Victorian Secrets

by Sarah A. Chrisman

  “No underwire!” Gabriel beamed.

  It did have that going for it. Even if the bullet-style, 1950s bra looked a little absurd over my emerald brocaded corset, it did increase the comfort level. It would fulfill its function until I could find something better—and I had my sights set beyond bras.

  I had been discussing the idea of a custom corset with Gabriel since I had realized how much I enjoyed wearing stays. After just a month with my second off-the-rack corset, it (like the first) could now close completely in the back, and I sensed my waist could still be smaller. The bloggers on the websites I had been reading discussed the superiority and comfort of custom-made models, and I was drawn by the idea of a figure that would be made to my own form, a lovely thing of silk-satin with custom contours that would compliment while they complemented.

  Biflex “Angle-Action” bra box.

  Back of a trade card advertising Ball8217;s corsets.

  The thing stopping me was the price. In books and old advertisements, I gazed at the corset costs of yesteryear, jealous of shoppers a generous century previous. Prices were listed from pence to guineas, but never more than ten pounds sterling. When prices were in American currency, the standard was about the equivalent of the contemporary price of five dozen eggs.

  If only . . .

  There was a single store in Seattle that sold custom-made corsets. Gabriel took me there and we pored over the design styles, fitting their various options against the ideal corset in my mind, growing giddy with excitement. When they quoted me a price for their lovely figures, though, I despaired. It was nearly a month’s rent.

  Later, I quoted the price and shook my head, pacing beside Gabriel in the Northgate Mall. In rainy weather, the mall was our go-to place—to walk, though, never to buy. We were both students at this time, but even when not in sway to the various restrictions that academic life places on finances, my husband and I are very particular about how we spend our money. There are any number of adjectives, from the proud to the pejorative, that I might use to describe our attitudes toward finances, but I will admit they are a bit unusual for early twenty-first-century Americans. Gabriel will happily scrimp and completely avoid many expenses that a lot of people might consider essential, then gleefully splurge on an item or activity he considers worthy. (He terms this “budgeting the luxuries first,” a description he borrowed from Robert A. Heinlein’s book, Time Enough For Love.) My own innate tendency is to avoid spending money at all, if possible. (It is probably fair to trace this characteristic to my Depression-era grandmother, who helped raise me.) Fairly early in our marriage, Gabriel had come home one day and found me cleaning the floor with a homemade mop that I had created by attaching some old rags to a bamboo gardening stake rather than purchasing a cheap mop from the store. He expressed his hearty approval of my frugality, then bought me opal earrings for Christmas.

  Discussion about the cost of a customized corset brought up the same dichotomy of attitudes. “I just can’t justify that,” I said, referring once again to the price. I shook my head sadly, the lovely picture in my head of my perfect corset fluttering away on swansdown wings.

  “You would get a lot of use out of it, though,” Gabriel pointed out. “Think about it: it’s something that would last for years, and you’d be wearing it every day. This is something that’s meant to become a part of you, after a while.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” I shook my head. The price was unbelievable. “You’re talking to someone whose mom used to borrow my piggy-bank money to buy groceries when I was a kid. I just can’t justify spending that much on something frivolous.”

  “It’s not frivolous!” Gabriel told me. “It’s necessary!”

  I laughed at that.

  “Budget the luxuries first!” he quoted. My husband grinned and squeezed my hand as we walked. “You’ve come as far as you can with the off-the-rack corsets, and this one will be too big soon.”

  I nodded. I had it only a month, but the green corset, like its blue-roses predecessor, was rapidly outsizing my shrinking waist.

  “And just think how comfortable it would be!” Gabriel continued. He kissed my hand. “It’s not frivolous. Like I said, it’s something you’ll be wearing every day. It’s worth it to have you comfortable and beautiful.”

  I blushed.

  “In the end, though, it’s up to you,” he concluded.

