At The Mercy Of Theirc Lothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture

The mackintosh, in contrast, became a part of wartime clothing vernacular. As during World War I, soldiers and civilians adopted a coat that was practical and serializing, a quality that seemed less problematic in a country at war. Whether in cities or in rural areas—to which, for example, evacuated children were encouraged to bring a mac⁵—the coat’s essential qualities were protection, durability, and practicality. Doris Kilman in her mackintosh would have excited no notice on a London street. Because group identity was rendered acceptable, if not unproblematic, the mac could once again assemble a visual impression of a cohesive British nation. Moreover, under the rationing scheme, purchasing a high-quality mackintosh required more coupons than did buying most other garments. Because the mac required a good deal of fabric as well as chemicals for waterproofing, it demanded a considerable percentage of a buyer’s clothing ration and thus was not “cheap” in the same way it had been before the war.⁶

As the evening gown and fancy dress slipped from the sartorial scene, and as the mac became ever more difficult to purchase, secondhand clothing was transformed from an abject to a prized commodity. The “Make-Do-and-Mend” campaign encouraged British women to preserve or make over their family members’ garments: How to “Make-Do-and-Mend,” a short film in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, suggests that castoffs largely remained within individual households during the war. A “fashion show” at Harrods featured pajamas made from “great-grandmama’s bed valance” and a dress fashioned from a “husband’s old plus-four trousers.”⁷ The film’s narrator closed by advising men to “lock up your favorite old clothes before you leave home in the morning,” lest the women of the house appropriate them.

Such rhetoric echoed Flora Thompson’s representation of welcome familial castoffs in Lark Rise (1939). If Thompson’s vision of late-nineteenth-century rural Oxfordshire and 1940s Britain had little else in common, the practice of adapting and wearing family hand-me-downs emerged as acceptable in both fiction and real life because it was widely practiced and because there were few better options. In 1943, the Ministry of Information went so far as to animate a family’s old garments in a short film: after knocking at the door and suggesting “Perhaps we can help,” the clothes jauntily move about and vocalize possible ways in which they might be remade.8 The contrast between this personification of garments and those published in literature before the war is startling. Secondhand clothes, the film suggests, are helpful, kindly things that aim only to assist those who may transform and wear them.

The trade in castoff clothing thus dwindled. In May 1945, E. Baxter promised the secondhand-clothing dealer Robina Wallis to “send you any clothes which come my way, only people are hanging on to them so,”⁹ a lament that points to the continued wearing (and reuse of) garments by those who had initially purchased them. What good-quality used clothes came to market were, like new clothing, subject to rationing.¹⁰ Thus the need to devote not only money but rationing coupons toward the purchase of clothes rendered the difference between new and secondhand almost negligible.

World War II and the clothing shortages that came with it made secondhand items at once harder to come by and more desirable. Castoffs emerge as valuable in wartime fiction such as Angela Thirkell’s Marling Hall, a novel about the “descendants” of Anthony Trollope’s characters. The Marlings need clothing for their only servant, Ed Pollett, but Mrs. Marling asserts, “I should think there isn’t a secondhand pair of chauffer’s breeches left in England.”¹¹ Although this remark sounds like hyperbole, none of the characters involved in the discussion can suggest how to locate such pants; Howell confirms that secondhand trousers were particularly scarce during the war.¹² The severe material restrictions of wartime made castoffs the stuff of dinner conversations and decreased the power of secondhand items to distribute identity, a power that had disturbed artists ranging from Le Corbusier to Jean Rhys. If one had to search all of England to locate a specific castoff, it was unlikely that successive owners would know one another—and, if they did, the mere fact of clothing’s scarcity made it easier to overlook an item’s origins.

This book has argued that the early twentieth century provided a temporal window through which writers came to consider, through clothing, the relationship between persons and things. At the onset of the new century, British citizens had unprecedented choices in what to wear as a result of the rise in wages,13 the advent of mass-production and thus the availability of ready-to-wear clothing, and the increasing independence of women, young people of both sexes, and others. Although individual options may have been limited, the ideology of democracy of dress made clothing less an unquestioned necessity than a reflection of class, gender, identity, and immediate community. The myth of unlimited sartorial choice made what people—and literary characters—wore compelling for a time; the selection of a dress, a coat, or a costume could figure both an individual’s sense of self and his or her sometimes unwitting relationship to larger ontological and epistemological structures. When that choice was radically restricted with the outbreak (yet again) of total war, this interest waned. Novels written and set during the war generally treat garments abstractly; in Thirkell’s Northbridge Rectory, for example, characters make comments such as “we must be very careful and make our clothes last for a long time”¹⁴ and “one couldn’t get any decent clothes now.”¹⁵ Rationing receives extended attention, but narrators and characters seldom mention specific attire.

