At the Mercy of Their Clothes by Marshik Celia;

Author:Marshik, Celia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004120, Literary Criticism/European/English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, HIS016000, History/Historiography
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 3.6 Celebrants at the “Alice in Wonderland” party, January 1930. It is possible that Virginia Woolf is standing next to Leonard at the left, but it is difficult to be certain. (Vanessa Bell [1879–1961], Bell Album 5, p. 24 A15. © Tate, London 2015)

Like her earlier costumes, which had allowed Woolf to put on a new role for a night, her fancy dress—“a hare…and mad at that”—left her “encouraged by the extravaganza.”87 As she wrote to Clive Bell, she “turned…and tapped Dotty on the nose” and complained that “she flared up like a costermonger; damned my eyes;…; and swore that I had wiped all the powder from her face.”88 Dorothy Wellesley’s costume is not identified in Woolf’s letter, but it obviously did not cover her face, as she wore standard makeup with it. Her reaction to Woolf’s gesture suggests that she shared Morrell’s standards for fancy dress, which she regarded as enhancing, not mocking or ironizing, female beauty. March hares were not compatible with these criteria.

Throughout the 1930s, Woolf continued to enjoy the play with identity that fancy dress afforded.89 As she would write of a costume party held in 1939, fancy dress offered “a kind of liberation…, tipsiness & abandonment at not being one’s usual self.”90 This personal experience with fancy dress doubtless informed Woolf’s increasingly radical approach to character, which surfaces in Orlando’s suggestion that there may not be a “self” under a costume—that costume and self are one. While scholars have noted that Woolf’s fantastical “biography” provides a literary example of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance,91 I argue that Woolf’s novel depicts identity itself as a performance. By means of fancy dress, Woolf came to see selfhood as assembled by the cooperation of person and material objects: Orlando argues that selves are multiple and dependent on what one wears.

Of course, this isn’t to say that Woolf regarded all fancy dress as liberatory. Her novel Jacob’s Room uses costume to highlight the difference between the educational and economic status of men and women. As the impoverished and lovelorn Fanny Elmer struggles to make sense of Tom Jones, she muses, “There is something…about books which if I had been educated I could have liked—much better than ear-rings and flowers, she sighed, thinking of the corridors at the Slade and the fancy-dress dance next week. She had nothing to wear.”92 Elmer’s inability to appreciate Henry Fielding’s novel—or her inability to like it better than fancy dress—rests squarely on her inadequate learning, and Woolf aligns women with the pleasures of costumes and men with the benefits of higher learning throughout this section of the novel. Although Jacob Flanders, the novel’s protagonist and Elmer’s love interest, briefly goes along with plans for the fancy-dress ball, “and though he looked terrible and magnificent and would chuck the Forest, he said, and come to the Slade, and be a Turkish knight or a Roman emperor (and he let her blacken his lips and clenched his teeth and scowled in the glass), still—there lay Tom Jones.

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