THE LANGUAGE OF DRESS IN THE NEW WOMAN NOVEL

By

KATHRYN IRENE MOODY

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. William R. Siebenschuh

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

August, 2011

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of

Kathryn Irene Moody

candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree *.

(signed) William R. Siebenschuh (chair of the committee)

Kurt Koenigsberger

T. Kenny Fountain

Mary E. Davis

(date) 7/13/2011

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

i

Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... ii

Acknowledgements ...... iii

Abstract ...... iv

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1

Aesthetic Dress and the Painted Heroine ...... 11

Chapter 2

The Tea Gown: “Perhaps More than You Think” ...... 43

Chapter 3

The Tailor-Made Girl ...... 80

Chapter 4

Knicksies, Kicksies, Rational Dress: The New Woman as Anti-Actress ...... 120

Conclusion ...... 165

Bibliography ...... 182

ii

List of Figures

Figure 1. Jane Morris photographed by D. G. Rossetti ...... 13

Figure 2. May Day by Kate Greenaway ...... 17

Figure 3. Tea gown with Watteau train ...... 44

Figure 4. “Garment No. 5” ...... 73

Figure 5. Tailor-made gowns by Spice Box ...... 81

Figure 6. Ladies Jacket with military braid by James Thomson...... 92

Figure 7. “Costumes at Oneida” ...... 126

Figure 8. Advertisement for Marie Lloyd‟s “Salute My Bicycle” ...... 128

Figure 9. Illustration of Jessie Milton in “rationals” by J. Ayton Symington ...... 133

iii

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my dissertation director, William Siebenschuh, for taking on my project and for guiding me through the process of presenting my argument. In addition, I would like to thank the members of my committee, T. Kenny Fountain, Mary

Davis, and in particular, Kurt Koenigsberger, who introduced me to the New Woman novel. All of my professors at Case have been crucial in shaping my academic persona and, consequently, this dissertation.

Gabriel Rieger‟s advice, editing, and experience have been invaluable to this process. Jared and Andrea Moody helped me obtain rare and vital resources. Linda

Moody scanned images. Eleanor Traster provided emotional and financial support for my long education, as well as an early example of a pants-wearing woman. Special thanks to Margaret Rieger, the perfect dissertation baby, who has napped in accordance with my writing schedule rather than the other way around, and who is even at this moment playing quietly while I tie up the loose ends. iv

The Language of Dress and the New Woman Novel

Abstract

By

KATHRYN IRENE MOODY

Historically, dress has served as a kind of shorthand for expressing information about characters, particularly female characters, in British literature. I assert that there is a language of dress at work in the New Woman novel, and this dissertation is an endeavor to interpret four components of that language: Aesthetic dress, the tea gown, the tailor-made gown, and rational dress.

Through analysis of Vernon Lee‟s Miss Brown, Sarah Grand‟s The Heavenly

Twins, and Mary Ward‟s Marcella, I argue that to dress a woman Aesthetically was often to denote her desire for women‟s liberation along with her own. As painters dressed female models Aesthetically, so Aesthetically dressed characters found themselves

“painted” into particular roles. Through readings of Netta Syrett‟s The Day‟s Journey,

John Strange Winter‟s A Blameless Woman, and Violet Hunt‟s The Human Interest and A

Hard Woman, I show that to dress a character in a tea gown was to demonstrate her desire for intimacy. New Women heroines often wear tea gowns in situations not v considered socially appropriate. Such fashion statements demonstrate a desire to expand societal notions of “respectable” intimacy; one example of this is the association of the tea gown with maternity. Through interpretations of Rita‟s A Jilt‟s Journal, George

Moore‟s Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa, Ella Hepworth Dixon‟s The Story of a Modern

Woman, and Beatrice Whitby‟s Mary Fenwick‟s Daughter, I show how the tailor-made represents a desire for solidarity with other New Woman, and a tendency to seek maternal guidance from one‟s peers rather than from one‟s mother. Finally, some fictional New Woman heroines appear in trousers, or rational dress. These costumes appear only rarely in fiction as they appeared rarely in life, due to social stigma which associated women in pants with actresses and prostitutes. Such fiction represents an attempt to revise the language of dress by presenting rationally dressed New Women as particularly honest, while depicting other characters as mendacious. I support this assertion through readings of H. G. Wells‟ The Wheels of Chance, Rhoda Broughton‟s

Scylla or Charybdis?, George Paston‟s The Career of Candida, and Elizabeth Burgoyne

Corbett‟s New Amazonia. 1

Introduction to the Dissertation

Women‟s clothing and dress have long been used as a kind of language in British fiction, both as a means of identifying a character‟s class status (sometimes illustrating a transition from one class to another) and as a means to reveal character. In The

Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath‟s personality is hinted at broadly by her bright red stockings and sharp spurs (Chaucer lines 456, 473). In Richardson‟s Pamela, Pamela must give up the fine clothes her employer has given her and acquire something more suitable to her station before returning home to her parents. Pamela also worries that accepting clothing from Mr. B will cause others to believe she is less than virtuous. In

Eliot‟s Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke‟s choice of simple, Quaker-like clothing, in contrast to the “shade of coquetry” in the clothes of her sister Celia, serves to reveal her serious, determined nature (7).

In the New Woman novel, clothing serves many of the same purposes as dress in earlier British fiction: demonstrating a character‟s class or motives. However, because new technology for dyeing fabrics and for mass-producing ready-made garments made clothing less expensive, it is at this point in the history of dress that clothing begins to regularly demonstrate more nuanced details about the wearer (aside from wealth or class status).

In this dissertation I will attempt to interpret the “sartorial language” of four different varieties of clothing which were adopted by the New Woman and which appear in New Woman novels: Aesthetic dress, the tea gown, the tailor-made gown, and rational dress. I will demonstrate ways in which a knowledge of that language may serve to improve our understanding of the New Woman in fiction and in life, and of the New 2

Woman novel, by making connections between these types of dress and universal themes such as adolescence, maternity, female solidarity, and integrity. Finally, and particularly in the final chapter, I will assert that New Woman novelists attempted to revise a language of dress already at work in society in order to persuade reader‟s to the woman‟s cause.

Aesthetic dress derived from the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and was characterized by loose drapery, natural colors, lack of traditional undergarments, and a vague allusion to a distant but nonspecific past. The contemporary reader might imagine those dresses worn in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. I will argue that Aesthetic dress implied a desire for freedom but a stunted emotional growth on the part of its wearer. Novels such as Vernon‟s Lee‟s Miss Brown, Sarah Grand‟s The Heavenly Twins, and Mary

Ward‟s Marcella demonstrate this assertion in their depictions of their New Woman heroines either as literal artist‟s models (as in Miss Brown and Marcella) or as playing roles in tableaux vivantes or living pictures. For example, in all three of these texts, male characters use the language of art in discussing the heroines, “painting” them into roles which they will not be able to escape.

The tea gown derived from the peignoir and its defining feature was the fact that it was generally worn without a corset. The most interesting connotations of the tea gown perhaps stemmed from its liminality: it was neither entirely for private wear (as a peignoir) or public wear (as a morning dress or evening gown). While the tea gown was certainly more fashionable than Aesthetic dress, it was novel enough (at least at first) to imply a degree of daring on the part of its wearer, particularly if that woman was unmarried, was venturing outside her own home and intimate circle of friends, or adopted 3 the tea gown for formal occasions. The tea gown demonstrated a desire for intimacy, a desire heretofore considered inappropriate in an unmarried woman. Through analysis of

Netta Syrett‟s The Day‟s Journey, John Strange Winter‟s A Blameless Woman, and Violet

Hunt‟s The Human Interest; A Study in Contradictions and A Hard Woman, I demonstrate the ways in which the New Woman novel use the image of the tea gown to address and underscore the important issue of intimacy as women‟s roles were being radically redefined. One example of this was society‟s attitude toward expectant mothers. Using New Woman fiction including John Winter Strange‟s The Money Sense,

Lucy Clifford‟s “The Key,” and Mary Cholmondeley‟s Red Pottage, I demonstrate the ways in which the tea gown served both to hide, and later to indicate, pregnancy, and eventually to allow women to be seen in public while pregnant.

The tailor-made gown was the predecessor of the contemporary woman‟s suit, and was commonly associated with New Women. It derived from the riding habit, and in its earliest incarnations, it generally consisted of a long skirt, a blouse, and a form-fitting jacket, often with a necktie, generally made of some plain and long-wearing fabric such as wool, and generally in a plain, drab color. Its similarity to the man‟s suit demonstrated one of the tenets of first wave feminism, the desire and ability to achieve the same goals as their male counterparts. In New Woman novels such as Rita‟s A Jilt‟s Journal,

George Moore‟s Evelynn Innes and its sequel Sister Teresa, Ella Hepworth Dixon‟s The

Story of a Modern Woman, and Beatrice Whitby‟s Mary Fenwick‟s Daughter, the tailor- made demonstrates the ambiguous relationship between a younger woman (in the beginning, it was only young, generally unmarried, women who wore tailor-mades) and her mother. In place of this relationship, the young heroines substitute some alternate 4 mother figure, often searching through a series of “bad mothers” in the process. In the end, these heroines turn to their own peers, similarly “tailor-made girls” or some equivalent, for guidance in navigating the changing roles of women, roles which for which their mothers are not able to prepare them.

Finally, rational dress was the style in which Punch often depicted New Women, though it was actually considered extremely radical and was probably actually worn only rarely. Rational dress generally meant some kind of pants or divided skirts for women.

As in real life, rational dress appears only rarely in novels. When it does appear in a New

Woman novel, as in H. G. Wells‟ The Wheels of Chance, Rhoda Broughton‟s Scylla or

Charybdis?, George Paston‟s The Career of Candida, and Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett‟s

New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future, I argue that the author must strive to revise the connotation of a rationally dressed woman from an actress or prostitute to one whose desire for freedom of movement and equality with males has driven her to this sartorial choice. In this, the author attempts to revise the language of dress.

The first known reference to the term “New Woman” appeared in an 1893 article in the The Woman‟s Herald entitled “The Social Standing of the New Woman,” according to Michelle Tusan (170). It was followed shortly thereafter by a reference in

Sarah Grand‟s novel The Heavenly Twins.1 The year 1894 saw another use of the term in

Grand‟s article “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” in the North American

Review, and Ouida capitalized the term in a response to Grand‟s article two months later

1 The elderly American Mr. Price uses the word to describe his new acquaintance Evadne Colquhoun: I don‟t know, of course; but I am no judge of character if she does not prove to be one of the new women, who are just appearing among us, with a higher ideal of duty than any which men have constructed for women. I expect she will be ready to resent as an insult every attempt to impose unnecessary suffering either upon herself or her sex at large. (195) 5

(Marks 11). In an 1896 article in the Humanitarian entitled “The Woman‟s Question.

An Interview with Madame Sarah Grand,” Grand actually refers to herself as a “New

Woman” (164).2 Thus, from its inception, the term “New Woman” was associated both with actual, living women (as in the original reference) and with a fictional type (as in

Grand‟s novel3). The discourse between Grand and Ouida, long thought to be the original sources of the term, refers to actual women, but at the same time, of course,

Grand and Ouida were both novelists. In Ouida‟s response, entitled “The New Woman,” the author makes clear reference to both literary and “real life” examples. She begins by asserting that New Women “meet us at every page of literature written in the English tongue” (154). The implication here is probably that heroines such as those in Grand‟s

The Heavenly Twins were nothing new. However, her use of historical figures (Jane

Grey, George Sand, Mary Somerville) and of contemporary events brought about or called for by the influence of New Women (allowing women to attend university, to travel unchaperoned, to vote) are very much real-life situations having to do with “real”

New Women, not characters in books. Thus the task of separating the historical New

Woman from the fictional New Woman heroine, or even the New Woman novelist,

2 Interestingly, Grand uses the term in response to a question concerning rational dress. Grand says when bicycling in Paris, she always wears a “rational costume”: There the culotte is the usual costume for lady cyclists and causes little remark. But I must frankly admit that our rational costume is exceedingly ugly; I wish we could invent something more graceful and so here I always ride in a skirt, which looks better and attracts less attention. It is necessary for a New Woman to be very careful about her appearance. (164) 3 Grand, like Ouida, conflates fiction with contemporary reality. She discusses the effects of her runaway best-seller The Heavenly Twins in “The Woman Question,” in which Sarah A. Tooley poses the question as to whether Grand received more positive responses to the novel from women or men, and quotes Grand as pointing to the latter because “Men knew so much better than women the need there was for the book” (161); thus Grand suggests that her work, while a novel, had an effect on actual women in that, among other things, it served to educate them about the dangers of venereal disease, and in so doing, to help to protect them and their children from contracting it. 6 becomes a sticky one indeed; the notions were bound together from the start. Says Sally

Mitchell, in “New Women, Old and New,”

The difficulty in writing about New Woman fiction—cultural

representations of New Women—or „real‟ New Women (self-identified or

otherwise)—still lies in sorting out these overlapping analytical frames to

define one‟s subject and specify one‟s intent” (581).

In spite of this call to separate the different connotations, most New Woman scholars conflate the two (See Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis‟ The New Woman in

Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms.), although some separate the stereotypes found in periodicals from the images portrayed in New Woman novels, and sometimes separate those written by men from those authored by “New Woman novelists.”

The New Woman, in her earliest conception, was an ideal of feminist womanhood. She demanded to be given the same choices as her male counterparts when it came to education, career, marriage, suffrage, political power, and social position.

Almost immediately, she was stereotyped as “mannish” or “unnatural” in various publications, most notably Punch, and she was, conversely, attacked as overly concerned with sex in various editorials. As Mitchell notes, in its time, the term “New Woman” was just as loaded and had nearly as many connotations as the term “feminist” does currently

(581). Various women known as “new” supported various social causes, sometimes at odds with each other. In New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism,

Ann Ardis argues that to consider the New Woman as merely a literary and not an actual phenomenon is to underestimate her power and to ignore a historical and sociological event (12-13). What is more, New Woman fiction was, according Ann Heilmann, Ann 7

Ardis, and others, “a genre intimately linked, for the first time in British history, to an organized women‟s movement” (Heilmann Strategies 2). Thus we can never separate the

New Woman novel as a genre from what Ardis and others call “real” New Women. Says biographer Kay Daniels: “‟Most of us,‟ [New Woman novelist Emma Frances Brooke] writes, „came tacitly to assume that the best way of treating the Sex-Question, is by representation‟—that is, through fiction” (154).4

The New Woman novel is one in which heroines also dubbed “New Women” make choices that depart from societal norms relating to the “woman‟s sphere,” with varying degrees of success. For example, characters might reject traditional roles as wives and mothers in favor of the pursuit of education, careers, or supporting women‟s causes to the exclusion, or redefinition, of these traditional roles. While discussions of the New Woman in comic theater and in periodicals, both those that focus on a stereotyped image and those in which early feminists attempted to define to support their ideas, tend to cast her as a broad type, the New Woman novel tends to focus on the individual.

Just as we see a necessary relationship between fictional and actual New Women from the earliest uses of the term, we also see a relationship in those earliest texts between the New Woman, real and fictional, and her clothing. In “The New Woman,”

Ouida describes

an engraving in an illustrated journal of a woman‟s meeting; whereat a

woman is demanding in the name of her sovereign sex the right to vote at

4 Here “Sex-Question” refers to what others might call the “woman question.” Lest we think Daniels‟ interpretation slanted to support her own argument, she goes on to say of Brooke, “Here she cites Shaw and two novels . . . on the woman question: her own A Superfluous Woman and Grant Allen‟s The Woman Who Did” (154). 8

political elections. The speaker . . . wears an inverted plate on her head

tied on with strings under her double-chin; she has balloon-sleeves, a

bodice tight to bursting, a waist of ludicrous dimensions in proportion to

her portly person. . . .. Now, why cannot this orator learn to . . . dress,

instead of clamoring for a franchise?” (156-57)

The earliest specific attack against the New Woman, therefore, does so on the basis of her dress.5 Granted, in this instance, Ouida merely gives her opinion on another‟s illustration of the New Woman, but later in the same article, she complains about the lack of “mystic charm” of women who “from the waist upward are indistinguishable from the men they profess to despise” (159), an obvious reference, I would assert, to the tailor gown—a fashion appropriated by the New Woman and the topic of my third chapter. Similarly,

Grand‟s novel, as I shall argue, contains several important references to dress, and in her interview with Sarah Tooley, she refers to herself as a “New Woman” in the context of her clothing. Grand goes on to say, “Want of taste in dress on the part of many women who advocate what are called advanced views, has thrown back the women‟s cause fifty years. Everyone who takes part in the movement ought to be particularly careful in dress” (165).

My dissertation will serve in part to counter arguments such as those made by

Richardson and Willis, that “Journalistic exploitation of the more visual of these issues, such as rational dress, tended to downplay, or deny, the significance of more weighty issues” (28). I will argue instead that it is no coincidence that these different varieties of dress—all outside of normal “fashionable” dress—are worn at the same time that New

5 For an indictment of Ouida‟s invective against this particular illustration, see Talia Schaffer‟s “„Nothing But Foolscap and Ink‟: Inventing the New Woman” (49). 9

Women novels become popular. It is at this time that mass production made a wide variety of clothing available to people of various classes, and therefore it became less important as a marker of class, and instead begins to mark the political beliefs of the wearer. And just as clothing‟s capacity as a signifier of class was becoming diluted, so the New Woman novelist “addressed diverse readerships, from the popular and conservative to the „high brow‟ and advanced” (Strategies 4).

While writers on the topic of the New Woman find the subject of women‟s dress important, often including dress in their definitions of the New Woman, and while we see many references to dress within the New Woman novels, little has been done critically thus far to connect the two; we have neglected to use our understanding of dress and the tangled nature of the “real” New Woman with her fictional counterpart to achieve a better understanding of the New Woman novel. Therefore, in this dissertation I will provide interpretations of the novel that depend on careful examination of the language of clothing. Unlike the work of those like Patricia Marks, Michelle Tusan, etc, this is not a study of periodicals enhanced by readings of novels, but the reverse. However, I will use the wealth of secondary information on dress available (often previously ignored except by fashion historians) in such works of nonfiction as newspaper and magazine articles about the New Woman, nineteenth century works on dress, as well as contemporary fashion theory.

This study will also differ from previous works in the degree to which it asserts that depictions of dress in New Woman novels serve as a kind of language, a space for the discourse of resistance that has gone largely uninterpreted. I will argue that dress does serve as a nuanced, symbolic language, consider the ways in which dress can alter 10 our interpretations of the novels (as spaces for resistance), and supply a new basis for interpretation upon which I hope other scholars may build. In so doing, I will make claims concerning the “meanings” of four types of dress, and I will assert that in the fourth instance, New Woman novelists attempted to revise the language of dress through their fiction.

11

Chapter 1

Aesthetic Dress and the Painted Heroine

In her novel Miss Brown (1884), Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) satirizes the roles of various members of the Aesthetic Movement. The novel tells the story of a young woman Anne Brown who has been “discovered” by a painter Walter Hamlin in Italy.

Hamlin determines to bring Anne to England, use her as his model, and groom her into a suitable wife, which training includes educating her about the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and indoctrinating her into the philosophy of his circle of friends. In so doing, Hamlin dresses Anne in accordance with his own artistic notions, in gowns of his own design.

When Hamlin attempts to surprise Anne with a gown he has made for her, Anne “was by this time tolerably accustomed to the eccentric garb of aesthetic circles,” quite in love with Hamlin, and certain of his artistic and literary genius, yet when she sees herself dressed in Hamlin‟s gown, “she could not help shrinking back in dismay” at its revealing nature (148). Later, she wonders “Why did that dress make such a difference . . . ?”

(150).

Why indeed did that dress make such a difference? The style of Anne‟s gown,

“shapeless and yet clinging with large and small folds, and creases like those of damp sculptor‟s drapery” (148), was known as Aesthetic6 or artistic dress and was a common sartorial choice to identify characters in novels as New Women. Artistic dress arose from the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which prized a style of painting that hearkened back to the early Renaissance, a style they found more beautiful and “natural” than the work of their contemporaries. In addition to cultivating a style similar to that of

6 I have capitalized “Aesthetic” here and elsewhere in order to indicate an association with the larger Aesthetic movement rather than simply something that is aesthetically pleasing. 12 the “old masters,” the Pre-Raphaelites also chose for their subjects romantic and medieval scenes. In order to do so, they designed and created gowns for their models to wear reflecting the “medieval” style they attempted to recreate, gowns which required either limited or no undergarments such as corsets and crinolines but which were loosely fitted and made of fabrics with a natural drape intended to highlight a woman‟s true figure as opposed to that created by stays and petticoats. Compared to fashionable gowns of the time, these dresses were plain, in muted colors made from natural rather than synthetic dyes and with little decoration aside from embroidery and such cords or ties as were necessary to the form of the gown. Eventually, the models and wives of the artists began to adapt this clothing for everyday use, and soon it spread beyond this particular group as others began to copy the unique style.

Aesthetic dress, popular during the 1880s and 90s, was similar to artistic dress, although it often incorporated more oriental themes with somewhat more color and ornamentation. In addition, Aesthetic gowns, while still representing a stylistic choice outside of mainstream fashion, were mass-produced (by Liberty, for example) and thus were much more commonly worn than their predecessors although still, according to Jane

Ashelford‟s The Art of Dress: Clothes and Society 1500-1914, worn by “a tiny and isolated group” (229-31). Although Aesthetes rejected the simplicity originally touted by

William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites in favor of more sensual beauty, the dress associated with the Aesthetic movement evolved directly from the art gown, and in fact, the two terms, Artistic and Aesthetic dress, are sometimes used interchangeably by fashion and textile scholars. 13

Fig. 1. Jane Morris photographed by D. G. Rossetti.

To choose to dress Aesthetically or artistically was to make a public statement as to one‟s political, social, and artistic points of view; as we have established, in novels as well as real life Aesthetic dress often helped identify a character as a New Woman.7

According to Ashelford, those who wore Aesthetic or art dress “tended to be from artistic or intellectual circles” and were often “closely associated with the movement for women‟s rights” (231). This can be attributed in part to the fact that it was those

“intellectual circles” from which many of the New Women came and in part to the women‟s movement‟s association with the Rational Dress Movement, which argued women should choose clothing which did not constrict their movement, cause them physical discomfort, or mar health, as some tight-fitting or heavy garments were thought to do. In Reforming Women‟s Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Health, and Art, Patricia A.

Cunningham notes the connection between Aesthetic and Rational Dress, asserting that

7 For instance, in Elizabeth Robins‟ novel The Convert, a suffragette is identified as such by her “picture hat,” a mainstay of Aesthetic garb, and one which the heroine Vida Levering jokingly calls “the hat of the Woman of the People” (86, 74). 14 dress reformers of varying agendas, including feminists, “not only argued for reform in women‟s clothes but recognized that a logical argument and perfectly sound way to achieve positive change in what they believed were debilitating garments would be best achieved through artistic means and by applying aesthetic ideas to dress” (105). While

Aesthetic and Rational dress are not the same thing, they did share certain elements in common, such as undergarments that were less constrictive and, to some degree, more freedom of movement. Ashelford tells us,

Women who braved [Aesthetic] dress wore loose-waisted gowns cut with

wide armholes and a dropped shoulder line, so removing the discomfort

caused by setting a sleeve in a fashionably low position. Dispensing with

the corset, the crinoline and the fussy and elaborate trimming demanded

by fashion gave them freedom of movement, but involved a rejection of

high fashion that few women dared to contemplate. (229)

Those who elected to wear Aesthetic dress, according to Ashelford, “were given a critical and unsympathetic reception,” and therefore, a woman who chose this style was taking some degree of risk by making such an (anti-) fashion statement.

That said, while choosing Aesthetic dress suggested one‟s involvement with, or at the least, support of the women‟s movement, as Ashelford has asserted, it also carried other, seemingly contradictory, connotations. In The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, Talia

Schaffer claims those women who chose Aesthetic dress wished to express “the freedom of a man, the modernity of the New Woman, the education of an aesthete, the nostalgic appeal of the past, and the receptivity of the reader of popular magazines” (19). In

Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz 15

Age, Valerie Steele posits Aesthetic dress reformers “perceived fashion as an outward manifestation of female sexuality, and they advocated less erotic clothing that was therefore widely perceived as less beautiful” (156-7). However, I will argue that these women were also seen, particularly by male counterparts but by other women as well, as objects for male gaze, molding, and erotic desire, the “live picture” so many New

Woman characters fear they‟ve become. The Aesthetic gown also reflects the role of women in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as artistic or Aesthetic gowns were popularized by the wives and models of Pre-Raphaelite artists. The “brotherhood” mostly consisted of males who depicted females, so that although aesthetic dress was popular in intellectual circles and among educated women, the first women to don art gowns generally still played secondary roles to their male counterparts. Thus Aesthetic gowns gave the impression of an intellectual woman, but in literature, such women are often still confined by the authority of their husbands and male relatives just as Pre-Raphaelite models were dressed by their husbands and portrayed by them in accordance with their own wishes.

In this chapter, I will argue that an author who depicts New Woman heroines as wearing Aesthetic dress (as opposed to rational, tailor, fashionable, etc.) does so in order to indicate her place in the women‟s movement. First, whether or not they are depicted as literal models for members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, these women are portrayed as the subjects of “living pictures”—they are “painted” by their male observers into roles they do not necessarily wish to play and in ways that they are generally unable to effectively resist. Second, this reification in a particular role—often that of the sensual, overtly sexual femmes fatales created by Rossetti et al.—seems to prevent them 16 from fully developing as liberated women, politically and sexually, even when they have the desire to do so; in other words, even when there is evidence that they would succeed in some endeavor not typically ascribed to a woman, they rarely complete such endeavors because they are busy playing the role of femme fatale to a controlling male in their lives.

In this, Aesthetic dress in the New Woman novel serves to represent a kind of arrested development in the life the female mind, body, and politic.

Dressing a character Aesthetically is an apt choice to indicate arrested social and political development given the physical attributes highlighted by Aesthetic gowns. As previously noted, those who dressed Aesthetically tended not to wear corsets and other restrictive undergarments; their clothing draped the body loosely rather than clinging to its curves. In this, Aesthetic gowns deemphasized a woman‟s secondary sexual characteristics just as a corset, by cinching the waist, emphasizes a woman‟s breasts and hips. The high waistlines common in the Directory and empire styles of Aesthetic dress likewise served to deemphasize the breasts. The Aesthetic ideal for a woman was willowy and thin, even emaciated,8 and shapeless dress would have served to produce a less curvaceous-appearing woman. Many critics have noted that the Pre-Raphaelite woman sometimes appears sexless or androgynous.9 That said, a tall, thin, shapeless figure is indicative of the “gangly” appearance of the early adolescent girl. We may see further connection between Aesthetic dress and the child or teenager in Alison Lurie‟s

8 See Steele 155. 9 For example, Kathy Alexis Psomiades unpacks the “sexlessness” of Anne Brown in Beauty‟s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (113). See also Wendy Bashant, “Redressing Androgyny: Hermaphroditic Bodies in Victorian England” and George P. Landlow, “Swinburne's Philosophy of Androgyny.” 17 assertion in The Language of Clothes that the Aesthetic dress movement was greatly influenced by the drawings of children in Kate Greenaway‟s books. 10 Says Lurie,

Though Greenaway‟s books appeared in the 1880s and 1890s, the children

in them are dressed in the costume of a hundred years earlier, which she

considered more picturesque and beautiful than that of her own time.. . .

the so-called „aesthetic dress‟ of the period owes almost as much to her

drawings as it does to Pre-Raphaelite notions of the medieval. (40)

Thus Aesthetic dresses evoked a girl who has only begun to mature sexually, and in conjunction with the tendency of male characters to “paint” her into “live pictures” throughout the novels, she becomes fixed in an immature state, one from which she is often unable to extricate herself.

10 Lurie also argues that it had been fashionable to dress children in such loose, high-waisted gowns since the eighteenth century, and that “by the 1780s such frocks were often worn well into the teens” (39). According to Lurie, this trend continued through the Victorian period and we still see vestiges of it in the Laura Ashley dress of our day (40). Geneviève Antoine Dariaux provided support for the argument that children continued to dress “Aesthetically” into the 20th century in her 1964 A Guide to Elegance, in which she recommends dressing little girls in “high-waisted cotton dresses of flowered Liberty prints” (35). 18

Fig. 2. Kate Greenaway, May Day.

The male characters that “paint” or “mold” her into these situations evince a type of mental as well as physical hebephilia, that is, a love of pubescent girls. They prefer their women only partially mature. One manifestation of the perpetual preadolescence forced on Aesthetically dressed characters lies in the characters‟ attitude toward sex. Of course, New Woman heroines have a variety of attitudes toward sex, but those who dress aesthetically tend to demonstrate a childlike fear of it and distaste for it in general. As

Talia Schaffer writes, “Far from wishing for free expression of covert desires, the female aesthetes often fantasize about a virginal realm far from any traumatic sexual demands, fears, or feelings” (31). If such a heroine does manage to escape social, sexual, political, and/or philosophical deadlock, she does so accompanied by a wardrobe change indicative of her maturation. We may classify certain New Woman novels, those whose heroines sport Aesthetic attire, as a specific variety of New Woman novel in which the heroines are prevented from reaching maturity by those who would “paint” them, literally and/or figuratively. Those I will discuss in this chapter are Miss Brown (1884), The Heavenly

Twins (1893), and Marcella (1894).

Vernon Lee‟s eponymous Miss Brown is a beautiful nurse-maid in Italy when the artist Walter Hamlin discovers her and takes her back to England to be his model and to 19 educate her so that she may eventually become his wife. At the insistence of her cousin

Richard, Hamlin draws up a contract whereby at the end of her education, Anne may choose to marry him, but she will be financially taken care of if she declines. Over the course of this roman-à-clef of the London literary scene in the 1880s, which Lee was accused of satirizing too mordantly, Anne Brown loses her love and respect for Hamlin but eventually decides to marry him anyway in the hope of checking his moral decline.

Anne Brown is a New Woman protagonist. She educates herself and as a single woman, going beyond the Aesthetic education Hamlin provides, and volunteers as a teacher for young women at the Women‟s Club educating and training girls so that they will one day be self-sufficient and will not have to rely on marriage to provide their occupation or their bread (298). In addition, Anne Brown attempts to make changes for the betterment of the peasants who live at Cold Fremley, on her future husband‟s estate.

However, despite the fact that she spends her days working to help others and particularly women, to be more independent, she finds herself in the uncomfortable position of wearing Hamlin‟s gowns when she would rather have made her own. Anne muses, “Why did he care so much more for her because she had it on? Did he care for her only as a sort of live picture?” (150).11 As she wears Hamlin‟s frocks, frocks made by a costume- maker for the theatre, she finds herself playing the role of “live picture” for the enjoyment of her future husband and his friends. Because this novel serves in part to satirize the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, one of Lee‟s goals in writing it is to underscore

11 In Beauty‟s Body, Psomiades takes this a step further, observing, “Although she seems initially to recoil from its indecency, it is not because the dress reveals too much of her body. The problem rather is that she does not recognize herself in the mirror. What she sees is the creation of Hamlin‟s erotic/artistic gaze, superimposed upon her” (168). 20 this contradiction between a group that ostensibly promotes intellectual and artistic enlightenment while treating women, both in art and in life, in this unenlightened manner.

For instance, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, satirized in Miss Brown in the character of

Walter Hamlin,12 produced portraits of women which are characterized by their sensuality. According to Tim Barringer, author of Reading the Pre-Raphaelites,

Rossetti‟s oeuvre from 1859 on is “intensely physical,” and the “idealized, sensual image of a single female, or group of females, became the central theme in Rossetti‟s output. . . .

Through these images, Rossetti created icons of woman as the exotic object of sexual desire” (146-47). However, the subject matter for Rossetti‟s paintings is not merely sensual; it also implies a kind of sexual immorality not compatible with the standard

Victorian conception of correct behavior. Barringer interprets Rossetti‟s inscription on the back of one such painting Bocco Baciata (“the kissed mouth”) to mean “The forbidden kiss of the adulteress is not poisoned and deadly, it seems, but promises renewed delight” (148). Says Barringer, “There is no implied moral condemnation: on the contrary, the painting seems to offer the (male) viewer untroubled erotic pleasure rather than matter for intellectual and moral judgement” (148). In the poems written by

Hamlin and his friends, female heroines are generally depicted as “fallen” and content to be so; the gentlemen consistently refuse to portray any of their heroines as virtuous or deserving of admiration. Anne balks at these kinds of portrayals, particularly when she finds herself the model for so many “fallen women.”13

In addition, Anne displays a distaste for sex in general, caused, I would argue, by the fact that she has been so often forced to play the part of the femme fatale. Anne likes

12 See Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual 112. 13 Says Zorn, “Women were ubiquitous in aesthetic and decadent art, but their images—romanticized fallen women or dark, devouring femmes fatales—were informed by antifeminism and misogyny” (113). 21 her cousin Richard, and when he proposes marriage, “It was too sudden, too wonderful.

The vision of being Richard Brown‟s wife overcame her like some celestial vision a fasting saint” (336). Yet she cannot abide the necessary sexual component of the relationship, and she refuses him even though marriage to him would mean an escape from Hamlin and a possibility to devote her life to education and her philanthropic causes. When Richard proposes,

it was a blow to Anne. In her loneliness . . . Richard Brown‟s friendship

had, almost without her knowing it, been her great consolation and

support. It had given her a sense of safety and repose to think that . . .

there was a possibility of honest companionship, of affection which meant

merely reciprocal esteem and sympathy in the objects of life. . . . This was

now gone: Richard Brown loved, her wanted her; it was the old nauseous

story over again; the sympathy, the comradeship, the quiet brotherly and

sisterly affection had all been a sham. . . . Was Mrs. Macgregor right, and

was there, of really genuine and vital in the world, only the desire of the

man for the woman and of the woman for the man, with all its brood of

vanity and baseness . . .? (337)

It does not seem worth it to Anne to break off her engagement with Hamlin for Richard given that all of his attempts to educate her and appeals to her better nature have been the result his desire to “satisfy his whim of possessing her” (338).

Eventually Anne sacrifices her own happiness and her desire to be useful by marrying Hamlin, “her girlish ideal of poetical love” (337, emphasis mine), even after he has fallen in her estimation. Like many longsuffering female characters in Victorian 22 novels, she has determined that the best way to improve the situation is to marry Hamlin so that she might use her influence over him for good.14 However, in marrying Hamlin,

Anne gives up her teaching of political economy at the Working Women‟s Club and her dreams of a Girton education. Says Zorn, “Anne can only slip into ready-made roles, aptly symbolized by the dresses Hamlin designs for her” (120). Thus, like Grand‟s

Evadne, Anne appears to be independent, educated, and politically aware, even serving as a teacher to women choosing a career over marriage, but in the end, she will sacrifice herself to a man who will neither allow her to continue this work nor to make improvements to the cottagers on his own land, a much more traditionally acceptable outlet for a woman‟s creativity and altruistic desire.15 In spite of Hamlin‟s determination to educate his fiancée so that she may decide for herself whether or not she wishes to marry him, Anne, after tasting other options through her experience with her philanthropist cousin Richard Brown, chooses to remain in a lifestyle she finds morally detestable; she remains an immature New Woman heroine.

