Hooked and Buttoned Together Victorian Underwear and Representations of The Female Body

"Hooked and Buttoned Together": Victorian Underwear and Representations of the Female
Body
Author(s): Casey Finch
Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring, 1991), pp. 337-363
Published by: Indiana University Press
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Casey Finch
"HOOKED AND BUTTONED

TOGETHER": VICTORIAN UNDERWEAR
AND REPRESENTATIONS OF THE
FEMALE BODY
IN JOHN DONNE'S "ELEGIE: GOING TO BED" (C. 1592), THE HEIGHT OF REN-
aissance heterosexuality is articulated as a moment when a man watches a
woman disrobe until she is altogether exposed in what the poet rapturously
calls her "full nakedness!" (Donne 58). 1 "Off with that girdle," the speaker
implores; "unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear"; "unlace your
self"; "off with that happy busk." The poem as a whole rather enthusiastically
enacts a playful scenario in which the speaker directs the woman to "unlace"
and whose telos is the revelation of her anatomy in all its splendor: "Full na-
kedness! All joyes are due to thee, / As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must
be, / To taste whole joyes." Although "full nakedness" is here apostrophized
as though it were a deity, the process-really a striptease-by which it is
achieved involves an emphatic reduction of the woman to the purely corpo-
real realm of the senses. The teleology of the striptease is simple enough: the
woman's undergarments-"busk," "gown," "white lynnen"-are ritualisti-
cally removed until she stands as a supposedly unmediated creatural reality.
Yet the asymmetry of Donne's apostrophe to nakedness is telling. Though the
soul is freed from the body in order to reveal its unalloyed essence, meanwhile
the body's essence is revealed not, as we might expect, when it sheds its soul,
but when it sheds its clothes; and more specifically-as here-its under-
clothes. 2
In Thomas Hardy's The WeU-Beloved (1892), by contrast, the object
of desire has "no tangible substance" whatsoever; emphatically unbodied,
like Donne's ideal soul, it is essentially "a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, . . . an
epitomized sex" (16). Jocelyn Pierston, a talented sculptor rapidly developing
a reputation for himself in London, constitutes a kind of reversed Pygmalion
figure. The Well-Beloved that he adores is not any of the idealizations of fe-
male beauty he creates in his studio but a "conception" that assumes "many
embodiments" in a series of real women each of whom represents merely a
"transient condition" of the ideal (16). One night Pierston, already engaged
to be married to what is for him the current embodiment of the Well-Be-
SPRING 1991
338 Casey Finch
loved, meets a strange young woman in a torrential rainstorm. He assists her

to an inn where, from an upstairs room, she sends down her clothes and un-
derwear to be dried before the hearth. Pierston takes these "habiliments of
the Juno upstairs, from which a cloud of steam began to rise" and opens "pro-
ceedings, overhauling the robes and extending them one by one. As the
steam went up he fell into a reverie. . . . The Well-Beloved was moving
house-had gone over to the wearer of this attire" (30-31). The result is at
once surprising and overdetermined: "In the course of ten minutes he adored
her" (31). Desire has here succumbed, not to the "full nakedness" of a
woman who stands in all her corporeal "reality," but to the underwear of a
woman who does not even occupy the same room. Clearly this is not one of
Donne's "bodies uncloth'd" but rather the clothing itself or, more specifi-
cally, the underclothing from which the body has been evacuated altogether.
When the female body in the Renaissance was freed from its clothes,
its "essence" was revealed as an absolute corporeality: it was made of the
earth and bound to the earth. For Donne, the unadorned "fact" of the female
anatomy constituted a site of (re)production, an earthly source of abundance:
a "myne of precious stones" and a virgin territory to be colonized at once by an
old sexual desire and by the new mercantile expansionism ("O my America!
My new-found-land"). The revealed female body in the pre-modem period thus
involved a solid admixture of the four classical elements, an interconnected
congregate of the humors. Upon this emphatically creatural body, underwear
and clothing were layered rather like supplementary coats of cultural mean-
ing. In Hardy's Victorian vision, by contrast, the woman functions as a faint
ideation conjured up by the sight of her underclothes, steaming as they dry
before the fire. The woman here (though of course literally she is not here) is
thus characterized by a "ghostliness," a sheer independence from "physical
laws" (16). The disembodied garments-which, unlike those in the Donne
poem, remain unnamed and undescribed-serve as a kind of fetishized synec-
doche for the "Juno upstairs." Here, then, the female body is articulated as a
vessel for an (absent) unworldly object of desire, and her clothing as a vessel for
the (absent) female body. The relation between the body and clothes has been
transformed; whereas in the pre-modem period clothes and underclothes were
placed in a relatively stark opposition to the body, in Hardy's passage at the end
of the Victorian era the female body and its clothes have become, not exactly
exchangeable objects, but metaphors of sorts for one another.
The specific gap between Donne's and Hardy's sense of the female
body exemplifies the more universal gap between the "pre-moder" and the
"modern" body as it has been explored recently by a wide range of critics.
The body, understood in the Renaissance as the corporeal object of sovereign
power and the resistance upon which this authority worked from without,
had by the nineteenth century come to be understood as a self-contained sys-
VICTORIAN STUDIES
VICTORIAN UNDERWEAR AND REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FEMALE BODY 339
tem of discipline. It was articulated not as an object upon which power

worked but as itself a powerful model echoed and resonating in the world
around it. As Foucauldians, recent feminists, and new historicists have sug-
gested, whereas in the pre-modem period the body functioned as a field upon
which meanings were emphatically and violently made, in the modem epoch
the body is thought to confer its own meanings upon the environment as the
source and agent rather than the object of truth. If in the Renaissance the
twin operations of sovereignty and law conferred upon people their identities,
by the nineteenth century it was the bodily, and in particular the sexual, that
became "a mode of specification of individuals" (Foucault, History 1: 47). 3
The somatic thus becomes less a signified of its coercive social context and
rather the very progenitor of that context.
Specifically, what emerges in late nineteenth-century England is a

