A modern city dweller suddenly transported back to Paris or London in the 1750s would find crowds whose appearance was at once simpler and more puzzling than the crowds of our time. A man in the street now can distinguish the poor from the middle class by sight and, with a little less precision, the rich from the middle class.
Appearances on the streets of London and Paris two centuries ago were manipulated so as to be more precise indicators of social standing. Servants were easily distinguishable from laborers. The kind of labor performed could be read from the peculiar clothes adopted by each trade, as could the status of a laborer in his craft by glancing at certain ribbons and buttons he wore.
In the middle ranks of society, barristers, accountants, and merchants each wore distinctive decorations, wigs, or ribbons. The upper ranks of society appeared on the street in costumes which not merely set them apart from the lower orders but dominated the street. The costumes of the elite and of the wealthier bourgeoisie would puzzle a modern eye.
There were patches of red pigment smeared on nose or forehead or around the chin. Wigs were enormous and elaborate. So were the headdresses of women, containing in addition highly detailed model ships woven into the hair, or baskets of fruit, or even historical scenes represented by miniature figures.
The skins of both men and women were painted either apoplexy-red or dull white. Masks would be worn, but only for the fun of frequently taking them off. The body seemed to have become an amusing toy to play with.
During his first moments on the street, the modern interloper would be tempted to conclude that there was no problem of order in this society, everybody being so clearly labeled. And if this modern observer had some historical knowledge, he would give a simple explanation for this order: people were just observing the law.
For there existed on the statute books in both France and England sumptuary laws which assigned to each station in the social hierarchy a set of “appropriate” clothes, and forbade people of any one station from wearing the clothes of people in another rank. Sumptuary laws were especially complicated in France.
For instance, women of the 1750s whose husbands were laborers were not permitted to dress like the wives of masters of a craft, and the wives of “traders” were forbidden certain of the adornments allowed women of quality. Laws on the statute books, however, do not indicate laws observed or enforced.
By the opening of the eighteenth century, very few arrests were made for violation of the sumptuary laws. Theoretically, you could go to jail for imitating another person’s bodily appearance; practically, you need have had no fear by 1700 of doing so. People in very large cities had little means of telling whether the dress of a stranger on the street was an accurate reflection of his or her standing in the society; most of the migrants to the cosmopolitan centers came from relatively far away, following new occupations once in town.
Was what the observer saw on the street then an illusion? According to the logic of an egalitarian-minded society, when people do not have to display their social differences, they will not do so. If both law and strangerhood allow you to “get away” with being any person you choose to be, then you will try not to define who you are. But this egalitarian logic breaks down when applied to the ancien régime city.
Despite the fact that sumptuary laws were seldom enforced throughout western Europe, despite the fact that in the great cities it would be difficult to know much about the origins of those one saw in the street, there was a desire to observe the codes of dressing to station. In doing so, people hoped to bring order to the mixture of strangers in the street.
The clothing of most urban middle- and upper-class Frenchmen and Englishmen showed a remarkable stability in cut and general form from the late seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century, certainly more stability than in the previous eighty years. With the exception of the female’s pannier (a flattened-out skirt) and the gradual change in the ideal male build – from corpulent to thin and narrow-waisted – there was a clinging in the eighteenth century to the basic shapes of the late seventeenth.
However, the use of these forms was changing. Clothing that in the late seventeenth century was worn on all occasions was by the middle of the eighteenth century conceived of as appropriate only on stage and in the street. In the eighteenth century home, loose-fitting and simple garments were the growing preference of all classes.
There appears here the first of the terms of the divide between the public and the private realm: the private realm being more natural, the body appeared as expressive in itself. Squire remarks that, during the Régence, Paris saw the complete adoption of a negligé appearance.
The costume of the boudoir had descended to the drawing-room.The “private” quality of dress was emphasized by the general use of forms distinctly “undress” in origin. On the street, by contrast, clothes were worn which recognizably marked one’s place – and the clothes had to be known, familiar bodily images if the markings were to be successful. The conservation of the late seventeenth century gross forms of bodily appearance cannot thus be viewed as a simple continuity with the past.
The attempt was to use proven images of where one belonged in the society in order to define a social order on the street. Given the changes in urban life, this attempt was bound to encounter difficulties. For one thing, many of the new mercantile occupations had no seventeenth-century precedent, so that those who worked in the accounts-receivable section of a shipping firm had no appropriate clothing to wear.
