Victorian Secrets

by Sarah A. Chrisman

  The smallest quantity in which the silk tulle could be purchased was by the quarter yard. (Naturally, small pieces had a higher cost per square inch, but I didn’t need much.) I wrote to the supplier and placed an order for one quarter yard of green silk tulle to make a veil for my smaller hat and half a yard of navy blue to go over my larger one.

  In a twist that emphasized exactly how small-scale the seller of this fabric was, my order was delayed for a week due to an unspecified “family crisis.” I couldn’t help reflecting upon how the mighty had fallen: a material that had once been a major industry had shrunk to such a niche market that the problems of a single family could render it unavailable. Thinking back on the entire wall of nylon tulle I had seen the last time I visited a fabric store, I blamed the rise of synthetics.

  When veiling material did come, I quickly decided it was worth the price, as well as the wait. The synthetic tulle I had used in my wedding petticoat was so sharp I had needed to underlay it with an extra skirt of satin because I feared the tulle’s unkind edges would snag my stockings. That artificial tulle had borne the same resemblance to this material that a plastic pool toy does to the water lilies floating upon Monet’s ponds at Giverny.

  If Arachne had met with Iris, the rainbow goddess, after Athena turned the presumptuous weaver into a spider, the resultant web might have been something like this material. Soft as a kitten’s breath, it lay on my hands with the weight of a butterfly come to rest, like a mist that swirled around me without intrusion. I lifted it up and watched its fey dance upon the air, laughing with delight.

  I was beyond nervous as I cut the veils to shape, but they were simple to tack onto my hats. It felt a bit like the sensation of walking through a spider’s web: light, unhindering, but present. The first time I wore one of them, it took very little time for me to comprehend the meaning of a “veiled glance.” My eyes wanted to half-close against it, and my lashes fluttered on demurely lowered lids. It took some acclimation, but I came to enjoy the soft feeling against my cheeks, like a flutter of butterfly kisses.

  Not long after the addition of veils to my hats, I visited a public street fair. Since crowds get so dense at these sorts of public gatherings, I’m afforded a bit more of an opportunity to hear comments meant to be private asides. One of my favorites was a little girl who, tugging at her mother’s hand and pointing at me, called out, “Mommy! Look at her face! Mommy, look at her hair!” The adorable little thing had never seen a veil before.

  I folded back the silk tulle from my hat and smiled at the little girl. “Hello.” I gently waved a gloved hand at her. She hid behind her mother’s legs, then peeked out shyly. “I like your butterfly,” I told her, referring to a brightly colored picture painted on her cheek. She hid behind her mother’s pants once more, but I saw a smile on her face before it disappeared.

  Further on, a youth of about nineteen or so did a full arm-swing point at my waist, his hand starting at the level of his sideways baseball cap, then diving down parallel to his baggy pants. “Yo, man! That’s some old-school shit there!” I couldn’t help laughing.

  Since I started wearing a veil, Muslim women smile at me a lot more. Actually, the increase in approving grins by women in head scarves started when I began wearing ankle-length skirts and long sleeves; the addition of veils ­simply took it up a notch. I can never quite decide whether this is appropriate or ironic.

  Nearly everything I’ve ever read about Middle Easterners coming to America for the first time makes a point of discussing the culture shock they feel at seeing how much skin is visible on Western women in public. Modesty of female dress in Muslim countries is a popular topic of discussion in both ­politics and media. (When I lived in France as a visiting university student, there was heated debate over whether certain traditional Muslim garments should be banned in public.)

  My Victorian-style clothes protect nearly all my skin; nonetheless, I really would not call them modest. They cover, but they do not conceal. My cotton blouse covers my arms to the wrists, but it is so tight over the torso that it requires hooks and eyes between the buttons to prevent the latter from popping off due to the strain. I’ve owned spandex shirts that didn’t fit me as snugly. My wool skirt falls in long folds from my hips, but it traces and accentuates those hips in a way of which trousers can only fantasize, and it’s held corset-tight against my waistline, showing off my body in several senses of the term.

