‘The Loose Woman in the Attic: Clothing, Corsetry and Control in Jane Eyre’ - Vivienne Richmond, Goldsmiths, University of London

‘The Loose Woman in the Attic: Clothing, Corsetry and Control in Jane Eyre’

Vivienne Richmond, Goldsmiths, University of London

Clothing in Charlotte Brontë’s work has received little scholarly attention, yet Jane Eyre is replete with dress references. From Rochester’s ‘steel clasped’ riding cloak, to the 'brown stuff frocks’ worn by the  Lowood pupils in stark contrast  with the Brocklehurst girls’ ‘shot orange and purple silk pelisses’, and Jane’s rejection of ‘brilliant amethyst’ silk and ‘superb pink satin’ in favour of ‘sober black’ and ‘pearl-grey’ for her trousseau,  Brontë deftly deploys clothing throughout the novel to signal the personalities, class and moral worth of her characters.

References to clothing are much less frequent in Brontë’s personal correspondence, but in one letter she writes about her corset (and Brontë’s corset is among the artefacts at the Brontë Parsonage Museum). Considering that reference in the context of Leigh Summers' assertion that Victorian corsetry was intended to regulate women's minds as much as their bodies, and the intimation (explored by Jean Rhys) that Bertha Mason was sexually voracious, this paper will argue that Brontë’s descriptions of the 'mad' woman's dress suggest an uncorseted, and therefore uncontrolled, body – and mind –  that her captors attempt to bring under control by the imposition of a ‘corset’ through binding.

3a: Re-Defining the Corset (Chair: Alex Tankard) – CWE 124

‘Parasols and Crinolines: Debating pleasure, defence and freedom of movement in steampunk fiction’ - Nickianne Moody, Liverpool John Moores University

‘Parasols and Crinolines: Debating pleasure, defence and freedom of movement in steampunk fiction’.

Nickianne Moody, Liverpool John Moores University

Contemporary understanding of Victorian fashion has to address the ambiguous symbolism of the corset.  It is an item of clothing “embracing at the same time the erotic and the respectable” and as such retains a focus of fascination in neo-Victorian fiction.[1]  It also has a central place in the Liddell Hart Collection of Costume, “Liddell Hart’s rapt attention was focused on one zone in particular the waist, its measurements and its displacement.  About the waist, the wasp waist, he exhibited a kind of monomania”.^[2]  The collection holds a variety of women’s and fashion magazines, scrap books and fashion histories which allow for an investigation of the controversy the corset has posed to the Victorians themselves and twentieth century interpretation of its social as well as symbolic role in the representation of ideals of femininity.

The corset, the crinoline and the parasol are reconfigured in steampunk to form associations with the pleasures of fashion and self-determination, self-defence and freedom of movement.  The cage crinoline, the corset and etiquette of accessories are frequently understood as representations of women’s oppression, steampunk however retains the fashion but rejects its twentieth century interpretation.  Steampunk parodies concerns of respectability and charts the heroine’s negotiation of gender politics in the steampunk diegesis through a preoccupation with fashion.  This discursive account of women’s clothing is part of a reconfiguration of the feminine roles of domesticity and maternity located in a neo-Victorian context.  Common to other forms of paranormal romance the fiction speculates on relationships that conform to twenty-first century ideals of the companionate marriage, expectations of life experience for women outside domesticity and a lived culture of sexism.  This paper aims to explore the critical nostalgia of texts which re-imagine the widening sphere of women’s experience in the nineteenth century by using clothing as an explicit form of material culture that enables women to negotiate the public sphere.

3a: Re-Defining the Corset (Chair: Alex Tankard) – CWE 124

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[1] Steele, V (1995) Fashion and Eroticism Oxford University Press, Oxford p. 161

[2] Danchev, A (1998) Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London

p. 85

Post-Victorian Corsetry on Film - Dorota Babilas, University of Warsaw

Post-Victorian Corsetry on Film

Dorota Babilas, University of Warsaw

From Judy Garland musicals to the mock-heritage comedy Stiff Upper Lips (1998) “a corset can do a lot for a lady” (to quote a Carol Channing song). Quintessential Victorian revealing garments reveal more than a bit of tantalising cleavage; they disclose changing worldviews and attitudes of the generations of wearers and spellbound fans since the 19^th century to the present.