For another, with the collapse of the guilds in the great cities, much of the repertoire of familiar clothing based on guild markings was useless, because few people were entitled to it. One way people solved these difficulties was by taking as street wear costumes which clearly labeled a particular trade or profession but had little relation to the trade or profession of the wearer.
These people were not necessarily dressing above themselves. In fact, the records indicate that lower-middle-class people seem to have been only sporadic counter jumpers in the matter of clothes. Nor, if these old clothes were donned by someone of a different but equivalent trade or profession, was there much thought given to altering the garments to suit or to symbolize their own particular station.
That would have been idiosyncratic; the clothes would not have meant much to a person on the street who did not know their wearer, much less the reason why he might have altered a familiar form. Whether people were in fact what they wore was less important than their desire to wear something recognizable in order to be someone on the street.
We would say of a shipping clerk in a poultry firm who dressed like a butcher or falconer when he went out for a walk that he was wearing a costume; that notion of costume would help us comprehend his behavior as having something to do with the dress of an actor in the theater, and we could easily understand that such a mode of dressing could be called observing a convention.
What makes eighteenth-century street wear fascinating is that even in less extreme cases, where the disparity between traditional clothes and new material conditions had not forced someone into an act of impersonation, where instead he wore clothes which reasonably accurately reflected who he was, the same sense of costume and convention was present.
At home, one’s clothes suited one’s body and its needs; on the street, one stepped into clothes whose purpose was to make it possible for other people to act as if they knew who you were. One became a figure in a contrived landscape; the purpose of the clothes was not to be sure of whom you were dealing with, but to be able to behave as if you were sure.
Do not inquire too deeply into the truth of other people’s appearances, Chesterfield counseled his son; life is more sociable if one takes people as they are and not as they probably are. In this sense, then, clothes had a meaning independent of the wearer and the wearer’s body. Unlike as in the home, the body was a form to be draped.
In articulating this rule, we should specify “men” in place of “people.” For women were rather more carefully scrutinized for a relationship between their rank and their clothing: within a general rank, like men, they might adopt one street face or another, but they could incur hostility for jumping the line between ranks.
The problem was most acute in the shades of ranking, none too clear themselves, between middlemiddle levels and upper-middle levels, and the reason for this lay in the means by which fashion was disseminated at the time among the female population. France was the model for feminine London’s taste in both the middle and upper ranks of society.
In this decade, middle-rank English women usually wore what upper-rank Frenchwomen had been wearing ten or fifteen years before. French clothes were disseminated by means of dolls; the dolls were dressed in exact replicas of current fashion, and then salesmen, their cases packed with fifteen or twenty perfect mannequins in miniature, would travel to London or Vienna.
In Paris itself something of a similar time lag existed between classes, though, of course, the dolls were unnecessary. The cast-off system would have created a tremendous blurring of class lines if the dolls were brought back to human size exactly, or, rather, the differences between middle and upper classes would have been that the former were exact echoes of what the fashionable ladies wore when they were much younger.
In fact, when the dolls were brought back to life-size proportions, the dresses were systematically simplified. In Paris, where the dolls were not needed, the same simplifying pattern also occurred. The result was that middle-class women were faint echoes of their aristocratic contemporaries when they were younger, but also simplified versions of them.
Codes of dress as a means of regulating the street worked by clearly if arbitrarily identifying who people were. The cast-off pattern could threaten this clarity. The following is the reaction of one middle-class husband, an oil merchant, to his wife’s dressing above herself, reported in the Lady’s Magazine of a slightly later period, 1784:
When down dances my rib in white, but so bepukered and plaited, I could not tell what to make of her; so turning about, I cried, “Hey, Sally, my dear, what new frolic is this: It is like none of the gowns you used to wear.” “No, my dear,” cried she, “it is no gown, it is the chemise de la reine.”
“My dear,” replied I, hurt at this gibberish . . . “let us have the name of your new dress in downright English.” “Why then” said she, “if you must have it, it is the queen’s shift.” Mercy on me, thought I, what will the world come to, when an oilman’s wife comes down to serve in the shop, not only in her own shift, but in that of a queen.
