Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction

Literacy, Textiles, and Activism

Christine Bayles Kortsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317147992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers. Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.

Chapter 1
Writing in Fabric, Working in Print

Tucked into a lonely corner of the Textile Room at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a sampler hangs. Quite a few samplers dot the walls, but this one is unique. It is made of plain white linen, worked in scarlet silk. No flowers, no alphabets, no Bible verses or birthdates mark this sampler. Instead, only words cross-stitched in block print without indentation, border, or any other decoration. The first line begins, “As I cannot write I put this down freely and simply as I might speak to a person to whose intimacy and tenderness I can fully intrust myself and who I know will bear with all weaknesses.”1 The creator, Elizabeth Parker of Ashburnham, Sussex, goes on to tell the story of her life. The daughter of a day laborer and a teacher, she entered domestic service at 13 years of age and was so mistreated by various employers that she tried to commit suicide. The sampler reads like a journal entry, a prayerful entreaty to God for mercy and sustenance. Eerily, the words break off in the middle of the canvas, in mid-sentence and without closing punctuation: “Oh, God, what will become of my soul.” Blank space follows this last line.

The red thread with which Parker stitched her tragic story finds an echo in what we might consider an unlikely location. Olive Schreiner, the so-called first New Woman writer, began writing her first novel, From Man to Man, in 1873. (It was published posthumously in 1926.) In one scene in Schreiner’s novel, sewing serves as a metaphor for women’s inability to express themselves in the public world. Describing the tragedy of one of her heroines, Bertie, Schreiner’s narrator explains that while men have pens with which to express ideas and circulate knowledge, women must limp along with needles: “In that torn bit of brown leather brace worked through and through with yellow silk ... lies all the passion of some woman’s soul finding voiceless expression. Has the pen or the pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human race as the needle?”2 The brutality of Schreiner’s image—of the needle stained with blood—suggests that sewing not only limits women, it destroys them. The needle may allow women to express their creativity and ambition, but it creates a type of writing the masculine world cannot decipher, and most often ignores. Yet contrary to what her needle image might imply, elsewhere in the novel and in her other works, Schreiner figures sewing as a creative, imaginative activity. Her protagonists Bertie and Rebekah use sewing for a variety of purposes, including reflection, creativity, effective communication, and financial freedom. For Schreiner’s reader, understanding the language of the needle—of sewing and dress—proves to be a pre-requisite for understanding the novel itself, including its radical call for women’s solidarity and intellectual freedom.

Looking at these two cultural artifacts side by side—Elizabeth Parker’s uncanny sampler and the contradictory portrait of sewing in Schreiner’s novel From Man to Man—provokes important questions. What is the relationship between writing in cloth and writing in print? How did Victorian women understand and negotiate the relationship between stitching and writing, and how did they represent and utilize it? Parker’s sampler and Schreiner’s novel suggest that the best way to address this question is through the idea of dual literacy—a phenomenon which is rooted, I suggest, in the merged issues of women’s education, labor, artistry, and activism.

Perhaps it is to be expected that a feminist such as Olive Schreiner would criticize sewing and dress as a symptom of female oppression. Yet what is surprising and equally important is the fact that Schreiner, along with contemporary women writers—New Woman, popular, and socialist writers alike—also validated women’s literacy in dress culture as a form of feminine knowledge, creativity, and power.

Multiple Literacies, Dual Literacy

Elizabeth Parker’s sampler haunts this project. The label text beside it informs the viewer that the sampler, dated sometime after 1830, has mystified and intrigued many people. Historian Maureen Daly Goggin has discovered that despite her painful adolescence, Parker became a teacher and lived in Ashburnham until her death in 1889 at the age of 76.3 Although the sampler certainly evokes sympathy and curiosity, it also highlights something that has become the focus of my project: Why is it that a woman stitching together letters, words, and sentences would begin her meditation with the apology, “As I cannot write”? Isn’t it perfectly obvious that she can write, since she writes those very words, albeit in thread and not ink?

Surely one reason why Parker asserts her inability to write is humility. “As I cannot write” might mean, “Since I cannot write well or with grace and style.” Parker’s use of the word “writing” could imply polished exposition or literary style; as a working-class girl, she would have been hesitant to claim the skill of writing, a skill associated, in the early nineteenth century, with men and with the upper classes. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers made similar apologies for their fictional work, claiming that they had to write out of poverty or that writing never interfered with their domestic and familial duties. Writerly evasion and modesty allowed women writers to preserve their respectability while yet pursuing their artistic and professional ambitions.4 Even today, some writers, particularly women or those of the working classes, stipple their work with these kinds of defensive maneuvers.

