He cites a Victorian phrenologist, thus: ‘Compression produces inflamation, retains the blood in the bowels and neighbouring organs and thereby inflames all the organs of the abdomen, which thereby excites amative desires . . .’ So that is the source of corset phobia! Especially since, once the corset has thoroughly awakened the sleeping demon in a woman’s belly, the compressive organ itself will deal efficiently with the consequences. It was widely believed that tight-lacing procured abortion.
At this point, Kunzle’s theory that tight-lacing was a means ‘to protest the ever-breeding, child-centred mother’ becomes hard to resist. And the foeticidal Victorian coquette, anxious to profit from her only capital, her body, by means of an upwardly socially mobile marriage or high-class prostitution, to do something, anything, to assert herself, becomes a sister under the skin.
Certainly, on the evidence Kunzle produces, fanatical nineteenth-century hatred of tight-lacing did not come from the female emancipation movement – which, after all, had far more important things to think of than what women did with their waistlines – but from those who saw women’s primary function in terms of domestic labour and childbearing, both of which are activities contra-indicated by tight-lacing.
Renoir, celebrant of the ‘natural’ woman, spreading, naked, dumb, available for rape at any moment, hated and feared corsets. He told his six-year-old son that women who wore them must inevitably suffer from dropped wombs. In his memoirs, Pierre says ‘ . . . this idea of the womb tumbling down gave me nightmares.’ You bet. Hogarth, however, adored ‘stays’, out of a metaphysical passion for a perfect, sinuous, rococo, artificial ‘line of beauty’ that is better than the natural, since it is a human creation. Baudelaire always preferred art over nature, and particularly enjoyed seeing men in corsets.
One of Kunzle’s most curious and interesting byways is his discussion of the military corset, the tight waists of Russian and Prussian heroes. In an appendix, he includes an interview (made in 1967) with an English baronet, a Member of Parliament for fifty years, who habitually wore a corset and found he always delivered a House of Commons speech better when supported.
Though often witty, Kunzle is never facetious, although facetiousness has often been the way of making these fetishistic items socially acceptable, and also of reducing their implicit menace, somehow transferring the responsibility for their effect from women back to men again. Advertising copy from the wasp-waist revival of the 1950s demonstrates this admirably: ‘Steel hand in the velvet glove’ (but not your own hand); ‘How can you look so naughty and feel so nice?’
Most histories of costume are lightweight gossipy journalism. Fashion and Fetishisms is, however, exactly how it describes itself: a piece of social history, instinct with intellectual curiosity and spiritual generosity towards the human race and its various contradictory ways of asserting its humanity.
From the photograph on the back-flap, it looks – though I could be wrong, and if so, I am sorry – as if David Kunzle may have donned, if not a waspy, at least a virile and inconspicuous corset of the ‘military’ type for the benefit of the camera.
(1982)
• 32 •
Christina Stead
To open a book, any book, by Christina Stead and read a few pages is to be at once aware that one is in the presence of greatness. Yet this revelation is apt to precipitate a sense of confusion, of strangeness, of anxiety, not only because Stead has a rare capacity to flay the reader’s sensibilities, but also because we have grown accustomed to the idea that we live in pygmy times. To discover that a writer of so sure and unmistakable a stature is still amongst us, and, more, produced some of her most remarkable work as recently as the Sixties and Seventies, is a chastening thing, especially since those two relatively recent novels – Cotters’ England (1966) and Miss Herbert (the Suburban Wife) (1976) – contain extremely important analyses of postwar Britain, address the subject of sexual politics at a profound level, and have been largely ignored in comparison with far lesser novels such as Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. To read Stead, now, is to be reminded of how little, recently, we have come to expect from fiction. Stead is of that category of fiction writer who restores to us the entire world, in its infinite complexity and inexorable bitterness, and never asks if the reader wishes to be so furiously enlightened and instructed, but takes it for granted that this is the function of fiction. She is a kind of witness and a kind of judge, merciless, cruel, and unforgiving.
