Consumptive Chic by Carolyn A. Day

Author:Carolyn A. Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350009400
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.6 Innocence is the Best White Paint. The Lady’s Toilet c.1845. Waddleton.e.9.628, Cambridge University Library.

Ironically the disease also furnished one symptom that demanded the use of pretense and trickery. It was believed that during the course of tubercular illness, “The hair loses its strength, so that it cannot be kept in order as before. You observe this particularly in females. There appears to be a softness of the hair, which will not allow it to remain in the way in which it has been placed.124 These sorts of deficiencies were mitigated through a combination of less intricate hairdressing and augmentation by hairpieces. The elaborate large coiffures, like the Apollo knot typical of the Romantic style of the 1830s, were supplanted by a softer sentimental style in which the hair typically parted down the middle, framed the face with a cluster of ringlets, or was held back in a soft knot or bun at the rear. Nevertheless, false means were resorted to in an effort to make up for the deficiencies created by disease, as the ringlets that framed the countenance were often not genuine, but rather composed from artificial clusters of hair attached to hidden bands. Thus, hairpieces were used to provide the look of simplicity and artless charm.

The cultural expectations that surrounded consumption were articulated in literature, medical treatises, and those works concerned with defining fashion and the female role, all of which overflowed with examples that connected the disease to beauty. These works reveal a shared consciousness that tuberculosis was indeed attractive and, as a result, contemporary patterns of representation were modeled upon this precept. Despite these positive representations, the hallmarks of tubercular beauty all told “The direful tale of an enemy at work within; not the less dangerous because decking his intended prey with delusive and dangerous attractions.” Consumption, then, was a “death adorned in the brilliant masquerade garb of beauty.125

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