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Body Politic: Revolutionary Fashions
The female body has historically been used as a canvas to express social, cultural, religious, and political ideologies. Today we're going to look at some of these costumes and Amy Lowell's poem "Patterns." Humanities - the study of the art of being human - allows us to read all these things as texts.
Patterns (1916)
BY AMY LOWELL
I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.
My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whale-bone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.
And the splashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.
I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.
Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
“Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday sen’night.”
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
“Any answer, Madam,” said my footman.
“No,” l told him.
“See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer.”
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.
In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.”
Now he is dead.
In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?
Amy Lowell, “Patterns” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Copyright © 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Brinton P. Roberts, and G. D'Andelot, Esquire. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Source: Selected Poems of Amy Lowell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002)
Group Activity: Dressing the Part
Go to this link and see if you can dress a colonial lady: http://www.history.org/History/teaching/dayInTheLife/webactivities/dress/dress.cfm
For more fun with clothes, see the "Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Clothing."
Imperialism
http://vimeo.com/102970407
Industry
Eighteenth-Century: French Court Fashion
- How does this dress construct the female body?
- How does this dress transform the female body into an icon of political power?
Court Dress 1780s (France)
During the Victorian Era, women's court fashions became the fashions of the public, fueled by the industrial revolution. By contrast, men's fashions became more practical (in fact, it was the last major change for men's fashion in the modern world).
Thus, the Victorian Era was marked by the construction of gender through clothing that was mass-produced by the industrial era.
Fashioning Gender Identity in Eighteenth-Century Clothing
Can you tell which of these details is for a woman's outfit and which is for a man?
Men's and Women's Suits ca 1780-1790
As the fashions of the aristocratic elite were adopted by the emerging middle class, their inherent gender ambiguity was criticized. Periodicals such as The Tatler and The Spectator helped transform aristocratic fashions for the increasingly polarized social spheres of men and women. Men's clothing became increasingly austere and functional while women's fashions continued to function as status symbols and embrace the extravagance that characterized eighteenth-century aristocratic clothing.
The 1790s: Revolution in Fashion
During the 1790s and the first decades of the 1800s, women's fashions changed dramatically.
Woman's Day Gown ca. 1800
The simple, high-waisted shifts of worn from 1790 - 1810 resemble the UNDERCLOTHES of earlier decades. These dresses were truly "revolutionary" - keeping in step with the political and social movements of the 1790s.
Corset, panniers, and Chemise (ca. 1760-1770).
However, these changes in women's fashions were as short lived. By the 1820s, simple shifts were again regulated to the role of underwear. Industrialization, the expanding wealth of the middle class, and the goading of fashion magazines created an elaborate culture of women's fashion.
Corset, Chemise, and Draws ca. 1830
During the 1800s, woman's body was literally shaped by the clothing (and devices) she wore. Her clothing indicated her place in the social hierarchy as well as her mastery of current etiquette. During the nineteenth-century, the full skirts and constricted waists of the eighteenth-century court culture permeated the middle class.
Women's fashion was characterized by the CORSET, petticoat, and CRINOLINE.
This page shows the evolution of female silhouette throughout the nineteenth-century. How does the fashion of men's clothing change throughout the century? What is the significance of this difference for nineteenth-century culture?
Day Dress, ca 1820
Notice the expanding figure of female fashion - this dress requires a corset and petticoats.
By the middle of the century women need a corset and hoop skirt to create the desired fashion.
Day Dress, 1860.
CORSETS:
Corsets were an ESSENTIAL part of a woman's attire. Some medical experts in the nineteenth-century claimed that the corset compensated for a woman's natural deficiencies (they claimed that a woman's spine was too weak to support her body, especially after puberty, and a corset was necessary to give her the support she needed to stand upright).
How do advertisements like this position the women's fashion with power matrices?
These corsets are a part of the fashion exhibit in the Victorian and Albert Museum in London.
Corsets were generally worn from the age of twelve, onwards. These restrictive devices could actually compress a woman's ribcage, causing permanent damage. However, women who did not wear corsets were immediately labeled "loose" women. Furthermore, the corset was thought to impose MORALITY upon the unruly (sexual) female body, curbing the appetites that resided in the torso and mid-section (See
"Crinolines, Crinolettes, Bustles and Corsests from 1860-80").
