Contesting the English Sartorial Style in Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main : Self-Fashioning in the Caribbean

Abstract

Abstract: The article examines Anthony Trollope’s affective responses to dress in the Caribbean, with a view to revealing how they shaped his clothing practices while travelling and informed his resistance to transplanted English sartorial codes. Drawing upon Jane Bennett’s conceptualization of distributive agency, I approach Trollope’s clothed body, his attire, and the tropical environment as interdependent vital forces that affected his relationship to clothing’s materiality and its symbolic significance. I argue that his dress exerted its agentic force through its materiality—the colour, the fit, and the texture—in the tropical climate and its surrounding environment. The tropical heat and humidity afflicted Trollope when he was dressed in dark, tight English attire, causing him physical discomfort and emotional anxiety that he dramatized and diffused through humour. These feelings motivated him to ponder clothing’s materiality and the need to adapt it to the environment. I shall argue that the tropical weather, in causing digestive discomfort and even physical breakdown, threatened Trollope’s sense of masculinity. He therefore resorted to alternative forms of clothing to fashion and refashion his masculinity. His masculine self-fashioning, however, was met with resistance from the capricious tropical climate. Adopting an environmentally-inflected cultural materialist approach to clothing, this article illuminates the challenges posed by what Jane Bennett might term clothing’s “agentic” power to travellers in the colonies, contributing to the recent increase in materialist studies of clothing.