The Secret World of Fashion Plates

Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2007.

In Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Sharon Marcus presents an insightful reinterpretation of femininity and sexuality in nineteenth-century England.  Marcus structures her study around three forms of female relationships: friendship, marriage, and desire between women (most often identified as homoeroticism rather than homosexual desire).  She argues that contrary to popular belief, women were not the frail, downtrodden creatures that most studies and literature have portrayed them to be.  Rather, according to Marcus, relationships among women gave them an agency they would not otherwise have had.  Marcus writes that while “[f]riendship reinforced gender roles and consolidated class status … it also provided women with socially permissible opportunities to engage in behavior commonly seen as the monopoly of men: competition, active choice, appreciation of female beauty, and struggles with religious belief” (p. 26).  Marcus also claims that homoeroticism among women was acceptable and, indeed, expected of women, asserting that “female homoeroticism did not subvert dominant codes of femininity, because female homoeroticism was one of those codes” (p. 113).  This female homoeroticism was played out through anything from fashion plates, to children’s dolls, to tales of corporal punishment bordering on the pornographic.  Though some saw these lurid tales about dolls and punishment as being scandalous, it is Marcus’ opinion that, for the most part, these forms of eroticism were designed to incite in women a desire for femininity, which would then help them to attain “the feminine virtues of sympathy and altruism that made women into good helpmates” (p. 26).

Marcus’ greatest strength is the structure and underlying argument for her study.  She insists that previous studies of this subject have missed the dynamics described above because the scholars who wrote them relied upon legal and medical sources.  Instead, Marcus uses lifewritings (diaries, letters, and the like), in addition to elements of popular culture like literature or fashion plates and magazines, in order to delve into the personal worlds of the women she is studying.  Marcus also wanted to eschew the common interpretation of female relationships as being defined against men, that is to say, that there is a central theme in the field that assumes that “the opposition between men and women governs relationships between women, which take shape only reactions against, retreats from, or appropriations of masculinity” (p. 11).  In addition, lesbianism and female friendship are often conflated and assumed to be only a rejection of a male-dominated society and a forced heterosexuality.  Marcus argues that this interpretation devalues the significance of relationships between women in and of themselves because they are viewed as existing solely as a reaction against oppression, rather than something that women may have found beneficial on an emotional, spiritual, or social level.  In shifting the meaning of female friendships, Marcus is able to give these women an identity that does not have to be defined in a dichotomous relationship to that of a man.

While her sources are many and varied, Marcus relies, unsurprisingly given her literary background, on popular literature of the time period to illustrate her point.  This is where we find her interpretive framework losing some of its resiliency.  While Marcus persuasively uses classics like David Copperfield and Middlemarch to show how female friendship is used as an integral element in ‘marriage plots’ in order to get the heroine happily married off in the end, there are times when her interpretations perhaps stretch the real intent of the author or the intuition of the reader.  When Marcus examines Great Expectations, she insists that all of the critics that have gone before her have missed an obvious theme of the novel; that of desire between women, and that this theme plays itself out in Pip’s desire to be a part of this female relationship as a female himself.  Marcus writes that “[j]ust as the desire to punish cannot be expunged from even the most moralistic doll narratives, which chastise girls for having punished their dolls, Pip’s sentimental mother-daughter relationship with Miss Haversham cannot fully displace the sadism and fetishism of the original dyad she formed with Estella” (p. 188).  Likewise, her use of fashion plates, while fascinating, is not wholly convincing because she has no proof that her explanation of their imagery – pointed shoes as a symbol for the clitoris, for example – was how the audience of middle class women were seeing these images.  While this alone does not debunk her argument, the strength of her interpretations of both the literature and of fashion plates can be called into question.  Interpretations of this nature are subjective and it is difficult to tell what historical actors thought of these things and whether or not they had the enormous impact upon the gender and sexuality of their audiences that Marcus argues they did.  However, despite these drawbacks, Marcus’ work is ultimately an innovative and thought-provoking study and the assumptions upon which it rests will provide a springboard for further work in gender studies as well as historical scholarship broadly.

~ by anyparameters on October 6, 2009.