and selling. The shop itself appeared as much like a domestic space as possible, with large showrooms and swaths of expensive fabric from which to choose. Once the lady had chosen her fabric and design, a “first hand dressmaker” would go the lady’s residence to take her measurements, then supervise other seamstresses in their work of cutting out and sewing the dress.46 A second-rate house would be much the same, except that the clientele would be middle-class. Like a first-rate house, the second-rate house would put out easy work (such as skirts) to freelancers (also called slopworkers, outworkers, or pieceworkers), saving the more difficult sewing for its own

E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo, eds., The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–1850 (London: Merlin Press, 1971) 430–32. See also Beth Harris, “All that Glitters is not Gold: The Show-Shop and the Victorian Seamstress,” in Harris 115–37. 46

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seamstresses. Third- and fourth-rate houses made everything on the premises and dressed the lower-middle classes.47 Miss Jean’s dress shop amalgamates these various types of shops. At the end of the novel we learn that her plate says “Court Dressmaker,” and it is not until Kirsteen arrives on the scene that Miss Jean’s shop attracts large numbers of the gentry. Kirsteen’s decision not to accept “commoners” moves the shop more squarely into the category Mayhew identifies as “first-rate.” Labeled “court dressmaker,” the highest standard for dress shops, Miss Jean’s shop relies on seamstresses who work on the premises. Yet in order to avoid the issue of outworkers, the type of labor upon which a house of this standing would also have relied, Oliphant uses the labor distribution of a “lower” house, one that would cater to lower-middleclass clients and complete all sewing on-site.48 That Kirsteen has a difficult time identifying the class status of the seamstresses at Miss Jean’s reflects the public’s ambivalence about seamstresses. As Patricia Zakreski points out, due to her association with middle-class feminine creativity, the seamstress was often considered respectable, even genteel.49 Lynn M. Alexander explains an important difference between working- and middle-class seamstresses: middle-class seamstresses “usually worked in large urban millinery shops …; working-class women who worked as seamstresses usually worked out of their homes as slopworkers.”50 Miss Jean’s seamstresses are “fashionable” and “imposing,” and they speak “fine English … with an air of refinement” (160). Kirsteen has no way to categorize the class position of these seamstresses. She wonders, “Were they all gentlewomen, come like herself to make their fortunes?” (160). When she asks Miss Jean, the older dressmaker scoffs at the notion (160), highlighting Kirsteen’s inability to perceive class differences in the unfamiliar, urban environment of London. Kirsteen’s leadership style is equally problematic. As I described earlier, Kirsteen quickly takes over the dress shop, and Miss Jean retires to a supporting role. The young dress designer rules the small kingdom with “a habit of authority” (224). Kirsteen “had but to speak but she was obeyed—partly from love, but partly also from fear: for Kirsteen was not the laird of Drumcarro’s daughter for nothing, and she was very prompt in her measures, and quite indisposed to tolerate insubordination” (224). When she works alongside them, the seamstresses tease Kirsteen, but when she becomes the shop manager, they quickly come to admire and fear her. When Kirsteen is angry or aggrieved, they sew in timorous silence out of respect for her unarticulated feelings. The dress shop may provide a safe and serene contrast to the smog of the city streets, but that peace comes at great cost. To keep up with the sartorial needs of 47

Walkley 14. Walkley 14. 49 See Zakreski, Chapter 2, “Needlework and Creativity in Representations of the Seamstress.” 50 Alexander 58. 48

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their clients’ hectic schedules during the London season, the seamstresses must work long, unregulated hours. So busy is the shop during the height of the season that “relays of seamstresses sat up all night, there being no inspectors to bring the fashionable mantua-makers under control” (221). This rather astonishing sentence closes Chapter 31, but apparently the narrator believes there is more to be said on the subject, for the next chapter begins with the following explanation: There were no inspectors to look after the work-rooms of the dressmakers in these days, but perhaps also, at least with mistresses like Miss Jean, there was little need for them. If the young women in the work-room had sometimes to work for a part of the night it was only what at that time everybody was supposed to do in their own affairs or in their masters’, when business was very urgent, or throng as was said in Scotland. The head of the house sat up too, there were little indulgences accorded, and when the vigil was not too much prolonged, there was a certain excitement about it which was not unpleasing to the work-women in the monotony of their calling. (221)

One of the “indulgences” Miss Jean offers is the midnight distribution of tea and cakes. Another is reading aloud. While the girls work at the long table, often through the night, Miss Jean reads to them to help pass the time. Her reading draws the workers together, leading the narrator to call them “the little community” (223). The narrator claims that the seamstresses work these grueling shifts cheerfully because Kirsteen “inspired them with her own energy” (223). While the seamstresses relay each other, “snatching an hour or two of sleep,” Kirsteen stays up the entire night (223). Unlike the Drumcarro household, dominated by Kirsteen’s despotic father, the dress shop in Mayfair functions outside of masculine control or desire. No male figures darken the door demanding more or less labor. Yet Kirsteen, the narrator admits, is a demanding and awe-inspiring boss whose employees obey her “partly from love, but partly also from fear” (224). Akin to a military general or laird of the castle, Kirsteen brooks no insubordination, and although she allows Miss Jean to encourage the girls with rewards and incentives, she stipulates long hours of back-breaking work. The narrator explains Kirsteen’s behavior by claiming that “in those days” people considered it normal to stay up all night working for their “masters,” and her use of the word “master” highlights the hierarchical structure of Miss Jean’s female-led dress shop. Oliphant’s dress shop offers a vision of Carlylean utopia. A system governed by love and benevolence, it unites the Captains of Industry and their grateful, dependent employees. Yet Oliphant’s dress shop is historically inaccurate; as Kabi Hartman points out, “Kirsteen is a pastiche, alternately evoking the lady embroidering at home for aesthetic reasons, and the impoverished seamstress earning her living in a workroom.”51 Oliphant’s dress shop defies readers’ cultural knowledge by recognizing but evading the issues of legal regulation and working 51

Hartman [n.pag.].

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conditions that were so pressing for her late Victorian audience. The narrator writes that there were “no inspectors … in these days,” but that in the absence of legal regulation, Miss Jean runs her dress shop on principles of cooperation and camaraderie. Relay shifts, tea and cake, reading aloud: these incentives encourage the women to work long and tedious hours on a regular basis, while Kirsteen’s “habit of authority” and lack of tolerance for “insubordination” provide perhaps more compelling reasons to submit to unregulated working conditions. By emphasizing the familial relationships among employers and employees, Oliphant diverts her reader’s attention from real-life debates over seamstresses’ unregulated work. Oliphant also aims to attenuate the public’s association of seamstresses and dressmakers with prostitutes and fallen women. Deborah Denenholz Morse has explored Gaskell’s fiction and her connection between sewing and fallenness but also between sewing and redemption.52 For heroines such as Ruth Hilton and Mary Barton, sewing creates the means of seduction: motherless and under the care of negligent female employers, both girls are seduced by upper-class men. And yet, as Morse argues, sewing also provides a path toward compassion and redemption. Mary remakes her own black mourning gown into a gift for a starving widow, and Ruth sews diligently in order to support herself and her illegitimate child. As Morse argues, “The home … is the imagined ideal house of Victorian culture, in which fathers and mothers nurture—and forgive. It is a house in which a starving needlewoman—and even a wretched fallen woman— might find succor.”53 Like Gaskell, Oliphant challenged the public’s association of seamstresses with sexual promiscuity, but she did so not by reworking Christian redemption but by erasing female sexuality altogether. Kirsteen and Miss Jean act as attentive maternal figures, protecting and safeguarding their female employees. Kirsteen watches over them with a steely eye and Miss Jean soothes them with readings and treats. This female community resembles a convent. Sisterly intimacy replaces sexual partnerships, and neither the employers nor their employees ever mention sexual encounters or relationships of any kind. By ignoring female sexuality, Oliphant focuses the reader’s attention on Kirsteen’s creativity, leadership, and business acumen. Oliphant’s dress shop is a female utopia in which women take leadership roles. Miss Jean and Kirsteen run the business, design the clothing, manage the employees, and cater to a wealthy and powerful clientele. As I mentioned earlier, the essays in Fashion and Famine demonstrate the reality that many Victorian women enjoyed success as business owners and employers in the needle trades. Yet debates over the needle trades tended to focus on distressed needlewomen and not on the women who owned, managed, and supervised the shops. According to Nicola Pullin, contemporary discourse most often portrayed these female employers as oppressive and cruel, or merely ignored them.54 In the “Ghost in the Looking 52

Morse 27–73. Morse 64. 54 See Pullin. 53

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Glass” (1863), the dressmaker, not merely the wealthy client, is responsible for the seamstresses’ demise. We cannot see the facial expression of the fashionable client, but the position of her torso and hands suggests surprise and shock, not pleasure. By contrast, the dressmaker wields a sinister expression. She is even given words: “We would not have disappointed your Ladyship, at any sacrifice.” This illustration emphasized the fact that unlike the client, the dressmaker had direct contact with the impoverished and overworked seamstress; it is she who exacted such costly labor. As the intermediary, she seems to shoulder more blame than the clueless, if yet complicit, client. Portrayals of dressmakers as unscrupulous business owners thrived in Victorian art and literature. In Kirsteen, by contrast, Oliphant offers a vision of positive female leadership. Both Miss Jean and Kirsteen demand long hours of difficult work, but in order to motivate their employees, they utilize sentimental values more often associated with family or friendship. In Kirsteen’s dress shop, loyalty, discipline, hard work, and clearly defined power roles create efficiency and intimacy. In Women, Work, and Representation, Lynn M. Alexander argues, “To many artists the seamstress appealed precisely because the strongly established iconography allowed them to tap into the entire history and all the accompanying responses with a single reference.”55 It is no wonder, then, that when Margaret Oliphant chose dressmaking as Kirsteen’s profession, she made sure to mention that the work-room was well ventilated, the seamstresses genteel and virtuous, and that even without inspectors, the seamstresses were protected by the high morals of their employers. She overlooked the reality that even in the Regency period, cultural critics also worried over the fate of seamstresses. In 1810, Mary Lamb, for example, implored middle- and upper-class women to abandon needlework so that working-class seamstresses would have enough work to make a living.56 Oliphant also made sure to highlight her heroine’s sexual abstinence; unlike other famous fictional heroines, most notably Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth and Mary Barton, Kirsteen is most certainly not a fallen woman. On the contrary, by the end of the novel her “shameful” dressmaking has, rather surprisingly, catapulted her into the life of an upper-class socialite and philanthropist. “Happy Days”: Unpicking and Remaking the Past Three years before she published Kirsteen, Oliphant prescribed the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë as reminders of “the happy days of the Victorian era.” As she wrote in her 1887 article, “The Literature of the Last Fifty Years,” 55

Alexander 194. Mary Lamb, “On Needle-work,” British Ladies Magazine (April 1815). In The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 5 vols (1903; New York: AMS Press, 1968) 1:176–80. 56

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Oliphant went on to review the literature of the Victorian age. Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot: these were the authors Oliphant believed would stand the test of time. Charlotte Brontë, while not to be compared with the monumental George Eliot, was yet to be admired for her “eyes of genius.” And of Brontë’s friend Mrs. Gaskell, Oliphant remarked that although she “ha[d] fallen into that respectful oblivion which is the fate of a writer who reaches a sort of secondary classical rank,” she was still “worthy of note” (418). Oliphant encouraged her readers to find and read Gaskell’s and Brontë’s allegedly hard-to-locate novels, claiming that even Jane Eyre, although it had been more popular than Mary Barton, could only be found in “private libraries, or in the old-fashioned circulating libraries of our youth” (418). She even went so far as to direct readers to small “circulating libraries in watering-places where Mudie is not yet supreme, and where books remain and accumulate” (419). In advocating a treasure hunt for novels such as Villette, Mary Barton, and Jane Eyre, Oliphant dodges the reality that Jane Eyre, at least, was never an obscure title at any time during the Victorian period. It was one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century, and cheap editions would have been available at the booksellers on the Strand even if it had gone out of print (which it never did). In fact, Oliphant herself wrote a parody of it, Janet (1891), which, like Kirsteen, was a bestseller.58 Gaskell’s works were also in print during the second half of the century. Smith, Elder, and Company reprinted Gaskell’s Mary Barton (often published together with a few of her short stories and titled Mary Barton and Tales) at least four times in the 1870s and five times in the 1880s. In the 1890s, it was printed by six different publishers.59 57 Margaret Oliphant, “The Literature of the Last Fifty Years,” Blackwood’s Magazine June 1887, in Prose by Victorian Women: An Anthology, ed. Andrea Broomfield and Mitchell 391–427: 419. 58 Philip V. Allingham, “Victorian Best-Sellers, 1862–1901,” Victorian Web, ed. George P. Landow, Brown University, 10 January 2006 . 59 According to WorldCAT, Smith, Elder, and Company printed Mary Barton in 1866, 1872, 1873, 1876, 1878, 1882–1886, 1884, 1887, 1888, 1891, 1889–1893, 1892, and 1895. According to The English Catalogue, Mary Barton was published in Feb. 1890 by Smith & Elder, in Sept. 1890 by Warne in a series called the “Crown Library,” in Jan. 1891 by Cassell (in the “Red Library”), and in Sept. 1891 by Ward and Locke in the “Minerva Library.” There was an edition of Ruth in March 1890 by Smith & Elder (a month after their Mary Barton), then editions by two other publishers in 1895 and 1896 (the latter from

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Oliphant recommended Gaskell’s books as good holiday reading, but in her own time, Gaskell’s name was virtually synonymous with the labor question. Mary Barton (1848), Gaskell’s first novel, catapulted her to instant fame and inspired Charles Dickens to hire her as a writer for his magazine Household Words. In 1848, Fraser’s Magazine advised reading Mary Barton in order to understand Lancashire’s violent class struggles: “Do they want to know why poor men, kind and sympathising as women to each other, learn to hate law and order, Queen, Lords and Commons, country-party, and corn-law leagues, all alike—to hate the rich in short? Then let them read Mary Barton.” Charles Kingsley, Christian socialist and chaplain to Queen Victoria, advocated the mass distribution of the novel “till a nation, calling itself Christian, began to act upon the awful facts contained in it.”60 Oliphant, by contrast, prescribed Gaskell’s novels as light reading, as examples of a better time, when “society was purer and manners better—when the Queen was at the head of everything in her kingdom … and the atmosphere more clear than it has been since.” Oliphant might well have recalled Gaskell’s less controversial novels, Cranford (1853) or Wives and Daughters (1865), yet in her essay the title she recommends is none other than Mary Barton (418). Given that Mary Barton launched Gaskell into celebrity status and spawned a national sensation and a companion novel, North and South (1855), and that Ruth caused a scandal, leading some to burn the book in public—not to mention the fact the Oliphant herself recommended Mary Barton in 1887—it is highly unlikely that Oliphant was unaware of Gaskell’s reputation as a writer of social problem novels. Oliphant’s portrait of “the happy days of the Victorian era” does not square with historical reality. Just as her novel Kirsteen created an imagined past in order to articulate and mute the debates of the present, so too, Oliphant’s literary criticism in “The Literature of the Last Fifty Years” mapped the needs and insufficiencies of the present onto a more bountiful, peaceful past. It was a strange moment of amnesia for Oliphant. Both in Kirsteen, set in the 1810s, and in this essay, referring to the early Victorian period, Oliphant seemed to have forgotten her history lessons. When Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, she inherited a country in an economic slump, with working-class citizens violently agitating for the vote. In 1845, Benjamin Disraeli, Conservative statesman and Prime Minister whose political career spanned most of the Victorian period, famously concluded, “Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.”61 In Kirsteen, Oliphant included references to slave-trading in Jamaica, the colonial the popular Walter Scott firm). In July 1897, Smith & Elder issued Gaskell’s Works in an eight-volume “Pocket Edition.” See The English Catalogue of Books, ed. Samuel Low, vol. 5 (1890–1897) (London: Publishers Circular) 872. 60 Charles Kingsley, Fraser’s Magazine (Apr. 1849); quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage, ed. Angus Easson (London: Routledge, 1991) 153. 61 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (1845; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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project in India, and the Battle of Waterloo, but these events merely provided historical signposts for the time-traveling reader. Oddly, both in Kirsteen and in “The Literature of the Last Fifty Years,” the political conflicts fueling and arising from these events were left unexplored. Had Oliphant forgotten the Corn Laws of 1815 and the anti-Corn Law Leagues; the years of economic depression and mass unemployment in the late 1830s and 1840s; the Chartist movement, which between 1836 and the late 1850s agitated for changes in social and legal conditions for working-class men? Why did she choose to overlook the controversial Reform Act of 1832 which extended the vote to some members of the middle classes and is said to have averted a revolution? Slavery, finally abolished in Britain in 1833, faded into oblivion for her, and the fact that Drumcarro owned slaves in Jamaica serves more to reinforce his brutality in his own home rather than abroad. What about the riots and rebellions of 1811–1819: the Luddite uprisings Brontë fictionalized in Shirley (1848), or the famous Peterloo Massacre of 1819, during which cavalry with sabers crashed through an unarmed gathering of fifty to sixty thousand people, including women and children? As we have seen, public anxiety about seamstresses and other sweated workers was far from resolved in the late 1880s, when Oliphant was writing Kirsteen. In fact, as Stephen Arata reminds us, “the 1880s and 1890s were a time of extraordinarily rich political ferment. At no time since the 1840s had the political landscape in Britain been quite so unsettled.”62 Socialist and labor movements were on the rise, the “Black Sunday” and “Bloody Sunday” riots (1886, 1887) led to a crackdown on public assembly, and strikes by match-girls (1888), gas workers (1889), and London dock workers (1889) wrung new rights from the government. By setting her story in a vague past, Oliphant tried to disentangle seamstresses from contemporary debates over sweated labor and unionization. Just as she tried to sidestep decades’ worth of accumulated cultural debate about seamstresses and their labor, Oliphant also ignored the harsh economic and social problems of the early nineteenth century. When her narrator nonchalantly informs the reader that the seamstresses under Miss Kirsteen routinely work 24hour shifts, she does so with the following explanation: “it was only what at that time [in the 1810s] everybody was supposed to do in their own affairs or in their masters’, when business was very urgent” (emphasis added). Oliphant’s narrator consistently reminds the reader that the action of the novel took place “seventy years ago,” when times were much different: dresses were less attractive and dressmaker’s shops were not inspected, but the dressmakers plied their craft more adeptly, the girls they dressed were more patient, the muslin was finer, and the dressmaking more artistic (54). In her idealized portrait, Oliphant seems to yearn for an earlier era in British history. In the good old days, she seems to imply, workers knew their place and employers ruled over them with wisdom. In other words, the stirrings to organize labor which roiled the 1880s were unknown. 62 Stephen Arata, “1897,” A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert Tucker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 51–65: 62.

