Fashion as a Cultural Sign of Change – a Study of Wilkie Collins' the Woman in White and Gail Carriger's Soulless and Changeless  

Oleh:

Tryniecka, Aleksandra

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: International Journal of Arts and Sciences vol. 06 no. 02 (2013), page 709-714.
Topik: Victorian and neo-Victorian fashion; Neo-Victorian literature; Roland barthes; The fashion system
Fulltext: 06_02_50_Tryniecka.pdf (200.38KB)

Isi artikel

Fashion, as depicted in a literary work, is believed to reflect the social decorum of the era it represents. This was precisely the case in the Victorian times: clothing was an important part in the creation of the image of the woman in Victorian fiction. Nowadays, numerous attempts have been made to re-create the Victorian world in neo-Victorian texts, in which female clothing - dresses, hats and bonnets - seems to proliferate as well. However, these feminine garments, presented from the modern viewpoint, have received a new status as both decorative and serviceable objects. “By presenting fashion as both useful and beautiful, as utilitarian and personally fulfilling, these [contemporary] novels reveal the importance of fashion to the very Victorian women,” Amy L. Montz argues. In this sense, in neo-Victorian texts, feminine clothing does not reveal, as it is mistakenly assumed, the vulnerability of the woman, but rather takes on a role of a sign of culture and power relations. Clothing “transformed into language”, Barthes notes in his The Fashion System, possesses a structure separated from its true image. In the neo-Victorian novel, Montz states, “it contains over a century of assumptions about the reassessment of the of the Victorian era.” Based on Barthes’s claim that fashion is a pretext for unmasking of the encoded meaning and drawing on Mrs H.R. Haweis The Art of Beauty - a Victorian guidebook of proper appearance, I analyse the feminine garments as presented in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Gail Carriger’s Soulless and Changeless as examples of signs interpreted differently in the Victorian and neo-Victorian texts. I also explore the “written fashion” as a set of changing assumptions about the Victorian woman.

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