Shimmyshake!

Miss Sadist's School of Tightlacing

From the “Sheffield Independent” July 18^th 1896:

SMALL WAISTS AND EDUCATION.

Nowadays, when almost every pastime is being annexed to the use of girls and women, and when, if we fully believe the more advanced ones of the sex we are within a reasonable distance of the day when the petticoat and skirt will be abolished in favour of the knickerbocker, at least when taking exercise, the manner in which girls were trained for their after positions in life at fashionable finishing schools forty years, or rather less, ago, will, says “Hearth and Home,” surely prove interesting reading, though, perhaps, almost incredible.

Not long ago, among a number of old books, the writer came across a diary of school-girl life from which extracts have been made showing how the girls are turned out in one (the conventional) mould without regard for differences of either disposition or temperament. Nothing could be plainer than the entries of the diary itself; and in the light of modern feminine development it becomes a valuable, if a frivolous, “human document.” Let it speak for itself.

“August 15, 1858. — I am fifteen years of age to-day, and I haven't a lover. Margery has two, she tells me, but then she has such a very, very tiny waist— l can easily span it— and Mary tells me, when I say my new stays pinch me, that young ladies ought not to mind how much they are pinched in, because if they intend to make a good marriage they must have a jimp, small waist. Perhaps it is Margery's waist has got her a lover, for she is not sixteen quite.”

“September 27 (same year)— At last I am at school. I have been here three days; how long they have seemed away from little Bob, mother, and Kathleen. What a wasp-waisted lot we are, all except myself and the one or two other new girls; but we have all been measured, and when Mrs. B— sends out her stays from Brighton I suppose we shall be pulled in like the rest, and be laced up till we can scarcely breathe. What the girls hate (and what I shall hate, too) is never being allowed to loosen, except for the bath on Saturdays. And then, I have never worn stays at night. 

Last night I could hear Madge T— groaning in her sleep; she said she hardly slept at all, her new stays cut her so horribly. She has been here more than two years, and Mrs. M— says she has a lovely little waist— it is only 15 inches — and that though Madge could scarcely walk or breathe sometimes, she will have a perfect figure when she leaves at Christmas. Madge told me all about poor Sarah W—, who used to faint, and whose mother fetched her away. But Mrs. M— doesn't allow it to be talked about.”

“September 30. — Margery is in disgrace. Mlle. V—  found a note she had dropped from Harry. Madame M— is very angry at the very idea of a lover, although, after all, she is always telling us girls, if we complain of our stays pinching us, or that Marie or Mademoiselle hurt us when they rub our chests to make us develop, on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, that we must have good figures and small waists, so that we can make good marriages. Madge tells me that Violet S— and some of the other girls in her room— the bigger ones, of course — wear poultices very often at night to make them plump.”

“November 7. — This morning was ‘corset parade,’ as we girls call it. Madame, before we put on skirt and bodice, came round with the measurement book in her hand accompanied by Mademoiselle, tape in hand. Martha W— got into rare trouble; she had been faint in the night and obliged to loosen. She did not lace up again quite as small as she should have, hence Madame's anger. Amy T— was much commended, though she was white as death till she put on rouge, because she was only fifteen inches. How she panted and gasped while Margery and I laced her in. 

I am always a good girl, Madame says, though I don't pull myself in till I'm almost strangled, but content myself with seventeen inches — which, alas, Madame says must be sixteen by Christmas. I often laugh and say we girls are entered up like pieces of furniture, or something of that sort. Madame always reads out each entry from the book as each of us are ‘paraded.’ Mine was ‘Figure satisfactory, waist ditto; to be reduced to sixteen by December 18th; bust improved, but to be frictioned three times a week with linseed oil. Two pairs of new stays to be ordered from Madame B made extra stiff.’ Heigh-ho wee me, and I suppose I shall be a little more uncomfortable than before.”

Then a year after comes the following entry: — “How delightful to be home for good. Nurse is charmed with my figure, and says she is sure Captain W— admires it. He was watching me all across the lawn to-day while they were playing croquet. I can scarcely eat anything when laced in like I am, but she says girls don't want to eat much, and mother [says] that many women ruin their figures by eating.”

The Victorian Corset: it hurts so GOOD!

Why is this woman trapped inside a corset? And why does she look so happy to be there?

In researching the fascinating, slightly kinky topic of the Victorian corset, I came across this amazing quote from one of my favorite actresses.

"Winona Ryder has credited her tight corsets with fueling her performance in The Age of Innocence by allowing her to channel her character's emotional turmoil. The actress insists her restrictive costume allowed her to give an authentic performance as a socialite engaged to a lawyer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, in the 1993 period drama.

And despite feeling uncomfortable throughout the entire shoot, Ryder admits she is grateful for the painful garments. She tells Britain's Total Film magazine, "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."

"Daniel would wear his clothes home, he was very in character and I was like, 'You have no idea the pain I'm in right now!' But if I did it again I would want it the same way because it made my performance."

Ah yes, the corset: that curious object of female repression, ruthlessly squeezing a woman's body (no matter what size or shape) into a tiny hard cone, with bosoms thrust upwards and balanced on top like two ripe cantaloupes. In other words, corsets were as much for men as they were for women.

Or was it the other way around?

I adore Victorian costumery  - for that is how I see it, "dresses" being an inadequate term for the sumptuous, 50-pound confections that fit women's waists like a second (and imprisoning) skin. Even more than that, I love the ads, often full of whimsy like this almost unbelievable example for Ball's Corsets.