  Various religions have specifications regarding ways to cover the body in public, but I was fairly surprised when certain people started assuming my clothing must have a religious basis. Some will query through an entire index of theological possibilities, each more inappropriate than the last. Are you a Jehovah’s Witness? No. Are you a Mennonite? No. Are you Amish? The Amish call themselves the “Plain People”; what exactly about what I’m wearing strikes you as plain?

  If there truly is a world religion somewhere in the globe whose canons require the wearing of corsets, I would be genuinely curious to hear the details of it. Mostly, such inquiries just reflect the questioner’s deep-seated ignorance about diverse beliefs. The pathos inspired by such cultural denseness is generally moderated by a bit of amusement, which is fortunate for my temper and sanity, although it would be impolitic to show it.

  One of my Mormon friends was flabbergasted when I told him of how, a few hours earlier, a drunken frat boy had seen me crossing a parking lot and started screaming, “Look, it’s a Mormon! A Mormon! Mormon!” Over and over again while pointing at me.

  Hearing the story, my Mormon friend stared at me. “Why?”

  I shrugged, chuckling. “Some people think I dress the way I do because of a religion.”

  “But why—” My cat jumped into my friend’s blue-jeaned lap and started pawing at his T-shirt. “—that one?”

  I rolled my eyes, shaking my head at the same time. “Why any of them?”

  Pretty Kitty, whose own favorite form of evangelism (especially in warm weather) was the gospel of “Spreading the Fur,” moved on to indoctrinate Gabriel. My atheist husband gave her a few quick pats and then set her back onto the floor.

  “Why is it so hard for people to grasp that people can have deep-rooted convictions that have nothing to do with religion?” he asked.

  I laughed. “I wouldn’t exactly call wearing a corset a ‘deeply rooted conviction’!”

  “You believe people should have the right to wear what they want,” Gabriel replied. “And you have a strong belief in the importance of history, don’t you?”

  “Well yeah, but that’s different from religion.”

  “I don’t think it is.”

  I like to tease Gabriel that history is his religion. Certainly he spends as much time poring over arcane texts as many theological scholars, and more than most casual religious devotees. He likes to point out that a person can have deep-seated faith in something without involving supernatural beings; and he prefers to base his ideas about truth on documented evidence and historical examples rather than on scriptures and deities.

  I have my own ideas about divinities that differ from those of my husband; however, I do agree with him that history is important and worthy of respect, that it is something that deserves to be taken seriously. This shared respect is the reason why we both inwardly shudder at falsehoods. It is why we refuse to play along with stereotypes we know to be inaccurate, even if we sometimes maintain silence through them for the sake of diplomacy. It is also why, when the opportunity arises, we enjoy imparting truth and educating people.

  Fashion plate.

  23

  Crisis for Beauty

  An 1890 fashion plate showing women sharing sweets.

  Whenever we heard of a new exhibit about the history of clothing, hope would spring eternal that the interpretations would be based around primary-source data, rather than simply regurgitating secondary-source stereotypes. Admittedly, when we learned of one titled “Suffer for Beauty,” our hopes did not spring very high, but we reasoned that we
should at least give it a chance.

  The exhibit did provide some entertainment, if only because it appealed to our sense of the ironic. There is something intensely amusing about labels that describe women in photographs as oppressed or tortured when the women themselves beam out from the sepia tones with bright expressions of joyful vigor.

  When we came to an electrical device in the corner, my eyes grew very wide. I glanced over at Gabriel, then riveted my eyes back on the display as I asked in a low undertone, “Is that what I think it is?”

  My husband was grinning from ear to ear. “Yep! Definitely.” He chuckled. “We knew they were a Victorian invention.”

  “Well . . . yeah . . .” We had actually watched a documentary (checked out from the University of Washington’s library) about such devices only a few days previously. This model was even quite similar to one that had been shown in the educational film.

