Catherine De Medici began a fashion for scented or “sweet” gloves when she married into the French Court. Gloves scented with pomegranate, orange blossom, violets, etc. made a practical as well as attractive gift. They were not only used to mask personal smells but also to cover the horrible scent of the leather itself, thanks to a fairly gross tanning process. Catherine was so hated by the French people, who spread rumours about her being a sorceress and a murderer, that everything she did—even making gloves smell better—was interpreted as dangerous and sinister.
So of course, when her enemy, Queen Jeanne of Navarre, died not long after receiving a pair of scented gloves from Catherine, guess who was blamed? Modern historians now believe tuberculosis was a far more likely cause of Jeanne’s death, but a glamorous fairy tale involving a foreign woman and poison is always going to capture public imagination. In this case, the rumour that Catherine had murdered her daughter Margaret’s future mother-in-law only weeks before the wedding fueled a wave of civic unrest that led to the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Massacre.
When Alexandre Dumas wrote up the story years later in his novel Queen Margot, he included the poisoned gloves story as a fact. Why would he not? It’s a great story, now preserved forever in fiction and myth as well as rumour.
Speaking of made-up facts, one of the most common hits you get when searching for stories about poisoned dresses is the movie Elizabeth (starring Cate Blanchett), based on the life of Elizabeth I. Sadly, this awesome scene in the film is one of the made-up bits and not one of the ‘real history’ bits. But, once again, it’s a great story.
Like in history, myth, and fairy tale, fantasy fiction is rife with poison. From iocane powder in The Princess Bride all the way through to modern books like Sam Hawke’s City of Lies and Claire Luana’s The Confectioner’s Guild (based on a poisoned cupcake!) we do love a juicy dose of something toxic. But what about deaths caused by clothes in our SFF? I’ll admit, I struggled to find a wide range of examples.
Poisoned or deadly crowns are a popular trope, found in the works of Kristine Kathryn Rusch (a lead character is assassinated with a crown dipped in holy water) and in the cartoon Adventure Time, where the Ice King’s tragic backstory involves a cursed crown that destroyed his memory and replaced his personality. (There’s also the death of Viserys in A Song of Ice and Fire involving a crown of gold that turned out to be…either more metaphorical or more literal than he expected.)
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is full of examples of sinister clothing, largely because this is a world where stories and myths take on literal power, so a crown might easily start putting ideas in your head. In Sourcery, the Archchancellor’s hat is actually an antagonist in the story, an idea that is later used to great effect in the children’s TV series Yonderland, with a wig. Also in the Discworld, one of the teachers at the Guild of Assassins has enough poison rings on her fingers to ‘inhume’ a small town…
In Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, we get a modern re-interpretation of the death of Heracles, with a t-shirt soaked in centaur blood…that causes hives in the wearer rather than death, because this is a children’s story.
In Lois McMaster Bujold’s Winterfair Gifts, a string of fake pearls prove to be poisonous…and in Harry Potter, there are all manner of deadly jewellery examples, from the cursed necklace used in an attempt on Dumbledore’s life, to the various Horcruxes that are wearable. Back to ASoIaF/Game of Thrones, and Sansa Stark finds herself an unwitting accomplice to murder when poison is smuggled into a wedding banquet in a bead of her hairnet (and in the TV show, a necklace).
Clothes in fantasy fiction, myths, and fairy tales often take on symbolic significance. They represent magic and beauty and transformation: the right gown can turn a maid into a princess, and it takes a crown or a ring or a lost slipper to prove identity.
So many classic stories turn on the idea that it’s a shocking revelation that something beautiful could in fact be horrible or deadly—because of course, there’s that toxic idea built into the bones of so many cultures that prettiness and ‘perfection’ must be inherently virtuous.
Poison, or other deadly consequences, concealed in clothing (especially women’s clothing) carries a certain narrative weight, not because we don’t expect it, but because we have been trained by ancient myths and stories to look for danger behind the glamour.
My first instinct is always to challenge the ways that women are criticised historically. So I was quite prepared to defend those ignorant young ladies with their giant, bright-green frocks when I began my research. I assumed this particular historical trend was a bewildering glimpse into how humans so often keep doing whatever they want despite knowing it is bad for them. But the more I delved into the subject, the more I learned about the suffering of the factory workers and the dressmakers—and most importantly of all, that people kept buying and distributing these garments, knowing of the dangers—I start to wonder if the cartoons of beautifully dressed skeletons had it right the first time. This was not a case of tragic irony: pretty thing is actually poison. Everyone knew: from the media and doctors through to the government itself. It took several decades of mockery, medical advice, and the protest action of women’s groups for the use of arsenic green to finally fall out of fashion in Victorian England…and a full 34 years after the death of Matilda Scheurer for the British government to regulate against the use of arsenic in clothing, long after France and Germany passed legislation to deal with this ongoing health risk.
Perhaps, after all, the wearers of those frocks felt that dancing on the edge of death (not their own death, naturally!) merely added to their beauty.
“Now if the ladies will persist in wearing arsenic dresses, a ball will be as deadly and destructive as a cannon ball, and nearly everyone who dances will be food for (arsenic) powder.”Punch, November 1862.
