Victorian Secrets

by Sarah A. Chrisman

  The bus came soon, and I gratefully sought its shelter. I took a seat next to a middle-aged woman, who regarded me for a long moment, then made an inquiry as to my destination. I explained about the centennial celebration of women’s suffrage in Washington State and clear interest bloomed in her face. She eagerly asked if I did a lot of work for women’s rights, if I was a women’s studies major.

  I paused. At university, I had generally tried to avoid people majoring in women’s studies, since the ones I had met seemed, by and large, to be disconcertingly rabid. But, how to express this diplomatically?

  “No . . .” I began slowly. The stranger started to give me a reproachful look, so I continued, choosing my words with care. “I’m grateful for what the suffragettes did, and I’m happy to have the vote—”

  This was a bit of a diplomatic stretch. Actually, since reaching the age of majority, I really hadn’t seen much benefit yielded from my much-touted vote. In the first presidential election after I became old enough to vote, my preferred candidate had won the popular election, only to be toppled by a political numbers game a few hours later.

  “But,” I continued, treading into paths where I held more conviction, “I think that the really important work was done a long time ago, and a lot of what people have been trying to do more recently has been sort of counterproductive. I think that in a lot of the efforts that women have made to try to prove they’re the same as men, a lot of the power that women used to have has gotten lost along the way.”

  She gave me a curious look, so I elaborated, using an analogy from a different culture.

  “I used to live in Japan,” I explained, “and one of the things that really struck me when I was living there was what an incredible amount of power women had over domestic life and everything that happened within the family. When I would visit people’s houses, the husband would nearly always be hidden away in a very small room, sometimes just a closet, really, while the women had the run of the entire rest of the house. There’s a lot of talk about Japan being a patriarchal society—and in business and government, the men do have a lot more power—but when a husband comes home, he gives his wife his entire paycheck, and she gives him an allowance, even though he was the one who earned the money!”

  The woman to whom I was speaking giggled at this.

  “So,” I continued, “when you take the culture as a whole, what I saw wasn’t so much that one gender overpowered the other in an overarching way, as much as just that the genders had very different spheres of control, and within those spheres, they each have an enormous amount of power.”

  I took a long breath, lining up my thoughts.

  “Of course, our culture is very different, but I think that in the past there was a lot better understanding that women can be different than men and still be very powerful. Biologically, we are really different—there’s no point in trying to deny it.” I shrugged. “You know, I’ll never be able to lift as much as my brother, no matter how hard I try.”

  I explained, “He’s a six-foot-five police officer, I can’t compete with that!”

  My listener laughed.

  “But,” I smiled, “I can do things that he can’t do. I think it’s important to remember that we can be very different, and it’s okay to be different, and there’s nothing negative about that. It doesn’t mean that either gender is inferior to the other. Just that we’re different.”

  Stepped On. (1901). Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson.

  In my own mind, I reflected that part of why I enjoy wearing a corset so much is that it is an accentuation of this difference. A woman is not an inferior man, so why should she dress like one? (Skirts are actually far superior to trousers for many needs of the female form, especially when paired with pantalets.) I am very proud to be a woman, and I had learned to enjoy flaunting that pride.

  My seat-partner was intrigued, and said that I had given her a lot to think about. With the bus rapidly reaching her stop, though, she asked if she might change the subject to a far less weighty matter, to satisfy a curiosity before she departed. After my assurance that this would be perfectly fine, she asked, “Is it accurate for you to be wearing earrings? Did they really have pierced ears back then?”

  I laughed. I had once asked my mother a nearly identical question when watching the medieval fantasy The Princess Bride. I had been about seven years old at the time, though.

  “Oh yes!” I reached up, feeling an earring to remind myself which ones I was wearing. “Actually, these are quite a bit older than the dress. These are from about the 1860s or so, and the dress is more like 1905. People have been wearing earrings since, oh, about the time they figured out they could poke holes through their ears with sharp things!”

  We both laughed, and I went on.

  “There’s a really famous painting that’s actually called Girl with a Pearl Earring, and that was done a few hundred years before this dress.”

  She had still seemed dubious up until this point, but that bit of information clinched the earring question for her.

  “Oh yeah!” she exclaimed. “I saw that movie!”

  I usually cringe at citations of Hollywood portrayals as though they were actual facts, but I let this one slide, given that it supported my point, and also that it was based on a book, which was inspired by the painting in question.

  The bus reached her stop, so she bid me a friendly adieu and we parted ways. Soon, the vehicle reached my own point of first disembarkation. (I would have three before finally reaching my destination and three more to come back home.)

  The storm had, if anything, grown even more intense. Getting from the drop-off point to the transfer stop was the longest uncovered portion of the journey: it meant going down a steep hill on which I’d been known to stumble even in clear weather, and on the exposed, rain-blasted side of the street. I looked out at the deluge in horror from the shelter of the drop-off point, took a deep breath, and entered the storm.

  In high heels down a slippery slope, holding my silk and linen skirts high, I raced down the hill, sprinting for the shelter of the other bus stop. My mad dash was halted by a red traffic signal. The rain was too obscuring and the cars too swift to cross against it, so I stood imprisoned on the wrong side of the street, helpless to protest against that electronic authority as I saw my bus approach the empty stop—and pass it.

