Victorian corsets, Part 2: the Cold Iron Hand

I don' t know what it is, but in the last few years I've become enraptured with pictures of Victorian women in beautiful dresses.

Is this my gay side, or what? Or do I want to BE them? I would imagine the undergirdings for such gorgeous gowns would be uncomfortable, to say the least.

Does it get any more elegant? Do we have anything to compare to this today, except maybe in a period movie or a stage play?

Period costumes - hell, no one does it better than Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence.

Memorable quote: "The corsets are a tremendous help to the performance, because you're playing a repressed person and you can feel the pain that they endured. My waist had to be 19 inches and they had to measure me every day. I would be on the floor and they would pull the strings until it was 19 inches. . . But if I did it again I would want it the same way because it made my performance."

What takes a little thunder out of this is the fact that Winona's waist was probably about 20 inches to begin with.

Now isn't this nice? It's one of those fainting couches. Makes you want to run out and buy one.  (Is that a cigarette I see in her hand??)

You didn't have to diet then. If you had overindulged or gained a few pounds, you just pulled the laces in a little tighter, et voila - a beautiful waist that a man could span with his two hands. It's proven by this shot of a woman in everyday dress whose waist has been reduced to a thread. This is probably a simple everyday outfit that somehow looks extremely elegant.

Looks like a Seurat painting, but it's real.

Ethel Barrymore, with roses stuck all over her.

From an interview with Karin Cartlidge (star of The Cherry Orchard) in the London Times:

"These bloody corsets do a lot for repression: I nearly fainted in one. I find them quite sexy; actually, it's a funny sort of thing. They hold you in like a cold iron hand round your heart, therefore all your emotions just seethe away underneath it. It's like being in a sort of prison and it's quite exciting, there's something erotic about it."

OK. . .

What about Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, being slowly and sadistically

driven crazy by Charles ("come wiz me to zee Casbah") Boyer? Sadomasochism. . . insanity. . . corsets. . . I'm ready to kvell.

This is one of those eerily crystalline Victorian-era photographs that depicts middle-class women out for a stroll in their ordinary clothes, which nonetheless look gorgeous. My goodness, I love those dresses: the proportions were always perfect, and the hats added height and style.

    Another quote. . . from some anonymous

actress in The Buccaneers: "For the first two weeks it is unbearable in the

corsets. Now I put it on, and I'm saying, 'Tighten me in more, tighten me in more!' and they're saying 'Your corset is meeting! We can't!"

Goodness. Now I see why they're coming back (mainly as a fetish item, but soon the world will catch up and realize this is the ultimate diet aid).

We couldn't do this slightly bizarre post without Miz Scahhlett and her green barbecue dress, probably the most fetching thing she wore in that interminable costume melodrama. Certainly better than that red rag she was forced to wear to that, you know, thingammy, that thingamajigger where she was supposed to be publicly acknowledging she was an adulteress when in truth she hadn't even given Ashley a hickey.

Though not for lack of trying.

In this scene, I assume war has just been declared (or "woah, woah, woah", as Scarlett put it). Men are running back and forth in a blur and colliding with each other, or maybe those guys are conjoined twins joined at the ear.

Lina Cavalieri, who could throw on just about anything and look

amazing. Oh well, maybe I AM gay.

Why is it, though - I just had this thought, and it was strange - I've never heard a gay woman rhapsodize over any item of apparel or anything to do with fashion. It's funny cuz they're supposed to like women and notice women and be turned on by women. But it's gay men who do all the rhapsodizing. It's weird.

Maybe I'm a gay man?

 

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Bewitched, enchanted, and downright seduced

Yes, this is about music again, a topic I can't help returning to. And this is one of those fugitive pieces, remembered quite vividly from my childhood: one that wriggled away and escaped. I think it was the title that popped into my head yesterday, in the tiniest bubble possible, but  at first I got it wrong: I thought maybe it was The Amazing Flutist, and I couldn't remember the composer's name.

It took a while. Then when I finally I winkled it out, The Incredible Flutist by Walter Piston, I realized that what we had listened to all those years ago was not even our record. I believe it belonged to my brother, who for some reason toted it home with him when he came back from university. I'd be maybe 10, he'd be maybe 20.

 

How often did we listen to it? Twice? If that. But if you take the time to listen to this, you'll see why at least parts of it lingered on in my memory. And yes, if you are at all familiar with Stravinsky's Petrushka, you'll likely notice that this is very much in the same mold.

Yet, in place of the frenetic near-delirium of Stravinsky's work, there is an innocence, even a purity in this suite: and some of it is just eye-fillingly beautiful, takes me aback. I don't know all of the story (for this is just a reduction of a full-length ballet score, one that was very rarely performed for some reason), but I can guess that the Flutist was a sort of enchanted/enchanting Pied Piper figure who attracted women rather than rats.

 

These folk tales often have an underlay of eroticism in them. If you look up the literal meaning of enchant, it means to gain power over someone by casting a verbal spell, an incantation. If you look at words like cantor, it's obvious we're in the realm of sacred (or profane) song. This seems to be implying (or shouting!) that music can be an extremely powerful means of seduction.

Let's not get into Justin Bieber or Mario Lanza or whoever happens to be the heart-throb of the day. Music hath charms, whether sung or piped or fluted. I once knew a man - an incredible man - who played a flute (and a saxophone and a piano and a clarinet and a -) who enchanted me for five years, without his ever knowing it.

So enchantment can even be involuntary. On his side, or her side, or both.