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
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What's under that skirt?

ACK!  This has to rate as the most hallucinogenic 1930s production number I've ever seen, and I don't even think it's Busby Berkeley. Berkeley had a certain shiny, tappy, violently vulgar quality, while this scene, done in one incredible shot, with its swooping, suffocating curtains, dancers in skin-tight body suits and sweetly androgynous tenor soloist, is oddly sultry, even erotic: those silken drapes are hauled up as seductively as a bosomy chorine slowly raising her hemline to reveal God-knows-what.

That massive spiral-staircase turntable, the design of which must be the product of an evil mind harnessed to an over-the-top budget, keeps revealing ever-more-incredible sights and sounds, bizarre stylized dancers that look almost mechanical, operatic excerpts quickly followed by Rhapsody in Blue, and. . . at the top of it all, a Woman, immobilized as a bride buried up to the waist in cake-frosting.

Yes, she's a human cupcake, folks, looking positively edible, and I could eat her right now.  As the silken folds of those swooshy, almost liquid drapes slowwwwwwwly descend, evoking smoky boudoirs and perfume-reeking bridal chambers, we realize we have been taken on a mind-boggling trip through an abstract-art-deco/Freudian-dream-symbol-scape, a big round succulent spiral slowly sucking us into its insatiable vortex, a. . . Yes. It's eight minutes of glorious, strangely orgasmic movie magic.

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Can the dalmation change its spots?

Yes, I admit it. I do get depressed.

This is like a Dalmation saying, yes, I do have spots. Or something.

Just trying to set up this particular post, everything stopped. Quivered and flickered back and forth for a while, then froze.

I feel the twingy, warning signs of a toothache deep in the left side of my jaw. A few months ago I had to have an expensive root canal, a crown replacement and surgery on an abscess. Because of the inflammation the freezing didn't take, so had to be injected four times until I couldn't feel my whole head. (Up until then I didn't think such a thing was even possible. FOUR doses of novocaine? Actually, the last one was delivered in four shots, making it seven.) If this is going to be another dental disaster, it had better happen NOW before our insurance runs out.

I don't know.

I know you're supposed to be chipper, no matter what happens to you, or doesn't happen to you. It's fashionable, and when something's fashionable, 95% of people follow it in great sliding herds like lemmings without even looking at it, let alone questioning it.

If a lot of people are doing it, then it must be right. I even had this used on me (by a minister, no less) to prove the validity of Christianity. Nobody mentions Eichmann and his merry band of assassins.

There's a new documentary out called Pink Ribbons, Inc. which no doubt echoes many of the things I said about breast cancer fundraising in an earlier post. Not that I mind, but why does the damned movie get all this attention when my writing on the same damned subject doesn't?

No, I'm not being gracious, because I don't feel like it!
A very few of my 600+ blog posts have attracted hundreds of views, and one freakish one on Carrie Fisher's ECT treatments drew 12,000, but for the most part I get less than ten views per post, sometimes even zero. Imagine posting something that no one looks at, at all, ever.  It happens to me with alarming frequency. Does this mean I'm: (a) a shitty writer, or (b)cursed?

I've heard pop psychologists/New Age philosophers (an oxymoron if ever there was one) say, "Never take anything personally." They mean anything. I mean, even if your best friend socks you in the face, then laughs. Even if your name is left off your mother's obituary (no joke - it really happened to me, indicating they are so ashamed of me they won't acknowledge that I was even born.) Even if NO ONE is taking your manuscript seriously, not even looking at it! For I am convinced that no one in the publishing industry has read it yet, in spite of well over a year of attempts and even a few promising leads.

It has been completely ignored. Whited out. And I'm supposed to be OK with that.

If I express any of these feelings, certain predictable things happen. The first one: advice. Torrents of it. Even if I haven't asked for it (and I haven't!). This indicates that my feelings are "wrong" and I must be "advised" out of them. (No one thinks just to listen.) The most predictable advice is, "Just write for your own enjoyment and don't think about publishing any of it."

Hm. Dickens would've gone far on that, eh? Or how about Mickey Spillane. Anybody. Writing isn't knitting (and even when you knit, which I do, copiously, you like to think someone, somewhere is going to wear the thing that you're knitting. Or should you be happy to throw it in a drawer somewhere, or even just throw it in the garbage?)

But writers are told to do this ALL THE TIME. I know I go over and over this, it's probably pretty tedious by now, but no one expects a concert pianist to play in an empty hall. But writing is a cheat, something you can't really study, so it doesn't count as "art". Wanting recognition for it is somehow deeply embarrassing. 

There's an unexpected phenomenon now that might have helped my chances enormously if I'd only been able to use it: the flukey runaway success of the European indie film The Artist. It's a silent movie about silent movies, and it has stolen the critics' hearts (which means Oscar nominations, causing the public to rush lemming-like to the box office and rave about it afterwards,not because they liked it but because it's the thing to do). 


But when I began marketing The Glass Character, which BY THE WAY is about the life and career of the phenomenal silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, I didn't mention The Artist because I had never heard of it. I had never heard of it because IT WASN'T OUT YET. And even when it did come out, I brushed it off as too hokey. There was no way anyone would pay attention to something so marginalized and odd.

Woody Allen also made a period movie, now up for several Oscars, called Midnight in Paris. It's all about a writer disillusioned with his own times who is somehow magically transported to Paris during the 1920s and the great flowering of arts and literature called the Jazz Age.

I didn't think to use that as a marketing tool either because, well, I just didn't. It didn't occur to me, and the way I'm feeling now, with a major dental catastrophe only a wet blink away, I wonder if it would have mattered anyway.

