CORSET LADIES RIDE SIDESADDLE in Victorian photos

A particular aspect of Victorian culture was the sidesaddle. For the sake of modesty, women were not allowed to ride astride - such things were indelicate, if not immoral. But what amazes me is how a woman could attain great heights of horsemanship sitting sideways on a saddle that was flat as a chair, with only one stirrup and a HUGE, voluminous skirt hanging down to her high-buttoned shoes - not to mention a very tight corset which restricted her breathing. Some of these shots are of trick riders, who still managed to do things like jump rope on horseback - sitting sideways! For a while, divided skirts were allowed, but this may have been the influence of the bicycle, which became wildly popular with women as it gave them a measure of freedom they hadn't known before. They could even get away from "mashers" without having to stab them with a hatpin. But even bicycles were frowned upon in some quarters as being too "stimulating" in an intimate way. Victorian women just couldn't catch a break.

BLOGGER'S NOTE! I just realized that one of these women is the world-famous sharp-shooter and horsewoman, Annie Oakley! She was a pattern breaker in a totally male-dominated field, outshooting all her rivals with a rock-steady hand - even once winning a competition with a broken arm. But even she couldn't ride astride - it was too indelicate.

💐🌹🌼ADORABLE! Victorian Ballerina Cats🌼🌹💐 (animation)

Hey, it looks like I'm "back" (not that I was ever away). After a brief moment of panic, YouTube is once again allowing me to post videos without going in circular gyrations that take forever and may not even yield results. This is one of my earliest animations, likely made for Facebook or perhaps for this blog, which I have transformed into YouTube videos. I came to rhe realization that I had THOUSANDS of gifs - I can't even count how many - that I spent a tremendous amount of time on, posed once, then filed away. Some of them are good enough to work on some more, adding sound/music and being given a second life. Sounds like a theme!

Arsenic and Old (green) Lace

Arsenic and old (green) lace 

 

(Excerpted from an article in Racked, a now-defunct historical website)

In 1814, a company in Schweinfurt, Germany, called the Wilhelm Dye and White Lead Company developed a new green dye. It was brighter than most traditional green dyes. It was bolder. The shade was so jewel-like that it quickly began being called "emerald green." And women loved it. Largely because it was during this time that gas lighting, rather than candlelight, was being introduced. When women went out to parties at night, the rooms were considerably brighter than they had been only a few decades before. These party-goers wanted to make sure they were wearing gowns that stood out boldly — gowns in a shade like emerald green. People also began using it for wallpaper and carpeting. Victorian Britain was said to be "bathed in… green." 

The effects of arsenic exposure are horrific. In addition to being deadly, it produces ulcers all over the skin. Those who come in close contact with it might develop scabs and sores wherever it touched. It can also make your hair fall out, and can cause people to vomit blood before shutting down their livers and kidneys. 

And if you think the effects were terrifying for the people who merely brushed against these fabrics, wait until you hear what happened to the women who manufactured them, working with the dye every day. Matilda Scheurer, a 19-year-old woman who applied the arsenic green dye to fake flowers, died in a way that horrified the populace in 1861. She threw up green vomit, the whites of her eyes turned green, and when she died, she claimed that "everything she looked at was green." When people began investigating such workshops, they found other women in similar distress, like one "who had been kept on [working with] green... till her face was one mass of sores." 

The Victorian slang for an attractive person — "killing" — even took on new meaning, with the British Medical Journal remarking: "Well may the fascinating wearer of it be called a killing creature. She actually carries in her skirts poison enough to slay the whole of the admirers she may meet with in half a dozen ball-rooms." 

You would think that these stories would have caused people to immediately stop wearing the color, but, of course, they didn’t. Some people tried to tell themselves that they’d be safe provided they did not lick the fabric or wallpaper, which was, unfortunately, not true. Others claimed that the doctors were simply lying, because some people will always believe that science is just not real. All this in spite of the fact that every Victorian household probably had a jar of arsenic to poison rats, so they knew it was poisonous. 

This backlash meant it took until 1895 for regulations to be put in place regulating conditions in factories where workers would be exposed to arsenic. Fortunately, by then, "in the absence of government intervention, the people of Britain had used the power of their pocketbooks" to demand alternatives to the arsenic-based dye.

Thank goodness they did.

Blogger's commentary: This seems like an extreme version of the old saw about "having to suffer for beauty". What alarms me most of all is the denial that existed for DECADES about the dangers of this extremely poisonous substance. Combined with the excessively heavy, close-fitting fashions of the time, arsenic dye would create a sweaty toxic stew ideal for skin penetration.

Even the ubiquitous green wallpaper in the fashionable Victorian parlour gave off a gas which eventually rotted a person's insides as well as their brain. Factory workers got the worst of it, with an incredibly horrible and grotesque death in which they literally turned green all over. 