There may be a more mundane reason for this phrase and the sampler it begins. Perhaps Parker did not have the materials necessary for writing—pen, paper, ink. In the 1830s, these items would have been expensive for a domestic servant.5 In working-class schools, such as the Apprentice House school for millworkers at the Quarry Bank Mill, established outside Manchester in 1784, slates or sand trays were often used for writing instruction. Paper, pens, and ink were reserved for the highest levels of male students.6

Even if Parker did have access to writing materials, in the 1830s, girls were rarely educated beyond basic writing.7 As we will see, many working-class girls received no formal education at all; those that did were taught, like girls of the middle and upper classes, what historian Lawrence Cremin calls “inert literacy,” the ability to read, memorize, or recite others’ ideas, but not to formulate their own.8 As linguistic anthropologists James Collins and Richard Blot explain, “Women might read, listen, be lectured to, but were not to participate in public in speech or in print.”9

Could it be that the writing to which Parker refers is a different kind of writing, one accomplished with a needle and not with a pen? Parker does in fact “participate in speech and print,” albeit it through a different kind of text and for a private purpose rather than a public one. Defying the nineteenth-century prejudice against working-class women’s writing, she used the feminine art of needlework to communicate an active, not an inert, literacy. Parker’s disclaimer, “As I cannot write,” at once draws a distinction between and conflates the acts of stitching letters and writing them, the execution of expert embroidery and that of sophisticated writing.

In educational theory and practice today, the term “dual literacy” is closely linked with bilingual instruction, or pedagogies that provide simultaneous training in two languages. A bilingual classroom, for example, might offer equal instruction time in both English and Spanish. In a similar way, Victorian girls learned to be dually literate in two languages—the language of cloth and the language of print. Yet in the context of this study, the meaning of dual literacy is quite different, for it calls into question the definition of a text. The comparison is more akin to the relationship between sign language and English. The idea is the same—synchronized instruction in two languages—but the languages rely on distinct means and methods of communication.

James Collins and Richard Blot ask that we revise our understanding of the term “literacy.” Rather than relying on “presumed dichotomies such as literate versus illiterate, written versus spoken, educated versus uneducated, and modern versus traditional,” we need to recognize that “there is no single literacy, instead a multiplicity of practices and values that get the same label. Indeed, the label ‘literacy’ can be and is extended to areas that have no or little connection to text, or at least to processes of decoding entextualized information.”10 This study relies on the belief that, in the nineteenth century, sewing and interpreting textiles functioned as one of the “multiple literacies” Collins and Blot describe (4). But because Dress Culture focuses more narrowly on the relationship between women’s literacy in print and their literacy in textiles, throughout this study, I will use the term “dual literacy” rather than “multiple literacy.”

Victorian women of all classes were expected to exercise literacy in what I call “dress culture”—that is, the interrelated skills of constructing and interpreting cloth and household textiles. By “dress culture” I mean any activity that includes not only the wearing, producing, purchasing, or embellishing of clothing and textiles, but also the regulating and interpreting of both women’s and men’s garments.

In The Woman Reader, Kate Flint examines how women writers and readers utilized “alternative discursive systems,” as well as “traditionally masculine structures of knowledge.”11 When we consider that women of all classes were expected to be literate in the language of cloth, a material culture with its own history, values, and concerns, it becomes clear that women’s fluency in dress culture further complicates the dynamic Flint erects between mainstream and alternative discursive systems. I aim to illustrate that literacy in dress culture was specifically gendered as a type of feminine knowledge in Victorian social practice. This meant that it could be utilized as an alternative to mainstream, patriarchal discourse. It could offer women a private language and culture, understood to be traditionally feminine. Yet at the same time, this knowledge was sanctioned, indeed mandated, by mainstream Victorian society. Mary Poovey has illustrated that proper womanhood was defined by patriarchal norms and expectations.12 Among other things, femininity required fluency in reading fabric. Thus literacy in dress culture could function simultaneously as an alternative discourse and a traditional one. The elasticity of this form of women’s knowledge enabled needleworkers and writers, such as Elizabeth Parker and Olive Schreiner, to turn it to a variety of ends. Refusing merely to recite others’ ideas, they wrote professionally, crafting their own autobiographies and fictions. Yet even as they did so, women writers—even at the fin de siècle—utilized two kinds of literacy, literacy in fabric (sewing and interpreting dress) and literacy in print (reading and writing).

Reading, Writing, and Sewing

In Charlotte Brontë’s influential novel, Jane Eyre (1847), Jane sets out to teach rural female schoolchildren the most rudimentary of skills: reading, writing, and sewing.13 Even into the latter decades of the Victorian period, women’s education—across class boundaries—stressed dual literacy. Victorian boys, depending on their class position and choice of trade or employment, could gain fluency in a variety of lexicons. By contrast, the educational experiences and professional opportunities of Victorian girls of all classes were more both more limited and more uniform. Girls of all classes were expected to know how to read and sew, and increasingly, how to write. These skills were considered the foundation of a girl’s education; if she learned nothing else, she would at least learn sewing and a little reading. As Eliza Farrar commented in 1837, in The Young Lady’s Friend, “A woman who does not know how to sew is as deficient in her education as a man who cannot write.”14

This is not to imply, of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Writing in Fabric, Working in Print
• 2 The Needle Dipped in Blood
• 3 Fashioning Women: The Victorian Corset
• 4 Art’s Labor Lost: Haunting the Dress Shop
• 5 Beautiful Revolution: New Women Sew a New World
• Afterword: Ode to a Dishrag
• Bibliography
• Index