Listen, this is a damn good book: Jeffrey Vance is probably the only person who has really read it, and he loved it. Jeffrey Vance co-wrote (with Suzanne Lloyd, Harold's granddaughter, whom he raised) perhaps the definitive Lloyd biography. My favorite one, anyway.

No one else is giving it the time of day. Even my queries aren't being read, and it's killing me.

Over and over and over again, I am being told to either self-publish, or e-publish. I am still hanging back. Though it doesn't mean I will never do it, every instinct in my body tells me to wait. I had enough trouble with distribution and promotion when I had a whole publishing company behind me. So many writers are doing this now that I think the market is being flooded. And I don't know how they put together a promotional tour with readings/signings, how they get the book into stores or reviewed in newspapers and magazines, or even significantly noticed on-line.

Are there editorial standards? I'm just askin', though I have that crawling feeling I shouldn't.

As far as I know, a novel published in this way would not be eligible for the Governor General or the Giller or the Booker or any of the other awards that can propel a writer from the literary doldrums into a position where (though we aren't supposed to want this, it's vanity, ego and other nasty things) people actually read our books.

Do I think the revolution will never happen? Things are in a state of flux now. Come back in ten years, maybe five. Maybe even three. But I wonder what the statistics are. How many self-published/e-published writers are becoming best-sellers and making decent money, or even a profit? One can usually pull out a single smash-hit, but what's the average? But even by askin', I'll be making a lot of writers angry and defensive (that is, if they read this at all). 

It's as if you can't ask anything or say anything (unless you're a non-writer, in which case you are required to give floods of advice on a subject you know nothing about), have to tiptoe around on eggshells or you'll end up a pariah, disloyal. I figured out a long time ago that there is a secret code among writers, one that I will never crack. But once a writer crosses over, is there any chance of reverting back to more traditional methods? I think publishers are pretty freaked-out by all this, though I think some of them are beginning to get on-board. Maybe it's that perceived lack of editorial standards. How should I know?

Along with the reams of other unsolicited advice, writers are forever being told to "toughen up", but guess what: if you toughen up, then you can't write any more. Writers are like tuning forks vibrating sympathetically with whatever buzz is going on around them. Not to agree with it, but often to criticize it and stand up to it. They serve a crucial but often completely unheeded function: to be the conscience of the world.


Being this cranky isn't popular. It exposes things, bare nerves that people don't want to see or feel. There's only so much novocaine in the real world. Another favorite ploy of people who know nothing about this is, "Well, I don' t feel that way about it, and I don't know anybody else who does." More lemming syndrome? Maybe. I can only have a certain emotion, or objection, or opinion, if others share it.

You're the only one. And don't you forget it.
I see why writers commit suicide, I really do. I can't because of my family, but if I did not have them, well, I see why they do it anyway. I don't see why successful writers do it however. I can't see why ANY successful person does it. They do, but it doesn't make a damn bit of sense to me.

Mothers, don't let your sons grow up to be writers! One way or another, they'll be shot through the heart.

P.S. if anyone actually does follow this blog, they will read this post and say, "Oh, I can't read it any more, it's just too negative and depressing." Then they will abandon it. (Not that I have any abandonment issues. Being left off my mother's obituary is totally OK with me.) Never mind that 95% of the posts are NOT negative or depressing. Every once in a while I just feel weighed down with all this and have to try to get words around it.

It's what writers do. Isn't it?

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Funny gifs: it all started with a Big Bang!

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The brain fetishist

Oliver Sacks, Oliver Sacks

Your books are curious to the max.

Whenever I see one on the shelf

I want to read HIM and nobody else.

Why? you may ask. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

‘Cause on the human race he does spy.

He seems like an android, he probes and he queries

As if he’s just some guy out picking strawberries.

When his stuff on the brain gets really bizarre,

I just want to drive far away in my car.

He writes about migraines and tumors and things,

And music: that guy with no memory who sings!

He writes about autism, he’s a big fan,

As if their weird language he can understand.

It’s probably true, he’s half-goofed himself,

But his IQ’s 300, like nobody else.

And when someone has a great big stroke,

They go “bllbll, blbd, bld gbllld,” and it ain’t no joke.

But Oliver Sacks figures out what they say,

And writes a best-seller and smiles all the day.

The man has some habits, it can’t be denied,

For he doesn’t like sex, and from partners he hides.

We don’t know if he really likes spaghetti,

But for him, no computer: just his old Olivetti.

In fact we have heard that every day

He eats the same meals, wears white coats all the way.

He has just one outfit that’s not very jolly,

Oh, wait: that’s Jeff Goldblum, The Fly! Sorry, Ollie.

When I saw Awakenings, I sat down and cried,

‘Cause its human sincerity can’t be denied.

Robin Williams tried hard to enact this tough part,

Where he had no real friends and put love on a chart.

And Robert deNiro, jeez what a guy,

His flailing around made me just want to die.

And what’s most especially skilled and nice is,

He acts out an oculogyric crisis.

Oliver Sacks, Oliver Sacks

I wish you’d give me these humble facts.

I know there’s something quite wrong with my brain,

In fact I find it a royal pain.

I don’t have a tumor, don’t have a disease,

When I try to play Chopin my mind does not seize.

And yet there is something that’s plain out of order,

It makes me just pack up and run for the border.

So come and dissect this pound of grey mush,

And I’m sure all my angst and dismay you will hush.

I need this so badly, there’s no way around it –

Just make sure you put it back where you found it.

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