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Oliphant set the action of her novel in an era she imagined to be less volatile than her own, but, in actual fact, that idealized time period never existed. In her narrative struggle to articulate the circumstances under which women’s sewing might have strong creative and practical value, Oliphant inscribed absence into her narrative. In On Longing (1993), Susan Stewart considers the dangers and possibilities of what she calls “the social disease of nostalgia.”63 As she writes, “Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack” (23). In Stewart’s view, yearning for a place or time imagined as better or more positive—or framing that utopia in an imagined present—arises from the perceived absence of that desired state in the here and now. By seeking a non-existent past, one that existed purely at the level of narrative, Oliphant exemplified Stewart’s definition of nostalgia: she reproduced an ideological absence, the “felt lack” of her particular cultural experience. Yet in the case of Oliphant’s Kirsteen, I would reframe Stewart’s definition of nostalgia. Oliphant did not merely reproduce the perceived “lack” of her historical moment; she also tried to disentangle herself from the “excess” of that moment. In other words, by 1890, the figure of the seamstress or dressmaker had become so thick with possible meanings and associations, so textured, that Oliphant tried to unravel a few stitches in Geertz’s “web of significance.” By distinguishing women’s professional sewing as an art form, and by sidestepping the issues of sexual promiscuity and exploited labor that her predecessors and her contemporaries debated, Oliphant tried to extricate dressmaking from the material culture in which it was historically grounded. It is telling that her heroine Kirsteen could only be modern in a vaguely distant past. The titles of Dixon’s and Oliphant’s novels reflect this urge to alter the past: The Story of a Modern Woman, and in a seemingly oppositional yet actually complementary, manner, Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago. In both formulations, a distinction was drawn in terms of femininity or domesticity (as well as in terms of fiction), between what was old and what was new, what was traditional and what was modern. The figure that remained old and new, traditional and modern, despite its permutations over time, was the sewing woman. Sewing, the one skill shared by Victorian women of all classes, offered women novelists a way to speak to and about women and about their work as artists and as laborers. Calling forth a textured history of artistic renderings, ethical debate, stereotypes—not to mention a range of emotional responses—women’s professional sewing connected the issues of women’s art, labor, and sexuality. Late Victorian women writers used women’s sewing and the issues surrounding it to question women’s “writing” in various modes. Writing a novel, sewing a garment: both functioned as a form of narrative. Taking apart the past and reusing it as fabric for a new pattern, late 63 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) ix.

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Victorian women writers such as Margaret Oliphant and Ella Hepworth Dixon used old and worn material for a modern design. Like a seamstress ripping out old seams and detaching select pieces of fabric, Oliphant and Dixon chose elements of the seamstress’s history. They then cut those pieces to different dimensions and stitched them together to create something new. The irony is that an astute woman reader of the early 1890s, one who was literate in the languages of cloth and print, would be able to detect the history in the fabric. She would remember Gaskell’s seamstresses, Mary Barton and Ruth Hilton. Popular Punch cartoons such as “The Ghost in the Looking-Glass” would haunt her reading. “Stitch, stitch, stitch,” the cadence of Thomas Hood’s famous poem “The Song of the Shirt,” would beat in her ears. Contemporary debates about ventilation and work hours would color her reading of Miss Jean’s airy dress shop, and images of aesthetes danced in her head when she read about Kirsteen’s directoire designs. Like the dressmakers they fictionalized, Oliphant and Dixon used existing material for new purposes. Yet despite their innovative designs, the warp and weft of old fabric retained its history, refusing to forget its past even as it dressed the future.

Chapter 5

Beautiful Revolution: New Women Sew a New World In the spring of 1888, an upper-class young woman from the West End went undercover as a “plain trouser hand” in an East End sweatshop. Beatrice Potter Webb, budding socialist, published her experiences later that same year in two Nineteenth Century articles, “Pages of a Workgirl’s Diary” and “The East End Tailoring Trade.” Although Webb’s inferior sewing skills lost her the job, her exposé of the abuses of the sweating system catapulted her into a career as an important Fabian politician and social historian. In her sweatshop articles and in her diaries, Webb chronicled her travels between West End high society and East End blight; what stands out is her struggle to reconcile her desire for beauty— defined by her upper-class surroundings—with her ideals of social justice. New Woman novelists, such as Sarah Grand in The Beth Book (1897) and Gertrude Dix in The Image-Breakers (1900), grappled with the same dichotomy. The protagonist of Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book sells her artistic embroidery to free herself from a husband’s economic tyranny. At the same time, she turns the old-fashioned skill of sewing not only to the practical task of unpicking and remaking beautiful clothing, but also of unpicking and remaking her own identity. By the novel’s end, Beth, once an abused child and persecuted wife, has become an orator for the women’s-rights movement. The Image-Breakers tells the story of two women, one an upper-class writer, one a lower-middle class artist, who live and work in a separate-sex socialist collective. At the end of the novel, upperclass Rosalind Dangerfield has abandoned her attempts to write a great socialist manifesto. Instead, she sews clothing for poor children. Although the novel criticizes the brutality of capitalist industrialism, Rosalind’s lower middle-class friend, Leslie Ardent, finds “beauty in a hell of capitalism.” Whether admiring the early morning view of an East End factory or carefully sewing and embroidering her threadbare garments, Leslie makes her own beauty. Given the radical views these novels espouse, their depictions of socialist activists and women’s rights orators, it is curious that they would represent sewing and dress culture as such rich, meaningful activities. New Woman authors such as Grand, a suffragist, and Dix, a socialist, often associated beautiful clothing with sweatshops, exploitation of the poor, mass consumerism, and capitalism—not to mention middle- and upper-class women’s relegation to the world of ornament and beauty rather than political power or social equity. And yet, in their depictions of  Gertrude Dix, The Image-Breakers (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1900) 9. Further references to The Image-Breakers are given in the text.

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sewing and of fine clothing, these novels also assert the revolutionary potential of dress culture. Sewing—that age-old, often belittled skill, as women’s unpaid or underpaid “work”—seems not to limit women, trapping them in mind-cramping, soul-numbing tedium. Attention to dress seems not necessarily to reflect a trivial, unenlightened mind. On the contrary, dress culture can provide women with financial independence, creative expression, a way to care for the needy, and social resistance. And in both novels, the most effective social activists are those who use dress culture to fashion an authentic self. In order to recognize why Grand and Dix envisioned the relationship between beauty and social change as they did, we need to understand the cultural conversations in which they engaged. Both novels respond to aestheticism, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and art embroidery, and Grand in particular positions herself against aestheticism even as she adopts elements of that movement. Both novels consider the ways that social class dictates how radical a woman can afford to be. While The Beth Book places the responsibility for social change in the hands of upper-class women, The Image-Breakers explores a lower-middle-class character’s disillusionment with socialism. Both novels seek to reconcile beauty and activism, claiming that the work of becoming a self-fulfilled artist and the work of rectifying social injustice cannot be accomplished as separate goals. As Grand argues, “Men entertain each other with intellectual ingenuities and Art and Style, while women are busy with the great problems of life, and are striving might and main to make it beautiful.” Sewing and dressing a self becomes a way to sew and dress a better world, one that is not only more just, but more beautiful. “The Delicate Fancywork of her Brain”: The Beth Book (1897) Sarah Grand (1854–1943) was one of the most prominent New Woman novelists and activists. The author of several novels, including the best-selling The Heavenly Twins (1893), Grand published widely in feminist and mainstream journals. In a pair of articles with Ouida in 1894, she coined the term “New Woman.” Certainly, she sought to promote that figure to an often unsympathetic public. Grand’s novels defied literary conventions, not only tackling volatile topics such as women’s rights, venereal disease, cross-dressing, and animal vivisection, but also modifying the form of the realist novel. On a personal level, Grand participated in the women’s rights movement. As I discussed in Chapter 2, she was a committed suffragist who also belonged to the Rational Dress Society; in 1898, she became President of the Tunbridge Wells branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Elaine Showalter and Carolyn Christensen Nelson have pointed out that even though Grand never acknowledged it, most of the details of The Beth Book (1897)

 Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (1897; New York: Dial, 1980) 376. Further references to The Beth Book are given in the text.

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are autobiographical. Beth’s journey from neglected, misunderstood girl to bold and vivacious writer and activist mirrored Grand’s own journey. Like the novels of other late Victorian writers I have examined in this project, The Beth Book makes use of women’s dual literacy in print and dress culture. For Grand’s protagonist, dress and embroidery offer ways to resist and transform patriarchal society. In dress culture, Beth finds an alternative vision of women’s material aesthetics and activism, a vision that depicts beauty and justice as the twofold project of upperclass women. The Beth Book traces the development of Beth Caldwell, a sensitive and talented girl who struggles against the strictures and injustices of late Victorian society. As a child, Beth’s class standing is uncertain; her mother’s family is upper-class, but her father is a Navy captain whom the narrator describes as a “quadroon” (4). Raised in Ireland, a place the narrator calls “that wild district” where both poverty and incest are rife, Beth grows up beyond the pale of “good” English society (45, 81). Precocious and outspoken, Beth’s formative experiences take place in what Elaine Showalter aptly describes as “an atmosphere saturated with sexuality and violence.” Like Oliphant in Kirsteen and Schreiner in From Man to Man, novels I discussed in earlier chapters, Grand critiques the defectiveness of the “traditional” bourgeois Victorian family. Dictatorial or absent fathers, sickly or controlling mothers, sisters and female friends who cannot be trusted: these novels not only condemn what patriarchy does to women, but what women within patriarchy do to each other. As in Kirsteen and From Man to Man, dress culture offers a window into these relationships and into the larger social mores the narrators criticize. In order to develop a strong sense of personal autonomy out of her dual literacy, Beth must educate herself. None of the adults in Beth’s life are able to support or guide her consistently or well. Beth’s father remains part of her life long enough to leave a confusing legacy. The narrator describes him as a man of ambiguous class and ethnic background: “His features were European, but his complexion, and his soft glossy black hair, curling close and crisp to the head, betrayed a dark drop in him, probably African. In the West Indies he would certainly have been set down as a quadroon” (4). Unlike Beth’s mother, Captain Caldwell shares his daughter’s imaginative way of seeing the world, and he encourages her to develop personal morals, as well as her creativity. Yet he is also a philanderer and an alcoholic, prone to severe depression, anxiety, and bouts of violence. Beth’s father dies early in the narrative, leaving her to the care of women. Her primary caregivers—her mother, her Aunt Victoria, and her teachers at boarding schools—use dress culture to provide differing models of late Victorian femininity. The primary woman-to-woman relationship in Beth’s life is that with her mother. Mrs. Caldwell, bright, talented, and passionate, exemplifies the dysfunction of the  Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (1977; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 207–8 and Carolyn Christensen Nelson, ed., A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s (Toronto: Broadview, 2001) 34.  Showalter 208.

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supposedly ideal Victorian family, a problem Grand critiqued in all of her novels. Mrs. Caldwell’s enslavement within a flawed marital system is evident even in her name: the narrator never refers to Beth’s mother by her first name or by her maiden name. She is always, merely, “Mrs. Caldwell,” a character identified by her marital status and her husband’s surname. Mrs. Caldwell suffers the financial ruin that threatened Victorian women who, particularly before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, were completely dependent on the goodwill of male relatives and husbands for their financial provision. Her husband dies without providing for her or their children’s futures, and as her father lies dying back in England, Mrs. Caldwell’s brother, James, convinces their father to ignore his faraway daughter and to give the entire inheritance to him instead (100–101). Mrs. Caldwell acts as the doppelgänger of Coventry Patmore’s famous “angel in the house.” In 1854, Coventry Patmore praised “the angel in the house,” the woman who finds satisfaction and fulfillment in her role as wife, mother, and domestic manager. In Mrs. Caldwell, Grand counters Patmore’s construction with a more sinister, perhaps more realistic characterization of Victorian womanhood. This “angel” seems destined to fall far short of Patmore’s ideal. Trapped, dissatisfied, bored, and manipulative, Mrs. Caldwell does not find fulfillment in the home. She has no intellectual interests to occupy her, and the few women she considers worthy of her friendship are insipid and unscrupulous. The narrator informs us that she “had the strong class prejudice which makes such stupid snobs of the English” and often mistook pretty manners for moral fiber (52). With her “ridiculous education” and poor judgment, Mrs. Caldwell fails to oversee her children’s most basic care, much less their moral and intellectual development (280–281). Rather than completing the domestic tasks Patmore praised—directing servants, planning delicious meals, mending and sewing her family’s clothing, gently and ably caring for her husband and children, providing a safe haven away from the rough-and-tumble world of commerce—Mrs. Caldwell “sat inactive and suffered” (281). While her husband is alive, she stumbles under the lash of his drunken displeasure; when he dies, she finds that he has left insufficient funds for the family’s provision. With no outlet for her anger and frustration, Mrs. Caldwell turns on someone she can control—her daughter Beth. Beth’s mother brutally beats her daughter for any perceived infraction, but she also abuses Beth verbally, constantly belittling her and quashing her independent spirit. The mother-daughter relationship sizzles with rage and guilt: Beth’s mother, an intelligent woman never given the opportunity to develop her own sense of self, systematically destroys her daughter’s individuality. Sometimes Beth tries to mollify her mother, giving in to ludicrous demands and sacrificing her own dreams and desires in order to satisfy her. Attuned to her mother’s moods, Beth “learned to read a countenance long before she learned to read a book” (20). Other times, however, Beth fights back. The ultimate showdown occurs when Beth threatens  See Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House (1854–1856; London: Haggerston Press, 1998).

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to hit her mother in return. She refuses to submit to yet another beating, and Mrs. Caldwell realizes her daughter is too old, and too large, to be controlled by physical force alone. Emotional manipulation becomes her primary weapon, one she wields deftly until her death. Grand uses Mrs. Caldwell’s failure to instruct her daughter in the most fundamental of womanly skills—sewing—to illustrate her ineptitude as a mother, her dissatisfaction with women’s traditional social roles, and her fallen class status. Beth’s mother has provided a shabby inheritance for her daughter. She has not taught her the traditional skills of sewing and housewifery, nor has she given her the modern necessities of independence and education. Beth’s shabby, ill-fitting clothes testify to her mother’s neglect (162). As the narrator describes, “All her clothing fitted badly, and were fastened on with anything that came to hand in the way of tape and buttons” (45). Mrs. Caldwell not only fails to provide decent clothing for her daughter, but she also neglects to teach her how to sew. She seems to assume that Beth should have been born with the skill and treats her mistakes as acts of insolence rather than of ignorance. Mrs. Caldwell orders her daughter to unpick a garment—to take it apart seam by seam—but with insufficient instruction, Beth bungles the job and is, of course, duly beaten (188). As the narrator comments dryly, “It was a pity she did not try to improve Beth and Bernadine [her sister] by finding some sewing for their idle hands to do” (130). One day, Mrs. Caldwell takes Beth to pay a social call on a friend. They discover their hostess in the middle of an embroidery project, “doing great black monkeys on a grey ground in woolwork” (26). (As I will discuss later, “woolwork” at the time of Beth’s childhood was virtually synonymous with Berlin wool-work, a type of canvas work.) Fascinated, Beth asks to be taught how to do “such wonderful work,” but her mother snickers derisively, ridiculing her in front of their hostess. Mrs. Caldwell herself has difficulty managing the piles of mending her own family produces, much less turning her hand to fancy-work. Beth never learns good sewing skills from her mother, but when she does begin to sew, it is a positive experience. After Captain Caldwell’s untimely death of alcoholism, Mrs. Caldwell takes her children back to her ancestral home in England, where they live as the “poor relations” of her brother James, the family’s corrupt new patriarch. An older relative, the quaintly named Aunt Victoria, also resides at the family estate; like Mrs. Caldwell, she finds herself dependent on her miserly nephew James. Noticing Beth’s lack of parental oversight, Aunt Victoria asks her niece to help her unpick a gown, so that she can use it as a pattern for a new one. Beth is astonished that her aunt knows how to make a gown, and Aunt Victoria is surprised by Beth’s unfamiliarity with the process. Clearly Beth has never seen her mother make a dress, much less been taught how to make one herself. The first woman to show a genuine interest in Beth, Aunt Victoria takes her niece under her wing, teaching her how to speak the language of cloth and also the language of print. Not only does she teach her niece how to sew, but she teaches her French and encourages her to read. Beth finds solace in her aunt’s gentleness and satisfaction in the dual literacy she learns from her. Soon after, Aunt Victoria carries Beth off to live with her in her house.