There were, of course, differences between what people wore on the street and how such clothing was transformed by literary representations. As dress historians have long noted, clothing in literature “can take us towards…our emotional responses to clothes, how fabrics move, sound, smell, how clothes feel on the body and their impact on the way their wearers move in them, for example.”¹⁶ The affective experience of dress captivated British writers, who transformed this experience to meditate on what particular sartorial choices might mean for their characters and, sometimes, for themselves. There are often surprising parallels between the accounts aimed at different readerships; while the details of each work are unique to it, middlebrow and modernist representations of evening dresses, mackintoshes, and fancy-dress costumes are similar in terms of affective impact and ontological complication.

The discomfort that women felt about evening attire was expressed across a spectrum, for example, and the “frock consciousness” that Virginia Woolf (to take just one example) suffered emerges as less unique to her than symptomatic of an experience that ranged across classes and became part of middle- and high-brow fiction as well as of an emerging mass culture. Representations of the mackintosh reveal parallels between novels as widely divergent as Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and Helen Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet…Stepdaughters of War (1930). Texts that employ literary styles that are poles apart, and authors with completely different reputations, emerge in quiet conversation about the impact of one specific garment on their characters. Together, they express a profound anxiety about the elision of subjects and objects—the ability of particular things to transform humans into passive matter.

This book’s garment-centered approach also helps to delineate and parse differences between middlebrow and modernist works, as, for example, when representations of secondhand clothing correspond to different attitudes about artistic style. At the same time, it is clear that the “brows” understood each other’s positions; when in The Orchard of Tears (1918), Sax Rohmer, the creator of the popular Fu Manchu franchise, pens a character who mouths the modernist distain for secondhand attire, it becomes obvious that authors knew and strategically deployed the positions of their contemporaries. My goal throughout this study has been to suggest that we achieve more accurate understandings of the literature of the early twentieth century when we examine work aimed at middlebrow and modernist readerships together instead of in isolation. Social issues such as class, war, gender, and identity—issues that writers examined through garments—come into sharper focus through a wide archive and a different angle.

More often, however, garments in British literature turn against humans. The evening gown reveals that the woman wearing it is also a thing; the mackintosh serializes individuals into slaughtered masses; the fancy-dress costume fails to transform the wearer; and secondhand attire becomes the initial owner’s shadow self, imprinting successive owners with an alien persona. In some cases, negative outcomes stem from objects figured to possess their own purposive will; writers personify and anthropomorphize clothing, in part to signify the power that garments exercise. These examples partially accord with Jane Bennett’s observation that “a touch of anthropomorphism…can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations.”17 Modern British literature catalyzes such sensibilities, but the assemblages that emerge work less as confederations (voluntary collectives unified for a greater purpose) than as misalliances. The representation of such unhappy groupings—one thinks of the many comic, fictional versions of Ottoline Morrell’s evening dress published in interwar novels—draws attention to an affective experience of a life so out of individual control that purportedly inert objects exercise more agency, more power, than the person who nominally owns and wears them. Clothes appear to think for, and even about, those who don them.¹⁸

At other times, British literature figures garments as less self-willed than carrying and distributing the will of specific characters or groups. The mackintosh, for example, came to serialize British citizens during World War I as the result of the armed forces’ code of uniform, a code that reflected the will of military and political leaders who wanted to forge a unified fighting force and a supportive civilian population. Just as often, however, things extract and deform the will of humans with whom they come in contact; representations of secondhand attire in middlebrow works (just one example of the many this book has discussed) demonstrate that donors and sellers can find aspects of their private lives circulated by means of the garments they attempt to discard. Their will—an act of charity or an attempt to raise funds—is not embodied but rather subsumed by things that behave unpredictably. Such literature sends a cautionary message: at a historical moment when persons appeared to exercise increasing control over the material world, even highly civilized objects like garments remained fundamentally unpredictable. And individual activity is felt at a further remove than characters expect as information about them circulates with the things they once used and wore.

Modern British literature presents an array of authors and characters who are, like Jan Struther’s popular Mrs. Miniver, “fool[s] about inanimate objects.”19 Miniver later qualifies this ontological category, musing that objects “become, in time, so much a part of one that they can scarcely be classed as inanimate. Insensitive, certainly—but so are one’s nails and hair.”²⁰ Although Miniver does not think about clothes in this manner—she focuses on cars, pens, toothbrushes, and other small items—her alignment of materiality with human “nails and hair” complicates long-standing binaries such as subject/object and person/thing. With the outbreak of World War II, the question became how to care for all British beings, be they human or nonhuman. The title of a paper by a Board of Trade officer captures the urgency: “Extension of the Life of Clothing—A Preliminary Investigation into Possibilities.”²¹ In contrast to an earlier period, when the “lives” of garments seemed to threaten individuation and human agency, the war recast clothes as precious things. Only by looking earlier in the twentieth century can we see a historical moment when the relationship between British citizens and what they wore seemed less friendly and less certain.