Dressing Literary History
AMY LEAL

The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 3, 2007 Friday
THE CHRONICLE REVIEW; Pg. 5 Vol. 53 No. 48

I don't want to see it, but I have to. On August 10, I will sheepishly pile into an overcrowded theater to see Becoming Jane, loosely adapted from Jon Spence's biographical study Becoming Jane Austen, even though I know Anne Hathaway isn't British and Tom Lefroy did not tussle with Austen in haystacks. That isn't what will pain me, though; it will most likely be the costumes.

It is time for me to take my closet out of the closet: I am one of those Janeites you hear about who likes to make historically accurate clothing. I have suitcases ready for travels to places that no longer exist. Georgian bodices, Regency chemises, Victorian "unmentionables," Edwardian walking skirts. I patronize Amazon Drygoods: Purveyors of Needed Items for the 19th Century Impression as much as I do Amazon.com. I own more steel boning than the Marquis de Sade.

It doesn't do to admit to such activities in academic company. Kipling popularized the term "Janeites" in a story about an Austenite Masonic Lodge created by soldiers to get them through the horrors of the Great War. Being a member of what one critic called the "frilly bonnet brigade" is a bit like joining that secret society. In her book on Austen fandom called Janeites, Deidre Lynch cautions "the career-conscious critic against letting the wrong people know of her desire to, for instance, wear Regency costume and dance at a Jane Austen Literary Ball." Making replicas smacks too much of scholarly dilettantism, of playing dress up with the canon like a little girl or boy tottering around in mother's gigantic heels with a slash of forbidden carmine on the lips.

Certain writers (Austen, Dickens) and time periods (the Renaissance, Regency, Civil War, and Victorian eras) seem to provoke unsavory sartorial obsessions that make scholars uneasy. The making of reproduction clothing slides too easily into the shadowlands of historical inquiry, the dubious pageantry of Renaissance Faires, Civil War re-enactments, and the Society for Creative Anachronism -- no matter that the participants themselves are often exacting about historical detail. Real scholars, it seems, don't play dress up.

Why do I do it? I live near a mall; there is no need for me to sit around of an afternoon like Cassandra Austen embroidering samplers. I did grow up on a post-and-beam farm in Vermont where we spun our own wool, but now making clothing is a leisure-time activity, and its very hobbyist quality cuts me off from the women I'm parroting who made the clothes simply because they had to. Yet sewing and swearing through multiple layers of coutil helps to reveal a small part of the activities and lived experience of women in another time period -- and besides, it's difficult to find ready-made Regency corsets.

Victoria's Secret, Frederick's of Hollywood, and your local goth shop won't cut it. They make lightweight corsets of plastic or spiral boning and forgiving hook-and-eye front closures. The typical mall purchase is more of an erotic nod to the past than a rib-and-body contorting device. Occasionally fashion lines crop up that look like history's hangovers -- an acid-washed denim corset or Edwardian-inspired pin tucks in georgette -- but mostly the garments you can buy at Macy's won't do if you want to pant like Catherine Linton in tight lacing. Authentic corsets typically are made of three or more layers, the top one of duck (like denim doused in starch), and rigid with steel boning (now that harvesting Moby Dick for his baleen is unacceptable).

I make clothing reproductions because I am fascinated with the "felt life" (to appropriate a Henry James term) of past eras. What did Regency hair smell like? What did cheddar cheese taste like back then -- tangy from some subtle differences in soil and fodder two centuries ago that we would be hard pressed to define? What was it like to wear Charlotte Brontë's silk traveling dress (pattern available from the Northern Society of Costume and Textiles) after wedding Arthur Bell Nicholls? How might such considerations have influenced the writing of the period? I want to know how Emma combated bad breath and what the bristle of a muffin seller's cheap linsey-woolsey felt like on the wrists.

