An actual corset-wearing woman might take issue with the word “easy.” Corsets are notoriously uncomfortable, constricting one’s upper body into a rigid bone- or
metal-reinforced scaffolding designed to straighten the posture, whittle the waist, flatten or boost the bosom, and, if the woman happens to be pregnant, keep the evidence to
a minimum.
In Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation, Professor Blondell focuses on Helen as an emblem of female agency under constraint. Stone asks the viewer to consider how the corset – a literal constraint – represents the constrictions and limitations placed upon 19th century women, with implications for women of today. Within the two booklets – Vol. 1: Ornamental Young Ladies, Social Discomfort and Vol. 2: Discipline and Duty, Fancies and Failings – are reproductions of vintage photographs depicting groups of women in formal and informal poses. Interspersed among the images are quotes from a variety of sources that lay out rules, offer advice and proffer aphorisms and two-penny philosophies on beauty, comportment, sewing, and the importance of a well-fitted corset.
Printed on cotton sateen and sheer silk organza pages are such “pearls of wisdom” as: “In life, women are supposed to play the same part that flowers do in the natural world; they have always been told that their proper object is to embellish and to please.” “To be admirable, the figure must be perfectly flat in the shoulders. No projecting shoulder-blades, no |
curves are allowed here, however pleasing they may be elsewhere.”
“Don’t be a Giggling Girl. The practice of giggling will certainly develop those tiny skin muscles in a way to make your face show some kind of distortion.”
One quote may bring the viewer’s thoughts back to Helen of Troy. To paraphrase, it says that beauty – in this case, in reference to “a high, full chest”– can “help her get that which she wants” (such as a position as a stenographer or a “place in some good man’s heart”). Beauty, as the Helen myth illustrates so acutely, is a force that can influence events and redirect opinion, sometimes trivially, sometimes profoundly.
Throughout modern history, women’s underwear has promised miraculous bodily transformations – lifting, flattening, smoothing, pushing up, pushing out – providing women with (at least the illusion of) control over real or perceived anatomical idiosyncrasies. In her intriguing dress-shaped book, A Revealing History of Women’s Underwear, Catherine Alice Michaelis tells how underclothes have changed over the years, linking their development to variables such as hygiene, technology and societal power shifts. To accompany her well-researched – and often hilarious – narrative, Michaelis created pressure prints of historical underwear using Barbie clothes and hand-fashioned doll-sized apparel.
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