If the oil merchant’s wife or anyone else could wear a chemise de la reine, if imitation was exact, how would people know whom they were dealing with? Again, the issue was, not being sure of a rank, but being able to act with assurance. Thus when one saw that a woman was dressing above her station, it was considered only good manners to hold her up to ridicule, even to point out to other strangers that she was an impostor.
This shaming however, was behavior which, like the clothes themselves, had a specific geography: if you found out someone dressing above station in a social gathering in your home, it would be the height of bad taste to subject her to the treatment you felt entitled to inflict on the street. The clothing of the aristocracy and the higher bourgeois classes can now assume its place in relation to that of the lower orders.
The principle of dressing the body as a mannequin, as a vehicle for marking by well-established conventions, drew the upper and lower realms of society closer together than a casual visitor might first surmise from the actual costumes, or more precisely, the upper classes drew this principle to its logical conclusion; they literally disembodied bodily imagery.
If that casual visitor were to stop for a moment, indeed, and consider in what the playfulness and fantasy of the upper-class clothing lay, he would be struck by the fact that the wig, the hat, the vest-coat, while attracting attention to the wearer, did so by the qualities of these adornments as objects in themselves, and not as aids to setting off the peculiarities of his face or figure.
Let us move from tip to toe to see how the upper orders arrived at this objectification of the body. Headdresses consisted of wigs and hats for men, and tied and waved hair, often with artificial figurines inserted, for the women. In commenting on the evolution of wigs by the middle of the eighteenth century, Huizinga writes: [T]he wig is swept up into a regular panache of high combed hair in front with rows of tight little curls over the ears and tied at the back with laces.
Every pretence of imitating nature is abandoned; the wig has become the complete ornament. The wigs were powdered, and the powder held in place with pomade. There were many styles, although the one Huizinga describes was the most popular; the wigs themselves required great care to maintain. Women’s approach to dressing their hair is best illustrated by La Belle Poule.
A ship of that name defeated an English frigate and inspired a hairdo in which hair represented the sea and nestled in the hair was an exact replica of La Belle Poule. Headdresses like the pouf au sentiment were so tall that women often had to kneel to go through doorways. Lester writes that the pouf au sentiment was the favorite court style, and consisted of various ornaments fastened in the hair – branches of trees representing a garden, birds, butterflies, cardboard cupids flying about, and even vegetables.
The shape of the head was thus totally obscured, as was much of the forehead. The head was support for the real focus of interest, the wig or hairdo. Nowhere was the attempt to blot out the individual character of a person more evident than in the treatment of the face. Both men and women used face paint, either red or white, to conceal the natural color of the skin and any blemishes it might have.
Masks came back into fashion, worn by both men and women. Marking the face with little patches of paint was the final step in obliterating the face. The practice was begun in the seventeenth century, but only by the 1750s had it become widespread. In London patches were placed on the right or left side of the face, depending on whether one was Whig or Tory. During the reign of Louis XV, patches were placed to indicate the character of the Parisian: at the corner of the eye stood for passion; center of the cheek, gay; nose, saucy.
A murderess was supposed to wear patches on her breasts. The face itself had become a background only, the paper on which these ideograms of abstract character were mounted. The surfaces of the body followed the same principles. In the 1740s women began displaying more of their breasts, but only as a ground on which to place jewels or, in only a few cases, let us hope, patches.
The male at the same time used lace at the edges of sleeves, and other sewn-on adornments, more and more delicate. With the slimming of the body, the body frame became simpler, so that it permitted more plasticity and variety in adornment. Women’s skirts largely hid their legs and feet. Men’s breeches did not hide the feet.
On the contrary, during this period, leggings divided the limb in half visually, and attention was focused on the shoe rather than, as in the early 1700s and again at the end of the century, on the leg as a whole. The bottom extremity of the body was, as were the face and upper torso, an object on which were placed decorations. The body as an object to be decorated bridged stage and street.
The bridge between the two had an obvious and a not so obvious form.The obvious bridge was in the replication of clothes in the two realms; the not so obvious bridge was the way in which stage designers still conceived of allegorical or fantastic characters through the principle of the body as mannequin. In addition, it is important to note one area in which the clothing already described, which was street clothing, was forbidden to be replicated upon the stage.