14 In The Heavenly Twins, Evadne‟s mother admonishes her for leaving her husband: “[R]emember: a woman has it in her power to change even a reprobate into a worthy man” (87). Similarly in George Paston‟s The Career of Candida, the eponymous heroine is happy to sacrifice her life in order to care for her unfaithful husband who has become paralyzed as a result of his debauchery: After all, he reflected, she was his wife, and in the eyes of the world it would be no more than right and fitting that this strong and splendid creature should offer up herself, her youth, and her beauty, at the shrine of her disabled husband; that she should bear upon her shoulders the burden of his shattered life, and act as his unpaid nurse and handmaid till death did them part. He began to feel that he was doing her a favor in providing her with such an unparalleled opportunity for the self-immolation that all true women are supposed to love (288). 15 Ward‟s Marcella does this, and so does George Eliot‟s Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch. 23

Sarah Grand‟s The Heavenly Twins, first published in 1893, which was a runaway best-seller, though its critical reviews were mixed, contains some of the original references to the term “New Woman.” It tells the story of three women Evadne Frayling

Colquhoun Galbraith, Edith Beale Menteith, and Angelica Hamilton-Wells Kilroy from their youths to adulthood, marriage, and for Evadne and Edith, motherhood. The three begin their adult lives full of youthful idealism, but lose most of this by the end of the novel. Evadne marries Major (later Colonel) George Colquhoun, but immediately after her wedding, she learns that he has had a child with another woman and refused to do the honorable thing; therefore, she does not wish to live with him. Eventually, she is persuaded to live with her husband in a white, that is, an unconsummated, marriage.

Colquhoun does not agree with her opinions about the role of women and social justice, and so she develops a habit of repressing her beliefs. Eventually, Colquhoun dies and

Evadne remarries, but she never recovers from the effects of her first marriage, and continues to sublimate her opinions while depressed to the point of suicide attempts.

Meanwhile, Edith marries, contracts syphilis, bears a syphilitic child, goes mad, and dies within the course of two years. Angelica, one of the “heavenly twins” of the title, is the most adventurous of the three, and marries an older man on the condition that he will let her do as she pleases. She pleases to dress herself as a boy and develop friendships with men in this garb, but she is eventually found out and discovers that it is impossible to have the kind of companionship she desires to have with males without evoking sexual desire, jealousy on the part of her husband, or at the very least, the frown of society.

In Sarah Grand‟s The Heavenly Twins, Evadne and Angelica, unlike Anne Brown, reside in small towns and are in no way linked to actual members of the Pre-Raphaelite 24 brotherhood or to the Aesthetic dress movement. Evadne begins wearing Aesthetic dress, described as “a distinctive style” and “art gowns,” not at the behest of her husband, but of her own accord after her marriage to Colquhoun. However, like Anne Brown, Evadne is similarly portrayed as an objet d‟art for the pleasure of her husband and his friends. On one occasion, Colonel Colquhoun invites his friend Dr. Galbraith (who, not coincidentally, will later become Evadne‟s second husband) to gaze on his wife in this way, saying, “Come, and I‟ll show you a pretty picture” (607). This “picture” might be compared to one of Rossetti‟s later, more sensual works, in that “half of her face was concealed by a fan of white ostrich feathers” (607). Similarly, in Rossetti‟s later work,

“Women are seen surrounded by luxurious accessories, many of them from [his] collections of oriental and medieval objects” (Barringer 146). Such exotic objects, according to Barringer, “lead to an interpretation of [the subject] as a temptress” (148).

Evadne‟s gown is made of cashmere, similarly underscoring an oriental theme. Even

Evadne‟s normally “glossy dark brown hair showed bright as bronze” that afternoon, just as the Pre-Raphaelites favored auburn-haired models.16 Evadne, meanwhile, is asleep and cannot respond to the gaze of her husband and his friend. Colquhoun comments,

“She keeps her looks,” emphasizing her physical beauty to his guest (607). Colquhoun is proud of his wife‟s beauty and seems to prefer her asleep and incapable of speaking rather than awake and expressing any of her modern views which so embarrass him.

Evadne begins to design and wear a distinctive dress in part as a means to express her creativity in a stifling marriage, but also because of the influence of her husband, who during their courtship, gave her the jewelry which inspires her first aesthetic gown,

16 The changing of a woman‟s hair color from brown or blond to red when viewed through the eyes of a male who exercises some control of her is a theme repeated in many a New Woman novel including Iota‟s A Yellow Aster and Elizabeth Robins‟ The New Moon. 25 demonstrating her husband‟s (albeit limited) role as “artist” in her choice of dress (She later subverts the control he attempts to exercise over her sartorial choices.):

In the early days of their acquaintance, Colonel Colquhoun had given her

some very beautiful antique ornaments of Egyptian design, and she

determined to wear them on this occasion for the first time, but when she

came to try them with a modern ball-dress, she found that they made the

latter look detestably vulgar. She therefore determined to design a

costume, or to adapt one, which should be more in keeping with the

artistic beauty of her jewels; and this idea, with the help of an excellent

maid, she managed to carry out to perfection—which, by the way, was the

accident that led her finally to adopt a distinctive style of dress, always a

dangerous experiment, but in her case, fortunately, so admirably

successful, that it was never remarked upon as strange by people of taste;

only as appropriate. (328)

This uniqueness in her style is interpreted by those around her in various ways. Her husband (for the space of one day) believes it is an attempt to please him, others believe she is courting social success, but her female friends realize she is attempting to express herself in the face stifling marriage in which her efforts to help other women are always thwarted and she is constantly prevented from expressing her political views, as distinctive as her dress, verbally. Once her husband catches on, he decries the fact that she dresses carefully for her friends but dowdily when they go out in public (and he would like to show her off). In this, Evadne avoids casting her pearls before swine, while acting passive aggressively toward her psychologically abusive husband. 26

In its simplicity, Evadne‟s dress evokes a kind of purity, much like the purity and simplicity of Evadne‟s decision to remain in a white marriage, in spite of the urges of her family and of her own sexual desire for Colquhoun.17 However, it is in the role of saint that Evadne again demonstrates her vulnerability to the whims of those around her: she is once again painted into a role she hasn‟t chosen and is unable to escape.

One night, Evadne goes looking for a book and accidentally stumbles upon her husband playing cards with people who are, as Colquhoun later admits, unfit to be introduced to her. Evadne‟s “gold-embroidered, ivory-white draperies”18 contrast with the garish clothes of the “three strange ladies, loud in appearance,” and Colquhoun‟s reaction is phrased in the language of painting, once again emphasizing Evadne‟s role as model to be interpreted by others: “It was a vision of holiness breaking in upon a scene of sin” (325, emphasis mine). After she has left the room, one of the men calls Evadne “St.

Monica the Complacent.” St. Monica was the mother of St. Augustine, and is the patron saint of wives and mothers because of her longsuffering patience with her abusive, adulterous husband, for whose conversion she prayed. However, while Evadne is not present to resist this designation, she has already protested her mother‟s encouragement to emulate St. Monica in her marriage:

St. Monica doubtless made things pleasanter for her own husband by

rewarding him with forgiveness, a happy home, and good nursing when he

returned to her exhausted by vice, but at the same time she set a most

pernicious example. So long as men believe that women will forgive

anything they will do anything. . . . The mistake from the beginning has

17 See Carol Senf‟s introduction to The Heavenly Twins ix. 18 Although this incident occurs just prior to the ball for which she designs her “distinctive dress,” the fact that Grand describes it as “drapery” indicates the loose, draping style associated with Aesthetic dress. 27

been that women have practised self-sacrifice, when they should have

been teaching men self-control. (92)

Yet, in this instance, Evadne does begin to resemble the portrait of her that others have painted. By the time Colquhoun dies, she has completely repressed all of her opinions and desires, attempting to avoid even thinking about things which annoy her husband.

Unfortunately, her friends cannot convince her to reverse this habit after his death.

Talia Schaffer observes that female Aesthetes “may have lived like New Women, but they dressed like Pre-Raphaelite maidens” (17). While Evadne is not actually involved in the Aesthetic movement, Evadne‟s Aesthetic dress reflects her white marriage to Colquhoun. Schaffer‟s description (In fact, she rarely describes Aesthetic dress without using the phrase “Pre-Raphaelite maiden”; the two terms are always linked.) is particularly apt in that Evadne is literally a maiden. In her refusal to consummate the marriage, Evadne remains sexually immature, and thus her dress, in that it deemphasizes secondary sexual characteristics and gives the appearance of an early- adolescent body, reflects her determination to cling to a preadolescent self. This is especially the case for Evadne, because she looks back on her childhood as an Edenic period of ignorant bliss. The night before her marriage, Evadne writes in her

“Commonplace Book,” “This is the close of the happiest girlhood that girl ever had. I cannot recall a single thing that I would have had otherwise” (59).

The name “Evadne” signifies both the twins‟ and her own interpretation that she will make a “well-pleasing,” devoted, and self-sacrificing wife like the figure from Greek mythology (603, 672),19 as well as her “evasion” of reality, a refusal to grow up both sexually and psychologically. The allusion is apt. Evadne‟s friend Edith‟s illness, a

19 The mythical Evadne cast herself on the funeral pyre of her husband Capeneus. 28 result of contracting syphilis from her husband, drives her mad and kills her within a year. Evadne, in avoiding disease by refusing to consummate her marriage to a man with a past, is overtaken by madness in a much slower, more subtle way. Forbidden to take action against the misery she sees in the world, the idea of that misery becomes too much for her, and when she thinks about it, she becomes suicidal, believing it would have been better if she and her children had never been born. In essence, “hysteria” with which Dr.

Galbraith diagnoses Evadne is a result of being prohibited from working for the causes in which she believes; she has been painted into inaction, reified into a preadolescent who reads about life (books chosen by her husband just as they were once chosen by her mother) instead of living it (and later, gives up her books entirely).

We see Evadne‟s “evasion” in her refusal even to consider political topics such as the woman question although her friends find her particularly well-suited to address them and to be “a representative woman such as the world wants at this period of its progress, making a name for herself and an impression on the age . . . . Her natural bent was certainly in that direction, but something had changed it” (556). She freely admits to this stunting of her growth, informing her friend George Galbraith, “I avoid questions of the day as much as possible . . . . I do not, as a rule, read anything on such subjects, and if people begin to discuss them in my presence I fly if I can” (556). In fact, Evadne refuses even to overtly link herself to the political views associated with her style of dress. Says

Galbraith:

She was wearing an art gown, very becoming to her, and suitable also for

such sultry weather, as Mr. Hamilton-Wells remarked. 29

“I suppose you are a strong supporter of the aesthetic dress

movement,” he said, doubtless alluding to the graceful freedom of her

delicate primrose20 draperies.

“Not at all,” she answered. (611)

After an interruption, Mr. Hamilton-Wells presses the issue, claiming that the topic of

“modern dress”

“brings us by an obvious route to another question of the day; I mean the

position of women. How do you regard their position at this latter end of

the nineteenth century, Evadne?”

“I do not regard it at all, if I can help it,” she answered incisively.

(611-12)

For fear it will upset Colquhoun, Evadne has long since ceased to verbalize her political opinions, or even to think about them, when she can avoid it. However, in choosing an

Aesthetic gown, she is willing to demonstrate a political view that she is afraid to voice aloud or consider acting on the basis of in her own life. Her husband, while disapproving of her “opinions,” finds her distinctive style of dress attractive, making her more of an asset to him, and thus he approves of her style of dress, unlike the beliefs she once expressed.

Galbraith himself, the narrator of that portion of the text, compares her avoidance of the woman question to physical immaturity: “[I]t was . . . evident that her objection was not the outcome of ignorant prejudice, but of knowledge and set purpose. It was the attitude of a burnt child” (556). After Evadne‟s first husband dies, freeing her from his

20 Says Lurie, “Grown persons who wear entire costumes of brilliant butter- or margarine-yellow . . . are judged to be a little silly or immature” (197). 30 oppression, her friends hope that she will grow up, so to speak, and become a leader of the “van,” that is to say, the vanguard which is making strides to change the position of women. However, the effects of Evadne‟s first marriage are not so easily erased, nor is her second marriage, though her husband Galbraith is sweet and kind to her, as idyllic as one might suppose. He encourages her to find some larger purpose in life, but at the same time, he jokes that she is like a child.21 What is more, intentionally or not,

Galbraith infantilizes her, censoring her reading materials, never allowing her to be alone, and making up little favors for her to do for him in order to keep her busy. Thus, though now a mother and therefore sexually mature, Evadne remains in the childlike position indicated by her dress, even in her second marriage, and despite the fact that her new husband loves her and would support her political aspirations, if she had them.

The physical immaturity linked to aesthetic dress also alludes to an emotional and intellectual immaturity caused by a lack of education, sexual or otherwise, or more accurately, only a partial education of “nice” young women. This is certainly the case for

Evadne, whose father cannot believe that she was able to teach herself arithmetic and whose mother brags that at the age of eighteen, she knows nothing of the facts of life.

Evadne refers to her second husband as “Don,” revealing the fact that she sees their relationship as that of a professor and student rather than as intellectual equals.

This unequal marital relationship is also the case for another New Woman heroine of the novel, Angelica Hamilton-Wells Kilroy, one of the “Heavenly Twins” of the title.

21 Says Evadne, “I hear you were asked the other day how many children you had, and you answered „Two or three!‟ Now, will you kindly count your children, and when you are quite sure you know the number off by heart, repeat it aloud to me, so that I may have some hope that you will not commit yourself in that way again.” “Oh,” I answered, “I know how many babies there are; my difficulty is about you. I am never quite sure whether to count you as a child or not.” (675) 31

We see Angelica‟s preference for Aesthetic dress in her disdain for tight-lacing22 and in her favoring of “Aesthetic” colors over jewel tones23; she wears pale green and yellow evening gowns (470). Angelica clings to her childhood as long as possible, wearing short dresses into her teenage years. After her marriage, she continues to behave like a child, making a game of letting stray dogs run races in the house. Her relationship to her husband who is twenty years her senior is overtly filial; she calls him “Daddy” and extorts money from him “to buy dolls” in a manner that calls to mind Humbert Humbert and Lolita (471). In the early days of her marriage, she makes the acquaintance of a tenor while pretending to be a boy, but when he finds her out, he can no longer be friends with her because of his sexual attraction, a result for which Angelica hadn‟t bargained. In the end, her husband forgives her for spending time unchaperoned with a young man (though even he cannot conceive that she would do so without some sort of sexual attraction on her end), and paternally blames himself for Angelica‟s exploits:

What occurred to him was that this young half-educated girl had been

committed to his care, and left by him pretty much to her own devices. He

had not done his duty by her; he had not influenced her in any way; he had

expected too much from her. It was the old story. Had he not himself

seen fifty households wrecked because the husband, when he took a girl,

little more than a child in years, and quite a child in mind and experience,

from her own family, and the wholesome influences and companionship

of father, mother, brothers, sisters, probably left her to go unguided, to

22 As a child, Angelica meets a tight-laced woman and comments, “Why are you tied so tight in the middle? . . . Doesn‟t it hurt? I mean to have a good figure when I grow up, like the Venus de Medici, you know” (132-33). 23 Dressed in a red frock, she eyes herself critically in the mirror, asks her husband‟s opinion, and then tells him she won‟t wear it anymore (485). 32

form her character as best she could, putting that grave responsibility in

her own weak hands as if the mere making a wife of her must make her a

mature and sensible woman also?

Angelica‟s stunted education, her reification in an artificial girlhood in spite of the comparatively open-minded attitudes of her husband, parents, and tutor, are clearly reflected in her preference for a style of dress which calls to mind the early adolescent body.

What is more, Angelica, like so many other New Women characters who wear

Aesthetic garb, has a particular antipathy toward sex. Unlike Edith, Angelica is not completely ignorant of sex at the time of her marriage, but Angelica‟s defining understanding of sex has come through the madness and death of her dear friend Edith to syphilis because her parents allowed her to marry a man of questionable reputation. The experience of watching her previously sweet and quiet friend rail at her family in madness has, understandably, created in her a distaste for sex. In addition, because of an unwanted sexual attraction, Angelica loses the friendship of her friend the tenor; because of her gender, they can never be on equal terms. When Angelica‟s husband looks at her,

“it did not strike her as significant of some deeper feeling than that to which the carnal admiration for her person which she expected and despised, would have given rise” (478, emphasis mine). Here Angelica‟s attitude toward sex, like that of Evadne, recalls

Schaffer‟s assertion that Aesthetic women often wished to avoid sex entirely (31). A choice of Aesthetic garb represents a desire to remain in the preadolescent body.

As The Heavenly Twins draws to a close, the New Woman heroines in their

Aesthetic dress may have aligned themselves with the women‟s movement, but they are 33 never able to be fully self-actuated or fully mature. Motherhood, which authors of later

New Woman novels, among them Iota, Ménie Muriel Dowie, and Mrs. Everard Cotes, will present as the appropriate outlet for a woman‟s passions, fails to give Evadne the kind of purpose and satisfaction she desires, much as she loves her children. Her second marriage to the man who loved her all along and waited patiently for the death of Colonel

Colquhoun does not prove to be a panacea for the depression that ails Evadne throughout her first marriage; even with Galbraith‟s medical attentions and the prospect of a new child, Evadne attempts suicide twice. As soon as they are married, Galbraith, like

Colquhoun, enjoys watching Evadne unawares in a scene which borrows the language of painting: he espies Evadne “through the open French window” which provides a frame for the tableau, and Evadne has “the creeper-curtained old brick wall for a background”

(658, emphasis mine). As in the previous scene, it is summer, and Evadne sleeps “in a high-backed chair” with “half her face concealed” (658). Although he does not invite others to gaze upon her as well, George the Second isn‟t so very far from George the

First.

In fact, this is the third time that Galbraith has witnessed Evadne in this position.

The first time is directly after she has run away from Colquhoun, and the only difference is that it is autumn and she is surrounded by sunflowers, a favorite blossom of the

Aesthetes (95). However, Galbraith has improved only a modicum in the interval. The first time he sees her, he “interprets” the subject of the “picture” in accordance with his own taste: “Are visions about? Is that one that I see there before me? If I were Faust, I should love such a Marguerite” (97). His choice is fitting: Faust‟s Margaret/Gretchen was several times a subject for Rossetti. Mrs. Orton Beg is annoyed that he would take 34 such a liberty as to gaze upon the sleeping girl unbeknownst to her, and corrects his evaluation, emphasizing that she is not a mere picture: “No vision . . . or if a vision, one of the nineteenth century sort, tangible, and of satisfying continuance” (97). What is more, Evadne‟s aunt assures him, “she is a very long way after Marguerite, whom I think she would consider to have been a very weak and foolish person” (97). Rightly so:

Evadne has run away to avoid consummating her marriage to a man she considers reprobate; she certainly seems unlikely to be seduced by a second man. Thus, in the end of the story, Evadne remains in the same physical and social position she occupied in her girlhood: being gazed upon and manipulated by a man into the mold of a character she does not wish to play.

Mary Augusta Ward‟s 1894 New Woman novel Marcella, like Miss Brown and

The Heavenly Twins, is one of the last of the “triple-deckers,” and its plot divides neatly into the three volumes of the book. In the first part, we learn that Marcella Boyce‟s father has just inherited Mellor, the family estate, and Marcella has recently arrived there to live with her parents. Marcella is accustomed to having little, so that even though

Mellor is in a state of disrepair, she enjoys her new position as lady of the manor.

However, this pleasure in her new position conflicts with her strong “Venturist” (Fabian socialist) political beliefs. While playing “Lady Bountiful” to her cottagers, she meets

Aldous Raeburn, the grandson of a local lord Maxwell, who immediately falls in love 35 with her. She agrees to marry him, but it soon becomes obvious that Marcella is more eager for the power and position that will come with being his wife than she is in love with Raeburn. In the meantime, one of her cottagers Jim Hurd is accused, Marcella believes falsely, of murder, and Marcella becomes consumed with his trial and with caring for his wife and family, while Raeburn acts as prosecutor. In the end, she asks

Raeburn to sign a petition requesting a stay of execution, Raeburn refuses, and Marcella breaks off the engagement. In the second volume, Marcella moves to London and becomes a district nurse, devoting her time and energy to caring for the poor in a manner much more useful to them than were her various schemes at Mellor. She meets Raeburn again in London and learns to respect his political persuasions. Finally, in the third volume, both Marcella‟s father and Raeburn‟s grandfather die, forcing each to return to the country. Marcella, who has now developed a love and respect for Maxwell, lets it be known that she would be willing to marry him if he again proposed, and he does.

In the first volume of the novel, Marcella finds herself the unwitting subject of another tableau vivant. Marcella, whose dress “was in general of the ample „aesthetic‟ type” (96), chooses this style at least in part for the freedom of motion it allows her:

“Her black dress revealed her fine full throat and her white wrists, for she had an impatience of restraint anywhere, and wore frills and falls of black lace where other people would have followed the fashion in high collars and close wristbands” (162). This freedom from “restraint” reflects Marcella‟s refusal to be governed by social customs.

However, it also results in a more revealing costume, and, therefore, a more “sensual” effect along the lines of those depicted by Rossetti. Like a typical pre-Raphaelite model,

Marcella, in her unfashionable aesthetic gown, is described as having a “great thickness 36 and full wave of the hair” which made her head appear large in comparison with “the nervous delicacy of much of the face, the thinness of the wrist, and of the long and slender foot” (162). Like Anne Brown, Marcella has actually modeled for a pre-

Raphaelite artist; her lover Aldous Raeburn writes, “I am told that Burne Jones drew her several times while she was in London, with delight” (91). Aside from this literal modeling, however, Marcella, like Evadne, unwittingly becomes a part of a living picture in her Aesthetic costume.

When Harry Wharton spies her, she is sitting alone in her eighteenth century library, the eighteenth century style being one that was favored by aesthetes.24 Also in accordance with aesthetic tastes is the literal decadence of the room which Mr. Boyce cannot afford to improve, and about which Wharton later exclaims, “I love this dilapidation!” (181, emphasis in original). 25 Wharton, who will later make unwanted sexual advances toward Marcella, comes upon her like Colquhoun and Galbraith do

Evadne, not announcing himself, but enjoying the image of Marcella in the firelight without making his presence known. When she does notice him and jumps to her feet,

Wharton exclaims, “Oh!—must you? . . . Couldn‟t you stay like that? At first I thought there was nobody in the room. . . . Then I saw you—and the fire—and the room. It was like a bit of music” (163). Although Wharton compares the scene to music instead of a work of visual art, as Beth Sutton-Ramspeck and Nicole B. Meller remark in their footnote to Marcella, this may be a reference to Walter Pater‟s “The School of

Giorgione”: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (163). Also, like an aficionado of visual art, Wharton comments on the beauty and the lighting of the

24 See Schaffer 19. 25 See Schaffer 95. 37 setting: “What a delicious place this is!—what a heavenly old place—especially in these half lights! There was a raw sun when I was here before, but now—” (164). Thus, like

Colquhoun and Hamlin, Wharton has made Marcella the object of his gaze and sensual enjoyment without her knowledge or permission. Marcella is startled and angry to find

Wharton standing in the doorway unannounced, but Wharton admits, “I knew you did not hear me. That delighted me. It showed what charming things there are in the world that have no spectators!” (164). The irony of this statement, of course, is that in Wharton, there most certainly is a spectator. The scene in the library reflects the way in which

Wharton later physically forces himself upon Marcella; here, the sexual act takes the form of the unwanted gaze.

Aldous Raeburn is the romantic ideal of the novel—Aldous Huxley, Ward‟s nephew, was named for the character—yet even he views Marcella as little more than a pretty picture. He tells his grandfather, “I have seen the only woman in the world I have ever wished to marry” (82, emphasis mine). Announcing his engagement to his friend

Hallin, he describes Marcella in terms of a work of art, comparing her to Renaissance frescoes and claiming her beauty has “morbidezza” and is “the most artistic beauty, having both the harmonies and the dissonances that a full-grown art loves” (91, emphasis in original). Curiously, the OED defines “morbidezza” as “Life-like delicacy in flesh- tints” (657, emphasis mine), revealing Raeburn still views Marcella as a very life-like work of art rather than, a decorative object, rather than a person with her own autonomy.

Regarding her, Raeburn thinks not of the daunting task of smoothing over the effects of her unconventional behavior and beliefs, but of her physical appearance: Marcella‟s

“egotism and extravagance, however, after a first moment of critical discomfort on his 38 part, had not in the end repelled him at all. The girl‟s vivid beauty glorified them; made them seem to him a mere special fullness of life” (64). Thus Marcella‟s perceived faults, like her morbidezza, render her still more lifelike to Raeburn. Of course, Raeburn pays for his short-sightedness; Marcella certainly makes life difficult for him over the course of their engagement.

Like Anne Brown and Angelica Kilroy, Marcella initially displays a disgust toward sexual advances by her fiancé. When Raeburn gives her his mother‟s jewels, she

“allowed herself to be kissed, which was, indeed, inevitable” (202). When Marcella asks him to sign the petition, “what absorbed him mainly was the wild desire to kiss the dark hair, so close below him, alternating with the miserable certainty that for him at that moment to touch, to soothe her, was to be repulsed” (294). Her desire for Raeburn, then, is certainly not sexual.

Raeburn‟s desire for Marcella, at least in the first volume of the novel, is particularly hebephilic in that while he disagrees with her specific political opinions, he admires the fact that she has opinions generally. It is love for a woman who has not yet experienced the logical results of her abstract political and social philosophies, for while

Marcella‟s unfashionable clothes allow her more physical freedom, they also serve as a testament to her socialist political leanings. In Fashion and Eroticism, Steele notes,

“some Aesthetes . . . were socialists and wanted dress to be more egalitarian and less ceremonious” (156). Marcella, like so many New Woman novels, is a kind of bildungsroman, and the Marcella of the first volume, fresh from school and new to her position as mistress of Mellor, is not the Marcella of the third whose politics have become less radical and who agrees to give up some of her “freedom” of behavior 39 reflected in her capacious dress to be bound, along with her corset, by at least some of the social conventions expected of the future Lady Maxwell.

Marcella, unlike Anne Brown and Evadne Colquhoun, is not trapped inside or defined by the tableaux-vivants Raeburn and Wharton paint, or at least not early in the novel. Anne and Evadne reach premature termini in their respective developments, reified by those around them into the role of the perpetual child. At the end of the first volume, Marcella breaks her engagement with Raeburn, and in the second, she becomes a district nurse in London. Significantly, this escape from oppression at the hands of her parents and fiancé is accompanied by a change of costume. Embarking on a year of training in a London hospital, Marcella begins to grow up26 when she exchanges (albeit temporarily) her aesthetic gowns for her nurse‟s dress.

Unlike her “„art serges‟ and velveteens,” which “gave her a good deal of trouble out of doors” (96), the nurse‟s uniform was dictated entirely by function. Says Florence

Dacre Craven in her 1889 A Guide to District Nurses, “The office of nurse is too high and holy for any woman called to it to wish to devote much time to the adornment of her person. Her one object, as regards herself, should be to be clean, simple, and neat” (5).

To this end, for example, nursing uniforms were generally four to six inches from the floor to avoid collecting dust and sweeping it about (13), while Marcella‟s art gowns would have trailed on the ground, and thus the “trouble” Ward describes. When Minta calls Marcella‟s nursing clothes “nasty things,” Marcella is “outraged” and declares, “I never like myself so well in anything” (350). That Marcella prefers her “caps and aprons

26 In “Portraits of „Audacious Youth‟: George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward,” Peter Collister summarizes what I‟ve called Marcella‟s „growing up‟ thus: “In London, chiefly through her nursing experiences, the heroine learns humility. Her intellectual education—she finally embraces a form of enlightened traditionalism—is the means too of emotional salvation, in a marriage finally accomplished with Raeburn which will benefit society” (297). 40 and plain black bonnets” with her dress of “plain brown holland, with collar and armlets of white linen” (373) to other clothes27 makes sense given her “impatience of restraint anywhere” as well as her philosophy. Of wearing the jewels Raeburn gives her, Marcella says, “I shouldn‟t know what to do with them.. . . . they don‟t give me pleasure.. . . . it‟s what they imply—the wealth—the having so much while other people want so much.

Things begin to oppress me so!” (202). Raeburn gives her the jewels specifically to wear with a white aesthetic gown to their engagement ball.28 But whether or not to wear jewels is not a quandary for a nurse; as Dacre Craven reiterates, a nurse “should herself be an example of the cleanliness which she inculcates, and of neatness and order in her dress, avoiding gold and silver ornaments, rings, etc” (7). Even though the reader is no doubt meant to assume that Marcella acquired her Aesthetic style while an art student in

London, and although this style is linked to her Venturist political ideas, in her nurse‟s dress, Marcella‟s clothing more closely reflects her personal philosophies than did her

Aesthetic gowns.

However, much as Marcella delights in the severity and utilitarianism of her nursing costume, her experiences in the London slums also enable her to delight in the jewels and feathers she once felt so guilty for enjoying, and eventually she does leave

London to become mistress of Mellor. As she tells her friends, “It comes, I suppose, of going about all day in those streets and houses among people who live in one room— with not a bit of prettiness anywhere—and no place to be alone in, or to rest in. I come home and gloat over all the beautiful dresses and houses and gardens I can think of!”

27 For example, Marcella takes very little interest in her wedding trousseau (206, 217). Also, “in her pre- nursing days,” she had exercised “a kind of proud neglect” in her dress (443). 28 A country squire‟s daughter describes Marcella thus: “very simply dressed too, except for those lovely pearls. She does her hair very oddly, so low down—in those plaits. Nobody does it like that nowadays” (224). 41

(431). When she returns to her Aesthetic gowns, remade by Betty MacDonald to be

“distinguished” without being “fashionable,” she can do so without feeling guilty for having so much more than the cottagers at Mellor. Her new gowns, although based upon the old ones, are less revealing.29 Marcella‟s dress follows a kind of dialectic from impractical Aesthetic gowns to the severity of her nursing dress and back to a modified

Aesthetic dress, just as the childlike Marcella first delights in being mistress of Mellor and in using her sexual attractiveness to hook the future Lord Maxwell, then rejects all the pleasures to which she is entitled in favor of an ascetic life in the London slums, and finally ends up able to aid the cottagers as lady of the manor, but in a much more practical way than her previous attempts playing Lady Bountiful.

In New Woman novels, Aesthetic dress serves to signal to the reader not only that the wearer has particular opinions about the role of women but that she plays a particular role in the text: that of a woman who, while attempting to escape the boundaries placed on her due to her gender by her lover, her family, or society at large, eventually finds herself trapped in a role from which she cannot escape, a role that has been determined by someone other than herself. In this way, she is like a model for a painting, portrayed in accordance with the whims of the artist rather than her own desires. In particular, she is trapped in the role of the early adolescent girl, lacking in education and experience and in sexual desire. Anne Brown, Evadne Colquhoun, and Marcella Boyce all find themselves subjects of living pictures: Anne as Hamlin molds her into the Jane Morris-

29 Betty MacDonald remakes Marcella‟s old gown: “I wouldn‟t make you fashionable for the world!” cried Betty, with a mouthful of pins, laying down masterly folds of lace and chiffon the while over the white satin with which Marcella had provided her. “What was it Worth said to me the other day?—„Ce qu‟on porte, Mademoiselle? O, pas grand‟-chose!—presque pas de corsage, at pas du tout de manches!‟—No, that kind of thing wouldn‟t suit you. But distinguished you shall be, if I sit up all night to think it out!” (443) 42 like image he has for her; Evadne through the eyes of her husbands, both the oppressive, misogynistic George Colquhoun and the well-intentioned, more progressive George

Galbraith; and Marcella by the scoundrel Harry Wharton. In the end, Anne determines to marry Hamlin, sacrificing herself for one man rather than helping the many women whose lives she had hoped to improve. Evadne remains depressed and suicidal even though she has married her Prince Charming; she is unable to contribute to the world in the way her friends had hoped. Marcella refuses both Wharton and Raeburn, but does so after exchanging her Aesthetic garb for a nurse‟s dress. When Marcella asks Raeburn to propose again at the end of the third volume, he does so with the full knowledge that she is no picture, but a woman who will act in accordance with her own mind and desires. In finding a compromise between her loose, Aesthetic gowns, and a dress considered particularly appropriate for a married lady, Marcella may well have hit upon the topic for the next chapter, the tea gown. 43

Chapter Two

The Tea Gown: “Perhaps More than You Think”

In Violet Hunt's novel The Human Interest: A Study in Incompatibilities (1899), the protagonist, Phoebe, and her husband Mortimer, finding themselves alone for the first time all day and, hearing the dressing gong, Phoebe explains, “I am going up to dress for dinner . . . Shan‟t you, Mortimer?” “There's nobody coming is there?” he asks (8-9), the suggestion being that changing to a tea gown, a special gown worn for his particular benefit and one which, as I will argue, acts as a symbol of their marital love, is somehow inappropriate. Phoebe responds, “No . . . but I like to dress.” Mortimer then says, “Dress if you like, but don't bother me.” Phoebe wonders aloud why Mortimer even married her to which he replies, “I do wish you wouldn't talk nonsense!. . . What has marriage to do with dressing for dinner?” “Perhaps more than you think,” Phoebe replies (9).

More than you think, indeed! We have just been considering the ways in which the authors of the New Woman Novels had found ways to use the conventions of

Aesthetic dress to make complex statements about their characters‟ values and gender politics. This chapter will deal with the language of the tea gown, and the many ways these novelists used it to express important facts about relationships and levels of intimacy. 44

Fig. 3. Tea gown. Note the loose fit, the frothy trim, delicate pastel color, and “Watteau” pleat.30 La Mode illustrée Dec. 1899.

The tea gown (or, alternatively, tea-gown, tea dress, or robe d‟interieur) first appeared in 1877 (Cunnington 283), and peaked in popularity in the 1890s and 1900s.

The major difference between a tea gown and a regular dress was its loose fit and the fact that it did not require a corset: the bodice (the fitted portion of the gown which extends from shoulder to waist) itself might be lightly boned, and it might either have an empire waist (cinched in directly beneath the bust, thus fitting loosely over the stomach), or a princess waist (having no waist seam at all, but long darts instead), or else be belted loosely. Because of this lack of undergarments, it was generally not worn in public or by

30 The Watteau pleat is the broad fold which hangs from the woman‟s neck and trails behind her; a popular addition to tea gowns, they might also extend from the waist. The name is a reference to the artist Jean Antoine Watteau, who designed a gown with such a pleat for Madame de Maintenon in the beginning of the eighteenth century. The gown was created for use during her pregnancy, and also included deep gores at the front instead of a defined waistline, a feature to which Hazel T. Craig attributes the inspiration for the princess style (60). The popularity of the Watteau style in tea gowns underscores their connection to Aesthetic dress because early eighteenth century styles were a common inspiration for both. 45 unmarried women. According to Patricia Cunningham, the tea gown constituted “the upper end of th[e] class of comfortable „at home‟ clothing” (7). The tea gown was either derived from artistic dress, or derived from the peignoir, a sort of fancy dressing gown, but was inspired by artistic dress, depending upon the fashion historian consulted; there is some discussion on this topic among fashion historians. Patricia Cunningham categorizes tea gowns as a variety of artistic dress (114), while Christine Bayles Kortsch asserts

(mistakenly, as I will argue) that the tea gown and art gown were synonymous (83).