  The light finally changed and I darted into the grudging shelter of the three-sided bus stop. I positioned myself in the relative (if scanty) protection of the corner, using my umbrella to fence off as much of the open side as possible, and took stock of my condition. My linen dress was slightly damp, but luckily it was clean rainwater, not mud, and the linen had shielded my silk petticoat underneath it. Using a small hand mirror from my purse, I ascertained that the umbrella had protected my hat. I had, however, lost my hatpin clutch. Since I had roughly an hour to wait until the coming of the next bus, I briefly considered the possibility of retracing my steps to search for it. I looked past my umbrella to the torrential sheets of water gushing from the sky and thought better of the concept. The likelihood of tracking down an item that small was minute and not worth the risk to my hat and dress. I had a small bead in my purse that I had wrapped with thread and used as an emergency clutch on a previous occasion, so I ferreted it out and pressed it into this service once more.

  (Throughout the rest of the day, people would mistake this for the top, rather than the end, of a pin. By the time I arrived home that night, I was to grow rather weary of people telling me that my “stickpin, or something, is falling out.” For the record, it is not remotely possible for a hatpin to fall out; the ornamentation at the top prevents it. The only way it would even be conceivable for a hatpin to fall out of its wearer’s hair would be for the lady in question to hang upside down and allow the weight of her hat to pull it off. Needless to say, this happens very seldom.)

  Sheltering behind my umbrella, I spent the next hour highlighting vocabulary words in a book chosen by a pu
pil I was tutoring and making private, snarky comments in the margins. (The book in question was being made into a big-budget movie, but in my opinion had no literary, or even grammatical, merit whatsoever.)

  At length, the bus arrived and I sighed with relief at being within its protection for the ensuing hour until the next transfer point. Missing the first bus meant that I had also missed my transfer, so I faced another hour under a different bus stop, although this one was thankfully more substantial. I furled my umbrella, set it aside, and carefully folded my skirts about myself to keep them from touching the ground as I perched on a little, flip-up seat designed to deter loiterers. Nearby, a young woman in her early twenties watched my movements. After a few moments’ observation, she worked up the courage to inquire, “Does it make you . . . feel different? To be dressed like that?”

  I smiled at her. “Well, I won’t deny that it’s a pleasant sensation to have four yards of silk twirling around my legs.”

  She laughed and a very pleasant conversation ensued. I told her about my pantalets, an element of the outfit not visible to the outer world, but probably my favorite article of Victorian underwear. Also called “split bloomers,” pantalets are like light, blousy undershorts—but with a significant difference: they are split right down the middle, and open in the back. Victorian women did not wear panties. Pantalets meant that they had perfect freedom of choice while answering the call of nature: they could do so sitting down or standing up like a man. The young woman laughed anew when I explained my conviction that women’s liberation had taken a dramatic step backward when we had given up this equality with the rougher sex. She had questions upon questions, and our amiable chat helped the time pass more quickly as the storm raged around us.

  When I finally reached Olympia, the rain had eased somewhat. I still could not shake that persistent idea that I would surely encounter someone I knew while I was down there, and I found myself searching each face in the small town as I walked under my umbrella toward the State Capital Museum. It was an absurd conviction, but I was unable to cast it aside, no matter how illogical I told myself I was being.

  Pantalets: Montgomery Ward, 1895.

  I even stuck my head into a coffee shop along my route and scrutinized its occupants. By now I knew I was being ridiculous. Resolving to cease this nonsensical behavior, I removed my head from the café’s door, determined the most direct route to my destination, and strode out to complete my actual goal in visiting the city.

  A block along, I heard steps running up behind me. I turned and saw a dainty young woman with a very large camera. Grinning broadly, she explained that she was a photographer. She had seen me from the coffee shop and wanted to take my picture.

  I was flattered, albeit incredibly surprised. I could remember only two other occasions in my entire life when a stranger had wanted to take my picture: on the first, I was helping to haul a twenty-two-foot Christmas tree behind a tandem bicycle, and on the second, I was in a small-town fish market in Japan, holding a turnip the size of a BMX wheel. For someone to want my picture as I simply walked down the street was an entirely new experience for me.

  Honored by the request, I saw no reason not to oblige. We were under the cover of a shop, so I started to fold away my ­anachronistic umbrella to get it out of the picture. “No, no!” the ­photographer insisted. “Keep it up! It looks good—it’ll hide the street.” Glancing behind me, I saw her point. The flowered umbrella might be anachronistic, but aesthetically it was more agreeable than the modern cars and cracked concrete at my back. I kept it up and smiled while she snapped off some shots. After she’d finished, I gave her my email address and she promised to send me digital copies.

  A bit farther down the road, a distinguished-looking woman pulled her car over next to me and asked if I was going to the museum’s presentation. Initially I was surprised at her insight, then it occurred to me that the outfit might be a bit of a giveaway. She invited me to get into her empty passenger seat, and we drove the rest of the way together.