REFERENCES:
Alison Matthews David, Fashion Victims: the Dangers of Dress Past and Present
Kat Eschner, “Arsenic and Old Tastes Made Victorian Wallpaper Deadly,” Smithsonian Magazine
Francesca Scantlebury, “Catherine De Medici’s Scented Gloves, Costume Society,” http://costumesociety.org.uk/blog/post/catherine-de-medicis-scented-gloves
Jennifer Wright, “The History of Green Dye is a History of Death,” Racked.com https://www.racked.com/2017/3/17/14914840/green-dye-history-death
© 2021 Tansy Rayner Roberts
Tansy Rayner Roberts was the first Australian woman to win a Hugo Award. Her fiction titles include Musketeer Space, Tea & Sympathetic Magic, and the Creature Court trilogy, and she also writes murder mysteries under the pen-name Livia Day. Her latest non fiction book release is From Baby Brain To Writer Brain: Writing Through A World Of Parenting Distractions (Brain Jar Press). You can hear Tansy on the Verity! podcast, and subscribe to her newsletter: https://tinyurl.com/tansyrr
Seduced by the Ruler’s Gaze: An Indian Perspective on Seth Dickinson’s Masquerade
by Sid Jain
There is a scene quite early in The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson that I vividly remember reading. It was 2015 and I was finishing my graduate degree at North Carolina State University. In the scene, the titular Baru has just been accepted to the new colonial school on her island:
They know so much, Baru thought. I must learn it all. I must name every star and sin, find the secrets of treaty-writing and world-changing. Then I can go home and I will know how to make Solit [one of her fathers] happy again.
I felt so seen. I was always a curious child: I participated in quiz contests, math Olympiads, and one summer I hand-copied three encyclopedias cover to cover for fun. Like Baru, I had to learn it all.
Finally, a protagonist experiencing what I really experienced as a post-colonial immigrant student. Hungry for knowledge, for knowledge offered to me because of my talents by the “civilized West.” Knowledge that I might use to make my parents back home happy. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dickinson for giving me this moment.
&nb
sp; Years later, after having read more deeply about British colonial education in mid-19th century India, I reread the scene and a different moment stood out to me, horrific in its plain speak:
“Lands around the Ashen Sea,” Farrier said, smiling conspiratorially at Baru. “New sorts of arithmetic and algebra. Astronomy—we have an excellent telescope, built by the Stakhieczi in the distant north. Science and the disciplines within it, Various catalogues”—his smile held—“of sin and social failure. The Imperial Republic is determined to help those we meet.”
“No,” father Solit said, taking her shoulder. “Your help is a fishhook.”
The life of Baru is all too familiar to Indians. Even for those like me, growing up in a country half a century past when the last British ship sailed away.
Baru, a precocious islander girl is mentored by a Masquerade agent, Cairdine Farrier, who has come to subdue her homeland. Her eyes are opened by the vast technocratic Empire of Masks to the wider world outside her tiny island through a state-sponsored education. The school teaches her to treat her island’s traditions as primitive compared to the enlightened imperial scholarship. The internal struggle between absorbing all knowledge the colonizer has to offer while giving as little of yourself to him as possible, willingly or not.
The actions of the characters in this series are a light shining on real history, illuminating the actions of historical figures whose influence still lingers over an education system that had an enrollment of 230 million students in 2013. There is a dotted line between the depiction of colonial education in the Masquerade series, British education policies in 19th century India, and my schooling in a British Raj-era founded school.1
It was only after finishing the third book in the series, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, that I could recontextualize my education experience in a way that finally dislodged centuries-old cultural conditioning for me.
In The Ruler’s Gaze by Aravind Sharma, a study of the British rule over India from a Saidian perspective, Sharma writes of the British view on the social development of nations in the mid-19th century:
According to [John Stuart] Mill, “The state of different communities in point of culture and development, ranges downwards to a condition very little above the highest beasts.”
[…]
[Such] Change elsewhere [outside Anglo-Saxon Europe] could only be induced; there was no internal dynamic to support it, but it needed a ‘government of leading strings.’
[…]
History was Geography. But history could be made in the sense that the people can be trained by advanced nations to similarly advance, and once the Indians had been sufficiently trained, ‘their claim to freedom would be irresistible.’
These views would not be out of place in the mouth of Cairdine Farrier and the Imperial teachers imported to teach native children. Baru describes the education that the Masquerade provides:
She went into the school, with her own uniform and her own bed in the crowded dormitory, and there in her first class on Scientific Society and Incrasticm she learned the words sodomite and tribadist and social crime and sanitary inheritance, and even the mantra of rule: order is preferable to disorder. There were rhymes and syllogisms to learn, the Qualms of revolutionary philosophy, readings from a child’s version of the Falcresti Handbook of Manumission.
Incrasticism, under the heavy veil of rational thought, is the Masquerade’s religion and the Handbook is its Bible. Through the mediums of their schools and courts, the Masquerade remade the social fabric of Baru’s island. Through the forceful application of Incrastic lessons and law, the more progressive social practices of Baru’s island were primitivized and rendered illegal.
