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  • At the Mercy of Their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture by Celia Marshik
  • Christopher Kitson
Celia Marshik. At the Mercy of Their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. xiii + 245 pp. $60.00

THERE IS MUCH RECENT WORK in modernist studies on the material things that surround the people in texts of the period and this has extended, notably in studies by R. S. Koppen and Katherine Joslin, to that material which surrounds them the most closely: the very clothes on their backs. Celia Marshik's At the Mercy of Their Clothes seeks to demonstrate that our view of garments in early-twentieth-century literature has nevertheless not been nearly suspicious enough. In a work of impressive scholarship, Marshik musters sources from a variety of cultural strata, from extant examples of clothing to cultural ephemera and canonical works of modernism, in order to "trace how categories of clothing mediate—and at the most extreme, enrich, damage, or queer—human characters' interactions and sense of self." Marshik's work is distinctive for its tight focus. She controls the potentially ubiquitous subject matter by dealing only with two specific types of garment, the evening gown and the mackintosh, and two well-defined sartorial practices, fancy dress and the used clothing trade. Influenced by the thing theory of Barbara Johnson, Bruno Latour and art historian Alfred Gell, Marshik formulates a distinctly pessimistic take on the relationship of people with these objects. She argues that clothing is so closely related to the sense of self that the inability to exercise full control over it and its associations means that clothing can seem to act as a "quasi-subject" of its own. This serves to make clothing a potential source of great threat, something that "damages, reduces, and even erases subjects."

The first case study is that of the evening gown. This piece of fashionable attire became "a temporal, class, and gender node" in the charged conditions of Edwardian consumer culture. Marshik discusses the surprisingly [End Page 138] negative treatment it received in popular culture and demonstrates how predominant characteristics of the dress fed into a set of morbid or threatening associations. Its formality led to a connection with mourning, and its slightness connoted the wearer's vulnerability to dangers physical and social. An impressive array of sources are deployed, and the analysis of "A Ballroom Tragedy," a "what the butler saw" bioscope film featuring scandal and murder in evening dress, is particularly memorable. The turn to highbrow texts late in the chapter is used, as throughout the book, to complicate the general account: professional female writers such as Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West felt the pull of aesthetic pleasure and introduced a note of ambivalence alongside the evening gown's troublesome associations.

The second garment considered is the mackintosh. As the discussion of its early history shows, the mac was from the start hardly easily associated with individualism. Its primary associations before World War I were with poverty and, at best, with being practical attire for children. The advent of the military incarnation of the mac, the trench coat, reinforced this de-individuating character, connecting it with uniform and with technological warfare. Wearers of the mackintosh became "undifferentiated and threatened material." Marshik's analysis of this development starts, surprisingly but convincingly, with wartime advertisements for the garment which encouraged those on the home front to "wear the war." The coat had a different valency in peacetime, however, and its impersonality accrued to a variety of subaltern characters who wore macs. The most extreme example, of course, is Ulysses's man in the mackintosh. This character's identity is for Marshik not so much hidden by his coat as constituted by it; M'Intosh is ultimately a "person/thing assemblage" whose claim to independent subjectivity is compromised as a result.

In the two later chapters, Marshik moves from discussing particular identifiable types of garment to focusing on what could be considered sartorial practices, fancy dress and second-hand clothing. This shift allows her to consider the issues at a slightly higher conceptual level and as such her thing theory argument is the...

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