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Away from Beth’s mother, the elderly woman and the neglected young girl develop an affectionate relationship. Their days follow an ordered rhythm in impoverished but beautiful surroundings. In the mornings, Aunt Victoria teaches her niece French and lets her enjoy the garden, and in the afternoons the pair sew or knit together. Aunt Victoria teaches Beth how to make her own undergarments, “to Beth’s great delight” (199). The narrator describes how Aunt Victoria mentors her young charge: All of her old things that were not rags were patches, and the shame of having them so was a continual source of discomfort to her; but Aunt Victoria, when she discovered the state of Beth’s wardrobe, bought some calico out of her own scanty means, and set her to work. During these long afternoons, they had many a conversation that Beth recollected with pleasure and profit. She often amused and interested the old lady; and sometimes she drew from her a serious reprimand or a solemn lecture, for both of which she was much the better. (199)

Learning to sew offers Beth several things: the opportunity to care for her own needs, companionship, and instruction—not only in sewing, but in middle-class mores. Like the women of From Man to Man and Kirsteen, Aunt Victoria and Beth form a little community around the activity of sewing. For Beth, the experience fosters the “tender discipline,” creativity, and self-sufficiency she so sorely needs (203). Aunt Victoria—and the Queen to whom she alludes—may be conventional and old-fashioned, but her quiet, steady presence calms Beth’s anxieties and regulates her often erratic moods. In her description of the cross-generational relationship between Aunt Victoria and Beth, Grand seems to stress the positive legacies of mid-Victorian women’s dress culture. Because she cannot sew well herself, Beth’s mother cannot teach her daughter to sew. But instead of encouraging her daughter to learn, she jeers at her. Victoria, by contrast, provides thorough instruction in old-fashioned domestic arts. Through this pairing, the narrator implicitly contrasts Mrs. Caldwell’s fallen class status with Aunt Victoria’s high-Victorian, ladylike accomplishments. In Chapter 2, I discussed Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labor (1911) in which she claimed that middle- and upper-class women’s traditional domestic work—once socially useful and valued—had been taken over by men, working-class employees, and machines. Bereft of meaningful labor, women had become “sex parasites”: their only social function was sexual partnership and reproduction. In her description of the relationship between Beth and Aunt Victoria, Grand, like Schreiner, seems to lament the fact that Beth’s generation has not been provided meaningful labor or social responsibilities. Grand esteems elements of traditional, middle- and upperclass women’s education, even as she exposes the abuses of the patriarchal system under which it developed. Aunt Victoria’s shelter cannot last for long, and soon Beth must leave her beloved aunt to return to her mother’s world. When Beth comes home, she tries to graft the order and serenity of her Aunt’s home onto her mother’s household. The experiment fails. As always, Mrs. Caldwell refuses to take the time to teach

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her daughter to sew or to sew with her, and mother and daughter never experience the structured productivity, the companionship, or the shared creativity of sewing together. As Beth grows toward adolescence, her mother continues to neglect her daughter’s clothing and sewing lessons alike. In a lament that will become a reprise throughout her story, Beth complains of her “uncouth” clothes. Soon after she returns home, she sees herself in a shop window and feels “miserably conscious of her old ill-cut skirt, more especially of the invisible dirt on it, and she did so yearn for something new and sweet and clean” (234). Beth knows that her mother happens to have an account at that very shop, but she is too mortified to enter it. Dejected, she finds herself unable to do what she enjoys—to sit on the beach and allow “things to come to her, by which she meant ideas” (234). The discomfort of the material world impedes her ability to enter the world of ideas. Her mind is fettered by dirty, ill-fitting clothes. This problem occurs for Beth again and again and, according to the narrator, indicates her artistic temperament: “Beth would have expressed the dainty refinement of her mind in her dress had she had the means; but it is difficult to be dainty on nothing a year” (234). Virginia Woolf would have been surprised to hear Grand’s assertion that in order to become a woman artist, one needs not only a room of one’s own and 500 pounds a year, but also good clothes. Desperate, Beth calls on the skills her now deceased Aunt Victoria had taught her. She finds an old lavender silk dress of her aunt’s, unpicks it, and redesigns it into a beautiful Sunday gown. Recalling her aunt, she is both “sad and glad to remember how much she owed her” (234). The sewing project raises her spirits, allowing her the satisfaction of using her creativity and her knowledge to provide for herself in a practical way while remembering her dead aunt. The dress turns out to be “very becoming,” but when Beth turns up at the breakfast table wearing it, her mother calls her daughter’s appearance “absurd” and “ridiculously over-dressed” and forces Beth to change into her ragged, black Sunday dress. At church, poor Beth feels so uncomfortable and unattractive that she fears everyone around her is secretly ridiculing her clothes. Her embarrassment only exacerbates her painful isolation. Ashamed of her clothing, the shy, unconventional Beth becomes more and more prickly and guarded, and her aloofness turns away would-be friends. Beth’s frustration with her clothing continues through all her years at home, but she finds momentary freedom in cross-dressing. Like Angelica HamiltonWells in Grand’s bestselling The Heavenly Twins, Beth dresses as a boy in order to visit a menagerie unsuspected (254–5). While cross-dressing affords Beth a way to manipulate successfully her literacy in dress culture to achieve her own ends, it ultimately fails. Her mother sees through the disguise, shattering the moment of freedom and brusquely returning Beth to the confines of her own identity as controlled daughter. Just as she refused to allow Beth to wear the redesigned lavender dress, so too, she outlaws cross-dressing. Beth’s fleeting experiences as a cross-dresser and amateur dress designer allow her to taste forbidden delights, even as they remind her that clothing is, after all, mere disguise. That summer, boys in the neighborhood also start to take notice of budding Beth, and she begins

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to feel “her own power” to control other people (272–3). Transgressing dress codes liberates Beth in ways she has never known, infusing her with fresh confidence as she moves into womanhood. Like her Aunt Victoria, Beth’s teachers at boarding school use dual literacy to instruct her in how to be a woman. Indeed, Beth’s attendance at the schools comes as part of her Aunt Victoria’s legacy; upon her death, Aunt Victoria leaves her beloved niece a small sum of money. Mrs. Caldwell promptly convinces Beth that she has no need of the inheritance and that she must give it to her lazy, spoiled brother in order to fund his expensive education. But Beth’s wild ways eventually force Mrs. Caldwell to use a meager portion of the inheritance for Beth’s education. Beth attends two different girls’ schools, the Royal Service School for Officers’ Daughters and Miss Blackburne’s finishing school. Both schools support her “natural love of order” and shape her into a very refined young woman, attentive to her appearance and manners (319). She develops her natural talent in music, playing “first piano in the first-class solo” (312). Neither school, however, provides sufficient intellectual instruction. Beth, a voracious reader, discovers that her teachers discourage all attempts to think abstractly. Instead, the schools emphasize rote memorization and spotty instruction in “showy accomplishments,” such as foreign languages, drawing, dancing, and music (318). The schools prepare the girls exclusively for marriage: “at both of her schools marriage was the great ambition of most of the girls” (319). Beth’s first boarding school instantly reminds the reader of Charlotte Brontë’s Lowood. The Royal School for Officers’ Daughters caters to girls who will have to work upon graduation, most likely as teachers, and its fees are “next to nothing” (296, 279). The “dreary” building with its “graceless barrenness” houses poorly trained teachers who flaunt “trumpery education[s]” (313, 296). The students are “not taught one thing thoroughly” (296). In contrast to Beth’s years “at home, running wild” like a reincarnated Emily Brontë, her experience at boarding school nearly smothers her (279). The strict rules and her teachers’ efforts to convert her to low-church Christianity grate against her independent spirit. Narrowly escaping expulsion, Beth soon leaves the school. At her second boarding school, Miss Blackburne’s, Beth receives systematic and thorough instruction in dress culture. A finishing school for young ladies, Miss Blackburne’s grooms its students for profitable marriages; the six other students come from upper-middle or upper-class families. The teachers expect the girls to read widely and to be able to converse wittily on a variety of topics. They learn to care for their personal appearance, soaking and buffing their skin with a variety of tonics and potions. Lovely dress is of the utmost importance. All the girls dress neatly and attractively, and three of them are on their way to becoming “women of fashion.” One of Beth’s schoolmates, Geraldine, tight-laces in order to shape her waist into the fashionably tiny size of seventeen inches (316). Beth scorns the tightlacing, but dressing well gives her a sense of personal satisfaction and beauty. As I explained in Chapter 2, Grand deplored tight-lacing and criticized it roundly in her fiction and non-fiction. In this novel, the narrator criticizes Geraldine’s tightlacing, but she nevertheless notes that Beth blossoms in her new environment:

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She was in a new world with them—a world of ease and refinement, of polished manners, of kindly consideration, where, instead of being harried by nagging rules, stultified by every kind of restraint, and lowered in her own estimation for want of proper respect and encouragement, she was allowed as much liberty as she would have had in a well-ordered home, and found herself and her abilities of special interest to each of her teachers. (318)

Under her teachers’ and peers’ tutelage, Beth becomes a “fastidiously refined” young woman, meticulous about her appearance, activities, and friendships (321). When Beth returns home, she tries to maintain her orderly schedule and newly acquired genteel tastes, always a difficult task in the unstable emotional environment her mother creates. Every day she performs particular tasks in a specific order. She sews, studies French, reads, exercises outside, and tends to her appearance (318). Her self-imposed discipline is soon shattered, however, when her mother manipulates her into marrying a conniving physician named Daniel Maclure. The not-so-good doctor has ingratiated himself to Beth’s mother, all the while turning a greedy eye on Beth and her inheritance, which he assumes to be substantial. As a child growing up with a negligent mother, Beth was not provided for, nor was she taught to provide for herself. Beth’s marriage turns out to be equally disempowering. Shocked to learn the actual amount of his wife’s inheritance, Dr. Maclure cavils at his wife’s tiniest expense, and he demands that the small pittance she receives as interest from her inheritance be applied to his evermounting bills. Given the ongoing theme of victimization in Beth’s relationships, it is unsurprising that her husband turns out to be a philanderer. That he convinces his wife to help him care for a female patient in their home, Bertha, only to seduce that very patient, epitomizes his moral repugnance. Like Aunt Victoria, Bertha is carefully named—in this case, she evokes the reader’s memory of Brontë’s “other woman,” the “madwoman in the attic,” Bertha Mason. Maclure snoops through Beth’s letters and clothing, shamelessly claiming such behavior as his marital right. Whenever he needs money, he squeezes out phony tears in order to manipulate Beth into giving it to him. In her depiction of Beth’s financial enslavement to her irresponsible, malicious husband, Grand vilifies late Victorian marriage. The Married Women’s Property Act which allowed women to control all of their own property even after marriage was not passed until 1882; before that time, most if not all of women’s inheritances became the personal assets of husbands upon marriage. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) paints a picture of the possibilities for unsavory men to take advantage of vulnerable wealthy women. Without the protection of the law, real women—like fictional ones such as Collins’s Laura and Grand’s Beth—could find themselves robbed of 

The Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 allowed women to retain some of their own funds after marriage. It was not until 1882 that women obtained rights to “property acquired before and during marriage.” Linda K. Hughes, “1870,” A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert Tucker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 35–50: 38.

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their own inheritances, completely dependent upon a husband’s generosity. Just as she experienced when growing up, Beth once again lacks the means to maintain a decent wardrobe, much less to purchase new dresses or other personal items. Neither her inheritance, her time, her body, nor her mind is her own: her husband claims all that she has as his possessions. Personal infractions turn out to be minor in light of what Beth eventually learns about her husband. As in The Heavenly Twins, Grand uses the character of the evil husband in order to raise awareness of those societal ills she found most revolting. Not only does Maclure practice animal vivisection in their home, but he also runs Lock Hospital, a hospital for the containment of women with venereal disease. The repeal of the Contagious Disease Acts was another cause close to Grand’s heart, and she pilloried the Acts in many of her novels, most famously in The Heavenly Twins (1893). The Contagious Disease Acts, passed in the 1860s, aimed to control the spread of venereal disease. Under the acts, any woman suspected of being a prostitute could be rounded up by the police and subjected to a medical examination. By signing the document which allowed the exam, she made a legal confession of prostitution. Refusing to sign the document could result in a prison term. If the exam (which in many cases caused permanent physical damage due to the brutality with which it was performed) pointed to venereal disease, the suspected woman could be contained indefinitely in a “lock” hospital. Male clients, however, did not have to submit to exams or containment of any kind, and they could accuse women of having venereal disease without having their own names or reputations jeopardized in any way. This sexual double standard enraged feminists such as Harriet Martineau and led to 20 years of protest and agitation. The leader of the campaign against the acts, Josephine Butler, finally succeeded in getting them repealed in 1886. Unaware of her husband’s “professional” activities, Beth nevertheless finds herself shunned by the very people whose society she craves most. Mrs. Angelica Kilroy, Mrs. Orton-Beg, Lady Beg, Dr. Gailbraith, and Ideala, characters from Grand’s earlier novels Ideala (1888) and The Heavenly Twins (1893), all reappear for repeat performances. These progressive, intellectual characters publicly denounce the unethical practices at Lock Hospital and, assuming that Beth must be aware of her husband’s activities, recoil from her. In her continuation of characters from novel to novel, Grand creates an imagined community of women with whom her readers can identify. Assuming that the reader is already aware of the feminist politics of Angelica and Ideala, the narrator plants the hope that these familiar characters will rescue Beth from her abusive marriage. Eventually, they do help Beth. By the end of the novel, she leaves her husband, falls in love with a young artist named Arthur Brock, and nurses him to the ruin of her own finances and health. Here, once again, Grand invokes both Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot,  See Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and Tom Winnifrith, Fallen Women in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

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providing her heroine with a male partner whose physical limitations allow for more equilibrium in the male-female sexual relationship. Beth not only reinvents herself on a personal level, she does so publicly as well: by novel’s end she has literally come back to life. While Grand may have challenged her contemporaries’ expectations of the realist novel by including “unmentionable” topics and close psychological detail, she retained one of the hallmarks of the old-fashioned tripledecker: the double ending. Pages from the novel’s end, Beth is found “dead” in her room; in the next scene she is revealed to be yet alive. To celebrate her rebirth, Beth becomes a celebrated speaker for the women’s rights movement. Although Beth finds support from her feminist friends, it is in fact needlework that allows her to disentangle herself from her husband’s financial and sexual control, and later to provide for her sickly lover. Desperate to avoid her husband’s sexual advances, Beth discovers an abandoned old room in the attic and, like Rebekah of From Man to Man, creates a room of her own. Reveling in the precious solitude it affords, Beth spends her days in her private chamber, reading, writing, and doing “ladies’ work” (353). Here Grand counters the familiar trope of the sewing woman in her garret that had found myriad permutations over the nineteenth century (and which I discussed in the previous chapter). Richard Redgrave’s The Sempstress (1844), Anna Blunden’s A Song of the Shirt (1854), and John Everett Millais’s Virtue and Vice (1853) all present the popular iconography of the distressed needlewoman in her cramped, lifeless garret. But here, Grand offers an alternative vision of the attic space. Her garret provides a safe, quiet place to be alone, to sew, to write, to think. Historian Rozsika Parker has argued that for the Victorians, embroidery often symbolized women’s “procreative capacity.” In John Everett Millais’s Mariana (1850–1851), for example, the trapped Mariana stretches away from her gorgeous embroidery, over which autumn leaves have gathered. Her fading sexual potential has been sublimated into her interminable embroidery. Like Mariana, Beth shuts herself up in a room of her own. But unlike Tennyson’s Mariana, she does not languish passively, wishing she were dead. Instead, like the Lady of Shalott, she works night and day at “woman’s work”—sewing. Beth designs and works intricate embroideries for a fancy-work shop. Beth retreats to her attic room and her needlework as a way of escaping her husband’s unwelcome sexual overtures, and because she needs a way to make money to pay one of Maclure’s debts to her mother. She refuses to sleep with her husband, or to bear his children. In place of sexual partnership and procreation, what Schreiner called women’s “sex parasitism,” Beth turns to sewing and to writing. Through her needlework, Beth breaks the spell cast on Tennyson’s trapped, sewing heroines. She chooses her garret as an escape, and her sewing provides 

For a discussion of the seamstress’s depiction in art, see Lynn M. Alexander, Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003).  Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984).

