Category Archives: Victorian

“Indeed, I would go further and argue that dress can reflect economic situation, social class, and cultural orientation and identity.” (324)

“Particular garments stood out in his memory precisely because clothing was a rare and costly commodity, which, for him and probably for many poor people, performed a dual role. Protective clothing was a necessity, escpecially for those agricultural laborers whose jobs involved much walking and workign out of doors in all weathers. Paradoxically, however, it was also a luxury, because after rent, food and fuel had been paid for, there must have been very little left out of the total earnings brought in by a fmaily to spend on clothing—a fact to which the above accounts testify.” (326)

Lots of information abotu smocks and sun-bonnets (328, 331)

“rustic stereotype manifested in traditional representations of milkmaids and gleaners” (334)

“The Dorsetshire Labourer” FIND THIS STORY/BOOK/ARTICLE
rural simplicity of tess—Hardy’s use of the sun-bonnet; perceptions of rural dress because Hardy’s readership was urban and middle class(335)

Alec and his smock-frock (337)
attitudes and changes in dress, hand-crafting of garments (339)

WHAT ROLE DOES THE SUN-BONNET PLAY AS BOTH A NOSTALGIC TOOL AND A SIGNIFIER OF CLASS, TIME PERIOD, CULTURE? HOW IS HARDY’S WRITING SITUATED FOR HIS AUDIENCE; WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH HIS USE OF DRESS? FASHION, ETC? HOW IS THIS PERCEPTION OF TESS’S DRESS TO BE COMPARED WITH HER DRESS IN OTHER PARTS OF THE NOVEL—HER MARRIED TO ALEC CLOTHES, HER CLOTHES BOUGHT BY ANGEL?

Simon Gatrell:
dress is performative (in “The Mayor of Casterbridge) but mostly applicable to Tess as well:
“The baron has certainly made sure that Margery’s costume will force Margery to represent a particular idea of herself to the world; it signifies wealth, class, taste, and it forces others (women as well as men), to look at the wearer of the dress with a kind of respect.” (144)
“Without the fitting body and the informing mind the dress is just an apparition, however beautiful…” (144).
Restraint signified by dress as well as by the separation of the man and women (146). (tight dress, riding with footman rather than riding in coach?

Tess:
“It is often suggested that Hardy chose not to publish “The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid” in book form for more than thirty years, because of the closeness of the narrative in some respects to that of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. And, Indeed, Hardy does re-examine this experience of Margery Tucker through Tess Durbeyfield.” (147)
Tess’s potential is “warped” by Alec’s violation of her but it comes early in the novel, so “that circumstance and Alec fix aspects of her self at too early a point in her development toward womanhood. Dress is an important element in Hardy’s demonstration of this idea. Throughout the novel, Tess herself chooses only dress that conforms to need and function. She has no incentive or opportunity to do otherwise.” (147) WHAT ABOUT WHEN SHE MARRIES ALEC? SHE WEARS A GREY DRESS? IS IT STILL FUNCTIONAL? ” HER NATURAL BEAUTY WAS, IF NOT HEIGHTENED, RENDERED MORE OBVIOUS BY HER ATTIRE. SHE WAS LOOSELY WRAPPED IN A CASHMERE DRESSING GOWN OF GREY-WHITE, EMBOIDERED IN HALF-MORNING TINTS…..” (Hardy 366)
discrepency between Tess and her dress (when her mom initially send her away): “Her dress is deceptive and is nto her own choice, it is designed purely to advance the naive plot of her mother.” (148)

Tess’ dress as angels wife (149) Tess not altered by the clothes Angel buys for her (149)
Tess wearing Angel by wearing his dress (150)
Sexual allure of dress-Alec (151)
Nature of Tess’s clothesmuted colors, soft fabrics, conservative cuts (153)

HOW DOES TESS’S CLOTHING PURCHASED BY ANGEL SIGNIFY THAT SHE IS A FARMER’S WIFE? HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO HER CLOTHING WHEN SHE CAME BACK FROM BEIGN WITH ALEC?

FOCUS ON: INITIALLY MEETING TESS IN WHITE WITH SCARLET RIBBON
THE FIELD HAND TESS
THE MILMAID TESS
ANGEL’S TESS
ALEC’S TESS
FINAL TESS AT STONE HENGE

POSSIBLE TOPICS: THE USE OF THE CLOAK TO COVER TESS BY ALEC IN BEGINNING ON TRIP, BY ANGEL AT STONEHENGE (BOTH TIMES SHE IS “SACRIFICED”)

I am going to start using this space to knock around my ideas for my research projects for class, too, so if it doesn’t interest you, stop reading now.