Stead has just reached the age of 80 and, according to Australian newspapers, is still writing. Born in Australia, she has lived in Britain, Europe, and the US and has written novels set in cities in various countries as if she were native to them all. This phenomenon of ubiquity helps to explain her relative obscurity: she appears to acknowledge no homeland and has therefore been acknowledged by none until her return to her native country after almost a half-century of absence. Lawrence, in exile, remained British to the core; Joyce took Dublin in his back pocket wherever he went. Stead becomes absorbed into the rhythms of life wherever she finds herself. Furthermore, although she has always written from a profound consciousness of what it is to be a woman, she writes, as they say, ‘like a man’: that is, she betrays none of the collusive charm which is supposedly a mark of the feminine genius. As a result, because she writes as a woman, not like a woman, Randall Jarrell could say of The Man Who Loved Children (1940): ‘a male reader worries: “Ought I to be a man?”’
Jarrell thought that The Man Who Loved Children was by far Stead’s best novel and believed its commercial and critical failure blighted her subsequent development. (Why did he say that? Was it revenge for having his machismo deflated?) However, at least three of her other novels – I’d say For Love Alone (1945), A Little Tea, A Little Chat (1948) and Cotters’ England (1945) – equal that novel, and in some ways surpass it, while Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) is, unusually for Stead, a fully achieved comic novel of a most original kind.
However, it wasn’t surprising that The Man Who Loved Children should acquire the romantic reputation of a unique masterpiece, especially when it was the only novel of hers in print. The single-minded intensity of its evocation of domestic terror gives it a greater artistic cohesion than Stead’s subsequent work, which tends toward the random picaresque. And Stead permits herself a genuinely tragic resolution. The ravaged harridan, Henny, the focus of the novel, dies in a grand, fated gesture, an act of self-immolation that, so outrageous has been her previous suffering, is almost a conventional catharsis. One feels that all Henny’s previous life has been a preparpation for her sudden, violent departure from it and, although the novel appals, it also, artistically, satisfies, in a way familiar in art. Later, Stead would not let her readers off the hook of life so easily. She won’t allow us the dubious consolations of pity and terror again.
Since Stead went home, she has become more and more known as an Australian writer. This geographical placement is, of course, only right and proper and geographically correct, and contains within it the enticing notion of a specific kind of post-colonial sensibility which might serve as a context for her illusionless power. But only one of her novels has a wholly Australian setting, and that the earliest, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934). Even here, she has already established her characteristic milieu as that of the rootless urban intelligensia, a milieu as international as it is peculiar to our century. Teresa Hawkins in For Love Alone is the only major Australian character in Stead’s later fiction, and Teresa is the most striking of these birds of passage, who sometimes become mercenaries of an ideology, sometimes end up as flotsam and jetsam.
Stead is also one of the great articulators of family life. There is no contradiction here. Stead’s families – the Pollitts in The Man Who Loved Children, the Foxes in Letty Fox: Her Luck, the Hawkinses in For Love Alone, the Cotters of Cotters’ England – are social units that have outlived the original functions of protection and mutual aid and grown to be seedbeds of pathology. These are families in a termin
al state of malfunction, families you must flee from in order to preserve your sanity, families it is criminal folly to perpetuate – and, on the whole, Stead’s women eschew motherhood like the plague. (Stead’s loathing of the rank futility of home and hearth is equalled, in literature, only by that expressed by the Marquis de Sade.) These are degenerated, cannibal families, in which the very sacrament of the family, the communal meal when all are gathered together, is a Barmecide feast at which some family member, wife or child, is on the emotional menu. One characteristic and gruesomely memorable family dinner, with its exaggerated hysteria and elements of high, diabolic farce, is that in Cotters’ England, at which raw chicken and dementia are served. Once away from the nest, Stead’s birds of passage tend to eat in the neutral environments of restaurants – as do the runaway lovers in The Beauties and Furies.
These rancid, cancerous homes may provide a useful apprenticeship in the nature of tyranny (several times in The Man Who Loved Children Stead stresses that children have ‘no rights’ within the family): that is all. The only escape is a plunge into an exponential whirl of furnished rooms, cheap hotels, constant travelling, chance liaisons, the blessed indifference of strangers. Stead’s families, in fact, produce those rootless, sceptical displaced persons she also describes, who have no country but a state of mind, and yet who might, due to their very displacement and disaffection, be able to make new beginnings.
