Fashion and Authorship

Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century

Gerald Egan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030268978
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030268985
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Literature

Studies of fashion and literature in recent decades have focused primarily on representations of clothing and dress within literary texts. But what about the author? How did he dress? What where her shopping practices and predilections? What were his alliances with modishness, stylishness, fashion? The essays in this book explore these and other questions as they look at authors from the eighteenth century through the postmodern and digital eras, cultural producers who were also men and women of fashion: Alexander Pope, Hester Thrale, Mary Robinson, Lord Byron, William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Trudi Kanter, Angela Carter, and Martin Margiela. The essays collected here ultimately converge upon a fundamental question: what happens to our notions of timeless literature when authorship itself is implicated in the transient and the temporary, the cycles and materials of fashion? "Gerald Egan's provocative introduction to this exciting new book poses a bold question: How are authorship and literature – so often linked to ideas of transcendence – implicated in the transient trends and stuff of fashion? The thirteen chapters that follow track authorship's complex implication in the discourses and materiality of fashion and fashionable goods from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Wide-ranging in discipline and chronology, yet forensically focused and carefully argued, this book makes a striking and wonderfully original contribution to studies of authorship, celebrity and material culture."
— Dr Jennie Batchelor, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Kent, UK

© The Author(s) 2020

G. Egan (ed.)Fashion and Authorshiphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26898-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Gerald Egan¹

(1)

California State University, Long Beach, Palos Verdes Estates, CA, USA

Gerald Egan

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

It was in the early 1990s that, with great ingenuity and inventiveness and employing a wide range of approaches, literary scholars in increasing numbers began to look at connections between literature and clothing, literature and dress, literature and fashion. Why did this interest arise? Why at this particular time? A brute-force approach to the question might query the MLA database. Casting a wide net, we search, Boolean style, for scholarly publications on

literature

AND

fashion OR clothing OR dress

Conducting our search over the bibliography’s first century of records, 1880 through 1979, we get a mere 62 matches, with some decades returning no results at all. In the 1980s we see early signs of interest, as our search returns 140 hits. In subsequent decades, however, as the influence of cultural studies is felt in literature departments around the globe, things pick up exponentially. In the 1990s our matches more than double to 342. In the 2000s they more than double again to 821. At the time of this writing, scholarly interest in fashion and literature shows no signs of waning, and our MLA hits from 2010 through mid-2018 project to more than 1000 for the decade.¹

Brute force, of course, tends neither to be nuanced nor subtle; our search could omit some studies that are relevant and include some that are not. But the trend is unmistakable: since cultural studies came upon the scene in the late 1980s, exploding the traditional divide between high and low culture and opening literary scholarship up to a now-familiar array of sub-disciplines and “subcultures” (material, visual, and commodity cultures, gender, celebrity, and body studies, to name a few), literary critics have increasingly been drawn to scholarly considerations of tight-laced corsets and taffeta gowns, of everyday sewing and fancy needlework, hairstyles, jewelry, and hats. This critical engagement with the materials of fashion has resulted in major studies from scholars such as Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Erin Mackie, Jennie Batchelor, Chloe Wigston Smith, and others. Insightful as they have been, however, these and other studies have for the most part considered the materials of fashion as represented inside of literary texts; or, alternatively, as they function outside of texts, in the historical or social contexts that enable and circumscribe literary production. Neither extensively nor exclusively, that is, have studies of fashion and literature treated fashion in relation to the dynamics of literary authorship. Indeed, at this writing there are evidently no extant essay collections dedicated to the connection between fashion and authorship, and a search over all decades of the MLA database for “fashion” AND “authorship” returns precisely two matches: a 2003 entry by Caroline Gonda in Notes and Queries and my own 2017 monograph.² The present collection thus exploits an evident scholarly need, as it gathers scholars of literature and specialists in material history to focus on the largely unwritten story of literary authorship’s connections and affiliations with the cultural formation of fashion.