"Revolution in Corsets," it proclaims, depicting a squeezed-in Amazonian figure holding a sword and staff, her foot planted firmly on what is presumably that old-style thing that nobody wears any more. Meanwhile a herd of frightened women stampedes away in the distance. The Ball's Revolutionary Corset has triumped again!

And just look at the results. This is Miss Lettice Fairfax, and aside from the fact that she was named after a garden vegetable, I know nothing about her. Though frills at the shoulder and massive skirts provided an illusion of contrast, corsets took at least 3 inches off the natural waist, converting women's bodies into the perfect clothes-horse for gowns that must have been unbearably cumbersome and stifling to wear.

In fact, I have read that the ideal size for a woman's waist was the same measurement in inches as her neck.

Nothing is more revealing of attitudes towards corsets than these hokey, strangely beautiful ads.  They speak so clearly of those bizarre times, when a torturing undergarment passed without comment because it was so standard. No doubt no one really perceived the irony of a corset being called Harness. Not only that: this was an electric corset (electric items being a fad then, supposedly conveying some sort of tingly, healthful vitality to the patient), making one wonder if it didn't serve the same purpose as the modern vibrator.  Did it plug in? Did it have batteries? One wonders.

Some of my favorite shots display early celebrities such as a very young and girlish Ethel Barrymore (and these days, the hallowed name of Barrymore is only asociated with Drew, one of the most unattractive young women I've ever seen). In all her photos, her huge dark eyes look sad, her regal costumes displaying her like roast beef on a platter or a hugely oversized wedding bouquet.

Modern actresses probably dread wearing these things: they make the wasp-waisted gowns grip the torso like a very tight glove and provide a sort of crucial undergirding for the weight and volume of the skirt. But the little torture chambers can be surprisingly addictive. A British actress named Karin Cartlidge, starring in a TV version of The Cherry Orchard, told 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."

Indeed. I won't get into the sites that celebrate the corset as fetish-wear.  You know how to find them. Unless you're attending a Renaissance fair or working as a barmaid at Heidelberg Days, women don't endure these things any more except as fetish-wear. Most of these sites are extremely creepy. Some particularly slavish devotees "tightlace" day and night, though I don't know why anyone would do that to themselves.

Victorian porn could be very subtle. I wonder how many men found satisfaction (of a sort) in looking at these almost subliminally-erotic ads. Just thinking about what was under a woman's dress must have been completely unacceptable, which is probably why naughty French post cards were so popular. But did the proper Victorian woman somehow identify with the daring sauciness of the Valeine ad, or the soft-focus intimacy of the Royal Worcester?

Helena Bonham-Carter is still the ruling queen of the period costume. In A Room with a View, she smolders. With her masses of chestnut hair piled precariously on top of  her head like those water-jugs in the Middle East and her waist reduced to a thread, she swishes around in these dresses as if to the manor born. It must be tiring to pull a wagonload of suffocatingly heavy drapery around with you all day, but somehow she manages it.

And when she lets her masses of hair down, even in a granny-flanny, she still smolders.

Women had to do everything imprisoned in these things, even ride horses (and sidesaddle! It was somehow considered obscene for women to straddle anything, which makes one wonder about those Victorian families with ten or twelve children.) There were maternity corsets then which must have been agony to wear, and corsets for little girls, just to get them good and used to being squeezed until you couldn't properly breathe. Past the age of ten, normal respiration was left behind with all the other trappings of girlhood.

But over and over again, in researching this strange artifact from a very strange time, I found comments from actresses who had endured wearing these things, then had somehow fallen in love with them.

Emma Williams, star of the British series Bleak House, claims, "You get quite strict about your corset - it's like, 'Come on, tighter, tighter.' I had this gorgeous dress for a wedding scene, but it was ridiculously small. I nearly fainted, my corset was so tight. I wore it for eight hours, breathing really slowly so I wouldn't fall over. I'm sure I cracked a rib that day. . .  I had original Victorian corsets, so they were really heavy. I spent half the day crouching down to take the weight off my back. But you do get addicted to them. I might start wearing one round the house, doing the cleaning in rubber gloves and a corset. I'm a classy girl, me."

CODA: I just found these two incredible corset ads while looking for something else. They reflect two common features, or perhaps obsessions, of Victorian corset advertising: little scantily-dressed cherubs fluttering around and acting strangely, and "health corsets" that were no doubt meant to counter the anti-tightlacing "dress reform" movement of the late 19th century. Though corsets were probably about as healthy as tanning beds, they were pitched just as effectively. The ads often included doctors' endorsements (shades of Lucky Strike!), as if that settled the whole thing.

I have no idea what sort of voyeurism is being practised in this ad. I guess the fact that they're photographing the corset, not the woman in it, lets them get away with this overwhelmingly fetish-y shot. (And why is the corset being used as a planter?) This ad is for Warner Bros. Coraline: not, presumably, the movie studio, which didn't exist then - though I think we still see Warners undergarments of a different sort. Bras and things. Next time you think your bra is digging into you and it's torture, think on this and repent.

Ball's advertisements are without a doubt the best. This one boasts a "coiled wire spring elastic section", which today sounds like medieval torture but which then promised increased comfort and flexibility (i.e. you could take at least half a full breath). The caption reads, "Cupid whispers 'Ball's corsets are the best, wear none other.' And so say the medical fraternity."

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Flash gals