Virginia Woolf, fashion, and literary modernity

Abstract

Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity. R. S. Koppen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009) ix + 182. Clothing was deeply implicated in fashioning and refashioning of what it meant to be modern in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Virginia Woolf, as for contemporary historians, psychologists and sociologists, sartorial fashion served as a privileged metonym for modern metropolitan life, while dressed body was primary site at which competing versions of modernity were proposed and contested. While fashion system was taken as an apt model of social and economic organization in modern metropolis, fact that clothing operated on boundary between body and external world enabled fashion to serve as dominant mode of negotiation between subjective and objective culture, between individual and society. The liminality of clothing imbued sartorial register with dialectical as well as symbolic power, with capacity to make connections between and to trace shifting relations of subject and object, organic and inorganic, masculine and feminine, in constituting modern. R. S. Koppen's Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity maps traffic between literary, visual and material cultures from Victorian period to 1930s, revealing ways in which Virginia Woolf employed language of clothing and cloth to articulate conditions of modernity, to formulate a critical historiography and to conduct her analyses of culture. Woolf draws on both alienating and exhilarating aspects of fashion system, with its capacity to regulate and standardize as much as to liberate and transform. Clothes are included as both material fact and metaphorical construction in Woolf's meditations on economies of class, gender and power. Koppen presents a comprehensive study of Woolf's work as cultural analyst and writer of fiction; of clothes as things, commodities and symbols; and of fashion as theory and practice. Striding through cultural landscape of Victorian period and into 1930s, we meet sartorial figures and clothed fantasies of age; contested modernities dressed up in different outfits, from Pre-Raphaelite swathed in flowing robes to suited and booted lesbian dandy. The dressed body is shown as star performer in a range of political and cultural movements, and Koppen's extensive frame of reference spans Surrealism, suffrage and sexology to popular physics, psychoanalysis and social reform. A sure-footed grounding in theory, taking in both usual suspects and lesser known, complements historiographical breadth. Drawing on work of period thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, George Simmel, and J. C. Flugel, as well as contemporary theorists of material culture and exponents of Thing-Theory such as Bill Brown, Koppen's skilful handling of complex issues is one of great successes of book. Yet, at times, level of involvement with theory tends to crowd out what's distinctive about this period in general, and about Virginia Woolf in particular. The result is a kind of heaviness at odds with Woolf's own lightness of touch. A sense of lack arises, I think, from a certain dismissal of personal and idiosyncratic. While Woolf, in Koppen's own words, is concerned with both seemingly trivial and ostensibly serious, Woolf's engagement with fashion on a personal level, trials and tribulations, however trivial, of her embodied experience, is only briefly touched upon in opening chapter, before vanishing without so much as a dangling thread. Despite an emphasis on principle of embodied mind, of (dressed) body itself as cultural and political agent, I found voice of Virginia Woolf becoming more disembodied as book progressed. Koppen cites Woolf's assertion in Three Guineas that Since marriage until year 1919 ... was only profession open to us, and since clothing has a function of attracting a male, the enormous importance of dress to a woman cannot be exaggerated. …