Moving beyond the brute-force approach, a summary of recent scholarship gives a clearer sense of the trends in this area. Lauren S. Cardon’s Fashion and Fiction (2016), for example, considers representations of fashion and clothing in the novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and other twentieth-century American novelists as vehicles for identity construction and self-transformation. Celia Marshik’s At the Mercy of Their Clothes (2016) explores the significance of the mackintosh, the evening gown, the fancy-dress costume, and the secondhand garment in the fiction of Joyce, Woolf, and others. In Thomas Hardy Writing Dress (2012), Simon Gatrell analyzes the clothes “that Hardy gave his characters to wear” in order to consider how the representations of these garments in Hardy’s novels “reveal or conceal, express or disguise” truths about the self. Rosy Aindow’s Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870–1914 (2010) considers the ways in which representations of fashionable dress in the novels of George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and others contributed to contemporary discourses of class identity. Recent edited collections have also taken up the intersections between literature and dress or fashion. Katherine Joslin and Daneen Wardrop’s Crossings in Text and Textile (2015) contains nine essays that “explore the diverse range of transatlantic representations of clothing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature.” And the 14 essays in Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television, edited by Peter McNeil, Vicki Karaminas, and Catherine Cole (2009), examine the historically complex interrelations between fashion and narratives, stories told not only in literary texts, but in film, television, and advertising. Summary as it is, this listing of recent scholarship on fashion and literature gives a sense of how diverse and productive this area of study has become in recent years. But it also suggests that the predominant focus has been on representations of clothing and dress within literary texts, or on the discourses that occur around these texts. What, we might ask (admittedly, from the perspective of the present volume), about the author? How did he or she dress? What where his shopping practices and predilections? What were her avowed or unstated alliances with modishness, stylishness, fashion? And how, if at all, have these factors shaped authorship over the course of a long “modern” period that begins in the early eighteenth century and continues through our present moment?

Before seeking to answer these questions, let us acknowledge that some significant recent studies on fashion and literature do take up matters related to the author’s affiliations with—or resistances to—fashion. In Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2013), Chloe Wigston Smith considers how canonical authors like Swift, Fielding, and others actively resist “the widespread conflation of expression and dress” in their novels as they repeatedly revisit the commonplace “analogy between dress and expression in order to challenge and rewrite it from within” (2, 12). In Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction (2009), Christine Bayles Kortsch takes up the material cultures of dress and sewing in order to “analyze why and how late Victorian women writers … employed dual literacy,” the analogous activities of writing and reading both dress and print (18). In a study that comes closest to the aims of the present collection, Katherine Joslin’s Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion (2009) examines the ways in which Wharton’s fashion choices, shopping practices, and her charitable support for seamstresses and lace makers in pre-World War I Manhattan are reflected in her fiction (12). With its focus on fashion and authorship, Joslin’s study is, however, the exception in recent scholarship, and even the relatively author-oriented studies by Bayles Kortsch and Wigston Smith actually suggest the dominance of the larger scholarly trend, the tendency to analyze fashion as represented in the literary text or as it connects to the societal and cultural conversations that surround that text. Central to Bayles Kortsch’s monograph, for instance, are representations of dressmaking in novels by Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix; and Wigston Smith, as suggested, explores the ways in which the traditional analogy of expression to dress is interrogated in the texts of particular eighteenth-century novels.

