‘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