  “But . . .” I looked at the sign near the door proclaiming the exhibit’s “Suffer for Beauty” title, the modern interpretive labels with their sensationalist claims of how torturous historic beauty regimes had been. “It doesn’t exactly fit in with their thesis, does it?”

  It was a vibrator.

  I glanced over to where a lump-shaped baby boomer was regarding a measuring tape that had been shaped into a circle at the eighteen-inch mark. “Can you imagine?” she was asking, shaking her head. “How awful!”

  “I suppose someone who’s never worn a corset might be willing to believe what they’re told about them, but . . .” I let my thought hang in the air for a second, my voice was barely above a whisper. I gestured toward the device, which had been invented for the explicit purpose of relieving female tension. “A vibrator?”

  I wasn’t even whispering now, just mouthing the words, but it was easy enough for my husband to read my lips under the circumstances. “How could anyone think that equated with suffering?!” I asked him.

  A lesbian couple came up behind us and looked curiously at the exhibit. The older of the two cocked her head at the vibrator, gave her partner a milder version of my own incredulous expression, then looked back at the device. “Now, what do you suppose. . . ?”

  Gabriel, ever the helpful historian, chirped up. “It’s a vibrator!” he told them in his most academically cheerful tone.

  The women laughed, then nodded at each other. “Well, I thought so,” said the older one, “but then I thought, ‘Nah, couldn’t be!’”

  “No, it is,” Gabriel confirmed.

  Whatever my expectations had been when I’d left home that morning, I certainly had not anticipated discussing vibrators with a couple of lesbians in the middle of a museum. Truly, one never knows where educational paths might lead.

  The vibrator is a marvelous representative case of an item whose dates invite reanalysis of the perceived prudishness of the Victorians. The electromechanical vibrator was invented in 1883 and was specifically adopted by physicians to bring about what they termed a “crisis” to alleviate female tension. Personal electronic vibrators for home use followed as home electricity became more common, and the personal electronic vibrator actually pre-dated the electric iron by ten years, the vacuum cleaner by nine years, and the electric frying pan by more than eleven years.50 (This timeline makes a rather interesting challenge to the idea that the Victorians considered housework a higher priority than sex!) As “catalogue culture” swept the nation and items became available for purchase through the postal system, companies such as Sears, Roebuck & Company started selling vibrators via the convenience of mail order. It wasn’t until fairly late in the twentieth century that certain states (Texas, Virginia, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) legally banned the sale of vibrators. One might pose the question: Which time period was more prudish—the one that invented the vibrator or the one that banned it?

  The query is, perhaps, an unfair one; I do not believe that any given generation or culture is truly either more or less prudish than any other. (If that were honestly the case, certain societies would cease altogether.) Humans are mammals, with all the biological imperatives that implies, and those drives do not change from one generation to the next. A more reasonable question then becomes: Why does modern society think the Victorians were repressed?

  Certainly, the monarch who gave the society her name was no prude. Queen Victoria was a great admirer of male beauty, and historian A. N. Wilson goes so far as to call her “highly sexed.”51 So, why does the 1999 Oxford American Thesaurus of Current English list “Victorian” amongst the synonyms for “prudish”?

  Perhaps part of the answer lies in a common condition: few people enjoy pondering the sexual congresses of their own grand-parents. Logic dictates it must have happened at least once, but most people really do not like to think about it. Attaching the couple involved with the label of prudish makes it easier to push the image out of one’s mind. However, this is really too simple of an explanation to be credible on its own, so what other contributing factors are involved?