The emphasis on textual representations, ideologies, discourses that we see in these relatively recent studies is to some extent traceable to influential earlier studies that appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For example, Erin Mackie’s 1997 Market à La Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the Tatler and the Spectator looked at the ways in which “stylistic norms of language, taste, dress, and manner”—identified by Mackie with the bourgeois ideology of fashion—were constructed in the early eighteenth century in The Tatler and The Spectator (x). Mackie’s analyses of the eighteenth-century ideologies of taste and fashion was not restricted to the pages of these two periodicals, as her study encompassed the rise of credit, the history of the hoop-petticoat, the construction of the figure of the coquette, and other topics. As the title of her book indicates, however, its focus was on the ways in which these eighteenth-century phenomena of fashion are constructed and represented in the texts of The Tatler and The Spectator, which in her analysis become invaluable sources of cultural and social history. The title of Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2001) suggests a study that ranges beyond textual representation of fashionable phenomena, and in its analyses of how fashion and clothing contributed to the “making of the human subject” in early modern England, it explored a wide range of materials and processes: the ways in which aristocrats used clothing to pay servants, for example, thereby “marking the wearer’s indebtedness to master or mistress”; or the ways in which the subject in Renaissance portraiture is “constituted through investiture,” through the depiction of garments that are of seemingly greater import than the face itself (11, 12). Perhaps unsurprisingly (both Jones and Stallybrass are professors of literature), their analyses of the materials of fashion were, however, frequently based on representations of fashion and dress in “Renaissance literary English texts,” as they drew upon the texts of Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Jasper Maynes, and many others as repositories of cultural and historical meaning.³ Jennie Batchelor’s Dress, Distress, and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (2005) examined “the discursive construction of the body and dress in eighteenth-century literature” (17). As she analyzed representations of dress in Richardson’s Pamela, Edgeworth’s Belinda, eighteenth-century conduct books, and other sources, Batchelor uncovered tensions between representations of fashion, the body, and female morality which become particularly salient late in the eighteenth century in the conflicted responses of writers like More and Wollstonecraft to the ideology of sentimentalism. The three major studies cited in this paragraph and others from the same period are landmarks of scholarship on fashion and literature, significant formations on the scholarly landscape to which later scholars have looked as they seek to orient their own explorations. To describe them in terms of what they are not—examinations of fashion and authorship—would be to countenance a response that is literally “negative,” that indeed detracts from the richness and complexity of their materials and the sophistication of their arguments. Like the recent studies cited earlier, however, collectively they provide further evidence that the predominant emphasis in this area has been on ideological, discursive, and textual representations of fashion.

Studies of fashion and literature which appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s like those just described were enabled by a body of scholarship from outside of literary studies, one which in the 1980s reoriented the traditional disciplines of dress history and costume history to more far-reaching considerations of the cultural and psychological meanings of dress.⁴ One of the most frequently cited examples is Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams, which argued in 1985 for the need “to view fashion through several different pairs of spectacles simultaneously—of aesthetics, of social theory, of politics….” (11) Wilson’s study, at once informed by and setting itself apart from the poststructuralist and postmodern theories that were then current, acknowledged the economic and social constraints imposed by fashion in order to suggest its ability to “successfully express the individual,” in effect to assemble the modern “fragmentary self … into the semblance of a unified identity” (12, 11). The argument suggests a positive openness to fashion, as does that put forward in another influential study which appeared at roughly the same time, Gilles Lipovetsky’s The Empire of Fashion (1987). Lipovetsky’s history of fashion proceeded from his aim “to reveal its positive power, with respect both to democratic institutions and to the autonomy of consciousness…. Whatever deleterious influence it may have on the vitality of minds and democracies, [fashion] appears above all as the primary agent of the spiraling movement toward individualism and the consolidation of liberal societies” (6). For Lipovetsky, “the frivolous” was central to “the development of critical, realistic, tolerant consciousness,” and fashion itself represented “the ultimate phase of democracy” (10). Wilson’s and Lipovetsky’s studies from the 1980s are influential examples of the ways in which fashion and dress studies of the time were reaching beyond the confines of traditional dress history to larger cultural concerns. They and other fashion theorists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, whether implicitly or explicitly, with seeming inevitability referred back to the semiological vision of fashion elaborated by Roland Barthes in his 1967 The Fashion System, to his contention that “the function of the description of Fashion is not only to propose a model which is a copy of reality but also and especially to circulate Fashion broadly as meaning” (10). Whether the cultural critics of the 1980s agreed with or sought to separate themselves from Barthes, the approaches that they took suggested that they were liberated by his Saussurean fascination with fashion as a representational system of signs capable of conveying meaning and difference. Another of Barthes’s insights was that “the semiology of Fashion is directed toward a set of collective representations” (10), and Christopher Breward has pointed out in this connection that, as fashion theory evolved in the 1980s, it was “largely concerned with issues of representation, the relationship between culture and image” (302). This emphasis on representation indicates a possible reason for the elision of the author from the later studies on literature and fashion: as Breward suggests in his recounting of the inception of contemporary fashion studies, “cultural studies offers a way of studying objects as systems rather than as the simple product of authorship” (306). Following a similar intellectual trajectory, the historicist and theoretical approaches to literary studies that emerged in the 1980s prioritized historical, social, and political contexts over considerations of authorial agency and intent.