new sartorial iconology that collapses the age-old dialectic between the body
and its clothes. For centuries, verbal and pictorial representations had
counted on and reinforced a relatively untroubled opposition between the
clothed female body (for instance in genre paintings) and the naked female
body (for instance in allegorical or mythological subjects). But now a new
body is constituted that seems to violate the distinction between a naked and
a clothed condition, between a private "truth" and a publicly acceptable
presentability. And this violation is perhaps nowhere so clearly articulated as
in the changing shapes of Victorian underwear and the new verbal and picto-
rial strategies devised to represent them. To be sure, since Greek antiquity
there had been a representational convention, now known as draperie
mouillee-a semi-transparent, clinging or flowing gauze-that posed a spe-
cial case in the cultural display of the female body, a paradoxical mid-point in
the dialectic between the naked and the clothed form. But though this con-
vention tended to modulate the distinction between the naked and the
clothed body, draperie mouillUe never operated openly to violate the binarism
upon which, indeed, it depended for its compositional effect. It was not until
the nineteenth century that underwear, along with its representations,
tended to revise completely (or to signal a revision of) the dialectic between
the clothed and the naked body and to generate problems that could not be
solved by recourse to the traditional antinomy. For if a clothed condition is
the body's public guise and nakedness its private "truth," then underwear
places the body in a problematic situation: neither dressed nor exactly un-
dressed, neither suitable for (re)presentation nor articulable as an Edenic
condition.
SPRING 1991
340 Casey Finch
In fact, attending (or generating) what Peter Brooks has recently

identified as "an artistic moment characterized by a kind of crisis in represen-
tation of the nude" is a more widely spread cultural dilemma that involves the
female body in its entirety (14). This body's relation to itself, to its clothing,
to reproduction, to its political and architectural environment, is reshaped in
the second half of the nineteenth century. I want to trace this transforma-
tion, and more specifically to explore the vicissitudes of the female body in Vic-
torian England, in order ultimately to gain some insights into the emergence in
the period of a particular set of pictorial practices by which it was figured and
articulated. And since Victorian underwear provides not only a useful blueprint
for the new architecture of the female body but a convenient grid against
which equally new technologies of representation can be traced, I want first
to investigate the new female underwear itself and the practices by which it
was imaged pictorially. This investigation in turn will provide a context (or a
countertext) against which to measure an unprecedented set of pictorial strat-
egies which arise in the period and which signal equally novel meanings cast
across social space itself. Ultimately it is these new meanings or, more accu-
rately, these new modes of meaning that constitute the object of this study.
Throughout, I will be locating my themes and problems in a wide va-
riety of sources: high art, fictional dialogues, fashion illustrations, poems,
cartoons. Of course, because each medium is produced in a more or less
unique context and consumed according to a more or less unique set of expec-
tations, each in turn tends not only to generate meanings but also to mobilize
modes of meaning that are different from those of other media; and it is wise
to bear such differences in mind. I have chosen, however, not to place such
considerations at the forefront of my argument. Instead, I emphasize not the
very real differences but the equally real similarities, the social conventions
and modes that cut across various media, in order to theorize a discursive do-
main-incorporating magazine caricatures and academic paintings, serious
literature and journalistic items-the parts of which may bear significant dif-
ferences but the whole of which moves, I would argue, in a single direction.
It is this direction that I want finally to understand.
First, however, an abbreviated history of the female body and its rep-
resentations will be useful. Loosely speaking, we can say that the buxom, vo-
luptuous, and indeed rotund Renaissance ideal of the female body, which by
the eighteenth century had come to seem faintly dated, was finally and
irrevocably overthrown during the Victorian period. Earlier, as Anne Hol-
lander suggests, "there seems to have been no impulse to constrict what we
call the waist. ... In the erotic imagination of Europe, it was apparently im-
possible . .. for a woman to have too big a belly." For centuries female nudes
constituted vast "expanses of belly and thigh" while "breasts and buttocks
were seen as subsidiary attendants of these" (98, 104). But by the end of the
VICTORIAN STUDIES
nineteenth century, on the contrary, the female body's erotic zones had
shifted from the belly backward to the posterior and from the pelvis outward
to the breasts and limbs. The new female objets du desir possessed exaggerated
breasts, thighs, posteriors, and relatively diminutive waists and bellies. A
markedly different form had emerged.
We should not, of course, either exaggerate or oversimplify the his-
tory by which the fertile, belly-centered body was replaced by the so-called
hourglass shape as the new desideratum. What was created by the end of the
Victorian period was not the hourglass shape per se (which had taken many
nuanced forms in many periods) but a particular and extreme variety of that
shape. Nor is the nineteenth century by any means the first moment in West-
ern history when breasts, posterior, and a relatively diminutive waist are priv-
ileged over the generous, sloping, rounded midriff. Indeed, the Victorian
hourglass shape derives ultimately from the time-honored paradigm of the
"classical" nude which stretches back at least to the Knidian Aphrodite of
Praxiteles (fourth century B.C.) and which for Kenneth Clark inaugurates
the central tradition in Western art's idealization of femininity. And for the
last millennium, at any rate, the history of the female body (or, rather, the
history of its representations) has been characterized by an oscillation be-
tween, on the one hand, an emphasis on the breast, posterior, and limbs and,
on the other, an emphasis on a sloping, curvaceous stomach. For centuries
the so-called classical nude, in which "the dominating rhythm is the curve of
the hip," operated alongside what Clark identifies as the "Gothic ideal of the
female body" whose dominating rhythm is "the curve of the stomach" (317-
18). The late nineteenth century is best understood as the moment in West-
ern culture when what has come to be called the anorectic body was placed
more or less permanently at the very center of the sexual imagination.
Recall any number of pre-modern female nudes: from the north
Diirer's 1504 engraving Adam and Eve, Cranach's mid-sixteenth-century
Nymph of the Spring, Rembrandt's Diana (1630); from the south Giorgione's
Le Concert Champetre (c. 1500), Raphael's The Nymph Galatea (1514), Ti-
tian's Venus and the Lute Player (1562-65). The shapes, to be sure, are
nuanced and varied, and significant differences between periods, artists, and
regions must be borne in mind. Nevertheless, there is everywhere evident
what Hollander calls the "desirable fleshy expanse" of the "big Renaissance
stomach" (98, 99). Corporeal, fertile, voluptuous, their stomachs thrust erot-
ically forward, these nudes embody what Hollander calls the ideal of the
belly-centered female body, sensuous because reproductive. One need only
compare such images with John Charles Dollman's 1897 The Temptation of St.
Anthony (fig. 1) to appreciate the degree of the change to which, by the late
nineteenth century, the female body had been subjected by the visual imagi-
nation. Dollman's desert temptress represents a culmination of the new ideal,
SPRING 1991
342 Casey Finch
Figure 1. John Charles Dollman, The Temptation of St. Anthony. Royal Academy Pictures. London,
1897.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
begun in the seventeenth century but with roots reaching back into Greek
antiquity, in which the waist is relatively flat and the breasts and posterior
vividly emphasized. Her belly has been pushed, as it were, behind her. As
Hollander has it, "in general, a marked fullness of breast and corresponding
fullness of backside had become the chief sexual charms of women, for which
a slender waist provided the appropriate foil" (113). The nineteenth century
recapitulates in miniature this wider history of the female body. Even during
the first twenty years of the century, when a "neo-classical," high-waisted,
tubular shape constituted the vogue, this form nevertheless tended to empha-
size a bold outline around the midriff which, in turn, accentuated the belly as
an elongated ring of sensuous energy. By the end of the century, by contrast,
the last traces of the reproductively charged belly were all but elided. As a
semiotic field, the female anatomy had been inverted; a new and elusive form
of erotics had replaced a belly-centered sexuality.
II
Meanwhile, the new forms of underwear doubtless operated both as