  Misunderstanding of culture might be part of it. Modern American culture associates sex with skin: the more epidermis is shown, the sexier an image is generally considered. (Pornographic films are even colloquially known as “skin flicks.”) Yet to the Victorians, luxurious clothing and sumptuous materials were considered sexy. Some of the most alluring sounds in the nineteenth-century world were the rustle of silk and the creak of whalebone; and cheap romance stories of the nineteenth century often give accounts of characters’ clothing in detail verbose enough to rival twenty-first-century romance novels’ descriptions of breasts and buttocks. A twenty-first-century American, seeing a figure clad chin to toe in velvet, might see a prude, while a Victorian seeing a woman wearing only a few torn threads might see a pauper.

  It might be appropriate to briefly address a shift that has taken place in people’s preference in erogenous zones. Some people wouldn’t even think to list the waist among these sexual zones any more, but in the nineteenth century, it was one of the most erotic spots on the female form. Breasts had a stronger association with motherhood, but the waist—the waist was exciting. In one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century, a woman describes how she would have seduced a man in her youth, starting with her waist: “If I was a young woman still, I might say, ‘Come, put your arm round my waist, and kiss me, if you like.’ . . . and you would have accepted my invitation—you would, sir!” 52

  There is also the issue of a private life versus a public one to consider. The Victorians placed a significantly higher value on privacy than do modern Americans; in all likelihood because—modern concerns notwithstanding—it was a rare commodity for them. For a Victorian of either sex to occupy an entire dwelling place by his or her self was unusual, and quarters could often be quite cramped. (Lascivious modern interpreters have been known to make a great deal of fuss over references to Abraham Lincoln sleeping with other men while traveling, but the reality of the matter is that sharing bed space in such circumstances was fairly common. Rich and upper-middle-class married couples could have private bedrooms as a sign of affluence, but in the poorest classes, entire large families were known to share a single bed.) Gabriel and I had spent a significant amount of time discussing the ways in which helping each other dress must have affected people’s relationships; the privacy issues in a culture where the highest-paid servants had intimate knowledge of their employers’ semi-nude forms must have been very interesting indeed.

  From A Widow and Her Friends (1901).Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson.

  The matter of hidden intimacies versus public display was in the back of my mind one day when a triflingly minor mischance brought it back to my attention. I was switching places with another student in my massage class, and as she removed her own linens from her bag, I noticed the clinging crackle of recently laundered items. She flicked one of the sheets open and something the electric dryer had evidently Velcroed to it via static fell loose: a small bit of polyester satin and
pink lace. She gave a nervous little giggle, then glanced to her left and right before grabbing her underpants off the floor where they had fallen. It occurred to me that in the nineteenth century, clothing of all sorts would have been visible to the public on any sunny laundry day. Indoor drying racks existed (I own an antique example myself) and were certainly useful for rainy days and during freezing weather, but conducting the entirety of washing and drying a large family’s laundry indoors is a cramped process, to say the least.

  The only way to maintain privacy in such settings was by setting up mental screens where no physical ones existed, to engage in self-discipline and actively not do certain things. Staring at the neighbors’ damp underwear was ­unacceptable. (Yes, of course it happened; but society agreed that it should not.) Groping an employer’s buttocks while fastening buttons just a few ­millimeters away from them? To use a Victorian phrase, “My dear, it was simply not done!” ­Overfamiliarity with a stranger or an acquaintance while sharing sleeping arrangements at an inn was likewise “simply not done!” These constant choices to act with decorum were ways people protected themselves and each other; they were mores that guarded privacy in a world where it could have been ­easily invaded.

  Despite many modern fears about invasion of privacy, we actually have far more of this commodity than our recent ancestors did. Private quarters are significantly more common, and certainly private beds are taken for granted for all but lovers. Imagine the scandal that would ensue if a modern candidate for public office were to share sleeping arrangements with a political partner! Even siblings complain if they are expected to share a bed beyond a fairly young age. (Current Washington State law not only legally requires that a foster child have a private bed, but furthermore goes into great detail about the parameters of that bed and of the room where the child sleeps.53 Any private bed, regardless of parameters, would have been a tremendous luxury to a foster child in the Victorian era, never mind the room.)