  We walked in silence for a while, pondering. It wasn’t the first time we’d had this same conversation. I had fallen in love with those curvy, silken images, but this was so much money. And yet . . .

  As we passed by a bustling coffee stand, I looked at the crowd of people seated nearby, sipping their lattes. The prices on the menu ranged between three and five dollars—more for extras like whipped cream and flavored syrup. “I guess, if someone bought one three-dollar latte every day—”

  “Lots of people do that,” Gabriel agreed. “Heck, that’s the low end. Around here, plenty of people buy a couple coffee drinks a day.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded, trying to be discreet as I watched a barista totaling a customer’s order—a very standard one, for Seattle: a twenty-ounce Frappuccino, plus one pastry. It came to over six dollars.

  “But let’s just say a person spent three dollars a day on coffee.”

  “Most people do that,” Gabriel agreed.

  “Over the course of a month,” I calculated, “that’s around ninety dollars. Times twelve for a year . . .” I cocked my head. “That’s more than the corset would cost, right there.”

  “Right,” Gabriel nodded. “And you don’t drink coffee.”

  Hardly ever, anyway. “And I don’t have a cell phone14 —”

  “—which are expensive,” Gabriel agreed.

  “And I don’t drive. How much do you suppose most Americans spend on gas alone?”

  “Just on gas?” Gabriel shrugged and shook his head. “Tons. Plus with a car, there’s car payments, insurance, repairs . . .”

  “But I ride my bike everywhere.”

  People often tell me I’m crazy for never even applying for a learner’s permit. I often think they’re crazy when I hear about the tally of their auto bills.

  “Hmm . . .”

  “Think about it,” Gabriel urged. “You’ve got to spend money on yourself sometimes.” He squeezed my hand. “In the end, though, it’s your decision.”

  The debate went on in my mind. My thoughts filled with swansdown and silk-satin, and I pored over ads old and new, coveting the images. I dreamed and I saved, and the borders of my notebooks filled with sketches of corsets.

  Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s “High Grade Special Corset”: $1.25.

  6

  A Museum Visit

  Victorian fashion plate.

  After meeting the costume group who had been playing tourist in Port Townsend, we were added to their emailing list and announcements came to us of various events. Many of these we declined for reasons of cost or practicality; even when these events were free, they tended to be fairly remote. For May, though, an invitation was issued that would have been difficult to refuse: they were holding high tea in a Victorian mansion, and Ellen was offering us a ride.

  Ellen was the tall, ebullient matron from the group who had clasped us to her bosom at first meeting. Even in the confines of a compact car, she seemed to be perpetually projecting her booming voice over an unseen audience. At times it was difficult to tell whether she was addressing her immediate companions or the blinking Bluetooth device that she never removed from her ear. Jammed into her auditory canal, this plastic anachronism flashed a steady pattern of garish, digital blue against the several pounds of ostrich feathers glued to her hat.

  Throughout the long ride to the mansion, Gabriel and I both squirmed uncomfortably in Ellen’s backseat. For reasons known only to the car’s designer, it had been made with the seat angled forward, the seat and its back forming a distinct V-shape. It seemed calculatedly designed to force its occupant into a slouch.

  “Enjo
y those seats!” Ellen boomed, smiling at us in the rearview mirror. “This car is so comfortable!”

  Maybe for Quasimodo.

  The only way for a human body to fit into those seats was to fold itself into the shape of a hunchbacked primate. Gabriel and I had both been practicing proper posture for months and neither of us wanted to slouch, but more than that, we couldn’t. My corset wouldn’t let me, and Gabriel’s fitted Victorian suit was every bit as restrictive. In the proper circumstances, both these garments were wonderfully supportive, but this context was about as proper as a cave.

  At some point in the very long drive, the subject of corsets came up. “Fine for the women who had everything done for them!” Ellen boomed. “The ones who didn’t have to work. It’s not like you can scrub a floor in a corset!”