cause and effect of this general erotic sensibility in the visual imagination
that was reconfiguring the female form. Especially after the innovation of the
metal eyelet in 1828-which allowed the corset to be violently tightened for
the first time-what might be characterized as an assault on the midriff and a
concomitant emphasis on the breast and the extremities began in earnest.
Deploying a vast array of materials, including whalebone and steel (fig. 2),
corsets evolved a number of subtly nuanced shapes, the waist gradually gain-
ing altitude from the '60s to the '80s before plunging downward in the '90s;
an overall movement toward the hourglass shape, however, is evident. 4
Corsets, of course, had existed for centuries, especially among the aristoc-
racy. And over the years they had expanded or shrunk, becoming taller or
shorter, a "natural" and integral part of larger oscillations in European fash-
ion. Now, though, with the advent of "ready-mades" (manufactured items of
clothing purchasable "off the shelf" for a few shillings), the corset became
wholly democratized; only the very poor, it seems, could not and did not wear
them (Davies 619-22). On the one hand, corseting became an imperative
signifier of fashionableness in middle- and upper-middle-class women. Pre-
dictably, perhaps, the fashionableness conferred by the corset was often dis-
guised as a "hallmark of virtue"; as Bernard Rudofsky has pointed out, to the
middle-class sensibility "uncorseted woman reeked of license; an unlaced
waist was regarded as a vessel of sin" (110-11). But on the other hand, to the
horror of middle-class observers, working-class women, including prostitutes,
took to the fashion as well, pushing it to a level of showiness that scandalized
SPRING 1991
344 Casey Finch
RADIAING SDE STEEL

A XOST 5I OU5UL N--YIONi
BrUIBThZND, APRIL 4'n. -I..
Th*t ove tfh >b

furioua prmsur an UheJ bomne o
Wh itee. and on 0ioutsu mt i. 0ld c
x B o a Sm Ika" It8q' .......,,n... _~ _ _
heo DAPEBUS nd LADIE' OUTPUf?E
Figure 2. Registered Steel-Sided Corset Advertisement, Drapers and Ladies' Outfitters. 1882.
Figure 3. Crinoline Advertisement, The Wallace Company. 1866.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
more "respectable" citizens. Then as now, as Mariana Valverde has argued,

the nuances given to the same item of fashion could signify the differences-
operative both within and across classes-between respectable "honest
dress" and "cheapness" (1). At any rate, there is little reason to doubt the
corset's ubiquity in late nineteenth-century England; Elizabeth Ewing's find-
ings that "by 1868 Britain produced three million corsets a year, while an-
other two million were imported from France and Germany" seem generally
accurate (qtd. in Davies 619).
And while the corset increasingly pinched the waist, the crinoline ex-
panded voluptuously below it. Coming into vogue in the '50s and '60s, the
crinoline marked a modified and exaggerated version of the hoop-skirt or,
rather, a newly combined form of the hoop-skirt and the petticoat. Various
kinds of underskirt-petticoats, flounces, layered and pleated prototypes of
the twentieth-century slip, and drawers-had for decades become increas-
ingly complicated and expansive until, in the '50s, they culminated in the
vast crinoline: a bell-shaped series of horizontal, concentric hoops hanging
from the waist and held together by vertical bands of tape. 5 Its materials
could include horsehair (hence the term, from the Italian crino [horsehair]
and the Latin linum [thread or linen]), cotton, iron, wood, or steel (fig. 3).
The crinoline hung from the hips and over various petticoats and under-
skirts-which, evidently, it did not replace-in a vast bell-like shape whose
lower circumference could reach five yards. A telling dialogue from the June
1856 issue of the Petit Courier des Dames underscores the extent to which the
crinoline constituted a bricolage of older forms:
-By the way ... I hope you have not taken to wearing those ridiculous steel and wire
petticoats.
-What kind of petticoats?
-Really, my dear, haven't you seen those miracles of progress? Don't you know the lat-
est and most curious fashion? Well, I shall have to tell you about this pretty bit of frip-
pery. You know the hoops which are used to dry linen?
-Well, what is the connection?
--ust wait! Much more than you would think-That is a petticoat.
-A petticoat? What on earth do you mean?
-Gracious me! Don't you understand-So that a dress should be voluminous and yet
have no folds whatever, someone has had the brilliant idea of making underskirts of cane,
iron, rubber, and finally, the latest creation, a petticoat of circles of steel, like the springs
of a watch, and which, held together by bands of elastic, can be folded up and put into
one's pocket! ....
-How extraordinary! Quite unbelievable! (qtd. in Waugh 121)
Here the crinoline is articulated (disapprovingly) as a hybrid form, a kind of ghastly

mutation, of the older petticoat and hoop-skirt for which metaphors have to be
drawn both from watchmaking (suggesting that women had become finely
tuned mechanisms) and from domestic clotheslines (suggesting that women
had become a kind of framework upon which clothes are laboriously draped).
SPRING 1991
346 Casey Finch
The third important development in Victorian underwear was the