The corset communicates contradictory cultural messages relating to questions of femininity, sexuality, and power. It can indicate dominance and submission, conservatism and rebellion, violence and liberation. The proposed paper will explore the changing semantics of the corset in post-Victorian film context using theoretical perspectives of Roland Barthes.

3a: Re-Defining the Corset (Chair: Alex Tankard) – CWE 124

Dressing/Undressing the Victorians: KEYNOTE LECTURE

Dr Rachel Carroll, Teesside University

The Sailor’s Return: Literary Adaptation and the Black Atlantic

1.30pm – 2.30pm:   KEYNOTE LECTURE (CWE 018)

Chair: Deborah Wynne

Dressing/Undressing the Victorians: FULL PROGRAMME WITH ABSTRACTS

‘Between ‘dirty ghosts’ and ‘a tailor’s dummy’: The Problem of Dressing a Portrait Statue in Victorian Britain’ - Claire Jones, Independent Scholar

‘Between ‘dirty ghosts’ and ‘a tailor’s dummy’: The Problem of Dressing a Portrait Statue in Victorian Britain’.

Claire Jones, Independent Scholar

Britain’s streets, squares, parks and public buildings are peopled with statues which were mainly commissioned, produced and erected during the Victorian period. They can be difficult to distinguish one from the other, because they generally follow a similar format – a white, middle-aged man in frockcoat and trousers with one foot extended forward, standing on a plinth four-foot high. Yet these now rather homogenous figures belie the fact that, in their day, the portrait statue was one of the most contested forms of contemporary sculpture. Central to this was the problem of how to dress a statue.

In this paper, I will consider the contested subject of clothes in Victorian portrait statues. This was a new type of sculpture, which meant that its parameters were uncertain. Sculptors therefore faced potential opportunities - and serious challenges - when attempting a portrait statue. There were three main dress options available to Victorian sculptors – classical drapery, historic costume and contemporary dress. Some critics demanded that all portraits should be clothed in classical drapery; others maintained that sculpture should be representative of its historical moment. Contemporary dress was the most contested category. The problem was how to depict actual, rather than imagined, people, and still work within the parameters of ideal sculpture. Far from being dull or ubiquitous, I argue that clothing these statues in frockcoats, reveals a profound experiment in modelling modern man in Victorian Britain.

2b: Fabricating Masculinity (Chair: Deborah Wynne) – CWE 125

‘Depiction as comedy and truth: women’s dress in Marie Duval’s drawings for Judy, or the London Serio-Comic Journal, 1869 – 1885’ - Simon Grennan (University of Chester), Professor Roger Sabin (Central Saint Martins) and Dr Julian Waite (University of Chester)

‘Depiction as comedy and truth: women’s dress in Marie Duval’s drawings for Judy, or the London Serio-Comic Journal, 1869 – 1885’.

Simon Grennan (University of Chester), Professor Roger Sabin (Central Saint Martins) and Dr Julian Waite (University of Chester).

This paper will present and theorise aspects of the facture and iconography of the work of pioneering female cartoonist Marie Duval, in relation to conceptions and representations of women’s dress in London in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s.

Duval’s work appeared in a variety of the cheap British penny papers and comics of the 1860s-1880s. An actress as well as a cartoonist, she lived and worked in an environment of music halls and unlicensed theatres, sensational plays, serials, novels and comic journals. Her drawing style was theatrical, untutored and introduced many techniques that only became common in much later cartooning.

She drew hundreds of comic strip pages for the magazine Judy and spin-off compilations, focusing on the humour, attitudes, urbanity and poverty of the types of people she knew. Her characters’ appearance, the ways in which they shape and move themselves in her visual world, and the technically maverick style in which they were drawn, provide a range of subtle and forthright commentaries on the historic dress and behaviour of her working-class London contemporaries, in particularly women of a range of ages, occupations and financial and social situations within this immediate milieu.