However many, including Steele, are in agreement with me that the tea gown is a different animal, a sartorial descendent of the art gown (152).31 In English Women‟s

Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, C. Willett Cunnington offers yet another explanation for the genesis of the tea gown, claiming it developed from the dressing gown, which women began wearing to breakfast in their own homes the year before:

The fashion for dressing for five o‟clock tea has now become very general

in country houses; the teagown arose from the habit of ladies having tea in

the hostess‟s boudoir and donning smart dressing gowns. Now that the

gentlemen are admitted to the function peignoirs have developed into

elegant toilettes of satin, silk, foulard, etc. (283)

In any case, the tea gown differed from the art gown in a few important ways.

One did not have to belong to a particular political or artistic clique in order to wear one; one was still making a certain social statement, but that statement was more subtle than

31 In any case, we may see the connection between the two in Richard Le Gallienne‟s Young Lives, in which Myrtilla Williamson wears a “flowered tea-gown” and was also “mysteriously and disapprovingly spoken of as „aesthetic.‟ She had a look as if she had tripped out of a Japanese fan, and slept at night in a pot-pourri jar” (59-60). 46 that made by the art gown because tea gowns, while daring, were fashionable.32 Unlike

Aesthetic dress, tea gowns were generally considered appropriate only for entertaining at home, originally for tea and later for the mid-day meal or dinner. To wear one outside of those parameters would have been to draw attention to oneself, to make a definitive political statement (more on this later). For example, Emily Post recommends wearing a tea gown when visiting another‟s home only on the condition that “you are not too young and are going to stay in an informal house, where you will probably be the only guest, and where it is likely no one will be asked in” (553).33 In The Cult of Chiffon (1902),

Mrs. Eric Pritchard suggests women consult their hostesses before wearing a tea gown in their homes, because some “consider the tea-gown as a sign of the indolence and degeneracy of the times” (qtd. in Ribeiro 148). Finally, tea gowns were generally made not of natural dyes and fabrics, but of “soft, light, „clinging,‟ and even semi-„transparent‟ materials (such as chiffon, lawn, muslin, faille, and thin silks such as crepe de chine) together with much lace” (Steele 218). This is because tea gowns were not unrelated to lingerie, which was becoming increasingly elaborate and decorative at this point.

According to Steele, tea gowns “hovered on the borderline between secret clothing and fashionable dress” (208). However, although the tea gown had distanced itself somewhat from its “artistic” origins, even being made by Worth and the other couture houses and thus readily available, it still retained an echo of its original connotations. Steele argues

“its image as an „artistic‟ garment of „poetry‟ and „fantasy‟ permitted designers and wearers a greater degree of experimentation” (210).

32 As Kortsch reminds us, “One did not necessarily have to subscribe to all the views of the aesthetic movement in order to keep up with the latest style” (83). 33 Granted, Etiquette was American and first published in 1923, but both of these qualities would account for a less, not more, formal attitude toward correct attire. 47

The New Woman, both in fiction and in life, was often dressed in a tea gown.

“Nora,” the author of an 1895 article in the Monthly Packet entitled “„The New Woman.‟

Does She Exist?” describes the New Woman as having “a tendency towards flame- coloured tea-gowns” (748). In Le Gallienne‟s 1899 novel Young Lives, Myrtilla

Williamson, is described in the same sentence as “‟a „new‟ woman,” and as wearing “tea gowns in advance of her time” (65).

There are several reasons why a New Woman novelist would choose a tea gown.

Tea gowns were considered especially feminine, generally made of soft fabrics and trimmed with lace and chiffon, and thus could be used by a novelist to underscore a New

Woman character‟s femininity, particularly during a time when a working woman‟s

“womanliness” was up for debate. Its soft, clinging form stood in contrast to the rigid figure created by the corset, indicating a soft nature.

As the sartorial descendent of the art gown, the tea gown also serves to indicate a process of maturation. In changing from Aesthetic dress to tea gowns one becomes a more independent woman,34 because the tea gown was generally only worn at home and indicated a kind of intimacy between the woman who wore it and those she allowed to see her so dressed, male or female. In Egerton‟s The Wheel of God (1898), Carrie Ellis demonstrates the link between the tea gown and intimacy when she longs to “get into a tea-gown . . . and lay aside the mask she wore for every [other] human being” (222).

Secondly, because the tea gown was only considered appropriate for married women, it acted as a symbol of marital love. To dress a heroine in a tea gown was to underscore her love and desire for intimacy with her husband. Because it was only properly worn by

34 See also Violet Hunt‟s A Hard Woman and my discussion of Mary Ward‟s Marcella in the previous chapter. 48 married women, the tea gown acted as a kind of signifier of a woman‟s sexuality. The ease with which one might slip in and out of this garment, in contrast to the difficulty of getting in and out of a form-fitting gown with a corset, which generally required the aid of a maid, also contributed to its reputation as a slightly risqué choice. The article “The

Cult of the Tea Gown” in Every Woman‟s Encyclopedia (1910-12) describes a tea gown

“with one fastening only! . . . fastened with a single hook and eye prescribed at one side of the waist” (“Cult”). With its status as the symbol of a woman‟s initiation into sex, it was the appropriate dress for an expectant mother, because the pregnant woman‟s belly too served as an outward representation of her sexuality.

New women heroines, however, often wore their tea-gowns “with a difference,” outside of the social parameters in which they were considered appropriate: while unmarried, in public, during the evening, or all three. To do so was to attempt to revise society‟s definitions of love, sex, or maternity. The notion that tea gowns must be worn with one‟s intimate friends and family accounts for the tea gown‟s popularity among

New Women at this time and, I will argue, for their inclination to wear them in more public arenas than the average woman might.

The question of how a New Woman was to achieve intimacy with members of either sex was certainly up for discussion. As she redefined her role as a woman, she necessarily redefined her relationships with others, both male and female, and a theme of loneliness permeates New Woman fiction. George Egerton describes the heroine of

“Gone Under” in Discords (1898) as follows: “She has read much, thought much, worked 49 hard, and lived clean—been necessarily lonely” (83).35 New Woman novels whose plots revolve around the loneliness of the heroines include Violet Hunt‟s The Workaday

Woman, Mary Cholmondeley‟s Red Pottage, Richard Le Gallienne‟s Young Lives,

Elizabeth Robins‟ The New Moon, Arabella Keneally‟s The Marriage Yoke, George

Paston‟s A Study in Prejudices, Ella Hepworth Dixon‟s The Story of a Modern Woman,

George Egerton‟s The Wheel of God, George Gissing‟s The Odd Women, and Netta

Syrett‟s Rose Cottingham. Part of this loneliness derives from the belief that allowing a woman to behave in ways previously considered inappropriate for her gender would result in her “unsexing.”36 Dressing a New Woman character in a tea gown served to address this problem because tea gowns were considered very feminine. In Afternoon

Tea, Jane Pettigrew explains, “The idea of the tea gown was that it allowed ladies to leave off their stays, at least for an hour or two between the more formal lunch and dinner, but continue to look ravishingly beautiful and feminine” (54, c. 2). Similarly, in

Where to Take Tea, Susan Cohen defines the tea gown as “a loose and luxurious creation

. . . which was feminine but still refined” (33). A goal for many New Woman novelists was simply to assert that even “New” Women required intimacy, including sexual intimacy, with their fellow human beings.

35 Loneliness is the theme of this story. Edith cannot meet the test her lover has devised for her because she will be all alone for three months. As Edith debates whether or not she will tell her story to the girl, the moon, a traditional symbol of virginity, is “playing hide-and-seek through a feathery maze of clouds” (94). 36 Among New Woman characters concerned with the belief among the larger society that to behave in ways considered “New” would “unsex” them, necessarily altering the way in which they related to others, include Sarah Grand‟s titular Ideala (20, 154), Beth from The Beth Book (509), Herminia in Allen‟s The Woman Who Did, Phoebe Elles in The Human Interest (46), Cecily Dormer in A Study in Prejudices (125, 128), Mary Desmond in George Egerton‟s The Wheel of God, and the girl in Egerton‟s “Gone Under” (87). Patricia Marks discusses the notion of education “unsexing” women in her Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers (7), while Kristine Swenson describes the fear that medical training would “unsex” female doctors in Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (87, 99, 113). 50

One reason that a New Woman might wear her tea gown “with a difference” was for the sake of modesty, and as a sign of fidelity to her husband, current or future.

Although a tea gown might be considered risqué because it lacked stays, it also concealed more of the shoulders and décolletage than would a typical evening gown. Thus New

Women, both single and married, who didn‟t want to wear clothing that was too revealing bucked convention by choosing tea gowns instead of typical evening dress. This is the case for two heroines of New Woman novels: George Paston‟s Candida of The Career of

Candida (1896) and Marion Rashleigh of Rita‟s A Husband of No Importance (1894), and in both instances, the reader‟s attention is specifically called to their “eccentricity” in dress (Paston 16, Rita 13). Says the narrator of Mrs. Rashleigh, “Evening-dress she scorned. It was immodest and degrading, she declared; designed to allure that weak creature, Man, and to pander to his vicious instincts” (13). Instead, Mrs. Rashleigh wears, “one of her apologies for evening-dress—a tea-gown of rich oriental brocade”

(14). Candida St. John, though as yet unmarried, takes a similar view. When her aunt chides, “That‟s not a bad tea-gown, but I prefer to see young women in evening dress,”

“I never wear evening dress,” Candida replied.

“Yet you have such beautiful arms and shoulders,” sighed her

mother. “It seems a pity that nobody should ever see them.”37

“I suppose my husband will see them one day,” said her daughter.

“I don‟t suppose that anyone else has the right to see them.” (30)

Thus Candida‟s decision in favor of modesty also indicates a desire for intimacy with her future husband. The same can be said for Mrs. Rashleigh‟s “eccentric” dress, as A

37 Both Rita and Paston must have feared the reader would attribute these characters‟ choice to homeliness. Rita also asserts Mrs. Rashleigh is “possessed of a beautiful figure and irreproachable arms” although she “never deigned to display these charms. She was true to her principles at the cost of vanity” (13). 51

Husband of No Importance, like The Career of Candida, is one of those books, common to the New Woman genre, in which the married woman who at first disdains her own husband gradually falls in love with him; this is the plot of Hunt‟s A Hard Woman

(1895), which I discuss later in this chapter, as well as Beatrice Whitby‟s The Awakening of Mary Fenwick (1890), and Iota‟s A Yellow Aster (1894), both of whose heroines wear tea gowns, and, through them, indicate their latent desire for intimacy with their husbands.

We may see how the tea gown is used to underscore marital love in another New

Woman plot device, in which a husband first loses and then regains his love for his wife, examples of which include George Paston‟s A Study in Prejudices (1895) and Netta

Syrett‟s The Day‟s Journey (1906). In A Study in Prejudices, Cecily Dormer chooses a tea gown as a sign of her desire for intimacy with her husband to the exclusion of all others. On the night they are to go to their first ball as a married couple, her husband

Miles sees her in a ball gown for the first time and becomes so afraid that she will be a social success and that he will have to share her company with others that he hates to take her out in public. When he confesses this, Cecily insists upon changing into a tea gown and spending the evening alone with her husband at home. Miles protests, “I want to have you as you are, pearls and satin, and beauty and all. I want to feel that you are mine—all mine, and that no other man has any share in you, even with his eyes” (135). It is not enough for Miles to dominate the private, domestic side of his wife represented by her tea gown, he wants to own her public self as well, embodied in the ball gown, to the extent that it is necessary that she have one. In humoring him, Cecily sets a dangerous 52 precedent, for he eventually succeeds in cutting her off entirely from all of her friends and preventing her from doing any work outside of the home.

Tea gowns appear twice in Syrett‟s The Day‟s Journey; the first time is the day on which Cecily Kingslake accidentally discovers her husband Robert‟s affair. As Robert attempts to make nonchalant conversation about his mistress Philippa Burton, Cecily chooses a tea gown from her wardrobe and “pinned on the brooch in front of her tea- gown with deliberation” (29). This choice of tea gown at the beginning of the novel indicates Cecily‟s feelings toward her husband; at this point she still loves him with the same passion she felt for him five years earlier, at the beginning of her marriage when

“she had given herself over to her love as the woman a little difficult, more than a little fastidious, always gives herself—with a surrender complete and unquestioning” (7). The lonely Cecily, like other New Women we shall see who crave intimacy, is associated with the chaste and solitary moon: the garden to which Cecily has devoted herself in the absence of her husband‟s love and attention is “magical with moonlight” (32) on the night she discovers his affair, which the reader may contrast with “the memory of the early sunshine, the early sense of being blessed above all women” (61). We may also contrast the scene in which “in the moonlight Rose saw the bitter little smile on

[Cecily‟s] lips” (36) with Cecily‟s memories of intimacy with her husband, a time not associated with the moon. When she espies Robert kissing his mistress in that garden, she “remembered one night,—soon after their marriage,—moonless, but full of stars, when she had sat with Robert on the bench under the hazels. . . . ” (122, ellipsis in the original). 53

Throughout the rest of the novel, Cecily does not wear a tea gown again until the final scene two years later, even though she spends most of her time with Dick Mayne, a man who had been her friend since childhood, and thus in front of whom, in 1906 when the novel was published, it would have been appropriate to wear a tea gown. In spite of

Robert‟s infidelity, the fact that Dick loves her and would be good to her, and the fact that she no longer loves her husband as she once did, Cecily chooses to return to her husband. When her husband enters the room, she “sat by the fire, looking back over her shoulder. She was in a tea-gown of soft silk, which fell away from her arms” (302).

Cecily has progressed in her life; she has overcome her debilitating love for her husband and become a successful writer in her own right. In returning to Robert, she must regress somewhat emotionally, and thus she sees him first over her shoulder. However, in putting on the tea gown again, she puts on the role of wife she was forced to abandon two years before.

Her tea gown also serves to show us the way in which her relationship to Robert has changed; in the beginning of the book, she loves him as a wife, by the end her love has become maternal. Their courtship was “devoted to impetuous, ardent love-making”

(6) and the first year of their marriage was “Paradise” (37). However, when Cecily became a mother, Robert became “bored” (37). After the baby died, Cecily grew depressed, and when she came out of her depression, Robert was no longer interested in his wife (38). Instead, he found “soul affinity” with Philippa Burton, who smiles at him

“as a mother smiles at the waywardness of a little child” (108, 116). Robert is “clean- shaven” and “almost childlike about the eyes” (3). His sister-in-law Diana calls him

“little lad” and “little boy” and jokes that “the moment he gets up to town, he takes his 54 marbles out of his pockets, and his little toys and things, and begins to play!” (78, 79).

Here Diana unknowingly hits upon a truth, as Robert has spent the day in London with his mother-like lover. In writing, Cecily eventually overcomes her jealousy, achieving “a serenity which should lift her above the storms of passion; for interests independent of the love of man” (135). When her friend suggests Robert has tired of Philippa and begins to long for Cecily once more, her expression is that “with which a mother might have heard of some unreasonable and rather troublesome caprice on the part of her son” (222).

By the end of the second year, Cecily has gone to live abroad, but she returns to England when she hears Robert is miserable without her and, according to her friend Rose‟s letter,

“looked like my Jim when he‟s been naughty and thinks I‟m not going to say good-night to him” (264-5). Upon receiving this letter, she decides to return to England and to

Robert with “no more hesitation than a mother feels when she hears her child is ill”

(265). When they are reunited, in the second “tea gown” scene, she exclaims “gently, as a mother speaks to her child. „Oh, Robin, what a thin little boy!‟” (302).

Her feelings toward her husband are so changed that where she was once wracked by jealousy38 (124), she is now so far from jealous that she is able to rescue her husband‟s former lover when she is forced to go from man to man because she has run up so many debts. Cecily both lies for Philippa to save her chances of marriage and pays her debts so that her future husband will not discover them. Emphasizing their female solidarity,

Cecily says, “because you‟re a woman, too,—and that in itself is hard enough,—I‟ll help you now” (293). However, she explains her change from lover to mother-figure to

Philippa: “If I were jealous now, I couldn‟t lift a finger to help you. But the worst of it

38 “There were times when, heightened by fierce jealousy, her old passion for him revived so strongly that she could scarcely restrain herself from the madness of throwing herself into his arms, appealing to him, begging him to come back to her—to love her” (124). 55 is, I‟m not jealous any more . . . You have taught me to put it out of any man‟s power to hurt me much again. But listen to me! . . . For what I‟ve had to kill to make it possible not to be hurt, I will never forgive you to the end of my life” (293-4). And to Robert, who longs to be loved as Cecily once loved him, she says, “There are different sorts of love” (308). Thus, in the second tea gown scene, Cecily‟s gown evokes maternity as well as marital love; for Cecily, the two are synonymous. Syrett implies that this is the way for a woman in Cecily‟s position to relate to her husband, much as she relates to the creative work she produces, which work has freed her from her romantic passion for her husband.

The tea gown aids the author in her attempt to redefine marital love in John

Strange Winter‟s 1895 potboiler A Blameless Woman, in which Margaret North believes she is marrying a Russian prince, Paul Dolgouroff, but two years later discovers that the ceremony, which was conducted in Russian, was not a marriage at all. For the two years of their relationship, Margaret and Dolgouroff reside in Berlin under an assumed name, and Margaret‟s family believes that she is living with her former governess while studying German. Thus, when Margaret discovers she is not married to Dolgouroff and that he is already married, she simply returns to Britain and tries to forget Dolgouroff, whom she still loves. Of course, the truth will out. An old suitor wears her down with his repeated proposals, and she finally agrees to marry Captain Stewart. However, she meets Dolgouroff in London and her husband takes a liking to him, while her husband‟s cousin Effie, who lives with the Stewarts, becomes engaged to Dolgouroff‟s friend Count

Zelenberg, so that Margaret is unable to avoid him. Effie, who has a bone to pick with the Stewarts, does some detective work, discovers the truth, and betrays Margaret to her 56 husband, who divorces her—even though she is “a blameless woman”—and refuses to let her see her two children. Finally, Dolgouroff‟s wife dies, and Margaret marries her prince.

In A Blameless Woman, as Margaret dreams of the lover she has left in Berlin, she wears one of her “half dozen beautiful tea-gowns, which she had worn in the evening, when she and Dolgouroff were not going out to dinner” (43). Her favorite is “a well-cut white woolen gown, relieved here and there with a touch of faint green” (43). Of course,

Margaret was not really married to Dolgouroff, but her choice of the tea gown serves to underscore the notion that to her, it was a marriage. However, the style she chooses nearly gives away the secret of her initiation into sex because in Blankhampton,

a tea-gown was a garment but little known . . . and was never worn by

unmarried women. Therefore, when Margaret went down into the

drawing-room, Mrs Luscombe looked up with something of a start.

“My dear,” she said, in rather a scared voice, “I don‟t know what

you have done to yourself; you are very much altered.” (43)

Margaret puts away her Berlin dresses and has new ones made in the style popular for young women in Blankhampton, but she continues to wear tea gowns in spite of their connotation: “I do wear tea-gowns, although some people in Blankhampton seem to think it is perfectly ridiculous to do so” (85). Tea gowns also serve to connect Margaret to Dolgouroff in that in them, she may wear the bangle he sends for her birthday because

“[t]he full sleeve of her soft silk tea-gown completely hid it from sight, and she went down to dinner at the summons of the gong, feeling strangely fortified and bright” (105). 57

Margaret is wearing her white and green tea gown when a letter arrives from

Dolgouroff the day after her return, and because of this association, she develops a liking for that particular dress. Before she marries Stewart, she burns her souvenirs of

Dolgouroff, and for this task, she chooses to wear

that very tea-gown which she had worn on the first evening of her return

from Berlin. It was very shabby now, and had been washed many times,

but Margaret had a particular affection for it, and although it was far too

much the light of other days for visible wear, yet she clung to it for use in

the privacy of her own room. (146)

Thus Margaret‟s tea gowns demonstrate her devotion to her former lover and her status as

“blameless,” because she thought she was married to him. The fact that Margaret chooses to burn everything except the tea gown and a lock of Dolgouroff‟s hair further underscores her belief in her own innocence. For one thing, she burns only the things which could be traced back to her lover and her life in Berlin (The lock of hair she puts in an envelope marked “Elsie” to throw any snooping relatives off the track.), demonstrating that she destroys them in order to save her own reputation, not out of any sense of guilt over her connection to the prince. However, it is also interesting that Margaret saves only items indicative of the physicality of their relationship. The souvenirs she burns are all at at least one physical remove from the body: letters, concert programs, photographs of pets and places. The only thing she hesitates to burn is a picture of Dolgouroff. The hair is quite literally a piece of Dolgouroff‟s body; the gown is the physical representation of Margaret‟s lost virginity: the stays are off. Says Alison Lurie, “fabric always stands for the skin of the person beneath it” (232). Margaret‟s tea gown works in 58 the same way as the ring and bracelet Dolgouroff gave her, which she also keeps, as symbols of her physical penetration. According to Ardis, Winter‟s portrayal of Margaret

North serves to “„transform‟ the „pure woman‟ not by producing the „correct‟ representation of her but by transforming the Victorian discourse of sexuality” (82). In this, Winter employs the tea gown to underscore Margaret‟s position as “blameless”

(because it represents marriage) without gliding over the fact that she has experienced sex.

In The Human Interest; A Study in Incompatibilities (1899), Violet Hunt dresses her heroines in tea gowns in order to emphasize the New Woman‟s need for intimacy.

Hunt‟s protagonist Phoebe Elles runs away from her husband because she feels misunderstood and unsatisfied in her marriage. She goes to Rokeby, where she meets and promptly falls in love with Edmund Rivers, a landscape artist and Royal

Academician who, while perfectly kind to Phoebe, pays little attention to anyone in his life, male or female, as he is so consumed by the pursuit of his art. When Edmund proposes, Phoebe admits she is already married, and he sends her back to Newcastle, but in the meantime a couple of busybodies have seen fit to alert Phoebe‟s husband Mortimer that Phoebe had assumed a false name and unwittingly gave herself away by neglecting to efface the initials and address from the handle of her umbrella. Mortimer sends his aunt to Rokeby to determine the truth of the situation for herself, and she arrives just in time to watch through a window as Edmund proposes to Phoebe. Thus, when Phoebe arrives back at Newcastle, her husband announces his intention to divorce her, and again she runs away, this time to London to stay with her friend Egidia, who happens to be

Edmund‟s cousin, and every bit as in love with him as Phoebe is. 59

Phoebe is flighty and self-centered, but Egidia does eventually make her see the truth of the situation—if her husband succeeds in divorcing her and Edmund marries her, which he will because he is a man of honor, then Phoebe will not have the exciting social life she has been experiencing since she moved to London, but will be forced to live abroad where no one will associate with her because of the scandal. What‟s more,

Edmund (and Egidia) will come to resent her because she has forced him into this situation. Phoebe can‟t stand to disgrace the man she loves and cannot stand the way her friends have come to dislike her for putting him in this awkward position (She is even surprised that her husband no longer seems to love her.), so she decides the only way to make everyone like her again is to commit suicide.

Phoebe is characterized from the beginning of the novel as a woman making the best of an unfortunate situation; she is trapped in Newcastle, a town which does not provide the kind of artistic and intellectual stimulation for which she longs and which

Hunt characterizes as perpetually shrouded by “a smoky pall” of gloom (1). Phoebe‟s loneliness is demonstrated by the fact that she often feels cold; Egidia describes her as “A young woman, beautifully dressed, who was sitting by the fire, though it was not cold”

(2), and when she visits Egidia, she sits with “her feet upheld to the glow of a North- country fire blazing away in the very height of summer, as usual” (13). Egidia associates the climate with the lack of material for artistic inspiration: she describes Phoebe‟s sitting room as “rather pretty and French, and thoroughly out of keeping with the grim realties of Northern hardness and abnegation of art-feeling that reigned outside” (2).

Called “the Muse of Newcastle,” Phoebe complains, “There are a few nice advanced 60 people, but they go away all the time, or if they bring nice people down from London, they keep them to themselves. I never see anyone worth talking to” (3).

In addition, Phoebe lacks spiritual communion within her family, particularly with her husband. Plus, in the scene with which we began this chapter, Phoebe dresses in a tea gown for dinner, indicating this desire for familial intimacy, but Mortimer says,

“There‟s nobody coming is there?” “No—unfortunately—but I like

to dress.” “Dress if you like, but don‟t bother me!” “Oh, I do wonder

what you married me for, Mortimer?” she complained with plaintive

savageness.

“I do wish you wouldn‟t talk nonsense!” he answered. “What has

marriage to do with dressing for dinner?”

“Perhaps more than you think,” she murmured . . . (9)

The “very handsome, vaporous tea-gown” she chooses serves to trigger an argument with her husband which ultimately leads to Phoebe‟s flight to Yorkshire. While the thin

“vaporous” material of the tea gown, as well as the looseness of the style, indicate

Phoebe‟s desire for communion with her family, her husband and aunt find it flimsy and impractical, an object for ridicule:

“Do you call that a gown?” he said, fingering a fold of the shining satin.

“And pr&y [sic], what may that have cost me?” . . . “It is not very nice of

you, Mortimer, to remind me that I haven‟t a penny of my own, and must

depend on your bounty!” (10)

Mortimer misses the point and can think only of the money it cost him so that Phoebe could have an extra gown to “dress” for dinner. One would think that Mortimer would be 61 accustomed to Phoebe‟s attempts to communicate through dress given her “little affectation” to “dress as far as possible in character with her mood of the moment” (10).

Even after she has confessed her (unconsummated) love for Rivers, Phoebe is surprised at her husband‟s desire to divorce her, and longs not only for good will and companionship, but even for his romantic passion, believing always “in the existence in Mortimer‟s heart of a latent love for her” (113).

The name of the object of Phoebe‟s affections, Edmund Rivers, is an obvious allusion to St. John Rivers in Charlotte Brontë‟s Jane Eyre (1847), the eponymous heroine‟s handsome but frigid cousin whose only desire is to become a missionary in

India. Just as St. John wishes to marry Jane for form‟s sake and to have a helpmeet in

India, Edmund proposes to Phoebe to keep up appearances, because he has unwittingly compromised her position by sharing a sitting room with her at a country inn. The

“human interest” of the title alludes to the fact that Edmund is a landscape painter so devoted to his subject that he refuses to depict people in his works because he finds them a distraction. Also, like Jane, Phoebe has been useful to Edmund, building a bridge to make him a shortcut, “rubbing” his colors onto his palette, and helping him to carry his painting supplies to remote locations. We see further indication of Phoebe‟s solitary condition in her relation to the cold, virginal moon, as the mythological Phoebe was traditionally associated with the moon. Phoebe wanders along the banks of the Greta on

“the most beautiful moonlight night of the whole year” (60), and even Edmund notes her mysterious connection with the moon: “How did you happen to know there was a moon, and that she would be shining over this reach of the river?” (61). 62

We see reason for this particular New Woman‟s obsession with romantic love in the scene in which she and Edmund plan to part forever:

She wailed out gently, like a child. “But what am I to do? What

are you going to do?”

“I am going to do my work,” he answered her severely and coldly.

“My work, that I have been letting go to the dogs lately. I shall paint and

paint—like the very devil—as I did before you came. You must do that

too. Work is the only thing, I find.”

“Work, work, honest work!” she repeated mechanically. “But will

you tell me what work I have to do?” (82).

Without a talent for art like Edmund‟s or one for writing like Egidia‟s, and without the kind of social intercourse she desires, Phoebe is left with little to occupy herself.

Although she does not resort to drastic measures as Phoebe does, Egidia too feels the loneliness of her position as a New Woman. Unlike Phoebe, she has a career as a novelist and the benefit of living in London and associating with other artists and intellectuals, but she continues to long for the romantic love of her cousin Edmund and demonstrates this in part through her choice of a red velvet tea gown when she invites him for tea, unaware that they will be interrupted by Phoebe (100). As Alison Lurie reminds us, “bright scarlet and crimson garments have traditionally been associated . . . with desire” (195).

The novel ends after Egidia goes to Rokeby to convince Jane Anne, the niece of the innkeeper, not to testify in the divorce case, which she intended to do out of dislike for Pheobe—she too has fallen in love with Edmund. Without Jane Anne‟s testimony, 63

Mortimer will have no evidence to get his divorce, and Phoebe‟s and Edmund‟s good names will be saved. However, Phoebe is unaware of Egidia‟s mission. In the final scene, Phoebe dresses herself in an elaborate white tea gown (135), a fitting choice given her desire for love and acceptance from Mortimer, Egidia, and Edmund, and her willingness to die in order to achieve this acceptance, as this is the only way to obtain the love of her husband, her lover, and her romantic rival simultaneously. Just as Monroe chides his wife for prizing beauty over warmth, Egidia tells Phoebe, “That is a ridiculously thin gown to wear” (135), but later softens toward her and sooths, “Cheer up!

You look very pretty! . . . Rather like Frou-Frou in the deathbed scene. Poor little Frou-

Frou!” (135).39 Hunt‟s novel, however, reverses the typical order of the plot of the romantic novel (or play): Not only has Phoebe already been married for ten years at novel opens, but hers is a “good” marriage worthy of the end of any Victorian romantic novel, given that her parents had not seen fit to provide for her and her face has been her fortune. It is on the final page of the book that, by Deus ex machina, her husband dies and sets her free. Ironically, by the conventions of the typical romantic novel, it is freedom from marriage which provides Phoebe with the intimacy she desires.

Not all New Women characters, however, craved this sort of intimacy (any more than they all chose to wear tea gowns). Violet Hunt‟s A Hard Woman (1895) serves to demonstrate the New Woman‟s need, if not desire, for human intimacy by depicting, as

David Trotter notes in The English Novel in History, 1895-1920, “a standoff between two

39 In Henri Meilhac‟s and Ludovic Halévy‟s 1869 play Frou Frou, significantly subtitled, A Play of Powerful Human Interest, Frou Frou marries the man her sister loves and then neglects her household, so that her sister must come and take care of it. When she tries to recover her position, her husband and sister merely laugh at her, and jealous of them, she runs away with an old lover. In the end, Frou Frou repents and spends her time nursing among the poor, where she contracts a fatal disease. In the final scene, her husband, sister, and child come to her bed and forgive her. 64 types of „modern woman‟, each hardened in her own way by modernity” (44). The novel juxtaposes the development of two New Women, Nevill France and Lydia Munday, who is the “Hard Woman” of the title. Lydia is sardonic, cynical, cool, and resists developing emotional or sexual attachments to anyone, either her sisters, her parents, her husband

Ferdinand Munday, or admirers such as Cossie Davenant. She confesses she has no maternal instinct and hates to be kissed (11-13). At the beginning of the novel, Lydia seems quite in control, orchestrating the details of the life of her “weak” family in such as a way as to win a “dreadfully careless and abstracted” husband and to “manage” him

(20). It is she who “hold[s] the purse strings” of her artist husband, whom she considers impractical for prioritizing his artistic ideals over the money he stands to make from commodifying his work (35). In a bid to keep from wasting all the time and energy that have gone into a painting of Keats‟ “Lamia,” when Munday‟s model quits, Lydia seeks out another with the same mouth, and then decides to make a “foil” of Nevill France, an aspiring actress and a “Burne-Jones girl” (40), i.e. a woman who wears Aesthetic gowns, who earns her living by type-writing. Lydia‟s plans backfire when she makes a bad investment and loses her money while her husband falls in love with Nevill.

Both Lydia Munday and Nevill France hold “modern” views on the position of women in society. Lydia says, “I do so dislike that patronizing way of speaking to women. Things are changed. We are not dolls and idiots and slaves anymore” (34).

Also, “You seem to have got a good deal of that old silly stay-at-home harem ideal of women hanging about you still. That‟s all utterly exploded now. Women can do anything!” (46). In fact, Lydia even writes a New Woman novel, noting that the heroine of her books is “a modern woman” (129). However, the “anything” to which she refers 65 seems to include only matters of finance. She also believes, “It‟s a woman‟s vocation to be married” (51). Nevill, in contrast, opines, “I don‟t see why there should not be some association of . . . Professional women, who have their work; who don‟t want to incur bonds” (67). However, the bonds to which she refers are those of matrimony but not of love: “to me, love bound by a promise is no longer love, but a bargain” (68). Nevill

“passionately” clarifies, “between two real lovers the mere marriage bond would be a trifle, a harmless necessary detail—like ordering a visiting card, or paying a call—a concession to society, a formality to be entered into or neglected, if need were” (68).

Thus both support emancipation for women, but while Lydia believes in marriage but not love,40 Nevill believes in love but not marriage. Later, it becomes clear that Lydia considers her husband a possession, when Nevill confesses her jealousy and she responds, “Nonsense! How can one be jealous of what isn‟t even one‟s own property?”

(117).

The role played by fashion in general and the tea gown in particular in this novel is interesting and informative. At the beginning of the text, Lydia dresses very fashionably, in expensive French gowns (“Why not? I can afford it” [40]) in bright, showy colors, while Nevill chooses Aesthetic dress. Lydia describes Nevill as

that girl over there . . .in a shockingly ill-fitting blue gown . . . did you

ever see such a dress, and such a way of doing her hair? Exactly like a

Burne-Jones‟s picture. She was most nice about it, poor girl, and quite

40 Before her marriage, Lydia consults her friend Mrs. Malory, who says: . . I may be old-fashioned I think you have left out the one thing that would make your marriage a success. Lydia (eagerly). Oh, what? Mrs. Malory. The one thing needful. Love! Lydia (deprecatingly). Dear Mrs. Malory! (15) 66

willing to alter it, as she was going out with me. But I decided it was

better to let her stick to her own style. „My dear Nevill,‟ I said,‟ your style

is „flop,‟ and you wouldn‟t look right in ordinary civilized dress. Do just

stay as you are,‟ and she did. (41)

The phrases “Burne-Jones girl” (See Fig. 5) and “flop” 41 both refer to Nevill‟s Aesthetic style of dress, a style characterized by flowing drapery, lack of undergarments, and natural colors, and the subject of the previous chapter. Lydia befriends Nevill because

“she makes a capital foil” to her own style, and she considers herself “quite the best- dressed woman in the room” (39). However, at least some of her friends disagree with this assessment. Mr. St. Jerome describes one of her gowns as “a costume that successfully defied every known law of harmony,” and her husband jokes, “It sears my eyeballs!” (45).