Victorian: I am writing about Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I am tentatively calling my paper Undressing Tess. So far, what I know is that in the Victorian Age, clothing signifies a person’s class, their gender, their occupation, and can also signify a woman’s status as fallen. In Tess, the main character, Tess, is a lower-class woman whose family is actually in the line of an aristocratic family. Tess, however through the manipulation of her family and their desire for upward mobility, is a fallen woman, so her status is mutated. She is outcast. Tess’s child, while he should be swaddled, is a symbol of Tess’s connection to nature. She undresses in the field to feed him. She never actually has an “acceptable” clothing until the end when she is married to the man who fathered her child. All this, of course, is complicated by the love triangle between she and the two men: Alec and Angel, the baby’s death, and the murder of Alec. At the end of the story when Tess dies, she lies upon the altar stone at Stonehenge, returning to her natural significance. In many ways, the story is cyclic, and Tess’s clothing reminds of her status at each cog of the wheel.

Contemporary Brit: I am writing about Miss Jean Brodie and the role of fascism and the homosocial/lesbian continuum with the pack of girls. I am not sure how this paper is going to flesh out, but I think it will have something to do with the elitism experienced by the girls in the Brodie pack and their training in the fine arts. How does that compare with Hoggart and Williams and their desire to keep the fine art fine? How does it relate to the fact that fascism was a movement of the people? How does that relate to schooling post-war in Britain? What does it mean that Spark is looking back on all this from a twenty year, post-war vantage point? How can this all work together to make one cohesive argument about the character who becomes a nun?

I am not sure about my school stuff right now. Maybe I should have aimed higher and tried to get into a more “impressive school.” Would there be so much B.S. there? I need to take French.

I am going to try blogging about my seminar papers so that I can get a better grip on the topics and stuff that I want to cover in them. I also think this may help me to avoid the last minute procrastination that I am so accustomed to. I NEED to make sure that I DO NOT do my papers at the last minute. I need to get a decent GPA and actually have some papers that I can send out to journals and conferences. Then I need to spend my summer sending things out. I finished my bibliography tonight. I am not sure how this paper is going to form, but I am excited to get the materials listed in a coherent space so that I can have them to read through. I am looking forward to investigating exactly what Tess’s clothes mean in her relationship to her status/her class/her body, etc. I plan to reread Tess over the weekend as well as get the two Hollander books from the library.Here is my Bib:

Burman, Barbara and Caroel Turbin. Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.

Butler, Lance St. John. Ed. Alternative Hardy. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.

Cavallaro, Dani and Alexandra Warwick. Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and Body. New York: Berg, 1998.

Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Dalziel, Pamela and Michael Millgate. Thomas Hardy’s Studies, Specimens and Notebook. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

Gatrell, Simon. “Dress, Body, and Psyche in ‘The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid’: Tess of the D’Ubervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge.” The Thomas Hardy Journal 22 (Autumn 2006): 143-58.

Guerard, Albert J. “Colour and Movement in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” Ed. Ian P. Watt. The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ser. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998.

Hollander, Ann. Feeding the Eye: Essays. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999.

—–. Seeing Through Clothes. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Kim, Ui Rak. “Marxist Criticism, A Working Class, and Alienation in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” Journal of English Language and Literature 46.4 (Winter 2000): 1061-72.

LaValley, Albert J. Ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Collections of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Michie, Elsie B. “Dressing Up: Hardy’s Tess of the D’Ubervilles and Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30.1 (2002): 305-23.

Silverman, Kaja. “History, Figuration, and Female Subjectivity in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles.’” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 18.1 (Autumn 1984): 5-28.

Williams, Merryn. “Hardy and Social Class.” Tess of the D’Ubervilles: Thomas Hardy. Ed. Peter Widdowson. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993. 24-32.

Worth, Rachel. “Rural Laboring Dress, 1850-1900: Some Problems of Representation.” Fashion Theory 3.3 (September 1999): 323-42.

—–. “Thomas Hardy and Rural Dress.” Costume: Journal of the Costume Society 29 (1995): 55-67.

My next research goal is to begin gathering for Miss JB. I am not sure even what tact I want to take for that book. The lesbian thing seems like it is too easy, but so little has been written on this book that it is unreal. I may end up comparing this to another Muriel Spark book. I am re-reading Miss JB tomorrow to prepare for my presentation with Hailey and maybe that will help me get a better grip on my research for that.