Victorian Secrets

by Sarah A. Chrisman

  Women of earlier times learned motion in stays from an age when the body learns easily, when acts of motion are not yet set by too much repetition. Victorian girls had training corsets in much the way modern girls have training bras: simpler than their mother’s garments, different in form, but kindred in spirit. Corsets encourage an up-right posture and stable core, adding to the grace of all the motions. However, they are really only the beginning.

  Each Victorian element I added to my wardrobe gave me new insight into the movements of a bygone era, and I came to realize that a Victorian ensemble, taken in its entirety, is an elaborate system of balances and counterbalances, each adding to grace of motion.

  Susan B. Anthony.

  The corset, as I’ve said, was the first step. It held me up proudly, positioned to gaze down upon the world rather than scurry away from it. Next came the heels. Once I’d developed the knack for walking in them, those beautiful, arching ­kitten heels made the ground meet my steps more promptly than a flat foot, encouraging strong, ­purposeful strides. At the same time, they shifted my center of gravity forward. As my motions became more natural and I moved about, graceful and light on the balls of my feet, people started to ask me if I was a dancer. It reminded me more, though, of positions I’d practiced in judo.

  An 1897 Ball’s Child Waist.

  “I can’t think of any sport,” my coach had said, “that’s practiced with your feet flat.” He would instantly spring to a ready position, quick as a tiger. “You’ve got to be fast.”

  I would remember these lessons as I strode about, and I felt confident I could put up a good fight against whatever the world threw at me.

  Wearing a hat brought my head up to hold it in place, and once I started winding my hair into a bun as an anchor for my hatpin, I found my cranium counterbalanced. During college, I had stared so habitually at the ground that I had been in danger of developing an obsession with collecting gutter change. Now, though, my head was high, and I viewed the world from a new perspective.

  By the end of summer, I could slip both arms down inside the front of my twenty-four-inch corset and wave them around. Clearly, my waist was eager to become smaller. My hip bones, however, were at their limit. Below a twenty-four-incher, the next size down in off-the-rack corsets was twenty-two inches—and that one squeezed the flesh against my pelvis so hard that my legs started to go numb in short order. So, I wanted something smaller in the waist and bigger in the hips than anything I could buy ready-made.

  It was time for a custom model.

  Having been overwhelmingly intimidated by the prices I’d encountered in my first researches, I tried to find an alternative. On the Internet, I’d read of a business in Vancouver, Canada, that made custom corsets, and when I contacted the proprietor, I was quoted a very reasonable price and turnaround time—so reasonable, in fact, that she convinced me to order two corsets. She promised that this would make the costs even cheaper, since they would be cut and sewn at the same time.

  I should have gotten her assurances in writing.

  We made an appointment, and Gabriel and I arranged our schedules so that we could drive up to Vancouver. The store was in a part of Vancouver we had never before visited, despite many trips to the area, and it took us a while to find the shop. I experienced my first feelings of misgiving when I saw the dingy storefront window in the run-down neighborhood, but I tried to reassure myself.

  Rent’s pretty high in most of Vancouver—she must be trying to keep costs down. I bet corset-making’s not that lucrative.

  The inside of the store was clean. This reassured me. The handcuffs for sale, on the other hand, did not. The biggest surprise, and the first real moment of doubt, however, came when I saw that the store’s owner, the self-styled corsetière, was not wearing a corset. There had been pictures on her website of her wearing a corset, but it seemed now they had just been for marketing. I thought back on all that wearing a corset twenty-four-seven had taught me—all that I had learned about breathing, movement, history, and poise from wearing corsets, how experience had made me understand them and was continuing to deepen that comprehension.

  How can she make a good corset if she doesn’t wear one herself? It’s a bit like going to a dentist who has no teeth.

  I tried not to dwell on this thought. We had come all the way to a different country for this; I felt I was in too deep to turn back. Besides, the price she had promised was very reasonable. So was the turnaround time she’d pledged. Although, again, I hadn’t gotten anything in writing.

  She took my measurements and I explained very clearly what I wanted, even leaving photocopies of historical corset pictures with elements circled and notes written detailing exactly how the finished product should look. We discussed size, and I specified that the finished corset should have a nineteen-inch waist, but should be roomy in the hips. At that first meeting, the store owner was very friendly. When I handed over a down payment of several weeks’ worth of wages in cash, it felt impolite to ask for a receipt, but some small voice inside me said that receipts are always a good idea. I was later to feel that asking for one was the wisest decision I made that day.

  (I think part of the spur for that internal advice to myself was the fact that, since her original quote, the owner had doubled her initially promised price. She seemed so nice, though, that I tried not to worry about it. I told myself that it was still cheaper than the estimate I’d been given by another business, since this price was in Canadian dollars, and the other had been in American dollars. Later, the quoted price was to be amended yet again—to American dollars, even though this was a Canadian store.)