bustle, an often complicated piece of padding tied around the waist and de-
signed to enlarge and thus enhance the posterior. Though it had had many
prototypes, the bustle's first official appearance came in 1868, explicitly de-
scribed, for instance, in an issue from that year of the Young Ladies' Journal as
a hybridization: "The full toumure added to the modem jupon gives quite a
different appearance to a lady's figure" (qtd. in Cunnington 113). The bustle
marked what Elizabeth Ewing calls a "backward sweep of the skirt," a "kind of
steel birdcage, covered with material" which by the early '70s "extended
down to the [back of the] knees, becoming a kind of half-crinoline" (78).
The most historically limited of the various forms of Victorian underwear-it
flourished only in the early '70s and again, briefly, about a decade later, but it
held nevertheless a central place in the cultural imagination for genera-
tions-the bustle was described in an 1868 issue of Punch as a monstrosity
"which sticks out in a bunch and causes the 'female form divine' to look
rather like the . . . Dodo" (qtd. in Ewing 113).6
Overall, the cultural sway under which the belly-centered body gave
way, both in art and in life, to the elongated hourglass shape took hold once
and for all in the Victorian period. To the horror of most doctors, middle-class
commentators, and many (though by no means all) feminists, the generous
belly-in representation gently and "naturally" elided, in reality aggressively
suppressed-lost its power for good in the erotic imagination. In its place came
what Margaret Oliphant in the 1870s called "the painful spectacle of the
whole female race more or less tied into narrow bags" (55) and what the De-
cember 1828 issue of La Belle Assemblee called a "wasp-like" look "as unnatu-
ral as it is disagreeable" (qtd. in Waugh 103). As Mary Haweis complained in
her 1878 manual, Dress, Health, and Beauty: A Book for Ladies, the hourglass
figure that attended tight-lacing constituted "the very badge of vulgarity"
(138). And whether vulgar or, as an anonymous contributor to the 1868
Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine has it, an approximation of the " 'female
form divine,' " the hourglass shape was not to be displaced as the ideal of fe-
male beauty (4). 7 A new bodily and sartorial architecture had emerged; the
technology of the female form had changed. As Thomas Carlyle complained
in his crucial Sartor Resartus, it appeared that "man's earthly interests" were
"hooked and buttoned together and held up by clothes" (40).
While underwear itself was reconfiguring the female body, there
emerged a number of unprecedented representational strategies within which
earlier pictorial practices depending on the age-old dichotomy between the
naked and the clothed body proved unserviceable. Whereas earlier "woman"
had been constructed as an explicitly reproductive source, now she became
reconfigured as an erotic field only problematically connected to a bodily
physics of reproduction. The ideology of reproduction was troped into a sys-
VICTORIAN STUDIES
tem of erotics where the meaning of sexuality operated not as a public "fact"
but as a private secret. Unlike the "truth" of the flesh in the Renaissance,
which was revealed once the body was freed from its clothing, now the naked
body and the body in clothes (or underclothes) revealed their truths simul-
taneously. And the new pictorial strategies for figuring the body and its
clothes themselves came to rely, not on explicit articulations of the female
body as a site of (re)production, but on covert representational methods-
visual puns, tropes, and uncanny confrontations-that mapped the body as
the place where secrets hide.
III
There is, for example, especially in late nineteenth-century popular

magazines, a vast cluster of images depicting corsets, crinolines, and bustles
inexplicably floating in a void. 8 These images refer uncannily to the absent
presence of the newly shaped body. Here, rather like the steaming "habili-
ments of the Juno upstairs" which cause Hardy's protagonist to fall in love
with their missing owner, empty undergarments reshape a body that invisibly
fills them, constricting and reconfiguring what paradoxically is not there at
all. Mere air is somehow reshaped. The insubstantial body mysteriously re-
quires the taut bones of the corset to be curved and pinched, or the surround-
ing bell of the crinoline to be expanded into a new form. For all their infinite
variety and inflection, these images tend toward a single goal: they emphasize
the palpable effect of underwear on the paradoxically missing body. Impossi-
bly, underclothing lends support and supplementation to nothing. And
whether these images depict underwear tight-lacing a void (as in the ubiqui-
tous pictures of empty corsets [fig. 2]), billowing out over nothing (as in the
floating crinolines [fig. 3]), or providing supplementary padding for air (as in
the bustles tied around non-existent waists), in each case the space occupied
or, rather, not occupied by the female body is at once strangely empty and
fraught (though ambiguously) with meaning. We might say that these spaces
are meaningful precisely because they are empty, for these images confront us
with the semiotic order of fetishism itself, in which an object operates as a
synecdoche for an absent whole.
Often the advertising copy that accompanies these images similarly
refers to, even as it tropes and problematizes, the absent body. In an 1882 ad-
vertisement for a newly patented steel-sided corset (fig. 2), for instance, the
written text underscores the extent to which underwear has altogether re-
placed the very female it is designed to reshape. The copy refers to the
"bones" and "hip," not of the invisible wearer, but of the corset itself: "Per-
fect support is given, and bones effectually prevented from breaking, in a
SPRING 1991
348 Casey Finch
manner entirely superseding all other attempts at producing a thoroughly fle-