Lydia chooses gowns which display her wealth and position: French gowns were expensive, and fashionable gowns could only be worn for a short period of time before they went out of fashion. Lydia‟s major concern is to escape from her middle class upbringing, and in fact, she married Munday because of his social position. In dressing, she selects the most fashionable and eye-catching gowns in hopes of improving her social standing and with little regard to the artistic “laws of harmony” which concern her husband, Mr. St. Jerome, and Nevill France. Nevill demonstrates little desire to move ahead socially or financially: she refuses pay for her modeling and dreams of being an actress, a career which still wasn‟t considered entirely respectable. In dressing unfashionably, Nevill demonstrates that she doesn‟t much care what others think of her,

41 The term “flop” refers to the loose, “floppy” aesthetic style. In The Day‟s Journey, Rose Summers describes Philippa Burton, a character who dresses Aesthetically as “pretty . . . in a floppy fashion,” to which Cecily replies, “Oh, she still flops?” (16). 67 but, as I argued in the previous chapter, her Aesthetic garments do speak to her youth, naïveté, and lack of control over her own situation.

Just as the tea gown derived from aesthetic dress42 and as Aesthetic dress, I have argued, alludes to a kind of physical and emotional immaturity, so the tea gown represents a more mature and nuanced New Woman (though one certainly did not have to be a New Woman in order to wear a tea gown). When her aunt first sees Margaret dressed in a tea gown in A Blameless Woman, she comments, “you look ten years older than you used to do. You don‟t look like a girl at all” (43). Sometimes we may see examples of this emotional and intellectual growth in the change of dress of a character in a single text. This is the case in Violet Hunt‟s A Hard Woman. Just as Marcella Boyce becomes more emancipated with a change of clothes—into nursing dress, so Nevill

France‟s emancipation is symbolized by her change of clothing, from aesthetic dress into a tea gown, as she matures from a model used by Ferdinand Munday to create art, to an artist in her own right. When she dresses Aesthetically, she plays an awkward role in a love triangle, in which she loves Munday, but continues to pain herself by spending large portions of each day with him without alluding to or acting on her emotions. When we see her in a tea gown, she has left London and Munday to pursue her own career. When she returns, she will not resume her former, suffering position in the Mundays‟ house; she will have her love or nothing at all.

In the first portion of the novel, Nevill is Lydia‟s protégée and souffre-douleur; she models for Munday, but isn‟t paid for it. Gradually, she falls in love with Munday, and tries to explain to Lydia that she can‟t continue to model for him because she is in love with him, although Lydia trusts her husband and doesn‟t mind Nevill‟s feelings

42 See P. Cunningham 114 and Steele 218. 68 because she finds her so useful. Nevill goes away to train as an actress, and two years later, Mr. and Mrs. Munday and their friends see her in a play, but without her Aesthetic clothing, they fail to recognize her at first. Nevill now wears “a tea-gown; impossible, but beautiful. It was fashionable, for the two women went into ecstasies about it, but to me it had a strange suggestion of the mystic wonderful colour harmonies, evanescent, indescribable,43 that characterize the draperies of Ferdinand Munday‟s medieval figures”

(159). When Nevill returns to London, she is no longer the child who let Lydia Munday order her around, a child whom she associates with her former Aesthetic attire: “You remember me as the Burne-Jones girl, don‟t you? So does everybody. I was like that once” (161). Recalling her days as a model to Munday, she comments, “Ah, what a long way back that is! I am so different now! When I remember what a little fool I was! I had no pluck, no savoir vivre. I ran away . . . .” (162, ellipsis in the original). Whereas

Nevill once fled the possibility of a relationship with Munday, even after his wife practically begs her to return, she now has no intention of evading intimacy with the man she loves, deriding her former behavior. Her first action after her return to London is to

43 To define a color as “indescribable” may seem either intentionally vague or lazy to the contemporary reader, but “indescribable” seems to have been a common “description” of colors of dress at the time, particularly those used for Aesthetic gowns. In The Art of Decoration, Haweis describes Aesthetic dress as having “indescribable tints” (12), quoting The Two Paths, in which John Ruskin states, “NO COLOUR HARMONY IS OF HIGH ORDER UNLESS IT INVOLVES INDESCRIBABLE TINTS. It is the best possible sign of a color when nobody who sees it knows what to call it, or how to give an idea of it to any one else. Even among simple hues, the most valuable are those which cannot be defined . . .” (269). As Aesthetic dress was supposed to employ artistic principles, so one consulted Ruskin to determine its worth. Tea gowns, given their relationship to art gowns, were also commonly described as “indescribable”: Cunnington quotes an unattributed 1892 fashion source as depicting the most fashionable tea gowns as having “yokes and capes of lace which begin and end in an indescribable manner” (381). Similarly, in an article entitled “February Fashions” in the February 1888 issue of Woman‟s World, a Mrs. Johnston depicts a red China crepe tea gown whose “intricacies of draping . . . are altogether indescribable” (186). In an article in the Ladies Realm in 1908, Mrs. Pritchard declares, “If it is to be successful, there must be more poetry in the tea gown [than the dinner gown]” and “it must be full of mysterious folds and lines” (qtd. in Taylor 121, emphasis mine). Jane Jones‟ 1900 novel The Prison-House contains Ruskin‟s exact phrase; the heroine Mary Clay wears “a Parisian tea-gown, a garment of indescribable tint, fascinating cut, and alarming price” (178). Mrs. W. K. Clifford‟s New Woman short story “The Key” contains a tea gown “of a blue-grey colour not easy to define” (266). 69 ask after Munday. Even her new stage name “Ilma” is a near anagram for “lamia”: she now intends to play the part for which she once merely posed. Her tea gown demonstrates that she is now open to an intimate relationship with Munday, that she has decided to prize intimacy with him above her former moral scruples.

Meanwhile, Lydia begins to regret her solitary position, and the secret of their financial position as well as the letters which compromise her, weigh upon her. It is after a night in the moonlight that Lydia finally breaks under the pressure of her lonely secrets and shares her trouble with her husband. On the night Munday discovers his wife‟s dangerous position, “The moonlight poured full onto Lydia Munday‟s face as she lay in bed,” causing her to talk in her sleep (151). It is only in the very throes of her secret difficulty that Lydia is associated with the chaste and solitary moon; throughout most of the book she is content to be independent.

Nevill and Lydia both wear blue gowns in the beginning of the book: Lydia, in the scene in which she “sears” her husband‟s eyeballs, and Nevill, both when St. Jerome first meets her at the exhibition and on her day as model to Munday, when as Boccaccio‟s

Fiammetta she wears a “blue silk gown of the Italian donzella” which Munday has designed and which Lydia calls “a blue rag” (111, 108). According to Lurie, blue clothing “is associated with distance” (198), and in the case of Lydia and Nevill, the distance represented is emotional: both are “hard” to Munday‟s love, Lydia because her

“one idea of love” is “a strong flirtation” (75), and Nevill because she runs away from him. However, by the end of the book, they have changed their colors. The very gown

Nevill wore to pose as Fiammetta seems to have changed color, for when Munday uncovers the unfinished painting two years later, the figure is “white-robed” (169). 70

Like Nevill, Lydia too learns to embrace her desire for intimacy with Munday, but her colorful gowns change to black at the end of the book. First, she attempts to hide her poor business decision from her husband, and manages to do so for some time, in part by making her own dresses and bonnets, sometimes even with the help of Nevill. The result, at first, is not very good—her husband notices a difference (118), but she improves with time. However, by the end of the novel, in contrast to the “white-robed” painting of

Nevill at whom Munday gazes over her shoulder, Lydia only wears an unbecoming black: “[S]he looks positively ghastly. Is it her black dress, I wonder? Black makes some people look awful” (144). Here we have a contrast, in black and white, so to speak, of the two women who love Munday. By the end of the novel, when Munday‟s rescue of

Lydia from both her financial troubles and the threat of a compromised social position caused by a reckless flirtation, has caused her to fall in love with him, she is still rather hard toward him, chiding, “[Y]ou look quite idiotic,” “I do hope you haven‟t muddled it,”

“and you a mere artist,” “You were enough to vex a saint with your stupid ideals and standards,” and “You have always been so haughty!” (166-68). Her love is still nothing like that of Nevill, who cannot even wait until her play is over before sending for St.

Jerome to come back stage and bring her news of Munday.

Finally, the tea gown, as a symbol of marital love, became the gown associated with motherhood. In so doing, the tea gown became an important signifier of a topic that 71 was not publically discussed. Attitudes toward maternity in the nineteenth century varied, but there were numerous reasons why many expectant mothers, particularly of the upper classes, wished to hide their growing waistlines. The most obvious reason was that the belly of the pregnant woman was the literal embodiment of sex. An article on Lane

Bryant, the first store to sell specifically to pregnant women, asserts “when the small store branched out into maternity clothes for street wear [in 1910] it was necessary to silence the horrified outbursts of a generation of women brought up to believe that no real lady ever ventured outside her door during pregnancy” (“Bashful” 16). In her popular advice book From Kitchen to Garret (1890), Mrs. J. E. Panton entitles her chapter on pregnancy “In Retirement” and describes it thus: “There comes a time in most households when the mistress has perforce to contemplate an enforced retirement from public life” (180). In Victorian Vinaigrette, Ursula Bloom relates her mother‟s experience while expecting: “At the end of about four months (all of which time she had worked hard trying to conceal the fact that she was in the family way), she was permanently consigned to the house. . . . It would have been unpropitious if a gentleman had caught sight her . . .” (2).

However, there were other reasons aside from propriety. Perhaps the most mundane is one still heard today, that the fat belly was simply considered unattractive. In

Women, Marriage, and Politics: 1860-1914, Pat Jalland quotes a diary of a pregnant woman who decides not to travel anymore once she no longer “looks decorative” (143).

Another reason, still common today, was fear of miscarriage and the disappointment to follow. Jalland sites several Victorian women who wished to keep their pregnancies a secret for this reason; for example, “When her 1886 pregnancy became a dangerous 72 miscarriage which nearly killed her, Mary Drew was mortified that so many people knew the real cause of her long illness” (142). One of the few people who did have to know was the dressmaker. Maternity clothing as such did not appear until 1904 (Wertz &

Wertz 148), and thus it is during the time of the New Woman that attitudes toward maternity and pregnancy saw a sea change.

A tea gown was a good choice for a pregnant woman given the absence or relative absence of stays. In a tea gown, a woman would certainly be better able to hide her pregnancy longer than would be possible in a form-fitting gown. However, once it was no longer possible to hide the pregnancy, the tea gown might have given some dignity to the woman‟s condition. For one thing, the tea gown was associated with marriage and marital love, as well as with physical “delicacy,” thus it would have been a particularly appropriate choice for the expectant mother. Given that the tea gown more or less advertised that a woman was married and therefore a sexual being, a woman might be more inclined to appear in public when visibly pregnant after the rise in popularity of the tea gown because this gown already made a similar statement to that which her growing belly made, eventually resulting in the 1904 inception of the maternity dress. In fact, the first maternity dress intended for this purpose was a tea gown “for at-home entertaining”

(Wertz & Wertz 148).44 Jalland writes that Mary Drew wore a “„circs.‟ tea gown when she began to feel „fearfully fat‟ in 1889” (142). In “The Wardrobe of Mrs. Leonard

Messel, 1895-1920,” Lou Taylor describes a tea gown of “mauve crepe silk” believed to have been worn as a maternity dress (121). In Mrs. Henry Dudeney‟s 1899 New Woman novel The Maternity of Harriott Wicken, Harriott wears a tea gown when announcing to

44 Designed by an American Lena Bryant, it boasted “accordion pleats from bust to ankle that allowed for expansion” and soon became so popular that it launched the Lane Bryant fashion house (148). 73 her husband that she is going to have a child (84), as does Mrs. Neville in Lucy Clifford‟s

“The Key” (1924) (266). In A Yellow Aster, Gwen Strange too dons a tea gown as soon as she learns she is pregnant (162), and in The Career of Candida, Sabina Ferrars wears one as a part of her “Modonna pose” after the birth of her daughter (142). In books in which the topic of pregnancy is skirted, tea gowns may serve to illuminate a character‟s

“very interesting condition,” as the shopkeeper says in The Money Sense (113).

Fig. 4. The infamous “Garment No. 5,” the first maternity dress.

In John Strange Winter‟s novel The Money Sense (1900), the heroine Angelique

Ingram buys “several new tea-gowns” when she is pregnant, both for her own comfort and “to make herself charming in her husband‟s eyes” in order to compete with his mistress Millicent, who is also pregnant (129). Angelique discovers that in the time since she has been pregnant and ill, her husband has begun to find her unattractive, and 74 therefore has begun an affair with the parlor maid. Angelique wishes to secure his favor even when she cannot please him sexually; she does this by dressing herself in tea gowns which serve both to make her appear as attractive as possible in her condition and to remind her husband of their marital love, that he owes his allegiance to her and her baby rather than to the sexy parlor maid.

Angelique comforts herself with the idea that she has these nice things while

Millicent must do without, but her husband secretly helps Millicent, too. When he offers to take Millicent to Brighton, she demurs because she has no clothes appropriate to her condition: “I‟ve nothing to wear but this, and I haven‟t any sort of a cloak. I‟m wearing a shawl when I do go out, which isn‟t often” (157). Ingram, therefore, offers to rectify the situation, saying, “Go to Peter Robinson‟s and get yourself a smart black tea-gown and a cloak thing—a proper one” (157). Thus the tea gown enabled women at the turn of the century to go out while pregnant, something they had not previously been able to do respectably.

In “The Key,” Florence Neville‟s tea gown is of particular importance because her pregnancy is never directly discussed in the story, so that the tea gown she wears becomes one of the few signifiers of her pregnancy, which is both “the key” of the title, and which remains, in the final sentence of the story, the “secret . . . in her heart” (278).

In “The Key,” Mrs. Neville is a quiet and unassuming woman who believes her husband has lost interest in her. However, after she returns from a brief trip with him to the country, “Suddenly something occurred that dazed and hypnotized her. It changed her altogether at heart, and had its effect outwardly” (269). Her husband “at last” notices a difference, but not its cause, and at her request for time alone with him, agrees to come 75 home to have tea with her, for which she “wore a tea-gown of a grey-blue colour not easy to define” (266) in order to tell him her secret. However, before he arrives and Florence can share her news, her husband‟s mistress arrives, announces she is pregnant, and demands that Florence give her husband a divorce.

Madame Veronet, arrives “beautifully dressed in velvet and furs,” which indicate her animal-like nature: She is described as “a wild animal hidden in ambush” (271),

“some beautiful beast from the jungle, reincarnated” (274), and “a tigress” (277).

Madame Veronet boldly tells Florence that she is pregnant by her husband. Thus she needs no tea gown: she is willing to state outright how her affairs stand, and she is as unashamed of her sexuality as Mrs. Neville is reticent about hers. Therefore Mrs. Neville believes, “She ought to go away and hide with [her child] . . . I don‟t think she belongs in this part of the world . . . I felt as if she had come out of a jungle” (277). Ever concerned with outward appearance, Madame Veronet insists, “He is mine already, and the child will be his. But I want the world to know it, to see us together” (273).

Both women may be pregnant, but in dressing Florence in a tea gown, Clifford emphasizes her status as Neville‟s wife, despite Madame Veronet‟s insistence that “The real marriage between a man and a woman is only accomplished when the child comes” and “In four months it will be born—his life and mine—the symbol of marriage” (271-

72). Florence merely agrees with this statement, without divulging her secret. As with so many solitary women, Florence, neglected by her husband, “at home, lonely, isolated”

(268) is compared to the moon: Madame Veronet tells her, “I love him, and give him more in an hour, as the sun does, than you could, than the moon could, in a lifetime,” and

“accept your fate, woman, as the moon does when the sun rises” (272, 273-74). 76

Throughout the time of his affair with Madame Veronet, Neville has told his wife he was writing a book, and Florence “supposed it was the book that made him so preoccupied, that caused him to be out so much, looking up references and talking over difficult points with specialists” (268). Finally, Neville arrives home and explains his desire for children stems from his lack of creative “genius”: “Not to have them may mean annihilation, unless one has genius and can leave something else behind” (277). In his time with Madame Veronet, he has participated in another kind of creation. However, unbeknownst to him, he and his wife have managed this kind of creation too. Florence, unlike Madame Veronet, is no artist—“there was no well of originality in her” (269)— yet, Florence has managed to create the same “symbol of marriage” her rival has.

However, Florence decides not to tell her husband, even in the end of the story, as her

“eyes looked large and clear, as if they had knowledge—and guarded a mystery” (277).

The indefinable color of her gown reflects this mystery, and allows her to continue to keep her secret.

The notion of the maternal evoked by the tea gown was not only a literal one. In

Mary Cholmondeley‟s Red Pottage (1899), the only character specified as wearing tea gowns is Hester Gresley (155). Hester‟s choice of a tea gown indicates her artistic and unconventional nature; Hester is a writer, and, according to Rainwater and Scheick, a writer of New Woman novels (103). When she moves to the country to live with her brother and sister-in-law, she dislikes the constraints of their bourgeois morality, which don‟t allow her to visit with her friend Lord Newhaven because “her brother and his wife looked coldly upon „an unmarried woman receiving calls from a married man.‟ For in the country individuality has not yet emerged. People are married or they are 77 unmarried—that is all” (181). Similarly, Hester says that since she left the city, “I have realized that I am unmarried. I never thought of it all the years I lived in London, but when I visit among the country people here . . . I remember, with a qualm, that I am a spinster” (181). Because there is such an exaggerated difference between the married and unmarried, in the world of Red Pottage, by dressing Hester in tea gowns, the author certainly intends her to stand out.

It is in the garb of a married or pregnant woman that Hester produces her book, emphasizing the maternity metaphor for writing. Indeed, Hester does speak of her book,

“as a young girl talks of her lover” (55). Hester repeatedly refers to her book as a child, and when her brother burns it, she strikes his son in revenge. When she has regained her composure, Hester says, “If I had a child . . . and it died, I might have ten more, beautiful and clever and affectionate, but they would not replace the one I had lost. Only if it were a little child . . . I should meet it again in heaven” (223). Also, after the destruction of her book, Hester becomes ill and, according to the Bishop, “Hester‟s life is ebbing away as surely as if she were bleeding to death” (189), evoking the hemorrhaging that can occur after a stillbirth.

Women are not the only ones to compare their creative work to children, nor was the New Woman the first to do so, but it is a fitting metaphor. Amid fears that work not traditionally done by women would “unsex” them, the motherhood metaphor assured the public that the two kinds of creative work are similar, that writing (or painting, etc.) was a fitting occupation for women, not unnatural at all. In “Figuring the New Woman:

Writers and Mothers in George Egerton‟s Early Stories,” Nicole M. Fluhr explains,

“Women writers‟ recourse to the maternal metaphor figures here [in the New Woman 78 novel] as a form of appeasement, insofar as it seeks to portray women‟s creativity as familiar and nonthreatening” (246).45 More specifically, Ardis says of Cholmondeley‟s depiction of Hester‟s book as a child, “production and reproduction become one here: they are not presented either as different kinds of activities or as activities that take place in different cultural spheres” (129). In The Human Interest, Phoebe Elles considers “one drawing . . . that she specially cared for and whose progress she surveyed as she might that of a beloved child of his brain and hers” (64). In Violet Hunt‟s The Celebrity at

Home (1904), Mr. Aix writes a play in which Lucy Vero-Taylor stars. Lucy‟s daughter

Tempe complains, “They talk of The Play as if it was a baby. „Mustn‟t christen it before it is brought into the world,‟ and „One thing you can confidently predict about it, it can‟t be born prematurely!‟” (271). In Netta Syrett‟s Rose Cottingham (1915), when her grandmother wishes to read her novel, Rose “felt like a mother whose plain but much- loved child is suddenly sent for to be inspected by a critical relative ready to pour secret if not open ridicule upon the defenceless infant” (391-92).

Thus, New Woman novelists dress their heroines in tea gowns to evoke a sense of privacy and of marital love. However, they also employ the tea gown in order to redefine an audience‟s sense of what constitutes marital love, as in A Blameless Woman, in which Margaret isn‟t actually married to her lover. When an unmarried New Woman wears a tea gown, as in Red Pottage, A Hard Woman, and The Career of Candida, it can denote the notion that a woman is an adult, is mature, whether or not she is married. In its loose fit and the fact that it was worn in private, it can denote a desire for intimacy, both among women and men. In that a tea gown was an outward sign of marital love, in addition to its comfortable, loose fit, it was a perfect choice for a “maternity dress” in the

45 For more on the “maternal metaphor” for writing, see Margaret Homan‟s Bearing the Word. 79 days before such things existed. It enabled a woman more freedom to go about in public while pregnant, both in that it hid her pregnant state longer and in that it served as an outward embodiment of sexual relations in the same way as did a woman‟s pregnant belly. Finally, in a tea gown‟s association with the development of a child, it could also represent the production of creative work, and in so doing, underscore the notion that this kind of work was an appropriate and “natural” occupation for women, married or otherwise, which did not “unsex” them. 80

Chapter Three

The Tailor-Made Girl

In 1891, the literary magazine The Strand published a number of letters under the heading “Letters from Artists on Ladies‟ Dress” (162-73). Louisa Starr Canziani, the only female of the eight artists consulted, wrote

Characteristic dresses of the period are the riding habit and the tailor-made

gown. I humbly confess that I dislike them both, for while they are

simple, practical, plain, neat, warm, and on a slender unexaggerated

figure, modest—they fail in the quality of womanliness, and therefore

cannot be beautiful. . . . [The tailor-made costume] paints truly the

character of the women of the age. Matter-of-fact, sharp, full of common

sense, with an eye to the main chance they are, and their tailor-made

gowns express this most clearly. Not much room seemingly is there for

romantic or motherly love, for devotion and self-sacrifice, in those tight-

fitting cases (170-71).

At 16, Starr was the youngest person ever to have been admitted by a Royal Academy school and had managed to get in by signing only her initials to a painting and later demanding to see any clause that said a woman might not attend. She had a highly successful career as a painter (“Biography”). However, by 1891, Starr Canziani was herself a mother (and a proponent of the tea gown [172]) with precise views as to the attitudes of a particular type of modern woman, commonly known as “the tailor-made girl.” This chapter will focus on the implications of presenting characters in New

Woman novels as “tailor-made girls,” in part in contrast to the wearers of tea gowns. 81

Fig. 5. Two practical tailor-made gowns. By Spice Box. From “The Evolution of

Hygienic Dress.” Demorest‟s Family Magazine. Dec. 1894: 146-48.

The tailor-made gown, or, alternatively, tailleuse or trotteur, was essentially a women‟s suit. Much like the women‟s suit of today, it consisted of a jacket or coat and an A-line skirt, worn either with or without a shirtwaist or blouse. Although examples of the tailor-made gown go back as far as the 1860s, it was not “firmly established,” according to C. Willett Cunnington, until 1877 (English 283). The tailor-made derived from the riding habit, and its name refers to the fact that, at least originally, it was made by male tailors who specialized in men‟s clothing, as opposed to the female dress makers who might have made a woman‟s other, more feminine, clothing. The tailor-made had been worn as a walking-dress or for participation in other sports from around 1865, but it became immensely popular for all sorts of activities in the 1880s. In addition, the tailor- made implied a particular personality type; the “tailor-made girl” was the subject of 82 popular songs, plays, poems, and stories. For example, Philip Henry Welch‟s 1888 collection of comic sketches The Tailor-Made Girl: Her Friends, Her Fashions, and Her

Follies was published after an immensely popular run in Puck. There were at least three

“tailor-made girl” songs of the popular variety between 1889 and 1909,46 and a popular play included characters designated only as first, second, and third tailor-made girl.47 Not every woman who wore a tailor-made was “new,” but as with the tea gown, the new woman wore her tailor-made with a difference.

The fabric of the tailor-made gown tended to be similar to that used for men‟s suits, although, as Lou Taylor explains in her article “Wool and Gender: The Use of

Woollen Cloth in Women‟s Dress, 1865-1885,” there was some anxiety about women dressing in materials typically associated with masculinity and thus more “feminine” fabrics, such as velvet, were sometimes used (42). Says Taylor, “The finer wool fabrics

[typically used for women‟s clothing] were simply not sturdy enough, while the standard male cloths of the late 1860s . . . epitomized familiar representations of Victorian masculinity” (38). The colors of tailor-made gowns tended to be (though were not always) “strong, dark, and earthy” (38). The tailor-made, especially in its earliest incarnations, was often worn with “masculine” accessories such as neckties, bowler or sailor hats, “horsey” pins, and shirtwaists. Repeatedly, we are told by fashion magazines that the tailor-made, particularly in its earliest incarnations, was repellently masculine and lacked charm.48 Yet, it became immensely popular. What was the reason for this?

46 These include two British songs “My Tailor-Made Girl” (1899), words and music by C. Russ Dashiell (Baillie) and “Tailor-Made Girl March and Two-Step” (1902) by Charles W. Kremer (Aeolian 137), and one American: “The Tailor-Made Girl” (1909), words by David W. Biow and music by Sol Wolerstein (Library 825). 47 This was Charles Hoyt‟s comedy A Hole in the Ground, which opened on Broadway in 1887 (Fiske 71). 48 In Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris and Oswald Curtis claim, 83

In wearing a tailor-made gown, one attempted to usurp the masculine authority associated with a man‟s suit. Says Nancy MacDonell Smith in The Classic Ten: The

True Story of the Little Black Dress and Nine Other Fashion Favorites,

In the language of fashion, the suit is a synonym for power. The suit is the

uniform of authority, so much so that those who wield it are colloquially

referred to as „suits.‟49 Like many women‟s garments, the suit is derived

from menswear, hence its high status associations. (Men‟s clothes always

have higher status than do women‟s. You have only to imagine a woman

in a man‟s suit and then a man in an evening dress to appreciate this

unfortunate truth.) (24)

Thus, it is not until the nineties that women began to add more feminine touches to their tailor-mades, such as floral panels and lace collars and cuffs50: to do so would have defeated the purpose.51

As early as 1877 “Masculinity in Garmenture” was the subject of a letter dated April 1st of that year, wherein some acidulous female protested against the masculine style of ladies‟ dress “in the present day. At a little distance it is really difficult to distinguish a woman from a man. They wear men‟s hats, men‟s coats, men‟s collars, and men‟s ties.” (218) Similarly, Cunnington quotes an unnamed fashion magazine of 1883 as describing tailor-made dresses as “made in a simple, almost severe style, perfect fit being relied on to produce the—must we say it— „mannish‟ effect which is, unhappily, the prevailing taste” (English 325). Louisa Starr Canziani writes that she dislikes tailor-made gowns because “they fail in the quality of womanliness, and therefore cannot be beautiful.. . . . [T]hey are unwomanly because they imitate men‟s dress” (171). 49 As we shall see, the corresponding term for the Victorian woman was the “tailor-made girl,” a designation intended to sum up a woman‟s class and personality, as well as her clothing. 50 For example, a 1905 article in The Bystander asserts, “For . . . the smartest tailor-mades, the prettiest sleeve . . . almost invariably concludes in a plethora of lawn or lace frills” (May 350). See also Norris and Curtis (224). 51 An 1894 article in the women‟s magazine Table Talk illustrates this opinion: Fashionable interest centres now on the tailor-made gown, and, if anything, it is even more severe in cut that usual. French dress-makers made a brave effort to control this field, but their fancy for frou-frou effects went contrary to the primary rule for the tailor suit—i. e., strict severity. A cloth suit, cut on mannish lines and feminized with ruffles and bowknots, is an absurdity. (Forney 223) 84

In “Romance, Glamour, and the Exotic: Femininity and Fashion in Britain in the

1900s,” Hilary Fawcett describes the tailor-made gown as “[t]he uniform of the New

Woman” (145); Sarah Grand, who coined the term “New Woman,” is described as wearing tailor-mades (Campbell 510).52 Although it achieved popularity in the same year as the tea gown, it is the tailor-made, according to Ashelford, that was “the most important fashion innovation” of the 1880s, in that it allowed women more freedom of movement (236). Cunnington agrees that “The new conception of women‟s dress, the most important, historically, of the century, was a tacit recognition of woman‟s advance towards equality with man” (309).

The tailor-made was considered extremely simple, and was probably in part a reaction against the superfluous frills of the ‟70s. It was an excellent choice for the working woman because it could withstand the constant changes in fashion with very little alteration. Because it was made with thick, woolen cloth, it was durable, unlike silk, muslin, or other more “feminine” fabrics, which could not withstand daily use for very long. Because the accessories changed the look of the outfit, a tailor-made could be worn day after day. In his short story “Llanfihangel Skerries” (1897), Grant Allen depicts a young woman who instead of carrying a whole trunk of clothes for a month-long vacation, “travels with a portmanteau alone, being a tailor-made young lady” (658).

Similarly, in Helen Burgess‟ short story “Her Tailor-Made Gown” (1890), the heroine

Alice Bowen wears the same green tailor-made every day of her vacation to every function except a dinner-party (370). In Ella Napier Lefroys‟ The Man‟s Cause (1899),

Mamie Chesney and her tailor-made companion Christian McCleod travel without a maid

52 The oft-sited “Character Note: The New Woman” from Cornhill Magazine also depicts the New Woman as dressing “simply in close-fitting garments, technically known as tailor-made” (366). 85 and with “[o]nly a portmanteau apiece . . . and sufficient changes of raiment for decency”

(295), which allows them the freedom to leave on the spur of the moment and to travel wherever they please. Being able to travel with a valise instead of a trunk would also contribute to a woman‟s independence; she would not have been at the mercy of others to carry and look after her luggage. In addition, the tailor-made lent an air of respectability.

As we shall see, the tailor-made gown also made it easier for women to ride on the tops of omnibuses, an activity only risked by the most daring of modern women. In

Principles of Correct Dress (1914), Florence Hull Winterburn recommends a tailor-made gown for traveling because it is “the perfect equipment for arrival at a hotel, where one is likely to be scrutinized and judged according to first appearances” (196). Therefore, a tailor-made gown was a good investment for the working woman.

It was an investment, for despite its simplicity, the very fact that it had to be made by a tailor rendered it more expensive than other types of dress, which a woman might copy on her own fairly cheaply. In A History of English Dress from the Saxon Period to the Present Day (1893), Georgiana Hill writes “the peculiarity of modern dress is that it becomes more costly as it grows plainer” (285). Therefore, a tailor-made gown also served as in indicator of status. In Belford‟s Magazine, Lee Grant describes the “tailor- made girl” as “money-bagged” (14). Alice Bowen confesses to her mother that she has blown her whole year‟s dress allowance on her one tailor-made costume (371).53 In The

Admirable Tinker: Child of the World, Tinker Beauleigh seeks a governess for his sister:

“He looked at the pretty young lady carefully, and then at the pretty young lady‟s tailor-

53 Her mother‟s disapproval will lend itself to my argument concerning the relationship between the tailor- made girl and the previous generation‟s ideal of womanhood as represented by her mother. 86 made gown, and the smile faded out of his face. „I‟m afraid,‟ he said sorrowfully, „you would be too expensive‟” (189).

However, despite its cost, the tailor-made also carried with it the notion of what

Lou Taylor calls the “democratization of dress” (Study 98). Eventually, the “tailor-made” became mass-produced, so that an expensive look might be imitated more cheaply.

Taylor disagrees with notions, such as that expressed by Alison Settle in her book

English Fashion, that the “„lower classes‟ wore copies [of the tailor-made] in cheaper woollens so close in look that it became hard to tell mistress from maid or well-to-do stay-at-home lady from the career girl earning her living in an office” (44). Taylor claims that such misunderstanding was the result of certain fashion historians taking a few journalistic hyperboles too literally. However, while the difference between the gown that was actually tailor-made and the one which was mass-produced and altered by its owner might have been evident to the contemporary observer, Taylor and Elizabeth

Wilson conclude in Through the Looking Glass: A History of Dress from 1860 to the

Present Day that on an

abstract level—the level at which fashion acts as a representation or

symbol of this or that aspect of a social mood—the fashions . . . did

suggest both modernity and the democracy of . . . society. . . . Despite the

vast differences in the quality of the actual clothes, the myth [of equality

and liberation] had its own potency, and may even have contributed to a

subjective feeling of emancipation for women, while physically the . . . 87

comfort of the actual clothes must have made a real difference to the

women who wore them, whatever their price. (89)54

Thus the tailor-made, while expensive, carried with it the idea of a classless society and solidarity with women of other classes.

The tailor gown also indicated a desire for (or necessity of) independence, in that, unlike other gowns, a woman might put one on without the aid of a maid, a husband, or a girlfriend. For example, in Violet Hunt‟s A Workaday Woman (1906), the working woman of the title Carrie Courtenay describes how her gown “fastened in front: all my things nearly do. I prefer not to have to ask Staples to „do up my back‟” (6). A tailor- made gown might be donned on one‟s own, if one did not have a maid to help one.

Living alone without a maid is a common quality of a tailor-made girl: it is the state of affairs for such New Woman heroines as Monica Frewen in Grant Allen‟s “Llanfihangel

Skerries,” Miss Rodney in Gissing‟s “The Leisure of Miss Rodney,” Mary Desmond in

Egerton‟s The Wheel of God, Christian Macleod in Ella Napier Lefroy‟s The Man‟s

Cause, and Peggy Saunders in Annie E. Holdsworth‟s The Gods Arrive. The ability to dress without one‟s maid is important to the plots of Rita‟s A Jilt‟s Journal, George

Moore‟s Evelyn Innes, and Beatrice Whitby‟s Mary Fenwick‟s Daughter.

Although the tailor-made and the tea gown both originated in England and both become fashionable almost simultaneously, they represent two very different instincts in the new woman. While the tea gown is properly worn only by married women, the tailor- made is generally favored by the unmarried. While the tea gown, as I have argued, demonstrated a desire for intimacy (most often with a member of the opposite sex) at a

54 In this section of Through the Looking Glass, Wilson and Taylor are actually discussing women‟s fashions of the 1920s. However, in The Study of Dress History, Taylor clearly asserts that it applies to fashions of other periods, including Settle‟s discussion of the Victorian tailor-made. 88 time in which changing notions of gender roles rendered that intimacy difficult, the tailor- made gown demonstrated a desire for independence from patriarchal domination, particularly as manifested through pressure to marry from the previous generation, often represented by the mother in these novels, as well as a desire for solidarity with the younger “new” generation of women, and often ambiguous feelings about sex, marriage, and motherhood.

A theme in descriptions of tailor-made young ladies is their relationships to their mothers. The Cornhill Magazine “Character Note: The New Woman” was a part of a series of “character notes” by an anonymous author in the 1890s. It is cited by several new woman scholars as exemplary of contemporary attitudes toward the New Woman.55

This article details the tailor-made “Novissima”‟s relationship to her mother; she is

“content to be called a lady, and is naturally of small account” (365). The author goes on to describe “Novissima” as dismissing her mother: “„Oh mother!‟ she will say if that relative is mentioned. „Yes; but she is hopelessly behind the times, you know‟” (366).