Writing literary scholarship and composing historical fiction for me is often sensory, as I try to get as full a picture of another era as possible and recapture lost times. Material-culture studies has done much to resurrect value systems and worldviews of the past through the analysis of artifacts, revealing how an anonymous quilt, for example, can become a record of a working-class woman's unrecorded history. But to taste and smell and feel the past as it was lived, not in the brittle remains of history -- how does one go about that?

Living-history museums, of course, abound. When I was a child, I frequented Plimouth Plantation -- a site where one can view Colonial English re-enactors hewing logs in full woolens beside modern-day Wampanoag people dressed in more summer-appropriate deerskins. But seeing living-history museums only tantalizes me with an imagined glimpse of the past. L.P. Hartley famously wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." I want a passport.

"Today we're going to smell Jane Austen," I told my students last semester, passing around rose water, Earl Grey tea, lavender, violets, and cloves (the 19th-century equivalent of breath mints). Truth be told, however, Miss Austen was probably in general a bit odoriferous, like most people back then. Not much had changed from when Queen Elizabeth I is said to have bathed once a month, whether she needed to or not. When the newfangled "showers" (basically, a bucket and a sieve) arrived on the set of the reality television show Regency House Party, one participant said, "This is the first time that I have felt clean in six weeks."

To convey the heft and rustle and cinch of living in the late 18th and 19th centuries, I also brought into the classroom replica clothing, from bloomers and corsets to corset covers and crinolines. Interestingly, the women cooed over the fabrics, but it was the men who wanted to try on the corsets, mesmerized by the sight of so much boned fabric and tight lacing. By participating in the pleasures and tortures of a past era, my students began to imagine what everyday existence would have been like for its denizens. A fully "boned" 18th-century corset feels like wearing a steel and cloth barrel with puffy little tabs at the bottom that don't do much to protect your hips from gouging. The male volunteer who bravely wriggled into this (much loosened) specimen gasped, "No wonder so many women fainted back then!"

Climbing into a replica of the past, you also realize that bodies were very different in days of yore. Women obviously tended to be shorter, but Victorian women also trained their bodies by wearing corsets from the time they were children -- even into pregnancy. Patterns made from bodices of the early 19th century seem to have arms sprouting out of their backs in more-than-military posture. (Working women of all eras, of course, obviously needed some breathing room if they were to thresh like Thomas Hardy's Tess.)

Regency corsets (when daring misses wore them at all) were designed to push up and smooth down (except for a horrifying contraption known as a "steel divorce," which separated the breasts into distinct pointed silos) and accentuate the high waistline. These corsets included a busk -- a bit like wearing a wooden ruler down your middle -- and more push-up power than the Wonderbra. (In a letter, Austen once commented snarkily of one specimen, "Mrs. Powlett was at once expensively & nakedly dress'd.") Dressing as part of the Regency beau monde makes one feel demure and exposed at the same time, ankles tucked under muslin but everything else blushingly exposed. Garb post-Reform Acts is something else altogether. Rigid, laced up, reined in, served up in secret layers of lace under silk -- that's what it feels like to be a Victorian lady.

In his book Life in Regency England, R.J. White writes about the impossibility of recapturing the spirit of an age, no matter how many facts we assemble, for "its life-quality eludes us, save as it comes to us like a flavour, a perfume, a clamour of voices, from a heath, a kitchen door, a busy street, in an unapprehended moment of revelation." Perhaps part of the will to sew replicas is the very elusiveness of the endeavor. But Austen herself enjoyed such imaginative play.

One wonders: Would she be archly amused by all the Janeitism abounding today, or coolly record reactions to her novels as she did in her lifetime, or even enjoy going to the adaptations? This was a novelist who went to museum exhibitions pretending that pictures she saw there were of the Bingleys and Darcys in the imagined sequels to her novels. When I sheepishly yet obsessively go to Becoming Jane, I will try to imagine how the whole thing would look to her, right down to the last stitch. She claimed that she hated describing clothing, but saw the importance of getting things right. "Mrs. Bingley's is exactly herself," Austen wrote whimsically to her sister of one painting exhibited in Spring Gardens. "She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her."

Amy Leal teaches English at Syracuse University.