Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women's Environmental Writing, 1781-1924

4. Gilt-Edged or “Beautifully Unadorned”: Fashioning Feelings

201 Chapter 4 Gilt-Edged or “Beautifully Unadorned” Fashioning Feelings Mrs Lowells rooms are three Bed chambers a parlour & a dineing room . . . the rooms we have a[re] very pleasent & handsomely furneshed they have very Elegant curtains & Chairs in the Parlour satin damask red and yellow what they call velvet carpets my room has a handsome carpet two shades of red blue & Brown paper on the walls blue chintz bed curtains mahogany bedsted mahogany plush chairs the curtains and paper match. —lorenza stevens berbineau [in Paris] We [humans] are affected by climate and locality, by physical, chemical, electrical forces, as are all animals and plants. With the animals, we farther share the effect of our own activity, the reactionary force of exercise. . . . But, beyond these forces, we come under the effect of a third set of conditions peculiar to our human status; namely, social conditions. In the organic interchanges which constitute social life, we are affected by each other to a degree beyond what is found even among the most gregarious of animals. . . . Throughout all these environing conditions, those which affect us through our economic necessities are most marked in their influence. —charlotte perkins stetson [gilman], Women and Economics merchants of voluntary simplicity and simple living barrage us today, as books, magazines, and Internet sites promote a return to “earlier values.” My own history as the daughter of a Depression-era mother who, more than fifty years later, could relate (with dismay and shame, but also with pride) having to make her own clothes from others’ old garments, resonated with the charge to “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” As my previous chapters illustrate, Jacobs, Berbineau, Wilson, and Larcom differentially suggest how what Gilman calls “social conditions” and 202 chap ter four “economic necessities” profoundly influence one’s perspective on the environment . Berbineau’s accounting of her hotel’s elegant furnishings illuminates how domestic servants underwrote their employers’ standards of living with their labor and even their material selves. Between about 1880 and the turn of the century, disparities—in income, in health, in access to the natural environment—between working people and prosperous Americans exploded. Increased consumption helped ignite the blast. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s extended meditation in Women and Economics excoriates her female contemporaries for the selfishness that undergirds this consumption, offering an acid brief for simplicity: “The consuming female, debarred from any free production, unable to estimate the labor involved in the making of what she so lightly destroys, and her consumption limited mainly to those things which minister to physical pleasure, creates a market for sensuous decoration and personal ornament, for all that is luxurious and enervating. . . . As the priestess of the temple of consumption . . . the limitless demander of things to use up, her economic influence is reactionary and injurious.”¹ Exposing the connection between consumption and the body, Gilman disparages these comfortable women for their indulgence and ignorant depletion of others’ labor and for their self-objectification and self-diminishment: their complicity in social systems that relegate them to the status of lovely objects. Earlier in Fallen Forests I explored how environmental agency depended on such contingencies as an individual’s social class, age, racial or ethnic identity, and location. The association of social subordinates (children, white women and women of color, the disabled, and the elderly) with their natural bodies deauthorized them or even relegated them to the status of resources. Here I extend the focus on embodiment with a different emphasis , showing how late nineteenth-century American women writers such as Celia Thaxter, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Pauline Hopkins negotiate women’s place in their individual environments and in American society via respectability, a class-based notion frequently mediated through such concrete necessities as clothing and food. While Berbineau , Wilson, and Larcom speak as the producers of wealth and ease, the resources from which the middle class and affluent draw, the writers in this chapter describe the embodied consumers of material goods and cultural ideologies . Calibrating their messages to their own consumers—principally prosperous, educated, urban female readers—Thaxter, Jewett, Freeman, Gilt-Edged or “Beautifully Unadorned” 203 and Hopkins map out connections among fashion, social class, respectability , sexuality, and gender identity in order to argue for women’s agency over their physical selves and their immediate environments.² Emerging in the late eighteenth century with...