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It was the knight in shining armour who effectively invented the corset. That strange garment which would eventually restrain the fair maiden he was supposed to liberate. To prevent the metal plates chaffing the skin an padded undergarment was invented which allowed the arms and legs to move freely, but built up the body in an exagerated form in order to protect it from thrusts from swords and lances.
Gradually as the danger of hand to hand combat faded the suits of armour was hung on walls as a display but the corset was adopted by the courts and used by royalty to emphasize their power and majesty. It was also used to cover up weakness and disease. Henry V111 who was immortalised by Holbein - skillfully corsetted and blazened in jewels, lived in fear of his only legitimate son dying early. The future Edward V1 was weak and suffered from consumption. In every portrait of him the poor little boy becomes a minature copy of his splendid father, the frail body carefully padded out by corsets, doublet and furs.
The cod-piece (an ultimate corset for men) did not entirely disappear from English society until the middle of the seventeenth century. Historians wrote disapprovingly of the insecure James 1 & V1 of Scotland whose hands 'fluttered' around his cod-piece during audiences with diplomats. The thirteenth and fourteenth century recognised the importance of fashion in denoting rank. No commoner was allowed to wear a corset or cloth dyed with colours that only royal society could wear ie purple and red.
The corset has never lost its association with power and riches. Even today the ultimate corset is usually red and decorated with highly coloured ribbons. See Dollie Parton in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
Increasingly, however, by the end of the Civil Wars in England the corset began to die out of use among men and become the preserve of women.
After the restrictions of the seventeenth Century stomacher and farthingales there was a brief respite in the early 19th century with the advent of the Empire line dress. This called for a Wonderbra type structure but the waist was not emphasized. The flowing lines of this dress was a reflection of the disorder of the day. Europe was in the grip of the Napoleonic wars and England was suffering from civil unrest and a dissolute monarchy. The Prince Regent seemed to 'let it all hang out'.
By the 1830s, however, the British Empire established and social order seemed to be restored with the coronation of the young Queen Victoria. The rise of the middle classes meant more people were striving to copy the upper class society. For the first time we see the Victorian ideal of a Husband supporting Wife and Children. The wife is the angel of the hearth (ie kitchen) the heart of the family. This angel will not move far from her domestic sphere. Any Victorian Female, such as Dickens' Little Emily, who did so was portrayed in art and illustration as 'disordered' : robes torn asunder left any amount of trailing cloth (which failed nevertheless to cover up breasts or dishevelled hair) flailing around them. The carefully structured dress and morals of the day were shattered by the woman's reckless movement.
Florence Nightingale appalled by the fate which waited most middle class girls wrote in Cassandra 'One would think we had no heads or hearts, by the total indifference of the public towards them. Our bodies are the only things of any consequence.' And the body was constrained by social restrictions and dress.
Charlotte Bronte cleverly concealed this with her apparent re-telling of Cinderella story; Jane Eyre. This heroine fled from a sexually immoral union with the fascinating but manipulative Mr Rochester. Despite her innocence she is nevertheless nearly killed by way of punishment. When she is found starving and semi clothed on the doorstep of a Parsonage she finds apparent sanctuary. Having fled from immorality her reward is awakening to order and neatness.
Her neatly pressed and stain free clothes are placed on a chair. As a child when reading this I found this very irritating, but Charlotte Bronte's care with Jane Eyre's wardrobe points to her spiritual danger. Mr Rochester tries to shower her with silks and pearls - none of which Jane is comfortable in or with and she abandons them on her flight from Thornfield Hall. Charlotte Bronte makes it clear that Mr Rochester is seeking to constrain his love by forcing her to wear clothes which please him. Jane becomes an object of his desire and therefore, in her eyes, unnatural.
So far this is no more than the standard stuff so beloved of the mid 19th Century -innocent girl tempted astray by wicked seducer. This moral was churned out by any number of Victorian writers, for example, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. What lifts Jane Eyre out of the realm of the ordinary into the extra-ordinary is that Jane rejects the mores of her society. On returning to health she finds the constrictions offered by St John and social convention absolutely suffocating. Like Margaret in Seven Little Australians she had voluntarily adopted restrictions governing her behaviour in order to win social approval. However, her new life, she tells us, is limited and limiting.
The more Jane tries to force herself to fit into its strictures the greater is her distress. Finally the effort is too much. Her position becomes life threatening. "If I were to marry you," she tells the horrible and uptight St John, who has proposed honourable marriage, "You would kill me, you are killing me now." She is literally unable to breathe in his presence.