First, the paper will consider the extent to which the facture of Duval’s drawings articulates relationships between constraint and liberation, in the ways in which she depicts women’s dress, utilising tracing techniques and briccolage, combined with a technically untutored style of drawing. She both cues readers to comedy (emerging as dissonance in her cutting and re-inscribing of contemporaneous fashion illustrations), and depicts embodied social discourse in the form of practices (as contemporaneous truths, in her deft manipulation of misrecognition), themselves generating a system of ideas, and creating a cognitive consensus connecting particular ideas with the behaviour of specific social groups.

Second, the paper will consider Duval’s use of body distortion, accumulation, diminution and exaggeration, in which her depictive techniques present women’s dress not as a produced subject but as praxis. It will examine the complex parodic relationships that she creates between readers’ cultural knowledge of action on the contemporaneous theatre stage, in the practices of stage melodrama, and her depictions of women moving through her drawn plots in ‘old fashioned’ bonnets; of their noses; of the significant, ever-changing silhouettes of the carapaces of their chin-to-ankle dresses and of their feet, for example. Parallels will be identified between these Victorian ‘innovations’ and their continued use in twenty-first century ‘current’ and neo-Victorian’ visual comedy.

2b: Fabricating Masculinity (Chair: Deborah Wynne) – CWE 125

‘[Ad]dressed for you: a Victorian view of dress in popular greetings cards’ - Stephanie Boydell, Manchester Metropolitan University

 ‘[Ad]dressed for you: a Victorian view of dress in popular greetings cards’

Stephanie Boydell, Manchester Metropolitan University

The exchange of illustrated greetings cards is a largely a Victorian invention. Commercial cards came to prominence in the 1840’s and dramatically took off in popularity, coming to a peak in the 1890’s. By their very nature they are ephemeral; the content of their illustration reliant on the everyday, the passing and the fashionable. The Victorians designed and published hundreds of thousands of these cards. They are a huge, varied and largely untapped source for contemporary visual accounts of the period, including dress.

     Using the internationally renowned Seddon Collection of Victorian and Edwardian Greetings cards (housed in the MMU Special Collections, and which comprises over 100,000 individual cards), this paper will be a graphic exploration of how the Victorians used, viewed and visualised dress. Greetings cards can be surprising in their revelations about the Victorian psyche. Its contradictory nature is evident in the range of subjects and styles represented. There is vibrant colour, humour and sauciness, alongside the religious, the moralising and the sentimental. The collection demonstrates how dress is employed as a signifier of these attributes in popular print media. The scope of the collection presents a snapshot of changes in dress from the 1840’s to the 1900’s, covering high fashion, working dress, sporting dress, seasonal dress and allegorical costume. Some make a feature of dress; others capture it accidentally. The cards offer the chance to examine the cultural significance of dress in relation to popular culture and the rapid development and explosion of visual culture and visual language in 19^th Century Britain.  

2b: Fabricating Masculinity (Chair: Deborah Wynne) – CWE 125

‘‘[T]he very clothes they wear’: The male body dressed and undressed in Anthony Trollope’s Irish Fiction’ - Yvonne Siddle, University of Chester

‘‘[T]he very clothes they wear’: The male body dressed and undressed in Anthony Trollope’s Irish Fiction’

Yvonne Siddle, University of Chester

Effective and sympathetic characterisation was for Anthony Trollope much more crucial than plot. In An Autobiography he explained that he wanted his readers to feel that they were encountering ‘human beings like to them selves’ [...] men and women with flesh and blood.’ In order to achieve this, the author, he insisted, must not only create but also co-exist with his characters:

He desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creations of his brain should be to them speaking, moving, living human creatures. This he can never do unless he know these fictitious personages himself, and he can never know them well unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy. They must be with him as he lies down to sleep and as he wakes from his dreams…I have lived with my characters, and thence has come whatever success I have obtained. There is a gallery of them, of all that gallery I may say that I know the tone of voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear.