  When we got to the museum, I was significantly amused by the way this woman took me around to all the other attendees and showed me off, rather as if I were the feather of some exotic bird she had chanced upon while on her way to the museum. There was an especially great fuss made over the soutache trim on my linen jacket, which surprised me because I had almost left that garment at home, thinking it would not be of interest to people. (Also, the jacket was rather boxy, and I wanted to show off my waist.) I initially hung the jacket in the museum’s coat closet, but was asked to retrieve and model the item so many times that I grew weary of the back-and-forth trip and resigned myself to a bit of concealment as I donned it for good. As a compromise, I positioned my hands behind myself so that they would tuck back the jacket’s edges and show off my waist, just a bit.

  Everyone was quite interested in my dress, and I was asked to tell its story repeatedly. I explained how my husband had bought it via eBay from a seller in Nebraska. It had been stored in the seller’s attic for nearly a hundred years, and when my husband had presented it to me, it had been an extremely different color from its current shade of light brown. When Gabriel gave it to me, it was a very grungy rust color, and the dress was my first experiment in washing an item of antique clothing. It had been a nerve-racking experience, but an educational one.

  Ever the researcher, Gabriel had turned up the information that the preferred cleanser in such cases is Ivory bar soap. I pared thin slivers into a basin of warm water, pressing them and working them with my hands until they dissolved. I strained this soapy water several times to get out the stubborn bits that refused to dissolve once the solution had reached saturation point, then let it cool to room temperature. I made sure our bathtub was pristine, filled it with cool water, and then added the soap solution.

  I was extremely uneasy about immersing a century-old dress in water, but Gabriel and I had both agreed that the degree of pollutants darkening the item was detrimental to it. Not only did the dirt detract from the craftsmanship of the beautifully constructed garment, but the longer it remained, the more it would degrade the fibers of the dress. The real question was which would ultimately be more destructive: allowing the dirt (and the acids within it) to stay and certainly eat away slowly at the fabric, or washing it and risking a catastrophic deterioration? Had it been a silk garment, the risk would have been too great, but linen is sturdy. I had decided to try.

  Having prepared the bath more carefully than I generally did for my own bathing, I had retrieved the dress and cradled it, looking down at the pearly water. I took a long breath and swallowed deeply. Here goes. I carefully laid the dress the length of the bathtub, as though I were laying it out on a bed.

  As water soaked the old fibers, it released a century of scents. The first was the dirty smell of tobacco smoke: pollution that had gotten into the dress through decades in an attic. After this dissipated, underneath it I could smell wetted dust, the dirt of ages. As the slippery water slid amongst the dress’s fibers, this smell too washed away, revealing the last, most mysterious scent. I knew the fragrance. It came like the unexpected appearance of a face from childhood: known, but rendered unfamiliar by strange context.

  Rose hips? It was not the flower I smelled, which might have been dismissed as old perfume, but its fruit. The association puzzled me. Did they dye it with them? I knelt close to the water, inhaling deeply. It’s definitely a fruit. They might have used rose hips as a dye, if they had a lot of them, but it’s such a weak dye . . .

  I had experimented with quite a lot of plant-based dyes over the years, and I knew that rose hips imbue a light, reddish-brown color, which is an agreeable hue, but doesn’t hold up to much washing. Picking enough hips to dye such a large garment would be a major task and hard to credit if the effort would go to waste. They must have known that. This last scent blossomed and started to fade, and I suddenly had it. It was not the fruit of roses I smelled, but their botanical cousins, the temptations of Eve. Apples! Th
ey dyed it with apple must!

  It made perfect sense. Apples have been an important mainstay of American life for centuries. When communities still pressed their own cider in autumn months, they would have had an abundance of the brownish, pulpy by-product left behind. Cooked down, it must have made a fine dye.

  Happy to have solved the mystery, I had left the dress to soak in the soapy water. When I checked it several hours later, the wash water was black. I folded the dress away from the drain and pulled the plug. Liquid the color of samovar tea—with none of its appealing aroma—gushed from the fabric.

  The dress was too heavy from its soaking to risk stressing the fibers by lifting it, so I carefully folded it away from the faucet, and held a plate under the spout to angle the water toward the side of the tub itself, keeping any direct water pressure away from the dress as the tub refilled slowly. An entire day of repeating this slow and careful rinse process still did not make the water run clear, but the dress was far cleaner than when I started: a lovely light brown color, like very creamy cocoa. This was the color that the event attendees saw when they viewed the dress on me, and they were fascinated by the tale of it.

  I kept lifting my skirt just enough to flash the silk petticoat underneath. The dress made for an interesting account of preservation technique, but for me the petticoat had the more emotional story behind it. While I had been recovering from my broken foot the preceding summer, my single connection to the outer world during many apartment-ridden days was a sporadic wireless Internet connection, which my computer picked up at certain times of day, from the very corner of the room, when atmospheric conditions were just right. I used these fleeting opportunities to look up websites selling antique clothing, and to dream. One particular site grasped especially firm hold of my imagination and my heart. The clothes on it were beautiful, and perfect, and utterly, utterly, out of my price range. Minute upon stolen minute, I must have filled hours with sighs.