The studies by Wilson and Lipovetsky exemplify the positive engagement with fashion that characterized 1980s criticism and that countered traditionally negative views: well-worn notions that the materials of fashion are fleeting and transitory rather than permanent, particular rather than universal, superficial rather than deep. The dialectic implicit in these oppositions was familiar to authors as early as Alexander Pope (the writer treated in the first chapter of this volume) as they contended with the imperative to be modern while retaining allegiance to the ancients, seeking to attain contemporary celebrity without foreclosing upon enduring fame. An influential entry in the “negative” tradition of fashion commentary is Thorstein Veblen’s economic argument, captured in his observation that “no line of consumption affords a more apt illustration [of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste] than expenditure on dress” (168). “In order to serve its purpose effectually,” Veblen argues, fashionable dress “should not only be expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labour” (170). Fashion, according to this economic argument, is intrinsically wasteful and useless. Daniel Purdy suggests that the critiques of Veblen and others are associated with a tradition of self-critical fashion commentary in which a “sense of guilt” and “shame” are intrinsic to fashion’s own “internal debate with itself” (9). In this internalized debate, “the whole concept of being ‘in fashion’ has a derogatory feel. For the truly avant-garde, if a look itself is called fashionable, then it is no longer. By denying its fashionable nature, fashion tries seriously to elevate itself above its own cycle of innovation and popularization” (Purdy 9). Grappling with the dilemmas of contemporary fame, Pope’s early modern contemporaries and the authors who followed would have understood Purdy’s observation that “To say that one has emancipated oneself from fashion is a fashion-conscious statement” (10).

As Purdy and others have suggested, however, the tradition of “negative” fashion commentary coexisted with a positive counter-tradition, and late twentieth-century cultural studies, in their openness to the expressive possibilities of frivolous fashion, echo and invoke much earlier writings from that positiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Pastoral Authorship and Porcelain Figurines: Pope’s Elite Aesthetic and the Fashionable Decorative Commodity
• 3. ‘Magnificent as Well as Singular’: Hester Thrale’s Polynesian Court Dress of 1781
• 4. Becoming Somebody: Refashioning the Body Politic in Mary Robinson’s Nobody
• 5. Nobleman Incognito: Byron’s Albanian Dress
• 6. Fraser’s Magazine and the Instability of Literary Fashion
• 7. Fashioning Femininity in the 1840s: Charlotte Brontë and Villette
• 8. No Room for the “Woman of Fashion”: Male Authorship, Anti-fashion, and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White
• 9. The Writer and the Couturière: Authorship and Creative Industry in the 1870s
• 10. ‘Down to the last button ... in the fashion of the hour’: Virginia Woolf and the Writer of Modern Fiction
• 11. Fashioning Modern and Modernist Authorship: Rebecca West in the 1920s and 1930s
• 12. Fashion as Self-Authorship, Escape from Fascist Terror, and Witness Testimony
• 13. Fantasies of Femininity Redressed: Angela Carter’s Authorial Self-Fashioning
• 14. “Style Description: / Provenance: / Period:”: Martin Margiela, Fashion Authorship, and Romantic Literary History
• Back Matter