Primitivization of a colonized culture was a tactic perfected by the British statesmen-academics of the 1840s.2 Sharma writes, “If a clear case could not be made for exalting yourself as civilized and the other as primitive, the other must be primitivized—repeatedly and vociferously.”
Then, once the native practices have been broken down as primitive, the colonizer creates whole-cloth a new morality for their subjects based on their own philosophy, often with a heavy religious undertone. The Masquerade’s technique of stigmatizing native heritage is paralleled in the use of Christianity by the British in India as a covert vehicle for ‘civilizing’ their subjects. While the criminalization of ‘sodomy’ is something the British implemented in 19th century India as well, they focused on other labels to forcefully primitivize their subjects: the words idolator and heathen.
Sharma quotes Thomas Babington Macaulay, a Farrier-like British historian-statesman who worked extensively on the British education project in India in the early 1800s and upon returning to Britain served as a Secretary at War. Macaulay was something of a savant as well—having written an essay on converting ‘heathens’ to Christianity at the age of eight. During the parliamentary discussion for the English Education Act of 1835, Macaulay circulated a famous memorandum called A Minute Upon Indian Education, in which he said:
No Hindoo who receives an English education ever continues to be sincerely attached to his religion… It is my firm belief that, if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes thirty years hence. And this will be effected without any effort to proselytize, without the smallest interference with religious liberty, merely by the natural operation of knowledge and reflection. I heartily rejoice at the prospect.
How can I explain what learning of this grand design makes me feel?
I was never the most excited about Hindu festivals or eager to go to temples with my family. I’ve called myself an atheist ever since my mother explained to me karma would not take care of my kindergarten bully. Intentionally disconnecting myself from Hindu traditions made me feel enlightened and self-aware. Like I was making a modern-eyed choice to rebel from my traditions.
Like Baru, I found myself confronting the fact that I may just be acting out Macaulay’s will from beyond his grave. An agent in his grand design fooled by choice. How many of my choices were constrained by the circumstances of my education, the foundations of which were laid so long ago?
Colonialism always leaves in its wake a chaotic admixture that never neatly purifies into layers of sin and virtue. The Masquerade series, the story that helped me decolonize my mind, is written by a white American author. The Indian Railways, pride of a new nation in motion, was built to loot her natural wealth. Hindu nationalists, descended from the group that assassinated Gandhi, have twisted the dynamic Hindu religion into a conservative, racist system of control over minorities, not unlike what the British had tried to do with Christianity to the Hindus in the 19th century.
Institutions born in colonial times made inescapable sacrifices and concessions that will always tar their reputation. Baru too, learns this lesson well. As she embarks on her journey to tear down the colonial apparatus of the Masquerade, she will commit atrocities that will always haunt her.
Modern School, the first private coed school in New Delhi, was built to teach “a blend of traditional Indian values and English education” during the British Raj in 1920, around the time when compulsory mass education laws were being placed in statute books across the states of British India. Alongside public schools built and run by the British and foreign mission-based schools that received grants from the government, The Modern School was a new type of private school, funded by the landed gentry who created it and sustained by tuition from its aristocratic pupils.
The founder, Lala Raghubir Singh, was an Indian aristocrat whose father was an Imperial Accountant (not unlike Baru herself!). He built the school with the help of builder Sir Sobha Singh, a man known as “the owner of half of Delhi” due to his extensive holdings, and a noted British sympathizer.
At Modern School, I received the same excellent education that my father and his siblings received before me. Modern School counts among its graduates Indian Prime Ministers, influential businessmen, and Olympic sports stars
. When I was young, my father taught me how it was natural to feel pride at others’ achievements, only because we had worn the same blue uniform. The golden class-conscious shine reflected from their glory was always ours to bask in.
Modern School was a favored center of education for both British and Indian aristocracy. Going to a school so great it was deemed fit to teach British children manifested an easy aristocratic arrogance among aspirational middle-class students like me. Growing up in a country that no longer recognized the titles of princelings, we settled on miming aristocratic behavior in the patter of our foreign vacation accents and fixation with being an elite studying at an elite school.
Despite its parallel Indian nationalist leanings (nothing built under a colonial gaze remains pure) Modern School provided an education that worked to justify the colonizer’s intellectual superiority, its own existence, in turn, justified by the colonizer’s approval. An ouroboros catering to the white gaze.
Aphalone is the language of the Masquerade, and they don’t waste any time ensuring it becomes the de facto language for trade, education, and exchange across the seas of their colonial enterprise:
Mother had a new book in her collection, bound in foreign leather. From the first page—printed in strange regular blocks, impersonal and crisp—she sounded out the title: A Primer in Aphalone, the Imperial Trade Tongue; Made Available to the People of Taranoke for their Ease.
Later, when at eighteen Baru takes the oath of citizenship and departs on her Imperial assignment:
They aren’t coming, Baru thought, her throat dry. They’re too angry with me. I wrote—maybe I wrote the letter in Aphalone, and didn’t notice, and they couldn’t read it—”
Uncanny Magazine Issue 39 Page 17