Above the level of degrading poverty, the street clothing of all ranks was usable almost intact as stage costume. But its use in the mid-eighteenth-century theater produced certain anomalies, at least to a modern observer. In plays with relatively contemporary settings, like Molière’s comedies, mid-eighteenth-century audiences saw characters dressed for the street even when the scene was a boudoir. Intimate dress for intimate scenes was out.
In plays with historical settings, the clothing of the street was the clothing of the stage, no matter whether the play performed was set in ancient Greece, medieval Denmark, or China. Othello was played by David Garrick dressed in a fashionable, elaborate wig; by Spranger Barry in a gentleman’s cocked hat. Hamlet as played by John Kemble, appeared in gentleman’s attire and a powdered wig.
The idea of historical presentation, of what a Dane or a Moor looked like in a certain place at a certain time, was largely absent from theatrical imagination. A critic wrote in 1755 that “historical exactitude is impossible and fatal to dramatic art.” The bridge between stage costume and street clothing cannot thus be thought of as part of a general desire for art to mirror life.
The bridge in images of the body distorted a mirror, of setting or of time. In addition, similarity between stage and street in the clothing itself was limited by one fact of social position. The theater audiences of this decade demanded a sharp discontinuity between the two realms when stage characters were those of the lower orders of society; these wretches people turned a blind eye toward in the city; they wanted to be equally blind in the theater.
Occasionally, some respectable manual occupations were also prettied up – especially servants. The servants dressed by the designer Martin in Paris “were all silks and satins with ribbons everywhere: the type has been preserved for us in the porcelain figures of the period.” In 1753 Madame Favart appeared once on the stage in the sandals, rough cloth, and bare legs of a real working woman of the provinces; the audience was disgusted.
Within these class limits, and within the generally conservative lines of dress, stage costume was often the proving ground of new wig styles, new face patches, new jewelry. Just as in the Renaissance designers would often try out new architectural forms first as stage backdrops, couturiers in the middle of the eighteenth century would often experiment with new styles on the stage before they attempted to make them into everyday street clothing.
If one moves from specific costumes to the principles of costuming employed by the great costume designers of the time, Martin and Boquet in Paris, there appears a less obvious way the theater bridged the rule of appearance which governed the street. Martin gave theater costumes a lightness and delicacy unknown in the days of Louis XIV; his costumes for Roman characters began to show an exaggeration which is whimsical.
This element of fantasy was picked up by Boquet, his successor in the mid-eighteenth century. Allegorical figures ceased to be creatures; they became an assemblage of decorative elements draped on the body but wholly unrelated to its movements or form. The actress Mlle Lacy would appear in the role of Amour dans l’Eglé with exposed breasts, but the breasts were not exposed by intent.
The costumer simply had no drapery he wanted to put under the lace garlands which were to be draped across the chest. The bare upper torso was like a background for the real focus of interest – the lace frills. The actor Paul would appear as Zéphire with drapery tied at an awkward point on his chest – no matter, it is not the chest the costumer is dressing, he is rather presenting a beautiful and delicate arrangement of cloth.
It is the rule of appearance in the everyday world – the body as mannequin – that this theater costuming elaborated. Allegorical figures were “fantastications of contemporary dress, street dress which itself expressed freedom and social dominance in terms of fantasy. Costume’s “fundamental lines changed with the fluctuations of fashion,” Laver writes.
That is true as well in terms of actual clothes; the bridge between the street and the stage also existed when a woman would think of showing herself on the street as Amour dans l’ Eglé.The rules of bodily appearance in London and Paris in the 1750s show an almost pure type of a structural continuity between the street and the stage.
The decades of the middle of the nineteenth century bore most historians of clothing and costume, as indeed they should. Squire’s judgment is short and damning: “The dullest decade in the history of feminine dress began in 1840. An insipid mediocrity characterized an entirely middle-class epoch.” Seldom had the female body appeared in more ungainly form, seldom had male dress been so drab. But these decades are all-important.
In them, personality entered the public realm in a structured way. It did so by meshing with the forces of industrial production, in the medium of clothes. People took each other’s appearances in the street immensely seriously; they believed they could fathom the character of those they saw, but what they saw were people dressed in clothes increasingly more homogeneous and monochromatic.
