Victorian Secrets

by Sarah A. Chrisman

  It’s a special kind of self-torture to gaze upon much-coveted items that one knows are entirely unobtainable. I’m really not sure why I feel compelled to inflict it upon myself from time to time. Combined with the already depressed state I was in from my broken foot, I managed to stew myself into a truly morose sulk of self-pity. When I had seen the most exquisite item of all on the site—an amazing, English watered-silk petticoat in peach, striped through with bold black and soft silver, edged in a ruffle to whirl and eddy around its wearer’s ankles—I decided that this auto-flagellation had gone on long enough and resolved not to even look at the price. I should put it all away, give up selfish, impossible fantasies, and resign myself to reality, I thought. Then a perverse curiosity got the better of me; I peeked at the price.

  It was pristine, and peachy-perfect, the most amazing item on the entire site. And it was the only item on the entire site I could afford. My jaw dropped. My eyes glued themselves to the computer screen. I had worked myself into such a sulk over my bad luck, I could not believe this change in fortune. Before the spell could break or the wireless signal dissolve, I whipped out my debit card and placed the order. I held my breath until the transaction went through, then let out a sigh of absolute contentment.

  “I’ll wear it when I can walk again,” I told myself. My luck was changing.

  This museum event was one of my first opportunities to wear that beautiful petticoat, and I tipped my skirts as much as possible to show it off. I adored the rippling, flowing feeling of the watered silk, liquid-soft against my legs. Most of all, I loved the whispering, rustling sound and feel of the pleated ruffle at the bottom, eddying around the proud ankles poised atop kitten heels above my newly mobile feet.

  The event itself was a lovely affair, with suffragist songs and sweet tea dainties. I took great care not to soil my dress as I nibbled small cakes and cookies, refilling my plate often but scurrying away from anyone whose plate overflowed. I sat well away from the table and chatted companionably with a handsome old woman. She had been a museum docent for decades, and I enjoyed hearing her wonderful stories of the mansion housing the collection and the family who had once lived there.

  When the event drew to a close, I was offered (and accepted) a ride from the same woman who had seen me walking to the museum and given me a partial ride there. As we were leaving together, a curly-haired woman with the face of a middle-aged cherub came running after me.

  “Did I hear you say you have more outfits like this?” she asked, referencing an earlier conversation.

  “A whole collection of them!” I explained enthusiastically. “My husband and I have been hoping we might get a chance to do a historical fashion show at some point. We think it would be a lot of fun.”

  At this, she was even more enthused. We exchanged emails, and she promised to call me. This was to prove the fortuitous meeting I had somehow known would occur that day, although not in the way I had at all expected. At the time, I could not have anticipated where that simple meeting would lead.

  Thanks to the friendly woman who had given me a lift from the museum, the first bus was achieved without difficulty. It was a comfortable ride, and I passed the time amiably chatting with the man seated next to me about fashion and the history thereof. The skies had cleared in Olympia when we left, but by the time the bus reached my transfer point in Tacoma, the rains had resumed. It was pouring in earnest by the time my next bus pulled up to the stop.

  Actually, “to the stop” is a rather generous way to express the actual fact of the matter. A good driver will halt the bus within feet of the shelter, especially in inclement weather. This one overshot it by at least fifty yards.

  Anxious about my dress and hat, and certainly not wanting to miss this—the last bus—home, I kept my umbrella up until the last possible moment and I sprinted for the bus. The other riders were nearly as eager to get out of the rain as I was and pressed against me with muddy clothes and dirty hands. The step up into the bus carriage was a particularly high one, and as I tried to make it, folding my umbrella to get it through the door and avoiding the wet, pressing bodies behind me, I heard the small rip of a few stitches parting. I looked down in horror.

  Was it my dress?

  No, worse: two little pleats hung loose from the ruffle of my silken petticoat. My peach petticoat, which I’d so proudly ordered from England, the one bright spot in my whole wretched summer! That little rip seemed an affront to history, a blank ingratitude on my part to the lovely garment I’d declared my reward for walking again. Oh no!

  I was horrified to see this mar, this injury, to my beautiful, beloved petticoat, but if I’d known what brutality was immediately to be inflicted upon it, I would have run shrieking back into the storm. What happened next ranks very high in the lists of “Reasons Some People Should Be Weeded from the Gene Pool” and “What the Bloody, Fucking Hell Were They Thinking?!”

  The bus driver—the idiot woman bus driver—grabbed the poor, torn little pleats and pulled. It happened too quickly for me to stop her; my scream for her to stop died halfway out my lips as two yards of ruffle accordioned out, her vicious yank slaughtering the delicate, old thread. The beautifully pleated ruffle, which had been dancing around my proudly heeled feet all day, hung like intestines ripped from a living thing.

  Physical assault of a bus driver is a felony in the state of Washington. If they filed equivalent charges for noncontact actions, I surely would have gotten the death penalty for the poison I injected into my look and tone.

  “Don’t. Touch. My. Clothes!”

  As it was, I just barely held myself in check from inviting felony charges.

