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Fabricating intimacy : reading the dressing room in Victorian literature
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Puri, Tara (2013) Fabricating intimacy : reading the dressing room in Victorian literature. Victorian Literature and Culture, Volume 41 (Number 3). pp. 503-525. doi:10.1017/S1060150313000077 ISSN 1060-1503.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1060150313000077
Abstract
The Victorian novel is dominated by heroines, its narrative driven by their impulses and their irrepressible physicality. These women possess a strong visual presence that is intrinsically bound with the way in which they choose to dress themselves, with authorial attention consistently focusing on the elements of their clothing. The body was a highly visible, and more significantly, a readable cultural symbol in the Victorian period, with its signifying ability vitally linked to the clothes that adorned it. Clothes have often been employed in literary metaphors – words as the clothing of thought, clothes as a masking of the real, and so on. In his long poem In Memoriam, A.H.H., Tennyson succinctly deploys the quiet grief contained in the idea of widow's weeds, bringing together the expressivity of both clothes and words, when he writes: “In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, / Like coarsest clothes against the cold” (stanza 5, ll. 9–10). But in the realist Victorian novel, clothes become even more pertinent, offering a useful descriptive device that is pivotal to the creation of a believable, legible character. The awareness of clothing as something that has potential for both restriction of identity as well as expression of it permeates much of Victorian writing, with numerous novels rendering visible the construction of a coherent selfhood through clothing.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman P Language and Literature > PR English literature |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism, Women and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century, Social classes in literature, Sex role in literature., Women's clothing -- Symbolic aspects -- Great Britain, Clothing and dress -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Victorian Literature and Culture | ||||
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press | ||||
ISSN: | 1060-1503 | ||||
Official Date: | September 2013 | ||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | Volume 41 | ||||
Number: | Number 3 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 503-525 | ||||
DOI: | 10.1017/S1060150313000077 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 23 December 2015 | ||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 23 December 2015 |
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