Finding out about a person from how he or she looked became, therefore, a matter of looking for clues in the details of his costume. This decoding of the body on the street in turn affected the bridge between stage and street. The codes of belief about street appearances began to be fundamentally different from the belief in appearances on the stage.
In these ways, the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie were trying to see in terms comparable to Balzac’s, but their vision led to a divorce between art and society. Terms like “homogeneous,” “uniform,” or “drab” must be used with caution. Compared with the garb of modern-day Peking, with its single military costume for all ages and both sexes, the clothing of the 1840’s would hardly appear uniform or drab.
Compared with the 1950s in the United States, it would be a celebration of style. But compared with what came before it, either in the ancien régime or in the Romantic era, it was homogeneous, it was drab. As numerous writers comment, it was the beginning of a style of dressing in which neutrality – that is, not standing out from others – was the immediate statement.
The epoch’s clothes pose two problems. The first is how and why clothing became more neutral.The second is the insistence on reading personality from neutral appearances.The first problem involved a new relationship between clothing and the machine. The sewing machine made its appearance in 1825, was worked on by various American and European firms, and was finally patented by Singer in 1851.
In the 1840s, watches became a mass-production item. In 1820, hats became the same when an American developed a machine for producing felt. By the middle of the nineteenth century, almost all shoes sold in cities were made by machine. The impact of these production changes on the clothes of Paris and London cannot be understood apart from a new means of disseminating fashion in the city.
One hundred years before, there were two ways in which a Parisian fashion was broadcast: within the city, the most effective was direct contact on the streets or in public gardens; and dolls were used, dressed in exact replica of what Countess So-and-So was wearing at the moment. By 1857, this had all changed.
Through “fashion plates” the pages of the newspaper disseminated fashion instantly, fashion depicted in its exact original form. The 1840s were the first great age of the mass-circulation newspaper; the sheer size of the newspapers’ circulation meant that most buyers, indeed, no longer needed to contact a living salesman in order to know what to buy.
Fashion dolls were still being made in the nineteenth century, but had lost their purpose; they were treated as archaic objects, interesting to collect, but were no longer used by salesmen of clothes. What happened within the department store was thus echoed within the world of clothes; active interchange between buyer and seller was transformed into a more passive and one-sided relationship.
By 1857, these changes in mass production and dissemination of clothes had penetrated the world of high fashion. In that year L. Worth opened up his fashion salon in Paris. He was the first high-fashion designer to use machine-made, mass-reproducible clothes. Today the technical quality of the Worth clothes, rather than their beauty, holds the eye.
One hundred and twenty years ago, they made an impact because his “good taste” and “beautiful design” were realized in patterns which could easily be copied by the new clothing machines, just as Worth used these machines on a limited scale to prepare costumes for his royal and aristocratic patrons.
As a result, there died out the simplifying process that operated in the eighteenth century, as clothes passed from elite originators to middle-class imitators. After Worth, such simplification was rendered mechanically obsolete. Differences between upper- and middle-class appearance moved to a new and more subtle terrain.
In the 1830s and 1840s the feminine silhouette came to be defined by the wasp waist and the leg-of-mutton sleeve. The extremely thin waist was achieved only by straitjacketing the body in a corset. The appeal of this imprisonment was, to bourgeois ladies, that it smacked of the dignity of bygone court years when royalty wore tight corsets and full dresses. By 1840, almost all of the female body below the collarbone was covered with clothing of some kind, for by this time the skirt had gradually descended to cover up the feet once again.
In the 1830s the male costume began to subside from the flowing and exaggerated lines of Romantic dress. By 1840 the cravat lost its flamboyance and lay close to the neck. Masculine lines became simpler in these two decades, and the color of clothing drabber.
Above all, broadcloth of a black color became the basic material for the streetwear of middle- and upper-class men and the “Sunday clothes” of the working class when they went to church. Now all these garments were cut by machine from patterns; if a gentleman or a lady could afford a tailor or seamstress, the patterns for hand-sewn clothes followed those of the machine-made patterns, unless the client was very rich or very eccentric.
And eccentricity in dress was itself frowned upon increasingly in these decades. We come here to a “puzzle of taste,” in Francois Boucher’s words, which was in fact a sign of a deep-seated and complex belief. In public, people did not want to stand out in any way; they did not want to be conspicuous. Why? Historians of fashion have ascribed this fear of standing out to rather trivial causes.