This photograph from the 1890s features a woman who has tight-laced her corset to achieve what is referred to as a WASP WAIST. However, this extreme was the exception rather than the rule.
HOOP SKIRTS AND CRINOLINES:
The hoop skirt came BACK into fashion in the 1850s (just after Frankenstein). The hoop skirt, combined with the corset, emphasized a woman's ARTIFICIALLY TINY waist and accentuated her bust and hips (her figure - her sexuality).
Evening Dress (ca 1860)
This evening dress utilizes a crinoline and a corset rather than a hoop.
Cage Crinoline (ça 1870)
Rigid hoop skirts were replaced by the more flexible crinoline cage in the later-decades of the nineteenth-century.
The hoop skirt or crinoline, combined with the corset, forced women to (outwardly) conform to mid-nineteenth-century ideals of feminine passivity because these two devices effectually rendered women unable to engage in (meaningful) physical activity.
- Corsets restricted breathing, effectively stopping women from engaging in strenuous (or normal) physical activities.
- A tight corset forced women to take shallow breaths (creating the sexually alluring "heaving bodice" effect)/
- Wearing a corset for a prolonged period of time (since age twelve) forced the ribcage to conform to an UNNATURAL hour-glass form that could be life-threating, especially during childbirth.
- Hoop skirts hampered any sort of movement, surrounding women in a (barely) mobile cage of wire, cloth, and crinoline. Even movement within the domestic sphere was very difficult (as the cartoon below states).
- Hoop skirts and crinolines were more than a nuisance, they were a FIRE HAZARD. Some estimate that the second leading cause of death among women (in the West in the nineteenth century) was FIRE (burns). Cloth was ESPECIALLY flammable in this era and big skirts were FREQUENTLY catching fire. Even if women refrained from working in the kitchen (genteel British women were supposed to supervise the kitchen, not work in it), they were constantly surrounded by fire and their skirts were often ignited. Since women's clothing was DESIGNED to be difficult to remove, women could not get free of their burning clothes and they died (often in agony, days later).
This is a nineteenth century cartoon demonstrates that people were COGNIZANT of the annoyance (and irrationality) of fashions (just as we are aware of our own fashion hang-ups).
This illustration shows a woman's crinoline catching on the door of a carriage. While the footman may be laughing at the spectacle, accidents like this could be hazardous (the woman could be caught and dragged behind the carriage, trampled in the busy London street...).
Reception Dress (ca. 1880)
This reception dress from the 1880s relies on a corset and bustle. Women's skirt widths steadily decrease after the middle of the century, but they still require artificial support.
Women's clothing in the nineteenth-century was supposed to serve as a middle-class STATUS symbol. The fashions that denoted the opulence of the aristocracy and upper-class in the 1700s permeated the ever-growing middle-class during the 1800s. Clothing that immobilized a woman demonstrated the wealth of her father or husband, indicating that she had servants and a lady's maid.
Fashions that had been associated with court culture in the eighteenth-century were associated with the nineteenth-century idealization of the middle-class domestic sphere. For example, the fashion plate below is from the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. Magazines throughout the nineteenth-century marketed the corse, hoop-skirt, and crinoline to middle-class women.
Creating clothing in the domestic sphere:
This Lozier and Stokes sewing machine advertisement positions women's clothing and the creation of that clothing at the center of the domestic sphere.
Reading Images: Viewing the Female Body in TEXTS
How can we READ images of the female body?
- How do we INTERPRET the images we find?
- How is reading an IMAGE different from reading TEXT?
- How is reading an image SIMILAR to reading a text?
Finding More Material on Material Culture:
Victorian Era Resources
- Victorian Web - this is a resource for everything Victorian.
- Victoria and Albert Museum - this is a resource for primary material, particularly artifacts from the Victorian Era (named for Queen Victoria).
- Secondary Sources:
- RaVon: Romanticism and Victorian on the Net
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