Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion by Parkins Ilya;Sheehan Elizabeth M.;Felski Rita; & Elizabeth M. Sheehan

Author:Parkins, Ilya;Sheehan, Elizabeth M.;Felski, Rita; & Elizabeth M. Sheehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Hampshire Press

While Mrs. Linton draws attention to the inadequacy of the visual as a method of determining meaning, her article expresses further anxieties about visuality and feminine visibility. Perhaps more problematic than the apparent likeness between “respectable” women and prostitutes is the possibility that, through the reciprocal transaction of viewing, the female gaze itself could be corrupted. For according to Mrs. Linton, the perfect imitation of the dress of the demimondaine depends upon an exchange of glances between the lady and the prostitute. She writes, “Our modest matrons meet,” not “to stare the strumpet down,” but “to compare notes, to get hints, and to engage in a kind of friendly rivalry—in short, to pay that homage to Vice, and in a very direct way too, which Vice is said formerly to have paid to Virtue.”48 In this way, the female observer misuses her power, using her eyes not to morally defeat the courtesan, but instead to engage her in solidarity by means of a shared, expressive stare. As a result of this, Mrs. Linton identifies a growing, uncomfortable similarity between “Vice” and “Virtue,” as the process of sartorial imitation might encourage, excuse, or normalize “fast” or sexually daring conduct. What emerges is a sense of fear that, as Valerie Steele has argued, “not only might girls and women be taken for what they were not, but their actual behavior and character might also denigrate.”49 Too insistent an interrogation of modern clothing might not only betray the “deception” of a woman affecting a different social role, but may also reveal the vulnerability of existing systems of visual signification and classification, as traditionally understood social and moral boundaries became increasingly complex and unstable.

Despite Mrs. Linton’s fears, a postscriptum of hope for the “modern” woman is presented in the writings of Mrs. Lucia Gilbert Calhoun, an American journalist who responded to the “Girl of the Period” articles with a work entitled Modern Women and What is Said of Them in 1868. Although Mrs. Calhoun unequivocally claims that “[s]omething, clearly, is wrong with fashionable women,” who “find in extravagance of living and a vulgar costliness of dress their only expression of a vague desire for the beauty and elegance of life,”50 she does not perceive the situation as a hopeless one. Rather, we are told that she has encountered some “very fashionable girls capable of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine voice,” but who “have she suggests that these ladies need “only to be taught that there is something better than being very fashionable” (22). She emphasizes, however, that fashionability is not necessarily incompatible with other worthy personal qualities, observing that she has “found very fashionable girls capable of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine voice” (22). Such assertions present a wryly progressive perspective on the modern woman that neither depends upon past models of femininity, nor condemns her on the basis of her visual appearance. This view circumvents traditional alignments between “fashionable” and “fast.”

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