  Measurements taken, assurances given, and money down, we went back to Seattle with the promise that the store owner would call me when things were ready for a fitting “in a few weeks.” That was the last I was to hear from her for quite some time.

  A few weeks passed.

  And then a few more weeks passed.

  Gabriel started pestering me to call the store.

  “Well,” I said reluctantly, “I don’t want to bug her . . . I’m sure she’s working hard.”

  More time passed.

  Summer started to draw to a close.

  Eventually I heeded Gabriel’s advice and tried to contact the store to schedule my fitting. First I tried emailing. When that met with no response, I bought a phone card so that I could make a long-distance call to Canada. Several international calls later, I learned that the store owner had gone on vacation. No one knew anything about my order.

  Pages fell from the calendar, and squirrels started checking their hoards.

  Finally, when the deadline by which I had been promised the first of my ordered corsets had long since passed, I received a call. She asked me to come in for a fitting, and I made another trip to Vancouver. Another huge chunk of cash was laid down, and I returned home for further waiting.

  When all was said and done, the first corset ran over a month past its promised deadline and was twice the price originally quoted. The second ran three months past due, three times the quoted price, and was still unfinished when I made a third trip to Vancouver. It was structurally done, but was bare white, completely without ornamentation. When placing the order, I had asked that it be flossed (stitching added to support the bones; I had asked for blue flossing to give a little bit of color to the plain white expanse), and this was supposedly included in the initial quote—now already three times higher than it had started. At this last fitting, the owner wanted to double the price yet again (six times her original quote!) to add the flossing. There was a scene in the fitting room that ran very much like something out of a poorly written penny dreadful:

  After she’d had me strip down to nothing but my panties for the fitting, she started screaming at me that she was an artist and I should be grateful to pay whatever she asked for whatever she was willing to make for me. “My corsets are made with love!” she shouted, brandishing a handful of very sharp pins. “And I’m just not feeling
any love from you!”

  If you think love is supposed to come into business transactions, you’ve got a really warped view of business, lady.

  This was ridiculous. Maybe some of her customers reacted favorably to this sort of treatment, but I certainly didn’t. To me, corsets are about Victoriana, not sadomasochism. My idea of proper wrist accessories are jeweled bracelets, not handcuffs.

  She already had the lion’s share of my money, so I paid enough to get a receipt for the unfinished corset and removed it and myself with all possible haste. (I later did the flossing myself. It took me a few hours and five dollars’ worth of thread.) It boggled my mind that the store owner, so friendly and full of promises before she had my money, could have turned into such a harpy after she’d parted me from my cash. The whole experience—which had started out as so much fun when I’d been planning the corset, and into which I’d launched with such bright hopes—seemed sullied, and I spent a great deal of time whinging to Gabriel about it over the subsequent months.

  Besides the time delays and exorbitant price inflations, there were, of course, issues with the corsets themselves. I had requested that the waists be nineteen inches, but the tags read twenty, and when I actually took a measuring tape to them, they proved to be twenty-two. Corset boning is manufactured with smooth, rounded edges, but some of the bones had been snipped short with no finishing. This left sharp, pointed metal edges that eventually punched through the corset lining and cut me in very tender places. To amend this, I had to buy a metal file from the hardware store, file the edges down, and darn up the holes.

  In the end, the best lesson I learned from the whole experience was one I should have known from the beginning: always get everything in writing.

  The 1895 corset, specifically designed for “tall, slim figures.” Price: $2.19.

  13

  The Freedom of the Corset

  Fashion plate, 1890.

  Despite the issues involved, when I finally did get my custom corsets, they were a lovely upgrade from the off-the-rack models. In the first place, they were overbusts: the corset extended sufficiently far up my torso to do away with bras altogether. Instead of being pulled from above by straps, which dragged down my shoulders, my breasts were now supported from below by the structure of the corset. This sudden liberty from brassieres gave an immense feeling of freedom that shocked me. I had never realized how much pressure my bras had put on my shoulders until that pressure was removed. The women in my family were lamentably near the back of the line when nature handed out the gift of breasts, and I am not well endowed. It had never occurred to me that my modest breasts could put strain on my shoulders while my bras dragged me into a poor posture. With this burden suddenly gone, however, I realized how heavy it had been.

  My shoulders were suddenly free—freer, even, than on prior occasions when I had left off a bra and gone completely unsupported. On those occasions, the weight of my breasts had still been pulling on my shoulders, albeit distributed a little more evenly than the point-specific pressure inflicted by a bra. With the overbust corset, though, the weight was completely shifted. The corset carried the whole weight of my breasts and was itself supported by not only the entire muscular structure of my torso (much stronger than the shoulders), but also my hip bones. The weight that had been an unrealized burden on my shoulders became completely negligible when distributed over such a large portion of my body. I was free to cultivate the proud, shoulders-back posture so striking in Victorian ladies—and so much better for the back.