Jane makes an astounding decision. One which is unique - I think - among Victorian heroines. She decides to return to Mr Rochester and live with him whether or not he is still married. (This is the opposite to Hardy's Tess D'Urberville who returns to her seducer out of despair).
How is Jane able to make such a choice?
The first and primary reason is she is now an independent woman of means. In true fairy tale fashion a distant relative left her a legacy of £20,000 (roughly equivalent to winning the National Lottery). Her financial independence releases her at a stroke from the restrictions facing most women of her time.
Secondly, Mr Rochester himself has been disabled. He loses his sight and an arm in the fire which killed (fortunately for the plot) his first wife. The characteristic vigour and energy which characterised him at Thornfield is now pent up. When Jane sees him again for the first time he reminds her of a caged eagle. Such a husband cannot subdue his wife. They meet as equals. Later, Jane tells us, some of his sight is restored and their marriage is portrayed as a quiet study of domestic bliss with neither partner seeking to control the other.
Most women either in fiction or in fact are not so lucky. By the late 19th Century - as food productivity increased - it was no longer a mark of wealth to be fat or 'plump'. The rollicking 18th century raunchy cartoons of huge and sexually active women bursting out of their stays became an embarassment. Women had to be 'angelic' or 'dove' like, fragile looking and never allowed to burst out of anything. Their only sphere was the domestic one where they were severely frowned upon if they could not manage servants or know how to cook chops. See Dickens' David Copperfield who first marries the winning but incompetent child-wife Dora, before marrying the Angelic Agnes who does nothing but drift through the entire novel polishing her halo. C
onsumptives were seen by some teenage girls to have all the advantages of thinness, flushed cheeks and bright eyes, rather as some heroin addicts are admired today. And, as today women will go to great lengths to achieve this ideal.
Some women authors did recognise the dangers. In Seven Little Australians, the adolescent Margaret nearly kills herself by starving and lacing into ever tighter corsets (made worse by her stepmother's careless compliment on her attractive slimness). Not until she faints while playing the piano is the damage discovered. The fashionable eighteen inch waist had caused breathlessness and is hinted to be life threatening. As her Doctor Father tells her, Margaret had a lucky escape
On the whole these warnings were as fruitless then as they are now. In 1986 The Barbican (in London) staged an exhibition of dresses from the 16th to the 19th century. Despite their equisite beauty and needlework some of these gowns can only have been subtle instruments of torture. They required a seventeen to eighteen inch waistline at the maximum. The requisite corsets standing alongside were constructed of iron. The body was literally crushed into it. This in turn compressed the kidneys, liver and lungs. The discovery of whale bone which did 'give' a little only heightened the demand for corsets and the fashions which depended on them.
In Europe French writers were using the fashion of the day as a way to indicate women's desires. Madame Bovary's fall is in part caused by her inability to forget the High Society Ball she attended. There she won a universal admiration which she is unable to forget on her return to a mundane lifestyle. Ultimately, Mme Bovary pays a terrible price for her desire to move out of the dosmetic sphere. Bound and corsetted in dresses which render her useless in the home she attracts the lovers who at first pay for her luxuries and then abandon her.
In 1871 Emile Zola published his novel 'The Kill' which paints an intimate study of a society woman's claustrophobic life. Nineteen year old Renee is married off to a wealthy business man in his forties. Boredom leads her to have an incestuous affair with her young stepson the vicious Maxime. Zola makes the erotic allure of women's clothing very clear. The young Maxime is allowed unlimited access to his stepmother's rooms. There he has very private delights indeed.
The ladies "Were ensconsed like a flight of white Lesbian doves. Maxime, whom they endured and loved for his girlish air, was the only man admitted into the circle. He there tasted delights divine; he glided along the sofas like a suppler adder; he was discovered under a skirt, behind a bodice, between two dresses, where he made himself quite small and kept very quiet, inhaling the warm fragrances of his neighbours..."
Renee's sole purpose, as far as her husband Saccard is concerned, is to reflect his own glory as a rich man. In this she excels. Zola describes her triumph in terms of her costume and produces one of the best descriptions of any dress in the history of the novel. I am quoting it in full.
