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the language of dress in the new woman novel PDF

211 Pages·2011·1.32 MB·English
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THE LANGUAGE OF DRESS IN THE NEW WOMAN NOVEL By KATHRYN IRENE MOODY Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Advisor: Dr. William R. Siebenschuh Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY August, 2011 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of Kathryn Irene Moody candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree *. (signed) William R. Siebenschuh (chair of the committee) Kurt Koenigsberger T. Kenny Fountain Mary E. Davis (date) 7/13/2011 *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. i Table of Contents List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Aesthetic Dress and the Painted Heroine ...........................................................................11 Chapter 2 The Tea Gown: “Perhaps More than You Think” .............................................................43 Chapter 3 The Tailor-Made Girl .........................................................................................................80 Chapter 4 Knicksies, Kicksies, Rational Dress: The New Woman as Anti-Actress ........................120 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................165 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................182 ii List of Figures Figure 1. Jane Morris photographed by D. G. Rossetti .....................................................13 Figure 2. May Day by Kate Greenaway .............................................................................17 Figure 3. Tea gown with Watteau train .............................................................................44 Figure 4. “Garment No. 5” .................................................................................................73 Figure 5. Tailor-made gowns by Spice Box ......................................................................81 Figure 6. Ladies Jacket with military braid by James Thomson........................................92 Figure 7. “Costumes at Oneida” ......................................................................................126 Figure 8. Advertisement for Marie Lloyd‟s “Salute My Bicycle” ...................................128 Figure 9. Illustration of Jessie Milton in “rationals” by J. Ayton Symington .................133 iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my dissertation director, William Siebenschuh, for taking on my project and for guiding me through the process of presenting my argument. In addition, I would like to thank the members of my committee, T. Kenny Fountain, Mary Davis, and in particular, Kurt Koenigsberger, who introduced me to the New Woman novel. All of my professors at Case have been crucial in shaping my academic persona and, consequently, this dissertation. Gabriel Rieger‟s advice, editing, and experience have been invaluable to this process. Jared and Andrea Moody helped me obtain rare and vital resources. Linda Moody scanned images. Eleanor Traster provided emotional and financial support for my long education, as well as an early example of a pants-wearing woman. Special thanks to Margaret Rieger, the perfect dissertation baby, who has napped in accordance with my writing schedule rather than the other way around, and who is even at this moment playing quietly while I tie up the loose ends. iv The Language of Dress and the New Woman Novel Abstract By KATHRYN IRENE MOODY Historically, dress has served as a kind of shorthand for expressing information about characters, particularly female characters, in British literature. I assert that there is a language of dress at work in the New Woman novel, and this dissertation is an endeavor to interpret four components of that language: Aesthetic dress, the tea gown, the tailor-made gown, and rational dress. Through analysis of Vernon Lee‟s Miss Brown, Sarah Grand‟s The Heavenly Twins, and Mary Ward‟s Marcella, I argue that to dress a woman Aesthetically was often to denote her desire for women‟s liberation along with her own. As painters dressed female models Aesthetically, so Aesthetically dressed characters found themselves “painted” into particular roles. Through readings of Netta Syrett‟s The Day‟s Journey, John Strange Winter‟s A Blameless Woman, and Violet Hunt‟s The Human Interest and A Hard Woman, I show that to dress a character in a tea gown was to demonstrate her desire for intimacy. New Women heroines often wear tea gowns in situations not v considered socially appropriate. Such fashion statements demonstrate a desire to expand societal notions of “respectable” intimacy; one example of this is the association of the tea gown with maternity. Through interpretations of Rita‟s A Jilt‟s Journal, George Moore‟s Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa, Ella Hepworth Dixon‟s The Story of a Modern Woman, and Beatrice Whitby‟s Mary Fenwick‟s Daughter, I show how the tailor-made represents a desire for solidarity with other New Woman, and a tendency to seek maternal guidance from one‟s peers rather than from one‟s mother. Finally, some fictional New Woman heroines appear in trousers, or rational dress. These costumes appear only rarely in fiction as they appeared rarely in life, due to social stigma which associated women in pants with actresses and prostitutes. Such fiction represents an attempt to revise the language of dress by presenting rationally dressed New Women as particularly honest, while depicting other characters as mendacious. I support this assertion through readings of H. G. Wells‟ The Wheels of Chance, Rhoda Broughton‟s Scylla or Charybdis?, George Paston‟s The Career of Candida, and Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett‟s New Amazonia. 