This was, in my opinion, far more dangerous than the extreme corseting which many now defend, claiming that if the corsets were "well-fitting" they could not possibly have caused serious health problems. But "waist training" is now a wildly popular activity for those who are into fetish-wear, not unlike the toe-tipping "ballet boots" which wrench the wearer's feet and spine into an unnatural c-curve. Thus it's a kink, a popular kink which is being vigorously, even angrily defended all over the internet in a way which puzzles me. 

Others claim - and in light of the thousands of crystalline-quality photos from the era, I can't see how they can defend this - that Victorian women didn't even wear tight corsets, but only reduced their waists by two inches or so. But the photos belie this, and the dresses on mannequins display astonishingly small waists, fitted on the dress form much as they would fit on the wearer. I can't help but believe that tightlacing fetishists are attempting to downplay or even rewrite obvious historical evidence to make a bodily-distorting kink more acceptable.

But never mind! We're not even talking about corsets here, but poisonous green arsenic-based dye which was killing people for some SEVENTY years before sufficient regulations were passed to make it illegal.

So why was this colour such a big deal, to the point where women were willing to risk their lives, or at least vigorously deny that there WAS any risk? The first time I saw this "arsenic green" (and I will admit I've never seen it in person), I was quite dazzled by it. Green is not my favorite colour in any of its permutations, but this was so deeply saturated, so dazzlingly jewel-like, that it grabbed me visually as few other shades do.

Then I thought of something (or someone) else: Scarlett O'Hara! Green was definitely her colour, from the glorious flocked barbecue dress with the ruffled neckline to her infamous Rhett-deceiving gown made from the green velvet curtains hanging at Tara.

Arsenic dye is never mentioned, either in the movie or the book, but in the novel it seems that everything Scarlett wears is green, a colour which brings out her alabaster skin and raven hair. She also complains all the way through the story about the agonizing tightness of her stays and how much they restrict her movement (but she never removes them, not even when reduced to picking cotton in the fields after the fall of the South). Though Margaret Mitchell was a blatant racist responsible for one of the most appalling pieces of historical fiction in literary history (and note that she won the Pulitzer Prize for it), she DID do her homework meticulously. I believe she was  accurate in portraying women with extremely tiny waists (and Scarlett's, remember, was only 17 inches!). Fetishists can do whatever they want with their own bodies, of course. But the revival of the kink is relatively new. What will happen when we come back in 30 or so years? Will pushing your stomach up, your liver down and your lungs in maybe-just-maybe turn out to have some long-term damaging effects?

The Glass of Fashion and the Mould of Form

Victorian Bicycle Humour

Gertrude: "My dear Jessie, what on earth is that Bicycle Suit for!"

Jessie: "Why, to wear, of course."

Gertrude: "But you haven't got a Bicycle!"

Jessie: "No: but I've got a Sewing Machine!"

O Happy, Joyous Eastertide!

Corset Queens: a Victorian gallery

Tightlaced: the glorious prison

Creepiest gifs you ever saw!

I gif too much. I'm just too much of a giffer in every sense. And now this new conflict comes into my life (as if I needed one): I'm finding out I pronounce the name of my beloved mini-vids wrong, or at least wrong by the reckoning of the geniuses who invented them.

I'm spozed to say "jiff", like the peanut butter. "Giff" like I've been saying it doesn't make it cuz it isn't correct. Even worse is the way I used to pronounce it, spelled-out-like: gee eye eff.

Why NOT gee eye eff? We say "pee en gee", don't we, not "ping" or "pinge"? The arguments about this on the internet are endless and truly heated. I'm going to have to come up with my own bloody name, but until then. . .

Creepiness delights me, always has, and even more as I get older and closer to my own inevitable creepage. When I found troves of Victorian automatons on YouTube, by yar, I was off to the races.

This is Nancy the life-size automaton, and she can knit and tap her foot and stuff, but who cares about all that when you have a face like this? Those shifty eyes are something to behold. Worse than human.

Was this supposed to be pleasant at one time, do you suppose? Or did people enjoy a bit of after-dinner queasiness now and again?

They don't know how to make dolls like this any more. It would be banned immediately.

This is a rabbit violinist, mighty ratty by today's standards. I wish he'd stop looking at me like that.

I call this one Hellhound.

Saving the best 'til last, this one was featured in my Dead Monk in the Middle of the Road post of a while back. I apologize for the teeny size and graininess, but it was all I could find. This astonishing artifact came from 1560 and represents a monk who looks diseased, if not demented. He seems to speak across the centuries.

But what is he saying? If we could hear his utterances from deep in the mists of antiquity, what would they be?

"Bluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluh!"

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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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