Dressing for England: fashion and nationalism in victorian novels

摘要

Victorian women were not merely the symbols of nation nineteenth-centuryimagery would suggest in an era marked by the images of Queen Victoria and thesymbolic representation of Britannia. They also were producers, maintainers, and evenprotectors of England at a time when imperial anxiety and xenophobic fears called thedefinition of Englishness into question. Dress, particularly fashionable dress, often wasviewed as a feminine weakness in Victorian England. At the same time women werechastised for their attentions to the details of their clothing, they also were instructed tooffer a pretty and neat presentation publicly and privately. Novels by George Eliot,Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, and H. G. Wells and manners and conduct textsby such authors as Sarah Stickney Ellis, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Margaret Oliphantdemonstrate how Victorian women used fashion and dress to redefine and manipulatethe socially accepted understanding of traditional English womanhood and tocommunicate national ideologies and concerns without violating or transgressingcompletely the more passive construction of Victorian femininity. By declaring their nationality through the public display that is fashion?dressdesignated by its appeal to a sophisticated, cultured, and perhaps continental society?these fictional and non-fictional women legitimized the demand for female access tosocial and cultural spheres as well as to the political sphere. Through an examination ofthe material culture of Victorian England?personal letters about the role of specificdress in Suffragette demonstrations, or the Indian shawl, for example?alongside anexamination of the literary texts of the period, ?Dressing for England? argues that thenovels of the nineteenth century and that century?s ephemera reveal its social concerns,its political crises, and the fabric of its everyday domesticity at the same time they revealthe active and intimate participation of Victorian women in the establishment andmaintenance of nation.