 When it comes to Trollope’s Irish fiction ‘the very clothes’ worn by his characters, and in particular his male characters, have a story to tell beyond their ostensible narrative function. This paper will examine from a twenty-first century perspective what that story reveals about both Trollope’s relationship with Ireland, and the relationship between Ireland and England in the Victorian period.

2a: Fabricating Masculinity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124

‘The Metonymy of Dress in Anthony Trollope’s Novels’ - Margaret Markwick, University of Exeter

‘The Metonymy of Dress in Anthony Trollope’s Novels’

Margaret Markwick, University of Exeter

In defining metonymy, David Lodge offers “a figure in which the name of an attribute or adjunct is substituted for that of the thing meant”. This paper will examine Trollope’s use of this trope to extend his thesis of masculinity, which I explored in New Men in Trollope’s Novels[1].

Though Dickens and Disraeli fought manfully against the trend, in mid-Victorian Britain, men’s clothing was predominantly dark, and commonly black. In Miss Mackenzie, Samuel Rubb, in trade, aspires to the hand of the decidedly genteel Margaret Mackenzie. His slender hopes are doomed when he escorts her one evening wearing yellow gloves. Primrose gloves as part of evening dress had been fashionable 30 years earlier; Robb’s gloves are not only out-of-date, they are a garish yellow. As Trollope warms to his theme, the gloves come to symbolise all the factors which destroy Robb’s standing and make him a laughing stock.

Phineas Finn is a young politician of fashion. To go to Loughlinter he wears knickerbockers (just “in”), a velvet hacking jacket and a Scotch hat with a feather. In his trial for the murder of Mr Bonteen, the critical qualities of his new light-grey silk-lined coat become shorthand for Phineas’ character, in contrast with the old-fashioned dark grey greatcoat, the “wraprascal” worn by the actual murderer. Textile imagery is explored at length and in a passage of remarkable vestimentary encryption, Trollope constructs a poetics of dress.

2a: Fabricating Masculinity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124

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[1] Ashgate 2007

'Rethinking Headwear: Sombreros and Power in Edna Ferber's Cimarron' Olivia Lyon, University of Chester

'Rethinking Headwear: Sombreros and Power in Edna Ferber's Cimarron'

Olivia Lyon, University of Chester

As part of an ongoing research project into the importance of headwear in 1920s literature, it became apparent that the significance and importance afforded to the sombrero in Edna Ferber’s Cimarron was sufficient and noteworthy enough to warrant an in-depth analysis of the subject. While written in 1929, the novel is set in the 1890s at the time of the Oklahoma Land Rush, meaning it is suitable for presentation at this conference as a Neo-Victorian text.

This paper aims to demonstrate the way in which Ferber uses sombreros to represent authority and social power by examining characters of varying social standing and their interactions with their sombreros, and in turn the way in which other characters in the novel respond to this. One of the novel’s central characters, the enigmatic Yancey Cravat, is made more critically accessible through an analysis of his headwear, namely his white sombrero. This analysis is of such significance it forms the main body of the paper. Additionally, the paper examines the representation of a characters’ morality through the condition and colour of their headwear. Through this analysis, it is demonstrated that Ferber’s characters are able to subvert their natural characteristics and successfully create an entirely different persona solely through the use of a sombrero. However, the paper also demonstrates that the power of headwear is diminished over time as styles fluctuate – what begins as a symbol of power and authority early in the novel is an indicator of low character and vagrancy by the end.

2a: Fabricating Masculinity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124

Rays of Light: the legacy of nurses' uniforms left by the 'Lady with the Lamp'

‘Rays of light: the legacy of nurses’ uniforms left by the ‘Lady with the Lamp’’

Elizabeth Mason-Whitehead, University of Chester

Today’s nurses’ uniforms are remote descendants of those worn by Florence Nightingale and the first nurses and sisters who arrived in Constantinople on 4^th November 1854. Rain-sodden and exhausted after travelling for 14 days, they must have been hoping for some rest. The devastating Charge of the Light Brigade, however, brought them their first patients immediately: 400 wounded soldiers.