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her with financial gain, creative expression, and time for intellectual reflection. Perhaps even more importantly, Beth’s embroidery crosses the divide between private and public labor. She designs and completes her needlework in the virginal privacy of her secret room, using traditional domestic skills. Yet the time invested in needlework produces material objects that can be bought and sold at a price, ones that publicize her traditional skills and her artistic taste. When her mother dies, Beth stops working for profit and saves the fifty pounds she had earned from her embroideries for her private savings, eventually using the money to support Brock (394). Beth thrives as a professional needleworker, reaping not only financial rewards, but personal and intellectual ones as well. Her work is “original and effective,” and the fancy-work shop “snap[s]” up her “artistically beautiful design” (355, 358). The creative energy she pours into her designs stimulates her, providing “continual exaltation of spirit” (356). By characterizing Beth’s work in this way, Grand associates Beth with the professional embroiderers of the “art needlework” style. As historian Barbara Morris points out, art needlework was a catch-all term for a type of freehand surface embroidery, mostly “crewel-work” in muted colors, which was immensely popular during the 1870s and 1880s.10 The style was associated with neo-Gothic church embroidery and William Morris’s Arts and Crafts embroidery, but above all, with the Royal School of Art Needlework. Established in 1872 by members of the nobility and aristocracy, the School boasted the goal “of restoring Ornamental Needlework for secular purposes, to the high place it once held among decorative arts, and to supply suitable employment for poor gentlewomen.”11 Only gentlewomen might apply. The titled ladies who ran the Royal School only admitted an applicant who could prove her gentility “by birth and education.”12 Art needlework emphasized the creativity of the needleworker as much as it reacted against the high Victorian style of embroidery known as Berlin wool-work. As Thomasina Beck points out, “If Berlin woolwork had appealed because it was easy and anyone could do it, Art Needlework caught the imagination because it required taste and skill and was therefore more exclusive.”13 In The Victorian Parlour (2001), Thad Logan emphasizes the sheer bulk and variety of Victorian handcrafts, as well as their association in the minds of the emerging middle classes with an aristocratic life of leisure.14 As she clarifies, “Ornamental handcrafts should perhaps read not so much as evidence of abundant leisure time, but, perhaps more

Barbara Morris, Victorian Embroidery (1962; New York: Dover, 2003) 124. Quoted in Barbara Morris 113. 12 “Rules of the Royal School of Art Needlework,” Woman’s Gazette 2 (1877) 53. 13 Thomasina Beck, The Embroiderer’s Story: Needlework from the Renaissance to the Present Day (Devon: David and Charles, 1999) 121. 14 For a fascinating discussion of women’s handcrafts, see Chapter 3, “An Empire of Things: Objects in the Parlour,” in Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 10 11

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importantly, as cherished signifiers of that leisure.”15 Logan goes on to demystify the socioeconomic implications of Berlin work: it was “the most popular variety of Victorian needlework, avidly taken up by the middle classes, perhaps especially by those whose mothers, aunts, and grandmothers did not know and could not pass along to them the techniques of more elegant embroidery.”16 Berlin wool-work had become a national craze by the 1840s. Worked in tapestry wool on a meshed canvas using predominantly cross-stitch, it required careful shading that resulted in a three-dimensional effect. Although much more complex than modern cross-stitch or needlepoint, Berlin wool-work was similar to those styles: it used the cross-stitch (as well as other stitches), a meshed canvas, and designs “copied stitch by stitch from patterns printed on squared paper.”17 With extra time on their hands, women of the emerging middle classes used this durable, elaborate form of embroidery to decorate just about anything they could get their hands on: upholstery, fire-screens, pictures, accessories, and clothing all paraded their requisite coats of many colors. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wryly comments on the superfluity of women’s handiwork in Aurora Leigh: We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, To put on when you’re weary—or a stool To stumble over and vex you…“curse that stool!”18

Despite the vexed husbands, Berlin wool-work was so popular that, in 1847, in The Illuminated Book of Needlework, Mrs. Henry Owen used the term as a synonym for embroidery in general.19 With the Great Exhibition of 1851 to inspire amateurs and professionals alike and patterns readily available in popular periodicals such as the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, Victorian women took up their needles and did not put them down for decades. By the 1870s, the popularity of Berlin wool-work had already begun to wane as art needlework became fashionable. In 1882, S. F. A. Caulfeild and Blanche C. Saward published The Dictionary of Needlework: An Encyclopædia of Artistic, Plain, and Fancy Needlework. They dedicated the work to H. R. H. the Princess Louise, a founding member of the Royal School of Art Needlework, president of The Ladies Work Society (a philanthropic organization with goals similar to those of the Royal School), and a painter, sculptor, and embroidery designer. This magnificent tome, which contains nearly 700 pages of entries and illustrations, demonstrates the staggering variety of Victorian needlework. To the topic of “Berlin Work” the authors dedicate over nine pages. They claim that Berlin work is in fact 15

Logan 178. Logan 168–9. 17 Barbara Morris 19. 18 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Kerry McSweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) Book 1, lines 456–8. 19 Quoted in Barbara Morris 19. 16

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Opus Pulvinarium, a type of embroidery used by the Phrygians and Egyptians, as well as the Hebrews for the Tabernacle curtains. Tracing its evolution through the medieval period, they explain that Berlin work was called Canvas Work until 1820, when Berlin wools replaced the “crewels, lambswools, and silks, that had been used up to that period.”20 The authors go on to criticize the impossible parrots, animals, and groups of flowers known in the present day as Berlin patterns, which have done so much to debase the public taste as far as fancy work is concerned. The work in itself is capable of good results, and is strong and lasting; but when it degenerates into the mere copying of patterns conceived in defiance of all true art principles, it helps to degrade, and not elevate, the mind. Happily, during the last few years the public have been taught to distinguish and appreciate good from false designs, and as long as this is so, there is no reason why Berlin work should not take its ancient position among needlework.21

Writing in the early 1880s, when Art Embroidery had begun to eclipse Berlin work, Caulfeild and Saward emphasize the importance of good design by a “skilled artist,” of needlework that “elevates the mind.” Art needlework—along with church embroidery and Arts and Crafts embroidery—revived elements of older styles, ones dating back to the medieval and Renaissance periods, as well as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Dictionary of Needlework defined “Art Embroidery or Needlework” thus: A name recently introduced as a general term for all descriptions of needlework that spring from the application of a knowledge of design and colouring, with skill in fitting and executing. It is either executed by the worker from his or her design or the patterns are drawn by a skilled artist, and much individual scope in execution and colouring is required from the embroiderer. The term is chiefly used to denote Inlaid and Onlaid Appliqué, embroidery in silk and crewels for ordinary domestic purposes, and embroidery with gold, silver, and silk, for church work; but there is no limit to its application.22

With roots in the Gothic revival, church embroidery influenced art needlework. In 1829, Parliament passed the Catholic Emancipation act, and new churches, all requiring lavish decoration, sprouted up all over England. The Oxford Movement also emphasized the idea that beautifully crafted material objects could inspire spiritual ecstasy. Architects such as Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin advocated the revival of Gothic architecture and decorative arts; in 1844, Pugin published the Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament, in which he argued that “Every ornament to 20 S. F. A. Caulfeild and Blanche C. Saward, Dictionary of Needlework. 2 vols (London: A. W. Cowan, 1882). Reprinted, from the 2nd edition (1887), as Encyclopedia of Victorian Needlework [Dictionary of Needlework], 2 vols (New York: Dover, 1972) 28. 21 Encyclopedia of Victorian Needlework 28. 22 Encyclopedia of Victorian Needlework 15–16.

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deserve the name must possess an appropriate meaning, and be introduced with an intelligent purpose, and on reasonable grounds.”23 In the 1850s, William Morris made a similar claim, famously asserting, “We should have nothing in our houses, which we did not either know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”24 Beginning in the late 1850s, Morris and his wife Jane (the beauty who, along with Elizabeth Siddal, worked as a model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters), together with their daughters May and Jenny, rejected the then-popular Berlin wool-work style and instead revived older techniques, ones dating back to medieval and Renaissance times. The entire Morris family participated in the effort to revitalize needlework. In 1885, May Morris, then 23 years of age, took over the embroidery section of the textile department of her father’s firm Morris and Company. Under her direction, embroidery became one of the firm’s most lucrative sections. She designed the majority of all subsequent embroidery patterns, which needleworkers could purchase, along with vegetable-dyed thread and other materials, by post or at the Oxford Street showroom.25 Morris went on to teach at the Royal School of Art Needlework, the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, and Birmingham’s Municipal School of Art (Figure 5.1). She also supported her father in his work of advancing socialism. George Bernard Shaw was one of many who admired May Morris, deeming her needlework more than worthy of the label “art.” In a review of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1888, Shaw praised May Morris’s two entries (a screen and a book cover) and “the rational enjoyment of embroidery” her work inspired.26 Many of the same designers worked with Morris and Company, the Royal School, and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Their goals and methods became interwoven. Morris embroidery was strongly influenced by Japanese art and embroidery, but William Morris cautioned amateurs not to attempt Japanese designs without “Japanese skill.”27 The revival of earlier styles in reaction against Berlin wool-work was originally associated with William Morris, high-church decoration, and with the wealthy nobility who founded and staffed the Royal School. The wealthy could commission the Royal School to repair or copy antique pieces or to work the designs of the foremost artists of the day. They could also purchase finished pieces created by professionals like Grand’s fictional character, Beth Caldwell. 23

Barbara Morris 85. William Morris, “The Beauty of Life,” Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design, Birmingham, 19 Feb. 1880. In William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures Delivered in Birmingham, London, and Nottingham, 1878–1881 (London: Ellis & White, 1882). 25 The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Textile Collection, 1850–1900, ed. Linda Parry (London: V&A Publications, 1999) 15. 26 George Bernard Shaw, “Review,” The World (3 Oct. 1888). Quoted in Morris 111. 27 William Morris, “Textiles,” In the catalog of the First Arts and Crafts Exhibition (1888). Quoted in Barbara Morris 110. 24

Fig. 5.1 Embroidered Altar Frontal, executed by Miss May Morris, designed by Mr. Philip Webb. In Grace Christie, Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving (London: John Hogg, 1912).

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By the 1870s, however, middle-class women began to claim the new “artistic” style for themselves. As it increased in popularity and ready-made designs or kits became available to and affordable for middle-class women, many professional needleworkers and artists criticized the glib use of the word “art.” In 1876, interior decorators and aesthetes Rhoda and Agnes Garrett complained, Young ladies think they have discovered a royal road to an artistic effect by working branches which grow as no branches grow, with wide spreading leaves and lumpy fruits, and they imagine this effect is heightened by using the coarsest materials and the most olive greens.28

The “coarsest materials” and “olive greens” that the Garretts criticize signaled art needlework’s indebtedness to the Morris style, which used subdued, earth-toned vegetable dyes instead of the vibrant aniline dyes of Berlin wool-work. As Barbara Morris points out, most art needlework “was not very complicated, [but] the work needed some considerable skill in interpretation and choice of colours for most of the numerous designs were issued as simple, outline drawings” (124). In June 1879, Punch ran a cartoon poking fun at the rage for art needlework, titled “Sweet Little Buttercup or Art-Embroidery” (Figure 5.2). Elaborate embroidery smothers every inch of the female figure’s clothing. Animals sporting human clothes frolic around her. The artist takes a jab at Art Needlework’s favoring of naturalistic, aesthetic motifs such as sunflowers, daffodils, honeysuckle, irises, “medievallooking daisies,” wild roses, strawberries, apples, peacocks, and butterflies. As Barbara Morris points out, “The flowers found in ‘art needlework’ became almost as much clichés as did the cabbage roses and Victoria Regia lilies of Berlin woolwork” (133). By the time of Grand’s publication of The Beth Book in 1897, for better or for worse (depending on the audience), art needlework was associated with aesthetic circles, and with aristocratic women who wanted to distance themselves from the allegedly passé, bourgeois, and overwrought Berlin wool-work of the high-Victorian period. Art needlework was also associated with socialism and philanthropy. By 1883, William Morris joined the Social Democratic League, but he soon left it to start the Socialist League, along with Eleanor Marx, Walter Crane, and Edward Aveling. (Morris left the League in 1890 after it came under anarchist leadership.) Morris’s lectures brought greater attention to workers’ need for creative, useful labor. In his 1884 lecture at the Leicester Secular Society, he asked a question which he posed in a variety of forms during his career: “Will you from mere folly and thoughtlessness make yourselves partakers of the guilt of those who compel their fellow men to labour uselessly?”29 Through his efforts to revive Rhoda and Agnes Garrett, House Decoration (1876). Quoted in Barbara Morris 124. “Art and Socialism,” The Secular Society of Leicester, Secular Hall, Humberstone Gate, Leicester, 23 Jan. 1884. In The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (1910; London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1992). See also Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism (New York: New Press 1997). 28

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Fig. 5.2

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Linley Sambourne, “Sweet Little Buttercup or Art-Embroidery,” Punch 14 June 1879.

and honor traditional craftsmanship, Morris tried to promote the merger of art and socialism. The titled ladies who ran the Royal School did not align themselves with socialism: their stated mission was “to supply suitable employment for ‘poor

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gentlewomen.’”30 Yet all over England, Ireland, and Scotland, other societies for the promotion of art needlework adopted a similar goal—to create opportunities for respectable, artistic, fairly compensated labor for women and to revive traditional techniques and styles.31 Like those distressed but genteel needlewomen, Beth turns her old-fashioned skills in needlework to a professional purpose. Not content to follow massproduced patterns (like those used in Berlin wool-work), Beth designs her own, and the fancy-work shop snatches up her work as fast as she can produce it. Like real women writers such as George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Beth turns private domestic skills to public use. Margaret D. Stetz has explained how, in 1893, Egerton made an exquisite handworked cover for the presentation copy of her collection of short stories, Keynotes, which she gave to her publisher John Lane. As Stetz illustrates, Egerton employed the traditionally private work of feminine artistry to decorate a public manuscript, a volume of her own short stories.32 Just a few years after the publication of The Beth Book, as Barbara Green and Lisa Tickner have described, the Edwardian suffrage campaigners used the domestic arts in very public settings, in the banners they embroidered for use in street marches.33 Any spectator of street marches today will see similar banners waving in the breeze. Embroidery also continued its legacy in ecclesiastical embroidery for kneelers, altar linens, vestments, and wall banners.34 While Bertie of From Man to Man finds herself unable to turn her handwork to civic use, here Grand suggests that women can and must use their private domestic skills for the public good. When Beth first decides to make money doing needlework, the narrator notes, “Curiously enough, it was with her fingers she first thought of working, not with her brain” (353). Yet, as it turns out, sewing creates the opportunity for her brain to work in new and fecund ways. Soon she begins to write, not only with a needle, but with a pen. The relationship between sewing, reading, and writing proves a fruitful one. Like Rebekah of From Man to Man, Beth uses the quiet activity of sewing to focus her mind on intellectual pursuits. She meditates on passages from literature, memorizing them in rhythm with the movements of her hands (357). Ideas begin to germinate in her mind, and instead of finding them to be mere “fireworks of the brain, pleasant, transient, futile distractions” she now focuses on 30

Quoted in Barbara Morris 113. Barbara Morris 117–19. 32 Margaret D. Stetz, “‘Keynotes’: A New Woman, Her Publisher, and Her Material,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 30.1 (1997): 89–106. 33 See Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905–1938 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). See also Simone Murray, “Deeds and Words: The Women’s Press and the Politics of Print,” Women: A Cultural Review 11.3 (2000): 197–222; Sowan Park, “Suffrage Fiction: A Political Discourse in the Marketplace,” English Literary Theory 39.4 (1996): 450–461, and Ann L. Ardis, “Organizing Women: Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 189–203. 34 See Barbara Morris’s chapter on church embroidery in Victorian Embroidery. 31

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them as “wholesome considerations of the realities of life” (357). Eager to release her bubbling thoughts, Beth begins to write for the first time. Disciplined stretches of sewing do not compete with writing; rather, they create the material for writing. Before, when she studied on her own (without needing to sew for long stretches of time), Beth applied herself to the memorization of facts. But with her mind unfettered, she encounters a new kind of “intellectual exercise, the delicate fancy work of her brain” (358). Compelled to make money, yet also finding fulfillment in her needlework, Beth sews until “she could no longer ply her needle.” Then, and only then, does she permit herself “to take up her pen” (359). In her discussion of American women writers, Jacqueline Chambers observes, “Women writers’ incorporation of needlework and other domestic activities into their works was a powerful way to counter criticisms of their unwomanly activity, but it was also a way both to record the facts of women’s lives and to assert that these activities had deep meaning (and not always simple and positive meaning) for the women who performed them.”35 For Beth, as for Rebekah, needlework serves all of these purposes, but it provides something even more complex: it provides the means of creativity, a kind of soothing and generative background noise for the imagination. Needlework allows Beth time to reflect on her reading and to explore her own ideas, and these activities make her a better and better writer. Soon her retreats to the secret attic room fail to provide enough time to work on her growing manuscript, and one day her husband and her new friend Sir George Gailbraith discover her writing at the dining room table. Her husband ridicules her, calling her “scribbling” the vanity of a “silly fool” and opining that “literature is men’s work,” but Dr. Gailbraith takes her seriously (366–7). (Readers of The Heavenly Twins will recall that in final section of the novel, Dr. Gailbraith writes a firstperson account of Evadne Frayling’s psychological decay due to her marriage to a corrupt man. He seems to take a similar interest in Beth as a “case.”) Dr. Gailbraith lends Beth some helpful books and promises to show her work to a reputable female author, his friend Ideala, the eponymous heroine of another Grand novel, Ideala (1888). Although she does not see Dr. Gailbraith again for six months, the experience of being treated as an intellectual equal for the first time inspires Beth to read, write, and sew at an even faster rate. She “worked hard, reading and re-reading the books he had lent her, writing, and perhaps most importantly, reflecting, as she sat in her secret chamber, busy with the beautiful embroideries which were to pay off that dreadful debt” (369). Just as Beth abandons conventional embroidery patterns, so, too, she rejects prevailing literary forms. Through insatiable reading, Beth begins to craft her own theories regarding the novel. She discusses literary theory with Dr. Gailbraith in a section that is worth tracing in detail because it illustrates Grand’s own aims as a 35

Jacqueline M. Chambers, “Thinking and Stitching: Stitching and Thinking”: Needlework, American Women Writers, and Professionalism, in Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Beth Harris (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005) 171–84: 182.