In For Love Alone, we actually see Teresa Hawkins performing this trajectory, from the mutilating claustrophobia of her father’s house – ‘home’ in Stead is almost always the patriarchal cage – into that homelessness which is the prerequisite of freedom. In The Beauties and Furies this process founders. Elvira leaves her husband in London for a lover in Paris, but Elvira is a dreamily narcissistic, emotionally contingent being, who scarcely knows what freedom is and who will, inevitably, return home. (There is a remarkable consistency in Stead. Elvira, the romantic, self-obsessed Englishwoman, of this, one of her earliest novels, has much in common with the Eleanor Herbert of her latest.) But Stead does not direct us to condemn Elvira – nor to pity her. Stead’s greatest moral quality as a novelist is her lack of pity. As Blake said,
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody poor,
and, for Stead, pity is otiose, a self-indulgent luxury that obscures the real nature of our relations with our kind. To disclose that real nature has always been her business. Essentially, she is engaged in the exposition of certain perceptions as to the nature of human society. She does this through the interplay of individuals both with one another and with the institutions that we created but which now seem to dominate us. Marriage; the family; money.
She has, obviously, from the very beginning – her first publication was a collection of short stories modelled on the Decameron – been a writer of almost megalomaniac ambition. The literary project of Louie, the unnatural daughter of The Man Who Loved Children, was to compose for an adored teacher ‘the Aiden cycle . . . a poem of every conceivable form and also every conceivable metre in the English language’, all in Miss Aiden’s praise. This seems the sort of project that would attract Stead herself. Hers may even be the kind of ambition that is nourished by neglect, of which she has received sufficient. (Had people believed Cassandra, she would have known something had gone badly wrong.) To read some of Stead’s more possessed and driven novels – Cotters’ England and A Little Tea, A Little Chat, in particular – is to be reminded of what Blake said about his Bible of Hell: ‘which the world shall have whether they will or no.’ If, as seems the case, we are now ready to accept Stead as one of the great writers of our time, this does not mean the times are going well.
It is possible to be a great novelist – that is, to render a veracious account of your times – and a bad writer – that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics. Like Theodore Dreiser. Conversely, good writers – for example, Borges – often prefer to construct alternative metaphysical universes based on the Word. If you read only the novels Stead wrote after The Man Who Loved Children, it would seem that she belonged to the Dreiser tendency. She patently does not subscribe to any metaphysics of the Word. The work of her maturity is a constant, agitated reflection upon our experience in this world. For her, language is not an end-in-itself in the current, post-modernist or ‘mannerist’ mode, but a mere tool, and a tool she increasingly uses to hew her material more and more roughly. Nor does she see the act of storytelling as a self-reflexive act. Therefore, as a composer of narrative, she can be amazingly slipshod. She will allow careless lapses in continuity. People can change names, parentage, age, occupation from page to page, as though she corrected nothing. They can also slip through holes in the narrative and disappear. Miss Aiden is honoured, arrives for a typically vile family supper with the Pollitts, and is then written out of the script like a soap-opera character with a contract elsewhere. All this would be unforgivable if, in Stead, narrative mattered, much. It does not. Her narrative is almost tachiste: she composes it like a blind man throwing paint against a wall. Her narratives shape themselves, as our lives seem to do.