They speak, for instance, of the influence of Beau Brummell.While Romantics like the Comte d’Orsay dressed flamboyantly, Brummell presented himself as clean, neat, and immaculately controlled. Just as bourgeois ladies deformed their bodies in pursuit of a vanished royal bon ton, gentlemen thirty to forty years after Brummell’s fall from fashion in 1812 could imagine that in being prim and drab they were showing good taste.
But that is not enough as an explanation. Consider, for instance, a painting in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Copenhagen of a street crowd in that city, done by the painter A. M. Hounoeus in the middle of the century. The children’s garb is purely Danish, the adults are dressed “Parisian fashion.” It is a bad painting but an extraordinary document.
Here is a crowd of people, all rather somberly dressed, a large crowd. Who are they? How could we divine their work, their specific status, their backgrounds? By sight it is impossible. They are shielded. Differences between cosmopolitan and provincial life were involved in this taste for anonymity. It became in the 1840s a sign of middle-class cosmopolitan breeding, or the desire for urbanity among provincials.
During the decade on the Continent, people outside the great cities, conversely and in another mood, began to place emphasis on conserving their “native dress,” as opposed to dressing “Paris style.” The growing ideas of a folk and a folk spirit, which gave nations their rationale and rights, produced in part this consciously delineated line between Paris and “native fashion.”
The idea of the folk began in Herder’s generation and survived as Herder’s romantic contemporaries passed from the scene – the folk being always rural or village, the cosmopolitan city being anti-folk. This new nativism produced extraordinary contrasts in the realm of fashion. If one looks at male fashion plates in Lyons’ and Birmingham’s newspapers, one finds in both countries that provincial ideas of good taste were far more colorful, more various, and, to put it finely, more interesting than cosmopolitan ideas.
To dress up in a sophisticated way, a cosmopolitan way, meant to learn how to tone down one’s appearance, to become unremarkable. One can make then an easy connection. Given all the material upheaval in the city, people wanted to protect themselves by blending into the crowd. The massproduced clothes gave them the means to blend.
If the story were left here, one could sensibly conclude that now machine society controlled the expressive tools of the culture of the city. And if this were true, then all our familiar friends – dissociation, alienation, and the like – come into the picture: people must have felt dissociated from their bodies because their bodies were expressions of the machine, there was alienation because man no longer expressed his individuality through his appearance, and so on.
These descriptions have become so familiar that they are almost comforting; they tell so easily what went wrong. Yet dissociation is exactly what people so dressed did not do. As the images became more monochromatic, people began to take them more seriously, as signs of the personality of the wearer.
The expectation that even blank or trivial appearances had great importance as clues to personality, an expectation which Balzac seized on in his work, his audience also maintained in their own lives. Cosmopolitans, more drab in appearance, tended to use clothes more than their provincial opposites as psychological symbols. The contradiction of their lives in public was that they wanted to shield themselves from individual attention, and the machines provided them the means to do so, yet they scrutinized the appearances of others so shielded for revealing clues about states of personal feeling.
How does a black broadcloth suit come to seem a “social hieroglyphic”, to use Marx’s phrase? The answer lies in seeing the new ideas of immanent personality mesh with the mass production of appearances in public.
The two phenomena which bourgeois people personalized in public appearances were class and sex. Through reading details of appearance strangers tried to determine whether someone had metamorphosed economic position into the more personal one of being a “gentleman”. Sexual status became personalized in public as strangers tried to determine whether someone, for all her seeming propriety, gave out little clues in her appearance which marked her as a “loose woman.
Both the “gentleman and the “loose woman” lurking behind the respectable lady were visually meaningful only as public phenomena.The gentleman and the loose woman out of the public light, at home, had wholly different connotations. A gentleman at home was an attentive person, especially to the needs of his wife. His appearance was not the issue.
The perception of a woman’s looseness within the family was a perception of her behavior, not of giveaway clues in how she looked or dressed. How do you recognize a gentleman when you meet a stranger?
In La Diorama, a popular story set in Paris in the 1840s, a young man suddenly comes into an inheritance. He immediately resolves to buy some good clothes.When he has finished outfitting himself, he encounters a friend on the streets who is a republican, scornful of privileged wealth. And this friend does not by looking at him recognize that he has suddenly acquired wealth, because the clothes do not obviously proclaim the facts.
