Victorian Secrets

by Sarah A. Chrisman

  “And corsets aren’t nearly as restrictive as people think they are,” I put in, speaking up for the women. Ellen started to object, but I refused quarter. We were nearly home, and I wanted to make this point. It was important to me. “I wear a corset every day: I eat in it, I go to class in it—”

  “She rides her bike to class in it!” Gabriel added.

  “You ride your bike in a corset?!” Ellen asked incredulously.

  “Yes, I do.” I asserted. “Six miles every day.”

  “Well.” Ellen shook her head as she made the turn off the highway to our apartment. “Just don’t talk to (she named the woman I had come to think of as Polly Esther) about corsets!”

  Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s “Yukon” ladies’ bicycle, 1897. Price: $56.

  7

  Twenty-Four-Seven

  From A Widow and Her Friends (1901). Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson.

  By May, I was wearing my corset to class almost every day. I had started with the decision to wear it on the days when we should have been working strictly from textbooks, but this proved irritatingly hard to predict. Theoretically, we had a schedule for hands-on days versus study days, but our deep tissue massage teacher could not count organization amongst her virtues, and she was just as likely not to change the schedule around completely on any given day of class. Her students learned to haul around our full kit (linens, bolsters, lotion, textbooks, etc.) every day, irrespective of what the syllabus listed as the activity.

  The first few times I was caught off guard by one of these last-minute ­schedule changes, I carefully rolled up my corset when I got undressed, and slipped it into my bike pannier to deal with after I returned home. No matter how carefully I packed the pannier, though, I worried about damaging the corset. I was a cautious rider, but I’d had crashes in the past, and whereas I would heal after being tumbled across the road, the corset wouldn’t. Besides that, I felt sloppy without it.

  Once I’d gotten used to the corset, going without it felt absolutely ­slovenly—like a grown woman running about with no bra. I won’t deny that vanity came into play as well: I was starting to grow accustomed to my reflection having a defined waist; when the corset came off, everything went right back to where it had been before the stays. Beyond these things, leaving my stays off for any considerable length of time had a peculiar side effect: it made me fall asleep.

  I had read theories online and in articles about why corsets make their ­wearers more alert. Generally, the ideas revolve around blood supply and the corresponding availability of oxygen to various organs. Blood cells replace themselves after trauma or as they wear out, but the overall amount of blood within a body should be fairly steady. If it is pushed away from the stomach and intestines, it becomes available to other organs, notably the brain. (It’s a bit like what ­happens after most people eat a large meal, but in reverse. Instead of the blood rushing away from the brain to work on the digestion, it gets pushed away from the digestive system and puts its oxygen-bearing cells to higher functions.) When I took my corset off, though, all that blood rushed into my ­stomach. Like a glutton after Thanksgiving, I found my attention drifting as my chin slowly nodded downward.

  This was where I reached the limit of my frustration regarding this particular situation. I could grudgingly tolerate feeling slovenly, but I drew the line at falling asleep in public. Massage class or not, if I’m not actually on that table, I’m wearing my corset! I decided.

  By this point, I’d had considerably more practice in lacing and unlacing myself unassisted. It was nice to have Gabriel help me in the mornings, but knowing that I didn’t need him to take the corset off alleviated much of the initial claustrophobia I had experienced with the garment. Enjoying being corseted is not the same as liking to be tied up. I was reassured by the knowledge that I could get into and out of my stays alone.

  From my initial experiments in tying my own laces, I had grown rapidly more proficient at it. Now, I could get into the body in under a minute, and out of it in even less time. The quick changes in the curtained-off areas at school seemed far less intimidating at that rate.

  This left only the lotion as problematic. In all fairness, greasy substances had been an issue throughout my time in massage school, even before I’d started corseting. My skin leans very slightly toward the dry end of the scale, but it is quite comfortable with its own sebaceous secretions. Harsh cleansers leave me raw; goopy lotions give me acne. Since starting massage school (with the attendant oil bastings at the hands of my fellow students), I had been suffering from monstrous breakouts over portions of my skin that had never before seen a pimple throughout my entire existence. I had gamely borne the oil dousings for months, but now I had finally started to protest. The other students thought I was being ridiculous, and it was a constant battle not to be slicked down like a Prince William Sound sea otter circa 1989, but I kept up the fight.

  During a palpation test for kinesiology, my teacher commented on how easy my pectoralis minor (a muscle that lifts the first rib) was to locate. She said that my palpation partner for the exam had an easy time of it; most of the other students in the class had a hard time even feeling their own pec-minors, but I could see mine when I took a breath. The more I wore the corset, the more developed my upper respiratory muscles were becoming. (With the diaphragm compressed, the lungs move up, instead of down, for a deep inhalation.) I was often short of breath when I first started corseting, but as these ­muscles strengthened, I realized the issue was purely transitory. (The ­modern ­slouch-shouldered posture had actually been impinging on my breathing just as thoroughly as any corset by causing my upper ­respiratory muscles to atrophy and crushing my lungs from above. Now they were finally serving their function.) I was breathing differently than when I’d lived hunched over and slump-shouldered, but I could breathe—and that’s what mattered.