xible hip." As in the pictorial image of the floating corset, in the written text
metaphors borrowed from the body have replaced the actual bones and hips
of the body which is absent but which is nevertheless somehow reshaped.
The tropological work here is densely compacted. Like the steel-sided corset
in the illustration, the nouns provide the body parts that are pictorially miss-
ing while the (strangely passive) verbs echo the "action" of the underwear
upon the absent body. The body and its underclothes are ranged in a volatile,
collapsing relation to one another; underwear is threatening to become the
very body to which it ostensibly provides mere supplementary enhancement.
One image, an 1880 advertisement for Cave's "abdominal supporter,"
varies the theme by setting side by side a giant, empty corset and a tiny
woman-she is no taller than the corset in question-whose figure is bene-
fited, as the copy has it, by the oversized accoutrement. Here the juxtaposi-
tion of the incommensurable scales of the corset and the wearer duplicates
the miraculous shrinking effect the copy tells us corsets have on "ladies in-
clined to embonpoint"; such women "may derive benefit from them, the belt
keeping the figure down to its proper proportion." Like the image itself, the
copy tells us, the body will be literally reduced and re-scaled by the constric-
tions of a corset occupied by nothing. A Parisian advertisement from 1840,
depicting a hollow corset upon which an armless and legless woman's head is
balanced, offers yet another variation. Here the relation of the written to the
pictorial text enacts a curious tension:
Ces corsets, qui habillent dans la perfection, amincissent et allongent la taille sans la
comprimer; on les lace, delace, serre et desserre en une seconde, sans aucune derange-
ment pour la toilette.
[These corsets, which fit to a tee, trim and lengthen the waist without digging into it; you
lace and unlace, tighten and loosen them in a jiffy, without dishevelling your toilette.]
Even as we are told of the easy manipulability of a corset for a woman who has
no hands, so a waist that is not there-since the corset seems to be hol-
low-is nevertheless somehow trimmed and lengthened. It is impossible to
say, here, whether the body (if there is a body) is dexterously manipulating
the underwear or whether the underwear is manipulating (trimming and
lengthening) the body-that-is-not-there.
By contrast, another cluster of images from the period (often from
high, academic art) represents very visible women wearing invisible under-
wear. These fantasies depict, in Hollander's words, naked bodies that "show
the effect of corseting without the corset" and the effect, too, of crinolines
and bustles without explicitly accounting for those technologies of fashion
(91). Often women's uplifted arms or supine position silently duplicated the
action that underwear had upon the body, serving the purpose of corsets in
elevating and separating the breasts and elongating the ribs and midriff. Look
VICTORIAN STUDIES
again, for instance, at Dollman's The Temptation of St. Anthony (fig. 1).
While the woman's uplifted arms create deeply ambiguous postural meanings
(is this temptress utterly self-absorbed or concentrating alertly on her "vic-
tim"?) at the same time the gesture accounts for the effect upon her body of
invisible underwear; she is "naturally" bustled (her wide hips frankly mani-
festing the effects of the new underwear) and "naturally" corseted (her stom-
ach showing the flatness and her breasts the lift and separation that attend
fashionable tight lacing). Or observe Herbert Draper's fanciful and semi-por-
nographic personification of the moon in The Gates of Dawn, submitted to
the Royal Academy in 1900 (fig. 4). Ostensibly, the painting marks a grandi-
ose liminal moment, the twilight passage of night to day when the moon
hangs above the horizon, seemingly "reluctant," as Bram Dijkstra has it, "to
relinquish her reign" (125). Also at work, though, is a prurient fascination
with the invisibly lifted and separated (i.e., corseted) breasts and the tightly
laced, visible ribs of this very modem young woman. Adding to the erotic ef-
fect, her neo-classical draperie mouillee legitimates (by mythologizing) the
new underwear's emphasis on legs and arms. Configured as an object of
fetishized attention, she is, indeed, both a product of the new underwear and
a "natural" articulation of it. As well as a metaphysical passage of the moon
from night to day, a very physical passage at dawn of a very real woman from
a private chamber to the public sphere is here feverishly imagined. 9
Here, then, we confront a pictorial ideology that naturalizes the new
shapes into which women were being transformed precisely by rendering in-
visible the pressures placed on the body by corsets and the extensions to
which the body was stretched by bustles and crinolines. In a telling literary
equivalent, Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House figures a young bride's
ideal submission to her husband as the lifting and constricting effects of the
corset she invisibly wears: "A rapture of submission lifts / Her life into celes-
tial rest; / There's nothing left of what she was. ..." (113). Here, the notori-
ously air-leaching effect the tightly laced corset has upon the lungs of a very
real women is troped into, and lovingly idealized as, a marital situation in
which the young bride's body becomes both erotically breathless and insub-
stantial, a transcendent ideal of her husband's Victorian imagination. She is
changed altogether, elevated (breathlessly and asthmatically, perhaps?) from
the earth, and turned by her underwear into a kind of angel. Beneath
women's clothes, we are told in general, lie breathlessly pressed ribs, a
pinched waist, widely separated breasts, and a vast, bell-like lower half.
These representations reverse the relation of the body and its underclothes
that pertained in the images of invisible women wearing visible underwear.
For here underwear operates as it were silently, leaving a visible mark on the
flesh with invisible instruments. As Roland Barthes has it, sartorial accoutre-
ments "go on pervading the woman with their magical virtue even once re-
SPRING 1991
350 Casey Finch
Figure 4. Herbert Draper, The Gates of Dawn. Royal Academy Pictures. London, 1900.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
moved, and give her something like the enveloping memory of a luxurious
shell" (85). Indeed, rather like a clue left at the scene of a crime in the
growingly popular detective novel, underwear leaves its trace on the body so
emphatically that it is paradoxically difficult to detect as such. 10
In yet another cluster of images, the clothed body and the body in un-
derwear, while both are visible, are at the same time strangely set against or
superimposed upon one another as echoes or counterimages. Often these im-
ages enact a rather straightforward visual dialectic between the public body in
clothes and the private body in underwear. Consider, for instance, a London
Corset Company advertisement from 1904 (fig. 5) where a fully dressed (and
obviously corseted) woman converses with a friend who has just donned the
corset in question (i.e., for sale). The tension in the image between the pub-
lic and the private spheres, between the merely quotidian and the danger-
ously erotic, could hardly be greater. The women are doubtless preparing to
venture outward into the reality of the middle-class streets and parks; and the
dressing room, fitted conventionally with a mirror that reflects more informa-
tion about the corset, is thus figured as a private space in which "woman"
readies herself for the public sphere precisely by donning the many layers of
her (under)clothes. l Yet the oscillation pictured between the body in
clothes and the body in underwear subtly problematizes, or rather eroticizes,
the period of transition. For rather like the moon in Draper's personification
(fig. 4), the women here occupy an ambiguous, liminal moment either of
public impingement upon the private sphere or of private extrusion into the
public space. Dramatically concretizing the "naturally" divided nature of
"woman," this image imaginatively splits her clothed, publicly presentable
side and her private, corseted being.
Sometimes, lurking behind a fully dressed woman lies a counteri-
mage-again in a mirror-in which her body appears in underwear. Con-
sider, for instance, a significant and disturbing example: Linley Sanbourne's
"Robe en Homard" from an 1876 issue of Punch (fig. 6), which parodies the
vogue for more natural designs, and tighter dresses, by depicting a woman un-
abashedly as a lobster, complete with a fork in her hair. Here, as if to confirm
the misogynistic fantasies, a woman has succumbed completely to current,
"naturalistic" fashions by donning a dress that figures her literally as the edi-
ble crustacean. In the mirror behind her, we see her counterimage, and
therefore her "truth," clearly wearing a chemise with puffed shoulders and a
ghastly crinoline made of the exoskeleton of a giant lobster. Here, then, the
body in clothes and the body in underwear are ranged in a volatile relation.
"Woman"-who is supposed to uphold the gentler virtues in an economic body
politic increasingly given to (Darwinian) comparisons of itself to a ferocious,
animalistic arena of competition-is at once a respite from and a confirmation
of the animalism that contaminates the new (d)evolutionary human being.
SPRING 1991
352 Casey Finch
Figure 5. Silk Tricot Corset Advertisement, London Corset Company. 1904.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
Figure 6. Linley Sanboume. "Mr. Punch's Dress Designs (After Nature)." Punch 11 (Mar. 1876):
90.
SPRING 1991
354 Casey Finch
Figure 7. "Dresses, Table, and Jewel Case." Harper's Bazar (12 Sept. 1885): 597.
Often such images will involve women against whom ghostly sugges-
tions of underwear are juxtaposed; here versions of underwear troped as dress-
makers' manikins, balconies, tables, chairs, and animals figure subliminally
within the pictorial space. Numerous illustrations from the period-for in-
stance Arthur Wardle's A Bacchante and Frederick Stuart Church's The
Enchantress-represent women next to whom dogs, lions, snakes, and birds
are arranged in such a way as to transform their silhouettes into the shapes
created by the new bustles and crinolines. In others, furniture, clouds, boats,
and tubs of water perform this function. An illustration from an 1889 issue of
the Young Ladies' Journal depicts a woman standing behind a table the legs,
slats, and fringes of which provide a kind of x-ray vision of the fringe-like for-
mations of the crinoline that doubtless lie underneath her skirt, the very foot
of the table echoing her booted foot with uncanny accuracy. Consider in par-
ticular a fashion plate from an 1885 issue of Harper's Bazar (fig. 7). Here the
woman's underwear is doubly troped. While the side table echoes the seated
condition of her crinoline and bustle-as she leans forward, its lid leans
back-the underwear-like drapery covering the dressing stand, and corseting
it at its top, constitutes an inflected version of the elaborate undergarments
that lie beneath. The image as a whole marks an emphatic instance of the
VICTORIAN STUDIES
Victorian phenomenon in which the domestic space itself is eroticized, here