As for the mother‟s relationship to and influence on Novissima, the author describes her as “speechless” (366). The ambivalent relationship of the tailor-made New Woman to her mother, I will argue, is one of her defining features. Much work has been done on

New Woman notions of maternity, for example, the use of childbirth as a metaphor for artistic creation (as discussed in the previous chapter),56 or the New Woman‟s adherence

55 Such scholars include Sally Ledger in The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the End of the Fin-de- Siècle, Lyn Pyckett in The „Improper‟ Feminine: The Woman‟s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (138, 219, 226, 231), and Lisa Ticknor in The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-14. Excerpts from this “Character Note” appear in Arlene Young‟s edition of Gissing‟s The Odd Women and Steve Farmer‟s edition of Hepworth Dixon‟s The Story of a Modern Woman. Ann Ardis begins her seminal text New Women, New Novels with the phrases, “She was called Novissima” (1), a direct reference to the Cornhill “Character Note.” 56 See also Margaret Homan‟s Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women‟s Writing. 89 to contemporary notions of eugenics.57 This chapter will in part consider the uneasy relationship of a particular kind of New Woman, specifically the tailor-made variety, to her mother.

Unlike the wearers of tea-gowns, tailor-made girls (They are always “tailor-made girls” or “tailor-made young ladies”) in fiction at least, are rarely married, though they are sometimes widows. Breaking away from the domestic values of the past generation

(mainly, from the goal of marriage, but also from other traditionally feminine skills58), they have few role models to follow. For example, in John Strange Winter‟s The Money

Sense, Gwyn Torville, a character who wears tailor-mades before her marriage and who eventually leaves home as a single woman to start her own career, complains that Mrs.

Torville expects her “to have no aspirations that Mother hasn‟t had” (2). Gwyn‟s sister

Angelique longs only for peace: “that peace which never comes upon a household where mother and daughters are each striving to go totally different ways” (2).

The new woman‟s mother‟s attitudes vary from speechless awe to vague disapproval and impotence, and much as we saw with Novissima‟s mother, she tends to be something of a nonentity. Frequently, as with Paula Trent in Rita‟s A Jilt‟s Journal

(1901), Evelyn Innes in George Moore‟s novel of the same name (1898), and the

Macleod sisters in Lefroy‟s The Man‟s Cause (1899), she is simply nonexistent and must wield her influence from the grave. Oftentimes, the story of the tailor-made girl is one in which she must change from a lifestyle which is a quest, conscious or otherwise, for a

57 See Angelique Richardson‟s Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. 58 For example, an 1891 poem entitled “Tailor-Made” from the magazine Wade‟s Fibre & Fabric, apparently reprinted from the Apparel Gazette, jokes ironically that the tailor-made girl is doesn‟t sew, relating the story of a gentleman who wooed a “tailor-made girl” because “the name seemed to fit with my bachelor need,/My wardrobe seemed pining for treatment that came/From creatures of that very breed” (313). However, she is either unable or unwilling to mend his clothing, and the gentleman “said to myself, though I feared to upbraid her,/That I didn‟t think much of the tailor that made her” (313). 90 lost mother. The fashions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, according to

Steele “reflected the social and erotic importance of the matron. There is considerable evidence that fashions were designed with the mature woman in mind, not only because she tended to have more money, but because she represented the feminine ideal” (222).

However, at a time when the fashionable “look” was that of the matron,59 the tailor-made girl imitates other girls rather than those of the previous generation. As I shall demonstrate, heroines in tailor-mades repeatedly break (or attempt to break) from the traditions of their often-absent mothers (sometimes after brief attempts to imitate them) in order to find a new identity with a group of young and like-minded tailor-made girls.

The limited style and color range of the tailor-made must have made its wearer look much like other “tailor-made girls.” Perhaps the tailor-made girl sought this safety in numbers; tailor-made gowns, especially in the ‟80s and ‟90s, resembled one another; their styles and colors were similar. An 1883 editorial in Household Words complains of the boring similarity of tailor-mades: “[O]ne gets tired of it if one takes it into ordinary wear . . . the ordinary tailors run in a dreadful groove when they take to making ladies‟ dresses” (395). It is no mistake that Fawcett calls them “the uniform of the New

Woman” (145). Similarly, in The Feminine Ideal, Marianne Thesander refers to the tailor-made as “a kind of uniform of sexual politics” (100). The first tailor-mades to come into fashion reflected uniforms: they were made with “Eton jackets”60 or in military styles,61 and these modes remained popular through the mid-1880s. For example, in

59 Alison Ives illustrates this notion in Ella Hepworth Dixon‟s The Story of a Modern Woman, when she half-jokingly complains about wanting to marry her friend Mary Erle‟s father: “it was no good trying to compete with her mother, Lady Jane, who was sixty-five and irresistible. Women of sixty-five, she said, were nowadays the only people who inspired a great passion” (70). 60 See Cunnington‟ s English Women‟s Clothing 348 and Norris and Curtis 232. 61 See Lou Taylor, “Wool Cloth and Gender” (35-40), Norris and Curtis (218, 381), and Lucy Johnston (16- 17). 91

“Wool Cloth and Gender,” Lou Taylor notes some of the first tailor-made gowns appear in an 1869 La Mode Illustrée, including “‟military jackets for young girls. A very pretty model is … a jacket of gendarme-blue cloth . . . others, more simple, are of navy-blue military cloth” (qtd. in “Wool” 33). In 1882, The Record of Fashion remarks on the subject of “Tailor-made garments” for ladies, “The military style of trimmings is gradually coming very prominently to the front” (52-53). Similarly, an 1882 Ladies

Treasury claims that along with a braided skirt, a tailor-made “Hussar jacket is indispensible” (584). Reflecting this connection between the tailor-made and the military was the 1902 march called “The Tailor-Made Girl” by Charles W. Kremer (Aeolian 137).

Lefroy describes the Macleod sisters as belonging “to the tailor-made class” (7), thus implying an entire group of women even though only the two sisters are present as at this particular party. Such a group even had its own manner of speech, as indicated by an observer‟s description of Mamie Cheswick, an older, contrasting “modern” woman: “her voice and enunciation were instantly classed by Blake as not of the tailor-made” (14-15).

92

Fig. 6. Ladies Jacket with military braid. James Thomson, The Ladies Jacket, Ulster and

Costume Cutter, John Williamson, London, n. d. (c. 1886).

Being able to fasten one‟s own dress is a useful quality in attire for Paula Trent in

Rita‟s A Jilt‟s Journal (1901). As the novel opens, Paula has just finished school and is going to live with her uncle, an absent-minded professor who lives in his own work.

Paula has difficulty navigating the social world into which she finds herself thrust; her schooling has not prepared her for it, and she lacks a mother‟s counsel, believing her to be dead. She hesitates to “come out,” even at her uncle‟s suggestion, and refuses four 93 proposals in her first year away from school because “I did not care enough for any of the four, to sacrifice a woman‟s best possession—independence” (294). The marriage of her school friends does not promise any great happiness: Lesley Heath marries in order to escape the fact that she has fallen in love with a man who is already married; Paula calls the ceremony “a hateful mockery” (302), and Lesley refers to the “tragedy” symbolized by her wedding gown (294). Meanwhile, Claire le Creux decides to marry a man she barely knows and with whom she plans to spend little time.

The plot of A Jilt‟s Journal is familiar: a girl leaves school, has a few romantic adventures, learns about the world, and finally accepts a proposal of marriage. However, to a great extent, Paula‟s quest is not for a husband but for a mother. The novel is peppered with vignettes that reveal a mother‟s importance. When Paula finds a small grave with a hand-made cross on it, Adam Herivale, the son of a local farmer, tells her that the baby died soon after its mother did and opines, “Perhaps ‟twas its mother it needed” (176). He continues, “I hope and trust ‟tis safe in her arms once more. For God couldn‟t part love like that, though man made scorn of it” (177). Lesley‟s bad marriage is blamed on her lack of a mother. Adam‟s mother tells Paula, “‟tis now you‟ll feel the miss o‟ your mother, my dear. The best friend you can have is never what your own mother can be” (184).

Paula longs to be a writer of novels, like her mother. In writing, Paula seeks after the lost mother, whom she believes to be dead and who acts as a symbol for the previous generation. In her mother‟s time, the only way to advance socially was through marriage, and thus, through the exploitation of one‟s sexuality. Later, Paula learns that her mother is not dead after all; instead, she ran away to America to become an actress. Nina 94

Desallion, the name her mother has taken, has earned her fame through her sensuality;

Paula‟s friend Dr. Quain tells of going to her play every night for a week just to see her let her hair down (222), and she is described as “a living picture of sensuous beauty”

(308) with “liquid” and “impassioned” speech (281), a woman over whom “men go wild”

(223). Paula longs for an alternative to a future in which she would follow in her mother‟s footsteps by using her sex appeal to attain what she wants. Therefore, she seeks other mother figures for alternative guidance, but Lady St. Quinton, who takes Paula under her wing and oversees her “coming out” reveals that she too is willing to use

Paula‟s sexual attraction to get what she wants. Paula reads her mother‟s novel as a kind of advice manual, and originally, she takes her mother‟s “advice.” Both Paula and

Fenella, the heroine of her mother‟s novel, are accused of being “jilts,” and both claim that they did not intend to mislead anyone, that they can‟t help it if men fall in love with them.

After her season in London, Paula is invited to spend two weeks with her friend

Lady St. Quinton, who hopes that during that time she will agree to marry Tommy

Yelverton. However, once at the Court, Paula realizes that in coming, she has been duped into a tacit agreement to marry Yelverton. Unable to bring her own maid because she is needed to perform housework at home, Paula also discovers that “the flowers the maid had pinned into my bodice” and which she had “worn so heedlessly” had been a gift from Tommy and “a signal of my willingness to listen favourably to that twice-rejected suitor” (337-38). Both Lady Brancepeth62 and Lady St. Quinton attempt to convince her that she has no alternative but to marry Tommy, but Paula remains true to herself. When

62 Lady Brancepeth is a mother-figure not unlike Nina Desallion; she is called “Lorely” because she resembles a siren. 95

Paula goes down to breakfast the next morning prepared to correct Tommy‟s assumption, she “presented only a trim, „tailor-made girl,‟ with loose glittering coils of burnished hair, and a half-proud, half-defiant look in her eyes” (352). She wears a gown that required no maid‟s help to don, nor has she had any help in putting up her hair. It is in a spirit of complete independence and in defiance of all those who surround her that she convinces

Tommy the whole thing was a mistake and returns to live with her uncle with no more chance of making the acquaintance of eligible young gentlemen.

Paula‟s tailor-made gown acts as a support in the vacuum created by her mother‟s desertion. In dressing in a costume so similar to what others wore, Paula strengthens herself through a sense of solidarity with other young women of her generation, and likewise, a sense of separation from the scheming, match-making representatives of the previous generation. She also gains mental strength by describing herself as a “tailor- made girl.” She has taken on the independent attributes of a type, of a whole group of

“girls,” and thus shrugs off her identity as a motherless child about to follow the advice of “bad mothers” Lady St. Quentin and Lady Brancepeth and marry Tommy Yelverton, just as her closest friend Lesley followed the advice of her own “bad mother,” i.e. her step-mother Lady Archie, resulting in a “tragic” marriage. Not coincidentally, Lady

Archie is a friend of Lady Brancepeth, who behaves as “bad mother” to Paula. It is she who corrects Paula when she refers to Lady Archie as Lesley‟s mother, even though

Lesley has never called her a stepmother.

In the end, Paula chooses Adam Herivale, whom her “bad mothers” would not consider “eligible.” In doing so, she defies her own mother, who observes, “I cannot understand how a pastoral idyl can possess a single element of content” (275). Thus, 96 although Paula marries, her marriage too bears a mark of her independence. In marrying

“beneath her station,” Paula Trent assures herself of social, if not physical or sexual, dominance. Even Adam‟s proposal is an allusion to their difference in status; the “three little words” he tells her repeatedly and which Paula sentimentally records in her diary are not the traditional phrase, but “at your service” (364).

Paula‟s tailor-made gowns also serve to demonstrate the sense of democracy which leads her to marry beneath her station, as we have seen that the tailor-made could act as a symbol for solidarity among the social classes (Tailor, Study 98). She will not

“manage” her husband through sex as her school friends plan to do—at least, that is not her intention. Through her behavior as well as her clothing, Paula differentiates herself from her mother, whose success both on the stage and as a novelist has come through the exploitation of her sexuality. In addition, Paula chooses the man whose mother she likes best. She refers to Adam‟s mother as “the essence of motherhood” and visits her often to get her advice (227). Adam too is a kind of mother-figure. When Paula finds the baby‟s grave, she assumes its mother marked it with the little cross of twigs, but she later discovers it was Adam.

In George Moore‟s Evelyn Innes (1898) and its sequel Sister Teresa (1901), the heroine‟s tailor-made signifies independence and foreshadows the nun‟s habit she will wear upon her entrance into a convent. Evelyn Innes tells the story of a woman whose lover Sir

Owen Asher promises to make her a great opera singer if she will run away with him to 97

Paris. However, he does not wish to marry her because, he argues, it would be bad for her career. After much deliberation, Evelyn agrees, and in due course, becomes a famous opera singer. Six years later, she returns to England and reconciles with her father. She has a brief affair with another man Ulick Dean. Finally, she decides she can no longer continue in the sinful lifestyle of an opera singer and decides to leave the stage and devote her life to her religion. In Sister Teresa, Evelyn struggles with her vocation, but eventually decides to remain in the convent.

Evelyn Innes‟ place in the canon of the New Woman novel might not be immediately obvious. However, in The “New Woman” in the Late Victorian Novel, a critical piece so early in the study of the New Woman that the phrase “New Woman” appears in quotation marks, Lloyd Fernando explains,

Evelyn Innes is a finely wrought work tracing with care and deep

understanding the course of a woman‟s search for emancipation of the

spirit. Like most of Moore‟s other novels, it may not at first sight seem to

have any emancipationist content; but that impression arises simply

because Moore preferred to deal with characters rather than with issues.

(102)

Thus, Evelyn is a new woman in her quest for independence from her mother‟s ideals of marriage, for solidarity with other like-minded women of various classes, and for freedom to pursue her own desires in spite of the men who constantly attempt to overpower her and overrule her own will, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. Evelyn eventually finds both peace and power in identifying herself with the other sisters in the convent. 98

As in A Jilt‟s Journal, Evelyn‟s life is haunted by her mother, even though she dies before the first chapter begins. Evelyn has inherited her fine singing voice from her mother, but Gertrude dies before she can train Evelyn‟s voice, and Mr. Innes cannot afford to send her abroad to study singing. He does not take her abroad himself because his heart is set upon returning ancient music styles to the church, and Evelyn aids him in this quest by playing the viola da gamba, an instrument so ancient that it would be difficult to find a person with the ability to play it. Thus, although Evelyn dearly loves her father, his desire to keep her at home is selfish. When Evelyn tells her father that she is considering running away with Owen, the two turn to her mother‟s portrait, whose eyes

“watched them, and there was something in her cold, distant glance which went to their hearts, but they could not interpret its meaning” (88). Ever haunted by ghosts or her mother‟s memory, Evelyn “seemed in a nearer and more intimate, in a more essential communication with her mother, than with her father who was alive” (241). To Evelyn, her mother “seemed independent of time and circumstance, a sort of principle, an eternal essence, a spirit which she could often hear speaking to her far down in her heart” (227).

Like Paula Trent, Evelyn desires success in the same artistic field as her mother. In

“More than Dramas of Sterility: Portraits of the Artist in Moore‟s Fiction,” Fabienne

Gaspari asserts, “In Evelyn Innes, the protagonist‟s career is initiated by a quest for her dead mother, and it appears as a way to resume and perpetuate the singing of the dead woman. Evelyn‟s path is linked to the mother figure and her aborted career as a singer”

(12-3). As Paula reads her mother‟s book in search of advice, Evelyn constantly asks how her singing compares to her mother‟s. 99

However, although Evelyn seeks to some degree to follow in her mother‟s footsteps musically, she also hopes deviate from her mother‟s example. Soon after

Gertrude‟s marriage, her singing career ends. In this, it makes sense that Evelyn always has an aversion to marrying Sir Owen, even toward the end of their affair when he is willing to do so. In discussing the possibility of her running away, Evelyn‟s father laments the fact that her mother is not there to offer Evelyn guidance, but Evelyn protests that her mother would not understand her—“mother and I are quite different”—and admits she is glad of her mother‟s absence (87). She muses, “One thing only she had inherited from her mother—her voice. She had certainly not inherited her conduct from her mother; her mother was one of the few great artistes against whom nothing could be said” (182). What is more, Evelyn is competitive with her dead mother: “It was strange that she always thought of her mother in connection with her voice; the other singers did not seem to matter; they might sing better or worse, but the sense of rivalry was not so intimate” (227). She hopes to convince her father, “that she could do something that her mother could not have done” (227). Like Paula Trent, Evelyn seeks guidance from her mother, but then when that guidance unexpectedly becomes available, as it does to Paula when her mother seemingly returns from the dead, she does not wish to follow it. One day, in dreaming of Gertrude, Evelyn “seemed to feel herself lifted a little above the verge of life, so that she might inquire the truth from her mother; but something seemed to hold her back, and she did not dare to hear the supernatural truth” (240-41).

It is Evelyn‟s tailor-made gown that reflects her conflicting desires to follow her mother (in pursuing a career in music) and to reject her example (by refusing to marry her lover). Like Paula Trent, Evelyn dons a tailor-made gown when she would like to dress 100 on her own, quickly, and with minimal help from her maid. One morning she decides impulsively to go visit her father before rehearsal. After arguing with her maid and rushing to bathe and dress, she finally leaves, “escaping her maid‟s hands” in “a grey, tailor-made dress and a blue veil tied round a black hat with ostrich feathers” (145).

These, I will argue, foreshadow the gray habit, black veil, and blue scapular Evelyn wears in Sister Teresa. Her choice of a tailor-made gown also indicates the beginnings of a break with Sir Owen and those, such as her maid Merat and her companion Mrs. Duckle, who work for him. Evelyn seeks her father at St. Joseph‟s, where he is an organist, but not finding him, she goes to mass instead. For the past six years, in accordance with Sir

Owen‟s teaching, she has attempted to be agnostic, but at the moment of transubstantiation, she feels a surge of religious feeling. This visit to mass results in feeling which will eventually lead Evelyn back to the Catholic Church.

When the mass ends, Evelyn goes to her rehearsal, where she sings the part of

Elizabeth in Tannhauser. Moore notes that Evelyn‟s “tailor-made dress and six years of liaison with Owen Asher were no let to the mediaeval virgin formulated in antique custom. In the duet with Tannhauser she was benign and forgiving, the divine penitent who, having no sins of her own to do penance for, does penance for the sins of others”

(167). Dressed in her tailor gown, Evelyn even sings like a nun: “when the music returned to the peace of the religious strain, her voice grew blanched and faded like a nun‟s voice” (176). When she returns to the convent, Evelyn observes the nuns “in extraordinary beauty of grey habit and veil and solemn procession” (390). The habits are made of serge, a material commonly used for tailor-made gowns. In the convent, too, 101

Evelyn must learn to dress on her own; she struggles with this task at first: “it seemed as if she could not dress herself” (389).

The tailor-made gown also prefigures the gray nun‟s habit in that it signals a desire for freedom, to be out from under the control of men. Even after Evelyn leaves her father, Sir Owen more or less runs her artistic life, making choices as to the roles she will play (mostly Wagner) in order to fulfill his own sexual and aesthetic fantasies. Says

Richard Allen Cave in A Study of the Novels of George Moore, “Evelyn is to be an embodiment of [Asher‟s] ideals; she is to have no life other than as a realization of

Asher‟s Aestheticism . . . Even his love-making is to be a testimony to his taste” (148).

Similarly, her other lover Ulick Dean plans to write an opera for her and thus sees her as material to be molded into the part of Grania on stage, in order to appease his own aesthetic and sexual fantasy (a fantasy he lives out by pursuing an affair with Sir Owen‟s lover, just as Grania runs away with Dermont though she is betrothed to Fin Mac‟Cool in the legend, and then again by making love to her in her dressing room during the intermission of Tristan and Isolde, and while she is literally in the middle of playing

Isolde in an opera whose love-triangle plot mirrors the story of Grania). Thus, in donning a nun‟s habit, Evelyn leaves an economy dominated by men for a hierarchy of women in which the head is the prioress. Like Evelyn, who serves as a kind of embodiment of Sir

Owen‟s aesthetic ideas, so Evelyn‟s mother Gertrude served as an “instrument” to her father, making popular one of his musical compositions. Both women‟s art is bound up in their love lives. The only way for Evelyn to escape is to give up not only her lover but her career as an opera singer. 102

The uniformity of the nuns‟ habits suggests the uniformity of the tailor-mades, the desire for strength in numbers, and not through identification with one‟s mother. At the

Wimbledon convent Evelyn eventually joins, the nuns come from a variety of class backgrounds, and the simple grey habits are intended in part to mask those class distinctions, which at least in theory have little bearing on the nuns‟ places in the convent hierarchy. Similarly, the tailor-made, as Taylor asserts, suggests a certain “democracy in dress.” Also like the tailor-made gown is the statement the nun‟s habit makes concerning the wearer‟s position outside of the sexual economy. When Evelyn sings with the nuns, she notices the “sexless” quality of their voices (409).

Just as Paula Trent seeks out other mother figures in the absence of her own mother, so Evelyn seeks out a mother figure, and devotes herself in the convent to a host of “mothers”: Mother Margaret, Mother Phillipa, Mother Hilda, and especially the

Prioress. Evelyn‟s “mothers,” however, are both virginal and completely independent of male influence. Gertrude‟s influence, and even her ghostly presence, is seen throughout

Evelyn Innes, but once Evelyn enters the convent, the only mention of her mother occurs after Evelyn loses her voice, the one gift her mother bequeathed to her. Thus, once she is in the convent with her sister nuns, her mother‟s influence becomes almost nonexistent.

As the tailor-made girl found her strength not in her sexual identity as implied by her mother‟s example but the numbers of other tailor-made girls, so it is safety in numbers that Evelyn seeks with the nuns. Evelyn notes that “[a]s far as the rule allows them [the nuns] are kind to one another, and I have seen none of that petty spite which is said to exist wherever a number of women gather together” (105), recalling the pact made by

Mary Erle and Alison Ives in Hepworth Dixon‟s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) to 103

“never, never do anything to hurt another woman” (164). United, these women have power. In Sister Teresa, once Evelyn has entered the convent, she “felt she was no longer a solitary soul fighting a lonely battle; now she was a member of a spiritual community” (83). Here the military imagery of “fighting a lonely battle” evokes the military style of the tailor-made. The strength in numbers Evelyn finds with the nuns is illustrated when lying in bed at a house party which Owen is also attending, Evelyn longs to go to him and nearly does so, but changes her mind when she mysteriously hears the sound of singing nuns (41). When Evelyn refuses to see Owen and he is unaware of her whereabouts, he tries to contact her telepathically, and manages to do so briefly on his first attempt. Upon later attempts, however, he is less successful, and he “sat wondering if it were the collective will of the convent which thwarted and rendered him unable to reach and influence Evelyn‟s” (47).

True to the tailor-made “type,” Evelyn remains ambivalent about her own motherhood. As she considers running away with Owen, the thought strikes her that

if she were going to abandon the life of the soul for the life of the flesh,

that she should accept the flesh wholly, and not subvert its intentions. She

should become the mother of children. Life was concerned more

intimately with children than with her art. But somehow it did not seem to

be same renunciation, and she stood perplexed before the enigma of her

conscience.” (Evelyn 84)

When the monsignor asks her why she has “deliberately avoided the probable consequences of [her] sin” by using birth control, she has no answer for him (359). But perhaps Owen Asher reveals the answer in Sister Teresa: “The mistake I made, Evelyn, 104 was not to allow you to have children. The only way a man can keep a woman is through her children” (3). Thus, in avoiding becoming a mother in her own right, Evelyn has avoided creating ties to Owen that would prevent her from pursuing her own desires.

At the end of Sister Teresa, Evelyn decides to leave the convent in order in order to better experience nature, which has helped her to overcome her grief after her father‟s death. And yet, when in the penultimate chapter of the novel she has the chance to leave, she decides to stay and goes to arrange flowers for an altar to the Virgin, which Cave interprets as a desire to stay in order to worship Mary (159). The ending of Sister Teresa mirrors the beginning of Evelyn Innes, in which the child Evelyn sings “a beautiful Ave

Maria . . . a quick, sobbing rhythm expressive of naïve petulance at delay in the Virgin‟s intercession” (3). As a virgin, Mary serves as the ultimate mother-figure to Evelyn, who longs for a mother‟s guidance and yet fears to follow her mother‟s example of sexual submission.

According to Cunnington, the tailor-made costume “was the first move towards a style signifying . . . that the wearer was engaged in some other pursuit other than the capture of man” (English 309). In Fashion and Women‟s Attitudes in the Nineteenth

Century, Cunnington divides the women of the 1880s into four sartorial “types,” but he concludes that “the various types of young women although pursuing widely different paths had this feature in common; they displayed a noticeable indifference to the arts of sex-attraction” (263). Thus, in dressing their heroines in tailor-made gowns, both Rita and George Moore display their heroines‟ desire to escape the sexual economy, the atmosphere in which they trade on their sexual appeal in order to achieve what they 105 desire, be it economic independence, affection, respectability, or social or career advancement.

Alison Ives of Ella Hepworth Dixon‟s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) is a tailor-made girl who exhibits a similar desire to escape such a sex-based economy.

Alison is the closest friend of Mary Erle, the “Modern Woman” of the title. However,

Alison too is described as “modern,” perhaps more modern even than Mary, whose education has prepared her only for marriage and who works only in order to put aside enough money to set up housekeeping with a future husband.63 In her introduction to the

1990 Merlin edition, Kate Flint opines, “Alison fits the stereotype of the „new woman‟ much more readily than Mary” (x).

The Story of a Modern Woman opens after Mary‟s father has died, leaving her to make her own living while supporting her younger brother. Mary attempts to gain entrance into a Royal Academy school in order to become an artist, but failing that, falls into a career in journalism. Her lover pledges to marry her when he can afford to do so, but he ends up marrying another for political and financial gain. In the end, he returns to

Mary and begs her to run away with him, but thinking of his wife and daughter, she refuses, citing her pact her with her best friend Alison: “All we modern women need to help each other now. We have a bad enough time as it is . . . surely we needn‟t make it worse by our own deliberate acts! We often talked it over, Alison and I” (184).

63 A review in the Athenaeum supports this idea, claiming Mary has “little „modernity,‟” while Alison is “decidedly more „up-to-date‟” (“The Story” 770). 106

Meanwhile, Alison is Mary‟s feisty best friend. Determined to find a purpose for her life, Alison eventually decides to devote herself to helping girls less fortunate than she. At first, she tries living among her charity cases in Mile End Road, but later decides a better method is “to bring the East End here—one by one of course, just as we go there”

(71). In pursuit of her plan, she rents a flat in Mayfair as an escape from her own aristocratic life and as “a little home for my East End girls, whom I intend to train” (71).

A typical tailor-made girl, Alison is leery of marriage, supposing “she should have to marry some day—the later the better—because it was absurd to suppose that old maids had any influence on people‟s lives; and power, to put it plainly, was what the modern woman craved” (92). Her desire to put off her marriage as long as possible may be related to her desire not to have children. She jokes with Mary about playing surrogate mother to her “East End girls,” “I believe I‟ve been making a mistake all this time. I ought to have been the mother of six boys—for Heaven forbid that I should bring another woman into the world!” (114).64 However, like Mary‟s, Alison‟s romantic match fails to go off as planned. Alison hopes eventually to marry Dunlop Strange, a doctor, and their feelings for one another are mutual. However, one night Alison has Strange take her and

Mary to the hospital where he works in order for Mary to gather information for an article. While there, they see a woman designated only as “Number Twenty-Seven,” who is dying of consumption and whom Alison hopes to help by taking her to the country.

She returns to the hospital later, on her own, and discovers that the girl is the cast-off lover of Strange and became ill due to his neglect. Her “lung troubles” began after she

64 Coincidentally, this is Evelyn‟s dream too. In Sister Teresa, she tells the Monsignor she‟d like to take “six little cripple boys” to live with her in the country (110). 107 attempted to drown herself on a cold day. Alison contracts the girl‟s illness and soon dies herself.

Alison‟s credo is the battle-cry for the New Woman: “All we modern women mean to help each other now” (184). Like Paula and Evelyn, she has pursued a career in the arts, studying sculpting in Paris and interpreting Chopin on the piano “like an artist”

(70). And like Evelyn, she has given up her artistic career in favor of a place in a community of women, believing “if we were only united, we could lead the world” (164), much as the strength of the Wimbledon nuns came through their union. Alison‟s defining features are “her intense womanliness, her utter absence of snobbery, her real desire to be in sympathy with her own sex” (70). As is typical for tailor-made characters in novels,

Alison‟s mother is, according to Valerie Fehlbaum‟s interpretation in Ella Hepworth

Dixon: The Story of a Modern Woman, representative of the older generation,65 and “still views marriage as the ultimate achievement in a young woman‟s life” (130). In “Class

Counts,” SueAnn Shatz reads Lady Jane‟s attitude toward her daughter‟s passion for helping the poor as one of “confusion,” “alarm,” and “dismay” (109). Although, like

Paula and Evelyn, who begin by pursuing the artistic careers of their respective mothers,

Alison follows in her mother‟s footsteps to some degree, as Valerie Fehlbaum notes, in attempting to make matches (and succeeding in the case of her protégée Evalina), by the time Evalina‟s marriage takes place, Mary and Alison have both given up on the idea of their own marriages (137). I would add that Alison‟s scheming to convince the father of

Evalina‟s baby to marry her is not exactly similar to Lady Jane‟s presenting and bringing out her nieces. Alison has allied herself not with her mother‟s world of perennial parties

65In The New Woman Novelist and the Redefinition of the Female, Adeline Carrie Koscher calls her “a mother of the old regime” (221). 108 and “Society” with a capital S, but with women whom she hopes to help. Alison‟s tailor- made indicates her feeling of sisterhood towards these women, even as she sometimes speaks of them condescendingly.

Alison saves money for her girls (and specifically for the little dot [dowry] with which she bribes the father of Evalina‟s baby to marry her) by economizing herself; she rides omnibuses and third class on trains in order to save money for them, and her tailor- made serves to smooth over the class barriers as she rides third class to a first-rate party

(75). Similarly, Alison has a dress made specifically for riding on the tops of omnibuses

(76), which was as eccentric a choice for a woman of her class as riding third class on a train, but one which provided more comfort and freedom than riding on the inside of the omnibus (Flanders 405). De Omnibus Rebus: An Old Man‟s Discursive Ramblings on the Road of Everyday Life describes the type of women who ride on the tops of omnibuses as “emancipated, cigar-smoking, horse-whipping women from England generally, and „sweet girl graduates‟ from the universities particularly (alias he-women)”

(138). In this description we see an obvious caricature of the New Woman, and although

Hepworth Dixon assures her reader that Alison, though modern, “never smoked, was ignorant of billiard-cues and guns, and hated playing the man” (70), we may see a connection here between the New Woman and the desire to ride on the top of the bus. To do so allowed freedom from the stuffy interior of the omnibus, a desire for freedom echoed in the New Woman‟s tailor-made gown. In fact, in Sister Teresa, Evelyn Innes compares her days before entering the convent where she finds her personal freedom to

“a stuffy omnibus” (140). Mamie Wick, the New Woman heroine of Sara Jeannette

Duncan‟s An American Girl in London (1898), is also a tailor-made girl and also enjoys 109 riding on the top of the bus in spite of her cousin‟s insistence that the “top of an omnibus is not a proper place for you—I might say for any connection of mine however distant!”

(42). Similarly, Gertrude Lorimer, the tailor-made New Woman heroine of Amy Levy‟s

The Romance of a Shop (1889), must rationalize her choice to ride on the bus instead of in it: “„Because one cannot afford a carriage or even a hansom cab,‟ she argued to herself, „is one to be shut up away from the sunshine and the streets?‟” (80).66 Gertrude too is spied by a disapproving aunt, the representative of a previous generation from which Gertrude hopes to separate herself.

The reason that riding on the top of the omnibus constituted a violation of decorum for a middle-class woman67 was that it rendered the rider an object of gaze; she was entirely unprotected from the eyes of anyone on the street. The tailor-made gown, however, lent its wearer a degree of anonymity; one tailor-made gown looked very much like another. In fact, in The Romance of a Shop, Gertrude manages to go unrecognized by her Aunt Pratt (99). As I have argued, to choose a tailor-made gown was to identify oneself as a part of a larger whole, a like-minded generation of women. Amy Levy used a similar excuse to her family when she made this bold decision, telling “her shocked family circle” that “she had committed the outrage in company with the daughter of a dean” (Salomon qtd. in Parejo Vadillo 205), thus she too was not alone, in her case, literally not alone, but with a like-minded young woman of her generation. Thus the tailor-made, as a uniform, was an ideal choice for the top of the omnibus, and not just

66 In the same vein, Levy writes of the freedom found in riding on the top of the bus in her 1889 poem “Ballade of an Omnibus” (21-22). According to Ana Parejo Vadillo‟s “Phenomena in Flux,” this poem “epitomized Levy‟s greatest achievement: her figuration of the female mass-transportation passenger as an icon of modernity, and her conception of mass-transportation facilities in general, and the omnibus in particular, as vehicles which enabled late-Victorian middle-class women to defy patriarchal gender and aesthetic ideology” (205). 67 For a member of the aristocracy, such as Alison Ives, it was not an issue because such a woman would have the means to use some other form of transportation. Thus, Alison is doubly eccentric in her choice. 110 because it generally lacked a crinoline, making it easier to climb the narrow staircase to the top. Alison‟s dress made specifically for riding on the top of the bus indicates a kind of solidarity with those women who, for a combination of financial reasons and a desire to escape the “stuffiness” of the bus‟s interior just as they wished to escape the stuffiness of the ideas of the previous generation.

Like the other tailor-made girls in this chapter, Alison longs for the independence implied in that sartorial choice. Alison complains, “All we women are so incredibly dependent on other people . . . I have known a woman stay with a husband whom she loathed, and whom it was an outrage to live with, simply because she couldn‟t do her own hair” (71). Thus she considers the ways in which dress affects the larger issues at stake for the New Woman. Alison has a flat in Mayfair, but she also goes home to her mother from time to time. It is in this way that she ends up dying in the room her mother has furnished for her “in a style which she considered suitable for an unmarried daughter.

There were many chintz draperies, patterned with sprawling pink roses; the pillows were trimmed with deep lace, and the ample silk eider-down quilt was of a piercing blue.

Little pot-bellied Loves disported themselves on the round looking-glass . . .” (162).

Lady Jane “disliked new fashions in her home” (89), so that while Alison literally suffocates with consumption, she is also stifled in a room dominated by her mother‟s romantic personality. Alison‟s own style may be seen in her plain and efficient dress.

Certainly her practical attitude toward marriage—that “after all, in her world, one had to marry some day or other. One couldn‟t permit one‟s self the luxury of being an old maid, unless one had an income of over five thousand pounds a year” (149)—clashes with the 111 cupids that adorn her room in Portman Square. Like other tailor-made girls, Alison finds herself confined by her mother‟s ideas of what is appropriate for her.