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writer and provides a paradigm for how she expects her readers to read The Beth Book. While Dr. Gailbraith argues that “good fiction may do more to improve the mind, enlarge the sympathies, and develop the judgment more than any other form of literature,” Beth exclaims that she is sick to death of novelistic conventions (372–3). She considers the thousands of novels she has had to read aloud to her husband and offers an alternative vision of the novel: I never will have a faultlessly beautiful heroine …. I am sick of that creature. When I come to her, especially if she has golden hair yards long, a faultless complexion, and eyes of extraordinary dimensions, I feel inclined to groan and shut the book. I have met her so often in the weary ways of fiction! I know every variety of her so well! … I would not write plotty-plotty books either, nor make a pivot of the everlasting love-story, which seems to me to show such a want of balance in the author …. In writing a life, if one could present all sides of it, and not merely one phase—the good and the bad of it, the joys and the sorrows, the moments of strength and of weakness, of wisdom and of folly, of misery and of pure delight—what a picture! (373)

Beth goes on to express her distaste for “cleverness,” for “writers who are especially praised for their style” (374). She dismisses what she calls “style” and “art” as the narrow, limited work of men (374). By contrast, Beth says that she aims to write “a simple story, full of the faults of my youth and ignorance, but with some one passage in it that would put heart and hope into some one person” (376). She despises the work of “modern writers,” especially the French (374). In her view, the “smartest modern writers” wrongly emphasize craft above substance: “They appeal to the head, but the heart goes away empty” (374). Dr. Gailbraith shares Beth’s view, remarking that the work of the stylists is “as the photograph to the painting, the lifeless accuracy of the machine to the nervous fascinating faultiness of the human hand” (374). In this passage, Grand’s authorial presence looms large, as she uses her semi-autobiographical character Beth to proclaim not only the woman writer’s coming of age, but the coming of age of the late Victorian novel. The conversation between Beth and Dr. Gailbraith serves as an apology for Grand’s own choices as a writer. When Dr. Gailbraith praises long novels that are “rich in thought,” it seems obvious that Grand wants to justify the often unwieldy length of her own 600-page novels, for by the late 1890s, slimmer volumes had become fashionable (367). Beth’s call for a reader who can tolerate complexity and enjoy reading about the mundane miseries and joys of unconventional heroines channels Grand’s own reader requirements. In Grand’s view, the late Victorian woman writer should address a female audience, defy conventions, aim to improve the mind of her reader, and reject the “school of art-and-style” which she associates with male writers (375). Beth claims that upper-class women must reject “Art” and “Style” in favor of making the world “sweet and clean.” As she goes on to inform Dr. Gailbraith during their conversation about the modern novel: “Men entertain each other with intellectual ingenuities and Art and Style, while women are busy with the great

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problems of life, and are striving might and main to make it beautiful” (376). Her friend Ideala echoes this sentiment: “The works of art for art’s sake, and style for style’s sake, end on the shelf much respected, while their authors end in the asylum, the prison, and the premature grave” (460). Rejecting both the aesthetic novel (“art”) and the naturalist novel (“modern writers” who write with “lifeless accuracy”) and associating both with men, Beth hopes to spin “a simple story” that will “put heart and hope into some one person.” Like Schreiner, Grand criticized the limits of sentimental domestic realism, with its “faultlessly beautiful heroine” and “everlasting love-story,” not to mention its “plotty-plotty” structure. Particularly in The Heavenly Twins, Grand experimented with literary genre; for example, she began that triple-decker with a “Proem,” a prosy poem that included bars of music. Yet, unlike Schreiner, who experimented with episodic and allegorical forms, in The Beth Book, Grand has her protagonist assert the importance of “the little things” of life, the “normal” and the “everyday” (373). Grand emphasizes the value of documenting the everydayness of life. She requires an active reader who can tolerate a novel that looks at life from “all sides of it, and not merely one phase.” When Dr. Gailbraith worries that Beth expects too much out of “the average reader, who never understands complexity,” Beth retorts that she will not write according to established conventions just to appease a reader’s expectations. Despite Beth’s distrust of “plotty-plotty” books, could it be that Grand uses the length and detail of Beth’s oppression as a stylistic tool, as a deliberate way to stir up the consciousness, the righteous rage, of her own reader? Given her list of novelistic requirements, it seems clear that this is exactly what Grand aims to do. By about page 400, when Beth begins to write, when she joins the radical activist coterie of The Heavenly Twins characters, when she finally stands up to and leaves her abusive husband, when she finds love with a decent man, when she becomes an admired women’s rights leader and orator—in other words, when Beth finally blossoms into an autonomous, independent woman, the reader wants to cheer.36 Even a conservative reader would be likely to overlook her radical politics, relieved that she has finally shaken off her innumerable shackles. For Grand, as for many Victorian women writers, the künstlerroman of the female artist provided a useful narrative structure. This genre allowed the woman writer to reconstruct what Ann Heilmann calls “her autobiographical quest for artistic identity in her fictional character.”37 This “artistic identity” emerges, argue Gilbert and Gubar, through the “story of the woman writer’s quest for her own story … of the woman’s quest for self-definition.”38 The development of the fictional 36 The narrator rewards Beth lavishly, but unconventional treasures do not seem sufficient, for, missing only his white steed, Brock, the “son of the morning,” her “Knight,” makes a gallant return at the close of the novel (527). 37 Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 174. 38 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) 76. Quoted in Heilmann 175.

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female character into a confident, integrated self mirrors the writer’s journey into a successful artist. This development also serves as a model to the attentive reader, a form of consciousness-raising. Grand uses Beth’s story to rouse her female reader, to pull back the veil on the reader’s own oppression so that she will do as Beth has done and in some way, great or small, pursue her own intellectual and personal freedom. In The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000), Talia Schaffer pointed out a major gap in literary critics’ understanding of the fin de siècle. As she argued, by focusing narrowly on the political activism of New Woman novels or on an “art for art’s sake” aestheticism traditionally associated with men, we have failed to recognize the existence of a significant number of female aesthetes. According to Schaffer, acknowledging the female aesthetes allows critics to understand more accurately the cultural climate of the 1890s.39 In Grand’s critique of both aestheticism (associated with male writers and artists such as Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and Aubrey Beardsley) and English naturalism (George Gissing and Thomas Hardy) in this passage, she offers further proof of her allegiance to the goals of New Woman fiction—namely, that late Victorian writers should aim to expose the political and social disenfranchisement of women. Grand seems to invoke the aims of the social problem novels of the 1840s and 1850s; like Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, she emphasizes the didactic and cathartic possibilities of fiction. Yet she also claims elements of aestheticism for New Women. In her work on aestheticism and New Woman authors, Margaret D. Stetz gives a crucial reminder: Feminist writers may have wished for the luxury of creating art for its own sake, which their male contemporaries enjoyed. They recognized, nonetheless, that their pursuit of the ideal had to be accompanied by a pragmatic struggle for change in the literary and social worlds, before their aesthetic accomplishments could be received and acknowledged in the first place.40

Beth’s literary criticism corroborates Stetz’s observation, yet Beth also reclaims women’s dominion over “the beautiful.” When we consider Beth’s comments in relationship with The Beth Book’s larger preoccupation with women’s dress and needlework, both of which were celebrated and claimed by male and female aesthetes alike, an even more complex picture of Grand’s work appears. For Beth, the work of transforming society, being “busy with the great problems of life,” and the act of creating beauty, “striving might and main to make it beautiful,” cannot be separated. This work, according to Grand, belongs to women. Beth’s claim—that the twofold job of transforming society and creating beauty belongs intrinsically to women—at once rejects and appropriates elements of Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late Victorian England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). 40 Margaret D. Stetz, “Debating Aestheticism from a Feminist Perspective,” Women and British Aestheticism, ed. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000) 25–43: 35. 39

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aestheticism. Beth’s old-fashioned lavender dress calls to mind Evadne Frayling’s “primrose draperies” in The Heavenly Twins. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Evadne designs her own gowns, and when male viewers associate her clothing with the aesthetic movement, she firmly replies that no, she is not an aesthete. She is, by the narrator’s standards, a woman of taste and creativity, above all, an individual. Similarly, at the end of The Beth Book, an observer notes that Beth’s clothing looks more like “Fashion” than “Art” since “Art is apt to be towzled” (487). This jab at the sloppiness of alternative dress reflects Grand’s own stance on the movement. Grand belonged to the Rational Dress Society, yet as I explored in Chapter 2, in an 1896 interview she called rational dress “exceedingly ugly” and “unsightly” (165). She urged participants in the women’s movement “to be particularly careful in dress and manners” or risk “throw[ing] back the woman’s cause fifty years.” This, in her view, many tastelessly dressed advocates had already done (165). Given that Grand’s novels reject aestheticism even as they utilize elements of that movement, could it be that Grand aimed to reclaim those aspects of women’s traditional experience—sewing their own clothing (as both Aunt Victoria and Queen Victoria taught), dressing artistically and individually, embroidering artistic designs—that male aesthetes had adopted as their own? The Beth Book demonstrates Grand’s attempts to claim elements of aestheticism as women’s province, even as she criticized aestheticism for being too esoteric, too unconcerned with the “everyday” injustices and experiences of women under patriarchy. In tracing Beth’s journey toward full and unapologetic selfhood, and toward upper-class, intellectual, radical activism, Grand uses dress as a gauge of her development and she links Beth’s evolution to the concerns of British women more generally. As Beth Sutton-Ramspeck points out, late Victorian authors such as Sarah Grand utilized the rhetoric of housekeeping as a metaphor for women’s need to clean out the larger “house” of British society.41 In her 1894 article, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” Grand wrote, “the first principle of good housekeeping is to have no dark corners, and as we recover ourselves we go to work with a will to sweep them out. It is for us to set the human household in order, to see to it that all is clean and sweet and comfortable.”42 Grand advocated women’s public political power, but she advised women to wield wisely their power within the private sphere, as well. She argued that women’s traditional work of managing their homes and families was, as she stated in an 1896 interview, “beautiful work.”43 In the interview, published in the Humanitarian, Grand spoke about women’s private labor and how it related to women’s activism. As she explained, 41 Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004). 42 Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” North American Review 158 (Mar. 1894): 270–76. Reprinted in A New Woman Reader, ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson (Toronto: Broadview, 2001) 141–6: 146. 43 “The Woman’s Question. An Interview with Madame Sarah Grand,” by Sarah A. Tooley, Humanitarian 8.3 (Mar. 1896): 161–9, in Nelson 160–67: 164. Further references to “The Woman’s Question. An Interview with Madame Sarah Grand” are given in the text.

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“While being fully in favor of women entering the professions, speaking on public platforms, and taking their part in the movements of the time, I think that they should always consider their homes and families first of all” (165). Grand’s call for “clean and sweet” households reemerges in The Beth Book, in her depiction of Beth’s dirty and painful childhood: as a little girl, Beth yearns for “sweet and clean” clothes. Although the narrator elicits pity for Beth’s mother, she also portrays her as a sadistic parent and feckless housekeeper, a woman who certainly has not “considered her home and family first of all,” much less “taken part in the movements of the time.” Yet by turning old-fashioned domestic skills (sewing, embroidering, making her own clothes) to modern use, Beth escapes from the control of her mother and, later, of her husband. For Grand, dress culture allowed women to bridge the divide between private and public labor, and to do so beautifully. Grand’s comments regarding domestic work and its transformative potential illuminate her portrait of Beth’s engagement in dress culture. Through every stage of her life—abusive childhood, awkward adolescence, enlightened womanhood— Beth remains sensitive to the social and psychological significance of her clothing. As a battered child and wife, Beth wore patched, ill-fitting clothes. Her clothes did not fit her, just as the roles that others forced upon her did not take into account her intelligence or talents. Even as an adult, at her first meeting with Angelica and Ideala and the other progressive women who will become her friends and fellow activists, Beth worries that they all hate her, because she is “shabbily dressed in homemade [clothes]” (405). Yet, toward the end of the novel, Beth begins to assert herself on several fronts, and her clothing reflects her growing independence and confidence. Hours after she has discovered her husband’s affair with Bertha by watching them from the window of her secret chamber, she appears at the dinner table wearing her “best evening dress,” “a diaphanous black, set off by turquoise velvet, a combination which threw the beautiful milk-white of her skin into delicate relief” (405). Her queenly elegance contrasts sharply with Bertha’s “tasteless” and “badly put on” dress and the garish bracelet, a gift from Maclure, that she wears on her “tawdry” arm (405). When Maclure comments on his wife’s appearance, asking if she is expecting a guest, Beth offers a response which indicates her blossoming confidence: “I dressed for my own benefit. Nothing moves me to selfsatisfaction like a nice dress. I have not enjoyed the pleasure much since I married. But I am going to begin now, and have a good time” (405). Soon after, Beth learns of her husband’s involvement in animal vivisection and in “treating” poor women with venereal disease at the Lock Hospital and eventually leaves him. Instead of mending and re-mending her tattered clothes while her husband fritters away her inheritance, she finally claims her right to her own money. Selling embroideries allows her to save enough to leave him, and beautiful clothes express her “self-satisfaction.” By the end of the novel, another character remarks that Beth’s clothing is “smart” and “elegant” (487). In the ultimate gesture of generosity, a generosity that arises out of sufficient personal resources, Beth sells her lovely clothing to provide for the nursing of Brock.

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Although Beth’s dress reflects her social and psychological development, it still fails to express her new identity. The ultimate if unsustainable freedom comes not in manipulating dress culture, but in abandoning it entirely. Two times in the novel, Beth engages in a ritual of undressing. As an adolescent, Beth escapes to the seaside, her favorite haunt, where she stands at the water’s edge and feels herself enveloped in nature.44 There she “tasted life at its best and fullest—life all ease and grace and beauty, without regret or longing—perfect life in that she wanted nothing more” (271). In response, Beth strips off every scrap of her clothing and, rapturously free, floats in the ocean’s tide, feeling herself moving “an interval toward oneness with the Eternal” (271). In the midst of her reverie, Beth is surprised by a group of girls, girls that the narrator tells us her mother would class as “common.” Still nude, Beth begins to gather them around her and in moments has become the leader of a secret group she dubs the Secret Service of Humanity (272). The narrator explains to the reader that initially it is the color of Beth’s skin that attracts them: “Then all the other girls stood and stared at Beth, whose fine limbs and satin-smooth white skin, so different in colour and texture from their own, drew from them the most candid expressions of admiration” (271). Soon, however, “the power of her personality” mesmerizes them, as Beth informs them that they are going to make a new world together, one that is “just like heaven” in which “everybody will be good and beautiful, and have enough of everything, and we shall all be happy” (272). After her speech, during which all of them remain blissfully nude, “they made haste to dress as if the millennium could be hurried here by the rate at which they put on their clothes” (272). Beth makes the girls swear “a terrible oath” and schedules their first secret meeting. At first, Beth takes a sisterly, philanthropic role, sneaking food to bring to the poor and hungry girls or, in an unexpected twist on the role of the female benefactress, hunting birds to give to them. Soon, however, she grows “sick” of the secret society and disbands it (277). It would appear that Beth’s cross-class relationships with the girls cannot continue past adolescence. Much later, at the end of the novel, Beth feels again the impulse to undress, and, once again, it is associated with other women’s adulation. Hours after she has discovered her “true career” as an orator for the women’s-rights movement, she returns home and engages in frenzied undressing. She speaks before a large, unsympathetic audience and turns them to the cause of women’s rights through “the mesmeric power which is part of the endowment of an orator” (525). The crowd erupts into applause and those who know her recognize that she has finally 44 Years later, Beth will return to the sea and find herself overcome by an urge similar to the one that overtakes Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). Beth raises “her hand to her throat to undo her dress,” but, unlike Edna, “she did not undo it—she never knew why” (325). The narrator informs us that had she followed her impulse she would probably have drowned, for “the water was deeper than she knew, and the current strong; and she might have yielded just as she resisted, for no reason that rendered itself into intelligible thought” (325).

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discovered her “natural gift.” The next day the papers laud her as “a woman of genius” and “a great teacher” (527). The narrator informs the reader that Beth will go on to become an early women’s rights activist: “Beth was one of the first swallows of the woman’s summer. She was strange to the race when she arrived, and uncharitably commented upon; but now the type is known, and has ceased to surprise” (527). In her moment of triumph, alone in her bedroom after the thrill of that first speech, Beth does a curious thing. Frantically pacing the room, she strips off her clothing “in feverish haste”: Everything she wore seemed too hot, too heavy, or too tight, and she flung hat and cloak and bodice down just where she took them off in her haste to get rid of them. Throwing her things about like that was an old trick of her childhood, and becoming conscious of what she was doing, she remembered it, and began to think of herself as she had been then, and so to forget her troubled self as she was at that moment—fresh from the excitement and terror of an extraordinary achievement, a great success. (525)

Just as in her childhood, Beth discovers that her clothes are too small for her, too tattered, too ugly, too confining. As a girl, stripping down to her skin and basking in the ocean’s salty breeze provided relief from the sensation of ugly, ill-fitting clothing. As a woman, tearing off her clothes releases her from anxiety. In both cases, Beth finds her clothing limiting and uncomfortable: she yearns for freedom. Just as her “genius” mind cannot be contained by petty conventions and outdated social mores, so too, her body bursts out of constricting clothing. Both as a child and as an adult, Beth’s undressing is linked to her ability to lead other women and to stimulate them to collective action. In the first scene, she rouses a group of poor, “common” girls; in the second, she turns a “hostile crowd” to her cause, and their “deafening shouts” of praise overwhelm her so much that she shrinks into her seat all the way home (524). If Beth develops into a strong feminist, a public-rights orator, why does she fail to help the very women her activism targets? Throughout the story, Beth positions herself as the leader of women of lower classes, as the upper-class liberator who will rescue them from poverty, apathy, or dim-wittedness. Yet, strangely, she never maintains relationships with the women she tries to convert. Like Rebekah of From Man to Man, Beth creates and wears an exquisite gown that draws masculine admiration, but she does so “for [her] own benefit.” Unlike Rebekah, who adopts the child of her husband’s affair with their coloured servant, Beth makes no effort to assist her husband’s lover, Bertha. Beth shuns Bertha as a “tasteless,” “tawdry” woman of a lower class. When she discovers her husband’s unsavory actions as a doctor at the infamous Lock Hospital for poor women with venereal diseases, Beth leaves him, but she never visits the women at the hospital or considers them as anything other than abstract victims of patriarchal society. As a child and adolescent, she is mothered by one of her family’s servants, a young woman in her 20s by the name of Harriet Eldridge. Beth’s sexually-charged, cross-class relationship with the vivacious Harriet disappears as soon as she reaches adolescence. At about the