  Mrs. Elizabeth Northrop was a soprano soloist with John Philip Sousa’s band. This was a woman who depended on lung power for her job, and look at her figure!

  Modern medical texts have very narrow views laying out the “right” and the “wrong” way to breathe, but their nineteenth-century predecessors were more open on the matter. Dr. Austin Flint’s 1893 edition of A Text-Book of Human Physiology17 describes not “right” and “wrong” ways to breathe, but simply different breathing patterns. Three different types of respiration are explained: “the abdominal type” (breathing from the belly), “the inferior costal type” (breathing from the lower chest), and “the superior costal type” (breathing from the upper chest).

  Flint describes the abdominal type of breathing as most often seen in babies under three years old. (Incidentally, this is the breathing pattern most modern people have.) He explains that men (of his time) mostly engaged in the inferior costal type of breathing, while the superior costal type of breathing appeared in females “a short time before the age of puberty.”18 He attributes this “to the mode of dress now so general in civilized countries, which confines the lower part of the chest and renders movements of expansion somewhat difficult.”

  Another powerful singer shows off her corseted figure: Alice Nielsen, opera prima donna.

  He goes on to cite an 1887 study by Thomas J. Mays: “[U]pon eighty-two chests of Indian girls at the Lincoln Institution in Philadelphia, between ten and twenty years of age, who had never worn tight clothing, the abdominal type of respiration was found to ­predominate . . .” He ­ultimately concludes, “It is ­certain that females accommodate themselves more readily than the male to the superior costal type; and this is probably a provision against the physiological enlargement of the uterus in pregnancy, which nearly arrests all respiratory movements except those of the upper parts of the chest . . . it is observed that females are able to carry, without great inconvenience, a large quantity of water in the abdominal cavity; while a much smaller quantity, in the male, produces great distress from difficulty of breathing.” In other words, evolution has designed women to be capable of brea
thing from our upper chest; it’s part of our legacy as the child-bearers of the species.

  I enjoyed how much more aware I had become of my own body since I had started corseting. While the other students in my class tried to remember the location of the spleen and whether the liver was on the left or the right, I knew exactly where all my organs were. I knew the location of my spleen because I could feel it get tender when I caught a cold, and as for the liver, I had seen it in too many articles of corseted anatomy to be ignorant of its location. Knocking on different parts of my corset, I could hear the difference between the solid liver and the hollow organs; it was in no way mysterious.

  It was about this time that I started to alter my clothes to fit my altered form. I had taken to wearing a frilly blouse tucked into my skirt, but as my waist drew in, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the way the shirt bagged at the sides. At first I simply took it in with a few basting stitches, pinning it on inside out and sewing up the excess. The extra fabric added bulk, though, and after a time I grew bold enough to snip it away, replacing the wide basting stitches with neat seams. Before long, nearly all my garments came under the shears in one way or another; I altered them if I could or simply gave them away if they had passed out of suitability. A lot of modern clothes were simply unfeasible to alter: the hips were too low on pants with a fly, and any shirt that pulled over the head couldn’t be taken in adequately. (If the waist were suitably altered, its reduced diameter would never fit over the shoulders.) All of my jeans went away, as well as most of my T-shirts, the lion’s share of my shorts, and a good deal of my sweaters.

  Summer dresses were generally acceptable; they tended to have ties at the back, and I simply drew them as close as the fabric would allow. Even this left waist-bagginess over time, however, so the needle and thread came out again, drawing seams tighter until they fit like a Victorian glove.

  The effect when I went out in public was dramatic. Whereas before people did double takes, now they simply stared. I had lived in a big city for a long time; I was used to jostling and shoving—but it suddenly no longer applied to me. It was as though I had my own private little pass-bubble through the elbowing crowds. The corseted figure seemed to strike at something hardwired into the human subconscious, the upright posture with the accentuated hips and bust seemingly shouting, “Alpha female, coming through!” People would suddenly cease glaring at their push-shove neighbors to smile at me and make room for my passage.

  Of course, some responses were less classy than others. One day, as I was walking along the sidewalk with Gabriel, a woman moving in the opposite direction simply screamed at me, “You’ve got the smallest waist in the world!”

  Was that a compliment? I wondered. Generally I don’t associate compliments with screaming strangers. Was I supposed to respond? How do you respond to that? “No, actually the Guinness Book of World Records lists record-holder for the world’s smallest waist as Cathie Jung”? It didn’t seem quite appropriate, and ­anyhow, the woman was already shouting at someone else halfway down the street.

  Words like “lovely” or “beautiful” have a ready response in cultural ­dialogue. They are clearly compliments, so it is easy to thank people for them. But I never know quite how to respond to odd statements in ambiguous tones—and there are a lot of odd people handing those out in this world.

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

  8

  Meeting Mom

  Corset advertisement from 1895 Montgomery Ward $ Co. 1895. Price : 50 cents.

  From the first time I’d worn the corset, I’d dreaded presenting myself to my mother in it. My mother, who, when I became a teenager, had started declaring anything below a size extra-large—or, by her preference, double extra-large—to be “too tight.” (I’d had my own job earning my own money from the time I turned sixteen, but I didn’t gain freedom to buy clothes that actually fit until I went off to university.) High school class of 1966, she is the sort of woman who had burned her bras. She is also the type of woman whose arms are covered in tattooed images of her pet parrots.