In that they evolved from the riding habit, tailor-made gowns also connoted exercise and health. Indeed, they were the garment of choice for many outdoor activities, including riding, fishing, hunting, rowing, yachting, golf, cricket, archery, and tennis. In

Fashion, Cunnington argues that the increase in attention to women‟s fitness in the 1880s arose from the idea that so many women were “superfluous” or “odd,” and therefore unable to marry. He suggests that many women took to physical exercise as a means of sublimating sexual desire on which they feared to act (238). While Jane Tozer warns us, in “Cunnington‟s Interpretation of Dress” to take the conclusions about female sexuality

C. W. Cunnington derived from his extensive costume collection with a grain of salt68, a desire for outdoor exercise might certainly indicate a love of freedom, particularly from one‟s patriarchal home, and a desire for equality with the men who were permitted to participate in traditionally masculine outdoor pastimes.

Perhaps this is the case with Christian MacCleod of Lefroy‟s The Man‟s Cause, whose desire to shoot with the men is attributed to her status as a member of the “tailor- made class” (7). As with other literary tailor-made girls, the Macleods lost their mother at a young age, and for guidance, they look to Mamie Chesney, a widow and a New

Woman whose relationship to the girls is so maternal and didactic, that she amuses them

68 Says Tozer, “Any theory of dress that discusses only female psychology is off-balance, and inherently sexist” (11). 112

“as you might a wheen bairns” and chooses the “old schoolroom” as the location for their

“lessons” (29). Mamie convinces Christian not to marry a man she does not love

(Christian, like Lesley Heath in A Jilt‟s Journal, feels pressured to do so because of her stepmother), and Christian admits that she loves another, one who is too devastated over the death of another woman to be interested in Christian. Therefore, ousted by her new stepmother from a position of authority in her father‟s home, Christian becomes the factor (a position like that of a steward) of her father‟s estate, a situation involving much out-of-door work along with intellectual challenges (287). However, as Mamie says when she insists upon sculling a boat while her male friend rides, “I have to work my body else the working of the mind grows strong to pain” (67). Mamie, whose “voice and enunciation were instantly classed by Blake as not of the tailor-made” (14-15), still dresses in a manner which allows her to exercise. When Blake questions her ability to scull in her church clothes, Mamie jokes, “You haven‟t yet fathomed the possibilities which lurk about the be-bloused woman” (66).

In Beatrice Whitby‟s Mary Fenwick‟s Daughter (1895), Bab Fenwick‟s desire to exercise may merely connote a desire to be outdoors and out of the house which represents the authority of both her father and Jack Holland, the man whom her whole town expects her to marry. As the novel opens, Bab is refusing the proposal of Stanhope

Peel, a man she knows to be interested in her for her money. Exclaiming that she doesn‟t want to be a “prop” to any man, she asserts she‟d rather marry Jack Holland, a boy who has lived with her family during his holidays from school because he does not get along with his stepfather. Jack overhears her and proposes, and despite her mother‟s protestations, she agrees. However, Bab doesn‟t seem to be the marrying type; she is 113 often careless of Jack‟s feelings, and finally (accidentally) shoots him in the knee. This is the last straw for Jack, and he flees to India. Bab agrees to marry Stanhope, and finds being his fiancée a humbling experience; unlike Jack, he does not give her her way, and she learns to be more thoughtful of others but also loses her self-confidence in the process.

When Bab originally agrees to marry Jack, she explains that she will not suddenly become domestic just because she is married: “I hate the house, Jack, I love to be out, out, OUT. I can‟t breathe stuffing in a room and pouring over books. I want to move, to feel my hat on my head, and the earth under my feet, and the fresh air around me” (33-

34). In the pictures that fill her father‟s smoking room, Bab is never “photographed within the house,” but rather “by the porch,” “on the sands by the sea,” “under the cedar on the lawn,” “in the stableyard,” “always out, out, OUT.” (39). Jack wonders at her passionate expression of her desire to be always “out” given in order for her not be a

“prop” to Jack, they must live in London where he can work and where she will not be able to pursue her outdoorsy hobbies. After her first engagement is called off, she meets

Stanhope at a party in London, and they bond over their joint love of the country. In the end, before Bab can marry, she is paralyzed in a riding accident, and the shallow

Stanhope breaks off their engagement. Jack flies home to her side and remains with her for two years, at the end of which time she finally recovers enough to walk, though she will never be an athlete again. Along with her back, her spirit has been broken, and she finally learns to love Jack. In narrating the two grueling years of Bab‟s convalescence,

Whitby emphasizes the extent to which Bab must learn to sacrifice her own ideas for the sake of her husband‟s, even a loving husband‟s, in order to be a “good” wife. In order to 114 be content in her marriage, she must literally lose her backbone. Her native independence, embodied by her love of the outdoors, and underscored in her preference for tailor-made clothing, must be curbed not only a little, as in her relationship with

Stanhope, but completely.

Bab‟s clothing, at least prior to her marriage, is described as “severely masculine .

. . with a great deal of collar and cuff, box cloth and tweed in different shades of drab about her, with an uncompromising little hat on her trim head” (4). Bab, we are told,

“was not specially interested in her appearance; so long as her muscles and sinews, nerves and eyes, wrists and shoulders were in condition, she left her useful garments to her tailor‟s taste” (4). Like Paula Trent and Evelyn Innes, Bab desires a certain independence from her maid, or at least from the maid who tries to dress her. While Bab protests, Becket, her mother‟s maid attempts to dress her in “some smart full-dress gown” with “lace and ribbons,” while Bab calls four times for her own maid to dress her in what

Becket dismisses as “a white duck suit plain as a charity child‟s, and a boy‟s hat with a bit of cricket ribbon round it” (20). However, it is independence which Bab craves; she

“was no slattern though she turned up her nose at such decorations as were forced upon her” (20).

In wearing a tailor-made for hunting, Bab merely demonstrates that she likes to hunt, but in wearing a suit to a garden party, as she does in this instance, Bab is wearing her tailor-made “with a difference.” In “Wool Cloth and Gender,” Taylor concludes that women demonstrated “sartorial radicalism” not in wearing tailor-mades, but in proposing

“that women should have the right to wear these modern styles when and where they 115 wanted to” (44). In declining to wear the beribboned daffodil gown, Bab sets herself apart from the other women at the garden party, and

[h]er white, duck suit, her sailor-hat, looked plain enough amongst the

gala gowns of the womenkind, who had seized the last chance of airing

summer smartnesses, no matter how chilly the afternoon should prove.

Every girl . . . steadily refused a wrap; for what woman feels the cold

when clad in her best gown . . . ? (23)

Yet, Bab is nothing if not popular, among people of either sex. At the garden party to which she wears her tailor-made among the other women in their “summer smartnesses,”

Bab “was engulfed by friends. Miss Fenwick was a favourite of Fortune. She knew nothing of cold shoulders, of slights, of social wounds. Her acquaintances were, for the most part, ready to be her friends: any advance of hers was met three parts of the way, any remark of hers was listened to as thought it was of consummate interest” (22).

Unlike Paula Trent and Evelyn Innes, Bab grows up with her mother present in her home. However, Mary Fenwick‟s relationship with her daughter, while characterized by “modern good fellowship,” is not particularly maternal, because “[d]uring Bab‟s lifetime there had been little to make a mother—as an adviser, guardian, as a mother, in fact—necessary to Miss Fenwick: she had felt no desire for shelter beneath a maternal wing” (3). During her childhood, Bab, “came to her [mother] for so little, she asked so little of the care which is a joy to give. She seemed to have small need of a mother. She had no . . . desires for petting. Over her childhood illnesses she hardly asked for Mary”

(109). Repeatedly, we are told that Bab is “not like her contemplative, unapproachable mother” (13). The Awakening of Mary Fenwick tells the story of a tea gown-wearing 116 woman‟s quest for intimacy with her husband, but the title of her novel about a tailor- made girl is Mary Fenwick‟s Daughter, although Bab doesn‟t achieve identity with her mother until the very end of the novel. Mary Fenwick is a wearer of tea gowns, demonstrating her need for intimacy with and love for her husband even when she is angry with him; she demonstrates this by secretly performing little domestic chores to add to his comfort even when she not will speak lovingly to him face-to-face. Bab, however, is unconcerned with domestic chores from the beginning of the novel, wanting only to be “out out out.” Upon their first engagement, Bab tells Jack she won‟t be

“modelled on my mother” (37), nor will she “change into a domestic person with needle- work and strained ears” to hear the arrival of her husband (38). Such “strained ears” would indicate that a wife was only truly living while in her husband‟s presence, and did nothing but pine for him when they were apart. Mary identifies herself with previous generations of the women in her husband‟s family by taking for her own use the morning room, the room once used by Captain Fenwick‟s mother and sister (Awakening 62). Bab, however, lacks this tie to the previous generation; if she has to be inside at all, she prefers her own “green and white chamber” (25), whose color reflects the outdoors in which she prefers to spend her time. Her mother wonders, “Where did this head-strong, heart-whole daughter of Mary Fenwick come from?” (98). Mary, in her tailor-made, does not take after the other women in her family, but is a new breed of New Woman.

To be an adult, the author implies, is to accept this marital paralysis. After her accident, Bab is gradually made over into her mother‟s image. She is confined by her paralysis to her mother‟s morning room, the room which was “Mrs. Fenwick‟s special property” and “stamped with her individuality, her work and her knickknacks, her books 117 and her flowers, her pictures and her presence” (3), much as Alison Ives in her illness is confined to the room that her mother has designed for her in Portman Square. Her mother‟s presence and influence thus envelope Bab, even when she is not there.

After her accident, Bab‟s wardrobe changes, and she relinquishes her tailor- mades. Her father weeps at the sight of the “rough-weather coats and capes, and the hanging dresses that had been cast off as the sunshine had been cast from their dear owner‟s life” (184). Although Bab once swore she would never “change into a domestic person with a . . . soul for books” or “take to sitting in the house, and to needle-work, and to straining my ears for your footsteps” (37), she eventually does all of these things, even knitting Jack‟s socks (189). However, even after this change, Bab‟s attitude toward her own motherhood, like that of Evelyn Innes, remains ambivalent. When Bab is herself a mother, she lacks Mary‟s “tender mother-eyes” (182), deferring to her mother‟s opinion of her baby: “Of course, I don‟t know anything about them myself . . . but my mother says he is a particularly sharp, strong, good-looking child” (198). Throughout most of the novel, Bab refuses to be called by her Christian name Mary, because it is her mother‟s name. It is in the end, after her marriage to Jack, that Bab finally becomes an adult, signing her name “Mary” instead of “Bab,” which was short for “baby,” in a letter to her mother. Not only has she finally followed in her mother‟s footsteps by marrying, but also in taking the name of Mary, Bab joins the ranks of other self-sacrificing Victorian Marys.

Stuck in her mother‟s room, stripped of her tailor-made clothing, Bab‟s personality changes along with her name. It is in London, apart from her friends, that

Bab renews her friendship with Stanhope which results in their engagement, and it is in her mother‟s morning room, the symbol of Mary‟s connection to previous generations of 118

Fenwick women, that Bab loses the easy camaraderie she has enjoyed her whole life, seeing only those young women “intent on doing their duty to the invalid” (185).

As Bab‟s story makes clear, to dress a character in a tailor-made gown was to imply association with an army of tailor-made girls. It was to set her in contrast with her mother‟s generation, a generation which expected her to marry and to perfect her domestic skills, to use her sexuality to achieve this end. Ideologically separated from the previous generation, the tailor-made girl in literature is often motherless and seeks for other women to fill her mother‟s place. Alternatively, if the mother is present, the young lady is unlikely to meet with a happy ending. The tailor-made girl in the new woman novel longs for the independence of the outdoors, literally and symbolically; it is in rooms designed by their mothers that Alison Ives meets her end and Bab Fenwick becomes her mother by taking her name. In addition, as Lou Taylor suggests, the solidarity implied by the tailor-made gown often transcended class. The similarities of the tailor-made gowns and the often military style they embody allow their wearers to identify strongly with one another, and to find strength in this identification. After all, I have argued that the tailor-made functions as a uniform, and a uniform inspires confidence and symbolizes authority. In addition, the uniformity of the tailor-made also provides at least literary characters with a confidence-inspiring sense of anonymity, even if, like the notion of solidarity between classes, this was more of an attitude than an actual fact. According to Lawrence Langner‟s “Clothes and Government,” a uniform serves “to 119 demonstrate the authority of individuals and groups and to transform this authority into the power of government” (124). An unmarried woman in her own house had little authority if a father, mother, brother, or step-mother was nearby; government, even self- government, was often her goal.

120

Chapter 4

Knicksies, Kicksies, Rational Dress: The New Woman as Anti-Actress

Behold! the “new woman” is coming apace!

Athletic in figure, with resolute face;

In rational dress, is she coming to stay?

With firmness of purpose she‟s pushing her way.

Behold, she has mounted her “bike” for a ride,

She‟s wearing her bloomers and sitting astride!

Her limbs are unhampered with feminine skirts,

She loves her cravats, her coats, collars, and shirts.

If she and a male friend are out for a round,

The one with the other we nearly confound!

The “new woman‟s” dress has now reached such a pitch,

‟Tis difficult, often, to tell which is which!

—from Charlotte Oates‟s “A Cynic‟s Opinion of the „New Woman‟” (249)

The phrase “rational dress” appears in many nineteenth and early twentieth century definitions of the New Woman, including that of Charlotte Oates seen here. This particular poem begins with the lines quoted above, and devotes six of its twelve stanzas to the discussion of the New Woman‟s dress, returning to the subject before the end of 121 the poem to note “In gaiters and „knickers,‟ and breast-shield arrayed,/Defying decorum at football she‟s played!” (249). (The poem which follows it in Oates‟ collection, “The

Same on the „New Man, ‟” contains not a single reference to his dress [249-251]).

Oates‟ sentiments are consistent with many contemporary images of the New

Woman, including those of Carolyn Christensen Nelson, Patricia Marks, and Talia

Schaffer. In “„Nothing But Foolscap and Ink‟: Inventing the New Woman,” Talia

Schaffer asserts that aside from the New Woman who was an invention of the press, the true New Women, who probably wouldn‟t have used that term to describe themselves, quietly went about their lives, “smoked cigarettes, cut their hair, or wore divided skirts and plain costume in accordance with the principles of rational dress” (39). And yet, rational dress appears in relatively few New Woman novels.69 In Ann Ardis‟ bibliography of 101 works of New Woman fiction, only eight mention rational dress by my count, and at least two of those references are deprecating (205-8).70 In the latter half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the term “rational dress” generally meant pants for women. There were various incarnations of rational dress and many terms to describe what was essentially the same thing. In Eden Phillpotts‟ 1889 play A

Pair of Knickerbockers, Mr. Morton notes that what his wife prefers to call “divided skirts” are identical to his own knickerbockers (6). Alternatively, such clothing was called “bloomers,” “knickers,” “knicks,” “bifurcated garments,” “zoauves,” “harem

69 Punch cartoons often portrayed New Women in divided skirts, but this was probably more of a convenient visual signifier than a reflection of the actual numbers of women who wore rational dress. Angélique Richardson and Chris Willis assert, “For Punch, cycling and rational dress provided visual emblems of the social, sexual, and political disquiet caused by women‟s demands for equality” (24). 70 I have purposely omitted from my study examples in which women wear bifurcated garments in order to pretend to be men or boys, and thus excluded from my count books such as Lady Florence Dixie‟s Gloriana, or the Revolution of 1900 (1892) and Sarah Grand‟s The Beth-Book and The Heavenly Twins. However, several authors have considered the role of cross-dressing in fiction, most notably Marjorie Garber in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. 122 pants,” “kicksies,” “pantalets,” “hose,” “Turkish trousers,” “rationals,” “breeches,” or

“culottes.”

The movement for a more “rational” dress for women began to attain some attention first in the United States in 1851 when Amelia Bloomer famously adopted a rational costume and wrote advocating it in The Lily, a suffragist paper which she edited.

The dress was also worn by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and both women copied the design from Elizabeth Miller. This costume consisted of a pair of loose or “Turkish” trousers gathered at the ankle and worn beneath a skirt reaching below the knee. In winter, the trousers were tucked into boots. Although this costume received much attention, the women who adopted it all eventually succumbed to societal pressures and returned to more typical feminine clothing. However, rational dress achieved acceptance in the

United States and continental Europe long before it did so in Britain.

The Rational Dress Movement in England began in the 1870s. Founded in 1881 and headed by the Viscountess Florence Harberton, the National Dress Reform Society71 promoted a costume similar to the American version, but with a much longer overskirt.

Other versions of rational costume included a long tunic worn over the trousers, and

71 Members of the Rational Dress Society and its offshoot, the Rational Dress Association, included Sarah Grand, and in Henry Robert S. Dalton‟s Lesbia Newman (1889), Lesbia‟s uncle consults the RDS concerning Lesbia‟s clothing (136). Other New Woman novelists who supported the notion of rational dress included Emma Hosken Woodward, author of Men, Women, and Progress, Elizabeth Robins, author of The Convert, Lady Florence Dixie, author of Gloriana, Ménie Muriel Dowie, author of Gallia, and Olive Schreiner, author of Story of an African Farm. According to Nan Bowman Albinski‟s “„The Laws of Justice, of Nature, and of Right‟: Victorian Feminist Utopias,” “Dixie herself defied some of the restrictive codes of dress for late Victorian women, particularly in adopting a divided skirt for riding astride, rather than riding sidesaddle in long skirts” (67). In the same vein, in her 1911 Woman and Labour, Schreiner writes, The tendency of the cultured and intellectually labouring woman of to-day is to adopt a more rational type of attire less shaped to attract attention to the individual than to confer comfort and abstain from impeding activity is often spoken of as an attempt on the part of woman slavishly to imitate man. What is really taking place is, that like causes are producing life effects on human creatures with common characteristics. (178)

123 some eliminated the skirt portion altogether. In this case, knickerbockers generally replaced the trousers. This society sponsored fashion exhibits and competitions to design

“bifurcated” costumes for women and published the Rational Dress Gazette, which informed women which dressmakers and tailors in London and Paris were willing to create such costumes. Further attention was brought to the society when in 1898, Lady

Harberton was denied service at the Hautboy Hotel because she was wearing a cycling costume with baggy trousers. The Cyclist‟s Touring Club sued the hotel for “refusing food to a traveler,” but the owner, Mrs. Martha Sprague, was acquitted (CTC).

There are many reasons for which women might have wished to adopt bifurcated garments. Longs skirts could be unsanitary; they brushed the ground collecting mud and dirt and sweeping it into the house. Both novels and real-life accounts suggest women‟s skirts caught fire on a regular basis. Cage crinolines could flip up in the wind, revealing more of the wearer than she would have liked. Trousers provided more warmth than skirts. Of course, trousers were generally much lighter and provided an ease of movement which reform-minded women associated with the freedoms and opportunities available to men; thus in addition to their practical benefits, trousered garments suggested equality between the sexes, just as the corset was associated by some with the restrictions placed on the female sex. While at this point in history rational dress is seen most often in the context of some practical purpose, in its most radical permutation, it does appear as evening wear, as a kind of fashion statement of its own. However, the eventual rise in popularity of rational dress almost certainly stemmed from the increasingly common belief that girls and women benefitted from physical exercise in ways at least moderately similar to those of men and boys. While some sports retained their masculine 124 connotations, women increasingly enjoyed lawn tennis, golf, and perhaps most importantly, cycling.

The modern bicycle appeared in 1885, and was soon associated with the New

Woman. The bicycle offered her various freedoms: it was relatively inexpensive

(certainly much cheaper than keeping a horse), it provided transportation as well as recreation, and it could be ridden without a chaperone. By contrast, according to Sarah

Wintle‟s “Horses, Bikes, and Automobiles: The New Woman on the Move,” “No lady at the time would be likely to have ridden a horse out unaccompanied by at least a groom, and horses, unlike bicycles, entail grooms and stableboys” (73). In Mrs. Humphrey

Ward‟s 1916 New Woman novel Lady Connie, Connie isn‟t permitted to ride alone even with a groom (17). However, riding a bicycle in a full-length skirt proved difficult, even dangerous.72

Lady Haberton‟s experience reveals the extent to which society still balked at the notion of a woman wearing pants. As Patricia A. Cunningham tells us, “Women who wore any form of trousers in public chanced being ridiculed or taken for an actress or prostitute . . . [They] were making a political statement and accepted the risk of possible ridicule” (32-33). For this reason, rationally dressed women are seldom portrayed in a positive light in the fiction of this time. Even some New Woman novels deride rationally

72 Horseback riding, oddly enough, seems to have been thought more difficult for women in divided skirts than in the old fashioned habit and side saddle, at least until they had had some practice. In Arabella Kenealy‟s The Irresistible Mrs. Ferrers, the Turkish trouser-favoring Duchess of Skye “skulked about with lost, discomfited airs: Malet conjectured because the form of the hunting-field had compelled her to drop out temporarily from the ranks of the emancipated, and since she had not learned to ride astride, to resume the frankly undivided skirt of serfdom” (145-46). In Une Culotte: or, a New Woman by Tivoli, Carrie Elliot‟s attempt to ride astride ends in a fall, even though she has been riding since she was five (143, 146). Says Tivoli, “Never had such an accomplished equestrienne felt so uncomfortable in the saddle” (142). In Lady Florence Dixie‟s Redeemed in Blood (1889), when asked why more women do not ride astride given that it is safer, Lady Ettrick explains that it is difficult when one has not been taught to do so from childhood (73). 125 dressed women. In The Irresistible Mrs. Ferrers (1912), Arabella Kenealy, who in addition to her work as a novelist was one of the first female doctors, pokes fun at the rationally dressed Duchess of Skye and suggests that she is more interested in titillating the husbands of her friends than in furthering the cause of womankind. In Jane Hume

Clapperton‟s Margaret Dunmore; Or, A Socialist Home (1888), Joe Ferrier hesitates to join Margaret‟s commune because he imagines his fiancée Vera Ward in

communistic dress, i.e., loose trousers, and a rather scanty skirt falling just

below the knee! A few days previously, Joe had dipped into Mr.

Nordohoff‟s volume on „Communistic Societies of the United States,‟ and

had lingered with a non-appreciative aspect over the illustration at page

282. (40)

As it turns out, Joe has needn‟t have worried; Margaret approves of lesbians, but not women in pants. In F. Frankfort Moore‟s A Damsel or Two (1902), an author of a book pertaining to women‟s issues receives letters from “women who wore strangely unfeminine garments—women who seemed to fancy that they had solved the question of the sexes the moment that they had put on a hideous, nondescript garment, though they had really only bifurcated it” (117). Finally, in Isabel Meredith‟s A Girl among the

Anarchists (1903), Isabel, who does not hesitate to aid in terrorism and murder when it benefits her cause, considers rational dress a “hygienic fad” and its adherents “cranks”

(27, 273-74). 126

Fig. 7. The illustration from page 282 of Charles Nordhoff‟s The Communistic Societies of the United States, which simultaneously nettles and titillates Clapperton‟s Joe Ferrier.

The association with the theatre and prostitution probably stemmed from the history of women in trousers in the Western world. Women were first permitted to appear on stage during the Restoration in 1660, and almost from the beginning, some of their most popular roles were “breeches parts” in which they either portrayed boys or portrayed women pretending to be boys. In The First English Actresses, Elizabeth Howe observes that nearly a quarter of the plays produced between 1660 and 1700 contained breeches roles for women (57). Although some critics have argued this was a means for women to subvert and critique gender roles, Howe avers, “Breeches roles seem to have been designed to show off the female body—there was no question of the actress truly impersonating a man” (56). In these plays, according to Howe, “In most cases, a woman dons male disguise as an unnatural action caused by some obstacle to her marrying her 127 lover or otherwise getting her own way. Once her wishes are met, she almost invariably returns . . . to a conventional female role . . .” (59). Thus we may understand why a nineteenth century woman in a divided skirt might be supposed to have ulterior sexual motives.

In 1838, harem trousers were worn by the French actress Rachel as part of a

Middle Eastern costume in the Racine play Bajazet (P. Cunningham 37), and thus in addition to typical associations between acting and prostitution, the kind of garments which inspired many rational dress costumes actually derived from the western world‟s notion of the costume worn in seraglios. Sarah Bernhardt adopted trousers on stage and in private, and once allowed herself to be photographed in them. The British actress

Fanny Kemble began wearing pantaloons not merely on the stage but in public in 1843.

In his history of British music halls They Were Singing, Christopher Pulling mentions several popular songs on the subject of rational dress, including one 1895 number by

Harrington and Lebrun called “Salute My Bicycle,” in which Marie Lloyd, a popular music hall singer whose scandalous performances nearly led to her removal from the stage more than once, sang “You see I wear the Rational Dress. Well, how do you like me, eh, boys? It fits me nicely—more or less. A little bit tasty, eh, boys?” (Harrington, qtd. in Pulling 207). One proponent of rational dress warned, “A „Rational Dress‟ should before all things be as unobtrusive as possible” in order not to “recall those costumes formerly met with only on the boards of a theatre” (Main 18). In a 1902 book offering medical advice Avenues to Health, Eustace Miles laments, “The „Bloomer‟ dress gives all the organs and limbs free play; yet, even if it were graceful, how many would dare to wear it off the stage? (150). Although one of the benefits afforded by pants was from 128 freedom from fear of one‟s crinolines bumping up and revealing too much, pants were considered revealing and immodest. Says Mrs. Morton in Philpott‟s A Pair of

Knickerbockers, “I suppose everybody knows I‟ve got a pair of legs don‟t they?” “Yes,” her husband replies, “but that‟s no reason why everybody should see ‟em” (7).

Fig. 8. Advertisement for Marie Lloyd‟s “Salute My Bicycle,” a music hall song in which the pose of the New Woman was used to titillate the audience. On a postcard sold as a souvenir of the show, Lloyd rides her bicycle in the nude. 129

Unfortunately for the cause of the Rational Dress Society, the association between

New Women and actresses was a strong one. Many authors of New Woman fiction were actresses by profession, most notably Elizabeth Robins, who revised her play Votes for

Women! into a New Woman novel The Convert (1907).73 Ménie Muriel Dowie, author of the New Woman novel Gallia (1895), first achieved fame for her account of a summer spent traveling through Ruthenia alone called A Girl in the Karpathians (1891). During her immensely popular lecture tour, she explained her travelling garments. An article in

The Women‟s Herald noted

The part of the lecture most of interest to women was that where Miss

Dowie described the dress she wore during her stay in the mountains. It

consisted of a shirt, knickerbockers, short skirt, and jacket, and she said

that the comfort of such a costume is more than she can tell; she never felt

so well in her life as she did while wearing it. Her belief is that women

will never rise to what they ought to be, until the present mode of dress is

changed, for it cramps both mind and body. (qtd. in Small xxviii)

However, Dowie‟s popularity as a lecturer was also attributed to her descriptions of bathing and dressing outdoors during her journey. Her biographer Helen Small asserts

Dowie probably encouraged this kind of interest in her lectures (xxviii), and this combined with Dowie‟s original career as a reciter of poetry, and her very public and scandalous divorce would have contributed to the association between the kind of

73 For more on New Women and the theater, see Linda Fitzsimmons‟ and Viv Gardner‟s New Woman Plays. 130 bifurcated garment worn by New Women in order to promote freedom and that chosen by actresses on the stage in order to titillate.

One of the main arguments against rational dress was that it was “false to nature,” as G. Armytage wrote in an 1883 article entitled “Modern Dress” in The Fortnightly

Review (qtd. in Living, 165). Also in 1883, The Lancet declared the divided skirt

“unnatural” and “productive of unwomanly ways which are to be deprecated”

(“Women‟s” 90-91). However, proponents of rational dress also appeal to nature. In a letter entitled “Rational Cycling Dress for Women” in the C.T.C. (Cyclist‟s Touring

Club) Monthly Gazette, Edward M. Richards argued, “If there be anything of natural beauty in dress, it can only arise from an intellectual perception of its fitness and adaptability to the purpose intended, together with some degree of conformity to the outline of the figure it covers” (65). Eustace Miles similarly asserted,

Each fashion, whether it was the huge collar, or the expansive crinoline, or

the cramped chest, looked quite right in its own day; indeed, nearly

everything else looked quite wrong and unnatural! And so it is to-day.

Fashion-plates and actual photographs show the human form distorted to

the likeness of a beetle or a wasp. Yet how many dare to rebel? (150)

As Joanne Entwistle explains in The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern

Social Theory, clothing “works to imbue the body with significance, adding layers of cultural meanings, which, because they are so close to the body, are mistaken as natural”

(141). So strong are our associations between sex and these particular items of clothing that even now, as Entwistle points out, the signs on public bathrooms indicate the men‟s and women‟s rooms by depicting a figure in pants and one in a skirt, respectively. 131

For all of the reasons stated above, those New Woman novelists who wrote in favor of rational dress faced an uphill battle against strong associations of rational dress with the theatrical and false or “unnatural.” In order to make their case, as I will argue, they had to revise the current language of clothing. Therefore, by depicting rationally dressed heroines who were particularly frank or sincere, often to the point of naïveté,

New Woman novelists attempted to counteract previous ideas about women and pants.

Thus when women adopt rational dress in New Woman novels, they are nearly always characterized as women of uncommon integrity. This reversal of stereotype is often accomplished by favorably comparing these New Women to other characters who lack integrity, or who are literal actresses or show people. Through these characterizations and comparisons, New Woman novelists combated general perceptions about women who wore pants and attempted to replace them with examples of women of great integrity who were not merely attempting to imitate men or actresses. H. G. Wells‟ The Wheels of

Chance: A Bicycling Idyll, serialized from May to September 1896, focuses on the theme of those who play roles in life versus those whose motives are sincere. Ironically, because of the association with acting, it is the wearer of a rational bicycle costume who turns out to be the only character in the novel who has the capacity for sincerity, and it is her naive belief in the sincerity of others which gets her into trouble. In Rhoda

Broughton‟s 1895 Scylla or Charybdis?, Honor Lisle turns out to be honest and true even though she has been forced to associate with actresses, while Lucy Clarence, in spite of her constant church-going, has been living a lie. George Paston‟s 1896 The Career of

Candida (1896) juxtaposes the New Woman heroine Candida St. John with her actress roommate Sabina Romney in order to demonstrate the innate duplicity of the typical 132

Victorian woman who, unlike Candida, is brought up in skirts and dresses. In Elizabeth

Burgoyne Corbett‟s 1889 feminist utopian novel New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the

Future, the suffragist narrator‟s lot is thrown in with an actor, misogynist, drug addict, and all-around charlatan Augustus Fitz-Musicus, and through her efforts to protect him from the New Amazonians who believe him insane, she inadvertently ends up back in

Victorian England, where her sex remains oppressed. Finally, and in contrast to these, I will also consider some of the non-New Woman novels, and the ways in which they do, in fact, present those who adopt rational dress as actresses.

133

Fig. 9. J. Ayton Symington‟s illustration from p. 315 of The Wheels of Chance:

Hoopdriver kissing the hand of Jessie Milton, who is dressed in her “rationals.”

134

In H. G. Wells‟ 1896 novel The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll, 18-year-old

Jessie Milton, who is incidentally the first of Wells‟ New Woman characters, runs away from her stepmother Hetty Milton, who is stifling her creativity. Jessie wears rational dress: “a patent costume with button-up skirts” of “a beautiful bluish grey” (171, 30).

She escapes on her bicycle with a member of her stepmother‟s literary circle, an art critic called Bechamel, who has promised as her friend (“Why shouldn‟t a man and woman be friends?” [101]) to escort her to his sister‟s home in Midhurst and to help her become a writer. The sister proves to be fictional and Bechamel married. Jessie surprises him in resisting his attempts to seduce her even though she has already compromised herself by spending two nights with him at inns. In the mean time, Jessie meets a draper‟s assistant on holiday named Hoopdriver who helps her to flee Bechamel. Jessie writes her former teacher Miss Mergle to ask for advice on how to establish herself and earn her living and, with the help of Hoopdriver, attempts to evade Bechamel and her stepmother until she receives Miss Mergle‟s reply. In the end, aided by three cartoonish suitors, Mrs. Milton tracks down her stepdaughter and convinces her to return home with her, promising to supply her with a room of her own and to allow her to choose her own reading materials.

Throughout all these adventures and misadventures, Jessie proves herself the most stable and sensible character of the bunch. Wells underscores the artlessness of his rationally dressed heroine by surrounding her with a cast of characters who are all, essentially, actors. Jessie‟s story begins in medias res, and so Wells‟ narrator relates the story of Jessie‟s elopement in a chapter entitled “The Artificial in Man, and of the

Zeitgeist,” in which he compares the human soul to other parts of the body which have been replaced or covered over by artificial replicas such as wigs, make-up, false teeth, 135 wooden legs, etc. (105). In this way, “when we open the head of these two young people, we find, not a straightforward motive on the surface anywhere; we find, indeed, not a soul so much as an oversoul, a zeitgeist, a congestion of acquired ideas, a highway‟s feast of fine, confused thinking” (107). At this point, Bechamel is trying desperately to seduce

Jessie and is uncertain as to why he is unsuccessful, given that “He knows Passion ought to awaken, from the textbooks he has studied” (107). Bechamel is playing a role; “the man has a pretty perverted ambition to be a cynical artistic person of the very calmest description” (107). Jessie too is playing a role, as indicated by the fact that her thoughts include ideas so great and universal that, like Bechamel‟s notions of “Passion” and

“Adventure,” they require capital letters; she is “resolute to Live Her Own Life, a phrase you may have heard before” (107). Like Bechamel‟s textbook understanding of

“Passion,” Jessie‟s “motives are bookish, written by a haphazard syndicate of authors, novelists, and biographers, on her white inexperience. An artificial oversoul she is,” however, one “that may presently break down and reveal a human being beneath it”

(108). Perhaps because of her youth, Jessie is the only character in the book to whom the narrator ascribes this possibility, and the story is that of her gradual emergence from her

“artificial oversoul,” which, like the skirts and petticoats she once wore, have prevented her from reaching her fullest potential.

Jessie‟s “skirted” stepmother, whose histrionics contrast with Jessie‟s sincerity, is, according to the narrator, “quite well known to you” (168). In context, he simply means that Mrs. Milton is a famous New Woman novelist, but Mrs. Milton‟s character is so false as to be a “type,” one with which the audience is familiar. Jessie‟s stepmother does everything “correctly”: “She furnished correctly, dressed correctly, had severe notions of 136 whom she might meet, went to church, and even at times took the sacrament in some esoteric spirit” (169). When Jessie disappears, Mrs. Milton again

did the correct thing. The correct thing, as you know, is to take hansom

cabs, regardless of expense, and weep and say you do not know what to

do, round the circle of your confidential friends. She could not have

ridden nor wept more had Jessie been her own daughter—she showed the

properest spirit. And she not only showed it, but felt it. (170)

Like that of Bechamel, Mrs. Milton‟s “oversoul” is spackled on so securely that she hardly perceives its presence. However, the fact that weeping and riding in hansom cabs does nothing to help bring Jessie‟s safe return indicates to what extent the author has taken to acting like a character in a novel—not one of her own novels, however. Jessie quotes A Soul Untrammelled in her farewell note, but Mrs. Milton explains to “her Men” the distance between the lifestyle she appears to support in her novels and Jessie‟s conservative, conventional upbringing with more capitalized words indicating greater connotations than Mrs. Milton‟s actual experience. Her novel, she says, “is just

Teaching. . . . I want to Teach new Ideas. Then when the Ideas have been spread abroad—Things will come about” (227).