  Another freedom came with corseting, which likewise took me a while to appreciate. My whole adult life, I had fretted about my weight. I had constantly kept tabs on what I ate, attempting to calculate complicated equations of food intake versus exercise output in my head. No matter how old I grew, some part of me was still that fat girl from high school who sat at home during dances. At the same time, I had been very close to a number of people with eating disorders and was even more terrified of going down that path. Meals were a constant internal battlefield of warring insecurities: If I eat this, will I get fat? If I don’t eat it, will I develop an eating disorder?

  One day after I had been corseting for several months, I came home very hungry for lunch, my mind fighting itself in the old debate. What should I eat? How much should I eat? If I eat “x” will I get fat? If I get fat my clothes won’t fit . . .

  Then, suddenly I had an epiphany. Wearing the corset had made all these questions obsolete. It was no longer a matter of biology, but of simple physics: my stomach could not expand past the diameter of my corset. If I started the day with my corset at twenty-eight, or twenty-four, or twenty inches, as long as I did not loosen it, I would have the exact same measurement at the end of the day, no matter what I ate or what I did in the interim. I could eat until I was full at every meal; my stomach got full faster with the pressure of the corset on it, and it would not allow my stomach to grow beyond its boundaries—boundaries I set whenever I tied my laces. I could eat ice cream—or cubes of butter, for that matter—until I gave myself stomachaches, but my waist would not change.

  I cannot adequately express how freeing this realization was. Years of insecurities and worries suddenly lost all force, like chains that prove to be made of paper. Knowing that I had complete control of the exact form I wished my body to take—not by some abstract equation of constantly changing variables, but by an actual physical means that I dictated absolutely—was freedom beyond measure. All the world’s weight loss products, scams and schemes, diets, programs, the billions of dollars spent by people desperate to throw money away on ineffective treatments, all seemed suddenly very frivolous. To be free of all that, joyously free, and know beyond a doubt that I had absolute control of my own body: that was the freedom the corset gave, and that freedom alone would have been worth the wearing.

  An 1890 fashion plate.

  Me, before I started wearing a corset.

  Winter visiting dress, circa 1890s.

  Custom corset.

  Portrait taken in the Suzzallo Library.

  Gabriel at a presentation.

  Gabriel and I put in an appearance at the State Capital Museum in Olympia.

  I get stopped by a photographer en route to the State Capital Museum.

  The 2009 Port Townsend Victorian Festival.

  An example of the amazing Victorian architecture of Port Townsend, Washington.

  Independence Day 2009: My last day on crutches after I had broken my foot. I hid the crutches behind my back when Gabriel said he wanted to take a picture: if you look closely, you can see one of them peeping out below my skirt.

  Half-in/half-out of an era: Victorian-style gray wool skirt paired with a modern sweater pinned in the back.

  Reading at the Better Living Through Coffee cafe in Port Townsend, while everyone else engages with technology.

  Back to the future: Contemplating the DeLorean.

  Preparing for presentations.

  Writing the text for this book.

  Portrait of me modeling Edouard Manet’s Nana, painted by artist Frances Gace.

  A presentation on the history of cycling at Port Townsend’s 2013 Victorian Festival.

  We show off our bikes.

  Gabriel learns to ride a high-wheel bicycle.

  14

  Objections

  A Widow and Her Friends (1901). A Charles Dana Gibson drawing poking fun at the differing attitudes displayed toward a woman’s behavior. The title of the piece is “Some think that she has remained in retirement too long, others are surprised that she is about so soon.”

  Due to my broken foot, we had been involved in relatively few social activities throughout the summer. After I’d regained the ability to wear high heels and the weather turned cool, we received another invitation from the group of historical costumers we had met in the springtime. They were holding a workshop on the history of corsets, and I was tremendously eager to attend. (Gabriel wasn’t allowed to come, as it was specifically lim
ited to women only.) I sent in my RSVP and hoped that one of my custom corsets would arrive in time to wear it. The first did—barely—reaching me by mail the day before the event. The morning of the workshop, Gabriel helped me into the new corset. He left it somewhat loose at my request, since I had a significant bike ride ahead of me to get to the workshop’s location at a group member’s private home. I tied the ribbons I had added to the waist of an old dress to cinch it in and hopped on my bike to ride the 11.88 miles to the event location.

  Sun sparkled on the waters of Lake Washington as I skirted around its perimeter. Road conditions were perfect for riding, and I arrived a bit early. After locating what I believed to be the proper address, I knocked on the door but, receiving no response, sat down on the steps and waited.

  Ladies’ riding outfits, for horse and cycle, circa 1889. In the high-wheeler days of the 1880s, women preferred tricycles like the one seen in this fashion plate to the penny-farthing bicycles that men rode. When the safety bicycle (with its two same-size wheels and more modern look) boomed in popularity in the 1890s, its use was eagerly adopted by riders of both sexes.