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same time that she deems herself the leader of the “common” Irish girls on the beach, Beth also takes in a poor girl named Emily and teaches her all she knows— including the necessity of referring to her benefactress as Miss Beth (138–40). In all of these relationships with women of lower classes, the narrator draws attention to Beth’s higher class status, as well as to the veneration with which the other women view her. Sally Mitchell has argued that one of the characteristics of New Woman fiction is its tendency to depict middle- and upper-class women’s adoption of workingclass lifestyles. 45 Yet, based on Grand’s investment in cementing Beth’s upperclass status, it would appear that for Grand, at least, a different project is at work. Along with other New Woman novelists such as Ella Hepworth Dixon, Grand emphasizes her heroine’s gentility in order to mitigate the alarm Victorian readers might have experienced as they read of Beth’s radical politics, not to mention her rejection of the traditional marriage plot. Grand aims to prove that in order for an Old Woman to become a New Woman, she must transform herself into an upper-class intellectual, a radical who can afford to be counter-cultural by virtue of her class affiliations. Beth may never enjoy the financial security of an upperclass identity, but she certainly takes advantage of the protections and privileges of upper-class values. In Grand’s künstlerroman, Beth rises from rags to riches, from victim to activist, from disordered Irish household to London intelligentsia. In so doing, she becomes an artist and a woman. Her journey is a vertical one, and her ascension is reflected in her female associates: in her childhood, Beth finds friendship with the “common” girls of The Secret Service of Humanity and her family’s servant, Harriet. At the first school she attends, she is surrounded by middle-class girls, at the second, by upper-class young ladies. As a married woman, she yearns to join the coterie of intellectual upper-class women that includes Angelica and Ideala, characters from Grand’s earlier books. In her work on eugenics and the New Woman, Angelique Richardson has argued that New Woman critics need to reevaluate Grand, the quintessential New Woman, in order to understand more fully the historical context of her social activism. As Richardson claims, “The apparently happy marriage of the New Woman to progressive feminism must necessarily be troubled by her class hostilities and her affinities with the racialized discourses which marked imperial Britain.”46 Beth Caldwell’s investment in dress culture reinforces Richardson’s observation. As we have seen, there is a complex manipulation of class affiliations within Beth’s claim that “women [writers] are busy with the great problems of life, and are striving Sally Mitchell, “New Women, Old and New,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.2 (1999): 579–88. 46 Angelique Richardson, “The Eugenization of Love: Sarah Grand and the Morality of Genealogy,” Victorian Studies 42.2 (2000) 227–55: 248. See also Richardson’s Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 45

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might and main to make it beautiful” (376). In both her fiction and her non-fiction, Grand placed the responsibility for social change in the hands of women, yet it would seem that the community of women which Grand imagines only admits women who are progressive, well-read, artistic—and, above all, upper-class. Rebel with a Blue Dress On: The Image-Breakers (1900) Leslie Ardent and Rosalind Dangerfield, the protagonists of Gertrude Dix’s The Image-Breakers (1900), face a struggle similar to that of Beth Caldwell. Like Beth, Rosalind and Leslie endeavor to reconcile their need for beauty with their engagement in social activism. Almost nothing is known about the author of The Image-Breakers. In her groundbreaking work on New Woman writers in the early 1990s, Ann L. Ardis lamented the fact that so little could be discovered about finde-siècle authors such as Gertrude Dix.47 We do know that Dix published an earlier novel, The Girl from the Farm (1895). We also know that she was a socialist and lived in a socialist collective and that she participated in Bristol labor politics. Sally Ledger notes Dix’s association with “new unionism.”48 Judy Greenway reveals that Dix had relationships with prominent socialists such as Helen and Olivia Rossetti, sisters who edited and published the socialist journal Torch.49 Contributors to the journal included George Bernard Shaw, Ford Madox Ford, Emma Goldman, and Pissarro. The Rossettis also wrote the novel Girl Among the Anarchists (1903) under the pseudonym Isabel Meredith. Dix worked as a governess to the children of leading Fabian socialist, Sydney Olivier, shortly after his experience at Fellowship House (a cooperative residence started by members of The Fellowship of the New Life, the famous socialist organization with which Olive Schreiner was also associated).50 47 See Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). In 1990, Ardis pointed out that our questions about writers such as Gertrude Dix, Edith Johnstone, Mary Cholmondeley, George Paston, and Ella Hepworth Dixon are nearly impossible to answer because “the primary documents—the correspondence, diaries, journals, and other private papers that might enable us to answer them—either have not been saved or cannot be located” (166). Fortunately, in the last two decades, scholars have uncovered more material about some of these authors; see, for example, Valerie Fehlbaum’s biography of Ella Hepworth Dixon, Ella Hepworth Dixon: The Story of a Modern Woman (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005) and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton’s Let the Flowers Go: A Life of Mary Cholmondeley (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). See also a new collection of scholarly essays on Cholmondeley (including my own on her short stories): Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton and SueAnn Schatz, eds., Mary Cholmondeley Reconsidered (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). 48 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) 56. 49 Judy Greenway, “No Place for Women? Anti-Utopianism and the Utopian Politics of the 1890s,” Geografiska annaler 84B.3–4 (Oct. 2002) 201–9: 205. 50 Greenway 205.

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Contemporary reviews of The Image-Breakers emphasized its journalistic qualities as an “exposé” of fin-de-siècle socialism. The American Monthly Review of Reviews informed would-be readers that Dix herself had lived for a time in a socialist collective,51 and The National Book League called the novel “a study of modern socialism and of the various theories and communities by which the world is seeking to right wrongs by doctoring and curing symptoms.”52 In 1913, A Guide to the Best Fiction in English called The Image-Breakers “A Study of Socialism and Socialist Manners.”53 Beyond these patchy details, we know next to nothing about Gertrude Dix or her writing career. With minimal archival material to consult, all we can consider is The Image-Breakers itself. To differing degrees and in various ways, Leslie and Rosalind both engage in socialism. The women become part of a socialist cell whose activities include organizing strikes, leading marches, writing articles and monographs, and eventually forming an intentional, separate-sex community on a rural farm colony. Rosalind, the wife of a wealthy capitalist landowner, leaves her husband to join the collective with the group’s leader, Justin Ferrar, a “mystic” whose ideals ultimately disallow human warmth and affection. Leslie Ardent, her lower-middle-class friend, chooses not to join the community but to work as a teacher and later as an illustrator for advertisements, while also trying to do her own artwork. Leslie struggles to develop a satisfactory sexual relationship with a budding radical politician, John Redgold. Although Rosalind and Leslie face distinct challenges based on their class positions, both struggle to fashion stable identities in the face of competing needs and desires. Rosalind and Leslie each have difficulty in romantic love, rejecting conventional marriage yet longing for monogamous, heterosexual commitment with the men they love—in Rosalind’s case, Justin Ferrar, in Leslie’s, the flamboyantly named John Redgold. Throughout the novel, the women turn to each other intermittently for support, affection, and sustenance, and their jealousies and intimacies reflect the unspoken yet powerful attraction between them.54 Few critics have written on The Image-Breakers, most likely because it is out of print and difficult to locate. Along with critics such as Ann Ardis and Sally Ledger, I believe that closer attention to this novel yields important insights about

51 See, for example, “Notes on the New Books of Fiction,” The American Monthly Review of Reviews 22, ed. Albert Shaw (July–Dec. 1900) 760. 52 The National Book League, Book News: A Monthly Survey of General Literature 19 (Sept. 1900–Aug. 1901) 175. 53 A Guide to the Best Fiction in English, ed. Ernest Albert (Routledge, 1913) 226. 54 It is unclear whether the attraction is platonic, romantic, or sexual. Although I will not discuss it in depth here, the relationship between the two women warrants further investigation, particularly in light of recent work by Sharon Marcus and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton (see Chapter 1).

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the relationship between radical activism, socialism, and the New Woman. 55 In my reading of the novel, Rosalind and Leslie, like Rebekah and Bertie of Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926), share the role of protagonist. In fact, the narrator dedicates more time to Leslie’s story, and it is with her triumph that the novel closes. The reader’s first introduction to Leslie and Rosalind comes through their clothes. The narrator leads us into Leslie’s room, where she lies “straight as a sword” (1). The “studied order” of her folded clothes and “recently mended” gloves reflects her personality and her lower middle-class status. Meanwhile, in Rosalind’s room, jewels and opulent fabrics betray their owner’s wealth, and “the rich dress flung over a chair” waits for a maid to fold it away (2). From the first page of the novel, dress serves as an indicator of the class differences between the two women, and those differences irrevocably shape their relationship to each other and to the socialist group of which they are a part. Leslie’s clothing becomes, for Rosalind, a mark of her friend’s political beliefs. After a rift due to Leslie’s decision to work as an illustrator rather than join the community, Rosalind “note[s] as a bad sign the strict conventionality of her dress” (272). Yet later, after the failure of the community and her realization that Justin will never care for her as an individual, immersed as he is within an idealized socialist system, she sees Leslie from afar. Rosalind notes Leslie’s “air of success, her resolute walk, and simple yet graceful dress—a dark-blue open coat and skirt, redeemed from conventionality by the soft green silk vest and the touch of green in her hat” (377). For Leslie, these unconventionally beautiful clothes represent something else: her successful fashioning of a stable, independent self. After struggling with poverty, in part because of her refusal to accept Redgold’s offer of a bourgeois marriage with traditional financial support, Leslie makes it as an artist in her own right. When she comes to visit Rosalind at the end of the novel, she drops off tickets to an exhibition of her work. Yet developing her own self, her own identity, requires almost four hundred pages of trial and error. The “simple yet graceful dress … redeemed from conventionality” by touches of green symbolizes her success. Throughout the novel, Leslie grapples with instincts she calls “feminine” to find new ways of being a woman. As the narrator explains, “The fight lay between the domination of her will over those cowardly, feeble and weak feminine instincts which tempted her over and over again to an ignoble retreat” (122, emphasis added). This derided femininity is often linked with clothing. Penniless and alone, Leslie tries to decide whether or not she should go to a homeless shelter but finds herself worrying about her clothes; almost immediately, she chastises herself for See Ardis, New Women, New Novels and “The Journey from Fantasy to Politics: The Representation of Socialism and Feminism in Gloriana and The Image Breakers,” Ingram and Patai 43–56; Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction; and Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism. 55

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doing so: “Not to have any clean clothes—how horrible! It would be almost better to take a situation. And yet to barter a career for a change of clean linen—how cowardly! how feminine!” (117, emphasis added). Choosing to support herself rather than accept marriage to a man she loves, Redgold, Leslie finds emotional, as well as financial, autonomy. Defeating her “feminine” instincts, her empty daydreams about romantic heroes, costly dresses, and knightly rescues, becomes Leslie’s rite of passage into a fuller, more socially just form of femininity. Leslie’s criticism of traditional femininity was one shared by Beatrice Potter Webb, who, in her diaries, rejected novel-reading because it seduced her into indulging romantic daydreams and building “castles in the air” rather than applying her time and energy to choosing a craft that would help the poor. Webb considered writing a novel but she rejected the idea. As she writes, “The whole multitude of novels I have read pass before me; the genius, the talent, the clever mechanism or the popularity-hunting of mediocrities—what have the whole lot of them, from the work of genius to the penny-a-liner, accomplished for the advancement of society on the one and only basis that can bring with it virtue and happiness—the scientific method?”56 Unlike Webb, who believed that statistics, not novels, would change the world, Dix presents the possibility that fiction, not fact, can most accurately reflect the problems of both late Victorian capitalist society and utopianism. Dix seems to follow Emily Dickinson’s advice to “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—/Success in Cirrcuit lies [sic].”57 At the beginning of the novel, Leslie gushes over the beautiful, upper-class socialist Rosalind and her lofty plans to transform capitalist society. It is not long before she begins to disentangle herself from that infatuation. In her focus on Leslie and her ultimate rejection of Rosalind and Justin’s separatesex socialism, Dix criticizes the socialist project that fails to take into account working and lower-middle-class women’s need and desire to work professionally. Even though Rosalind takes a leadership role in the socialist collective, Leslie comes to associate her friend with a “feminine” unworldliness. Here Dix uses traditional Victorian gender ideology to critique allegedly progressive social movements. Even though Rosalind joins the socialist collective, she brings to it her experience as an upper-class socialite who has not had to work to support herself. Rosalind criticizes Leslie for working as an illustrator rather than living in the socialist collective, little understanding how Leslie’s class position and lack of family support force her to work to survive. Leslie also rejects the community’s “separate sex” policy, and her sexual relationship with Redgold comprises an important part of her development. That Leslie rejects the lofty idealism of the socialist community for practical, fulfilling work and a free-union with Redgold criticizes the socialist project more generally. Like Leslie’s girlish idealism, the 56 Beatrice [Potter] Webb, My Apprenticeship (1926; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 398–9. 57 Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Little, Brown, 1960).

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socialist community is, in Dix’s narration, “feminine”—a word that in the context of the novel implies weakness, inefficacy, and silly romanticism. Although the novel ends with a vague hope that Redgold has what it takes to make it in the brave new world of New Woman sex politics, it seems doubtful that he has actually “grown up.” Earlier in the novel, when Leslie breaks off their relationship in order to support herself (and to prove to him that she can do so), Redgold scorns her work, calling it the “fetish of the modern woman” (335). Driven by his hopes of garnering a parliamentary seat, he takes up with the upper-class socialite Alison Granville Smith, who is the niece of a politician. Unlike lowermiddle-class Leslie with her socialist ideals and rejection of bourgeois marriage, Alison is all too ready to snare Redgold. Perilously feminine in all the traditional nuances of the word, Alison is “sincere in respect for the great British fetish of Appearance” and has “all the feminine weapons ready to hand” (310, 321). Even more important for the social-climbing Redgold, Alison is upper-class. On the one hand, Alison represents the “type” of the new female professional, like Rhoda Nunn of George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893). Alison works as an amanuensis for her uncle, who is writing a book on the labor question. In fact, the narrators informs us, Alison is actually the force behind the new work, “the hand of a feminine diplomatist for whom ‘my uncle’ was a person to be twisted round the little finger for his own good” (292). On the other hand, Alison’s class status means that she, like Beatrice Potter Webb and Rosalind Dangerfield, can slip back and forth between her role as a writer and social investigator and the role of drawing-room hostess and fashionable socialite. Redgold eagerly allows himself to be seduced by well-connected Alison, with her fine clothing, attractive appearance, and sparkling repartee. Leslie, meanwhile, strikes out on her own, struggling to survive by her wits and her drawing. The contrast between Alison and Leslie highlights the antagonism between fashionable, beautiful appearance (women’s traditional work) and creative, public labor (women’s modern work). In 1843, Anna Brownell Jameson wrote, “Of all the vanities in life, that of dress is at once the most inane and mindless, and its gratification the least defensible, if purchased at the cost of pain to any human being.” 58 By the end of the novel, Redgold seems to share this criticism, for he abandons the lovely but shallow Alison for a woman the narrator paints with a deeper, fuller beauty—Leslie. In The Beth Book, Sarah Grand reframed the conventional ending of the heterosexual romance. Beth leaves her husband and falls in love with a sickly young man, whom she pursues emotionally and supports financially. In The Image-Breakers, Dix also rejects the conventional marriage plot while still invoking the romantic climax. Leslie and Redgold promise never to marry, and the novel closes with Leslie’s anticipation that their free union relationship will actually work. Dix’s hopeful ending, however, leaves unanswered the questions of modern female identity she traces so poignantly in Leslie’s struggle to mature into 58 Anna Brownwell Jameson, “The Milliners,” The Athenaeum (4 March 1843), in Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors, ed. Susan Hamilton (Toronto: Broadview, 1995) 21–6: 26.

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an artist and independent woman. It remains unclear whether or not Redgold is truly ready to become the New Man. Given his inability to read Leslie accurately, it seems unlikely. The novel nevertheless closes with Leslie’s satisfied view of herself in the mirror, where she sees “beside her own face … the face of the man also” (392). Yet there is more to be said about the role of dress culture in the novel. Unable to afford the fashionable clothing Alison flaunts and suspicious of pretty clothes (good socialist girl that she is), Leslie nevertheless admires beauty and acts the part of the rapturous female aesthete, albeit it in the privacy of her room. In her garret apartment—attic rooms being so necessary for New Woman heroines— Leslie stores a blue silk dressing-gown sprigged with hand-embroidery. “Made by herself,” the dress provides Leslie with a costume in which to daydream. One day, tired from altering one of her few dresses, Leslie dons the blue dressing-gown and, standing in front of the mirror, holds a clutch of anemones against the dress to admire “the contrast of red and blue of about the same tone and equally rich and vivid” (133). The cobalt blue of her dress, the anemones, the hand-embroidery, her dreamy stance—all of these details would have signaled, to a dually literate reader, Leslie’s engagement with aestheticism. When Redgold surprises her a few minutes later, he admires the dress, but he fails to ascertain its significance. Staring into her eyes, Redgold tells Leslie that blue is his favorite color, and Leslie, assuming that his compliment refers to “the rare shade of her dress” rather than to the far more conventional referent, her eyes, takes this as “evidence of [his] artistic sensibility” (140). In reality, however, Redgold does not share Leslie’s attention to detail or her aesthetic reveries. A man with a “fondness for alluring petticoats,” Redgold merely “admired a prettily dressed woman, without being able to distinguish any of the details which went to make up the full effect” (139). In this scene, the narrator calls for a community of readers who, unlike the illiterate Redgold, will accurately interpret the nuances of Leslie’s clothing and what they reveal about her artistic sensibilities. In this scene color is particularly important. Alison Victoria Matthews explores the significance of color in fin-desiècle aesthetic circles. As she argues, “aestheticism’s very efforts to free color from its material, economic, and erotic connotations also created new codes and possibilities for female and homosexual writers.”59 Here Dix asks her reader to recognize the cultural connotations of the color blue, but also to read its subversive sexuality. Blue has traditionally been associated with spirituality, yet it was also a favorite with aesthetes. Leslie, a closet aesthete, only wears the blue dressing gown in the privacy of her attic apartment. That Redgold visits her alone in her room violates “respectable” sexual etiquette. Color, not words, communicates the sexual attraction between them. The blue of the gown, the brilliant red flowers Leslie has just been holding, the vividness of Redgold’s name—red and gold—all offer the reader the new “material, economic, and erotic connotations” that Matthews identifies in her study of aestheticism. 59 Alison Victoria Matthews, “Aestheticism’s True Colors: The Politics of Pigment in Victorian Art, Criticism, and Fashion,” in Women and British Aestheticism 172–91: 188.