Mrs. Milton‟s “Men—as a charming literary lady she had, of course, an organised corps” (171)—similarly act their parts. While Dangle, Widgery, and Phipps claim to want what is best for Jessie, their first priority is in fact to win Mrs. Milton‟s affections away from the other two. Even that is something of a pretense, for Mrs. Milton is a wealthy women, a “successful little authoress and even more successful widow of thirty- two” (170) who lives on the money made by a lotion her husband invented while she tries 137

“to gain a footing in Literature” (228). Dangle, for one, “felt the absurdity of the pose of the Wounded Knight, and abandoned it after the faintest efforts” (225). All four members of the search party, according to the narrator, are “souls living very much upon the appearances of things” (229-30). They too speak of capitalized ideas, complaining that Jessie “had done it not for Love and Passion, which are serious excuses one may recognize even if one must reprobate, but just for a Freak, just for a fantastic Idea” (226).

Even the “strong-minded” Mrs. Mergle speaks of “Class Distinctions” with capital letters

(307).

Also in contrast to Jessie is poor Hoopdriver, a regular Walter Mitty who does little besides consider himself as other than he is, pretending to be a detective, a romantic villain, and Jessie‟s Knight Errant, but his “chief idea . . . had been to live up to her level, by pretending to be more exceptional, more wealthy, better educated, and, above all, better born than he was” (256). “Honesty,” he says, “is the best policy—often” (233).

According to John Huntington‟s “The Time Machine and Wells‟ Social Trajectory,” the character of Hoopdriver is a version of Wells himself, and the story embodies Wells‟ own fears concerning the possibility of social mobility for one such as himself (100).74 Jessie is the one character to whom Wells ascribes the ability to live sincerely, to escape the

“oversoul” of ideas gleaned from New Woman novels, the oversoul under which she struggles in the beginning of the story. Her very reason for leaving home involves her disgust for her stepmother‟s acting various roles in order to please various of her “Men”

74 A former draper and the son of a servant, Wells had written the highly successful novel The Time Machine the year before, and found himself rising in class status at a rate that was dazzling. Thus, to Huntington, the novel poses a question: “by the time one is an adult, has one‟s class background . . . become inescapable?” (100). If this is the case, it would seem Wells wrote the character of Hoopdriver based on a fear that he too was only acting the part of his new class status, wondering as Hoodriver wondered, “Where would the draper break out next?” (263). Is it possible, then, to rise from a draper‟s assistant to something more meaningful? Hoopdriver never really has the opportunity to “Stop playing at life,” as Jessie bids him (279). 138 in spite of the feminist tone of her novels. Jessie may not immediately discover

Hoopdriver‟s lower middleclass status, but she “had speedily seen through” her stepmother‟s “amiable defenses. The variety of pose necessitated by the corps of „Men‟ annoyed her to an altogether unreasonable degree. To return to this life of ridiculous unreality—unconditional capitulation to „Conventionality‟ was an exasperating prospect”

(259). By the end of the novel, her capitalized “„Conventionality‟” appears in quotation marks, as if she is adding an ironic dimension to her notion of the universal theme. When

Hoopdriver decides to fight a man who has made a rude remark about Jessie‟s rational dress, he does so because he is taking his role as Jessie‟s “Knight Errant” to its logical end. Jessie, however, comments “I thought only Ouida‟s guardsmen75 did things like that” (254), demonstrating that at least to some degree, she knows the difference between life and a novel, even if Hoopdriver does not. When she dismisses Hoopdriver‟s daydreams, he tells her, “You‟re real. And it sets me thinking what I really am, and what

I might have been” (279, emphasis mine).

Finally, we see Jessie‟s integrity demonstrated through her admission that she has much still to learn. Jessie, unlike the others (Hoopdriver, for one, is certain his education is over.), is determined to continue her education. When her escape with Bechamel ends in a failed seduction rather than a career as a writer as she had expected from her reading of New Woman novels, Jessie begs for time to think (107, 142). To Hoopdriver, she complains, “I want to Live, and I want to see what life means. I want to learn. Everyone

75 Although Ouida insisted that her strength as a writer lay in the verisimilitude of her characters (Abbot 407-08), her guardsmen characters were apparently a joke even in her own time. G. S. Street writes in an 1895 article in The Yellowbook, “Everybody has laughed at Ouida‟s typical guardsman, that magnificent creature of evil life and bitter memories, sumptuous, reckless, and prepared withal to perform heroic feats of physical strength at a moment‟s notice. Nobody, I admit, has met a guardsman like him; I admit his prodigality to be improbable in its details . . .” (168). 139 is hurrying me, everything is hurrying me; I want time to think” (189). She speaks airily of her desire “to write Books and alter things. To do Good. I want to lead a Free Life and Own myself” (192). Hoopdriver cannot follow her train of thought, but it is no wonder, as he is busy calculating how many days their money will last. If Hoopdriver plays at being a “bloomin‟ Dook,” Jessie plays at socialism (or “Socialism,” as Jessie and her pursuers call it). It is not until the end of their adventure, when their lack of money has forced them to quit fleeing, that Jessie has a sudden realization: “Money . . . Is it possible—Surely! Conventionality! May only people of means—Live their own Lives?

I never thought …” (290). It is at this point that Jessie ceases thinking and speaking in capital letters. After her final interview with Hoopdriver, Jessie‟s last words in the story convey her lack of knowledge, her desire to learn more: “„I did not know,‟ she whispered to herself. „I did not understand. Even now—No, I do not understand‟” (316). It is the acknowledgement of her lack of understanding, her refusal to feign a knowledge which can only be gained by experience, which sets her apart from the rest of the characters.

Because of the association between women in trousers and actresses, Jessie‟s trousers suggest the question of whether or not the New Woman is sincere in her desire to see improvement in the world. Wells demonstrates that some, such as Mrs. Milton,76 who goes so far as to use another name when writing her “advanced” books, are merely

“oversouls,” but some, as represented by Jessie, are “real,” and with the right education, capable of doing great good in the world. By depicting the rationally-dressed Jessie as the only sincere character in a cast of cartoonish, unrealistic actors, Wells attempts to

76 Mrs. Milton also has some connection to prostitution in that she makes her choice of which suitor to marry based on his ability to support her financially. 140 revise the language of dress by changing the stereotypic the significance of a woman in trousers from mendacity to sincerity.

As in The Wheels of Chance, the New Woman heroine of Rhoda Broughton‟s

1895 novel Scylla or Charybdis? is the only one of the three primary characters who turns out to be who she says she is. Ironically, it is the wearer of knickerbockers and the daughter of a less-than-respectable father who is not an actress but a genuinely good and faithful girl, while her love interest Harry Clarence, a man from a respectable family whose mother looks down on such a girl as Honor Lisle, turns out to be illegitimate. In

Scylla, Broughton rewrites the language of dress, clothing the honest character in attire normally reserved for actresses, while the “actress” Lucy Clarence is “clothed” in conservative skirts, religion, and respectability.

A widow, Harry‟s mother dotes on her only child, following him both to Eton and

Oxford, and later taking a home in St. Gratian, a suburb of London, so that the 28-year- old Harry, a barrister, may visit her often. While on a business trip, Harry meets and falls in love with Honor Lisle, a shy young woman with a questionable upbringing: her father is a “well-known racing man” (53) who generally leaves her alone in a dreary, ramshackle home, but occasionally “swoops down upon her with a horde of doubtful ladies and shady sporting men, most of whom . . . persecute her with extremely equivocal attentions” (54). A few months after Harry‟s trip, Honor comes to St. Gratian to visit her 141 old school friend Euphemia, who happens to be the daughter of Lady Bramshill, one of

Lucy Clarence‟s childhood friends. The young people tacitly decide to give the impression that Harry is courting Euphemia rather than Honor, Euphemia to tease her mother, and Harry in order to be alone with Honor without arousing suspicion. The ruse is successful, and the day before Honor leaves the Bramshills, Harry proposes and is accepted. Lady Bramshill, however, fears Harry wants to marry Euphemia, and reveals to him his mother‟s secret: his father, grandfather, uncles, and aunt were all homicidal maniacs who died in a madhouse. Harry goes to Honor‟s home to tell her he cannot marry her and why. Honor declares that she is willing to marry him anyway, but Harry refuses and leaves on a trip around the world in hopes of forgetting her. Meanwhile

Honor‟s nurse recognizes Harry as her own former charge and reveals to Honor Mrs.

Clarence‟s real secret, that Harry‟s father is not Mr. Clarence but Mrs. Clarence‟s former fiancé, whom her guardian did not allow her to marry because he was poor. Later, Harry returns from his journey to find his mother has died only twenty minutes before, but has written a letter confessing all. The news ages Harry, stooping his shoulders and turning his hair white, but he is able to return to Honor, at which point she proposes, he accepts, and neither ever mentions his mother‟s dishonor as long as they live.

Harry meets Honor at the home of Mrs. Bevis, another New Woman who wishes to consult him about building a recreation room for her village. Honor is staying in Mrs.

Bevis‟ cottage to help her with the harvest, which the two ladies, who wear matching knickerbockers when their labor requires it, conduct themselves. For shrimping, Honor sports “bare legs and feet, a blue serge blouse belted round her slender waist, and . . . a square red sailor collar and blue knickerbockers. A red silk handkerchief is tied over her 142 sleek black head” (60). Just as Jessie Milton, the wearer of rational dress, is the only character in The Wheels of Chance who has the capacity for sincerity, Mrs. Bevis and particularly Honor are characters whose integrity is striking, particularly when compared to Honor‟s father and Harry‟s mother, and to a lesser degree, to Euphemia Bramshill and

Harry. When Harry sees Mrs. Bevis driving the lead wagon in the fields, he compliments her on her energy, but adds

“isn‟t it rather a severe game in this weather, to play at being your own

wagoner?”

“Play”‟ repeats she, with an accent of surprise . . . “there is not

much play about it. I always lead every day through the harvest. They”—

with a glance at the harvestmen—“would think the world was coming to

an end if I did not.” (43-44)

Honor Lisle has even more of a reputation for honesty than her friend. Says Mrs.

Bevis, Honor is “the most absolutely looking-glassly truthful person I ever met” (56).

Harry is first attracted to Honor because of her likeness to his mother, and Broughton paradoxically juxtaposes Honor‟s knickerbockers and their association of the actress and prostitute to her good character and honesty in the same way that she juxtaposes Honor‟s image with that of Mrs. Clarence, “an ironical outside likeness, covering such deep dissimilitude” (104). Mrs. Clarence is known for her old-fashioned conventionality and her saint-like religious devotion. She disapproves of Honor, her knickerbockers, and the fact that she once spent a week entertaining the actress Poppy de Vere in her father‟s home. And yet Honor, according to Mrs. Bevis, “is not in the least innocent, in the mistaken sense in which that word is generally employed as a synonym for „ignorant.‟ 143

How should she be, with her upbringing? No, Honor is the least ignorant of evil, and the most really innocent girl I have ever met” (54). The dissimilarity between Honor and

Lucy Clarence is heightened with the crisis of the story, when Nasmyth reveals that it is the saintly Lucy, who attends church services twice daily, who has had a child out of wedlock, while Honor, the hostess of “blacklegs and Poppy de Veres” is innocent, even faithful to Harry in a way that his mother is not. Honor freely admits her past and is willing to marry Harry even though it means she can never have children and that he may well murder her in his madness, but Mrs. Clarence knowingly destroys her son‟s happiness by sticking to Lady Bramshill‟s story in order to keep up the ruse of her own good character.

Broughton underscores Honor‟s sincerity by presenting a series of contrasts in

Harry‟s mind. Harry conceives of the image of Honor leading her horses, leaping onto the moving cart, and riding on its shaft, an activity one might associate with the underclass or young boys, as “heavenly graceful and womanly” (46). Harry finds

Honor‟s dislike of reading “Incredible! With that face!” (56). Harry falls in love with

Honor‟s “odd duodecimo beauty,” a peculiar phrase to describe a woman, meaning small, but suggesting a book. And yet, as Broughton reminds us in the very next sentence,

Harry “is a bookish man, and [Honor] never for one moment blenches or wavers in her strong and consistent assertion of her detestation of all book-learning” (55). To describe the self-professed hater of books as a book herself is another odd contrast, like that of the knickerbockers and Honor‟s, well, honor. Finally, when they go shrimping, Honor removes her cloak and “stands with perfect sangfroid, getting ready her net. He could not have believed that bare legs and knickerbockers could be consistent with so dignified a 144 composure” (60). But in linking Honor‟s honesty and fidelity with her chosen costume and in demonstrating its fitness for the tasks at hand, Broughton works to alter the implication of the image of a woman in pants from dishonorable to fitting and correct.

Brougton, through her character Mrs. Bevis, reminds us, “We are all, and women especially, mortifyingly dependent for our identity upon our clothes” (43). Therefore, it is not surprising that she would attempt to alter the dishonorable associations of the clothing she finds most liberating.

The Career of Candida is a novel about women and integrity in which George

Paston works to revise the language of dress by depicting her heroine Candida St. John in knickerbockers, while her roommate Sabina Romney, a treacherous friend and a literal actress, refuses to wear them. Candida believes, and the plot of the story confirms her belief, that from the time they are little girls, women are taught to dissemble as a result of men‟s desire to keep them in their place. Her grandmother, given the traditional girls‟ education, “never was herself in this life, except perhaps during her earliest childhood.

She, like most other women, was the purely artificial product of a lopsided civilization which has been built up by one sex, and of an age in which one sex has reigned supreme”

(44).

The novel depicts how as adults, such women can never fully drop this habit of dissembling because it is so ingrained in their psyches. In hopes of avoiding this result, 145

Candida‟s father allows her to wear knickerbockers as a child because he believes that boys and girls should be raised in exactly the same manner. Candida turns out to be a very frank and honest young woman because of her non-gender-specific education.

However, she soon discovers that she differs vastly from other women of her acquaintance. As was the case in The Wheels of Chance and Scylla or Charybdis?,

Paston holds up a foil character to that of her heroine in order to demonstrate her sincerity by contrast. Jessie Milton is juxtaposed with her step-mother, a New Woman novelist, who, as it turns out, does not take literally the views she espouses in her books. Honor

Lisle ironically resembles her future mother-in-law physically, but it turns out that Mrs.

Clarence is not as saintly as she appears. Candida‟s roommate Sabina Romney earns her living as an actress. Unlike Candida, however, Sabina ironically refuses to wear knickerbockers, despite their association with the acting profession, as “she objected to boy‟s parts” (71).

Candida is a gymnastics instructor who devotes long hours to her work, teaching a free course to women one night a week and helping other “sister” women when she can.

When she meets Adrian Sylvester, a boyishly handsome stock-broker and heavy drinker who believes he loves her because he finds her physical strength so attractive, she initially resists his proposals, seeing through his pose. However, when he becomes ill, apparently for love of her, she cannot resist her desire to care for him by becoming his wife. In the meantime, Sabina meets and consoles Candida‟s childhood playmate Ted

Ferrars, who had hoped to marry her when he had saved enough money. Ted is plain but honest and inclined toward philosophy and modern notions concerning the role of women. Of course, both the Sylvesters and the Ferrarses are entirely mismatched— 146

Candida should have married Ted, and Sabina should have married Adrian—and soon after their double wedding, Adrian and Sabina begin an affair. Candida is aware of

Adrian‟s unfaithfulness, but unaware of the identity of his mistress. However, the thing which eventually ends their marriage is his dishonest financial dealings with his mother.

When the marriage is over, Candida takes her child and returns to her career, once again becoming successful and supporting the two of them. Soon, Sabina becomes unhappy with her husband, who desires more of an intellectual companion than a social butterfly. They quarrel and she too returns to her original profession, the stage. Ted and

Candida begin to meet again, and when someone suggests their meetings are unseemly, both realize their true feelings for one another. However, at this time, Sabina returns to

London, apparently on her deathbed. Candida convinces Ted to forgive her, nurses her back to health, and the Ferrarses decide to give their marriage another go. Candida is not lonely for long; she soon meets Adrian in the street, now partially paralyzed as a result of his debaucheries. Although he offers her a divorce so that she may again find happiness, she determines to bring him home and support him the rest of their days, blissful in her self-sacrifice.

Rational dress plays a seminal role in Candida‟s life. After her unconventional childhood dressed in “short petticoats and knickerbockers” (4), Candida‟s adulthood begins when her mother gives her a long-skirted frock for her seventeenth birthday, insisting “long skirts will help to tame her more than anything. . . . They will be an education in nice, gentle, feminine ways” (4). Paston underscores her connection between sincerity and rational dress in Mr. St. John‟s reply that “you women choose to think that nature‟s provision of two legs is indecent, and therefore handicap yourselves by 147 pretending to move about on a draped pedestal” (4, emphasis mine). As part of her nonconventional upbringing, Candida has been told to choose a profession, but had been indecisive until they day she first wears her skirts, when she decides to become a gymnastics instructor so that she may continue to wear knickerbockers. Candida‟s gym suit is “a well-cut tunic and knickerbockers of smoke-blue, with a silken sash loosely knotted round the waist” and “became her far better than ordinary feminine attire” (46).

In order to make her pennies go farther during her early years in her career, Candida decides to avoid the kind of society which would require fancier clothing than her gym suit (17). Even when she can eventually afford to buy dresses, Candida opines, “Now I, except when I am wearing my gymnastic costume, feel as if I had the effect of an anachronism. Fashionable clothes never look natural on me” (54). In fact, Candida is successful in all of the various activities practiced as a part of her career, except for the one which requires she wear a dress, and the one most directly related to the stage, skirt- dancing (14).77

Candida‟s personality mirrors her name; her defining feature is her frank honesty.

While attempting to woo her, Adrian says, “I thought you prided yourself on your honesty” (58). Once they are married, Candida fears she will be unable to keep Adrian‟s interest, confessing, “I am always the same; I can‟t pretend to be what I don‟t feel,” as if

77 Skirt-dancing was a kind of dance performed in a long skirt which derived from “gaiety dance,” and thus was originally performed in music halls. In the late nineteenth century, daring women of the better classes studied skirt-dancing for exercise and recreation and to entertain their friends at private parties. In Violet Hunt‟s The Maiden‟s Progress (1894), the New Woman heroine Moderna breaks off an engagement with a man who permits her to learn skirt-dancing but only allows her to perform for himself (90). Later, when Moderna hides behind a curtain while the men have their drinks after dinner, she learns their real opinion of her dancing, that “it‟s bad form for society girls to try to cut out the professionals” (224). Adrian Sylvester first meets his future bride when he attends a field day at her gymnasium because his friend promises “there‟s to be skirt-dancing as well as gymnastics, and altogether I imagine it will be something like a highly respectable music-hall with the songs left out” (46). Thus Candida succeeds at all aspects of gymnastics except the one associated with the stage. 148 this is a flaw in her character (83). When she does eventually fall for Adrian, one of his main attractions for her is

the fact that he assumed no pose, made no pretensions to any artistic

infallibility, but confessed his ignorance with cheerful unconcern, yawned

when he was bored, and positively refused to admire anything that did not

really appeal to his taste. His simplicity and naturalness were especially

refreshing to one whose chief acquaintance lay among the lesser lights of

art and literature, and whose amusement at their affectations had long

since changed to weariness and disgust. (54)

She is so honest herself, that she sometimes has difficulty in comprehending others‟ prevarications. When Adrian smoothes things over after an argument about her pregnancy, Candida is “quite incapable of perceiving that his desire for a reconciliation lay not so much in a real feeling of tenderness as in his dislike of any unpleasantness in his social surroundings” (95).

As we have seen in The Wheels of Chance and Scylla or Charybdis?, Paston‟s heroine is surrounded by a cast of actors carefully chosen to help the authors make their points about the contrast between them and their rationally dressed heroines. For all his honest appearance, Adrian is continually described in terms of an actor, as playing a

“rôle” (62, 82). Mr. St. John believes the love Adrian bears for his mother and the supposed reason the young couple plans to live with her, is a pose and tells his daughter

“Ma mère!” is “a most effective allusion on the stage” (68). Always having the notion of the larger dramatic scene in mind, when he first proposes to Candida, Adrian begs, “say you love me, whether you do or not” (57). Apparently, Adrian is able to change with the 149 personality of the woman he desires. With the actress he becomes even more of an actor;

Sabina teases Candida: “You never told me what a splendid mimic he was. He can take off the vicar to the life, and most of the funny old people in the village” (96). Of course

Candida has not mentioned this aspect of her husband to her friend; knowing his wife would disapprove, Adrian is wily enough to hide this particular talent from her.

However, although Candida is aware of his marital infidelities, Adrian‟s major act of dishonesty and the one which finally parts him from his wife is his swindling of his mother out of the money she needs to run the household and to feed herself, his sisters, his wife, and his child.

Though certainly less dangerous and offensive, Adrian‟s mother and sisters are as bound up in their own variety of mendacity as Adrian. The three women are terrible hypochondriacs, whose constant (perceived) illnesses worry Candida until she realizes how they add flavor to their otherwise monotonous lives. Candida is a little shocked, if understanding, however, to discover Adrian‟s middle-aged sisters advertise in a

“matrimonial newspaper,” describing themselves alternately as young and beautiful or rich but plain, simply for the excitement of reading the responses. While a lover of truth,

Candida‟s “heart filled with compassion for the two loveless little women, who had sought to brighten their stunted, colourless lives by means of counterfeit romances, and indignation against the customs that had rendered such a state of things possible” (90).

The habits of acting and lying, Candida is certain, were ingrained in these women by a society which favored the other sex. Fanny and Louisa never had the opportunity for love affairs when they were young because the money that might have paid for their clothing went instead to their brother‟s education. They were brought up with the notion 150 that their lives would culminate in marriage and motherhood, but were not given the proper clothing to accomplish this. Candida, on the other hand, never dressed to attract men in her knickerbockers. However, it is the knickerbockers and the independent career they represent which eventually enable Candida to support her child as well as her husband. In this way, Paston links the necessity of acting to skirts and the capacity for honesty to rational dress. It is their shabby skirts, or the lack of nice ones, which cause

Fanny and Louisa to compose these dangerous lies (dangerous, because, as Candida tells them, someone might follow them home from the shop where they retrieve their love letters), while Candida‟s trousers, by eliminating her need for outside financial support, keep her honest.

The longer she lives with her husband and in-laws, the more Candida finds herself participating in their little mendacities. Although she gets along well with her in-laws,

“Her success, it is true, was partly due to a suppression of her own ideas and opinions—a piece of moral insincerity of which she was often ashamed” (89). In addition, there is an unspoken rule that the members of the household behave as if Adrian‟s frequent hangovers are simply unfortunate attacks of headache and nausea. Candida soon finds herself repeating the same little lies as her mother- and sisters-in-law in order to cover for her husband, “so anxious was she to „play up to him‟ in the squalid little drama” (104).

The little lies bother Candida, but she sees no way around them. She fears if she angers

Adrian, he will insist upon seeing their son, and perhaps harm him in his drunken state.

In fact, Candida‟s life with her husband and in-laws feels like a fiction to her from beginning to end. Not long after Candida declines Adrian‟s first proposal, Mrs. Sylvester writes her to tell her he is dying and her name has been on his lips. Candida reflects, “It 151 was like an episode out of some ancient tale of chivalric romance” (63). After her marriage, when Candida gives up her career and moves in with the Sylvesters in Herne

Vale,

She felt as though she were plunged into the middle of some novel dealing

with suburban life and society, and only needed to close the book when

she wearied of the tedium and pettiness of the details therein described.

Indeed, there was so strange an air or unreality about this new existence . .

. that she could hardly believe she would not wake some morning to find

herself back in her Bloomsbury lodging, with a hard day‟s work before

her. (85)

When her marriage finally does collapse and Candida decides to take her baby and leave, supporting the child and herself with the “career” of the title, “She could hardly believe that the last two years, with her marriage and her life at Herne Vale, had not been some strangely vivid dream” (119). Thus, it is when she is back in her gymnasium knickerbockers that life once again seems real to her. Her brief spell in skirts as the wife of a man who refused to explain his work to her, a life in which she was expected to play the part of “toy” wife to him and agreeable daughter- and sister-in-law to his family has ended.

Sabina Romney, the character who acts as Candida‟s foil, is not merely a literal actress but also one of those women who, like Candida‟s grandmother, is an actress at heart. However, it is the men of the world who have forced her to become this perpetual actress. Sabina‟s father deserted her family when she was young, and her mother, having no skill like Candida‟s, supported her little family with “fine needlework” until Sabina 152 obtained work as an actress at sixteen. Three months later, Sabina lost her job and her mother became ill. The desertion of her father and her mother‟s illness forced her to sleep with her manager in order to be hired in another play, so that her mother could have the cure she needed to survive. She didn‟t want to go over to the dark side, but once she was there, she grew accustomed to it. Her name, Sabina, is perhaps predictive. Like the

Sabine women, after being coerced into sex, she came to like her new world, and thus her marriage to Ted is originally a failure, and she returns to the stage. Sabina stands as a symbol for nearly all women in The Career of Candida, who have nothing on which to bank except for their sexual attractions, who, like Candida‟s grandmother, are never their authentic selves, and who become so accustomed to acting a role that the role itself becomes inseparable from their personalities.

Sabina does not exactly intend to manipulate Candida‟s childhood sweetheart into proposing, but “her latent coquetry awoke, and from sheer force of habit she began to put forth all her wiles to lure him into her net” (69). After her marriage, Sabina confesses, “I begin to think it is a pity I gave up the stage when I married . . . He might see that as I‟ve nothing else to do, I must go in for dress and society; I‟m simply driven to it” (95). Just as Candida finds herself playing a role when she is with Adrian, Ted begins to “play the part of brother” to Sabina in the face of possible rivals (70). Ted initially hesitates to marry Sabina, and she is so surprised that temporarily “she was startled into naturalness and sincerity” (71). Even Sabina‟s wedding gown is something of a sham; she has its revealingly low-cut bodice “filled with lace for the ceremony” (82), a metaphor for the way in which she hides her true character before her marriage. After leaving Ted in order to act in Brazil and then returning to England to die, Sabina writes to Candida to beg her 153 forgiveness for her flirtation with Adrian, and Candida insists upon bringing her home to her own flat, convincing Ted to express his forgiveness to his dying wife. When he enters the room, he sees

a table by her side, on which stood a vase containing three lilies, and a

small Church-service with a very large cross. These were the correct

„properties‟ for a dying girl, and Sabina, though perfectly sincere in her

belief in her approaching dissolution, could still feel an artistic pleasure in

an effective pose. . . . For the first time [Ted] felt convinced that her days

were numbered; it was so impossible to doubt the evidence of the vase of

lilies and the Church-service. (137)

Ted begins to see her regularly, and she soon recovers.

In order for their marriage to work, Sabina finds she must continue to act, but no longer on the stage or with her “society” friends. Once she complained that Ted didn‟t know her, that he only loved “an ideal of his own creation” (76). However, after the experience in Brazil which nearly kills her, Sabina becomes grateful for her home and her husband. In order to keep his attention, she learns to pretend to be the intellectual companion Ted once longed for in Candida: Sabina‟s “quick superficial intelligence caught up with amazing dexterity the more striking of his ideas and opinions, which, slightly coloured and remodelled, she would reproduce in the course of conversation, immensely to his surprise and gratification” (142). After the birth of their daughter,

Candida visits her old friends to find Sabina in a tea-gown, which, as stated in Chapter 2, was synonymous with maternity. In her tea gown, with her hair smoothed down, Sabina looked like a Madonna, and “Candida could not be sure how much of this altered 154 appearance was due to nature, and how much to Sabina‟s innate sense of the fitness of things” (142). When Candida asks if she is happy to be a mother, Sabina agrees and adds, “I shall never be afraid of Ted finding out that I am an intellectual fraud, and getting tired of me. The baby‟s mother will always be sacred in his eyes” (142).

Candida‟s theory that most women are inescapably bound in roles adopted so early in their childhoods that they no longer know the truth from the fiction, does not prevent her from empathizing with other women and attempting to make their lives easier. It is perhaps because she has not been taught to compete with other women for the attention of men who hold all power in their lives, that she is able to say, “No woman worthy of the name is hard upon a sister” (78). Candida “pitied other girls who were forced to eat out their hearts in idleness, to dance and dress and smile and chatter, hiding their haggard looks beneath „face joy,‟ the costliest mask that women wear” (59).

However, it is Candida‟s honesty which gets her into trouble; because of it, she loses Ted

Ferrars and ends up with useless Adrian Sylvester. Candida loses Ted‟s friendship by confessing that she loves him, which forces both of them act upon these feelings by avoiding one another. Says the narrator, “It was the truth, but the truth is not always prudent from woman to man” (130).

Thus The Career of Candida is a novel which suggests that women would have more integrity were they only raised in the same way that boys are. The woman of integrity is the one who continues to wear her knickerbockers through her childhood and into her adult years. However, just as many New Women, real and fictional, including

Sarah Grand78 and Nellie Silverton in Emma Hosken Woodward‟s Men, Women, and

78 Grand tells Tooley she always wears “the rational costume” in France, where it is more common, but in England, “I always ride in a skirt, which . . . attracts less attention. It is necessary for a New Woman to be 155

Progress (1885),79 argued that while rational dress was best, women shouldn‟t adopt it until it was more generally accepted by society, Candida is born too soon for her unconventional education. When she gives birth to a son, Candida is glad, “the world being, as she sometimes said, not yet ripe for women” (206). Her surname St. John reflects her role as prophet of the future, and her knickerbockers must also underscore that role, given the proliferation of knickerbocker-clad women in futuristic novels of the

1880s and 90s.

One such novel is Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett‟s 1889 utopian work New

Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future, in which the narrator finds herself transported to a woman-dominated Ireland 600 years into the future during a nap.80 There, she discovers the “New Amazonians” are descendents of Victorian suffragettes. The unnamed narrator appears in New Amazonia along with another time-traveler from Victorian England,

very careful about her appearance” (Tooley 164). Grand goes on to say, “Want of taste in dress on the part of many women, who advocate what are called advanced views, has thrown back the woman‟s cause fifty years” (165). 79 When Nellie‟s brother asks her why she does not adopt rational dress given that she believes in its superiority to fashionable clothing, she replies, There is no good in making oneself peculiar . . . one only gets talked about and laughed at, and loses what little influence one might otherwise possess. The world always ridicules what it is not accustomed to; you must have observed yourself that, however pretty and sensible a dress may be, provided there is anything uncommon or unfashionable about it, those who venture to wear it are always pointed out as people who ought to be kept under moderate restraint as harmless lunatics. . . . (83-84) 80 New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future is not the only contemporary Utopian novel in which the ideal society is one dominated by women. Henry Robert Samuel Dalton‟s Lesbia Newman, in which a revolution overthrowing the men in power is symbolized by the destruction of an enormous phallic light house, was also published in 1889. Lady Florence Dixie‟s 1892 Gloriana, or the Revolution of 1900 is written on a similar theme; the titular Gloriana also wears pants. In William Henry Hudson‟s 1906 A Crystal Age (1906), it is the men who adopt skirts in the future, instead of the women taking up trousers. 156 unbeknownst to her before their journey, the Honourable Augustus Fitz-Musicus, and once again, we see the author rewriting pants as rational dress, while skirts are the domain of the actor.

On arriving, the narrator observes one of the natives wearing the “national dress”:

. . . a very peculiar dress, I thought, until I saw that science and common

sense had united in forming a costume in which the requirements alike of

health, comfort, and beauty had reached their acmé.

A modification of the divided skirt came a little below the knee,

the stockings and laced boots served to heighten, instead of to hide, their

owner‟s beautiful symmetry of limb. A short skirt supplemented the

graceful tunic, which was worn slightly open at the neck, and partially

revealed the dainty whiteness of a shapely bust. The whole costume was

of black velvet, and was set off by exquisite filmy laces, and by a crimson

sash which confined the tunic at the waist, and hung gracefully on the left

side of the wearer. (11)

The narrator soon learns that “the Mother,” that is, the government, provides for all visitors to the state “as showed good reason for their advent” (57). Inadvertent time- travel, apparently, is good reason, and thus “the Mother” provides the narrator and her companion with their own versions of the national dress, minus the sash, which is only permitted to be worn by citizens. The narrator likes her new clothes, and finds them “a good fit, if the term could be applied to garments whose chief beauty consisted in the absolute freedom from constraint which they exercised over the body” (57-58). 157

Augustus Fitz-Musicus, however, does not like his gift of clothing from “the mother.” The narrator does not discuss the male version of the New Amazonian dress, because, she says, Fitz-Musicus is also planning to write a book on his experiences in

New Amazonia, and she doesn‟t want to steal his thunder; she mentions only that he “was as much transformed as I was . . . Considerably to my amusement he professed to be very much disgusted at being compelled to renounce his wonderful tweeds and three-inch high collar, in favour of . . . garments that were very much more artistic and comfortable”

(65). Eventually, he refuses entirely to wear the national dress, even though it means “he will brave the probability of becoming a laughing-stock” (142).

In New Amazonia, the character of Fitz-Musicus plays the same role of foil to the rational dress-wearing heroine as do Hetty Milton, Lucy Clarence, and Sabina Romney.

Although he is a man and therefore accustomed to wearing bifurcated garments, he still finds his rational dress “disgusting.” Also, Corbett very ostentatiously leaves out a depiction of the male dress, often teasing the reader by inserting blanks with phrases such as “Their dress ---- upon consideration I have decided not to describe their attire” (64) and “being dressed in ---- there, now, I nearly betrayed the secret after all” (65). These tantalizing blanks, the declaration “He was as much transformed as I was” (65) in his

“artistic” dress, and the narrator‟s response, “it makes you look more insignificant than ever, if possible” (67), coupled with Fitz-Musicus‟ disgust (and later refusal) at being forced to wear it strongly imply that the national dress for New Amazonian men is, well, a dress. The reversal of gender roles in New Amazonia further supports this theory. The rationally dressed narrator condescendingly offers, “I daresay my presence will be some 158 little protection to you” (68).81 When the narrator and Fitz-Musicus travel to New

Amazonia, they find themselves in a women‟s college, and thus, while the narrator simply moves into the dormitory with the girls, one professor contends, and the principal agrees, “It would never do to let [Fitz-Musicus] sleep in the college for a night! The poor little thing‟s character would be irretrievably compromised” (20).