The principles of their uniforms were intended to demonstrate that whatever their background, they were now nurses; they should be easily identified; and they should demonstrate subservience to their ‘superiors’. As the Crimean War progressed, the professionalization of the first nurses in Scutari Hospital developed and their behaviour became more regulated. The enhancement of their uniforms was significant to these developments, including new boots, sent from England to Scutari. 

Florence Nightingale captured the imagination of the readers of The Times as they read, ‘Miss Nightingale, lamp in hand, each night traversed alone the four miles of beds.’ Throughout the next 160 years, nurses have continued to respond to the changing demands of health and illness with their uniforms being a central thread of how the profession perceives itself and is in turn perceived. 

1b: Textiles and Labour (Chair: Louisa Yates) – CWE 125

'Nursing Secrets: The Story of a Victorian Nursing Dress'

‘Nursing Secrets: The Story of a Victorian Nursing Dress’

Kate Lampitt Adey, University of Edinburgh

In the archives belonging to Glasgow Museums there lies a silk dress cradled in tissue paper. The dress, dating from about 1850, has an unusual secret which can be discovered on further inspection. Hidden in the bodice are openings in the fabric to facilitate breastfeeding. This dress intrigued me as the sweat stains and the provision for nursing tell of intimate bodily functions and personal details.

This paper explores what stories this dress can help us tell about the experience of being a woman and mother during the Victorian period. I will discuss my personal interactions with this dress, suggesting that the luxurious fabric, corseted waist and provision for nursing can fuel rich and evocative discussion. The paper will take the audience through the process of investigating this dress, and explore how we might use and negotiate issues of objects as evidence and the potential for shared experience across time to generate insights into lived experience.

After setting out some methodological thoughts on these issues the paper discusses, in turn, the style and fabric, the corseted waist and then Victorian breastfeeding. Each of these features are positioned as representations of aspects of the owner’s identity. I will suggest that looking at clothing in this way we can imagine how this Victorian woman might have negotiated her individual identity and her identity as a wife and mother and how dress might be both an imposer of identity and as a vehicle to challenge impositions.

1b: Textiles and Labour (Chair: Louisa Yates) – CWE 125

Irish Rags and Irish Lace: Famine, Fabric and Nationality in the Nineteenth Century - Melissa Fegan, University of Chester

‘Irish Rags and Irish Lace: Fabric, Famine and Nationality in the Nineteenth Century’

Melissa Fegan, University of Chester

For many writers on Ireland in the nineteenth century, raggedness was the national condition. Travellers in Ireland were amused, astonished, and often made apprehensive by, the state of Irish clothing: Samuel Foote is said to have exclaimed ‘Now I know where the cast-off clothes of English beggars go to!’, while Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal: ‘You are constantly fearful that some knot or loop will give, and place the individual before you in all the primitive simplicity of Paradise’. Yet Ireland was also associated with fine fabrics: Limerick gloves, Connemara stockings and Ulster linen were highly prized, and Irish lace and crochet were showcased at the 1851 Great Exhibition. This paper will examine the relationship between Irish rags and Irish lace, as the symptom of and potential solution to Irish poverty, in particular the encouragement of lacemaking and knitting by poor girls and women during the Great Famine, and their literary representation in texts such as Mary Anne Hoare’s ‘The Knitted Collar’, Louisa Anne Meridith’s The Lacemakers: Sketches of Irish Character, and ‘Brother James’’s Eva O’Beirne, or The Little Lacemaker.