  When I had longingly dreamed of the Victorian era as a child, one of her favorite admonitions with which to scold me had been, “If you’d lived back then, you would have had to wear a corset!” This was generally coupled with, “If you’d lived back then, you’d be dead now!” When I was twelve, we visited the Flavel House Museum19 on a trip to Astoria and I’d asked her to leave me there.

  Mom is rather averse to deviations in her routine, and she’d seen me the weekend before my birthday. I had a few months before she visited again. Whether this helped or hindered my presentation of the corset is debatable. It meant that I had more time to work up my courage, but it also meant that my figure had had time to change dramatically.

  “You’ll stick up for me, won’t you?” I asked Gabriel, nervously finishing the last wipe-down of the apartment after a morning of frenzied cleaning. “If she starts being nasty about the corset?”

  “Of course.” He kissed my shoulder. “Don’t worry!” He gave me a pat. “She’ll be fine with it.”

  I glanced at my bureau. “Maybe I should put on something looser, after all.” Something that would hide my figure. I had been debating this for weeks. Not many loose clothes had survived my repeated wardrobe purges, but I had saved some pants for bad-weather cycling, and I had kept a few baggy T-shirts, like one bought on vacation in France, purely for their sentimental value.

  Gabriel shook his head. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Easy for you to say.” I turned down one corner of my mouth and took a deep breath.

  When I opened the door for her later that day, my mother frowned, staring. “Have you been sick? You’ve lost a whole bunch of weight!” (I can’t remember a time in my life when my mother didn’t consider the slightest downward alteration in my weight to be a sign of mental and/or physical illness. I also can’t remember a time when she wasn’t complaining about her own weight.)

  Moment of truth. I took a full breath. “No. I’m wearing a corset.”

  She blinked, her chin jerking backward. “Does that hurt?”

  “No.” I shook my head emphatically. “Not at all.”

  At that moment Gabriel’s mother arrived. “Hi!” She thrust a package into Gabriel’s hands and wrapped me up in a hug. “Wow, you look great! The ferry was packed . . .” She launched into her usual detailed account of the trip to Seattle from her home on Bainbridge Island. This flowed seamlessly (as it always does) into a recounting of all the various details of life that had passed since the last time she’d seen us. She didn’t pause for breath until she had covered every element of minutia.

  Bless her.

  In the kitchen later, Mom was looking me up and down. “Can you breathe in that thing?”

  No, Ma—look, I’m flopping around on the floor, gasping for breath.

  I took the teapot down from its place on the top shelf. “Yes, I can breathe just fine.” I took a full breath to illustrate my point.

  She shook her head. “That thing’s got to hurt. How do you pee in that thing?”

  I was irritated by her repeated use of the word “thing,” as well as by the absurdity of the question. How do I pee? How does she think I pee? I pulled up my skirt and flashed her. “Like this!” That ended the discussion—for that day, at least.

  My mother turned the phrase “Have you been sick? You’ve lost a bunch of weight!” into her standard greeting to me for the next twelve months. No matter how many times she saw me in my corset, each new encounter was met with fresh resistance to belief. (She also refused to refer to it as anything other than “that thing.”) Every time, this was followed by the same questions about breathing and reiteration of her belief that it had to be painful to wear. Mercifully, she didn’t ask me about elimination again, although she did demand the answer to an even more intimate question right in front of the clerk as we checked out of a grocery store.

  Of course, it was a grocery sto
re in my own neighborhood, with a clerk who checked me out all the time. He smiled at me in his usual, friendly way.

  “You know,” he said, a little embarrassedly, “I’ve been wanting to ask you . . .”

  He looked down sheepishly.

  I smiled encouragement, nodding a little.

  “You always look so nice when you come in here.” He traced subtle curves in the air. “So . . . Victorian. I was wondering . . . Do you wear . . . Do you wear a corset?” He nearly whispered the last word, as if it were a secret.

  As I was nodding, Mom broke in at top volume. “She says that thing is comfortable, but I can’t believe it doesn’t hurt!”

  The grocery clerk looked embarrassed, but he did manage another question. “Do you wear it all the time?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” I began my usual explanation. I’d had this question asked often enough by this point to have a rote response worked up. “I wear it pretty much twenty-four-seven; the only time I take it off is for showers—”

  “And sleeping!” my mom interjected.

  This annoyed me. That I slept in my corset was generally the hardest thing for strangers to believe, and here was my own mother telling the world that it wasn’t true.

  “Actually,” I said pointedly. I had told her this before. “I do sleep in my corset.”

  The clerk smiled.

  “You sleep in it?!” she asked disbelievingly.

  I have no idea why my mother acts incredulous over facts I’ve already told her multiple times on previous occasions.

  “Yes.”

  “What about . . . in moments of intimacy?”

  Oh gods. Things you don’t want to hear your parents say. Most especially, things you don’t want to hear your parents shout in the middle of the grocery store.