Bound to Please: a history of the Victorian corset
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Whether loathed as a symbol of women’s objectification or adored as a bringer of erotic delirium, the Victorian corset continues to excite interest well beyond the relatively narrow field of academic histories of fashion. Bound to Please explores the ambiguity of the Victorian corset in Britain and North America as both a signifier of femininity and an object of material culture – an item which was both decoded for its cultural meanings, and worn on the real, physical bodies of middle- and working-class women and girls. Summers charts medical, feminist and public debates about corsetry, ‘tightlacing’ and dress reform, and explores the symbolic meanings and physical impacts of the corset on childhood, pregnancy and ageing as well as on adult women’s (hetero)sexuality. She asks why women in the mid- to late nineteenth century remained so determined to wear the corset – and indeed to train their daughters to wear it – when its physical, psychological and social effects were so deleterious. Her answer to this question takes her through the labyrinthine constructions of Victorian femininity, and through the ways in which binding and constricting one’s body could paradoxically offer sexual and social freedoms. Middle-class women, for example, could continue to venture outside of the home until relatively late into their pregnancies by corseting, and thus hiding, their ‘indecently’ pregnant bellies. As, in Summers’ words, a ‘lifetime companion’ (p. 4) for many Victorian women, the corset simultaneously shaped the literal and metaphorical contours of acceptable femininity, and provided the means by which women could inhabit those contours in everyday life. One of the books’ great strengths is its insistence on the materiality of corsets themselves, and of the bodies which wore them. This is a welcome corrective to a certain kind of feminist cultural history which treat discourses of femininity as sets of ideas rather than as physical, material practices. In a key passage, Summers writes: [Some] discussions of nineteenth-century female complaints [y] have privileged oppressive gender stereotyping as the principle [sic] causative factor in the aetiology of nerve tire and womb ills. To privilege cultural expectations above the physical causes of female complaints is a dangerous theoretical practice. This is because it trivializes or even entirely negates the material reality of pain, and thereby reduces or
feminist review 71 2002 c 2002 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/02 $15 www.feminist-review.com (105–115)
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even obliterates the reality and history of corset-related suffering which was endured by many North American and British middle-class women (p. 119).
Summers adroitly maps the dynamic between cultural expectations and material realities, and in doing so also makes a valuable contribution to long-standing debates in the histories of sexuality, gender, fashion and material culture. Indeed, the book itself embodies the paradoxical status of the Victorian corset as both alluring and horrifying. It describes in detail t
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