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Not only does Leslie savor the rich blue of her dressing-gown, but she sees beauty where others see only ugliness. Walking through a factory area, Leslie marvels at the loveliness of the early-morning light as it illuminates the industrial landscape. Her companion, a militant activist, scorns her, calling the factory scene “a hell of capitalism” (9). Surprisingly, Leslie’s artistic temperament and her thirst for beauty do not disallow her practicality. While Justin and Rosalind sail through a mist of soonto-be-shattered ideals, Leslie observes, with sadness, that “ideas cannot succeed because they’re beautiful” (95). As an illustrator for mundane items such as “hair dyes, jams, coffee,” Leslie learns that she will have to sacrifice her own artistic style, her love of beauty, to Mammon. Her new employer admires her work but abruptly informs her that he wants “muck” instead. As he warns her, “You will have to bear in mind that it’s one thing to work for money, another to please yourself. You’ll have to force yourself to do stuff that outrages every sense of beauty and fitness you possess, to make a pound or two” (111, emphasis added). In order to keep body and soul together—a battle she is always on the verge of losing—Leslie sacrifices her own “sense of beauty.” Yet, by the end of the novel, she has made it as an artist in her own right. No longer a slave to commodity culture, she gives Rosalind tickets to an exhibition of her own work. She has earned the right to create and publicize her own aesthetic vision, and her individual style of dress reflects the beauty of an independent, autonomous self. That Rosalind fails to understand her friend’s seeming abandonment of their shared socialist ideals signals the class differences between the two women. Even though she leaves her husband for a life of radical activism, Rosalind has lived a life of wealth and ease. No matter how much she sacrifices to join the collective, she does so out of her own choice. Leslie, by contrast, must work in order to survive. Her decision to provide for herself reflects her class status, but it also indicates her determination not to marry Redgold or become financially dependent on him. If Leslie’s personalized clothing becomes a symbol of her freedom from the mores and conventions that bind her (those of both mainstream and radical cultures), Rosalind’s relationship to clothing is even more complex. Early in the novel, under Leslie’s worshipful gaze, Rosalind resembles both Rosalind in the Forest of Arden and a Pre-Raphaelite beauty: With her bare feet upon the sprinkled lawn, with eyes gazing gravely out between her loosely parted hair, in the white gown archaically straight in cut, and clothing her with the fine simplicity of immemorial garments, it seemed as though this Rosalind, at once so willful and so good, who had been for her the portress of the modern world, and given her the freedom of intellectual regions as full of new delights as woods in spring, were bound by some subtle link to the women of ancient, far-away times. (6)

Both medieval and classical in style, Rosalind’s simple and “archaic”—clearly aesthetic—clothing contrasts sharply with Leslie’s “studied neatness” and her “ceremonial regard for the occasion” (7).

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Soon after, Leslie watches Rosalind dress for a ball, and her reaction is quite different. Rosalind’s “ample draperies of flame-coloured silk and gauze” elicit Leslie’s awe, yet even as she admires her friend, she cannot help but imagine Justin Ferrar tossing “the costly treasures to the fire as so much shameful dross” (64). On the way to the ball, Rosalind’s vibrant dress and costly jewelry shame her. Her husband directs their carriage through a march of unemployed men, people Rosalind knows through her work as a socialist writer and budding activist. The humiliation of the experience leads Rosalind to reject the trappings of wealth. She leaves her husband to live in intentional community with Justin Ferrar. Together the two revolutionaries organize marches and strikes and write a critique of capitalism, a book they call their “child.” The more active Rosalind becomes at the collective, the more she condemns Leslie’s choices. By the end of the novel, however, Rosalind once again returns to the material world, to dress. She has burned the book, finally recognizing Justin’s inability to know her, much less love her as an individual, for he lives “so completely in the world of ideas—the true world as he would have called it—that even the material forms of those near to him were but as shadows, scarcely to be noted” (380). What do we find her doing at the gravesite of all her high hopes for a changed society? With no inspiration to write—collaboration with Justin Ferrar had long been found impracticable—she would sew hard to keep herself from thinking. [..] When her fingers ached and her eyes were dim, she would smile at the irony of things. She who wished to destroy systems spent her time in the simplest of women’s handiwork. She wanted to strike a blow at the foundations of poverty and sordid life, and could do nothing more that sew at little frocks and petticoats to lighten some poor mother’s burden. (212–13)

For Rosalind, the tedious work of stitching thread through fabric turns out to be the only real way of changing the world. That a woman who wanted “to destroy systems” ends up sewing clothing for the poor criticizes the utopianism of the socialist project. For hundreds of years, good middle- and upper-class girls regularly sewed clothing for the poor, as part of their “work.”60 Here Rosalind’s work, the book she labors over so intently that it becomes her “child,” is ultimately replaced by conventional women’s “work,” sewing. Like Mary Erle’s seamstress in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman, Rosalind sews mechanically, to “keep herself from thinking.” By contrast, both Beth of The Beth Book and Rebekah of From Man to Man sew in order to think. The contrast highlights the importance of why and for what purpose a woman sews. That Rosalind returns to her husband’s estate, to nurse him at his deathbed, also serves as a strange sort of penitent return to the past, to convention. In her aristocratic sewing for poor children and in her retreat to her husband’s ancestral home, Rosalind reclaims the Victorian lady’s domestic mission. Collective life in its most traditional forms (marriage, the family estate) and in its most radical (the socialist community) has 60 See Janet Arnold, “The Lady’s Economical Assistant of 1808,” The Culture of Sewing, ed. Barbara Burman (New York: Berg, 1999).

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failed her. Does this mean that the novel advocates a revival of conventionally feminine roles and values? When we consider Leslie Ardent’s narrative, the answer can hardly be affirmative, yet Rosalind’s heartrending isolation cannot be assuaged by the misty hopefulness of Leslie’s ending. If mainstream periodicals painted a picture of a New Woman “type” that reprised old stereotypes about spinsters and bluestockings, here we see a New Woman novel that refuses to homogenize women. The images of women that the novel breaks open are not merely conventional ones—the oppressed needlewoman, the fallen woman, the star of the bildungsroman—but also the counter-images of radical socialism—the partner in a free-union, the sexless member of a utopian community, the classless activist. The reader is not encouraged to condemn or pity Rosalind, nor is the reader expected to valorize Leslie uncritically—or vice versa. Instead, the two narratives offer two possibilities for women at the fin de siècle. In Sarah Grand’s künstlerroman, The Beth Book, she claims women’s rights activism as the work of upper-class women. Her eponymous heroine ascends to a higher class—both financial and moral—and even though she has numerous opportunities to engage with women of lower classes than her own, she fails to do so. Dix, by contrast, uses her novel as a prism through which to refract a wide spectrum of class-based perspectives on the relationship between beauty and social activism. The novel commends lower middle-class Leslie and her work as both a commercial illustrator and an independent artist. It traces the ultimate failure of upper-class Rosalind’s engagement with separate-sex socialism, an enterprise shown to be both “feminine” (in the lexicon of the novel, meaning weak and ineffective) and unrealistic. It also casts the modern upper-class socialite and part-time social investigator and writer, Alison, as Leslie’s frivolous foil. Gertrude Dix and Sarah Grand both anticipated their female readers’ dual literacy, and they used that dual literacy to demonstrate the complexity of the choices facing women. Those characters that develop full literacy in cloth and in print—Beth and Leslie, along with Rebekah and Kirsteen of earlier chapters—are most likely to achieve fulfillment and independence. They find opportunities to choose their own means of self-expression, to provide financially for their own needs, and to give out of their resources to other people. Beth wants “to write for women, not for men” (376). Yet given Beth’s climb up the social ladder, and the fact that the coterie of Grand characters with whom Beth ultimately aligns herself are all upper-class, it would seem that while the new novel Grand imagines should aim to improve the lives of women in general, the leaders of that movement must have the time, economic freedom, and education to challenge cultural norms. In other words, they must be—or act—upper-class. Dix, by contrast, emphasizes the prismatic complexity of class identity. In her portrayal of Leslie and Rosalind, she considers the ways that differences in education, financial resources, and class background complicate ideals of community and intimacy. The separate-sex collective, the friendship between Rosalind and Leslie, and even the heterosexual relationships are all compromised by the differences among women. The Image-Breakers places its female readers, along with Leslie, before the looking-glass. In that mirror they see conflicting images of themselves, a bricolage

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of possible ways to experience and express late Victorian feminine identity. In Punch’s famous 1863 illustration, “The Ghost in the Looking-Glass,” the viewer is invited to look past the opulently dressed beauty and see in the mirror the wasted form of the woman behind the dress—the seamstress. Here Dix asks her readers to look into the mirror and to acknowledge not only the reflections of other women, but the fraught relationships among them. At the fin de siècle, women may have shared dual literacy in print and cloth, but ideas about how they might utilize that dual literacy varied from author to author, and from woman to woman.

Afterword:

Ode to a Dishrag Here’s a littering shred Of linen left behind—a vile reproach To all good housewifery. Right glad am I, That no neat lady, train’d in ancient times Of pudding-making, and of sampler-work, And speckless sanctity of household care, Hath happened here, to spy thee. She, no doubt, Keen looking through her spectacles, would say, “This comes of reading books.”

In order to conclude this study of women’s dual literacy and dress culture in the late Victorian period, allow me to tell a story. This is a modern story, yet also a very old one. It is a story of a small square of knitted yarn, a dishrag made by my grandmother. The yarn is pale blue, with an uneven lighter blue throughout. Nine by ten inches of simple garter stitch with a finished edge, made of inexpensive cottonblend yarn, it is uneven now from hanging on a bulletin board in my study. It probably took my grandmother an hour or two to complete, and she made it to be used as a dishrag. The dishrag was a gift, an unstudied, even nonchalant gift. Although the stitches are done in an even hand, it is clear the dishrag was made quickly, effortlessly. For my grandmother, an expert in knitting and crocheting, this was easy work, functional, fast, mindless. Not being sufficiently old or unique, the dishrag isn’t worth much, to anyone really. A few years ago, it would have been considered by most people to be “quaint” or “old-fashioned.” Now, with the renewed popularity of knitting, crochet, and other forms of fancy work, it might be considered “interesting” but also “boring.” Why? It is made of cheap yarn, probably a synthetic blend purchased at Walmart, rather than the hand-spun, artisan-crafted, kettle-dyed, or 100 percent natural fiber yarn one might find at one of the now popular knitting boutiques. When my grandmother gave it to me, I thought I might use it for its intended purpose. But now, years later, I can’t bring myself to use it in that way. Why sully it with the remains of meals, with sticky egg and strawberry stain? Instead let it be a talisman against ennui. Let it hang on my bulletin board, to be used for a very different purpose—inspiring me to write about clothing in late Victorian novels. In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use,” a newly Africanized daughter returns to the poor rural home she’d been so desperate to escape. She’s back for  [Mrs. L. H.] Lydia Sigourney, “To a Shred of Linen,” Poems (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1859) 159–62.

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the quilts. Her younger sister, burned and reticent from an accident, uses the quilts, washes them, loves them. But the older sister wants to hang the quilts on a wall in her city apartment, to show off to her friends her quaint roots. She scolds her mother and sister for using the quilts, forgetting or ignoring the fact that those quilts keep them warm at night. In the end the mother decides to give the quilts to the younger daughter, the one who will use the quilts and enjoy them for their intended purpose. How might we make sense of this urge to remake the past, a phenomenon present just as much today as it was in the nineteenth century? Material culture theorist Henry Glassie explores this idea through a story about a Turkish artist and his carpet. Glassie remembers the nostalgia in Hagop’s voice, his longing for a “lost rural life.” For Glassie, it is “country people” who “hold such sentiments more passionately than any outsider”—people like Hagop who read specific narratives out of and into objects. Yet, as Susan Stewart reminds us in On Longing and as we saw in Oliphant’s Kirsteen, nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. Stewart points out the hazards of longing for something that never existed. In her view, nostalgia invents an imaginary past, one we have made out of our need and our lack. How then can I, with intellectual responsibility, make meaning, a narrative, out of a dishrag? Does the mere fact that I take time and energy to do so indicate a profound and diseased longing on my part, the nostalgia Susan Stewart interrogates for its imprecision and self-referentiality? Although Stewart’s point is well-taken, I situate it within the larger thrust of her argument—that we create narratives about objects all the time, inevitably. We do so out of our need to know and understand ourselves and our past. “To spin a yarn” is of course a well-known colloquialism for storytelling. Objects tell us stories that can be as varied, magical, contradictory, unwieldy, and recalcitrant as the people who tell them. In recent years, knitting and crochet, the “old-fashioned” work we watched our grandmothers do, has suddenly become chic. For most of the Victorian period, knitting was associated with the rural poor, while crochet was considered refined and graceful. Today, both types of work are being lauded for their traditional appeal, their simplicity and their link to an artisanal past. Waldorf education, an alternative movement started by philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1919, emphasizes imagination, creativity, and critical thinking. Handwork is a foundational element in Waldorf curricula. Students learn “knitting, crochet, sewing, cross-stitch, basic weaving, toymaking, and woodworking” in order teach manual dexterity, creativity, and traditional skills. William Morris would be pleased. Yet handwork also attracts See Alice Walker, “Everyday Use,” In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985).  Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999) 122.  Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993).  Henry Barnes, “Waldorf Education: An Ascending Spiral of Knowledge,” Why Waldorf Works. Association of Waldorf Schools of North America. 30 July 2008. . 

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what designer Wenlan Chia calls the “urban knitter.” While Waldorf schools aim to keep alive traditional skills, Chia’s Twinkle’s Big City Knits (2007) focuses on the ways knitting can be reinvented and made “modern.” With photographs that look like something out of Vanity Fair or Harper’s Bazaar—complete with wiry models in billowy dresses and cabled, doll-size cardigans—Chia tailors her book to “fashion lovers all over the world who want to create something as desirable as the designer clothes at Barneys New York.” In the foreword to the book, Dany Levy, editor-in-chief of dailycandy.com, writes, “in the fashion world, where everything old is insistently new again, knitting has become chic. … While some might dismiss the knitting craze as the trendy hobby of the moment, it’s not. The fad may wane, but knitting will always play a significant role in the inextricably connected worlds of craft and fashion.” Underneath this discussion lurk the shifting categories of “old” and “new,” “outdated” and “modern,” “craft” and “art”—the very terms that vexed the late Victorians I have focused on in this book. Knitting has become modern. But, of course, only a certain kind of knitting, one that employs hand-spun, kettle-dyed, “artistic” yarn and follows unconventional, high-fashion patterns. Granny’s scratchy pastel green jumper need not apply. Chia’s use of unconventional weights, gauges, and techniques emphasizes the freshness of her patterns, yet in order to read and execute the patterns, one must already possess a repertoire of conventional knitting skills, not to mention a glut of leisure time. Like Victorian handwork, Victorian fashion has made a comeback. In 2004, W celebrated voluptuousness with the article “The S-Curve,” which flaunted the subtitle, “From the red carpet to the operating table, the femme fatale figure returns.” And for the next few years, corsets paraded across runways, glossy magazines, and even college campuses. Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé Knowles captured the public gaze, and not only breast enhancements but now buttock implants and Butt Lifter Jeans offered thin women the allure of strategic fleshiness. History never fails to inspire nostalgia. The September 2005 issue of Vogue featured “A Grand Affair,” in which “The 1870s romantic heroine takes a twentyfirst-century beau—proving that highly dramatic, ground-sweeping looks do work brilliantly today.”10 Ten pages of photographs follow, in which a female model in various Victorianesque ensembles cavorts with twenty-first-century surfers. The elaborately tucked, tailored, and trussed “heroine” alternately fixes a car engine, whips a horse, and hoses down a semi-nude beau. Later in the same issue, the magazine celebrates the designs of Olivier Theyskens of Rochas: “Olivier Theyskens’s wasp waists and trailing skirts evoke a never-neverland of fin de Wenlan Chia, Twinkle’s Big City Knits (New York: Potter Craft, 2007) 12. Dany Levy, foreword to Wenlan Chia, Twinkle’s Big City Knits (New York: Potter Craft, 2007) 11.  “The S-Curve,” W (April 2004) 112–14: 112.  “The S-Curve,” 114. 10 “A Grand Affair,” Vogue (Sept. 2005).  