1 Introduction to the Dissertation Women‟s clothing and dress have long been used as a kind of language in British fiction, both as a means of identifying a character‟s class status (sometimes illustrating a transition from one class to another) and as a means to reveal character. In The Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath‟s personality is hinted at broadly by her bright red stockings and sharp spurs (Chaucer lines 456, 473). In Richardson‟s Pamela, Pamela must give up the fine clothes her employer has given her and acquire something more suitable to her station before returning home to her parents. Pamela also worries that accepting clothing from Mr. B will cause others to believe she is less than virtuous. In Eliot‟s Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke‟s choice of simple, Quaker-like clothing, in contrast to the “shade of coquetry” in the clothes of her sister Celia, serves to reveal her serious, determined nature (7). In the New Woman novel, clothing serves many of the same purposes as dress in earlier British fiction: demonstrating a character‟s class or motives. However, because new technology for dyeing fabrics and for mass-producing ready-made garments made clothing less expensive, it is at this point in the history of dress that clothing begins to regularly demonstrate more nuanced details about the wearer (aside from wealth or class status). In this dissertation I will attempt to interpret the “sartorial language” of four different varieties of clothing which were adopted by the New Woman and which appear in New Woman novels: Aesthetic dress, the tea gown, the tailor-made gown, and rational dress. I will demonstrate ways in which a knowledge of that language may serve to improve our understanding of the New Woman in fiction and in life, and of the New 2 Woman novel, by making connections between these types of dress and universal themes such as adolescence, maternity, female solidarity, and integrity. Finally, and particularly in the final chapter, I will assert that New Woman novelists attempted to revise a language of dress already at work in society in order to persuade reader‟s to the woman‟s cause. Aesthetic dress derived from the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and was characterized by loose drapery, natural colors, lack of traditional undergarments, and a vague allusion to a distant but nonspecific past. The contemporary reader might imagine those dresses worn in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. I will argue that Aesthetic dress implied a desire for freedom but a stunted emotional growth on the part of its wearer. Novels such as Vernon‟s Lee‟s Miss Brown, Sarah Grand‟s The Heavenly Twins, and Mary Ward‟s Marcella demonstrate this assertion in their depictions of their New Woman heroines either as literal artist‟s models (as in Miss Brown and Marcella) or as playing roles in tableaux vivantes or living pictures. For example, in all three of these texts, male characters use the language of art in discussing the heroines, “painting” them into roles which they will not be able to escape. The tea gown derived from the peignoir and its defining feature was the fact that it was generally worn without a corset. The most interesting connotations of the tea gown perhaps stemmed from its liminality: it was neither entirely for private wear (as a peignoir) or public wear (as a morning dress or evening gown). While the tea gown was certainly more fashionable than Aesthetic dress, it was novel enough (at least at first) to imply a degree of daring on the part of its wearer, particularly if that woman was unmarried, was venturing outside her own home and intimate circle of friends, or adopted 3 the tea gown for formal occasions. The tea gown demonstrated a desire for intimacy, a desire heretofore considered inappropriate in an unmarried woman. Through analysis of Netta Syrett‟s The Day‟s Journey, John Strange Winter‟s A Blameless Woman, and Violet Hunt‟s The Human Interest; A Study in Contradictions and A Hard Woman, I demonstrate the ways in which the New Woman novel use the image of the tea gown to address and underscore the important issue of intimacy as women‟s roles were being radically redefined. One example of this was society‟s attitude toward expectant mothers. Using New Woman fiction including John Winter Strange‟s The Money Sense, Lucy Clifford‟s “The Key,” and Mary Cholmondeley‟s Red Pottage, I demonstrate the ways in which the tea gown served both to hide, and later to indicate, pregnancy, and eventually to allow women to be seen in public while pregnant. The tailor-made gown was the predecessor of the contemporary woman‟s suit, and was commonly associated with New Women. It derived from the riding habit, and in its earliest incarnations, it generally consisted of a long skirt, a blouse, and a form-fitting jacket, often with a necktie, generally made of some plain and long-wearing fabric such as wool, and generally in a plain, drab color. Its similarity to the man‟s suit demonstrated one of the tenets of first wave feminism, the desire and ability to achieve the same goals as their male counterparts. In New Woman novels such as Rita‟s A Jilt‟s Journal, George Moore‟s Evelynn Innes and its sequel Sister Teresa, Ella Hepworth Dixon‟s The Story of a Modern Woman, and Beatrice Whitby‟s Mary Fenwick‟s Daughter, the tailor- made demonstrates the ambiguous relationship between a younger woman (in the beginning, it was only young, generally unmarried, women who wore tailor-mades) and her mother. In place of this relationship, the young heroines substitute some alternate

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allusion to St. John Rivers in Charlotte Brontë‟s Jane Eyre (1847), the eponymous heroine‟s .. In Mrs. Henry Dudeney‟s 1899 New Woman.
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