As foil to the narrator‟s character, Fitz-Musicus is portrayed as dissembling. First of all, he comes from a theatrical family, claiming his family line stems from a duke who was the result of a liaison between King George IV and an opera singer. His elder brother is “the Duke of Quaverly,” another comic reference to music. When the two are asked to give a speech, Fitz-Musicus “bowed so theatrically and looked so killingly dudish that the one prevailing expression on the faces of all who saw him was a large smile” (99). Thus just as Jessie Milton saw through her step-mother‟s pose, the rationally-dressed New Amazonians see through Fitz-Musicus‟ pose, while he does not realize the cause of their mirth, and their smiles “produced radiant satisfaction in

Augustus” (99). In addition, Fitz-Musicus interprets the hospitality of the female New

Amazonians as romantic desire, and believes they “took a violent fancy to myself” (103).

Principal Grey tells the narrator “his vanity is inextinguishable, and nothing could bring him to the belief that his appearance does not eclipse that of our handsomest men” (142).

He proposes to six New Amazonian women, and each merely laughs at him. He attributes this laughter to the notion that they “didn‟t believe that I really meant to throw myself away upon them” (144).

81 The gender role reversal and the assertion that Fitz-Musicus will be mistaken for a little boy in his dress implies another reason why women of this period would resent wearing skirts, the fact that dresses were worn by children of both sexes. Thus the fact that women continued to wear only skirts throughout their lives could be interpreted as an indication of their childlike social and political status. 159

In New Amazonia, the rational costume itself is depicted as honest and straightforward, and thus contributes to Corbett‟s revision of the meaning of the woman‟s trouser. The narrator notes that of all the girls she sees swimming in their “neat and elegant, but at the same time thoroughly utilitarian” rational bathing costumes, “not one of them owed her superb proportions to artificial means” (63). Thus the narrator finds the absence of corsets more honest than their presence, which allowed women to pretend to have a seventeen-inch “wasp waist.” The costume is also considered vital to one‟s identity as a rational being. When Fitz-Musicus refuses to wear his, the New

Amazonians take that as a sign of insanity.82 This troubles the narrator because she has been told the New Amazonians euthanize those they believe to be insane. Upon warning

Fitz-Musicus, he too becomes anxious, so much so that he reveals his dishonest nature.

Not only does he descend from a theatrical family, but his identity as the Honourable

Augustus Fitz-Musicus, who claims he “never had even to dress myself without assistance until I came to this benighted land” (144) is itself a pose. He cries out to God for help and forgiveness, revealing that his real name is Jones, that he works in a shop, and that his very clothes were acquired on credit from that shop. He admits to thimble- rigging and stealing from his mother. Not only has he pretended to be an “Honourable,” but he once cheated a hotel-keeper by pretending to be Lord Hastings. The narrator

“involuntarily recoiled from too near contact with an avowed blackguard, imposter, and cheat” (145). In New Amazonia, then, it is not the honesty of the rationally dressed heroine that is underscored, but the dishonesty of her foil character who refuses to dress rationally.

82 Insanity may seem a harsh diagnosis for a person who chooses unique dress, but in Men, Women, and Progress, Nelly Silverton cites as her reason for eschewing the divided skirt her fear of being taken for a lunatic (84). 160

Other New Woman novels similarly highlight the integrity of their rationally dressed heroines, whether or not this integrity is central to the novel‟s plot. In Mrs.

Hungerford‟s A Point of Conscience (1895), Carry Desmond, who wears breeches while hunting because the rustle of her petticoats tends to alert the game to her presence, is described as “terribly direct” (259), and having “honest” eyes (132). Sarah Grand‟s eponymous Babs the Impossible (1900), who wears knickerbockers under a short walking dress, has many faults, but “She‟ll tell the truth, at all events,” says her brother (202).

When her fiancé Cadenhouse sees her in what appears to be a compromising position and

Babs informs him he is mistaken about its meaning, he immediately believes her, saying,

“you have always been truthful. I trust you implicitly” (320). Far from being an actress, she is revolted when her singing teacher suggests she take to the stage.

In contrast to The Wheels of Chance, Scylla or Charydis?, The Career of

Candida, and New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future, novels whose aims are not feminist which contain New Woman characters often underscore the connection between the wearer of rational dress and the actress. For example Eyre Hussey‟s On Account of

Sarah (1900) contains three major New Woman characters, all of whom demonstrate their allegiance to the cause by wearing their hair short. But Mrs. Jaques, the member of the trio who wears divided skirts, turns out to be both to be lying about her identity and a literal stage actress. Her real name is Bella Johnson, and she is only posing as a New 161

Woman; in reality she finds her rationals “Hideous . . . Could anything be devised more unbecoming to the form divine? . . . Well, anyone can bunch herself up in these” (285).

In Tivoli‟s Une Culotte; or, a New Woman: An Impossible Story of Modern

Oxford (1894), two Girton graduates Helen Murray and Carrie Elliot decide to dress as men and obtain admittance into the fictional St. Chad‟s College, Oxford, 83 in order to better study the character of men after Helen catches her fiancé in a compromising position and is forced to break off their engagement. The two women obtain their information about male costume from an actress, the sister of Helen‟s maid. Susy

Gainsborough puts Helen and Carrie in touch with the woman who makes “kicksies” for actresses because “You don‟t suppose I could go with his lordship to be measured at

Poole‟s!” (52). Susy, like the Restoration actresses noted by Elizabeth Howe (56), makes no pretense that she wears knickerbockers for any other reason than to titillate her male audience. When Carrie naively asks what “kicksies” are, Susy explains, “They are what‟ll fetch the boys when I‟ve got ‟em on!” (51). She tells Helen and Carrie that far from attempting appear masculine when she portrays a boy, “I know I don‟t look a bit like a boy, and I don‟t try—none of us do!” (52). Susy‟s kicksies, which she designs based on “an idea what‟ll take with the public” are the key to her fame; “her audacious costumes had been the principal reason of her notoriety” (52). Nor does Susy limit the use of her sexual attractions to the stage; the girls naively wonder how she can afford diamonds and a brougham on £25 a week. Thus when Helen Murray, the New Woman of the title, dons her knickerbockers, Tivoli makes a clear connection between her status as a New Woman and the idea of the actress. Helen claims a desire to better understand

83 There is a St. Chad‟s College, but it is part of the University of Durham, not Oxford, and was founded in 1904, ten years after the publication of Une Culotte. 162 the male psyche, but what she really wants, and what she accomplishes in the end, is to become Maurice‟s wife.

In Robert Cromie‟s 1895 The Crack of Doom, a science fiction story about a secret society whose goal is to blow up the world, the female members of the society wear knickerbockers. On comparing two of these women, the hero, Arthur Marcel, says,

“what seemed to me in the one a natural eccentricity, seemed in the other an unnatural affectation” (26). It is Natalie Brande, the sister of the head of the society, for whom,

“There remained an air of unassumed sincerity about herself and all her actions, including even her dress, which absolutely excluded her from hostile criticism” (26). At first glance this might seem in harmony with the sincerity that characterizes other fictional wearers of rational dress. However, in the end of the story, the reader learns that

Natalie‟s brother Herbert has been mentally controlling Natalie. The two had long been able to communicate telepathically, but at the end of the novel, Natalie confesses, “My brother‟s brain so far overmatched my own that it first absorbed and finally destroyed my mental vitality. Thus I am . . . bound to perish” (205). Therefore, although Natalie survives the explosion meant to destroy the earth, her brother does not, and she dies a few hours later from lack of his influence. Natalie tells Marcel, “I was mesmerized. I have been so for two years. But for that I would have been happy in your love—for I was a woman before this hideous influence benumbed me” (206). Thus the knickerbockers appeared natural on her and unnatural on other women because her mind had been taken over by her brother, rendering her something other than a woman.

Oddly, this is the plot of a fourth book, Frank Kinsella‟s The Degeneration of

Dorothy (1899), in which Dolly Castlemaine comes under the influence of a man after a 163 blood transfusion, and although the her own personality is restored after a second transfusion, she dies without the influence of her original blood donor Señor Manuel De

Castro. However, in the Degeneration of Dorothy, it is Dolly‟s sister Cythera who wears rational dress. Cythera‟s father attributes her “scientific” personality to his own influence at the time of her conception, an example of the “prenatal conditions, which undoubtedly influence us all” (20). Such stories demonstrate a fear that the wearing of trousers signified the unnatural “unsexing” of women.

The wearer of rational dress, in spite of her numerous appearances in Punch cartoons and the like, was actually a rare occurrence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Women who chose to wear it risked association with actresses and, therefore, with prostitutes. A New Woman who wore bifurcated garments might be accused of doing the very thing Helen Murray does in Une Culotte, pretending to be a man in order to get her man. Therefore, when depicting this particular garment, New

Woman novelists who supported the idea of rational dress had first to “rewrite” the language of dress by depicting women who wore bifurcated garments as particularly honest, and often the only sincere person in a sea of actors. In this way, they might exchange the previous associations of women in pants with actresses and prostitutes, and revise it so that rational dress might be linked with the notion of honesty and integrity.

Jessie Milton is “real,” according to a review in The Literary World (“Cycling” 374), and 164

The Academy called her the personification of “Beauty” (424). Also in The Academy,

George Saintsbury describes Honor Lisle as an “A1 heaven pigeon-girl” (291-92).84

According to a review of The Career of Candida in The Speaker, the book is “packed full of feminine charm and tenderness,” while Candida herself “neither despises men nor seeks to attract them with petty wiles” (24). Thus to at least some extent, these authors were successful.

However, the acceptance of trousers on women required a larger social change.

Women‟s reluctance to wear bifurcated garments remained the case well into the twentieth century. The popularity of trousers for women increased somewhat in the

1930s when they were worn on the screen by actresses such as Ginger Rogers, Marlene

Dietrich, and Katharine Hepburn. At this time, it was not that trousers came less often to be associated with actresses but that actresses were less often associated with prostitutes.

The actresses in silent films tended to portray angels or whores; they were Mary Pickford or Theda Bara. However, with talkies came characters with whom women could identify, and whose clothing they wished to copy, as witnessed by such magazines as Film

Fashionland and Film Fare, both of which sold dresses and patterns to British women who wished to copy the stars (Wilson & Taylor 99-100). Thus the association between actresses and trousers eventually contributed to their acceptance.

84 This is slang for a good person; it derives from a Pidgin English description of the Bishop of Hong Kong as „A-one-heaven-pigeon-man.‟ 165

Conclusion

We have seen how New Woman novelists incorporated depictions of dress in their fiction in order to underscore characterizations of their heroines and of their struggles in their personal lives and in the larger world. Such depictions also served to highlight issues which were important to women in as their roles were in a state of flux, issues such as maturity, sex, maternity—that is both their roles as mothers (in particular, as expectant mothers) and their relationships to their own mothers, marriage, education, mobility, the public versus the private spheres, and physical and political freedom. Such references to dress can also aid the contemporary scholar in understanding the New

Woman novel. This is particularly the case given that the position of women in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain allowed her few acceptable means for self expression. The design and construction of dress was considered an appropriate creative outlet for women of all classes. Some of the sartorial choices I have discussed turned heads because they were radical, but for the most part, deciding what to wear was within the realm of acceptable behavior. (The exception to this, of course, was choosing to wear pants, a decision at which society, and men in particular, balked.) Thus a woman‟s dress provided a space for resistance but through a means of expression that was traditionally considered appropriate to women.

Depictions of Aesthetic dress in the New Woman novels serve to indicate that the heroine is not yet completely mature as a woman. Aesthetic dress indicates immaturity in women due in part to the fact that it disguised secondary sexual traits, making its wearer appear younger, and even, in the case of Anne Brown, somewhat androgynous. In addition, Aesthetic dress came into being through the efforts of the Pre-Raphaelite 166

Brotherhood, whose members dressed their models and family members in such

Aesthetic gowns. Thus in literature, Aesthetic dress often indicates a woman‟s position as a “model” for the men in her life, painted into certain roles just as she might be painted into a scene. Although such New Women might indicate a desire to escape from these tableaux vivantes, their Aesthetic dress indicates their inability to do so. Thus, although wearers of Aesthetic gowns in these novels may well be New Women, they are not completely mature examples of New Woman characters.

Some Aesthetically dressed heroines behave as New Women only to eventually choose the more traditional role of wife, as is the case for Anne Brown in Vernon Lee‟s

Miss Brown. At times, Aesthetically dressed characters may be compared to other characters who are more liberated, as Evadne Colquhoun is compared to Angelica Kilroy in Sarah Grand‟s The Heavenly Twins. In other examples, a heroine may change her garmenture, denoting a maturation in her ideas, as Marcella Boyce does in Mary Augusta

Ward‟s Marcella. In fact, Ward wrote a sequel to Marcella Sir George Tressady (1895), which takes place ten years after Marcella ends. In that novel, Marcella has developed, and uses her influence to help her husband‟s causes in parliament.

Finally, authors might have depicted New Women heroines in gowns that emphasize their lack of maturity in order to demonstrate how far women had still to go.

Including such dress might indicate the forces against which New Women had to contend, including ingrained notions of a woman‟s role in her family and in society, as well as the psychological damage she might suffer as the result of a bad marriage. For

Anne Brown, it is the notion of the woman‟s role as ministering angel to a Byronic hero which motivates her to sacrifice her potential on the altar of marriage to a man she neither 167 loves nor respects, who has been and who will almost certainly continue to be unfaithful to her. Anne has the talent and desire to “minister” to many others: she has already demonstrated this capacity in her teaching at the Girls Club and her attempts to educate herself. However, Hamlin will almost certainly prevent her from pursuing this vocation, given his negative reaction to her request to help the poor cottagers living on his property.

In addition to her notion of her role as a woman, Anne‟s decision to marry Hamlin is certainly affected by the fact that he has been financially responsible for her upkeep. It is he who “discovered” her when she was a nursemaid in Italy, sent her to school to be educated, and brought her to London for her social education, where he financed her food, lodging, and yes, clothing. Anne feels indebted to Hamlin for these things, emphasizing the ways in which a man‟s superior ability to earn or inherit money might harm the cause of the woman‟s movement in general. By preventing Anne from helping others, Hamlin prevents the possible liberation of many women. Thus Anne‟s childlike clothing also demonstrates her inability to become a financially independent adult.

In The Heavenly Twins, Evadne Colquhoun‟s intellectual and emotional growth are stunted by a bad marriage. However, even after escaping this marriage, she purposefully remains an emotional child, refusing to take part in the women‟s movement or even to think about it, as her friends believe she should. Her friend Angelica, at least, is able to chair women‟s meetings and to work with “the victims of holy matrimony,” as we discover in another novel by Grand, The Beth Book (419). In this novel, we learn that

Evadne continues to require protection from the knowledge of the ways in which women are abused. When Angelica learns how Beth‟s husband Dan Maclure has been treating her, she exclaims, “Oh, how sickening it all is! Sometimes I envy Evadne in that she is 168 able to refuse to know” (419). However, the titular Beth Maclure is able to overcome her past, presumably because she spent less time in her abusive marriage. Beth eventually assumes the role her friends once hoped Evadne would play, as a powerful speaker and advocate for women‟s rights. Unlike Evadne, Beth does not dress Aesthetically. Instead, she, like Angelica, once dressed as a boy. However, she does wonder, “Is purification always possible? Can evil ever be cast out, once it has taken root in the mind?” (454).

Grand‟s answer, demonstrated through Evadne‟s Aesthetic dress, is no.

As I demonstrated in the first chapter, Marcella becomes more mature as a woman after her stint as a nurse, when she adopts a nurse‟s uniform. After injury forces her to return to the London “season,” she alters her dress somewhat, but it retains some elements of the Aesthetic style, elements Betty MacDonald, in altering her gowns, refuses to touch. It is true that, in Sir George Tressady, Marcella learns to aid her husband‟s cause. However, When Marcella delivers a political speech to a working class audience, instead of being persuaded to support her husband and his reform bill, the crowd winds up throwing stones at her. Marcella is eventually successful, converting Sir

George Tressady to her way of thinking so that he votes in favor of her husband‟s bill.

However, she does so through her own sex appeal. Although she achieves the desired political result, she is ashamed of the way in which she manages it. Her dress may have altered since her days at Mellor, but not entirely, and neither has she learned to make a difference politically in a more dignified manner. However, the events Ward depicts may be as much a criticism of society as it is of Marcella‟s character. Marcella has been trained to influence others is through her “feminine wiles,” and these are the very things 169 anti-suffragists claimed women should use in order to influence politics through their husbands‟ votes.

Thus, Aesthetic dress sometimes indicated a woman who attempts to be liberated, but is ultimately unsuccessful due to her immaturity. However, this was not necessarily a criticism of female character on the part of New Woman novelists. Instead, it may have served to underscore the difficulties would-be New Women faced, both internal (or internalized) and external. Many of these novels which may not seem terribly optimistic but their work is not to gloss over major societal dilemmas by providing easy answers.

Instead, they demonstrate how much of the force against which New Women strove was personal and internal.

The tea gown, I would argue, is the sartorial descendent of Aesthetic dress, one which was much more socially acceptable and popular, but only in certain situations. As

I have argued, the tea gown indicated a desire for intimacy on the part of its wearer.

Victorian and Edwardian authors dressed New Women characters in tea gowns in order to demonstrate new ways in which a woman might experience intimacy, with their husbands, other women, children, and creative production. Novels whose heroines wear tea gowns indicate a greater degree of independence than do novels whose heroines dress

Aesthetically, but they still end up making what Ardis calls (borrowing the phrase from

George Gissing‟s The Odd Women) a “retreat with honor” (156). Their authors seem to demonstrate a societal notion that a woman‟s love may extend in one direction only, and should she attempt another kind of love, even if that love is maternal, she will be punished for it. New woman heroines wear their tea gowns “with a difference” when their authors attempt to demonstrate society‟s constraints on their natural affections. In 170 addition, we see the “mysteriousness” of the tea gown in the ambiguity of the endings of the novels.

In Netta Syrett‟s The Day‟s Journey, the put-upon wife Cecily Kingslake loses her husband‟s affections while she is in a deep depression after the loss of their child.

When she emerges from that depression, she realizes he has been unfaithful and tries to win him back, but eventually gives up. Instead, she pursues a literary career in which her success eventually exceeds that of her writer husband, who merely addresses topics he knows will be popular. After two years, Robert returns to his wife and begs her forgiveness, which she extends. However, her love has become something different, a maternal rather than a romantic love. The ending of The Day‟s Journey is ambiguous concerning the future of Cecily‟s writing career. The Atheneum claimed the book “ends sadly” (Atheneum 201), and other reviewers posed the question as to whether or not

Cecily or Robert would write again (New 629); the reviewer for Book Review Digest thinks not (342). However, given her eagerness to drop her life in Rome and rush back to her repentant husband, I would project that Cecily would not take up her literary career again, if only to assuage any jealousy on Robert‟s part that his wife is the better writer of the two. Thus Cecily can‟t have both her literal child and her husband (or at least, her grief for that child and her husband). Later, it seems at the very least unlikely that she can have both her husband and writing career, her creative product-as-child discussed at the end of my second chapter.

In John Strange Winter‟s A Blameless Woman, Margaret North is the “Blameless

Woman” of the title, and her relationship with a man who is not her husband is not her fault. She wears a tea gown when she returns to her family, indicating that she is married 171 to Dolgouroff in her heart. However, when she marries Maxwell Stewart, she thrusts herself into her marriage and new family heart and soul. After the births of her own two children, Margaret persuades Maxwell to adopt Effie, one of his poor relations. Margaret does so against the advice of her in-laws. It is because she has adopted Effie that her marriage ends, and she loses all of her children. As was the case with The Day‟s

Journey, the ending of the novel is ambiguous. Chapter L finds Margaret miserably alone, living for the brief moments when she spies her children on their daily drive. She hopes to be proven innocent in the divorce case, but believes it is unlikely, and even if

Stewart is denied his divorce, Margaret knows she can never go back to him. Yet, when

Dolgouroff arrives, explains his wife is dead and he is free to marry Margaret, she declines his proposal in hopes of being able to see her children again. When he proposes,

a strange, sickening, intense revulsion of feeling overtook her, a revulsion

of feeling which brought her senses down with a rush from the Paradise

which Dolgouroff had spread out before her, a revulsion which showed

with agonising clearness that the dark way which she must tread if she

rejected his proposals was the only way which could utterly satisfy her

heart. (307)

Margaret believes she must choose between love and the unlikely chance that she may be reunited with her children, and she chooses her children. Ardis wonders,

Will [Margaret] continue to think she must deny her attraction to

Dolgouroff for the sake of her children? Will she continue to believe, in

other words, that she can be a good mother only if she denies her sexual 172

desire for a man who is not her husband? That these questions remain

unanswered in A Blameless Woman is, I think, significant. (81)

I would suggest that the fact that the chapter is titled “Desolation,” implies that Margaret does not find happiness, can only extend her love in one direction, and that is toward

Madeline and Ethel, the children she has rather than the possibility future children with which Dolgouroff attempts to seduce her. Margaret even forgives Effie,85 the woman who has ruined her life, in hopes that she will be good to her other daughters.

However, Ardis‟ analysis of the A Blameless Woman is based on an 1894 edition.

In the following year, Winter added a fifty-first chapter, possibly in order to assuage an unhappy readership. Scholars refer to this added chapter as a “sentimental” ending (as if the previous ending wasn‟t sentimental!), and some, such as Molly Youngkin, suggest the novel would have made a better feminist statement had she stuck to the original ending

(170). True, in the tacked-on chapter, Margaret finally gets her Prince, but she loses

Madeline and Ethel in the process. Thus Winter, like Syrett, still presents us with an either/or equation: Margaret may have romantic love or maternal love, but not both.

We see the same in the other “tea gown” novels. Phoebe Elles of Violet Hunt‟s

The Human Interest gets a proposal from Edmund Rivers, a thing her romantic rival

Egidia, a writer of books, cannot manage although she certainly understands his character better. Nevill France, the tea gown wearer in Hunt‟s A Hard Woman, hangs around the studio of the man she loves for years, kowtowing to his wife and acting as his model without pay. For years, she dreams of becoming an actress but does little to realize this dream. It is only after she severs ties with Ferdinand Munday that she can begin her

85 Significantly, Effie‟s betrayal of Margaret is also the result of choosing between different kinds of love, filial love for her adoptive mother or romantic love for her fiancé Zelenberg. 173 creative production, becoming a talented actress. In Mary Cholmondeley‟s Red Pottage

(1899), Hester Gresley, the wearer of tea gowns and writer of books, is a spinster. Her friend Rachel West gets the romantic intrigue, and is the subject of Hester‟s first book, but she doesn‟t write one.

As Aesthetic dress sometimes evolved into the tea gown, so the tailor-made girl, in some ways, functions as the daughter of the wearer of tea gowns. Certainly this is the case in Beatrice Whitby‟s The Awakening of Mary Fenwick and Mary Fenwick‟s

Daughter, in which Mary wears tea gowns while her daughter Bab favors tailor-mades.

However, the tailor-made gown in the New Woman novel, as I have argued, demonstrates a young woman‟s desire for solidarity with and guidance from her own generation rather than her mother‟s. The literary tailor-made girl‟s feelings about her own mother remain ambivalent. Their authors are similarly ambivalent about the fates of their New Woman heroines. At the end of the traditional romance plot, the heroine marries and has children. However, given that the tailor-made girl looked to other young ladies for her support and example, how was she to have any effect on the coming generation? How were her personal struggles to make any difference on the larger world?

In the same vein as Winter‟s A Blameless Woman, George Moore rewrote Sister

Theresa, supplying a different ending in which Evelyn eventually leaves the convent.

This multiplicity of endings underscores the same problem of the tea gown novel, which makes sense given that Evelyn‟s tea gowns appear in both Evelyn Innes and Sister

Theresa. Both texts demonstrate the conflict between Evelyn‟s desires, at first between filial love and duty toward her father and mother, whom she imagines as a ghost who 174 continues to counsel her, and her strong physical attraction to Sir Owen Asher, and later to between her love for Asher and physical attraction to men generally and her love for and desire to serve God by becoming a nun. The ambiguous or multiple endings of A

Blameless Woman and Sister Theresa also serve to indicate their authors‟ conflicting ideas about the future of the New Woman.

Of the four major texts discussed in chapter three, two end in marriages, but neither is traditional. In Rita‟s A Jilt‟s Journal, Paula Trent goes against the advice of her mother and her substitute mothers Lady St. Quinton and Lady Brancepeth in order to marry Adam Herivale, a man of another class. The friends with whom Paula identifies,

Claire le Creux and Lesley Heath, make bad marriages. Paula seems to learn from their example by making a different kind of marriage, but the results are unclear.

In Beatrice Whitby‟s Mary Fenwick‟s Daughter, Bab Fenwick marries Jack

Holland in a very traditional marriage, but only after giving up her tailor-made gowns and much of her personality. She has a child, but remains emotionally distant from that child, much as her mother was emotionally distant from her. This makes sense in that, as we have seen, New Woman novelists depict tea gown-wearing heroines such as Mary

Fenwick as capable of extending love in only one direction; Mary becomes so enamored with her husband that she pays little attention to her daughter until Bab is nearly killed.

Like her mother, Bab initially balks at the idea of having her wings clipped by marriage, but her accident and the subsequent two years spent lying in bed in her mother‟s room, the same room once inhabited by Mary‟s mother-in-law, help to change her mind. The experience turns her into the docile wife Jack craves throughout the text. However, Bab continues the cycle of “bad motherhood” with her own child, demonstrating little interest 175 in him. Unlike her mother, however, Bab has a son. Whitby leaves us with the question of what kinds of mothers such former tailor-made girls will become, and what effect they will have upon the men of the next generation. With her original “pluck” nearly effaced by her accident and slow recovery in her mother‟s room, Bab has little chance of affecting her world for the better, even through the traditional means of motherhood.

Ella Hepworth Dixon presents a similarly bleak view of the future in The Story of a Modern Woman. Her tailor-made girl dies trapped in the room her mother has made for her, the room that implies a romance absent from Alison Ives‟s life. In fact, it is the pursuit of this romance, the time spent with the man she hopes to marry, which kills

Alison when she contracts the disease of Dunlop Strange‟s former mistress in the hospital. Of course, because Alison goes to the hospital with her friend Mary Erle in order to help her to write an article, one might also argue that her death is due to her commitment to the women of her own generation. Either way, the results, as we have seen before, are ambiguous. Alison does get Mary to make sure Evalina‟s marriage comes off before her death, Evalina whose child is born before her marriage much as

Alison is born before her time in displaying a desire for autonomy not yet granted to women. Mary does continue in Alison‟s footsteps after her death in her pact not to harm another woman, specifically in refusing to run away with Vincent Hemming in order to avoid harming his daughter. However, women “of the old regime” like Alison‟s mother, have a much greater effect on future generations of women; after Alison‟s death, Lady

Jane continues to “bring out” two nieces. The best we can hope for the next generation,

Hepworth Dixon implies, is simply not to harm them. Other than that, the solidarity of the tailor-made girls in the absence of their mothers leaves them very much alone. 176

However, Hepworth Dixon does title the chapter in which Mary declines to elope with

Hemming “In Which Civilization Triumphs,” implying that the self-sacrificial act of

Mary for a little girl she has never met is proof of some progress in the world.

For the average woman, to wear pants in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain was a more radical act than any of the other three sartorial choices discussed. To do so was to evoke the clothing by which actresses and prostitutes were known. However, it was also to appropriate the clothing which allowed men so much more literal and metaphorical freedom than women enjoyed. In order to make this clear,

New Woman novelists who dressed their characters in bifurcated garments had to rewrite the language of dress in order to indicate a liberated woman instead of an actress. To do so, New Woman novelists who supported a woman‟s right to wear trousers emphasized the integrity of their rationally dressed characters, particularly in comparison to other characters who are literally or figuratively actors.

In the four major texts I discussed in the fourth chapter, it is the male characters who are educated as the rationally dressed women remain more or less static throughout the texts. For example, in H. G. Wells‟ The Wheels of Chance, Hoopdriver is the character who learns to ride a bicycle, to behave properly around a young lady, and just how woefully uneducated he is. He doesn‟t succeed in remaining a “bloomin‟ duke” for the duration of his holiday, and he returns to the drapers‟ shop when his holiday ends.

Similarly, Bechamel fails to seduce Jessie and is fortunate to escape the debacle without being discovered. Jessie, however, obtains more or less what she wanted from the beginning, the love and respect of her stepmother and freedom from restraints on her reading and writing. Plus, Mrs. Milton will marry, and thus Jessie will in future be 177 spared the dealings with her stepmother‟s entourage which so annoy her. Jessie may have behaved naively in running away with Bechamel, but she escapes with her reputation unscathed and retains the opportunity to succeed as a journalist in future.

Meanwhile, she teaches Bechamel, Hoodriver, Dangle, et al. not to believe what they read in books about New Women.

Similarly, in Rhoda Broughton‟s Scylla or Charybdis?, it is Harry Clarence who must change and reevaluate his conceptions of what is means to be an honorable woman.

Honor Lisle is constant throughout the text. She begins with a particular perspective on life, and she retains that perspective through to the end. It is Harry suffers with the knowledge of his mother‟s past and whose internal conflict during his journey back to

Honor causes him to age prematurely.

In George Paston‟s The Career of Candida, Candida is curiously immune to the doings of her husband. First, she establishes herself in a career; then she abandons it to marry Adrian Sylvester. When the marriage fails two years later, she returns to her career. Now she has a son to support, but aside from that, the past two years seem like a dream or a bad novel. Aside from her son, she has no reminders that her regrettable marriage ever happened. In the end, she does return to Adrian in order to care for him, but it is he who has been taught the lesson; as a result of his debaucheries he has become paralyzed. Candida thus loses the possibility of a future romantic life when she declines his offer to slap her in public so that she will have grounds for a divorce. However, she still has her son. She may sacrifice her romantic life to Sylvester, but he no longer has any power of her in his invalid state. Most importantly, she retains the titular career, symbolized by her rational gym suit, the largest portion of her identity. 178

While it is true that Candida gives up her opportunity for romantic happiness by determining to care for the paralyzed Sylvester, we must remember that in addition to her rational gymnastics costume, Candida also wears a tea gown. As we have seen in other

“tea gown” novels, Paston emphasizes the way in which a woman‟s love may extend in one direction. Candida misses out on love, and she believes that once she sends her son to school, he will lose his love his as well.86 However, her career remains the one constant in the story.

In Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett‟s New Amazonia, it is Augustus Fitz-Musicus who learns to behave himself properly in order to avoid being considered insane and subsequently euthanized by the New Amazonians. The narrator, a Victorian New

Woman, has little difficulty in adopting the lifestyle, along with the dress, of the New

Amazonians. Because this is a utopian novel, the narrator is thrust back into her previous life in Victorian England, in which she feels repressed and unable to live up to her full potential because she is a woman. However, it is Fitz-Musicus who learns to be less arrogant in his dealings with women and to tell the truth over the course of his stay in

New Amazonia.

In addition to their portrayal of the need for men to be educated (by women), New

Woman novels which include examples of rationally dressed women underscore the rationality of the bifurcated garment by contrasting rationally dressed women with men whose clothing is at best outlandish and tasteless, and at worst, inappropriate for the task at hand. This is the case in three of the four major texts I discussed in Chapter 4. In The

86 Candida laments, “She still had Roley, it was true, but for long? In a few years‟ time he would go to school, and she knew that the first lesson a British boy learns at school, and the only one he learns thoroughly, is to despise his womenkind” (143). Paston was not alone in expressing this opinion. In Arabella Kenealy‟s The Irrestistable Mrs. Ferrers, Lady Monica Lygon opines, “a boy ceases to be his mother‟s when he goes to school” (61). 179

Wheels of Chance, Hoopdriver and Phipps both wear “wonderful” chequered stockings which serve only to draw attention to themselves as dandies, while Jessie Milton‟s costume of grey shows less dust and wear from her journey, and is practical for dismounting from her bicycle, a task with which Hoopdriver and Phipps both struggle.

Phipps wears a golf-suit: “the grotesque raiment for which the Cockney discovery of the game of golf seem indirectly blamable” (289). In Scylla or Charybdis?, Harry Clarence is “much to finely dressed” to aid Mrs. Bevis and Honor with the harvest (44), and “he is profoundly chagrined at being prevented by the unsuitability of his dress from following”

Honor when the women go shrimping (61); instead, he must watch the rationally dressed women at their work. Finally, in New Amazonia, Fitz-Musicus‟ stubborn adherence to his “tweed suit of the most alarmingly demonstrative pattern and colour” nearly gets him killed (10). He insists upon wearing this garment even after he has torn holes in the knees of his pants while climbing down from an apple tree, an activity for which he is dressed inappropriately.

Thus depictions of literary New Women‟s sartorial choices contributed not only to their individual characterizations as examples of New Women, but to illustrations of the larger world in which they lived. Aesthetic dress, which indicates a desire for liberation but also a kind of stunted intellectual and emotional growth, serves to demonstrate the stultifying effect of traditional marriage (or in the case of Ward‟s

Marcella and Lee‟s Anne Brown, the prospect of traditional marriage) on the woman who thinks and, in some cases, acts. The tea gown serves to indicate a woman‟s desire for intimacy, but in the Victorian world of social correctness, many kinds of intimacy are taboo. I have asserted that depictions of the tea gown in New Woman novels 180 demonstrate a Victorian notion that a woman‟s love can extend only in one direction.

However, a woman‟s creative production (writing, painting, acting, etc.) functions as an act comparable to having a child. Thus Cecily Kingslake must choose between her successful literary career and her unfaithful husband (She picks Robert.) and, Margaret

Stewart must choose between the love of her life and her children, and Phoebe Elles must choose between her love of Edmund Rivers and her desire for female friendship with a

New Woman novelist Egidia. The tailor-made gown characterizes its young wearer as desiring solidarity with women of her own generation rather than that of her mother. In terms of Victorian society, it depicts the New Woman‟s solitary nature, her lack of appropriate examples to follow, and the trouble she can get into when she does attempt to reconcile her “modern” ideals with those of the previous generation. To depict a woman as rationally dressed, by far the most radical sartorial option of the four I have discussed, was to risk that the character and, by extension, the novel as a whole would be dismissed out of hand, so strong was the association between women in pants and actresses. Thus,

New Woman novelists attempted to rewrite the language of dress, characterizing their rationally dressed protagonists as particularly honest and straight-forward.

Depictions of dress in the New Woman novel, as I have shown, serve not only to characterize the new and contentious figure of the New Woman, but also to identify some the societal pressures from whose effects she suffered. Dress, like the writing of fiction, served as a space for resistance in a world in which more direct means of self-expression were taboo for women. Both in fiction and in life, it supplied a voice for the voiceless. In an environment in which they often were not heard, the language of dress gave women a voice. 181

I hope this work will serve as impetus for further study on the topic. In particular,

I would like to see actual analysis of the depictions of these gowns in fashion magazines in light of their relationship to New Woman fiction. Future scholarship might also address the extent to which depictions of fashion in the New Woman novel might have actually influenced the course of fashion and the sartorial choices of “real” New Women.

182

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