Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals ed. by Janine Hatter and Nickianne Moody (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals ed. by Janine Hatter and Nickianne Moody
Fashion, a "pervasive presence" in the nineteenth-century periodical press, deserves serious study as more than historical artifact or vehicle for creating Roland Barthes's reality effect (xxxii). This claim anchors Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals, co-edited by Janine Hatter and Nickianne Moody. The twelve interdisciplinary essays in this first volume of Edward Everett Root's New Paths in Victorian Popular Fiction and Culture series make a persuasive case for reconsidering fashion and fashionable discourse as a window into the cultural landscape of the Victorian era. In a carefully researched introduction on fashion plates that is lavishly illustrated with examples from the Liddell Hart Collection of Costume, Moody invites readers to rethink prior assumptions and see the fashion plate as a narrative space that reflects a "system of knowledge" (xv). In making this turn, the collection encourages readers to acknowledge a symbiotic relationship between fashion and fiction.
To bring structure to an exceptionally diverse collection, the editors have divided the content into four distinct areas. Part one, "Fashion and [End Page 457] Hierarchies of Knowledge," examines how journalism and the periodical press contributed to the development of fashion as a discipline. In this section, Royce Mahawatte considers the Regency dandy novel as fashion text, showing how Edward Bulwer Lytton's Pelham, or the Adventures of a Gentleman (1828) slips into the linguistic registers of 1820s fashion editorials. In this study, silver fork novels and fashion periodicals exist on a continuum within a "fashion writing system" (14). Moving to the end of the century, Alyson Hunt analyzes fashion in fin de siècle serialized crime fiction through the lens of Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and Georg Simmel's "Fashion" (1904). In these novels, Hunt argues, "criminal-heroes exploit fashion to expose the hypocrisy and injustice of traditional social hierarchies" (18). Barbara Vrachnas's essay establishes a concrete connection between the lavish fashions of design icon Charles Frederick Worth, mentioned in such periodicals as the Woman's World, Belgravia, the Ladies' Treasury, the London Journal, Harper's Bazaar, the Queen, and Bow Bells, and representations of fallen women and femme fatales in sensation fiction by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ouida.
The second part, "Artistic Engagement with Fashion's Material Culture," moves to the concrete uses of fabric and sartorial style within fiction to represent character and social constructions of femininity. This section opens with Elaine Arvan Andrews's essay about fashionable beauty in the late juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë. Extending previous scholarship on the use of physical characteristics as an indicator of interior character, Andrews concludes that "Brontë's use of dress enlarges her scope of codifying surfaces of the body" (55). In one of the most meticulously researched chapters of the collection, augmented with images of rare fabrics from private collections, Carolyn Ferguson examines the "symbolic language" of fabric prints and patterns in novels by George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, and Elizabeth Gaskell using a methodology inspired by Elaine Freedgood's work in thing theory (67). The fashion choices within the novels of these midcentury women writers are not just included for a reality effect, Ferguson argues; instead, "the realities of textile prints and patterns [are used] as effective devices to show class, character, humour, practicality and pathos" (82). To complete this section, Kara Tennant analyzes the discourses of fashionability and taste within midcentury periodicals and the portrayal of "making, altering, trimming, refashioning and selling of female clothing" within popular fiction, including Lady Audley's Secret (1862), Rosa Nouchette Carey's Not Like Other Girls (1884), and H. J. Brooke Houston's "Dressmaker to the Queen!" Or, Jennie's Ambition (1879) (87).
The relationship between fashion and cultural power connects the chapters of part three, "Conduct and Clothing." This section extends [End Page 458] the analysis into the public sphere of men's work and politics and opens...
