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  • Dress Culture
  • Diana Maltz
Christine Bayles Kortsch . Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction: Literacy, Textiles, and Activism. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. x + 201 pp. $99.95

Midway through A. S. Byatt's recent novel The Children's Book, the working-class Elsie Warren stares disdainfully at the gown "covered with faded golden lilies and birds and pomegranates" that she has inherited from her employer. She longs for a "sleek, dark, business-like skirt and a fresh white shirt with a collar, that would show off her narrow waist." Resolutely, she takes her shears and fashions a hybrid: a Morris-patterned skirt with darts and seams. Reading the meanings behind cut and drape, Elsie has rejected Pre-Raphaelite dreaminess and nostalgia for a more streamlined, modern aesthetic. Later she apprentices herself as a student teacher. Christine Bayles Kortsch would say that Elsie cultivates "dual literacy," the ability to create and interpret in textiles and in print. As much as Elsie has resented her domestic role, its skills free her. In this way, she further embodies one of Kortsch's central claims about late-Victorian women writers: they regarded needlework alternately as a servitude and as a means of gaining voice.

Kortsch's first chapter examines the material and ideological basis of women's dress culture. Throughout the century, girls across economic classes acquired basic literacy and sewing skills by stitching samplers. Marking their growing body of work with initials, they imbued it with a sense of their identity and valued it as a future legacy. Periodical and novel reading united middle-class women as an imagined community sharing sartorial knowledge as cultural capital: this self-confidence could spur them to progressive activism, but it could also reinforce their class authority over poorer women. Kortsch locates the New Woman in such power plays.

Chapter two demonstrates how dress culture gave women the tools to judge one another. It traces the persistence of sewing in Victorian [End Page 396] women's education across classes and the cumulative impacts of the sewing machine, paper patterns, and marketed ready-made clothing on home dressmaking. It then explores the anxieties underpinning Eliza Lynn Linton's and Harriet Martineau's defenses of sewing as meaningful domestic labor. Linton argued that middle-class women had lost sight of the necessity for proper household management, and she equated their pursuit of paid work with extravagant "fancy work." Martineau censured working women for purchasing new clothing rather than repairing what they had. Such critiques were rooted in long-held class assumptions. Worried about middle-class women's usefulness, they condemned women's aspirations to fashion, urged an unachievable preindustrial ideal, and ignored the ease that affordable, ready-made clothing presented to working-class women.

Such class contradictions also fueled Olive Schreiner's treatment of sewing in From Man to Man, where the pursuit of needlework is a means to women's friendship and knowledge, but where gossip and the social ability to read clothes set respectable women against fallen ones. According to Kortsch, Schreiner refuses to answer the questions she poses about sexuality, labor, and education, and so dual literacy produces its own contradictions. The intellectual Rebekah's expertise as a seamstress enables her to detect her husband's infidelity; elsewhere it provides creative fulfillment and a pleasurable, contemplative step in her writing process. Yet the writing that grows from this process is ultimately ignored, just as her sister Bertie similarly fails to gain others' approbation through gifts of needlework. Neither words nor stitches earn them the sympathy they crave.

Chapter three returns to Schreiner in a nuanced treatment of the corset in New Women literature; here Kortsch deals more deeply with race in the text. The corseted "coloured" servant who scorns corsetless Rebekah gains temporary power over her by implying she has surpassed her in respectability; however, once this servant catches her master's eye, she suffers his sexual exploitation. Schreiner's implicit conclusion—that the corset is metonymic for the girl's colonial acculturation and oppression—seems more complex than Sarah Grand's strategies in The Beth Book. Following several scenes where tight-laced women are rendered vulgar and coquettish, Grand sanctions taste as an aristocratic sensibility...

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