  She threw the sundered ruffle at me. “I’s just tryin’ to help ya out!” she bleated in a very low-class Southern accent, rolling her eyes at me.

  I held my head up high and from my eyes spat venom at her. I did not ball my fists, and I most deliberately did not reach for the nine-inch rod of pointed steel holding my hat in place. Drawing attention to these choices, I do not mean to imply that the thought was far from my mind.

  There is a scene in a piece of classic children’s literature36 where a young boy gathers up his cherished pet’s intestines after it has been savaged by the “devil-cat of the mountains.” In such a way, I delicately placed the distressed pink coils over my arm, and with as much dignity as I possessed, passed on to my seat.

  I was subdued through the rest of the bus rides, trying to work out whether the damage was reparable. I knew that it would never be as it had been, but knew equally that I would try. It would join a great heap of mending projects, and it would be over a month before I could face this particular repair without the sewing tools shaking in my furious hands at the memory of how it had come to be injured, but I would return to it. I have an ingrained hatred of waste, and to let such a beautiful piece of history lie neglected would have been a terrible shame upon me.

  Nearly all my antique items had some element needing repair; it is virtually inevitable after they have spent more than a century on this Earth. Humans don’t usually last that long—and if they do, they generally require more extensive mending and upkeep than a bit of darning. My cedar chest was full of tattered treasures from the past that I had been slowly, painstakingly repairing, stitch by labored stitch. For several years I had been working on repair of a Belle Epoque–era cape, which Gabriel had given me as a gift: It was ornamented with thousands of jet and steel-cut glass beads, some of them so tiny I could barely pick them up. The thread holding them onto the cape had rotted with age, and I’d passed season after season restitching each one individually. Many of the original beads had been lost over the years, and I scoured every bead shop to which I could possibly travel to try to find replacements. I was never able to match them exactly, so I had to make do with close approximations: I used the smallest iridescent glass Indian beads I could find to replace the original, minuscule glass beads that strained my eyesight and fingertips so much. The jet beads were even more challenging.
Jet (known to geologists as lignite) is a dark, shiny substance related to coal. It was popular in Victorian jewelry and other ornamentation—so popular, in fact, that it was mined out. If it were an animal instead of a stone it would probably be on an endangered species list. The beads I found to replace those originals are onyx. Some garments had ripped seams, others wanted replacements for lost buttons and similar fastenings. Nearly all had holes—from use, from moths, from the gnawing teeth of time.

  The petticoat, though, my beautiful petticoat, with which I had rewarded myself for learning to walk again after a frustrating convalescence, had been perfect when I’d bought it. It had sailed through untold tempests of time and come to me in pure condition. Then it had been ravaged by an ignorant brute for absolutely no reason whatsoever. The galling remembrance of this infuriated me every time I tried to repair the damage. My mending stitches looked coarse and clumsy next to their fragile antique sisters, and I felt intense guilt that my skills were unworthy of this beautiful relic, which I had failed to protect from a savage.

  I wondered what a Victorian lady would have done if a coarse driver had deliberately torn her skirt. I like to think that she wouldn’t have needed to take action herself, that any gentlemen seeing the attack would have dragged the savage forcibly before the nearest magistrate, while administering a suitable number of justified and well-placed blows. Even if chivalry missed seeing the assault, I picture a few affronted words of the encounter dropped in the ear of the nearest constable, sending the law to enact the swift justice of the billy club, then requiring the ruffian to pay for the damages. Perhaps I romanticize. In any event, it gave me something to fantasize about during the long hours I spent mending my beloved petticoat.

  Reproduction of statue of Justice: Montgomery Ward, 1895.

  16

  Feminine Anatomy, and Matters of Hygiene

  Victorian fashion plate showing 1889 dresses. Note how much shorter the girl’s skirt is than the skirt of the grown woman. Mothers didn’t quite trust very young girls to keep long skirts clean, so skirts were extremely short on toddlers, then grew progressively longer as a girl matured.

  Over the summer, my everyday clothes had largely been light cotton dresses, which had been easy enough to fit to my new figure, although they had never been designed with corsets in mind. Once the weather had turned decidedly chill, however, these light dresses were simply unfeasible. I had grown rather vain about my figure, but I couldn’t see how it would do my beauty any good to catch pneumonia over it.

  After so long in skirts, I found pants needlessly cumbersome, even downright uncomfortable. I disliked the feeling of my legs being divorced from each other and my limbs bound. Having grown accustomed to the freedom of Victorian-style undergarments, negotiating pants in a lavatory seemed by comparison like something Houdini might have conceived. (As I’d explained to my seatmate on the bus, using facilities in Victorian ladies’ garments is simply a matter of spreading fabric; pantalets are split right down the middle.)

  I couldn’t get used to moving in pants again, either. I’d grown to love the way my skirts swished around me, and, like a cat’s whiskers, communicated subtle information about the air currents and objects around myself. Extending my proprioception, it was like an extra sense I had developed without considering its presence—until I found it cut off.