by draping undergarments on the furniture.
Some images suggest women veritably grappling or toying erotically
with their constricting, entangling underclothes. In Edward Robert Hughes'
1894 Biancabella and Samaritana, Her Snake-Sister (fig. 8), a very modem
young woman, whose clothing has been discarded behind her, plays seduc-
tively with a serpent twisted around her whose two main horizontal coils out-
line perfectly the shape of the contemporary corset even as the tub in which
she stands faintly echoes the wide, horizontal hoop of the crinoline. Or,
again, consider William Holman Hunt's c. 1890 The Lady of Shalott (fig. 9);
here, the fatal desire to which this unfortunate Arthurian lady has succumbed
is figured as a vast hoop of crinoline (troped as a loom) in the threads of
which she has become hopelessly ensnared. The image forcefully underscores
the extent to which the new underwear not only constituted a site of charged
sexuality but occasioned a collapse between the public and the private
spheres. For the outer world has intruded violently upon this ordinarily clois-
tered lady who "weaves," in Tennyson's words, "by night and day / A magic
web with colors gay" (11. 38-39). The moment Sir Lancelot crosses her mir-
ror, in one and the same movement her unbearable sexual passion is aroused,
her fate is sealed, and her "underwear" snaps.
IV
With the strategy of the counterimage, the visions of underwear float-