1b: Textiles and Labour (Chair: Louisa Yates) – CWE 125

Perusing The Paradise: Dressing in the Department Store - Kara Tennant

‘Perusing The Paradise: Dressing in the Department Store’

Kara Tennant, University of South Wales

In this paper, I consider representations of Victorian clothing and bodies in the BBC’s 2012-13 costume drama The Paradise, set in the nineteenth-century British department store. Its appearance reflects a growing interest in the history of consumer culture within mainstream television. The Paradise, for example, aired alongside its ‘rival’ ITV production Mr Selfridge (2013-present), and was followed by the three-part BBC documentary Shopgirls (2014), presented by Professor Pamela Cox, which examined the ‘strange new phenomenon’ of the female shop-worker.[1]

The Paradise took inspiration from Émile Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames, and follows the experiences of Denise, an assistant in the ladieswear section of a burgeoning new store. In this case, however, the action is resituated from 1860s Paris to the  north-east of England in the mid-1870s, a decision that impacts significantly upon the costume design, as well as upon the social meanings conveyed through clothing.

Indeed, I argue that the process of dressing the Victorian body – particularly the female body – becomes centrally significant within the series. As Denise shapes and re-shapes both her own body, by wearing her new work uniform, and those of her customers, in the form of the garments that they purchase, we see new understandings of Victorian fashion and femininity formed. And these, I suggest, respond to our own, modern, culture in interesting and revealing ways.

1a: Fabricating Femininity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124

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[1] ‘Shopgirls: the True Story of Life Behind the Counter’ (2014), <http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2014/25/shopgirls> [accessed 10 December 2014].

Idealised and Fabricated Femininity in 'The Lady's Dressing Room' - Sue Elsley

‘Idealised and Fabricated Femininity in The Lady’s Dressing Room

Sue Elsley, University of Chester

The Lady’s Dressing-Room was published in Britain in 1893, adding another volume to the existing plethora of manuals offering advice, on matters as diverse as household management and personal conduct, to Victorians eager to improve themselves and their lot.  This specific work is in fact a translation from an 1893 French book by Baroness Staffe. Its Continental origins, its focus on the creation of domestic sanctuaries where ‘ordinary women’ might become ‘goddesses’, and its translation into English by the glamorous and notorious Lady Colin Campbell, all suggest that its appeal may have been more exotic than other publications which also advised wives on such things as furnishing bathrooms and care of the clothes and body. The Baroness constantly reminds her married, female readership that finding their inner goddess, and making the most of her potential, is an essential element of their wifely duties. This sentiment, along with some bizarre, alarming, and some still viable suggestions for self-help, provides insight to the dreams and realities experienced by those who yet aspired to be perfect wives rather than New Women, but nonetheless yearned for glamour and greater autonomy. Staffe presents the dressing-room itself as a bespoke alchemical chamber in which a woman might blend potions and fabrics to transform herself into the ideal of feminism, as natural as ‘the lilies of the field’; but she shows those with limited financial resources and imperfect bodies how they too might create a ‘holy of holies’ and transform themselves into its securely resident deity.  

1a: Fabricating Femininity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124  

Dressing/Undressing the Victorians - George Eliot's Dresses by Jen Davis

‘George Eliot’s Dresses’

Jen Davis, University of Chester

 ‘I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles – to win your tears for real sorrow: sorrow such as may live next door to you – such as walks neither in rags nor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel.’ (George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life)

It is appropriate that Eliot chooses clothing to illustrate her manifesto for the ordinary and commonplace in Scenes of Clerical Life; she often uses clothes to represent her characters’ personalities in some way. Analysing dress in Eliot’s novels can reveal fascinating insights into characters’ morality, sexuality and social status, as well as shedding light on Eliot’s attitudes and preconceptions. Eliot’s comments on the practicalities of her characters’ dresses can provide a fresh perspective on the reality of dressing the Victorians. Anyone familiar with Eliot’s novels, or her biography, may expect her to dress rather sombrely – a Dorothea in dove-grey silk, perhaps, or a mourning gown to match her Sybilline status. It may come as a surprise, then, to discover that her choice of clothing for herself tended towards the colourful and vivacious. A discussion of one of Eliot’s own dresses presents her in a new light. 

1a: Fabricating Femininity (Chair: Sarah Heaton) – CWE 124