  Besides all this, most pants looked absolutely ridiculous with the corset. Since trousers are modeled on male anatomy, the waist is nearly always cut as a straight line up from the hip, in no way at all taking into account the curve of the female pelvis. Stays enhance those curves, and trying to put pants over them becomes a sort of visual reductio ad absurdum. Any pants large enough to be pulled over my hip bones would hang so loosely around my waist that I could have dropped an apple down the front. It was the fashion at that time (Seattle, circa 2009) for pants to be cut with waistlines more than a full handspan below the natural human waist, so unless I wore an excessively long and baggy top, I’d be left with several inches of my corset exposed. To get any sort of proper fit to this situation meant belting (or pinning) the blouse in addition to the pants.

  Skirts, I decided, were far superior; but at this point, my waist was so small that even many modern skirts did not fit me; most of them had elastic waists that hung as low as the detested pants. They also tended to be very much not my style and unsuited for winter wear. Polyester, rayon, and flimsy cotton abounded in light, summer colors and droopy waistlines, but what I really wanted was a long, sturdy woolen skirt that would fit me properly. I sketched out pattern ideas and started hunting for fabric.

  I was absolutely determined to avoid synthetic materials. I had seen enough costumes made of materials invented a century after their patterns had gone out of fashion to impress on me that something can be made to look real only if it is real. I was adamant that the quality of the materials should correspond to the labor required in sewing a garment by hand: I was not making a costume, but clothes.

  The distinction between costume and clothing was—and is—very important to me. The word costume does derive from the French term, which simply denotes a suit of clothing; the educated classes of Victorians often had fairly extensive training in the French language, and when they used the term in this way, they did so with full understanding of its cultural and linguistic ­context. However, the idea of costume as normal clothing is no longer in keeping with the way the word has come to be used in twenty-first-century American culture. To anyone who would dispute this fact, I invite consideration of the following scenario: You wake up on a typical morning, yawn, and reluctantly roll out of bed. You start to pull on your everyday shirt and whatever else you happen to wear on a normal day. Someone else in the household, still half-asleep, asks what you are doing. Do you reply, “I’m putting on my clothes,” or “I’m putting on my costume”? I think not many people would give the latter response.

  The word costume has acquired strong associations with things that are false, such as children’s Halloween fantasies and theatrical roles.37 A costume is ­window-dressing for playacting; something worn in a specified context by someone pretending to be something they are not. For an individual with this heavy cultural load in his or her subconscious to refer to historical clothing as costumes is to partially deny the veracity of those who wore them, perhaps without even realizing it. The antiques packed away in my cedar chests, which I had studied, worn, and learned from, were not costumes. They were real clothing, worn by real people on a daily basis.

  On the very first day of my first French class in college, my teacher made an insightful statement that stayed with me throughout my studies and beyond. “French people,” she said, “don’t say something in French because they mean it in English and don’t know any better. French people say things in French because they mean them in French!”

  The clothing of the past was not worn because those creating it didn’t know any better; it was worn for a myriad of very specific reasons, practical as well as cultural. I had already learned that corsets support the back and aid in good posture. Likewise, Gabriel had discovered that the small, and very deliberately placed, pocket at the front of a man’s waistcoat keeps his watch (an extremely delicate and valuable piece of technology) in the place where it is least likely to be broken, easiest to access, and at the same time most difficult to steal owing to the visibility of its location. Even the tiniest detail had something to teach us about the daily life of history—things we could never learn from books because they were too commonplace or too intimate to be written down, and things that could certainly never be taught by costumes because playclothes often leave out the details altogether.

  One of those very important details—more than a detail, really—was the material of the garment. There are legitimate, scientific reasons why natural fibers (as were available in the Victorian era) are superior to synthetics. For example, when moved into a cold, wet place from a warm, dry one, real wool actually creates its own heat by a fascinating phy
sical exchange ­involving water vapor.38 Humans have been playing around with synthetic ­fibers for only around one hundred years, but breeders have been ­perfecting wool for thousands; and the animals themselves from whom the wool is gathered have been evolving the fiber far longer than that, with nature, “red of tooth and claw,” ensuring that the stakes were life and death for optimal material choice.

  However, when shopping in twenty-first-century Seattle, real wool proved remarkably elusive. I hadn’t quite appreciated how thoroughly plastic fibers permeate the vast majority of winter fabrics currently marketed until I attempted to find pure examples. Scrutiny of entire shops of fabric would generally unearth, at most, one or two bolts of woolen fabric that were not adulterated to one degree or another, and the odds of this being in a pleasing color and appropriate weight verged on nil. Gabriel finally convinced me to order from an online supplier, from which the offerings were far more numerous.

  Once the fabric had arrived, I based my first skirt roughly along the same lines of a pattern I had worked out years before for my wedding-dress skirt. As I neared its completion, I asked Gabriel to help me make sure that I had pinned the hem straight around my ankles before I ironed and basted it.

  From About Paris (1901). Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson.

  “You know,” I reflected, as I modeled the skirt, taking care not to tread on any pins. “The idea that clothes should fit their wearers must have totally gone out the window when women stopped sewing for themselves.”

  “Hmm?” he asked, circling me slowly to see if I had missed any uneven portions outside of my own field of vision. “How’s that?”