ing on invisible bodies, on the one hand, and those of bodies wearing invisible
underwear, on the other, are collapsed and multiplied at once. Collapsed, be-
cause the body and its underwear are given a pictorial simultaneity. Multi-
plied, because the body and its underwear are discovered literally everywhere.
The phenomenon of the counterimage thus marks two simultaneous proce-
dures: implicit equations are made between the body and the accoutrements
around it (jewel boxes, dressing tables, mirrors) and implicit multiplications
erupt in which everything and anything can become potentially erotic, poten-
tially draped in underwear. What is enacted in general is a dynamic interrela-
tion between the clothed and the naked body, a sort of pictorial oscillation
between the two conditions that yields, ultimately, in a new erotic field of
meaning: the body in underwear, the body neither public nor absolutely pri-
vate. Generally, as Mario Pemiola has argued, eroticism functions as a "rela-
tionship between clothing and nudity" that is "conditional on the possibility
of movement-transit-from one state to the other." For Periola there are
two great erotic traditions in the West. On the one hand, there is an erotics
of undressing in which the veil is removed not because it is a "mere obstacle
SPRING 1991
356
Casey Finch
Figure 8. Edward Robert Hughes, Biancabella and Samaritana, Her Snake-Sister. 1894. Rpt. in The
Studio 4 (1895): 125.
VICTORIAN STUDIES
Figure 9. William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott. C. 1890. Courtesy of the Wadsworth
Atheneum: Hartford, Connecticut. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection.
SPRING 1991
358 Casey Finch
to seeing with the naked eye" but because it is "actually the condition that
makes vision possible." And on the other, there is an erotics of dressing in
which the body is articulated as a garment that makes corporeal and therefore
visible what would otherwise remain invisible. In both cases, the body's
"truth" is hiding even as it is uncovered, unveiled even as it is shrouded in
costume. An erotic transit is made "between the visible and the invisible, be-
tween clothing and what it covers" (237, 247-48, 242).
But in these nineteenth-century iconographies, on the contrary, the
naked and the clothed body are given a simultaneity that exists neither in an
erotics of undressing nor in an erotics of dressing. For within these images the
body is dressed and undressed at once, and the transit from one condition to
another never moves in a single direction. Even as the "truth" of the body
lies elsewhere (in the underwear it invisibly wears, in the nearby furniture, in
a mirror image) so the "truth" of its underclothes lies in the body itself (where
underwear's effect is so thoroughly internalized that it need not be repre-
sented as such). In such pictorial juxtapositions of the naked (or clothed)
body and the body in underwear, the age-old dialectic between the body and
its clothes is now collapsed, given the effect of a striptease, even if that strip-
tease often moves in reverse, draping the body in clothes that are not there.
In the late-Victorian period a suggestively erotic field of meaning thus re-
places what in the Renaissance had been a set of celebrations of the reproduc-
tive. The sexually hidden nature of meaning, a new erotic epistemology,
emerges; the experience of the uncanny is breached. What J.-K. Huysmans
in a different context calls "the sensation of exact strangeness, of the pre-
cisely right unseen" is unleashed (qtd. in Bemheimer 158). For it is the un-
seen that is crucial here; it is the unseen that marks the possibility of vision.
The new source of erotic energy is ultimately located in the body, to
be sure, as it had been in the Renaissance. 12 But now it is no longer limited
to the body; on the contrary, the erotic now manifests itself everywhere and
anywhere. It is as readily detectable on the surface of the skin as it is in the
interior architecture of a boudoir. Furniture, animals, tapestry looms-all are
charged with the intensity previously recognized only in and as the body.
Now a new tropology develops. Here underwear suggests a body that is not
there. There a body wears an invisible corset. Here a clothed woman sits in a
room filled with visually punned forms of underwear. There a juxtaposition is
fashioned that collapses the distinction between what is secret and what is
open. "Innocent" moments are dramatized and filled with meanings that lurk
beneath their surface; the very atmosphere is given an uncanny, erotic glow.
Truth in general is now a function of something not explicitly stated, some-
thing missing, something elsewhere. Spaces previously articulated as "merely"
domestic, "merely" economic, or "merely" recreational, have become uncon-
sciously eroticized. The world's meaning now lies at once hidden beneath the
VICTORIAN STUDIES
surface of the flesh itself and dispersed everywhere and anywhere within the
social sphere.
For what is operative in these images of the female body and its under-
clothes is the evocation of a world everywhere haunted by a generally erotic
system of signs rather than a specifically reproductive "truth." Where the fe-
male body in the pre-modem period had been ideologized, for instance, as a
corporeal and "natural" source of abundance, now it became an elusive
source of signs that could be generated potentially anywhere in the social
space. 13 And though these signs ultimately pointed back to the body which
was their meaning as well as their source, their telos as well as their origin,
they nevertheless left a glowing, erotic residue on the objects they occupied.
There occurred indeed a proliferation of fetish objects-fragments, tropes,
echoes, simulacra-saturating social and pictorial space even as they hung
on the very borders of the visible order of things. Just as the body that in the
Renaissance had been fashioned as a corporeal source and center of abun-
dance was transformed in the Victorian period into a body articulated as an
elusive site of dispersed significations, so in pictorial systems the locus of
truth moved from the center to the periphery of the visual field. Just as,
within somatic technologies, the belly-centered, reproductive "essence" of
femininity was replaced by the hourglass shape as the cultural ideal, so,
within visual technologies, meaning, which had been located at the very
center of the illustrated space, was now scattered within that field. What had
been constructed as a single, unified, and central denotation now was con-
structed as a fragmented, multiform, and peripheral set of connotations.
Rather than revealing frankly and forcefully its sexual "essence," as in the
Renaissance, truth now became covert: a secret, like underwear, only myste-
riously connected with and buried beneath the accoutrements of the cultural
environment. A genuinely modem and illicit form of secrecy had emerged.
Yet the "secret," paradoxically enough, was not only out; it was every-
where brazenly figured and reiterated (see Miller ch. 6). As we know from the
images that attempted to come to terms with the new relation of the body
and its underclothes, the "secret" of the generally erotic nature of things was
in fact no secret at all but always already a part of common knowledge, a
nominally precious commodity hardly recognized as such because it was every-
where available for the asking. In the pictorial strategies that figured the
female body as their special domain, a newly sexualized psychic interiority-
whose metaphor is nakedness-is created as a private, supposedly inviolable
space which is nevertheless evidently ranged under the gaze of public scrutiny
and therefore answerable to the new forms of knowledge that surround it.
And simultaneously, personal exteriority-whose metaphor is clothing-is
articulated as a condition of transparency that naturally (and indeed invit-
SPRING 1991
360 Casey Finch
ingly) always grants knowledge entrance. No doubt the metaphor for this im-
possible oscillation between the "truth" of the interior and the "truth" of the
exterior is underwear itself, a term which in the pre-modem period might
have been an oxymoron (because what was under clothes was nakedness and
not something worn) but which by the end of the Victorian period had be-
come emphatically redundant (because now it goes without saying that just
beneath clothing, and just beneath the surface of the social environment, lies
another kind of garment).
New York University
NOTES
I would like to thank Peter Bowen, Perry Meisel, Pamela Nicely, James Schamus, Martina
Sciolino, and, especially, Jeffrey Spear for their generous help and intelligent remarks on this pa-
per.
1As we know from recent scholarship, strictly speaking there is neither heterosexuality nor,
for that matter, homosexuality before the modem period. I use the anachronistic term merely as
a shorthand for male, opposite-sex desire, with which this article is exclusively concerned.
21 do not mean to suggest, of course, that either Donne or the Renaissance as a whole privi-
leged naked corporeality at the expense of an eroticized appreciation for clothing. What is more,
Renaissance nudity is not always a sign of corporeality; often it signalled spirituality, sublimated
emotion, or an allegorical (and sometimes even Platonic) abstraction. I use this poem merely as
an example of one-very dominant-mode of pre-modem sexuality in which a supposedly
unmediated experience of the flesh was idealized.
3For a general background, see also Foucault, Discipline; Greenblatt; Scarry; Gallagher and
