the language of dress in the new woman novel

211 Pages·2011·1.32 MB·English

by  Irene Moody

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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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