  I opened my mouth to tell her of my research, of the photos I’d seen of corsets marketed specifically toward servants, the nineteenth-century citations in Valerie Steele’s book15 of men complaining that they couldn’t tell the servants from the mistresses anymore because their figures all looked alike. I wanted to tell her that I scrubbed my floor in my corset every week.

  “Actually—” I began.

  “And the men’s clothes!” She bowled over my protestations. “Men always have it so easy!”

  “Actually—” Gabriel tried to interrupt.

  We had discussed the matter so often, I knew exactly what he wanted to say. The men’s clothes were just as restrictive as the women’s. The suits were tailored specifically to hold the shoulders back in proper posture, and the trousers were tailored to stand, not to sit.

  “Coffee break!” Ellen cut off Gabriel’s interjection. She pulled into a drive-through Starbucks and ordered a venti drink with flavored syrup. “What do you guys want?” We gave each other frustrated looks and declined to order.

  We arrived at our destination too early for the scheduled tea. While Ellen searched for a parking spot, we asked to simply be dropped off on the small town’s main street and allowed to find our own way to the mansion. Free of the torturous seat, Gabriel and I stretched our backs and rolled our shoulders, glad to have regained the posture of Homo sapiens.

  We wandered through the town’s quaint shops. I smiled at sweet little temptations, but kept my purse firmly closed: I was saving for my custom corset. After exhausting the possibilities of window shopping, we strolled up the hill toward the advertised event. There were two museums on that hill: the quilt museum in a Victorian mansion, which we had come to see, and a more conventional, smaller museum. The latter was housed in a humbler, modern building and outlined the history of the area. We found that we were still early for the event at the first museum, so we meandered our way up the hill toward the second.

  The curator at the little museum was delighted to see us. (The museum was small enough that I think she would have been happy to see any visitors at all.) She listened with rapt attention as we explained the histories of our outfits, and told us we looked as though we should be in one of her displays. We enjoyed the compliment and gladly accepted her invitation to view the museum for free in exchange for a simple promise to tell more people to come visit.

  The museum was a standard format, but it was our favorite kind. There were no artifacts of great men involved, no prototypes of inventions that changed the world. It was simply a collection of small tokens of people’s everyday lives—not grandiose personages at whose words the earth shook, just simple people like us. They were born, did their duties, and cherished the happiness life gave them, and then departed, leaving these faint traces of themselves, now gathered here as reminders.

  Fashion plate from 1890 showing children’s clothes and toys.

  We lingered over the clothes they had worn and the dolls they had played with as children. An exhibit of wax cylinder recordings particularly caught our eyes. Gabriel had recently learned of a digitized collection of these early audio recordings, and we had been enjoying listening to downloaded versions of the songs whose original medium was now too fragile to be used. I peered at the thick wax cylinders, which had pre-dated phonograph records, the small metallic horns that had once conveyed music to rapt listeners. As we wandered through the museum and I watched my husband beside me in his fine clothes, the lines of a particularly favorite song played themselves in my mind:

  When I was the dandy, and you were the belle,

  We went out walking on Sundays

  I wore a tulip right in my lapel and you wore the bonnet with red roses on it

  Oh how proud and happy I used to be to have the crowd see you out walking with me,

  My dear

  When I was the dandy, and you were the belle,

  In those dear old sweetheart days . . .16

  From About Paris (1895). Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson.

  After our tour of the museum, we bid good-bye to its cheerful curator and wandered back to the mansion. The beautiful old building had been converted to a museum, but this one was entirely devoted to quilts. The keeper of this collection was handing out white cotton gloves at the door.

  “The tea is happening in those two rooms over there.” She pointed. “If you go in any other rooms, you have to wear these. Oh!” She stopped at my quizzical look as I dubiously reached with my own gloved hand for the gloves she was handing me. “You brought your own!” She smiled at me.

