“Politics and Petticoats”: Fashioning the Nation in Punch Magazine 1840s–1880s

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the role of fashion as a component of visual analysis of Britain's national identity in Punch magazine from the 1840s to the 1880s. It aims to investigate how the comic weekly plays on its “clothes philosophy” about the female body to illuminate the role and function of fashion in formulating and circulating diverse perspectives on Victorian nationalist consciousness. Although Victorian women were prevented from being politically active within a male-dominated culture, Punch cartoons incidentally carved out a place for the representations of the byplay between woman and nation through the rhetoric of fashion. In this context, the iconic figure of Britannia, the female incarnation of Great Britain, becomes the very nucleus of national character and her dress functions as a microcosm of the British state. With a deeper understanding of the narrative practices of Punch, therefore, we can begin to comprehend the multiplicity of dress and bodily performance that may help the reader probe into the process of imagining and narrating the nation.