But here there is a second step. He is hurt because, as a young man initiated, he can tell whether the clothes are those of a gentleman or not. Since the friend doesn’t know the rules, he can notice nothing. This works in reverse too. When the young man goes to a factory he cannot read the rank of the various workers, although his friend can instantly.
That is to say, this clothing does speak socially; it has a code which can be broken. In 1750, the use of color, emblems, hats, trousers, breeches were instant signs of social place that everyone on the street could know; they may not have been an accurate index, but they were clear if arbitrary signs. These young people of the 1840s inhabit a world where the laws are accessible only to initiates.
The clues the initiate reads are created through a process of miniaturization. Details of workmanship now show how “gentle” a man or woman is. The fastening of buttons on a coat, the quality of fabric counts, when the fabric itself is subdued in color or hue. Boot leather becomes another sign. The tying of cravats becomes an intricate business; how they are tied reveals whether a man has “stuffing” or not, what is tied is nondescript material.
As watches become simpler in appearance, the materials used in their making are the mark of the owner’s social standing. It was, in all these details, a matter of subtly marking yourself; anyone who proclaims himself agent obviously isn’t. A Russian visitor to the Jockey Club asked his hosts to define a gentleman: Was this an inherited title, a caste, or a question of cash?
The answer he received was that a gentleman disclosed his quality only to those who had the knowledge to perceive it without being told. The Russian, a rather abrupt soul, demanded to know what form these disclosures would take, and one member replied to him, as though breaking a confidence, that one could always recognize gentlemanly dress because the buttons on the sleeves of a gentleman’s coat actually buttoned and unbuttoned, while one recognized gentlemanly behavior in his keeping the buttons scrupulously fastened, so that his sleeves never called attention to this fact.
Miniaturization extended down into the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie and upper working classes. The use of lace frills becomes in the 1840s a mark of social standing; a mark gentlemen could not pick up. The sheer cleanliness of small articles of clothing like the neckband may be enough for a shopkeeper, inspecting someone to whom he is introduced, to decide whether he is one of us or not.
The characters of loose and respectable women were read through the same combination of inflation and miniaturization. In his study of Victorian sexuality, The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus has shown how the medical and social picture of the mid-19th century prostitute laid great stress on her resemblance to the ordinary respectable woman.
Here is Acton, a physician, on the physical similarities: If we compare the prostitute at thirty-five with her sister, who perhaps is the married mother of a family, or has been a toiling slave for years in the over-heated laboratories of fashion, we shall seldom find that the constitutional ravages thought to be necessary consequences of prostitution exceed those attributable to the cares of a family.
Nor in street behavior do loose women show themselves specially. They give off small clues only, a glance held too long, a gesture of languor, which a man who knows how to read will understand. This similarity worked from the other side as well. How was a respectable woman to set herself off from a loose one, let alone a fallen woman, if the resemblance was so close?
How could she, presumably innocent and pure, pick up the knowledge to guide her? There arose out of this dilemma a need to pay great attention to details of appearance and to hold oneself in, for fear of being read wrong or maliciously; indeed, who knew, perhaps if one gave off miniature signals of being loose, one really was.
Miniaturization operated, in the perception of “looseness”, in terms of the body itself. Since the major limbs of the body were covered, and since the shape of the female body dressed bore no relationship to the body undressed, little things like the slight discoloration of the teeth or the shape of the fingernails became signs of sexuality.
Furthermore, inanimate objects which surrounded the person could in their details be suggestive in such a way that the human being using or seeing them felt personally compromised. Some readers may remember the piano-leg covers in their grandfather’s homes, or the dining-room table-leg covers; it was considered improper for the legs of anything to show.
The idiocy of such prudery can so cloud the mind that its source is forgotten. All appearances have personal meanings: if you believe that little gestures with the eyes may involuntarily betray feelings of sexual license, it becomes equally rational to feel that the exposed legs of a piano are provocative. The root of this indiscriminate fear is as much cultural as sexual, or, better, it was the change in culture which permitted the Victorian bourgeoisie to become more prudish than their eighteenth-century forebears.