  The tea was potluck style, and we were designated the dining room and adjoining sitting area. These were both filling rapidly with polyester-clad women on the downward slope of middle age, their thronging mass punctuated occasionally by a put-upon-looking husband. Besides Gabriel and myself, the only other group member who appeared to be younger than forty was a woman stiffly seated in the corner. After an abortive attempt to engage her in conversation, a great deal of being subjected to petty gossip by the older women, and yet another chewing-out from Polly Esther (the short woman who had scolded us in Port Townsend) about how horrible she thought it was to wear real antiques, I evaded the tea party and went to explore the rest of the museum.

  The museum curator had ceased passing out gloves and had caught me on my way up the stairs. “I have to ask,” she began, her voice low. “Is your waist really that small?”

  This is always a somewhat strange question. It seems to imply that I paint invisibility makeup over triangular sections of my torso, the way that other women paint on lipstick or mascara.

  “Well,” I offered. “I am wearing a corset.”

  “Wow!” She looked me up and down. “Do you mind if I ask how big it is?”

  “Twenty-four inches.”

  “You’re kidding!” She stared in openmouthed admiration. “And, how big is your waist without the corset?”

  “Well, it shrinks when you’ve been wearing a corset awhile,” I explained. “The more you wear a corset, the smaller your waist gets. I had a natural thirty-two-inch waist before I started this.”

  She was clearly intrigued. “And when did you start wearing the corset?”

  “March twelfth.” I smiled. “It was a birthday present.”

  “March! Just in March?!”

  I nodded. It was early May at that point.

  “You’ve gone from thirty-two to twenty-four inches in three months! And it’s just the corset that’s done that?”

  Again, I nodded.

  A new group of people came through the door, clearly seeking the museum itself, not the tea. They dithered over the admissions sign and the curator looked quickly at her basket of gloves.

  “Oh! I’ve—” She held up a finger to me. “Wait right here!”

  She returned in a short moment, several blue-jeaned teenage girls in tow.

  “You’ve got to see this woman!” she was telling them excitedly. She presented me to them with the air of someone unveiling a masterpiece. “Her waist went down from thirty-two to twenty-four inches, just from wearing a corset!”

  I did my best not to laugh at the curator’s sweet enthusiasm. The girls in their T-shirts
were clearly not as struck as she was, but they were polite enough. After a few minutes’ conversation, the museum keeper saw that more visitors were entering and rushed off to glove them, bidding me a fond adieu, with many thanks for talking with her. As she bustled off and I ascended the stairs, I giggled privately at her ardor.

  Most of the quilts in the mansion were highly modern and not to my taste, but the building housing them was lovely. I particularly fell in love with a beautiful tower room overlooking a soaring view. When I ventured downstairs again and found a teenage girl caught between two gossiping matrons with the air of a fox-cornered rabbit, I took her back up to the tower room with me.

  Her mother was considering joining the costume group and they had arrived late, she explained. “But,” she confessed, taking off her broad-brimmed hat, “I’m really more into sports.”

  We passed a cheerful hour chatting, enjoying the gorgeous room, and avoiding the crowd downstairs.

  Eventually, Gabriel infiltrated our hideout. He had fled the mansion when I’d come upstairs and had been spending the intervening time speaking with members of an antique cars club outside. They were leaving, though, and it seemed like a reasonable opportunity to ask Ellen if we might head home.

  On the ride back to Seattle, we managed to wedge enough of ourselves into the conversation to bring up the points we had wanted to discuss earlier about antique clothing.

  “People talk a lot about corsets,” Gabriel explained, “and how restrictive they were, but people don’t realize that the men’s clothes were just as restrictive.”

  He tried to point toward his back to illustrate his point, but this simple action was defeated by the Car Seat of Doom.

  “The tailoring,” he continued, abandoning illustration, “forces you into an upright posture. So you have to stay upright, you can’t slouch. That was part of the point of the clothes—you showed that you were an ‘upright citizen’ by being upright, and the clothing enforced that.”