"She was really divine. Upon a tulle skirt, garnished behind with a flow of flounces, she wore a bodice of pale-green statin, bordered with English lace, caught up and fastened with large bunches of biolets; a single flounce adorned the front of the skirt and bunches of violets held together by garlands of ivy, fastened a light muslin draper. Her head and bust appeared adorably gracious above these petticoats of regal fulness and richness overloaded. Her neck was uncovered down to the points of her breasts, her armes were bare and had clusters of violets at her shoulders: she seemed to emerge quite naked from her case of tulle and satin, similarly to one of those nymphs whose busts issue from the sacred oaks. Her white neck and shoulders, her supple body, seemed so happy already in their semi freedom, that the eye expected every moment to see the bodice and skirts glide down, like the dress of a bather enraptured with her flesh"
Succard, "made little of it. But his grinning features betrayed a lively satisfaction' he has the satisfaction of seeing two guests 'listening with evident respect to the sound of such figures as fifteen and fifty thousand francs."
Eventually Succard discovers his wife's affair with his son. But by this time he has already cheated his wife out of her inheritance and can afford to ignore her. Father and son continue to work together. The devasted Renee finds herself bankrupt and alone. She looks into the mirror and sees herself naked. "How old she looked! She inclined her head, and when she saw herself in her tights, in her light gauze blouse, she gazed at herself with lowered eyelashes and sudden blushes. Who had stripped her naked? What was she doing there, bare breasted, like a prostitute who uncovers herself to her stomach? She no longer knew... She was ashamed of herself, and contempt of her flesh filled her with mute anger against those who had left thus, with mere bangles of gold at her wrists and ankles to cover her skin."
Penniless she can not take advantage of her unbound state. She hates her body once it is revealed in its natural form and she dies broken and alone. The bleak last sentence sums up the novel's obsession with fashion and money. The dressmakers bill, Zola tells us, came to 'two hundred and fifty seven thousand francs'.
In Germany the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson were documenting the fairy tales of Europe. The one which shot to favour with the public of the day was, of course, Cinderella. This most beautiful and enchanting of tales seems to fulfill at every level the young girl's dream. Forgotten by her father, surrounded by dreadful sisters and an impossibly cruel step mother, Cinderella is an icon for outraged teenage girls everywhere. Anyone who has had a sister take her favourite shampoo or dress for an evening will know just how Cinderella feels. The sheer injustice of the world is impossible!
Fortunately most girls do not have to suffer the real hardships suffered by this gentle heroine. She is barefoot and in rags. In the Kitchen fire's embers Cinderella builds herself pictures and dreams of rescue. Fortune appears in the shape of the fairy godmother with that ringing promise, 'You shall go to the ball'. We are not told what the dress looks like or whether it requires a bodice or not. The only thing we know for certain is that Cinderella wears a glass slipper. The glass slipper is the ultimate feminine icon. It is beautiful, transparent, delicate and seemingly fragile.
And yet anyone who has suffered from wearing a shoe that pinches can imagine the sheer discomfort of unyielding glass. This is not footwear that can adapt to the foot's shape. It demands utter conformity from its user. Hence the sisters fail to get the shoe to fit. Indeed in some versions of the story the sisters cut the toes and heels off their bodies in order to cram into the shoe and win the Prince. Each time the Prince, oblivious, it seems to imposters, takes the sisters as his bride. Only a bird singing in the woods tells him his judgement is flawed.
'Look back, Look back, there's blood on the track.'
Only then does the Prince see the dripping wounds and reject his 'bride'.
When Cinderella flees the Palace at midnight and runs away into the night, the only thing which does not dissolve and disappear is the glass slipper. Alone of the finery it remains to reclaim its true owner. Why? If the Prince really wanted to find his bride a lock of hair would have done so?
The glass slipper is a form of restraint as restricting as the corset. Cinderella fits the shoe and she will never be barefoot or free again. Unlike Jane Eyre she is not an equal partner and this is why Jane Eyre is not a true Cinderella story. Equally disturbing is the fate of the two women who do not fit the slipper. They are maimed and outcast rather as the ruined Victorian woman is. Neither of them are accepted into society and indeed in some versions are killed after their sister's marriage.
Society is the slipper and if you do not fit there is no place for you in it.
Check out our Christmas 96 Edition...
The Corset in the 20th Century
Paul Johnson The Birth of the Modern ISBN 1-85799-015-3
Emile Zola: The Kill
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield.
Culture & Society in Britain 1850-1890 edited by J.M.Golby. ISBN 0-19-871112-3
Marquis de Sade: Justine Male fantasy of female bondage. Triumph of evil over good.
Richardson .. Clarissa. (study of money and power in the 18th century)
Gay Dayly..Pre-Raphaelites in Love ISBN 0-00-637535-9 fascinating study of the Pre-Raphaelites models and wives in Victorian England.