And that cultural change, leading to the covering of piano legs, has its roots in the very notion that all appearances speak, that human meanings are immanent in all phenomena. One’s only defense against such a culture was in fact to cover up, and from this came the stony feminine fear of being seen in public.
To be shielded from light, from the streets, from exposure of the limbs, was the rule for bodily appearance. Here is how one writer describes it: Few Victorians were seen closely in strong light once they had passed their youth. At night they were aureole by oil lamps and gaslights; during the day they lay in semi-darkness.
They undressed in the dark; the rich woman would breakfast in bed and come down to the main part of the house when her husband had left for his office, his club, or his estate. The 1840s were an age in which the hooded bonnet reappeared as an article of genteel dress; later the thick veil appeared as a feature of middle-class garb, one which shielded the face almost completely.
As people’s personalities came to be seen in their appearances, facts of class and sex thus became matters of real anxiety. The world of immanent truths is so much more intense and yet so much more problematical than the public world of the ancient régime in which appearances were put at a distance from self.
In the coffeehouse, in the theater, in one’s clothing, the facts of social standing were so suspended or so stated, even if false, that they needn’t of necessity raise questions in a social situation. A man might or might not be what his clothes proclaimed, but the proclamation was clear. Through convention, the anxiety about whom you were talking to was less than in the Victorian situation, where a process of decoding had become necessary.
Investigative logic is necessary as a means of contacting the individual who might or might not flourish behind the facade of appearance. If, however, one did not know the rules that governed particular appearances, did not know how to “read” a cravat tied, or the existence of a kerchief worn over the chignon, you could never be sure of your deductions about whom you were meeting on the street. The compulsive attention to detail, the anxiety for facts which has since come to obsess us in so many ways, was born out of this anxiety about what appearances symbolize.
Closely tied to a code of personality immanent in public appearances was a desire to control these appearances through increasing one’s consciousness of oneself. Behavior and consciousness stand, however, in a peculiar relationship; behavior comes before consciousness.
It is involuntarily revealed, difficult to control in advance, precisely because there are no clear rules for reading the miniature details; they are clear only to initiates, and neither in acting as a gentleman nor in appearing as a woman of absolute respectability is there ever a stable code to use. In sexuality as in fashion, once “anyone” could pass on a certain set of terms, those terms became meaningless.
A new set of clues, a new code to penetrate arises; the mystification of personality is as continued as the mystification of new goods in stores. Consciousness becomes therefore retrospective activity, control of what has been lived – in the words of G. M. S.Young, the work of “unravelling” rather than “preparing.” If character is involuntarily disclosed in the present, it can be controlled only through seeing it in the past tense.
A history of nostalgia has yet to be written, yet surely this past-tense relationship of consciousness to behavior explains a crucial difference between eighteenthand nineteenth-century autobiography. In eighteenth-century memoirs like Lord Hervey’s, the past is nostalgically recalled as a time of innocence and modest feeling.
In the nineteenth-century memoir, two new elements are added. In the past one was “really alive”, and if one could make sense of the past, the confusion of one’s present life might be lessened. This is truth via retrospection.
Psychoanalytic therapy comes out of this Victorian sense of nostalgia, as does the modern cult of youthfulness. In a happier light, it thus arose that during the nineteenth century in both Paris and London the detective and the mystery novel became a popular genre. Detectives are what every man and woman must be when they want to make sense of the street.
Take, for example (although the example comes from later in the century), passages from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – like the following – which so delighted us as children. In “A Case of Identity”, a young woman walks into Holmes’s Baker Street flat; he takes one glance at her.
“Do you not find,” he said, “that with your short sight it is a little trying to do so much typewriting?” The girl and, as always, Watson are amazed that Holmes could deduce this. After she has left, Watson remarks: You appeared to read a good deal upon her which was quite invisible to me.
To which Holmes makes the famous reply: Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important. I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumbnails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.
That sentence could easily have served Balzac as a motto; his methods of characterization, too, were based on decoding isolated details of appearance, magnifying the detail into an emblem of the whole man.
Indeed, that magnification he practiced upon himself, as with his famous canes, writing to Madame Hanska one day, for instance: You cannot exaggerate the success my latest cane has had in Paris.
It threatens to create a European fashion. People are talking about it in Naples and Rome. All the dandies are jealous. Remarks like this were, unfortunately, innocent of any irony.