Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction: Literacy, Textiles, and Activism, and: Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (review)

"A new fashion," writes Elizabeth Bowen, reviewing C. Willett Cunnington on nineteenth-century women's clothing, "is the fruit of fancies, tendencies, wishes, reactions to events that are our own, but that we do not recognize when we see them expressed in hats, dresses, 'accessories.' . . . Fashion expresses us more truly . . . than we can, by individual effort, express ourselves" (Collected Impressions [Longmans Green, 1950], 114). The perceived potential for the objects of fashion—clothing, hairstyles, jewellery—to explain us to ourselves lies behind these two books from Ashgate. Christine Bayles Kortsch's study of dress and sewing and Galia Ofek's examination of representations of hair reflect current interest in nineteenth-century material culture. Their contextualization of the fiction they address in relation to a wide range of other cultural discourses—journalism, advertising, painting, poetry, cartoons, and correspondence, to name a few—will be of particular interest to readers of this journal. Adopting a more focused timeframe, Kortsch concentrates upon late-Victorian women's fiction, while Ofek ranges from the middle of the nineteenth into the first decade of the twentieth century. Both employ their chosen lens—dress culture or hair culture—to draw attention to the complex and sometimes contradictory significance of these forms of fashioning identity, although contrary to the cross-gender reach that could be implied by these topics, readers looking for an account of male sartorial trends or the beard movement will find neither here.

Kortsch begins with the arresting juxtaposition of a modest sampler, worked by Elizabeth Parker of Ashburnham and now hanging in the Victoria and Albert Museum, with a scene of sewing in Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man (1926) to introduce the relationship between needlework and writing that is one of her key themes throughout. Rather than simply analyse the representation of women's clothing, she employs the more capacious and suggestive concept of "dress culture"—"the interrelated skills of constructing and interpreting cloth and household textiles" (4)—to argue innovatively for a type of cross-class literacy acquired by women that "could function simultaneously as an alternative discourse and a traditional one" (5). She thereby paves the way for her subsequent multivalent account of clothing and needlework in late-Victorian women's fiction. The idea of women's dual literacy is a productive one, enabling Kortsch to build upon Sharon Marcus's project in Between Women (2007), casting fresh light on female relationships and imagined communities by giving attention to hitherto unnoticed details of dress culture. In each chapter, she moves from cultural and historical context to literary examples, charting the history of female education alongside developments in needlework and the textile industry in the nineteenth century, for instance, in order to account for Schreiner's conflicting views of sewing in the context of her feminism. The tight-lacing controversy that filled the correspondence columns of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in the late 1860s has been discussed elsewhere, but Kortsch considers it anew in relation to actual dress sizes insofar as they can be inferred from the holdings of the Bath and Chertsey museums of costume. Kortsch uses photographs and Punch cartoons to illustrate the "shifting silhouette" and attitudes toward it throughout the period (58). While the female protagonists of Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893) use choice in "dress as a way to express their reactions to the ideological structure of late Victorian society" (94), Kortsch shows how Margaret Oliphant's Kirsteen (1890) breaks new ground in its portrait of the professional dressmaker, notwithstanding the author's attack upon the New Woman in her reviews. Kortsch returns to her theme of stitching as writing here, to argue that "sewing, the one skill shared by Victorian women of all...