Abstract
This study centers on the significance, uses and changes of the corset in the Western culture and literature through a study of body politics, culture and fashion. The emplacement of corsetry in the West as an undergarment goes back to 1600s. Research shows that the study of corsetry is important as the corset has been a permanent, pervasive, popular object preferred mostly by women from different classes, sometimes by men and even children since the Middle Ages. Moreover, it is important to notice how the corset has gone beyond its use value and has become first a symbol of rank and elegance, then of female oppression and victimization and finally a symbol of sexual empowerment and feminine rebellion in contemporary time. Popular critics of the field state that the corset today is far beyond its earlier restrictive usages and negative meanings as the garment today has become a favored item in fashion industry and preferred by celebrity icons all around the world. The corset at present is an outerwear, art object and ideological construct. So, what makes the corset so popular and everlasting? The study on corsetry yields to a critique of Western culture from socio-political perspective as well as through body politics and gender studies. In that respect, this work aims to explore how corsetry in past and contemporary time exists as an essential part of patriarchal ideology, influencing social and literary landscapes and borrowing from the beauty aesthetics, thus creating the idealized feminine of each century.
Highlights
As Elizabeth Wilson (2003) claims, clothes represent the mood of each succeeding age and what we do with our bodies express the Zeitgeist (47)
The study of corsetry is aimed to unveil the ways ideology co-operates with fashion to define the beauty standards and help create the idealized image as a cultural construct in Western society
The use of corsetry at present time can be explained in terms of post-feminist ideas borrowing from the contemporary feminist critic Naomi Wolf (2002) who claims that the corset now is replaced by the new control devices of patriarchal culture such as plastic surgery, diet and extreme physical exercise
Summary
As Elizabeth Wilson (2003) claims, clothes represent the mood of each succeeding age and what we do with our bodies express the Zeitgeist (47). This study aims to include American examples such as Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920); Amy Lowells’ Patterns (1917) and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), to name only a few All these works, among many other sub-plots they handle, make emphasis on dress codes and represent the corseted body both in restricting and liberating contexts that help women construct their identity and position in society. The nineteenth century corset represented the hourglass body figure contrary with the S shape corset of the Edwardian period popular with the idealized feminine images like the New Woman and the Gibson Girl; and eventually more liberating dress codes with looser forms of corsetry emerged with the Flapper type of woman in the 1920s. The study aims to examine the interaction between body, culture and fashion through the lens of cultural studies practices
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