Laqueur; Poovey; Crary et al.; Veeser; Cohen.
4In a provocative debate, Helene E. Roberts rehearses the conventional wisdom that tight-
lacing constituted a patriarchal technology designed to oppress women. For Roberts, "condition-
ing in childhood, physical dependence, the ideal of masochistic submission and discipline, and
pride in moral rectitude" (565) all combined as pressures on women "to conform to the submis-
sive ideal" (564) of the hourglass shape. Corsets "helped mold female behavior to the role of the
'exquisite slave' " (557). But David Kunzle, in a response to Roberts, paints a portrait of the re-
formers who excoriated tight-lacing as a group of "generally autocratic males with a low opinion
of the female sex and an attachment to the concept of the 'natural woman,' that is, one dedi-
cated to home and children" (570). For Kunzle, reformers used "the 'fashion' of tight-lacing to
damn the sex as a whole. It was not, as Roberts states, the uncorseted woman who was 'in danger
of being accused of loose morals' so much as the tight-laced one, whose practice was, on occa-
sion, darkly linked to prostitution" (572). Kunzle refers to a number of letters to the editor in the
Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in which corseted "women openly admit to experiencing
'delightful. . . sensations,' thus defying and in a way justifying the puritanical fury of their oppo-
nents" (573). Moreover, according to Kunzle, "very few serious feminists spent much time
denouncing the corset" (575); and one in particular, Lydia Becker, editor of Women's Suffrage
Journal, apostrophized to her readers in 1888: "Stick to your stays, ladies, and triumph over the
other sex" (575). Kunzle's point is both misleading and well taken. It is misleading because, as
Elizabeth Wilson suggests, Kunzle "downplay[s] the real discomfort and even danger of the prac-
tice," and because the rational dress movement-which denounced tight-lacing-was indeed a
serious and significant phenomenon. It is well taken because, as Wilson has it, Kunzle is "right to
challenge the simplistic equation of fetishized fashions with women's subordination" (99).
VICTORIAN STUDIES
5American bloomers-a "slightly flaring skirt which reached well below the knees" beneath
which were visible "baggy, Turkish style trousers reaching to the ankle"-did not enjoy great
popularity in England, where, indeed, they were sometimes considered scandalous (Ewing 64).
To be sure, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century (when the tubular silhouette held
sway), slim, clinging "undertrousers" often replaced petticoats as the foundation for women's en-
sembles (see Foster 31, 34). In general, however, pant-like constructions as undergar-
ments-drawers, pantaloons, bloomers, and other prototypes of modem "panties"-came very
late to English female fashion. Introduced in France around the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury, such constructins did not become truly popular in England until the turn of the century,
with the advent of sportswear for women. See Ewing 60ff.
6As this quotation suggests, the corset, crinoline, and bustle received scathing ridicule from a
wide array of commentators-an unlikely coalition of male doctors, factory owners, conserva-
tive satirists, and feminists genuinely concerned for women's health. The corset in particular was
excoriated. Medical men published innumerable caveats against the "fatal stays" (Nineteenth An-
nual Report 194). Andrew Combe, in his 1860 Principles of Physiology, mentioned a report of girls
in a finishing school who had been "made crooked in their spines and pallid, sallow, and listless
in their manner" by corseting (qtd. in Roberts 560); and an issue of the Englishwoman's Domestic
Magazine of 1867 claimed that 20,000 women annually were injured in one way or another by
tightly laced corsets.
7 In the 1920s and late 1960s, of course, the vertical, tubular shape came very briefly to domi-
nate the fashionable imagination. But in both cases it was rapidly superseded by the return of the
sometimes more, sometimes less "voluptuous" hourglass shape, and never again held anything
like the twenty-year reign it enjoyed at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
8Certainly, the immediate reason Victorian advertisements depicted underwear floating in a
void was the taboo-until very recently still in place in American culture (recall the floating
underwear in the cross-your-heart bra commercials)-against representing women, or men for
that matter, in underwear. Nevertheless, I would claim, these images at the same time suggest,
trope, and echo the female body in such a way as to emphasize rather than repress its presence
and meaning. It is this feature that links them to other pictorial strategies-in high art for in-
stance-that I will be exploring before the end of the paper.
9A related cluster of images-ranging from scientific drawings to popular engravings-un-
derscores the extent to which these articulations of women in invisible underwear involved not
only misogynistic but racist ideologies. Sander Gilman has investigated a pair of nineteenth-cen-
tury iconologies-one concerned with European prostitutes and one with African (in particular
so-called Hottentot) women-that exhibited deep affiliations with one another. Pruriently de-
picting Hottentot women and steatopygic prostitutes with exaggerated, oversized buttocks, these
paired clusters of images reflect the very Victorian fascination with the female posterior that
manifested itself so palpably in the bustle (which of course is naturalized in these images as a part
of the anatomy). Together these iconologies demonstrate how the "perception of the prostitute
in the late nineteenth century . . merged with the perception of the black [woman]" (Gilman
229). For both the European prostitute and the African woman, it turned out, were given to un-
bridled, indeed pathological, sexuality; both were supposedly responsible for the spread of vene-
real disease (an obsessive concern of nineteenth-century medicine); both were anatomically and
characteristically primitive; and both, pertinently for our purposes, had huge posteriors.
0lYet "invisible" underwear palpably manifested itself, for instance, in the Victorian (cult of
the) fainting, neurasthenic woman, who suffered from the innumerable corset-related illnesses
which D. Edgar Flinn summed up in 1886 as a "general sense of languor and fatigue" (23). In the
real as well as the pictorial spaces of Victorian England, underwear left its trace, permanently if
invisibly, on the body itself.
1 Dijkstra catalogues a vast array of images from the high art of the period depicting women
reflected in, and often staring into, what he calls the Mirror of Venus. He comments: "Vanity,
self-absorption, the reflected qualities of woman's moonlike existence, her passivity, her imita-
tiveness-all these themes came relentlessly into play in the woman-and-her-mirror theme"
(135). As we shall see, in the fashion plates, too, the mirror not only conveyed more informa-
SPRING 1991
362 Casey Finch
tion about the garment in question than a mere frontal representation; it also connoted the
woman's inwardness and private "truth."
12 Again, I am relying on recent studies of the history of the body. An analogy might be drawn
here between the sexual body and the body of the condemned man in the Renaissance as it is
discussed by Foucault. For just as the body of the condemned man in the Renaissance was "the
major target of penal repression," the site upon which power asserted itself, so the sexual body in
the Renaissance operated as the source and telos of desire (Discipline 8).
13One is reminded, again, of Foucault's point in Discipline and Punish that whereas in the
Renaissance sovereign power tended to limit its symbolic assertions to the body of the con-
demned man, in the modem period somatic power came to operate everywhere: in medicine,
law, novel reading, hygiene, fashion, psychology, gossip, mercantilism, sex.
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Hooked and Buttoned Together Victorian Underwear and Representations of The Female Body

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"Hooked and Buttoned Together": Victorian Underwear and Representations of the Female

"HOOKED AND BUTTONED

loved, meets a strange young woman in a torrential rainstorm. He assists her

tem of discipline. It was articulated not as an object upon which power

Specifically, what emerges in late nineteenth-century England is a

In fact, attending (or generating) what Peter Brooks has recently

Meanwhile, the new forms of underwear doubtless operated both as

RADIAING SDE STEEL

BrUIBThZND, APRIL 4'n. -I..

Th*t ove tfh >b

Figure 3. Crinoline Advertisement, The Wallace Company. 1866.

more "respectable" citizens. Then as now, as Mariana Valverde has argued,

Here the crinoline is articulated (disapprovingly) as a hybrid form, a kind of ghastly

The third important development in Victorian underwear was the

There is, for example, especially in late nineteenth-century popular

manner entirely superseding all other attempts at producing a thoroughly fle-

Figure 5. Silk Tricot Corset Advertisement, London Corset Company. 1904.

Victorian phenomenon in which the domestic space itself is eroticized, here

With the strategy of the counterimage, the visions of underwear float-

New York University

Cunnington, C. Willett. The History of Underclothes. London: Michael Joseph, 1951.

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