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siècle Paris.”11 Indeed, with an ice-blue tailored suit with black ostrich-feather hat and gloves followed by an ultra-hourglass black satin bustier dress, Theyskens does indeed usher us into a fin-de-siècle never-neverland. Perhaps all fashion—whether textile or literary—can only exist in a neverneverland, where fact and fiction collide and where as Albert Einstein said, imagination is more important than knowledge. Yet why at the start of the twentyfirst century have we brought back modified corsets, once vilified as inhumane and oppressive? Why have traditional forms of women’s work (knitting, sewing) reappeared now? Beyond the simple answer of pleasure, or trendiness, or artistic autonomy in a ready-made world, handwork and fashion tell stories, they spin yarns. Dress culture will never disappear entirely because it allows us to express and recreate personal and social identities over and over again. In this book I have explored the role of nostalgia and inheritance in novels by late Victorian women writers. For Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, Gertrude Dix, and many of their contemporaries, dress and textile culture provided an important link with a material past. Because women of all classes were educated to be dually literate in cloth and in print, late Victorian women writers could open this treasure trove of associations and use it for a plethora of purposes. For some, sewing underscored their traditional domesticity, perhaps mitigating the threat to patriarchal culture that female authorship implied. For others, sewing and dress allowed them to blast open old assumptions and create fresh, modern takes on old issues. Lydia Sigourney’s poem “To a Shred of Linen” (1849) reflects the anxiety that many women writers felt about the seeming competition between intellectual and domestic activities. Yet later in the poem, the speaker uses her dishrag, a symbol of traditional domestic housewifery, for a new purpose: she turns it into paper. As historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explains, “Turning her scrap of linen into paper, Sigourney metaphorically chose cultural production over household production. Silence was not the crown she sought.”12 Yet as we saw with Elizabeth Parker’s eerily incomplete sampler, the line between “cultural” products and “household” ones is not quite so distinct. Neither is silence always an absence of meaning. If a dishrag can speak, so too can a scrap of linen, a corset, or a sampler. Dress culture was—and is—a capacious and flexible category. Attention to dress and textiles has been associated with patriarchal oppression and mass consumerism, but it has also communicated artistry, creativity, and exclusivity. Dress culture has been figured as a form of feminine community, a great unifier, but it has also recapitulated seemingly irreconcilable class and racial differences among women. The Punch cartoon “The Haunted Lady: or The Ghost in the LookingGlass” (1863) illustrates the complexity of dress culture. In the cartoon we saw three women: the wasted seamstress, the greedy and unscrupulous dressmaker, “Olivier Theyskens,” Vogue (Sept. 2005) 673–4. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Vintage, 2001) 21. 11

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and the faceless lady of fashion. The mirror juxtaposes their images, revealing the invisible web that weaves them together even as it keeps them apart. As this study has explored, late Victorian women novelists used their education in the material culture of dress and sewing to old and new purposes. We might argue that Victorian women writers found inspiration in a variety of material cultures, such as furniture, landscape painting, and interior design. One might ask, what makes this particular material culture—sewing and dress—so different from any other? The answer lies in the novels themselves. Continually negotiating the language of print and the language of cloth, Victorian women writers from Gaskell to Dix employed dual literacy as a form of authority, a means of community, and an indicator of women’s differences. Even at the fin de siècle, when New Woman writers quite deliberately sought “modern” readers, they, like Gaskell and Brontë and Eliot before them, invoked the power and flexibility of what Gertrude Dix called “the simplest of women’s handiwork.”13

Gertrude Dix, The Image-Breakers (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1900) 212–13.

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Index activism, political and the New Woman 15–19, 142–3, 163–5, 169–78 and class 167–78 and dress 56–8, 69–71, 77–9, 91–3; see also dress reform advertising; see corset, periodical culture aesthetes, female 17, 163–4, 174–5 aesthetic dress 81–9, 95–8, 117–19, 163–4, 174–5 movement 77, 81–6, 95–7, 117 aestheticism 17, 95–8, 117–19, 142, 163–4 reactions against 160–64 Angel in the House 16, 63, 143–5 Anti-Sweating Exhibition (1906) 126 Ardis, Ann 15–17, 170 art needlework; see embroidery artistic dress; see aesthetic dress Arts and Crafts Movement 81–3, 97, 118–19, 142, 152, 154–5 athletics, women’s 77–9, 101 Austen, Jane Emma 123 and fashion 61 Mansfield Park 108 Pride and Prejudice 48 Becker, Lydia 19, 30, 91–2, 97, 125 Beeton, Isabella 31 Berlin wool-work; see embroidery Bloomer, Amelia 63, 77, 92 bloomers 63, 77, 92 Bourdieu, Pierre 13–14 Brontë, Charlotte 21, 136, 150, 183 Jane Eyre 5–6, 48, 120, 135–6, 148, 149, 150 literary reputation 135–6 Shirley 138 Villette 23, 48, 136 Brontë, Emily 62, 148

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Aurora Leigh 48–9, 153 Burdett, Carolyn 52–3, 98–9 busk 59–60; see also corset S-curve 69–71 spoon-shaped 65 bustle or “Dress Improver” 41, 63–5, 83 Byron, Gordon Lord 61–2 Chinese foot binding 90, 94; see also corset Cholmondeley, Mary 169 classicism; see also education, classical Hellenism 84–9 ideals of beauty 57, 79–90 Oxford classicism 57 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 28 Collins, Wilkie The Woman in White 88, 149–50 color blue 81, 174 mauve 62 sexual connotations of 174 white 61, 110 community, among women 9–14, 20, 100, 110, 131–5, 182–3; see also relationships between women, socialism Contagious Disease Acts 15, 93, 150 corset 19, 58–61; see also tight-lacing and advertising 73, 93 children’s 59 and class 59–60, 72–7, 94–7 colonial attitudes toward 89–90 hourglass 59–61 hygienic or rational 69, 73, 79 straight front or “S-curve” 59, 69–71, 181 and race 50, 88–91, 98–100 20th- and 21st-century versions 101–4, 181–2 The Corset and the Crinoline, or Freaks of Fashion 73–6; see also Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine

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crinoline (or hoop skirt) 63–5, 73, 77, 93 crochet 6, 179, 180, 25, 40, 50; see also sewing cross-dressing 95–6, 142, 147–8 department stores 31–3, 37, 62 Dickens, Charles 136–7, 163 Disraeli, Benjamin 137 Dix, Gertrude 141, 169–71 The Image-Breakers 19–20, 58, 141–2, 169–78 Dixon, Ella Hepworth 16, 139–40, 168–9, 182 As I Knew Them 65 The Story of a Modern Woman 13, 18, 19, 24, 26–7, 105–6, 120–24, 176 domesticity 15–16, 26, 139, 164–5, 182 dressmakers 30–3, 38–41, 63, 73, 105, 110–12, 116–20, 134–5; see also homeworkers, seamstress, sewing trades as business owners 115–16, 132–5 negative stereotypes of 115–16, 182–3 shops, types of 124–35 dressmaking 19, 30, 97; see also dressmakers, embroidery, needlework, sewing as art 118 du Maurier, George “An Impartial Statement in Black and White” (Punch) 84–5; see also Punch Trilby 65 dual literacy, definition of 2–18; see also education dyes hair 81, 175 synthetic 62 vegetable 62, 81, 83, 155–7, 179, 181 Education Acts Anthony John Mundella’s Education Act (1880) 5, 28–9, 93 Free Education Act (1891) 5–6, 28 William Forster’s Elementary Education Act (1870) 5, 25–6, 28–9, 93, 109 education; see also Education Acts, sewing classical 95; see also classicism

governess 25–6 school inspectors 28–9 schools, types of 27 boarding 73, 143, 148–9, 52n94 colleges and universities 25–6, 93 factory 3, 27–30 finishing 26, 148–9 middle-class 26, 120–21, 148–9, 168, 25–6 Royal School of Art Needlework 26, 36, 152–8; see also embroidery working-class 3, 5, 27–30, 40, 109 and sewing 1–9, 36, 40 Scottish 109–10 Waldorf 180–81 Egerton, George 16, 24, 105–6, 122, 159 Eliot, George 21, 136, 150–51, 183 Middlemarch 47, 121 The Mill on the Floss 8, 23 “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” 10–11 Ellis, Havelock 42–3, 60–61 embroidery 4, 6–9, 20, 23, 25–6, 36, 45, 50, 61, 65, 81, 110, 135, 141–2, 152–7; see also sewing, needlework art needlework 10, 20, 36, 81, 141–2, 152–9 Berlin wool-work 10, 36, 145, 152–9 and sexuality 151 Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine 39, 73, 128; see also periodical culture eugenics 16–17, 91, 168; see also social Darwinism factory 28–9, 31, 141, 175 Factory Acts (1847, 1850) 29, 128 inspectors 132–3, 134 schools; see education system 37–9; see also textile mill, ready-made industry worker 40–41; see also seamstress, homeworker fallen woman 44, 48–9, 52, 111–12, 121–2, 130, 134–5, 177; see also sexuality family, Victorian 143–6; see also domesticity Fellowship of the New Life 43, 169 female entrepreneurs; see dressmakers, as business owners

Index Flower, Dr. William, Fashion in Deformity 84–8, 90 Foucault, Michel 13, 47, 71–2, 91 “docile bodies” 71–2 Gâches-Sarraute, Inez 69; see also corset Gaskell, Elizabeth 21, 105, 134, 136–8, 163, 183 Mary Barton 19, 23, 118, 134–40, 136–7, 140 Ruth 19, 48, 112, 118, 121, 134–40, 136, 140 Gibson Girl 69–71 gigot sleeves (also called “leg-of-mutton” or puffed) 62, 65, 81 Gissing, George 163 The Odd Women 14, 65, 173 Gothic Revival 154–5 Grand, Sarah 94–5, 97–8, 113, 142–3 The Beth Book 19–20, 141–69, 173, 176–8 The Heavenly Twins 24, 58, 94–8, 100, 147, 150, 160, 162, 164 Grundy, Mrs. 79–81 hair jewelry 111 handmade versus machine-made 81–3, 97, 119; see also aesthetic dress, Arts and Crafts Movement Hardy, Thomas 113, 163 Harrison, Jane 86–8, 95 “The Haunted Lady, or The Ghost in the Looking-glass” 126–8, 134–5, 140, 178, 182–3; see also Punch, periodical culture haute couture 62–3, 73, 101, 181–2; see also Worth, Charles Haweis, Mary 83, 88–9, 92 Healthy and Artistic Dress Union 77, 84 Heilmann, Ann 16–17, 52, 94, 95, 99, 106, 162, 171 Hellenism 84–9; see also classicism hobble skirt 101 Hogarth, William 48, 111–12 Hollander, Anne 61, 74 homeworkers (slopworkers or outworkers) 125–6, 131–2; see also ready-made industry, seamstress, sewing trades, sweatshops

199

Hood, Thomas, “The Song of the Shirt” 19, 126, 128, 130, 140 housekeeping 164–5 Kingsley, Charles 137 knitting 6, 7, 25, 28, 41, 107, 108, 179–82; see also sewing Labour Exam 29 Laidman, Elizabeth, sampler of 6–8 Liberty and Company (fabric, gowns) 84, 97; see also aesthetic dress Liberty, Arthur Lasenby 84 Linton, Eliza Lynn 18, 34–9, 87, 116 “The Modern Revolt” 35–9 “The Wild Women” 116 Lurie, Alison 9–10, 62, 91–2 Marcus, Sharon 12–13, 170n54 marking 6, 8, 110–11 marriage; see also family, domesticity arranged 108, 113 free-union 170, 172–4, 177 intermarriage, in South Africa 98–9 and middle-class education 120, 148–9 New Woman critique of 15, 113 and property; see Married Women’s Property Acts reworking of conventional marriage plot 168, 170, 172–4, 176 same-sex 12–13 Married Women’s Property Acts 92, 144, 149–50 Martineau, Harriet 9, 18, 34, 150 “Female Industry” 39–41 Marx, Eleanor 43, 157 Mayhew, Henry 131–2 minimum wage; see Trade Boards Act Mitchell, Hannah 30 Mitchell, Margaret, Gone with the Wind 62, 75 “The Modern Venus Attired by Three DisGraces” 128–30; see also Punch; periodical culture Montgomery, L. M., Anne of Green Gables 65 Morris and Company embroidery kits 155–7 fabric 83 Morris, Jane 81–3, 155

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Morris, May 83, 155–6 Morris, William 20, 36, 8–4, 155, 157–9, 180 movables 8–9 muslin 48, 61, 110, 117, 138 needlework; see also embroidery, seamstress, sewing definition and history of 5–11, 23–33 etymology of 25 and industrialization 33–51 neoclassical fashion (see also Empire, Directoire, Regency) 61, 110, 117 New Look 101 New Woman, definition of 14–18 nostalgia 137–40, 180 Oliphant, Margaret 105–7 “The Anti-Marriage League” 113 Kirsteen 19, 105–40, 143, 180, 182 Pankhurst, Emmeline 19, 91–2 Parker, Elizabeth 1–4 sampler of 1–9, 20, 182 Pater, Walter 81–3 patterns 8–10, 24, 31–3, 39, 46, 55, 62, 107, 118, 129–30, 139–40, 145, 153–5, 159, 181 periodical culture 10, 39, 63, 73–4, 76, 93–4, 128, 170 petticoats 46–7, 50, 62–3, 69, 77, 83, 93, 117, 174, 176; see also crinoline Poiret, Paul 101; see also hobbleskirt Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 81–4, 155 ideals of beauty 88, 110, 175; see also aesthetic dress professions, for middle-class women 16, 37–8, 65 prostitutes and prostitution 48, 56, 92, 99, 111–12, 120, 124, 130, 134, 150; see also Contagious Disease Acts, fallen woman Punch, cartoons in 19, 57, 79–81, 84–8, 126–30, 140, 157–8, 178, 182–3 Purvis, June 26–8, 30 race and politics in South Africa 52–3, 98–100 and racialialized theories of the body and clothing 17, 86–91

and relationships between women 13, 16–17, 98–100 railway travel 31, 33, 62 rational dress 77–81, 84–94; see also aesthetic dress, Rational Dress Association, Rational Dress Society, Sarah Grand Rational Dress Association 77–9, 92 Rational Dress Society 19, 69, 77–81, 88–93, 97–8, 142, 164 ready-made industry 30, 31–3, 37–41, 63; see also textile mills, sewing trades red hair 81, 110–11, 117, 131 relationships between women cross-class 166–9 and difference 11–14, 16–17, 77–8; see also race doubling 51–2 gossip 45–6 reading each other’s clothing 46–9, 121–4, 144, 171, 174–6 types of (platonic, romantic, sexual, etc.) 12–13, 170, 170n54 Royal School of Art Needlework 26, 36, 152–9; see also embroidery, art Ruskin, John 81–3 sampler 1–9, 18, 20, 33, 179, 182 Schaffer, Talia 17–18, 163 Schreiner, Olive 5, 16, 18, 24, 42–4, 55, 169, 182 From Man to Man 1–2, 18–19, 23–4, 42–53, 57, 65, 98–101, 107, 111, 121, 159–60, 171, 176 “I Thought I Stood” 47–8 The Story of an African Farm 42, 52, 90, 94, 98n106, 119–21 Woman and Labor 18, 33–4, 41, 146 “The Woman’s Rose” 47–8 Scott, Walter 61–2 seamstress 14, 23, 31, 33, 56, 105, 111–12, 138–40 and class 113–16, 119–20, 122–35 portrayal of 19, 48–9, 109, 111–12, 114, 118–19, 121–35, 138–40, 151, 176, 178, 182–3 Second Reform Bill (1867) 25 Select Committee on the Sweating System 125–6, 128

Index sewing 1–18; see also embroidery, needlework, seamstress, sewing trades, homeworkers and fallenness 111–12, 120 home sewing, 31–3, 40–41, 108–10 plain and fancy 6, 25, 36, 108–10 professional 37–9, 139–40 and relationship to writing 49–51, 159–60, 176–7 sewing machine 31–3, 39, 40–41, 62, 109–10 sewing trades 37–9, 105–6, 111–12, 120, 126, 128–30 regulation of 124–5, 139–40; see also sweatshops sexual purity movement 113 sexuality, female 1, 12–13, 15, 44, 53, 100, 106, 120, 124, 134, 139, 143, 177 and corsets 59–61, 72–3 homoerotic bonding 12–13, 170–71 and sewing 111–13, 119–20 Shaw, George Bernard 43, 155, 169 shifting erogenous zone 60–61 slavery 99–100, 108, 137–8 social Darwinism 91; see also eugenics and clothing; rhetoric of savage versus civilized 89–91 socialism 15, 20, 83–4, 142, 155, 157–8, 169–78 Fabian 141, 169 Fellowship of the New Life 43, 169 same-sex collective 58, 170, 172, 176–7 and sewing 157–8, 176–8 stays; see corset Steele, Valerie 71, 72–3, 74 Stetz, Margaret 17, 121–2, 159, 163 suffrage movement 11, 30, 34, 35, 56, 71, 91–3 and New Woman 15, 142 use of dress culture (fashion, embroidery, banners) 91–3, 159 Summers, Leigh 60, 72, 74, 89, 93

201

sweatshops 19, 37–9, 124–35, 141; see also dressmakers shops, sewing trades “tailor-made” 65, 67, 81, 129–30 tailors 30–31, 37–9, 123, 125, 129–30, 141 tea (or art) gown 83, 89, 97, 101 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 26, 151–2 Mariana 151–2 The Lady of Shalott 151–2 textile mills 37–9; see also factory, sewing trades tight-lacing 19, 56–7, 73–6, 94–8, 148–9 The Times 128; see also periodical culture Trade Boards Act 125–8 underwear, 20th-century (girdle, brassiere, merry widow) 71, 92, 101–4 Veblen, Thorstein 56 Venus de Milo (or de Medici) 56–7, 79, 83, 84–9, 95, 128–30 waist measurement, average 73–6 Walker, Alice, “Everday Use” 179–80 Webb, Beatrice Potter 126, 141, 172–3 Wilde, Oscar 11, 43, 83, 88, 163 The Importance of Being Earnest 11 Women’s Movement 15–6, 34–5, 91–3; see also suffrage movement Women’s Political and Social Union 91–2; see also suffrage movement Woolf, Virginia Orlando 94, 95 Review of The Letters of Olive Schreiner, New Republic (March 18, 1925) 42 A Room of One’s Own 42, 147 The Workwoman’s Guide 40; see also periodical culture World War I 68, 101, 104 Worth, Charles (House of Worth) 62–3, 118