Interestingly enough, she started her career as a very mannered writer indeed. The Salzburg Tales of 1934 is a collection of glittering, grotesque short fictions, parables and allegories not dissimilar to the Seven Gothic Tales that Isak Dinesen published in the same year. The Salzburg Tales are contrived with a lush, jewelled exquisiteness of technique that recurs in The Beauties and Furies, which first appeared in 1936. At one point in that novel, Coromandel, the antique-dealer’s daughter, recites just such a little Gothic tale, ‘The Story of Hamadryad’. Oliver’s adventures in the Club of the Somnambulists at the end of the novel and the dreams of several of the characters have a similar overblown, highly decorated, romantic extravagance. It is rather unusual for Stead’s characters to dream with quite such abandon – ‘She saw a rod with two headless snakes emerging from a dusky ivory egg . . .’ – and it is tempting to hypothesise some influence from the surrealists, especially since this novel takes place in a Paris that is decidedly Paul Eluard’s capitale de la douleur. And, at this stage, Stead is assimilating influences from every conceivable source. She is a self-consciously brilliant young writer. The Beauties and Furies is evidence of a love-affair with language which produces felicities such as: ‘Not a blade of grass moved and not a bird flew down the perspective of the great water, but, under thickety trees, officers and children skated with coloured cloaks and gloves over a pond. Beyond, dazzling and enchanted, lay the leafless forest.’ Very finely crafted, too, though this love-affair can induce logorrhoea, and the same novel contains much purple: ‘Imprisoned by her marauding hair, she lay, and turned dark, silent eyes upon me.’ And so, on. Fine writing must have come easily to her; roughness, ungainliness, ferocity were qualities for which she had to strive.
In House of All Nations (1938), which comes after The Beauties and Furies, the puppy-fat is already beginning to fall away from the bare bones of Stead’s mature style, and of her mature purpose, for this is a novel straightforwardly about the root of all evil: that is, banking. However, the complications of its plotting recall the Jacobean drama at its most involuted, so that it is quite difficult to tell exactly what is going on. In fact, the elaborately fugal plotting of House of All Nations is beginning to dissolve of its own accord, just because too much is going on, into the arbitrary flux of event that characterises Stead’s later novels. And she is beginning to write, not like a craftsman, but like an honest worker.
At the time of The Man Who Loved Children, she relinquished all the capacity of the language of her narrative to bewitch and seduce. But Sam Pollitt, the father almighty or Nobodaddy of that novel, uses a babbling, improvised, pseudo-language, a sort of Pollitt Creole, full of cant words – ‘cawf’ for coffee, ‘munch-time’, ‘orfus’ – with which to bemuse, delight, and snare his brood. This is the soft, slippery, charming language of seduction itself. Louie invents an utterly opaque but grammatica
lly impeccable language of her own and confronts him with a one-act play in it, acted by her siblings. ‘Mat, rom garrots im.’ (In translation: ‘Mother, father is strangling me.’) Sam is very angry. Louie’s ugly language is vengeance. Stead does not go as far as Louie. Her later style is merely craggy, unaccommodating, a simple, functional, often unbeautiful means to an end, which can still astonish by its directness: ‘With old Mrs Cotter after the funeral, time had been, time was and time might be again, but it was all one time: she knew no difference between the living and the dead.’ So, without pathos or elaboration, she depicts senility in Cotters’ England.
Since she is technically an expressionist writer, in whose books madmen scream in deserted landscapes, a blue light turns a woman into the image of a vampire and a lesbian party takes on the insanely heightened melodrama of a drawing by George Grosz, the effect is the thing, not the language that achieves it. But there is more to it than that. The way she finally writes is almost as if she were showing you by demonstration that style itself is a lie in action, that language is an elaborate confidence trick designed to lull us into acceptance of the intolerable, just as Sam Pollitt uses it on his family, that words are systems of deceit. And that truth is not a quality inherent in any kind of discourse, but a way of looking at things: that truth is not an aspect of reality but a test of reality. So, more and more, Stead concentrates on dialogue, on language in use as camouflage or subterfuge – dialogue, or rather serial monologue, for Stead’s characters rarely listen to one another sufficiently to enable them to conduct dialogues together, although they frequently enjoy rows of a polyphonic nature, in which it is not possible for anybody to hear anybody else. If the storytellers in The Salzburg Tales reveal their personalities through the gnomic and discrete fables they tell, Stead’s later characters thunder out great arias and recitatives of self-deceit, self-justification, attempted manipulation, and it is up to the reader to compare what they say with what they do and draw his or her conclusions as to what is really going on. The monologue is Stead’s forte, dramatic monologues comparable to those of Robert Browning.
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